Now he set himself down to dip into the ink for his third chapter,
wherein he merely sported. His lip-omnipotence over the listening heart
refreshed him to such a degree, that he made frequent experiments to
see whether she could not laugh herself almost to death. Women in love,
by reason of weakness and fire, take the laughter-plant most easily;
they hold the comic heroic-poet still more as their hero, and prove
therewith the innocence of their laughing at him. But Roquairol loved
her less when she laughed.
In his fourth chapter,--or sector, or Dog-Post-day, or letter-box,[27]
or in whatever other way I have (ludicrously enough) made my divisions,
instead of using the Cycle,--in his fourth Jubilee, I say, it went, so
to speak, harder with him. Rabette grew at last sated and sick of his
eternally jumping off and opening the pot of the lachrymal glands that
hung between the wheels, to grease his mourning-coach. Deep emotion was
every day made more disagreeable and bitter to him; he must be ever
giving longer and more vivid tragedies. Then he began to perceive
that the tongue of the country maiden is not the very greatest
landscape-painter, soul-portrayer, and silhouettiste, and that she
hardly knew how to say much more to him than, "Thou, my heart!" He
made, on that account, in the fourth chapter, rarer visits; that again
helped him considerably, but only for a short time. Fortunately, the
half-mile from Pestitz to Blumenbühl counted in with Rabette's lines
and rays of beauty; in the city, in the same street, or in fact under
the same roof, he would have remained too cold from very nearness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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