After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative, stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.

When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an indictment against the encased Billet-doux; but not so much as an initial letter or the rubrum of a sentence was seen upon her face, as he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in bed,—not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,—the moss-bank,—the high-altar,—the royal palace,—in short, the princely chair and seat. Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed, nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics, except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless, that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or—a German lady,—or both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet conspired to shed an undulating blue clare-obscure. A single wax taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons, that is, in sculpture,—upon which custom of the great not to enjoy nature except in counters, in effigie and copy-paper, never in naturâ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons, because it would require a whole

EXTRA-LEAF

in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere—on tapestry, on the dessus des portes, des trumeaux,[[26] ]des cheminées, on vases, on candle-sticks, on plats de menage,[[27]] on snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle—love to see a landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and concede to old Nature this jus imaginum, the true one could be picked out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,—or from the fact that the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what they hate,—or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated images of the same,—or that from a finer feeling they fancy less the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller puzzle-pictures of the artists,—or that they would resemble people (if there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts—and yet, if the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would, from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the

End of the Extra-Leaf.

The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[[28]] at Besançon; for at the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six livres.—The hated covering was the gloves, against which he universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.—There, at most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus de' Medici, even to the very hands?[[29]] I pause for a reply!"

In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything—except Agnola's beautiful Roman shoulders—is covered up; even two images of saints were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown—it was not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine crowns—was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very fine St. Sebastian by Titian—copied from the Barbarigo palace in Venice—(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung close by her pillow)—she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.

Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in here six final S's in succession) than one which is just in the act of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of such a lovely glow—when he was about to proceed as oculist—that he at once proceeded as Protomedicus[[30]] of her head, in order to take her hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand the glove-callus—they were, however, only half-gloves with bare fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. hemiptera,—then was the Doctor, because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged there,—all of us in a body,—but they must bury them in a stocking, which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book—e. g. the Dog-Post-Days—as in a lantern.

—It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely chamber, one tail—I mean one digression à la Sterne—has followed another.—

The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight, he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be made of the apple of beauty—and the black ribbon of beauty-patches pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and Madonna-face,—and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,—to keep himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a true postillon d'amour, so beautifully divides and sets off,—a bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on the pillow and on the hand....