wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as princes do through each other in their public--playbills. He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask," he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle, rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as remarkable enough to be observed. The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding, dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold, self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.