"O, touch me!..."
Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an impossibility.
He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because, indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end. "Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles, deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire, which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why will we take from them the rest?"
But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she had ever sought to show.
Nothing is more dangerous than—as he had done some weeks before—to make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus, the voluptuary Baron, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes, himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a malade imaginaire, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder one.—The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this, however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity) sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and—into it.
After some days,—while the question about Joachime's worth and his own love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,—while he stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was coming,—she came.
[23. DOG-POST-DAY.]
First Visit to Clotilda.—The Paleness.—The Redness.—The Race-Weeks.