When women wish to carry a point, and find hindrances constantly recurring, they grow at last blind and wild, and dare anything and everything. The tour to Italy approached so fast; still the Minister was no nearer to letting go his high consideration for his beloved,--although from just her own motive, that of the tour, with the nearness of which he animated himself to a cheerful endurance of so short a flame. Her passion for the Count increased with the Count's tranquillity, because coldness strengthens strong love, just as physical coldness makes strong people more vigorous and weak ones more puny. Froulay, as an old man, was, as it seemed, capable of creeping along so for a whole age to his object, without making one unnecessary leap, since old people, like ships, always move slower the longer they have been going, and on similar grounds, namely, that both, by the adhesion of filth, weeds, barnacles, and the like, have become unwieldy. In short, the Princess at last ceased to ask for anything, but matters went thus:-- The Prince had gone a journey, the Princess had been invited as god-mother out into the country. The castellain on one of her country castles, who had already the year before invited the Minister, had not been restrained by bashfulness from making his way still farther up on this rope-ladder, with his descendant under his arm, and up there on the throne laying his child of the land in the arms of her, the Princess herself. Princes love to let themselves down--on thin silk-worm threads--(as well as up); they value the good-natured, stupid people, and would fain in this way raise somewhat the poor creeping dwarf-beans,--for they well know how little it matters,--and, so to speak, pole them and boot them by means of the leg of the princely chair. Beside this, the Minister had been invited as grand-god-father (so called). The autumn day was only a brighter, more perfect spring, and the autumnal night stood under a brilliant full moon. Courts always long so exceedingly to be away in the country, among the idyls of murmuring rivulets, sighing branches, and tree-tops, and bleating Swisseries, and farmers; Courts--that is, courtiers, court-dames and official chamberlains'-staves, and others--yearn so for the society of human beings; as beasts are driven by the December hunger, so does a noble hunger drive them down from the throne-mountains into the flat plains; not that they would fly from _ennui_, but they desire only a different kind, as their very pastime consists in the abbreviation and alternation of their _ennui_.