Physical love also has its "thunderbolts." Yesterday in her carriage with the prettiest and most easy-going woman in Berlin, we saw her suddenly blush. She became deeply absorbed and preoccupied. Handsome Lieutenant Findorff had just passed. In the evening at the play, according to her own confession to me, she was out of her mind, she was beside herself, she could think of nothing but Findorff, to whom she had never spoken. If she had dared, she told me, she would have sent for him--that pretty face bore all the signs of the most violent passion. The next day it was still going on. After three days, Findorff having played the blockhead, she thought no more about it. A month later she loathed him. [1] Translated _ad litteram_ from the Memoirs of Bottmer. [2] Several phrases taken from Crébillon. [Pg 71] CHAPTER XXIV VOYAGE IN AN UNKNOWN LAND I advise the majority of people born in the North to skip the present chapter. It is an obscure dissertation upon certain phenomena relative to the orange-tree, a plant which does not grow or reach its full height except in Italy and Spain. In order to be intelligible elsewhere, I should have had to cut down the facts. I should have had no hesitation about this, if for a single moment I had intended to write a book to be generally appreciated. But Heaven having refused me the writer's gift, I have thought solely of describing with all the ill-grace of science, but also with all its exactitude, certain facts, of which I became involuntarily the witness through a prolonged sojourn in the land of the orange-tree. Frederick the Great, or some such other distinguished man from the North, who never had the opportunity of seeing the orange-tree growing in the open, would doubtless have denied the facts which follow--and denied in good faith. I have an infinite respect for such good faith and can see its _wherefore_. As this sincere declaration may seem presumption, I append the following reflexion:-- We write haphazard, each one of us what we think true, and each gives the lie to his neighbour. I see in our books so many tickets in a lottery and in reality they have no more value. Posterity, forgetting some and reprinting others, declares the lucky numbers. And in so far, each one of us having written as best he can, what he thinks true, has no right to laugh at his neighbour--except [Pg 72] where the satire is amusing. In that case he is always right, especially if he writes like M. Courrier to Del Furia(12).