With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,—as he set down all faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there. The first was,—for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short duration of her Christmas sentimentality,—that she was always finding fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas! all posterity must yet cross the same hot line of folly and of youth.
[24. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Rouge.—Clotilda's Sickness.—The Play Of Iphigenia.—Difference between Plebeian and Patrician[[275]] Love.
On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's—the proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took leave;—and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an hour longer.
Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see, nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said: "To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial things weighty, as Leibnitz[[276]] said of himself. When the crown and a hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the hair-pin."[[277]]
By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much more tender and ardent towards my hero,—which on any other man than he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,—that he would cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a request,—for she often did him that honor,—but at the intelligence that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms of health at his soul's expense in the race-weeks, had worn only dead blossoms,—namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the remaining red copper-flowers[[278]] of the court. Agnola, who, like her rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the candidate for examination.
And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from Eldorado,—Goethe's Iphigenia. When he saw the patient again with the evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest even during her going down,—when he saw this still victim (marked red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging restlessness,—and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with it,—mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over thy separation from a beloved brother,"—and when he saw how she tried to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first state that the fair patient—although he had been hitherto a falling Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to repentance—nevertheless remained the second person, whom he never denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous, whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with him. The first person—whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in the present state of his heart—was his Emanuel.