And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he, whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing, and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days, and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it. There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off again without a single--hope. Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above than from below upward!-- Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the _Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do what I can."