Yes! people were prosaic, and their lives
threadbare:--all but himself and organist Max, perhaps, and Fritz the
treble-singer. In return, the people in actual contact with him
thought him a little mad, though still ready to flatter his madness, as
he could detect. Alone with the doating old grandfather in their
stiff, distant, alien world of etiquette, he felt surrounded by
flatterers, and would fain have tested the sincerity even of Max, and
Fritz who said, echoing the words of the other, "Yourself, Sire, are
the Apollo of Germany!"

It was his desire to test the sincerity of the people about him, and
unveil flatterers, which in the first instance suggested a trick he
played upon the court, upon all Europe. In that complex but wholly
Teutonic genealogy lately under research, lay a much-prized thread of
descent from the fifth Emperor Charles, and Carl, under direction, read
with much readiness to be impressed [136] all that was attainable
concerning the great ancestor, finding there in truth little enough to
reward his pains. One hint he took, however. He determined to assist
at his own obsequies.

That he might in this way facilitate that much-desired journey occurred
to him almost at once as an accessory motive, and in a little while
definite motives were engrossed in the dramatic interest, the pleasing
gloom, the curiosity, of the thing itself. Certainly, amid the living
world in Germany, especially in old, sleepy Rosenmold, death made great
parade of itself. Youth even, in its sentimental mood, was ready to
indulge in the luxury of decay, and amuse itself with fancies of the
tomb; as in periods of decadence or suspended progress, when the world
seems to nap for a time, artifices for the arrest or disguise of old
age are adopted as a fashion, and become the fopperies of the young.
The whole body of Carl's relations, saving the drowsy old grandfather,
already lay buried beneath their expansive heraldries: at times the
whole world almost seemed buried thus--made and re-made of the
dead--its entire fabric of politics, of art, of custom, being
essentially heraldic "achievements," dead men's mementoes such as
those. You see he was a sceptical young man, and his kinsmen dead and
gone had passed certainly, in his imaginations of them, into no other
world, save, perhaps, into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, [137] and
more pompous phase of ceremony--the last degree of court etiquette--as
they lay there in the great,