Produced by David Widger







THE PARISIANS

By Edward Bulwer-Lytton




PREFATORY NOTE. (BY THE AUTHOR'S SON.)

"The Parisians" and "Kenelm Chillingly" were begun about the same time,
and had their common origin in the same central idea. That idea first
found fantastic expression in "The Coming Race;" and the three books,
taken together, constitute a special group, distinctly apart from all
the other works of their author.

The satire of his earlier novels is a protest against false social
respectabilities; the humour of his later ones is a protest against the
disrespect of social realities. By the first he sought to promote social
sincerity and the free play of personal character; by the last, to
encourage mutual charity and sympathy amongst all classes, on whose
interrelation depends the character of society itself. But in these
three books, his latest fictions, the moral purpose is more definite and
exclusive. Each of them is an expostulation against what seemed to him
the perilous popularity of certain social and political theories, or a
warning against the influence of certain intellectual tendencies upon
individual character and national life. This purpose, however, though
common to the three fictions, is worked out in each of them by a
different method. "The Coming Race" is a work of pure fancy, and the
satire of it is vague and sportive. The outlines of a definite purpose
are more distinctly drawn in "Chillingly,"--a romance which has the
source of its effect in a highly wrought imagination. The humour and
pathos of "Chillingly" are of a kind incompatible with the design of
"The Parisians," which is a work of dramatized observation. "Chillingly"
is a romance; "The Parisians" is a novel. The subject of "Chillingly" is
psychological; that of "The Parisians" is social. The author's object in
"Chillingly" being to illustrate the effects of "modern ideas" upon an
individual character, he has confined his narrative to the biography
of that one character; hence the simplicity of plot and small number of
dramatis personae, whereby the work gains in height and depth what
it loses in breadth of surface. "The Parisians," on the contrary,
is designed to illustrate the effect of "modern ideas" upon a whole
community. This novel is therefore panoramic in the profusion and
variety of figures presented by it to the reader's imagination. No
exclusive prominence is vouchsafed to any of these figures. All of them
are drawn and coloured with an equal care, but by means of the bold,
broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas
so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component
features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of
one collective impersonal character,--that of the Parisian Society of
Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy
throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This
society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration as
being the most advanced in the progress of "modern ideas." Thus, for a
complete perception of its writer's fundamental purpose, "The Parisians"
should be read in connection with "Chillingly," and these two books
in connection with "The Coming Race." It will then be perceived that
through the medium of alternate fancy, sentiment, and observation,
assisted by humour and passion, these three books (in all other respects
so different from each other) complete the presentation of the same
purpose under different aspects, and thereby constitute a group of
fictions which claims a separate place of its own in any thoughtful
classification of their author's works.

One last word to those who will miss from these pages the connecting
and completing touches of the master's hand. It may be hoped that such a
disadvantage, though irreparable, is somewhat mitigated by the essential
character of the work itself. The aesthetic merit of this kind of novel
is in the vivacity of a general effect produced by large, swift strokes
of character; and in such strokes, if they be by a great artist, force
and freedom of style must still be apparent, even when they are left
rough and unfinished. Nor can any lack of final verbal correction
much diminish the intellectual value which many of the more thoughtful
passages of the present work derive from a long, keen, and practical
study of political phenomena, guided by personal experience of public
life, and enlightened by a large, instinctive knowledge of the human
heart.

Such a belief is, at least, encouraged by the private communications
spontaneously made to him who expresses it, by persons of political
experience and social position in France, who have acknowledged
the general accuracy of the author's descriptions, and noticed the
suggestive sagacity and penetration of his occasional comments on the
circumstances and sentiments he describes.




INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

They who chance to have read the "Coming Race" may perhaps remember that
I, the adventurous discoverer of the land without a sun, concluded the
sketch of my adventures by a brief reference to the malady which, though
giving no perceptible notice of its encroachments, might, in the opinion
of my medical attendant, prove suddenly fatal.

I had brought my little book to this somewhat melancholy close a few
years before the date of its publication, and in the meanwhile I was
induced to transfer my residence to Paris, in order to place myself
under the care of an English physician, renowned for his successful
treatment of complaints analogous to my own.

I was the more readily persuaded to undertake this journey,--partly
because I enjoyed a familiar acquaintance with the eminent physician
referred to, who had commenced his career and founded his reputation in
the United States; partly because I had become a solitary man, the ties
of home broken, and dear friends of mine were domiciled in Paris, with
whom I should be sure of tender sympathy and cheerful companionship. I
had reason to be thankful for this change of residence: the skill of
Dr. C______ soon restored me to health. Brought much into contact
with various circles of Parisian society, I became acquainted with the
persons and a witness of the events that form the substance of the tale
I am about to submit to the public, which has treated my former book
with so generous an indulgence. Sensitively tenacious of that character
for strict and unalloyed veracity which, I flatter myself, my account
of the abodes and manners of the Vril-ya has established, I could have
wished to preserve the following narrative no less jealously guarded
than its predecessor from the vagaries of fancy. But Truth undisguised,
never welcome in any civilized community above ground, is exposed at
this time to especial dangers in Paris; and my life would not be worth
an hour's purchase if I exhibited her 'in puris naturalibus' to the eyes
of a people wholly unfamiliarized to a spectacle so indecorous. That
care for one's personal safety which is the first duty of thoughtful man
compels me therefore to reconcile the appearance of 'la Verite' to the
'bienseances' of the polished society in which 'la Liberte' admits no
opinion not dressed after the last fashion.

Attired as fiction, Truth may be peacefully received; and, despite the
necessity thus imposed by prudence, I indulge the modest hope that I do
not in these pages unfaithfully represent certain prominent types of the
brilliant population which has invented so many varieties of Koom-Posh;

   [Koom-Posh, Glek-Nas. For the derivation of these terms and their
   metaphorical signification, I must refer the reader to the "Coming
   Race," chapter xii., on the language of the Vril-ya. To those who
   have not read or have forgotten that historical composition, it may
   be convenient to state briefly that Koom-Posh with the Vril-ya is
   the name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the
   most ignorant or hollow, and may be loosely rendered Hollow-Bosh.
   When Koom-Posh degenerates from popular ignorance into the popular
   ferocity which precedes its decease, the name for that state of
   things is Glek-Nas; namely, the universal strife-rot.]

and even when it appears hopelessly lost in the slough of a Glek-Nas,
re-emerges fresh and lively as if from an invigorating plunge into
the Fountain of Youth. O Paris, 'foyer des idees, et oeil du
monde!'--animated contrast to the serene tranquillity of the Vril-ya,
which, nevertheless, thy noisiest philosophers ever pretend to make the
goal of their desires: of all communities on which shines the sun and
descend the rains of heaven, fertilizing alike wisdom and folly, virtue
and vice; in every city men have yet built on this earth,--mayest
thou, O Paris, be the last to brave the wands of the Coming Race and be
reduced into cinders for the sake of the common good!

                            TISH.

PARIS, August 28, 1872.




THE PARISIANS.




BOOK I.




CHAPTER I.

It was a bright day in the early spring of 1869. All Paris seemed to
have turned out to enjoy itself. The Tuileries, the Champs Elysees, the
Bois de Boulogne, swarmed with idlers. A stranger might have wondered
where Toil was at work, and in what nook Poverty lurked concealed.
A millionaire from the London Exchange, as he looked round on the
magasins, the equipages, the dresses of the women; as he inquired
the prices in the shops and the rent of apartments,--might have asked
himself, in envious wonder, How on earth do those gay Parisians live?
What is their fortune? Where does it come from?

