January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the _montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that, when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame, which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him. --But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation. The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.