The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (_mores_) enough to teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds, hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the pulpit,--merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for it,--in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall. Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees of a stillborn fœtus, and proved by a short argument that a parson could demand of every fœtus--and though it were five nights old--the appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for otherwise he would be cheated out of his best fœtuses) could make every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind." With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my parson,--who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till on the third he became absolutely an angel,--the world should promise itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely, that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company, a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,--the three twins of course. At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood Matthieu.--If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who, according to the assertion of _Guliermus Parisiensis_, flank a _dying_ Abbess, is made much too small,[39] one can readily imagine how many devils may form the escorting squadron of a _living_, a _blooming_ one. I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are male persons. When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the stop,--but is it not with men as with organs, of which the _human voice_ goes most finely with tremolos?--when she thus appeared, then had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.