The Minister, during this speech, had several times unnecessarily snapped-to the snuffers over the wax candles, and only beheaded the point of the flame; the fixed air of wrath now colored the roses of his lips (as the chemical does botanical ones) blue. "_Bon!_" he replied, "I travel; you can reflect on the subject,--but I give my word of honor, that I never consent to any other match; and though it were (whereupon he looked at the lady ironically) still more considerable[147] than the one just projected,--either the maiden obeys or she suffers, _decidéz_! _Mais je me fie à l'amour que vous portéz au pere et à la fille; vous nous rendréz tous assêz contens._" And then he went forth, not like a tempest, but like a rainbow, which he manufactured out of the eighth color only, namely, the black, and that with his eyebrows. After some days of resentment with the mother and the daughter, he rode, as Luigi's business-agent, to Haarhaar to see the princely bride. The oppressed mother confided to her oldest and only friend, the Lector, the sad secret. The two had now a pure relation of friendship toward one another, which, in France, in consequence of the higher respect for women, is more common. In the first years of the ministerial forced marriage, which dawned not with morning dew, but with morning frost, perhaps the hawk-moth[148] Cupid fluttered after them; but by and by children drove away this sphinx. The wife is often forgotten when she becomes the mother. She, therefore, with her characteristic cool and clear strength, took all that was ambiguous in her relation to Augusti forever out of the way; and he made her firmness more easy by his own, because he, with more love of honor than of women, grew not more red at any kind of braided-work than at that of a basket,[149] and erroneously believed that a man who receives it, has as much to be ashamed of as a woman who does.