Manifestations of Honor Which Were Made to me by my County on my Return Home from the Grand Tour.
If a Count's subjects take from him his six nonnatural things[9] I know not how they can give him a better reception. Now mine left me not a single non-natural thing.
First of all, they took away from me the most important unnatural thing, sleep. Having traveled or waded, as if I were big with child, from Chalons to Strasburg, only to thunder down from there at such a rate that I rather hopped than sate, so furiously as to knock down my runner--I would for the life of me have gladly flown round Flörzhübel (the first market town in my country) sleeping (and was not that easy to do in dream?); but just at the boundary and bridge, as I opened my eyes in going down hill and closed them in going up, I was fallen upon, not murderously, but musically, by a body of militia sixteen drunken men strong, who had been lying in wait here since seven in the morning with their musical trumpets and ear-breaking tools, in order at the right time to wound me and my horses in the ears with fife and drum. Fortunately the storming-artists had drummed all day long for fun and _ennui_ more vigorously than they did afterwards in earnest and for love. During the whole march, while orchestra and barracks went along beside my horses, I was scolding myself for having, seventeen years before, qualified and graduated Flörzhübel to a city--"I don't mean merely" (I said to myself) "because afterward a Sovereign Rescript stripped Flörzhübel again of city-rights and its Gens d'Armurie of its accoutrements, or merely because we proposed to sell the superfluous equipments at auction in Cassel--but because they will not now let me sleep, which is surely _the first non-natural thing_."
Eating they absolutely denied me, because that is the second unnatural thing of a reigning lord. Did not the Restaurateur of Flörzhübel, who had set on the fire for me the whole boiled and roasted _widow's half_ of my country, summon me on the very carriage-step to take a bite, and when--for we grandees do not like to excite the populace to a hungry astonishment by despising envied fare--I begged with my own mouth only for a beer-soup, did not the Restaurateur make a sour face and say: "He had none in the whole hotel; and if he had, future hosts should never have it to say of him, that among so many _jus_ and _bouillons_, he had presented to his most gracious master nothing but a bowl of beer-soup."