He appeared now on the war-theatre of souls, of which one seldom catches an exact map, the court;--to his heart, filled with paradises, even the apartments seemed like glass cases of a stuffed aviary, which one strews with powder-brass, conchs, and flowers, and the live articles of the rooms like dried birds stuffed with wood or arsenic; through the snakes wire was drawn, as through the tails of great beasts, and the tree-runners on the throne stood on wire.----So very much had he become through the Whitsuntide festival the antipode of us who in colder blood easily remark what is sublime and noble about a court.--The newest news he heard there was that the Prince in company with the Princess was to take a journey to the mineral springs of St. Luna, he to cure his gouty feet, she to cure her eyes. Victor was really not quite tolerant, when he thought to himself, "If you will not fare any better, then, for all I care, go to the D----." The Paullinum was to him a slaughter-house, and every antechamber a chamber of torture; the Prince treated him not with courtly courtesy, but with coldness, which pained him so much the more as it proved that he had loved him,--the Princess more proudly,--only Matthieu, who loved best to talk with people who mortally hated him, had a face full of sunshine. From him and from his sister and some unknown persons he had to take and worry down some light snake-poison of persiflage about his duel, which the stomach indeed digests, like other snake-poison, but which injected into wounds dissolves the blood of life.----Does not even my correspondent fall into a fury and send his fury to me through his _Capsarius_,[141]--the Pomeranian dog, saying: "Let any one keep cool, if he can, who is warm, that is to say in love, and whom death has not yet made cold, let him keep cool, I say, before the stinging smiles of a court-sisterhood at his sensitive love, especially before those higher ladies who are Goddesses, and on whose Cyprian altar always (as with the Scythians) a stranger is sacrificed, and to whom (as the Gauls believed of their Gods) malefactors, _roués_, Orleanses, are the most acceptable offerings!--Or, even if he can dispose of that, let him composedly hear himself mocked for his love by an Evangelist who invents and dresses up on the subject the following maxims: _La décence ajoute aux plaisirs de l'indecence: la vertue est le sel de l'amour; mais n'en prenez pas trop.--J'aime dans les femmes les accés de colère, de douleur, de joie, de peur: il y a toujours dans leur sang bouillant quelque chose qui est favorable aux hommes.--C'est là où la finesse demeure courte, qu'il faut de l'enthousiasme.--Les femmes s'étonnent rarement d'être crues, foibles; c'est du contraire qu'elles s'étonnent un peu.--L'amour pardonne toujours à l'amour, rarement à la raison_.[142]--Blessed are the adversaries [sighs Knef] who are at liberty to cudgel one another."