I am ashamed that Gustavus should have had such ignorance in love matters as to undertake to find out from some of the best romances whether he must now write a love-letter to Beata--nay, that _her_ absence should have caused him anxiety about her disposition and embarrassment in regard to his own conduct. But the _strength_ of the feelings makes the tongue poor and heavy, as well as the _want_ of them. Fortunately little Laura often came skipping to meet him--not in the park (for nothing makes more ink-spots and coffee-stains on a fair skin than fair nature), but within four walls--and the pupil supplied the place of the teacher.
But a higher and newly risen form now entered upon the land of his love. Ottomar, of whose amphibious body--inhabitant of two worlds--there had hitherto been so much talk in ante-chambers, appeared there with it himself in the apartment of the Lady Resident. His first word to the latter was: "She must pardon him, for not having appeared sooner in her ante-chamber--he had been interred and consequently been unable to do so." But "he was the first," he said, "who so soon after death had come into Elysium" (here he looked round with a flattering smile at the landscape pieces of the tapestry), "and into the presence of the Divinities." This was mere satirical malice. Notoriously it is already an approved clause in the æsthetics of all elegants that they--and is my brother in Lyons in any other category?--have to take away entirely from the flatteries which they are obliged to say to women, the tone and look of sincerity, wherewith the ancient beaux used to provide their fleurettes [or flowery speeches]. In this mocking flattery he dressed up his disgust with women and courts. The women exasperated him because--as he fancied--they sought nothing in love but love itself,[79] whereas the man knows how to blend with it still higher, religious, ambitious sentiments--because their emotions are only couriers, and every feminine heat is only a transient one, and because, if Christ himself should be teaching in their presence, in the midst of the most affecting passages they would turn aside to peep at his vest and his stockings. The courts enraged him by their unfeelingness, by their representation in his brother, and by their oppression of the people, the sight of which filled him with insuperable pain. Hence his accounts of travels in other countries were a satire upon his own; and as the French authors in the characters of the Sultans and Bonzes of the Orient for some time painted and punished those of the Occident, so in his narratives was the South the bearer and Pasquino of the North. The mild humane tolerance which he had proposed to himself in his last letter, he kept no longer than till he had punctuated and sealed it--or so long as he went to walk--or during the gentle unscrewing of the nerves after a wine-debauch. Nor did he care much to be respected by those whom he did not himself respect; in the midst of great, philosophic, republican ideas or ideals, the trivialities of the present were to him invisible and contemptible, now especially, when the future world or worlds obscured the thin one from which he looked at them, as through the blackened spy-glass one sees no object but the sun. Thus, _e. g_., he spent five grotesque minutes at the Lady Resident's in the process--since the proper body of the soul is made up solely of brain and spinal marrow and nerves--of ideally stripping off the skin of the most intellectual court-ladies and the handsomest court-gentlemen, furthermore of drawing out their bones and removing in thought the little flesh and viscera that clothed them, till nothing was left sitting on the ottoman but a spinal tail with a cerebral knob at the top. Thereupon he let these reversed knockers or erected tails run at each other and act and utter fleurettes, and laughed inwardly at the most clever people of birth, whom he had himself scalped and scaled. This is what we may call the philosophic Pasquill.