Every one can imagine how he felt about the matter.--He would have got through it very well, if he had dared to lie terribly, or if he could have ventured at least to imitate the few courtiers who, into the twenty-eight pounds of blood which irrigate their bodies, have not instilled twenty-eight drops of honest blood,--of which a single one may, as a _liquor probatorius_, leave behind in the remaining mass confounded precipitates. But his soul loathed this new bait to lure him to a lie. The reader cannot possibly yet know that Victor shot aside from the mark,--that is to say, that, on account of the remoteness of Joachime's suspicion, he did not guess it at all, but fell upon the nearer one, that Joachime had nosed out his whole whimsical trick upon the Princess. He was never capable of holding up another's body as a shield against the arrows which were aimed at his own,--a habit on the Court-Moriah, which, not, like the Old Testament plan, redeems an _Isaac_ with a _ram_, but a ram with an Isaac; he was to-day least of all capable of sacrificing the Princess to save himself; but neither could he bring himself even to _this_, to sacrifice Joachime for the sake of saving _her_, i. e. to recoin the devil's-billet into a sweet-billet (_billet-doux_) to Joachime. The Satan in him screamed himself hoarse to get him only so far along, that he at least would lie by silent expression of countenance, and justify hers, wherein there began to be less and less appearance as if she supposed it directed to another lady. He told her right out plainly what he was,--a fool. He narrated the whole business in Kussewitz. He concluded by saying that it was lucky for him that the Princess had not at all detected the crazy insertion into the watch.... As now he recited all this monotonously without a single flattery, out of which some sort of a new and improved edition of the insertion might possibly have been made, he was fortunate enough, at his departure, to leave the enlightened Joachime in a state which, after such magnetic passes, expresses itself with cultivated women in a fine, proud _exaltation_, and with uncultivated ones in the attempt to put the sculptor's last touch to a man, just as the Greek artists did to their models,--namely, with the finger-nails. Victor took his leave with two very different sorts of _views_, those of the future and those of Maienthal.-- She kept the billet. Not fear, however, but the bitter feeling that his former follies ended only in another's heart with an abortive hope, this trickled with bitter drops into the sweet, rejuvenating sensation of having acted right at his own expense. An emotion, a tear, is an oath before Heaven that one will be good;---but a single sacrifice steels thy soul more than five tears of penitence and ten penitential sermons.