As the day declined, many of the scattered loungers crowded into the
Boulevards; the cafes and restaurants began to light up.

About this time a young man, who might be some five or six and twenty,
was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens, heeding little the throng
through which he glided his solitary way: there was that in his aspect
and bearing which caught attention. He looked a somebody; but though
unmistakably a Frenchman, not a Parisian. His dress was not in the
prevailing mode: to a practised eye it betrayed the taste and the cut
of a provincial tailor. His gait was not that of the Parisian,--less
lounging, more stately; and, unlike the Parisian, he seemed indifferent
to the gaze of others.

Nevertheless there was about him that air of dignity or distinction
which those who are reared from their cradle in the pride of birth
acquire so unconsciously that it seems hereditary and inborn. It
must also be confessed that the young man himself was endowed with
a considerable share of that nobility which Nature capriciously
distributes among her favourites with little respect for their pedigree
and blazon, the nobility of form and face. He was tall and well shaped,
with graceful length of limb and fall of shoulders; his face was
handsome, of the purest type of French masculine beauty,--the nose
inclined to be aquiline, and delicately thin, with finely-cut open
nostrils; the complexion clear,--the eyes large, of a light hazel, with
dark lashes,--the hair of a chestnut brown, with no tint of auburn,--the
beard and mustache a shade darker, clipped short, not disguising the
outline of lips, which were now compressed, as if smiles had of late
been unfamiliar to them; yet such compression did not seem in harmony
with the physiognomical character of their formation, which was that
assigned by Lavater to temperaments easily moved to gayety and pleasure.

Another man, about his own age, coming quickly out of one of the streets
of the Chausee d'Antin, brushed close by the stately pedestrian
above described, caught sight of his countenance, stopped short, and
exclaimed, "Alain!" The person thus abruptly accosted turned his eye
tranquilly on the eager face, of which all the lower part was enveloped
in black beard; and slightly lifting his hat, with a gesture of the
head that implied, "Sir, you are mistaken; I have not the honour to know
you," continued his slow indifferent way. The would-be acquaintance
was not so easily rebuffed. "Peste," he said, between his teeth, "I am
certainly right. He is not much altered: of course I AM; ten years of
Paris would improve an orang-outang." Quickening his step, and regaining
the side of the man he had called "Alain," he said, with a well-bred
mixture of boldness and courtesy in his tone and countenance,

"Ten thousand pardons if I am wrong. Put surely I accost Alain de
Kerouec, son of the Marquis de Rochebriant."

"True, sir; but--"

"But you do not remember me, your old college friend, Frederic
Lemercier?"

"Is it possibly?" cried Alain, cordially, and with an animation which
charged the whole character of his countenance. "My dear Frederic, my
dear friend, this is indeed good fortune! So you, too, are at Paris?"

"Of course; and you? Just come, I perceive," he added, somewhat
satirically, as, linking his arm in his new-found friend's, he glanced
at the cut of that friend's coat-collar.

"I have been here a fortnight," replied Alain.

"Hem! I suppose you lodge in the old Hotel de Rochebriant. I passed
it yesterday, admiring its vast facade, little thinking you were its
inmate."

"Neither am I; the hotel does not belong to me; it was sold some years
ago by my father."

"Indeed! I hope your father got a good price for it; those grand hotels
have trebled their value within the last five years. And how is your
father? Still the same polished grand seigneur? I never saw him
but once, you know; and I shall never forget his smile, style grand
monarque, when he patted me on the head and tipped me ten napoleons."

"My father is no more," said Alain, gravely; "he has been dead nearly
three years."

"Ciel! forgive me; I am greatly shocked. Hem! so you are now the Marquis
de Rochebriant, a great historical name, worth a large sum in the
market. Few such names left. Superb place your old chateau, is it not?"

"A superb place, no--a venerable ruin, yes!"

"Ah, a ruin! so much the better. All the bankers are mad after ruins: so
charming an amusement to restore them. You will restore yours, without
doubt. I will introduce you to such an architect! has the 'moyen age' at
his fingers' ends. Dear,--but a genius."

The young Marquis smiled,--for since he had found a college friend,
his face showed that it could smile,--smiled, but not cheerfully, and
answered,

"I have no intention to restore Rochebriant. The walls are solid: they
have weathered the storms of six centuries, they will last my time, and
with me the race perishes."

"Bah! the race perish, indeed! you will marry. 'Parlez moi de ca': you
could not come to a better man. I have a list of all the heiresses at
Paris, bound in russia leather. You may take your choice out of twenty.
Ah, if I were but a Rochebriant! It is an infernal thing to come into
the world a Lemercier. I am a democrat, of course. A Lemercier would be
in a false position if he were not. But if any one would leave me twenty
acres of land, with some antique right to the De and a title, faith,
would not I be an aristocrat, and stand up for my order? But now we have
met, pray let us dine together. Ah! no doubt you are engaged every day
for a month. A Rochebriant just new to Paris must be 'fete' by all the
Faubourg."

"No," answered Alain, simply, "I am not engaged; my range of
acquaintance is more circumscribed than you suppose."

"So much the better for me. I am luckily disengaged today, which is not
often the case, for I am in some request in my own set, though it is not
that of the Faubourg. Where shall we dine?--at the Trois Freres?"

"Wherever you please. I know no restaurant at Paris, except a very
ignoble one, close by my lodging."

"'Apropos', where do you lodge?"

"Rue de l'Universite, Numero --."

"A fine street, but 'triste'. If you have no longer your family hotel,
you have no excuse to linger in that museum of mummies, the Faubourg St.
Germain; you must go into one of the new quarters by the Champs Elysees.
Leave it to me; I'll find you a charming apartment. I know one to be had
a bargain,--a bagatelle,--five hundred naps a-year. Cost you about two
or three thousand more to furnish tolerably, not showily. Leave all to
me. In three days you shall be settled. Apropos! horses! You must have
English ones. How many?--three for the saddle, two for your 'coupe'?
I'll find them for you. I will write to London to-morrow: Reese [Rice]
is your man."

"Spare yourself that trouble, my dear Frederic. I keep no horses and no
coupe. I shall not change my apartment." As he said this, Rochebriant
drew himself up somewhat haughtily.

"Faith," thought Lemercier, "is it possible that the Marquis is poor?
No. I have always heard that the Rochebriants were among the greatest
proprietors in Bretagne. Most likely, with all his innocence of the
Faubourg St. Germain, he knows enough of it to be aware that I, Frederic
Lemercier, am not the man to patronize one of its greatest nobles.
'Sacre bleu!' if I thought that; if he meant to give himself airs to me,
his old college friend,--I would--I would call him out."

Just as M. Lemercier had come to that bellicose resolution, the Marquis
said, with a smile which, though frank, was not without a certain grave
melancholy in its expression, "My dear Frederic, pardon me if I seem to
receive your friendly offers ungraciously. But I believe that I have
reasons you will approve for leading at Paris a life which you certainly
will not envy;" then, evidently desirous to change the subject, he said
in a livelier tone, "But what a marvellous city this Paris of ours is!
Remember I had never seen it before: it burst on me like a city in the
Arabian Nights two weeks ago. And that which strikes me most--I say
it with regret and a pang of conscience--is certainly not the Paris of
former times, but that Paris which M. Buonaparte--I beg pardon, which
the Emperor--has called up around him, and identified forever with his
reign. It is what is new in Paris that strikes and enthrals me. Here I
see the life of France, and I belong to her tombs!"

