OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
[25. DOG-POST-DAY.]
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.—Julius.—Emanuel's Letter concerning God.
Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as this thou wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love, Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades, by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?
—When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I begin it thus....
Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St. Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him exceedingly.
Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a window of the Ministerial Louvre. The conversation was lively enough; the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street. Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her, wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest, as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so little. Joachime was fond of only one child and one beauty,—and each was herself. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."
"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?" asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.
"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago, it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.