For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years, imparts growing life and Cupid's wings. He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen 1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may, however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by, (consider only Mat,) warmer than usual. Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence. Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together, according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people. "It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there, and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one." "Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all court-feasts pay for a single court-service?" "No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less than the spectator." "It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman. "Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."