Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist Read Free

Josephe’s breast, bid her most cordially to sit down beside her. And even Don Pedro, Don Fernando’s father-in-law, who was wounded in the shoulder, gave her a kindly nod.
    Curious thoughts stirred in Jeronimo’s and Josephe’s breasts. If they now saw themselves treated with such great intimacy and kindness, they did not know what to make of the recent past, of the place of execution, of the prison and the bell; and wondered if it had only been a bad dream. It was as if the dispositions of their fellow citizens had all been rendered conciliatory following the terrible shock. They could not revert any further back in their memories than to that moment. Only Donna Elisabeth, who had been invited by a girlfriend the day before to witness the spectacle of the execution from her rooftop, but declined the invitation, cast an occasional dreamy look at Josephe; but word of some new terrible misfortune soon tore her attention, hardly rooted in the present, back to that time.
    There were accounts of how, immediately following the first quake, the city was teeming with women collapsing in full view of all the men; how the monks ran around, crucifix in hand, crying: “TheEnd of the World is at hand!” how the people replied to a guard sent by the viceroy with orders to empty a church, that Chile no longer had a viceroy; how at the most terrible moments the viceroy had to have gallows erected to rein in the looting; and how an innocent man, who managed to save himself by fleeing through a burning house situated to the rear of his own, was caught by the owner, who promptly accused him of undue haste, and the man was hanged on the spot.
    At one point, amidst the liveliest recounting of simultaneous experiences of the quake, Donna Elvira, whose wounds Josephe assiduously tended, took the liberty of asking her how she had weathered that terrible day. And when, with a heavy heart, Josephe revealed a few of the most salient details of her ordeal, Donna Elvira was overcome by a flood of tears; she grasped Josephe’s hand and pressed it, and with a wink, implied that she need say no more. Josephe bethought herself among the blessed souls in heaven. In a burst of emotion which she was not able to hold back, for all the misery that the preceding day had wrought, she called it an act of deliverance the like of which heaven had never released upon the world. And amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, asthough the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.
    Instead of the meaningless chatter for which the world ordinarily furnished material aplenty at teatime, people now recounted cases of inconceivable heroism; they spoke of individuals who in the past had been but little respected in society who rose to the grandeur of ancient Romans; countless examples were given of fearlessness, of cheerful recklessness in the face of danger, of self-denial and godly self-sacrifice, of the unflinching abandonment of life as though it were the most worthless possession, which one was likely to find again round the next bend. Indeed, seeing as there was not a soul to whom something stirring had not happened on that day or who had not himself performed some magnanimous deed, the bitter pain in every human heart was mixed with the sweetest sense of gratification, so much so that it was