Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action, deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,--though with more heat than one will now expect,--"O thou good Princess, the _German_ scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never heal!--Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and defend his friends too ardently,--and, in fact, from his very inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his _own_ honor, he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would, indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth. The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff inexpressibly disgusts me.--O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!----" He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,--and Clotilda came with her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"--and Joachime danced by and said, "I laugh at you, _mon cher_!" and the Princess veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!" The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a neighborhood,--as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces, took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the watch. 27. DOG-POST-DAY. Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two Virtues in Danger.