The two companions arrived early in the beautiful, enchanted village in
the afternoon before dinner, just as the neat children were already
banding together to go to gleaning, and the wagons were already going
out to meet the gatherers of the sheaves. Idoine's brother, the future
hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess,--the Dwarf of Tivoli,--looked out of
the window, and Julienne almost regretted the journey. Idoine flew to
meet her, and clasped her heartily to her breast. When Julienne had
before and upon her face that great blue eye and every transfigured
feature of the form which once her brother had so blissfully and
painfully loved, she fancied herself, now that she had become his
sister, to receive, as his representative, the love of the
representative of Liana; and she must needs, as she had done every time
since that death at the first reception, weep heartily.
Linda was received by the Princess with such a deep tenderness that
Julienne wondered, since the two generally lived in an alternation of
coldness and love. There stood the Minister's lady, Froulay, so old
with mourning, so cold, still, and courteous, so cold towards the
occasion and the company (except the fac-simile of her daughter),
particularly towards Linda, whose bold, decided, philosophical tone
seemed to her unwomanly, and like a trumpet on two female lips.
The future hereditary Prince of Hohenfliess fortunately withdrew
himself soon from so inconvenient a place, where he navigated a
shipwreck plank instead of a gondola. After inquiring of Julienne with
interest about the state of her brother, his present predecessor, and
reminding her and Linda of her and his Italian tour, he became so
fretful and out of tune at Julienne's frigidity, and at the moral
discourses of the women, and at a certain oppressiveness premonitory of
a moral tempest,--which sensualists experience in the presence of
women, where everything rude, selfishness, arrogance, screams like
discord,--and at the general, plaguy hypocrisy,--which he could not but
immediately take it all to be,--that he was glad to break away, and
relieve this pastoral life of the only wolf who had crept into it.
Voluptuaries can never hold out long among _many_ noble women,
tormented as they are by their many-sided, sharp observations, although
they can more easily with one, because they hope to ensnare her. What
made him feel worst of all was, that he was compelled to pronounce them
all hypocrites. He found no good women, because he had faith in none;
since we must believe in them in order to see them where they are, just
as one must exercise virtue in order to be acquainted with it, though
not the reverse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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