Fantastic Tales

On New Year's Eve, a traveler wanders through Berlin, his heart frozen by an encounter that has just reopened an old wound. At the home of the Councillor of Justice where he was a guest, he was reunited with Julie, whom he had not seen for years, transformed into a classical and distant figure, married to a man with spider-like legs. She offers him a chased goblet; their fingers brush, electric sparks course through his veins, and for a fleeting moment, in a cabinet illuminated by an alabaster lamp, they recover their former intimacy while Berger plays Mozart on the piano. But the illusion shatters when the husband appears, and Julie once again becomes cold and mocking, chiding him for drinking too much before disappearing on his arm with a laugh.

Driven into the storm without a coat or hat, the traveler crosses the Opera and Lock bridges, numb with cold, until he washes up in a dimly lit tavern where he orders English beer. There, two peculiar strangers intrude upon his solitude: first, an immensely tall and gaunt man, dressed in a black kurtka with slippers over his boots, who is examining alpine plants from Chimborazo; then, a diminutive man in a brown coat falling into a thousand folds, who violently pushes away a polished snuffbox while shouting at the mirrors, and whose face vacillates between youth and cadaverous old age. The three men recognize one another as wounded souls of the same spiritual kin. The little man, who claims to still possess his shadow, flees into the street with a maniacal laugh. The tall man then reveals that he no longer has a shadow—he is Peter Schlemihl, who vanishes into the night in his seven-league boots.

Chevalier Gluck appears in the Berlin gardens, where mediocre orchestras torture fashionable melodies. A strange man, with an aquiline nose and fiery eyes set in a fifty-year-old face, sits near the narrator and, with the gesture of a conductor, animates from within the overture to Iphigenia in Aulis that a small ensemble is butchering. He then recounts his visions of the realm of dreams, where an immense eye dives into an organ and gives rise to wondrous chords, where flowers sing, and where a sunflower hides the divine eye in its heart. Later, the narrator finds him at his home, in a room filled with antique furniture and Gluck's scores bound in gilded volumes. The man then plays the overture and scenes from Armide on blank pages, improvising brilliant variations that surpass the original. Suddenly clad in an embroidered court suit with a sword at his side, he solemnly declares himself to be Chevalier Gluck.

Councillor Krespel builds his house in an extravagant manner, without plan or architect, walking toward the walls until he bumps into them to determine the placement of the doors and windows, which he has struck through at random before the astounded eyes of the workmen and a crowd of onlookers. He crafts violins with consummate skill but destroys them immediately after playing them once, seeking a secret in their internal structure. His daughter Antonie possesses a voice of unearthly beauty that had enchanted the entire city on one memorable night, but Krespel now forbids her to sing and guards her like a jailer. The narrator discovers that Antonie was born of Krespel's tumultuous union with the prima donna Angela, who died on the day scheduled for her daughter's wedding. A structural defect in Antonie's chest gives her voice its extraordinary power but dooms her to die if she sings. Her composer fiancé, driven away by Krespel, who accuses him of wanting to kill Antonie through music, had fled after a terrible scene. One night, Krespel hears Antonie singing a sacred hymn with her fiancé in the adjoining room, but paralyzed by leaden bonds, he is unable to move. In the morning, he finds her dead on the sofa, a smile upon her lips. The Cremona violin he used to play for her, whose tones seemed to issue from a human chest, shatters at the very moment of her death and is buried alongside her.