This duplicate of rogues was held back in mid-current merely by a drag-rake, which threatened to draw the prey out of their pike-like teeth. An old, scolding, but true-souled chambermaid from Nuremberg was the rake; she could not be drawn away from Liana, or reduced to silence. Bouverot, to be sure, a Robespierre and destroying angel to his servants, would, in Froulay's place, have caused the Nuremberg dame, a couple of days beforehand, to be furnished by a servant with some complex fractures, and then thrown upon the street; but the Minister--his heart was soft--could not do that. All that was possible for him was this: He sent for her to his chamber; represented to her that she had stolen his Magdeburg ear; remained, in his present state of hearing, deaf to every objection, but not to every incivility, and at last found himself under the necessity (a word and a blow) of driving the thievish wench out of service. With every successor to the office, as being a new one, money would have weight, he knew. He proposed thereupon to beg of the Princess an invitation for himself and his lady to tea and supper, to bespeak the miniature-painter, to instruct the new chambermaid, and put all things in a right train. Two tigers, according to the legend, digged the Apostle Paul's grave; so do our two men here scratch away at one for a saint. So much the more confidently do I say this, as I do not otherwise see through--if nothing is to be made but a picture--the meaning of so many circumstances. But the father I could almost excuse. In the first place, he said expressly to the German gentleman, the Abigail might, in his opinion, as well stay in the chamber, or in the adjoining one, in case the patient wanted anything; secondly, the otherwise soft man had contracted, from his ministerial commerce with justice, a certain grit, a certain barbarity, which is so much the more natural to Themis, passing sentence behind the bandage, and, as an Areopagus, without the sight of the pains, as even Diderot[23] asserts that blind people are more cruel than others; and, thirdly, no one could well be more ready than he to pity the more deeply, in case she should die, the very child whom he, as it was once pretended Jews and witches did with Christian children, crucified, in order, like them, to do something with the blood (as parents generally, and particularly human parents, can indeed get over easily the misfortunes of those who are near and dear to them, but hardly their loss, just as we, in the case of the hair of the head, which is still nearer to us, feel not the singeing or cutting of it, but very painfully the tearing of it up by the root); and, fourthly, Froulay had always the misfortune that thoughts which in his head had a tolerable, innocent hue, became, like muriate of silver or good ink, black on the spot, when they once came to light.