ned virtue, which is only the offspring of your vices and your
crimes; but thou wouldst have seen a man who, in meekness and resigned
magnanimity, shows more force of soul, than do your renowned heroes in
their blood-stained fields of battle, or your ministers in their
perfidious cabinets. If it were not for these, and for your priests, and
above all for your false philosophers, the gates of hell would soon be
closed. Canst thou say that thou knowest man, when thou hast only sought
for him in the paths of vice and crime? Dost thou know thyself? I will
make your wounds yet deeper, and pour poison into them. But if I had a
thousand human tongues, and were to keep thee here confined for as many
years, I should still be unable to enumerate to thee all the frightful
consequences of thy actions and thy temerity. Know now the result of thy
life, and remember, that I have scarcely fulfilled one of thy insensate
desires without having forewarned thee to check it. It is by thy command
that I have interrupted the course of things, and committed crimes which
I myself could scarcely have imagined; so that, devil as I am, I am not
so bad as thyself.

"Dost thou remember the nun Clara, and the voluptuous night which thou
didst pass with her? But how canst thou have forgotten her? Listen now
to the consequences. A short time after thy departure, the Bishop, who
was her friend and protector, died; and she, having become a mother, was
condemned, as an object of public horror, to be starved with her child in
a dark dungeon. In her ravenous hunger she fell upon the newly-born, ate
of thy flesh and her own, and prolonged her existence as long as there
was a bone for her to gnaw. In what had she sinned?--she who did not
comprehend her crime; she who did not know, or even suspect, the author
of her ignominy and her frightful death. Feel now the result of one
single moment of pleasure, and tremble! Hast thou not strengthened the
delusion which condemned her? Must not hell now bear the reproach of thy
crime? Those people condemned the child as the spawn of Satan, and
murdered the mother under the idea that she had been possessed by him;
and through this thy deed thou hast bewildered their minds, and those of
their posterity.

"Thou wast not more fortunate with the Prince Bishop. He caused, it is
true, Hans Ruprecht to be buried, and provided for his family. He
likewise, by the trick I played him, lost his fat, and became the m