Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly, "you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion; for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred times wished me a horn and six verses." The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair. Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation; for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty _New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond, indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.