"I don't quite understand you," said Lemercier. "If you think that
because your father and grandfather were Legitimists, you have not the
fair field of living ambition open to you under the Empire, you never
were more mistaken. 'Moyen age,' and even rococo, are all the rage.
You have no idea how valuable your name would be either at the Imperial
Court or in a Commercial Company. But with your fortune you are
independent of all but fashion and the Jockey Club.

"And 'apropos' of that, pardon me,--what villain made your coat?--let
me know; I will denounce him to the police." Half amused, half amazed,
Alain Marquis de Rochebriant looked at Frederic Lemercier much as a
good-tempered lion may look upon a lively poodle who takes a liberty
with his mane, and after a pause he replied curtly, "The clothes I wear
at Paris were made in Bretagne; and if the name of Rochebriant be of any
value at all in Paris, which I doubt, let me trust that it will make me
acknowledged as 'gentilhomme,' whatever my taste in a coat or whatever
the doctrines of a club composed--of jockeys."

"Ha, ha!" cried Lemercier, freeing himself from the arm of his friend,
and laughing the more irresistibly as he encountered the grave look of
the Marquis. "Pardon me,--I can't help it,--the Jockey Club,--composed
of jockeys!--it is too much!--the best joke. My dear, Alain, there is
some of the best blood of Europe in the Jockey Club; they would exclude
a plain bourgeois like me. But it is all the same: in one respect
you are quite right. Walk in a blouse if you please: you are still
Rochebriant; you would only be called eccentric. Alas! I am obliged to
send to London for my pantaloons: that comes of being a Lemercier. But
here we are in the Palais Royal."




CHAPTER II.

The salons of the Trois Freres were crowded; our friends found a table
with some little difficulty. Lemercier proposed a private cabinet,
which, for some reason known to himself, the Marquis declined.

Lemercier spontaneously and unrequested ordered the dinner and the
wines.

While waiting for their oysters, with which, when in season, French
'bon-vivants' usually commence their dinner, Lemercier looked round the
salon with that air of inimitable, scrutinizing, superb impertinence
which distinguishes the Parisian dandy. Some of the ladies returned
his glance coquettishly, for Lemercier was 'beau garcon;' others turned
aside indignantly, and muttered something to the gentlemen dining with
them. The said gentlemen, when old, shook their heads, and continued
to eat unmoved; when young, turned briskly round, and looked at first
fiercely at M. Lemercier, but, encountering his eye through the glass
which he had screwed into his socket, noticing the hardihood of his
countenance and the squareness of his shoulders, even they turned back
to the tables, shook their heads, and continued to eat unmoved, just
like the old ones.

"Ah!" cried Lemercier, suddenly, "here comes a man you should know, 'mon
cher.' He will tell you how to place your money,--a rising man, a coming
man, a future minister. Ah! 'bon jour,' Duplessis, 'bon jour,'" kissing
his hand to a gentleman who had just entered and was looking about him
for a seat. He was evidently well and favourably known at the Trois
Freres. The waiters had flocked round him, and were pointing to a
table by the window, which a saturnine Englishman, who had dined off a
beefsteak and potatoes, was about to vacate.

M. Duplessis, having first assured himself, like a prudent man, that
his table was secure, having ordered his oysters, his chablis, and his
'potage a la bisque,' now paced calmly and slowly across the salon, and
halted before Lemercier.

Here let me pause for a moment, and give the reader a rapid sketch of
the two Parisians.

Frederic Lemercier is dressed, somewhat too showily, in the extreme of
the prevalent fashion. He wears a superb pin in his cravat,--a pin worth
two thousand francs; he wears rings on his fingers, 'breloques' to his
watch-chain. He has a warm though dark complexion, thick black eyebrows,
full lips, a nose somewhat turned up, but not small, very fine large
dark eyes, a bold, open, somewhat impertinent expression of countenance;
withal decidedly handsome, thanks to colouring, youth, and vivacity of
regard.

Lucien Duplessis, bending over the table, glancing first with curiosity
at the Marquis de Rochebriant, who leans his cheek on his hand and
seems not to notice him, then concentrating his attention on Frederic
Lemercier, who sits square with his hands clasped,--Lucien Duplessis
is somewhere between forty and fifty, rather below the middle height,
slender, but not slight,--what in English phrase is called "wiry." He
is dressed with extreme simplicity: black frockcoat buttoned up;
black cravat worn higher than men who follow the fashions wear their
neckcloths nowadays; a hawk's eye and a hawk's beak; hair of a dull
brown, very short, and wholly without curl; his cheeks thin and smoothly
shaven, but he wears a mustache and imperial, plagiarized from those of
his sovereign, and, like all plagiarisms, carrying the borrowed beauty
to extremes, so that the points of mustache and imperial, stiffened and
sharpened by cosmetics which must have been composed of iron, looked
like three long stings guarding lip and jaw from invasion; a pale
olive-brown complexion, eyes small, deep-sunk, calm, piercing; his
expression of face at first glance not striking, except for quiet
immovability. Observed more heedfully, the expression was keenly
intellectual,--determined about the lips, calculating about the brows:
altogether the face of no ordinary man, and one not, perhaps, without
fine and high qualities, concealed from the general gaze by habitual
reserve, but justifying the confidence of those whom he admitted into
his intimacy.

"Ah, mon cher," said Lemercier, "you promised to call on me yesterday at
two o'clock. I waited in for you half an hour; you never came."

"No; I went first to the Bourse. The shares in that Company we spoke of
have fallen; they will fall much lower: foolish to buy in yet; so the
object of my calling on you was over. I took it for granted you would
not wait if I failed my appointment. Do you go to the opera to-night?"

"I think not; nothing worth going for: besides, I have found an old
friend, to whom I consecrate this evening. Let me introduce you to the
Marquis de Rochebriant. Alain, M. Duplessis."

The two gentlemen bowed.

"I had the honour to be known to Monsieur your father," said Duplessis.

"Indeed," returned Rochebriant. "He had not visited Paris for many years
before he died."

"It was in London I met him, at the house of the Russian Princess
C____."

The Marquis coloured high, inclined his head gravely, and made no reply.
Here the waiter brought the oysters and the chablis, and Duplessis
retired to his own table.

"That is the most extraordinary man," said Frederic, as he squeezed the
lemon over his oysters, "and very much to be admired."

"How so? I see nothing at least to admire in his face," said the
Marquis, with the bluntness of a provincial.

"His face. Ah! you are a Legitimist,--party prejudice. He dresses his
face after the Emperor; in itself a very clever face, surely."

"Perhaps, but not an amiable one. He looks like a bird of prey."

"All clever men are birds of prey. The eagles are the heroes, and the
owls the sages. Duplessis is not an eagle nor an owl. I should rather
call him a falcon, except that I would not attempt to hoodwink him."

"Call him what you will," said the Marquis, indifferently; "M. Duplessis
can be nothing to me."

"I am not so sure of that," answered Frederic, somewhat nettled by
the phlegm with which the Provincial regarded the pretensions of the
Parisian. "Duplessis, I repeat it, is an extraordinary man. Though
untitled, he descends from your old aristocracy; in fact, I believe, as
his name shows, from the same stem as the Richelieus. His father was
a great scholar, and I believe he has read much himself. Might have
distinguished himself in literature or at the bar, but his parents died
fearfully poor; and some distant relations in commerce took charge of
him, and devoted his talents to the 'Bourse.' Seven years ago he lived
in a single chamber, 'au quatrieme,' near the Luxembourg. He has now a
hotel, not large but charming, in the Champs Elysees, worth at least six
hundred thousand francs. Nor has he made his own fortune alone, but that
of many others; some of birth as high as your own. He has the genius of
riches, and knocks off a million as a poet does an ode, by the force
of inspiration. He is hand-in-glove with the Ministers, and has been
invited to Compiegne by the Emperor. You will find him very useful."

