4021

The drawings he made were undoubtedly executed during his second stay at Mariazell: the title-page, which is a single composition, contains a representation of both the bond scenes. The attempt to make his new story tally with his earlier one may well have caused him embarrassment. It was unfortunate for him that his additional invention could only be of an earlier bond and not of a later one. Thus he could not avoid the awkward result that he had redeemed one - the blood bond - too soon (in the eighth year), and the other - the black bond - too late (in the tenth year). And he betrayed the double editing of the story by making a mistake in the dating of the bonds and attributing the earlier one as well as the later to the year 1669. This mistake has the significance of a piece of unintentional honesty: it enables us to guess that the supposedly earlier bond was fabricated at the later date. The compiler, who certainly did not begin revising the material before 1714, and perhaps not till 1729, had to do his best to resolve its not inconsiderable contradictions. Finding that both the bonds before him were dated 1669, he had recourse to the evasion which he interpolated in the Abbot’s deposition.

It is easy to see where the weak spot lies in this otherwise attractive reconstruction. Reference is already made to the existence of two bonds, one in black and one in blood, in the Abbot’s deposition. I therefore have the choice between accusing the compiler of having also made an alteration in the deposition, an alteration closely related to his interpolation, or confessing that I am unable to unravel the tangle.¹

¹ The compiler, it seems to me, was between two fires. On the one hand, he found, in the village priest’s letter of introduction as well as in the Abbot’s deposition, the statement that the bond (or at any rate the first bond) had been signed in 1668; on the other hand, both bonds, which had been preserved in the archives, bore the date 1669. As he had two bonds before him, it seemed certain to him that two bonds had been signed. If, as I believe, the Abbot’s deposition mentioned only one bond, he was obliged to insert in the deposition a reference to the other and then remove the contradiction by the hypothesis of the post-dating. The textual alteration which he made occurs immediately before the interpolation, which can only have been written by him. He was obliged to link the interpolation to the alteration with the words ‘sequenti vero anno 1669’, since the painter had expressly written in his (very much damaged) caption to the title-page:

‘A year after He

... terrible threatenings in

... shape No. 2, was forced

... to sign a bond in blood.’

The painter’s blunder in writing his Syngraphae - a blunder which I have been obliged to assume in my attempted explanation - appears to me to be no less interesting than are the actual bonds.