Alas! he found with the Minister's lady that showman of magnificent pictures, who, like Nature, made not only a beginning of his spring, but an end of his autumn, with poisonous flowers,[167] Mr. Von Bouverot. Dian had sent him four heavenly copies from Rome; these he opened with dry, artistic palate. Liana received the Count again as ever. Was, perhaps, Raphael's _Madonna della Sedia_, in whose heaven-descended palladium her tender soul was absorbed, the seal-keeper of her holiest mystery? The all-forgetting artistic passion became her so gracefully! Her optic nerves had become, by her long painting, like delicate feelers, which closed fast around lovely forms. Certain female forms, like this one, stirred up her whole soul. For she had, in childhood, sketched in her inner heaven shining constellations of the heroines of romances, and in general of unseen women; great ideas of their spirit, their heavenly walk, their exaltation above all that she had ever seen; and she had felt equal shyness and longing to meet one such. Hence she went forth out of this colossal nympheum[168] of her fancy, so easily dazzled, and with such warm, heartfelt reverence, to meet pure female friends and the Countess Romeiro. Now certain pictures brought back these altar-pieces like copies. The good girl thought not of _this_, but her friend may well have done so, that one needed only to quicken into life the eyes of this loving, down-gazing Mary, and merely to warm these lips with tones, and then one had Liana. The German gentleman went on, and now placed beside each other Raphael's Joseph, telling his brothers a dream, and the older Joseph, interpreting one to a king, and began to translate the three Raphaels into words, and that with so much felicity, and not only with so much insight into mechanics and genius, but also with such a precise setting forth of every human and moral lineament, that Albano took him for a hypocrite, and Liana for a very good man. She seized every word with a wide-open heart. When Bouverot painted the prophesying Joseph, as at once childlike, natural, still, and firm as a rock, and glowing and threatening, there stood the original at her side. There also dropped from the German gentleman much thought about Da Vinci's boy Christ in the Temple, about the magnificently executed fraternization and adoption of the boy and the youth in one face. Liana had also copied the copy, but she and her mother were modestly silent on the subject.