Alain made a slight movement of incredulous dissent, and changed the
conversation to reminiscences of old school-boy days.

The dinner at length came to a close. Frederic rang for the
bill,--glanced over it. "Fifty-nine francs," said he, carelessly
flinging down his napoleon and a half. The Marquis silently drew
forth his purse and extracted the same sum. When they were out of
the restaurant, Frederic proposed adjourning to his own rooms. "I
can promise you an excellent cigar, one of a box given to me by an
invaluable young Spaniard attached to the Embassy here. Such cigars are
not to be had at Paris for money, nor even for love; seeing that women,
however devoted and generous, never offer you anything better than a
cigarette. Such cigars are only to be had for friendship. Friendship is
a jewel."

"I never smoke," answered the Marquis, "but I shall be charmed to come
to your rooms; only don't let me encroach on your good-nature. Doubtless
you have engagements for the evening."

"None till eleven o'clock, when I have promised to go to a soiree
to which I do not offer to take you; for it is one of those Bohemian
entertainments at which it would do you harm in the Faubourg to
assist,--at least until you have made good your position. Let me see, is
not the Duchesse de Tarascon a relation of yours?"

"Yes; my poor mother's first cousin."

"I congratulate you. 'Tres grande dame.' She will launch you in 'puro
cielo,' as Juno might have launched one of her young peacocks."

"There has been no acquaintance between our houses," returned the
Marquis, dryly, "since the mesalliance of her second nuptials."

"Mesalliance! second nuptials! Her second husband was the Duc de
Tarascon."

"A duke of the First Empire, the grandson of a butcher."

"Diable! you are a severe genealogist, Monsieur le Marquis. How can you
consent to walk arm-in-arm with me, whose great-grandfather supplied
bread to the same army to which the Due de Tarascon's grandfather
furnished the meat?"

"My dear Frederic, we two have an equal pedigree, for our friendship
dates from the same hour. I do not blame the Duchesse de Tarascon for
marrying the grandson of a butcher, but for marrying the son of a man
made duke by a usurper. She abandoned the faith of her house and
the cause of her sovereign. Therefore her marriage is a blot on our
scutcheon."

Frederic raised his eyebrows, but had the tact to pursue the subject
no further. He who interferes in the quarrels of relations must pass
through life without a friend.

The young men now arrived at Lemercier's apartment, an entresol looking
on the Boulevard des Italiens, consisting of more rooms than a bachelor
generally requires; low-pitched, indeed, but of good dimensions, and
decorated and furnished with a luxury which really astonished the
provincial, though, with the high-bred pride of an oriental, he
suppressed every sign of surprise.

Florentine cabinets, freshly retouched by the exquisite skill of Mombro;
costly specimens of old Sevres and Limoges; pictures and bronzes and
marble statuettes,--all well chosen and of great price, reflected from
mirrors in Venetian frames,--made a 'coup d'oeil' very favourable to
that respect which the human mind pays to the evidences of money. Nor
was comfort less studied than splendour. Thick carpets covered the
floors, doubled and quilted portieres excluded all draughts from chinks
in the doors. Having allowed his friend a few minutes to contemplate and
admire the 'salle a manger' and 'salon' which constituted his more state
apartments, Frederic then conducted him into a small cabinet, fitted up
with scarlet cloth and gold fringes, whereon were artistically arranged
trophies of Eastern weapons and Turkish pipes with amber mouthpieces.

There, placing the Marquis at ease on a divan and flinging himself
on another, the Parisian exquisite ordered a valet, well dressed as
himself, to bring coffee and liqueurs; and after vainly pressing one of
his matchless cigars on his friend, indulged in his own Regalia.

"They are ten years old," said Frederic, with a tone of compassion at
Alain's self-inflicted loss,--"ten years old. Born therefore about the
year in which we two parted--"

"When you were so hastily summoned from college," said the Marquis, "by
the news of your father's illness. We expected you back in vain. Have
you been at Paris ever since?"

"Ever since; my poor father died of that illness. His fortune proved
much larger than was suspected: my share amounted to an income from
investments in stocks, houses, etc., to upwards of sixty thousand francs
a-year; and as I wanted six years to my majority of course the capital
on attaining my majority would be increased by accumulation. My mother
desired to keep me near her; my uncle, who was joint guardian with her,
looked with disdain on our poor little provincial cottage; so promising
an heir should acquire his finishing education under masters at Paris.
Long before I was of age, I was initiated into politer mysteries of our
capital than those celebrated by Eugene Sue. When I took possession of
my fortune five years ago, I was considered a Croesus; and really for
that patriarchal time I was wealthy. Now, alas! my accumulations have
vanished in my outfit; and sixty thousand francs a-year is the least a
Parisian can live upon. It is not only that all prices have fabulously
increased, but that the dearer things become, the better people live.
When I first came out, the world speculated upon me; now, in order to
keep my standing, I am forced to speculate on the world. Hitherto I have
not lost; Duplessis let me into a few good things this year, worth one
hundred thousand francs or so. Croesus consulted the Delphic Oracle.
Duplessis was not alive in the time of Croesus, or Croesus would have
consulted Duplessis."

Here there was a ring at the outer door of the apartment, and in another
minute the valet ushered in a gentleman somewhere about the age of
thirty, of prepossessing countenance, and with the indefinable air
of good-breeding and 'usage du monde.' Frederic started up to greet
cordially the new-comer, and introduced him to the Marquis under the
name of "Sare Grarm Varn."

"Decidedly," said the visitor, as he took off his paletot and seated
himself beside the Marquis,--"decidedly, my dear Lemercier," said he, in
very correct French, and with the true Parisian accent and intonation,
"you Frenchmen merit that praise for polished ignorance of the language
of barbarians which a distinguished historian bestows on the ancient
Romans. Permit me, Marquis, to submit to you the consideration whether
Grarm Varn is a fair rendering of my name as truthfully printed on this
card."

The inscription on the card, thus drawn from its case and placed in
Alain's hand, was--

             MR. GRAHAM VANE,

               No. __ Rue d'Anjou.

The Marquis gazed at it as he might on a hieroglyphic, and passed it on
to Lemercier in discreet silence.

That gentleman made another attempt at the barbarian appellation.

"'Grar--ham Varne.' 'C'est ca!' I triumph! all difficulties yield to
French energy."

Here the coffee and liqueurs were served; and after a short pause the
Englishman, who had very quietly been observing the silent Marquis,
turned to him and said, "Monsieur le Marquis, I presume it was your
father whom I remember as an acquaintance of my own father at Ems. It
is many years ago; I was but a child. The Count de Chambord was then at
that enervating little spa for the benefit of the Countess's health.
If our friend Lemercier does not mangle your name as he does mine, I
understand him to say that you are the Marquis de Rochebriant."

"That is my name: it pleases me to hear that my father was among those
who flocked to Ems to do homage to the royal personage who deigns to
assume the title of Count de Chambord."

"My own ancestors clung to the descendants of James II. till their
claims were buried in the grave of the last Stuart, and I honour the
gallant men who, like your father, revere in an exile the heir to their
ancient kings."

