"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100] from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda, the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose, wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted. Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop in wit.