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192 these lovely children of my art, to ornament your vile den, and look what you have done to them! I thought that they would adorn your house and carry on my name for generations, and here they are, spoiled, tortured, and violated! What joy was mine when I evoked all these from the enduring wood, and worked with loving care to make them beautiful, perfect in every limb,—and now see them, thus soiled and mutilated from head to foot, defaced and ruined. Poor dears! your own father scarcely knows you, one would think that you had all been to the wars!"

And then I put up a fervent prayer to Heaven (which was perhaps superfluous), entreating that I might not enter Paradise, but be sent to the nethermost hell, where I might assist Lucifer in tormenting my enemy. "Ah!—ha! when I think of this brutal destroyer, how I should love to stick a spit through him and twirl him before a slow fire!"

The steward Andoche came in, while I was still foaming with rage; he begged me as an old acquaintance to calm myself, and led me from the room, saying what he could to console me.

"They are only bits of wood, after all," he said. "It is not worth while for you to excite yourself so for things like that; and what would you do if