The Englishman said this with grace and feeling; the Marquis's heart
warmed to him at once.

"The first loyal 'gentilhome' I have met at Paris," thought the
Legitimist; "and, oh, shame! not a Frenchman!" Graham Vane, now
stretching himself and accepting the cigar which Lemercier offered him,
said to that gentleman "You who know your Paris by heart--everybody and
everything therein worth the knowing, with many bodies and many things
that are not worth it--can you inform me who and what is a certain lady
who every fine day may be seen walking in a quiet spot at the outskirts
of the Bois de Boulogne, not far from the Baron de Rothschild's villa?
The said lady arrives at this selected spot in a dark-blue coupe without
armorial bearings, punctually at the hour of three. She wears always
the same dress,--a kind of gray pearl-coloured silk, with a 'cachemire'
shawl. In age she may be somewhat about twenty--a year or so more or
less--and has a face as haunting as a Medusa's; not, however, a face to
turn a man into a stone, but rather of the two turn a stone into a man.
A clear paleness, with a bloom like an alabaster lamp with the light
flashing through. I borrow that illustration from Sare Scott, who
applied it to Milor Bee-ren."

"I have not seen the lady you describe," answered Lemercier, feeling
humiliated by the avowal; "in fact, I have not been in that sequestered
part of the Bois for months; but I will go to-morrow: three o'clock you
say,--leave it to me; to-morrow evening, if she is a Parisienne, you
shall know all about her. But, mon cher, you are not of a jealous
temperament to confide your discovery to another."

"Yes, I am of a very jealous temperament," replied the Englishman; "but
jealousy comes after love, and not before it. I am not in love; I am
only haunted. To-morrow evening, then, shall we dine at Philippe's,
seven o'clock?"

"With all my heart," said Lemercier; "and you too, Alain?"

"Thank you, no," said the Marquis, briefly; and he rose, drew on his
gloves, and took up his hat.

At these signals of departure, the Englishman, who did not want tact
nor delicacy, thought that he had made himself 'de trop' in the
'tete-a-tete' of two friends of the same age and nation; and, catching
up his paletot, said hastily, "No, Marquis, do not go yet, and leave
our host in solitude; for I have an engagement which presses, and only
looked in at Lemercier's for a moment, seeing the light at his windows.
Permit me to hope that our acquaintance will not drop, and inform me
where I may have the honour to call on you."

"Nay," said the Marquis; "I claim the right of a native to pay my
respects first to the foreigner who visits our capital, and," he added
in a lower tone, "who speaks so nobly of those who revere its exiles."

The Englishman saluted, and walked slowly towards the door; but on
reaching the threshold turned back and made a sign to Lemercier,
unperceived by Alain.

Frederic understood the sign, and followed Graham Vane into the
adjoining room, closing the door as he passed.

"My dear Lemercier, of course I should not have intruded on you at this
hour on a mere visit of ceremony. I called to say that the Mademoiselle
Duval whose address you sent me is not the right one,--not the lady
whom, knowing your wide range of acquaintance, I asked you to aid me in
finding out."

"Not the right Duval? Diable! she answered your description, exactly."

"Not at all."

"You said she was very pretty and young,--under twenty."

"You forgot that I said she deserved that description twenty-one years
ago."

"Ah, so you did; but some ladies are always young. 'Age,' says a wit
in the 'Figaro,' 'tis a river which the women compel to reascend to its
source when it has flowed onward more than twenty years.' Never mind:
'soyez tranquille;' I will find your Duval yet if she is to be found.
But why could not the friend who commissioned you to inquire choose
a name less common? Duval! every street in Paris has a shop-door over
which is inscribed the name of Duval."

"Quite true, there is the difficulty; however, my dear Lemercier,
pray continue to look out for a Louise Duval who was young and pretty
twenty-one years ago: this search ought to interest me more than that
which I entrusted to you tonight, respecting the pearly-robed lady;
for in the last I but gratify my own whim, in the first I discharge a
promise to a friend. You, so perfect a Frenchman, know the difference;
honour is engaged to the first. Be sure you let me know if you find
any other Madame or Mademoiselle Duval; and of course you remember
your promise not to mention to any one the commission of inquiry you
so kindly undertake. I congratulate you on your friendship for M. de
Rochebriant. What a noble countenance and manner!"

Lemercier returned to the Marquis. "Such a pity you can't dine with us
to-morrow. I fear you made but a poor dinner to-day. But it is always
better to arrange the menu beforehand. I will send to Philippe's
tomorrow. Do not be afraid."

The Marquis paused a moment, and on his young face a proud struggle was
visible. At last he said, bluntly and manfully,

"My dear Frederic, your world and mine are not and cannot be the
same. Why should I be ashamed to own to my old schoolfellow that I am
poor,--very poor; that the dinner I have shared with you to-day is to
me a criminal extravagance? I lodge in a single chamber on the
fourth-story; I dine off a single plat at a small restaurateur's; the
utmost income I can allow to myself does not exceed five thousand francs
a year: my fortunes I cannot hope much to improve. In his own country
Alain de Rochebriant has no career." Lemercier was so astonished by this
confession that he remained for some moments silent, eyes and mouth
both wide open; at length he sprang up, embraced his friend well-nigh
sobbing, and exclaimed, "'Tant mieux pour moi!' You must take your
lodging with me. I have a charming bedroom to spare. Don't say no.
It will raise my own position to say 'I and Rochebriant keep house
together.' It must be so. Come here to-morrow. As for not having
a career,--bah! I and Duplessis will settle that. You shall be a
millionaire in two years. Meanwhile we will join capitals: I my paltry
notes, you your grand name. Settled!"

"My dear, dear Frederic," said the young noble, deeply affected, "on
reflection you will see what you propose is impossible. Poor I may
be without dishonour; live at another man's cost I cannot do without
baseness. It does not require to be 'gentilhomme' to feel that: it is
enough to be a Frenchman. Come and see me when you can spare the time.
There is my address. You are the only man in Paris to whom I shall be at
home. Au revoir." And breaking away from Lemercier's clasp, the Marquis
hurried off.




CHAPTER III.

Alain reached the house in which he lodged. Externally a fine house,
it had been the hotel of a great family in the old regime. On the first
floor were still superb apartments, with ceilings painted by Le Brun,
with walls on which the thick silks still seemed fresh. These rooms
were occupied by a rich 'agent de change;' but, like all such ancient
palaces, the upper stories were wretchedly defective even in the
comforts which poor men demand nowadays: a back staircase, narrow,
dirty, never lighted, dark as Erebus, led to the room occupied by the
Marquis, which might be naturally occupied by a needy student or a
virtuous 'grisette.' But there was to him a charm in that old hotel,
and the richest 'locataire' therein was not treated with a respect so
ceremonious as that which at tended the lodger on the fourth story.
The porter and his wife were Bretons; they came from the village of
Rochebriant; they had known Alain's parents in their young days; it was
their kinsman who had recommended him to the hotel which they served:
so, when he paused at the lodge for his key, which he had left there,
the porter's wife was in waiting for his return, and insisted on
lighting him upstairs and seeing to his fire, for after a warm day the
night had turned to that sharp biting cold which is more trying in Paris
than even in London.

The old woman, running up the stairs before him, opened the door of his
room, and busied herself at the fire. "Gently, my good Marthe," said he,
"that log suffices. I have been extravagant to-day, and must pinch for
it."

