"Your Matthieu." An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace, there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers, so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our _Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the womanly refinement of her character. Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures, he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too roguish.