But it stopped not here. Hardly had her Albano appeared, when the thorn-girdle and hair-shirt of the pure Minister was made disproportionately more rough and thorny, and the strongest requirements, namely, gifts, redoubled, in order that the poor Joseph might the more speedily assail her honor and therefore run into his ruin, which should be bait for the Count. By this time he had been already brought along so far that he wove and knotted in her flying hair (to him poisonous snake-hair),--he must needs blow out soap-bubbles of sighs from his pipe,--he must needs quite often be beside himself; yes, he must even (if he would not see himself chased away as a hypocritical rascal) be half-sensual, although still decent enough. Meanwhile he was not to be tempted into a temptation by the Devil himself. Whenever he even thought of the subject, shuddering, how the least misstep might hurl him from his ministerial post, then he would as soon have let himself be impaled and quartered as bewitched. For a third party, not for these two,--they were the sufferers,--it would perhaps have been a feast, to have seen how they (if I may use a too low comparison) resembled a pair of silk stockings drawn over each other, which for and by each other, when one keeps them distended[41] at a certain distance, ethereally blow themselves and fill, but immediately collapse, flat and flabby, when they touch each other. Of course, in the long run, it fell heavily upon the old statesman to have to leap along before the dancing pageantry of love-gods as their arch-master, tackled into the triumphal car of the Cyprian,--a flower-garland on his state-peruke, in his eyes two Vauclusa fountains, the cavity of his breast a choked-up Dido's cave, wearing in his button-hole an arrow in a heart, or a heart on an arrow, and faring toward the capitol, in order there, after the Roman fashion, not so much to sacrifice as to be sacrificed. Nothing except the tin boxes which the government officers and exchequer messengers stowed away for him at home could fan fresh and cool again the stalemated man, who would fain be a checkmated one. He read with her Catullus, she with him the better pictures out of the Prince's cabinet; it was allowed him to reward her by his Latinity for her artistic favors: but he remained, nevertheless, as he was.