are two fine talents, which you must convert into money.  For this purpose I send you to Holland.  You are to buy pictures for me and to help the Electoral Prince to while away the hours and enjoy life.  I shall rejoice if you succeed, and it would be agreeable to me for you to transmit to me exact accounts, every week, of your efforts, and of the life you lead there with the Electoral Prince.  You can write, Master Gabriel Nietzel?”

“Yes, I can write; but—­”

“Well, what signifies that but, and wherefore do you look all at once so gloomy and so cross?  Peradventure my commission does not please you?”

“No, your excellency, it does not please me, and I can not undertake it!” cried Master Gabriel, indignantly.  “You send me to The Hague, not as a painter, but—­let me call the thing by its right name—­but as a spy, and, what is yet more, as the corrupter of the Electoral Prince!”

“And that pleases not your virtue and your honesty?” asked the count, shrugging his shoulders.  “Well, good then, dear master!  Stick to it!  Let all that we have said to one another be unsaid.  Remain an honorable, independent hero of virtue, paint pictures, and see to it that you sell them, and if you do not succeed, then be contented to paint signboards for merchants and their walls for burghers, and console yourself with this, that you have refused a higher career from principles of virtue and magnanimity.  Take your Venus, Master Champion of Virtue; I had not commissioned the purchase, and she is too dear for me.  We are released from our mutual obligations, and have nothing more to do with one another.  Go!”

“Will not your excellency keep the picture?” asked Nietzel, shocked, great drops of agony standing upon his pale brow.  “Will not your excellency indemnify me for all my labors and expenses, and shall I go from you with—­”

“With the proud consciousness of your virtue,” said the count, completing his sentence for him.  “Yes, that you shall, Master Gabriel.  You shall bear in mind that Count von Schwarzenberg would have taken you into his service, and that you declined it, thereby exciting his wrath a little, which, as I have been told, has seldom turned to the advantage of those who have roused it, but always to their injury.  However, you care nothing for that; you defy the wrath of the Stadtholder in the Mark, you—­”

“No farther, please, your excellency, no farther!” cried out Gabriel, pale as death.  “Forgive my excitement and my struggles.  I pray you to forget my improper words, and accept me for your humble and obedient servant.  You must do me the favor to keep the Venus of Master Titiano Vecellio, for she is my only possession, and I have given away my whole property in her purchase.”

“Speak more clearly, master!” cried the count.  “You mean to say I must keep your copy of the Venus, and pay for it as if it were an original one, for on that you base all your hopes.”