windlass-maker, together with all the levers of her sunken fortune, had now been buried with her husband; and who, as she threw all the blame upon Clotilda's conduct, sought still more to afflict this mourning spirit by an intentional exaggeration of her own mourning. As Lady Le Baut, for the rest, liked nothing so much as prayer-books and freethinkers, she now compensated for the latter with the former. Some of my readers will already have darted on before me, and have peered into Victor's balcony to find his grief hidden within four walls;--frightfully stands the solitude before him, unfolding to him a great black picture, with two fresh graves. In one great grave lies lost friendship; in the other, lost hope. Ah! he wishes the third, in which he might also lose himself. He had the sublime mood of _Hamlet_. The darkened Julius appeared to him like a galvanically quivering dead man. He wholly avoided the court; for his self-regard was far too considerate and proud to keep up a fleeting pomp with a stolen nobility, and the surreptitious privileges of a lord's son. Moreover, a slight chilblain was raised on his heart by the thought that his Lordship, according to the degenerate way of all statesmen and state-machinists, of managing men only as bodies, not as spirits; only as caryatides, not as tenants of the state-edifice; in short, merely as dancing-girls of Golconda,[169] who have their limbs yoked and tied together as a beast of burden to a single rider,--that his Lordship, I say, this otherwise exalted soul, had misused even his Victor too much as the tool of his virtue. But he forgave the man for it, whom, after all, he had nothing to reproach with, except that he had only the kindnesses of a father, without his rights. As Victor no longer paid court to any one, naturally the Apothecary cared no more to pay it to him. The former smiled at that, and thought: "So should every good courtier act, and, like a clever ferryman, always leave that side of his boat which is _sinking_, and step over to the other." Zeusel stepped over to the favored Watering-place-doctor, Culpepper, to whose judgment they ascribed January's recovery, which was the effect of summer; and he prostrated himself to lick with his little snaky tongue the feet whose heels he had formerly stung with his poisonous bite. But churls never forgive; Culpepper despised the "ninety-nine per cent fellow,"[170] and the "ninety-nine per cent fellow" again despised my court-physician, although, from fear,--as the Prince from love of ease,--he ventured not either to browbeat him or to turn him out of his house.