I myself could scarcely have imagined; so that, devil as I am, I am not so bad as thyself. "Dost thou remember the nun Clara, and the voluptuous night which thou didst pass with her? But how canst thou have forgotten her? Listen now to the consequences. A short time after thy departure, the Bishop, who was her friend and protector, died; and she, having become a mother, was condemned, as an object of public horror, to be starved with her child in a dark dungeon. In her ravenous hunger she fell upon the newly-born, ate of thy flesh and her own, and prolonged her existence as long as there was a bone for her to gnaw. In what had she sinned?--she who did not comprehend her crime; she who did not know, or even suspect, the author of her ignominy and her frightful death. Feel now the result of one single moment of pleasure, and tremble! Hast thou not strengthened the delusion which condemned her? Must not hell now bear the reproach of thy crime? Those people condemned the child as the spawn of Satan, and murdered the mother under the idea that she had been possessed by him; and through this thy deed thou hast bewildered their minds, and those of their posterity. "Thou wast not more fortunate with the Prince Bishop. He caused, it is true, Hans Ruprecht to be buried, and provided for his family. He likewise, by the trick I played him, lost his fat, and became the most mild and merciful of princes; but he so relaxed the band of social order by his over-indulgence, that his subjects soon became a horde of drunkards, sluggards, ruffians, and highwaymen. The present Bishop is obliged to be their executioner, and to disperse and destroy a hundred families, in order that the rest, terrified by their example, may again become humanised, and submit to the laws. The furies themselves could not do half the injury to these people which those now do to whom the Bishop has been obliged to intrust the sword of justice and the power of vengeance.