He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before." Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily, for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the _shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she requested to have brought over to her. He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133] "I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_ lady reader think? She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court. Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called [Greek: kadiskon].[136]