Victory of the Losers - According to Heinrich von Kleist

Rumbling Uncertainty

The marquise's father accepts the Russian cavalry captain (and count) as her bridegroom. The mother rubs her hands together. She has the Count fetched from the guest bed. Drowsy, he hurries to appear. He passionately declares his willingness not to contest the judgment of the family court.
The forester (Julietta's brother) prospective brother-in-law offers him his service calash. Domestics are driven to frantic haste. The masters barely give the servants time to dress. In a bacchanalian scene, everyone whirls around.

The Count wants, no, he has to catch up with the dispatch riders and withdraw the dispatches he sent to Naples in his desperate desperation, promising to be ready for a job in Constantinople. He swears to cancel the Orient mission and to be back on the marriage mat as soon as possible.

The family is left with rumbling uncertainty. The matter loses its plausibility in the count's absence. The Russian furor reverberates in an incomprehensible echo chamber. The members of the family feel overrun and drawn into a maelstrom of exaggerations. At least General K, one of the Count's uncles, comes and vouches for his nephew. The Count's intentions were entirely honorable. 

Julietta then notices "an incomprehensible change in her appearance. She (revealed) herself with complete frankness to her mother".

The mother doesn't know what to make of it. She insists on consulting a doctor. The doctor insults Julietta with the truth. The marquise assured him that she would inform her father of these insults. The doctor replied that he could swear to his statement in court.

According to the rules of the game in their era, the two view an outrage from very different perspectives. Julietta doesn't know how she got pregnant. The doctor accuses her of theatrically distracting from a fiasco. He diagnoses the feigning of a somnambulistic reaction related to the theme of virginal conception.

The Marquise believes herself to be on the verge of madness. Shaken by the respectable seriousness with which the pregnancy was discovered, she reviews the past months without being allowed to doubt a single moment. At last, the woman in charge (Julietta' mother) turns up and demands to be shown the full picture. Mrs. von G... is furious about the doctor. She hammers the messenger for the message. Fortunately in the doctor's absence.

Kleist creates a large picture to illustrate the monumental gap between the biological facts and Juiletta's mental situation. 

"I would rather believe (than think a pregnancy possible in my case, says the Marquise) that the graves will be fertilized and a birth will develop in the womb of the corpses."

The mother reassures herself in the mode of good faith. Her husband (Julietta's father) should be informed in good time. 

"O God!" says the Marquise, with a convulsive movement, "how can I calm myself?"

She wants a midwife for a final examination. The most intimate conversation follows.  At the end, the mother calls a domestic and orders him to bring the midwife into the house.

The Marquise weeps in her mother's lap. She invokes her virtue. The birth specialist announces impassively: "The young widows who would come into her situation all thought they had lived on desert islands."

Julietta flees into a faint. Her mother wakes her up, beside herself with indignation.

"Go! go! you are unworthy! Cursed be the hour when I bore you!"

*

The midwife points the way to the complete obscuration of the matter. Julietta wants nothing to do with this. She dismisses the woman. She soon receives a letter in which her father expels her from the house.

Closed doors rule out any softening of the verdict.