"M. le Marquis jests," said the old woman, laughing.

"No, Marthe; I am serious. I have sinned, but I shall reform. 'Entre
nous,' my dear friend, Paris is very dear when one sets one's foot out
of doors: I must soon go back to Rochebriant."

"When M. le Marquis goes back to Rochebriant he must take with him a
Madame la Marquise,--some pretty angel with a suitable dot."

"A dot suitable to the ruins of Rochebriant would not suffice to repair
them, Marthe: give me my dressing-gown, and good-night."

"'Bon repos, M. le Marquis! beaux reves, et bel avenir.'"

"'Bel avenir!'" murmured the young man, bitterly, leaning his cheek
on his hand; "what fortune fairer than the present can be mine? yet
inaction in youth is more keenly felt than in age. How lightly I
should endure poverty if it brought poverty's ennobling companion,
Labour,--denied to me! Well, well; I must go back to the old rock: on
this ocean there is no sail, not even an oar, for me."

Alain de Rochebriant had not been reared to the expectation of poverty.
The only son of a father whose estates were large beyond those of most
nobles in modern France, his destined heritage seemed not unsuitable
to his illustrious birth. Educated at a provincial academy, he had been
removed at the age of sixteen to Rochebriant, and lived there simply and
lonelily enough, but still in a sort of feudal state, with an aunt, an
elder and unmarried sister to his father.

His father he never saw but twice after leaving college. That brilliant
seigneur visited France but rarely, for very brief intervals, residing
wholly abroad. To him went all the revenues of Rochebriant save what
sufficed for the manage of his son and his sister. It was the cherished
belief of these two loyal natures that the Marquis secretly devoted his
fortune to the cause of the Bourbons; how, they knew not, though they
often amused themselves by conjecturing: and, the young man, as he grew
up, nursed the hope that he should soon hear that the descendant of
Henri Quatre had crossed the frontier on a white charger and hoisted the
old gonfalon with its 'fleur-de-lis.' Then, indeed, his own career would
be opened, and the sword of the Kerouecs drawn from its sheath. Day
after day he expected to hear of revolts, of which his noble father was
doubtless the soul. But the Marquis, though a sincere Legitimist, was
by no means an enthusiastic fanatic. He was simply a very proud, a very
polished, a very luxurious, and, though not without the kindliness and
generosity which were common attributes of the old French noblesse, a
very selfish grand seigneur.

Losing his wife (who died the first year of marriage in giving birth to
Alain) while he was yet very young, he had lived a frank libertine life
until he fell submissive under the despotic yoke of a Russian Princess,
who, for some mysterious reason, never visited her own country and
obstinately refused to reside in France. She was fond of travel, and
moved yearly from London to Naples, Naples to Vienna, Berlin, Madrid,
Seville, Carlsbad, Baden-Baden,--anywhere for caprice or change, except
Paris. This fair wanderer succeeded in chaining to herself the heart and
the steps of the Marquis de Rochebriant.

She was very rich; she lived semi-royally. Hers was just the house in
which it suited the Marquis to be the 'enfant qate.' I suspect that,
cat-like, his attachment was rather to the house than to the person of
his mistress. Not that he was domiciled with the Princess; that would
have been somewhat too much against the proprieties, greatly too
much against the Marquis's notions of his own dignity. He had his
own carriage, his own apartments, his own suite, as became so grand a
seigneur and the lover of so grand a dame. His estates, mortgaged
before he came to them, yielded no income sufficient for his wants; he
mortgaged deeper and deeper, year after year, till he could mortgage
them no more. He sold his hotel at Paris; he accepted without scruple
his sister's fortune; he borrowed with equal 'sang froid' the two
hundred thousand francs which his son on coming of age inherited from
his mother. Alain yielded that fortune to him without a murmur,--nay,
with pride; he thought it destined to go towards raising a regiment for
the fleur-de-lis.

To do the Marquis justice, he was fully persuaded that he should shortly
restore to his sister and son what he so recklessly took from them. He
was engaged to be married to his Princess so soon as her own husband
died. She had been separated from the Prince for many years, and every
year it was said he could not last a year longer. But he completed the
measure of his conjugal iniquities by continuing to live; and one day,
by mistake, Death robbed the lady of the Marquis instead of the Prince.

This was an accident which the Marquis had never counted upon. He was
still young enough to consider himself young; in fact, one principal
reason for keeping Alain secluded in Bretagne was his reluctance
to introduce into the world a son "as old as myself" he would say
pathetically. The news of his death, which happened at Baden after a
short attack of bronchitis caught in a supper 'al fresco' at the old
castle, was duly transmitted to Rochebriant by the Princess; and the
shock to Alain and his aunt was the greater because they had seen so
little of the departed that they regarded him as a heroic myth, an
impersonation of ancient chivalry, condemning himself to voluntary exile
rather than do homage to usurpers. But from their grief they were soon
roused by the terrible doubt whether Rochebriant could still be retained
in the family. Besides the mortgagees, creditors from half the capitals
in Europe sent in their claims; and all the movable effects transmitted
to Alain by his father's confidential Italian valet, except sundry
carriages and horses which were sold at Baden for what they would fetch,
were a magnificent dressing-case, in the secret drawer of which were
some bank-notes amounting to thirty thousand francs, and three large
boxes containing the Marquis's correspondence, a few miniature female
portraits, and a great many locks of hair.

Wholly unprepared for the ruin that stared him in the face, the young
Marquis evinced the natural strength of his character by the calmness
with which he met the danger, and the intelligence with which he
calculated and reduced it.

By the help of the family notary in the neighbouring town, he made
himself master of his liabilities and his means; and he found that,
after paying all debts and providing for the interest of the mortgages,
a property which ought to have realized a rental of L10,000 a year
yielded not more than L400. Nor was even this margin safe, nor the
property out of peril; for the principal mortgagee, who was a capitalist
in Paris named Louvier, having had during the life of the late Marquis
more than once to wait for his half-yearly interest longer than suited
his patience,--and his patience was not enduring,--plainly declared that
if the same delay recurred he should put his right of seizure in force;
and in France still more than in England, bad seasons seriously affect
the security of rents. To pay away L9,600 a year regularly out of
L10,000, with the penalty of forfeiting the whole if not paid,--whether
crops may fail, farmers procrastinate, and timber fall in price,--is to
live with the sword of Damocles over one's head.

For two years and more, however, Alain met his difficulties with
prudence and vigour; he retrenched the establishment hitherto kept at
the chateau, resigned such rural pleasures as he had been accustomed to
indulge, and lived like one of his petty farmers. But the risks of the
future remained undiminished.

