Albano now left no stone unturned which friendship could lift, for the sake of setting the noble patient to rights again, and renewing his youth, inwardly and outwardly. Especially did he seek to set up again the bridge over which all his strings were drawn, and which the Knight and his brother had overturned in the presence of Linda, namely, his pride of character, which had been brought so very low by this barbarous humiliation. As only pure brotherly respect and holy worship of a divine relic can softly warm and reanimate a wounded pride, the faithful Albano took this course. But without satisfaction from the Spaniard, the contriver of the mischief and the misleader of the Knight, his backbone, Schoppe said, would never run perpendicular again, and his spinal marrow would remain bent. Only Albano's duel with the uncle was a fresh draught of cool water to him; he had to have it told over to him several times. His thirsty wish was to be as well as he needed to be in order to fight with the Spaniard, and then, as a madman, to extort from him on a death-bed, whereupon he thought to lay him, the confession of all his tricks and juggleries. "Then," he added, all the time smiling, "it can well be _égal_ to me whether the world is round or angular, and to France is my first step." Albano had to let this Greek fire of wrath, which in the end worked as a strengthening cure to a body frozen by humiliation, burn deeper and deeper under itself, since every attempt to extinguish merely fed it; only he had to watch, that he did not get a free, solitary moment, to fly off in a blaze and seek out the Spaniard. Albano stirred not day nor night from his sofa-bed, and that for other reasons also. For if Schoppe should be left alone, and his Mordian fall asleep (whom he never woke, because the dog, he said, evidently dreamed, and then went flying and nosing about in ideal worlds, snuffing things whereof in the streets of the actual hardly a trace of a shadow was to be scented), if, then, he should be alone with the quiet animal (for when it was awake he had society enough), and his eye should accidentally fall upon his legs or hands, then would his cold fear creep over him that he might appear to himself as his own apparition, and see his own "I." The looking-glass had to be overhung, that he might not come across himself.