Sterne
says so somewhere. Did you ever read Sterne? Would you like to have a
Sterne? it would amuse you."
"A pearl, they say, is the result of a disease," she answered; "we
have suffered enough already."
"Do not be sad; you will make the happiness of those you love; you
shall be rich and all-powerful."
"Mademoiselle has got such a good heart," said Lemulquinier, whose
seamed face stretched itself painfully into a smile.
For the rest of the evening Balthazar displayed to his daughters all
the natural graces of his character and the charms of his
conversation. Seductive as the serpent, his lips, his eyes, poured out
a magnetic fluid; he put forth that power of genius, that gentleness
of spirit, which once fascinated Josephine and now drew, as it were,
his daughters into his heart. When Emmanuel de Solis came he found,
for the first time in many months, the father and the children
reunited. The young professor, in spite of his reserve, came under the
influence of the scene; for Claes's manners and conversation had
recovered their former irresistible seduction!
Men of science, plunged though they be in abysses of thought and
ceaselessly employed in studying the moral world, take notice,
nevertheless, of the smallest details of the sphere in which they
live. More out of date with their surroundings than really
absent-minded, they are never in harmony with the life about them; they
know and forget all; they prejudge the future in their own minds,
prophesy to their own souls, know of an event before it happens, and yet
they say nothing of all this.
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