And the same morning, this son, our Victor, was _not_ happy. It seemed to him, at the report of Flamin's discharge and of Matthieu's officiousness, as if he heard the hissing and the bullet-like whistle of the swooping hawk, that hitherto in motionless poise, as if with nailed pinion, had hung high in the blue above his prey.--Think not too hardly of the Doctor, that he mourned the lost opportunity of freeing his friend out of the narrow prison, and himself out of the wide one of life. For he has lost too much and is too lonely; men appear to him as people in the Polish rock-salt mines, who grope round with a light bound to their heads, which they call "I," encircled with the unenjoyable glitter of the salt, clad in white and with red fillets,[192] as if they were bandages.--The speech of his acquaintances, like that of the Chinese, is monosyllabic.--He must live to see the mortifying day when January and the city will set down against him the lowliness of his rank as a fraud.--Before every eye he stands in a different light, or shade rather. Matthieu regards him as coarse; January, as intriguing; the women, as trifling,--just as Emanuel regarded him as pious, and Clotilda as too ardent; for every one hears in a full-toned, harmonious man only his own echo. What heart could henceforth induce him--his own could not--to hold an oar any longer in the slave-ship of life? O, one could do it, a warm and mighty one,--his mother's! "Only once plunge out of this world," said his conscience, "then will thy mother, in the fulness of love, die after thee, and appear before thee in the next world with so many tears, with all her hot wounds, and say, 'Son, this sorrow is thy work!'"--He obeyed, and perceived that, if it is noble to die for a mistress, it is still nobler to live for a mother. He therefore determined this very evening--in the evening, so that night might place its screen before certain weather-wasting ruins of better times, before certain gliding _night-corpses_ of memory--to go to St. Luna, to call to his mother, and to refresh her sick and weary heart with at least _one_ flower of joy, and say to her,--as no oath any longer bound him,--"Now for the second time thou givest me life!" How sweet was the thought to him!--A single good purpose makes up and airs the sharp sick-bed of a shattered life. But at evening, you good, oppressed souls, in the evening--not of life, but--of the 21st of October, all will be lighter and fresher to you, and the ball of your fortune will revolve from the stormy to the sunny side.