Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.

Hesperus

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.