False "thunderbolts" form one of the most comic sources of love stories. A weary woman, but one without much feeling, thinks for a whole evening that she is in love for life. She is proud of having found at last one of those great commotions of the soul, which used to allure her imagination. The next day she no longer knows where to hide her face and, still more, how to avoid the wretched object she was adoring the night before.
Clever people know how to spot, that is to say, make capital out of these "thunderbolts."
Physical love also has its "thunderbolts." Yesterday in her carriage with the prettiest and most easy-going woman in Berlin, we saw her suddenly blush. She became deeply absorbed and preoccupied. Handsome Lieutenant Findorff had just passed. In the evening at the play, according to her own confession to me, she was out of her mind, she was beside herself, she could think of nothing but Findorff, to whom she had never spoken. If she had dared, she told me, she would have sent for him—that pretty face bore all the signs of the most violent passion. The next day it was still going on. After three days, Findorff having played the blockhead, she thought no more about it. A month later she loathed him.
[1] Translated ad litteram from the Memoirs of Bottmer.
[2] Several phrases taken from Crébillon.
CHAPTER XXIV
VOYAGE IN AN UNKNOWN LAND
I advise the majority of people born in the North to skip the present chapter. It is an obscure dissertation upon certain phenomena relative to the orange-tree, a plant which does not grow or reach its full height except in Italy and Spain. In order to be intelligible elsewhere, I should have had to cut down the facts.
I should have had no hesitation about this, if for a single moment I had intended to write a book to be generally appreciated. But Heaven having refused me the writer's gift, I have thought solely of describing with all the ill-grace of science, but also with all its exactitude, certain facts, of which I became involuntarily the witness through a prolonged sojourn in the land of the orange-tree. Frederick the Great, or some such other distinguished man from the North, who never had the opportunity of seeing the orange-tree growing in the open, would doubtless have denied the facts which follow—and denied in good faith. I have an infinite respect for such good faith and can see its wherefore.