Matthieu entered and produced the great weighty matter,--the bold petition for Flamin's life. January pronounced an equally bold "No!" for man is quite as indignant at him who drives him into a groundless fear, as at him who drives him into a well-grounded one. Matthieu coldly repeated his request: "I simply beg your Highness not to suppose that I should ever hold mere friendship as an adequate apology for such a bold petition,--the duty of a subject is my excuse."--January, who was annoyed at the uncourteous retraction, broke it off: "The guilty cannot petition for the guilty."--"Most gracious sir," said the Evangelist, who sought to drive him into fear and fury at once, "in any other times than ours it would be quite as punishable to guess or to predict certain things as to decree them; but in ours, these three things are easier. Against the day when the Regency-Councillor should lose his life, a plan is arranged, which certain persons have formed for the salvation of his life at the expense of their own."--The Prince--enraged at a boldness which ordinarily resides not within the _snow-line_[182] of courts, but only at the democratic equator--said, with the death-sentence which Mat had long since wanted to get into his face: "I shall have you required to tell tomorrow the names of the wretches who propose to sacrifice their lives for the sake of turning the course of justice." ... Here the page fell down before him, and said quickly: "My name is the first; it is now my duty to be unhappy. My friend has killed no one, but I did it; he is not the son of a priest, but the first-born son of the murdered Mr. Le Baut." ... Since pier-mirrors first existed, never was such a dumfounded, distracted visage seen in them as to-day. January dismissed him, in order to collect himself. We will now in the antechamber say three words about the absent one. A shrewd thinker once said to me, that he had once said to a great connoisseur of the world, "The fault of the great was never to trust themselves in anything, and hence they were led by every one"; and that the connoisseur answered, he had hit it.--January had a grudge against Mat, and that merely on account of his satirical and sensual face,--but not anywise on account of his vices. I take for granted that the reader will certainly have seen courts enough--on the stage, where the higher classes get their notions of country people, and we ours of them--to know what one hates there----not vicious persons, not even virtuous ones, but both of these one really loves there (precisely as they do violinists, mechanics, Wetzlar attorneys, intendants) whenever they have need of them.----