Unspeakably did the man struggle against the spoon in which fate offered him the powder wherein he was to let the swallowed diamonds of his plans go down; he delivered the strongest sermons,--so did he, like Horace, name his Satires against "his women"; he was a war-god, a hell-god, a beast, a monster, a satan,--everything;--he was in a frame now to undertake anything and everything,--but what availed it?--Much, when the German gentleman surprised him just in this mood of moral feeling. He made no scruple of refreshing the paternal memory on the subject of the promised sitting of the daughter for a miniature, and asserting his claim to it; for the rest he was all-knowing, and seemed to know nothing. For the sitting-scene of a blind girl he had cut out certain original, romantic situations, according to the notices which he had drawn out of the Captain. His artistic love for Liana had hitherto suffered little, and his slow, stealthy advances and reconnoitrings were in accordance with his viper-coldness and his worldsman-like energy. The old father--who in life, as in an imperial advertiser, always sought a partner with 60-80,000 dollars for his business--declared himself anything but averse to the match. These two falcons on one pole, trained by one falcon-master, the Devil, understood and agreed with each other excellently well. The German gentleman gave to understand that her miniature-likeness would, through her striking resemblance to Idoine, who, like her, had never been willing to sit, be serviceable for many a piece of pleasantry with the Princess, but still more indispensable to his "flame" for Liana, and just now, in her blindness, one might, indeed, sketch her without her knowledge,--and he would write under the picture, _La belle aveugle_, or something of the kind. The old Minister, as was said, swallowed the idea with perfect _goût_. As the Italian female singers carry a so-called mother instead of a passport on their journeys, so did he regard himself as in a similar sense a so-called father; he thought to himself: at all events there is little more to be done with the girl; she lies there as so much dead capital, and pays a miserable interest; I can take the god-penny-medal which the German gentleman in his godfatherly capacity offers to me as the father like a name for the child, and just put it in my pocket.