Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart. And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_ of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell, _not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine; species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how near the monkey borders upon man. A great person has always some branch or other of science which he cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles. Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders. Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately bore him.