Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers, and a Noble Man. Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her. Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her friend. Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the _calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--