"There is but one way, Monsieur le Marquis," said the family notary, M.
Hebert, "by which you can put your estate in comparative safety. Your
father raised his mortgages from time to time, as he wanted money,
and often at interest above the average market interest. You may add
considerably to your income by consolidating all these mortgages into
one at a lower percentage, and in so doing pay off this formidable
mortgagee, M. Louvier, who, I shrewdly suspect, is bent upon becoming
the proprietor of Rochebriant. Unfortunately those few portions of your
land which were but lightly charged, and, lying contiguous to small
proprietors, were coveted by them, and could be advantageously sold, are
already gone to pay the debts of Monsieur the late Marquis. There are,
however, two small farms which, bordering close on the town of S______,
I think I could dispose of for building purposes at high rates; but
these lands are covered by M. Louvier's general mortgage, and he has
refused to release them, unless the whole debt be paid. Were that debt
therefore transferred to another mortgagee, we might stipulate for their
exception, and in so doing secure a sum of more than 100,000 francs,
which you could keep in reserve for a pressing or unforeseen occasion,
and make the nucleus of a capital devoted to the gradual liquidation
of the charges on the estate. For with a little capital, Monsieur le
Marquis, your rent-roll might be very greatly increased, the forests
and orchards improved, those meadows round S_____ drained and irrigated.
Agriculture is beginning to be understood in Bretagne, and your estate
would soon double its value in the hands of a spirited capitalist. My
advice to you, therefore, is to go to Paris, employ a good 'avoue,'
practised in such branch of his profession, to negotiate the
consolidation of your mortgages upon terms that will enable you to sell
outlying portions, and so pay off the charge by instalments agreed upon;
to see if some safe company or rich individual can be found to undertake
for a term of years the management of your forests, the draining of the
S_____ meadows, the superintendence of your fisheries, etc. They, it is
true, will monopolize the profits for many years,--perhaps twenty; but
you are a young man: at the end of that time you will reenter on your
estate with a rental so improved that the mortgages, now so awful, will
seem to you comparatively trivial."

In pursuance of this advice, the young Marquis had come to Paris
fortified with a letter from M. Hebert to an 'avoue' of eminence, and
with many letters from his aunt to the nobles of the Faubourg connected
with his house. Now one reason why M. Hebert had urged his client to
undertake this important business in person, rather than volunteer his
own services in Paris, was somewhat extra-professional. He had a sincere
and profound affection for Alain; he felt compassion for that young life
so barrenly wasted in seclusion and severe privations; he respected,
but was too practical a man of business to share, those chivalrous
sentiments of loyalty to an exiled dynasty which disqualified the man
for the age he lived in, and, if not greatly modified, would cut him
off from the hopes and aspirations of his eager generation. He thought
plausibly enough that the air of the grand metropolis was necessary to
the mental health, enfeebled and withering amidst the feudal mists of
Bretagne; that once in Paris, Alain would imbibe the ideas of Paris,
adapt himself to some career leading to honour and to fortune, for which
he took facilities from his high birth, an historical name too national
for any dynasty not to welcome among its adherents, and an intellect
not yet sharpened by contact and competition with others, but in itself
vigorous, habituated to thought, and vivified by the noble aspirations
which belong to imaginative natures.

At the least, Alain would be at Paris in the social position which would
afford him the opportunities of a marriage, in which his birth and rank
would be readily accepted as an equivalent to some ample fortune that
would serve to redeem the endangered seigneuries. He therefore warned
Alain that the affair for which he went to Paris might be tedious, that
lawyers were always slow, and advised him to calculate on remaining
several months, perhaps a year; delicately suggesting that his rearing
hitherto had been too secluded for his age and rank, and that a year at
Paris, even if he failed in the object which took him there, would not
be thrown away in the knowledge of men and things that would fit him
better to grapple with his difficulties on his return.

Alain divided his spare income between his aunt and himself, and had
come to Paris resolutely determined to live within the L200 a year which
remained to his share. He felt the revolution in his whole being that
commenced when out of sight of the petty principality in which he
was the object of that feudal reverence, still surviving in the more
unfrequented parts of Bretagne, for the representatives of illustrious
names connected with the immemorial legends of the province.

The very bustle of a railway, with its crowd and quickness and
unceremonious democracy of travel, served to pain and confound and
humiliate that sense of individual dignity in which he had been
nurtured. He felt that, once away from Rochebriant, he was but a cipher
in the sum of human beings. Arrived at Paris, and reaching the gloomy
hotel to which he had been recommended, he greeted even the desolation
of that solitude which is usually so oppressive to a stranger in the
metropolis of his native land. Loneliness was better than the loss of
self in the reek and pressure of an unfamiliar throng. For the first few
days he had wandered over Paris without calling even on the 'avoue' to
whom M. Hebert had directed him. He felt with the instinctive acuteness
of a mind which, under sounder training, would have achieved no mean
distinction, that it was a safe precaution to imbue himself with the
atmosphere of the place, and seize on those general ideas which in great
capitals are so contagious that they are often more accurately caught
by the first impressions than by subsequent habit, before he brought his
mind into collision with those of the individuals he had practically to
deal with.

At last he repaired to the 'avoue,' M. Gandrin, Rue St. Florentin. He
had mechanically formed his idea of the abode and person of an 'avoue'
from his association with M. Hebert. He expected to find a dull house
in a dull street near the centre of business, remote from the haunts of
idlers, and a grave man of unpretending exterior and matured years.

He arrived at a hotel newly fronted, richly decorated, in the
fashionable quartier close by the Tuileries. He entered a wide 'porte
cochere,' and was directed by the concierge to mount 'au premier.'
There, first detained in an office faultlessly neat, with spruce young
men at smart desks, he was at length admitted into a noble salon, and
into the presence of a gentleman lounging in an easy-chair before a
magnificent bureau of 'marqueterie, genre Louis Seize,' engaged in
patting a white curly lapdog, with a pointed nose and a shrill bark.

The gentleman rose politely on his entrance, and released the dog, who,
after sniffing the Marquis, condescended not to bite.

"Monsieur le Marquis," said M. Gandrin, glancing at the card and the
introductory note from M. Hebert, which Alain had sent in, and which
lay on the 'secretaire' beside heaps of letters nicely arranged and
labelled, "charmed to make the honour of your acquaintance; just arrived
at Paris? So M. Hebert--a very worthy person whom I have never seen, but
with whom I have had correspondence--tells me you wish for my advice;
in fact, he wrote to me some days ago, mentioning the business in
question,--consolidation of mortgages. A very large sum wanted, Monsieur
le Marquis, and not to be had easily."

"Nevertheless," said Alain, quietly, "I should imagine that there must
be many capitalists in Paris willing to invest in good securities at
fair interest."

"You are mistaken, Marquis; very few such capitalists. Men worth money
nowadays like quick returns and large profits, thanks to the magnificent
system of 'Credit Mobilier,' in which, as you are aware, a man may place
his money in any trade or speculation without liabilities beyond his
share. Capitalists are nearly all traders or speculators."

"Then," said the Marquis, half rising, "I am to presume, sir, that you
are not likely to assist me."

"No, I don't say that, Marquis. I will look with care into the matter.
Doubtless you have with you an abstract of the necessary documents,
the conditions of the present mortgages, the rental of the estate, its
probable prospects, and so forth."

"Sir, I have such an abstract with me at Paris; and having gone into
it myself with M. Hebert, I can pledge you my word that it is strictly
faithful to the facts."

The Marquis said this with naive simplicity, as if his word were quite
sufficient to set that part of the question at rest. M. Gandrin smiled
politely and said, "'Eh bien,' M. le Marquis: favour me with the
abstract; in a week's time you shall have my opinion. You enjoy Paris?
Greatly improved under the Emperor. 'Apropos,' Madame Gandrin receives
tomorrow evening; allow me that opportunity to present you to her."
Unprepared for the proffered hospitality, the Marquis had no option but
to murmur his gratification and assent.

