He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind. His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular illusion of the sensitive retina.[[31]] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will be hurled down."
"No, I am to be hurled down first (to express myself in thy fashion),—but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage to interrupt other people like fools,—for my absence is just what they want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion. Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank, their mental structure, and their frequent separation.—
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess—"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without children, as Spitz says.)