Nothing, if one can only see it, is more instructive than the awareness of how everything in human life is connected – toothache and a married couple’s happiness, for instance. How even what is wrong and forbidden can be put right once it gets into the hands of the right man or woman, and how, in the universal, relentless process of change, each and every individual thing merges with others and can never be recovered. Yet what’s done endures and is not lost, be it good or bad, just as when one pours a glass of water into the Rhine, no mortal can scoop it out again, because it is united with the river and instantly swallowed up into its great stream. Yes, but when the sun – as we say – absorbs water, a few drops may fall again somewhere from a rain cloud in the sky, onto Bavaria or Lorraine, and refresh a young flower.

A maid, young, good, and handsome too, with a manservant of similar quality, together worked on a noble estate, and rather than taking coffee or enjoying a daily roast, they would much rather have married one another. But they were not free, being bound to do service for a certain time, and the lady of the estate was unwilling to release them early because they were so upright in their behaviour and diligent and faithful in their work. This was why they often sat together and wept, or she wept and he whittled away at a piece of wood. At other times, so fleeting are the moods of man, they gave each other courage, saying there were only two short years to go, and looked forward to their future happiness when ‘you’ll be my wife’ – he would say – ‘and I your husband’, and one day they even forgot it was the future they were talking about and thought it was now.

Precisely a year had passed when the noblewoman woke in the night in agony with toothache, not that that was the real reason. She got out of bed, threw herself into a chair, rushed from one room into another, and then into a third. In that third room she sat down opposite a little window that looked into the kitchen and was covered with a white curtain, and now her agony would soon be over. She was sitting in just the right place. For, suddenly, she saw the light spreading behind the white curtain. She heard something move, a whispering and a rustling. She quietly drew back the little curtain, and there in the kitchen stood the servant and the maid, putting kindling on the fire at midnight, and on the stove was a little pan. The toothache was already receding a little.

‘Oh, you godless good-for-nothings,’ said the lady to herself. ‘So no one is to be trusted any more. Do you not have decent food everyday? Is that not good enough for you? Must you steal from me at night and cook yourselves tidbits?’ After some time, the young woman took the pan from the stove as if to help herself. The man, however, left the room.

‘At daybreak I’ll have them both sent packing in disgrace,’ continued the noblewoman, ‘and I’ll chase them away without a reference. The little hussy will end up getting pregnant by the wretch in my own house. I shall not let it come to that.’

At that moment, the servant returned with a three-month-old baby in his arms and laid it on its mother’s lap. Suddenly the noblewoman’s toothache stopped as if blown away. The mother fed the infant gruel out of the pan and put it to her breast, and the glow of the sinking fire lit her face just as she looked at the child again with moist eyes and gave it back to its father and said something to him. Now the noblewoman’s heart was wonderfully moved and she thought again. For it was as if the mother with moist eyes had said, ‘God will take pity on the poor little mite’, and as if that was what she herself was there to do. Dread seized her soul at what a disaster might have taken place in her own house had not God preserved the parents’ hearts from a grievous crime.

Early next morning she had both parents summoned before her. They looked at each other. ‘I think,’ said the maid, ‘we’ll get our freedom.’ ‘Or perhaps not,’ said he. However the noblewoman, when they had come, addressed them gravely and imperiously: ‘Where is your child?’ Both thought they would sink into the ground for horror and shame, and stole sideways glances at each other to see if the other was still there. ‘Where do you keep your child?’ repeated the noblewoman. ‘Well,’ stammered the father at long last, ‘we do have one. In the wood-shed, behind a pile of logs.’ And, ordered to fetch the child, he brought it as it was, in an old knapsack. It was clean and tucked up on a little bed of hay, and it cried as if it understood just what it had to do. And the noblewoman’s heart filled with even greater compassion, and when the faithful maid and mother contritely and tearfully begged her not to make her and her innocent child unhappy, she could no longer hide how moved she was, and said: ‘No, I will not make you unhappy. I will make up for my severity towards you. I shall sweeten the burden you have borne. I will make good your sin. I will grant you the mercy that you have shown your child.’

Do we not believe that we hear the Good Lord Himself speaking in the Books of the Prophets or in the Psalms? A heart moved to goodness, taking the part of the poor and lifting up the fallen – such a heart, you see, puts on the image of God and speaks in His language. ‘You may have yourselves quietly given in marriage on Sunday,’ said the noblewoman. ‘I’ll set you up well. I would like to make something of the child. Is it a boy?’

And so, at the behest of the noblewoman, they were married on the next Sunday and have lived together ever since as man and wife in loving harmony. Meanwhile, the little boy can crack open hazelnuts with his teeth, is eager to learn, and has plump red cheeks. What will come of it all, however, only He knows who measures heaven to the nearest inch and holds our speck of earth in the hollow of His hand.

Johann Peter Hebel, ’Einer Edelfrau schlaflose Nacht’, 1819

Translated by Nicholas Jacobs; with thanks to Irving Dworetzky, Rowena Garrod, and John Hibberd.

[ Oxford German Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2011, pp. 113–14 ]