Another day,A.S.,one of his friends,came into his room.Sand,who had heard him coming up,was standing by the table,with a paper-knife in his hand,waiting for him;directly the visitor came in,Sand flung himself upon him,struck him lightly on the forehead;and then,as he put up his hands to ward off the blow,struck him rather more violently in the chest;then,satisfied with this experiment,said:--"You see,when you want to kill a man,that is the way to do it;you threaten the face,he puts up his hands,and while he does so you thrust a dagger into his heart."The two young men laughed heartily over this murderous demonstration,and A.S.related it that evening at the wine-shop as one of the peculiarities of character that were common in his friend.After the event,the pantomime explained itself.
The month of March arrived.Sand became day by day calmer,more affectionate,and kinder;it might be thought that in the moment of leaving his friends for ever he wished to leave them an ineffaceable remembrance of him.At last he announced that on account of several family affairs he was about to undertake a little journey,and set about all his preparations with his usual care,but with a serenity never previously seen in him.Up to that time he had continued to work as usual,not relaxing for an instant;for there was a possibility that Kotzebue might die or be killed by somebody else before the term that Sand had fixed to himself,and in that case he did not wish to have lost time.On the 7th of March he invited all his friends to spend the evening with him,and announced his departure for the next day but one,the 9th.All of them then proposed to him to escort him for some leagues,but Sand refused;he feared lest this demonstration,innocent though it were,might compromise them later on.He set forth alone,therefore,after having hired his lodgings for another half-year,in order to obviate any suspicion,and went by way of Erfurt and Eisenach,in order to visit the Wartburg.From that place he went to Frankfort,where he slept on the 17th,and on the morrow he continued his journey by way of Darmstadt.At last,on the 23rd,at nine in the morning,he arrived at the top of the little hill where we found him at the beginning of this narrative.Throughout the journey he had been the amiable and happy young man whom no one could see without liking.
Having reached Mannheim,he took a room at the Weinberg,and wrote his name as "Henry"in the visitors'list.He immediately inquired where Kotzebue lived.The councillor dwelt near the church of the Jesuits;his house was at the corner of a street,and though Sand's informants could not tell him exactly the letter,they assured him it was not possible to mistake the house.[At Mannheim houses are marked by letters,not by numbers.]
Sand went at once to Kotzebue's house:it was about ten o'clock;he was told that the councillor went to walk for an hour or two every morning in the park of Mannheim.Sand inquired about the path in which he generally walked,and about the clothes he wore,for never having seen him he could only recognise him by the deion.
Kotzebue chanced to take another path.Sand walked about the park for an hour,but seeing no one who corresponded to the deion given him,went back to the house.
Kotzebue had come in,but was at breakfast and could not see him.
Sand went back to the Weinberg,and sat down to the midday table d'hote,where he dined with an appearance of such calmness,and even of such happiness,that his conversation,which was now lively,now ******,and now dignified,was remarked by everybody.At five in the afternoon he returned a third time to the house of Kotzebue,who was giving a great dinner that day;but orders had been given to admit Sand.He was shown into a little room opening out of the anteroom,and a moment after,Kotzebue came in.
Sand then performed the drama which he had rehearsed upon his friend A.S.Kotzebue,finding his face threatened,put his hands up to it,and left his breast exposed;Sand at once stabbed him to the heart;Kotzebue gave one cry,staggered,arid fell back into an arm-chair:
he was dead.
At the cry a little girl of six years old ran in,one of those charming German children,with the faces of cherubs,blue-eyed,with long flowing hair.She flung herself upon the body of Kotzebue,calling her father with piercing cries.Sand,standing at the door,could not endure this sight,and without going farther,he thrust the dagger,still covered with Kotzebue's blood,up to the hilt into his own breast.Then,seeing to his surprise that notwithstanding the terrible wound--he had just given himself he did not feel the approach of death,and not wishing to fall alive into the hands of the servants who were running in,he rushed to the staircase.The persons who were invited were just coming in;they,seeing a young man,pale and bleeding with a knife in his breast,uttered loud cries,and stood aside,instead of stopping him.Sand therefore passed down the staircase and reached the street below;ten paces off,a patrol was passing,on the way to relieve the sentinels at the castle;Sand thought these men had been summoned by the cries that followed him;he threw himself on his knees in the middle of the street,and said,"Father,receive my soul!"Then,drawing the knife from the wound,he gave himself a second blow below the former,and fell insensible.
Sand was carried to the hospital and guarded with the utmost strictness;the wounds were serious,but,thanks to the skill of the physicians who were called in,were not mortal;one of them even healed eventually;but as to the second,the blade having gone between the costal pleura and the pulmonary pleura,an effusion of blood occurred between the two layers,so that,instead of closing the wound,it was kept carefully open,in order that the blood extravasated during the night might be drawn off every morning by means of a pump,as is done in the operation for empyaemia.