fib.

Indeed, the last thing that Fritzing was at this convulsed period of
his life was what his master would have called conscientious. Was he
not encouraging the strangest, wickedest, wildest ideas in the
Princess? Strange and wicked and wild that is from the grand ducal
point of view, for to Priscilla they seemed all sweetness and light.
Fritzing had a perfect horror of the Grand Duke. He was everything
that Fritzing, lean man of learning, most detested. The pleasantest
fashion of describing the Grand Duke will be simply to say that he was
in all things, both of mind and body, the exact opposite of Fritzing.
Fritzing was a man who spent his time ignoring his body and digging
away at his mind. You know the bony aspect of such men. Hardly ever is
there much flesh on them; and though they are often ugly enough, their
spirit blazes at you out of wonderful eyes. I call him old Fritzing,
for he was sixty. To me he seemed old; to Priscilla at twenty he
seemed coeval with pyramids and kindred hoarinesses; while to all
those persons who were sixty-one he did not seem old at all. Only two
things could have kept this restless soul chained to the service of
the Grand Duke, and those two things were the unique library and
Priscilla. For the rest, his life at Kunitz revolted him. He loathed
the etiquette and the fuss and the intrigues of the castle. He loathed
each separate lady-in-waiting, and every one of the male officials. He
loathed the vulgar abundance and inordinate length and frequency of
the meals, when down in the town he knew there were people a-hungered.
He loathed the lacqueys with a quite peculiar loathing, scowling at
them from under angry eyebrows as he passed from his apartment to the
library; yet such is the power of an independent and scornful spirit
that though they had heard all about Westphalia and the pig-days never
once had they, who made insolence their study, dared be rude to him.