In a minute more he was in the streets. The next evening he went to
Madame Gandrin's,--a brilliant reception,--a whole moving flower-bed of
"decorations" there. Having gone through the ceremony of presentation to
Madame Gandrin,--a handsome woman dressed to perfection, and conversing
with the secretary to an embassy,--the young noble ensconced himself in
an obscure and quiet corner, observing all and imagining that he escaped
observation. And as the young men of his own years glided by him, or
as their talk reached his ears, he became aware that from top to toe,
within and without, he was old-fashioned, obsolete, not of his race, not
of his day. His rank itself seemed to him a waste-paper title-deed to
a heritage long lapsed. Not thus the princely seigneurs of Rochebriant
made their 'debut' at the capital of their nation. They had had the
'entree' to the cabinets of their kings; they had glittered in the halls
of Versailles; they had held high posts of distinction in court and
camp; the great Order of St. Louis had seemed their hereditary appanage.
His father, though a voluntary exile in manhood, had been in childhood a
king's page, and throughout life remained the associate of princes; and
here, in an 'avoue's soiree,' unknown, unregarded, an expectant on an
'avoue's' patronage, stood the last lord of Rochebriant.

It is easy to conceive that Alain did not stay long. But he stayed long
enough to convince him that on L200 a year the polite society of Paris,
even as seen at M. Gandrin's, was not for him. Nevertheless, a day or
two after, he resolved to call upon the nearest of his kinsmen to whom
his aunt had given him letters. With the Count de Vandemar, one of his
fellow-nobles of the sacred Faubourg, he should be no less Rochebriant,
whether in a garret or a palace. The Vandemars, in fact, though for many
generations before the First Revolution a puissant and brilliant family,
had always recognized the Rochebriants as the head of their house,--the
trunk from which they had been slipped in the fifteenth century, when a
younger son of the Rochebriants married a wealthy heiress and took the
title with the lands of Vandemar.

Since then the two families had often intermarried. The present count
had a reputation for ability, was himself a large proprietor, and might
furnish advice to guide Alain in his negotiations with M. Gandrin. The
Hotel do Vandemar stood facing the old Hotel de Rochebriant; it was less
spacious, but not less venerable, gloomy, and prison-like.

As he turned his eyes from the armorial scutcheon which still rested,
though chipped and mouldering, over the portals of his lost ancestral
house, and was about to cross the street, two young men, who seemed two
or three years older than himself, emerged on horseback from the Hotel
de Vandemar.

Handsome young men, with the lofty look of the old race, dressed with
the punctilious care of person which is not foppery in men of birth,
but seems part of the self-respect that appertains to the old chivalric
point of honour. The horse of one of these cavaliers made a caracole
which brought it nearly upon Alain as he was about to cross. The rider,
checking his steed, lifted his hat to Alain and uttered a word of
apology in the courtesy of ancient high-breeding, but still with
condescension as to an inferior. This little incident, and the slighting
kind of notice received from coevals of his own birth, and doubtless his
own blood,--for he divined truly that they were the sons of the Count
de Vandemar,--disconcerted Alain to a degree which perhaps a Frenchman
alone can comprehend. He had even half a mind to give up his visit
and turn back. However, his native manhood prevailed over that morbid
sensitiveness which, born out of the union of pride and poverty, has all
the effects of vanity, and yet is not vanity itself.

The Count was at home, a thin spare man with a narrow but high forehead,
and an expression of countenance keen, severe, and 'un peu moqueuse.'

He received the Marquis, however, at first with great cordiality,
kissed him on both sides of his cheek, called him "cousin," expressed
immeasurable regret that the Countess was gone out on one of the
missions of charity in which the great ladies of the Faubourg
religiously interest themselves, and that his sons had just ridden forth
to the Bois.

As Alain, however, proceeded, simply and without false shame, to
communicate the object of his visit at Paris, the extent of his
liabilities, and the penury of his means, the smile vanished from the
Count's face. He somewhat drew back his fauteuil in the movement
common to men who wish to estrange themselves from some other man's
difficulties; and when Alain came to a close, the Count remained some
moments seized with a slight cough; and, gazing intently on the carpet,
at length he said, "My dear young friend, your father behaved extremely
ill to you,--dishonourably, fraudulently."

"Hold!" said the Marquis, colouring high. "Those are words no man can
apply to my father in my presence."

The Count stared, shrugged his shoulders, and replied with 'sang froid,'
"Marquis, if you are contented with your father's conduct, of course it
is no business of mine: he never injured me. I presume, however, that,
considering my years and my character, you come to me for advice: is it
so?"

Alain bowed his head in assent.

"There are four courses for one in your position to take," said the
Count, placing the index of the right hand successively on the thumb and
three fingers of the left,--"four courses, and no more.

"First. To do as your notary recommended: consolidate your mortgages,
patch up your income as you best can, return to Rochebriant, and devote
the rest of your existence to the preservation of your property. By that
course your life will be one of permanent privation, severe struggle;
and the probability is that you will not succeed: there will come one
or two bad seasons, the farmers will fail to pay, the mortgagee will
foreclose, and you may find yourself, after twenty years of anxiety and
torment, prematurely old and without a sou.

"Course the second. Rochebriant, though so heavily encumbered as to
yield you some such income as your father gave to his chef de cuisine,
is still one of those superb 'terres' which bankers and Jews and
stock-jobbers court and hunt after, for which they will give enormous
sums. If you place it in good hands, I do not doubt that you could
dispose of the property within three months, on terms that would leave
you a considerable surplus, which, invested with judgment, would afford
you whereon you could live at Paris in a way suitable to your rank and
age. Need we go further?--does this course smile to you?"

"Pass on, Count; I will defend to the last what I take from my
ancestors, and cannot voluntarily sell their roof-tree and their tombs."

"Your name would still remain, and you would be just as well received
in Paris, and your 'noblesse' just as implicitly conceded, if all Judaea
encamped upon Rochebriant. Consider how few of us 'gentilshommes' of
the old regime have any domains left to us. Our names alone survive: no
revolution can efface them."

"It may be so, but pardon me; there are subjects on which we cannot
reason,--we can but feel. Rochebriant may be torn from me, but I cannot
yield it."

"I proceed to the third course. Keep the chateau and give up its
traditions; remain 'de facto' Marquis of Rochebriant, but accept the new
order of things. Make yourself known to the people in power. They will
be charmed to welcome you a convert from the old noblesse is a guarantee
of stability to the new system. You will be placed in diplomacy;
effloresce into an ambassador, a minister,--and ministers nowadays have
opportunities to become enormously rich."

"That course is not less impossible than the last. Till Henry V.
formally resign his right to the throne of Saint Louis, I can be servant
to no other man seated on that throne."

"Such, too, is my creed," said the Count, "and I cling to it; but my
estate is not mortgaged, and I have neither the tastes nor the age for
public employments. The last course is perhaps better than the rest; at
all events it is the easiest. A wealthy marriage; even if it must be a
'mesalliance.' I think at your age, with your appearance, that your name
is worth at least two million francs in the eyes of a rich 'roturier'
with an ambitious daughter."

"Alas!" said the young man, rising, "I see I shall have to go back to
Rochebriant. I cannot sell my castle, I cannot sell my creed, and I
cannot sell my name and myself."

"The last all of us did in the old 'regime,' Marquis. Though I
still retain the title of Vandemar, my property comes from the
Farmer-General's daughter, whom my great-grandfather, happily for us,
married in the days of Louis Quinze. Marriages with people of sense and
rank have always been 'marriages de convenance' in France. It is only in
'le petit monde' that men having nothing marry girls having nothing, and
I don't believe they are a bit the happier for it. On the contrary, the
'quarrels de menage' leading to frightful crimes appear by the
'Gazette des Tribunaux' to be chiefly found among those who do not sell
themselves at the altar."

The old Count said this with a grim 'persiflage.' He was a Voltairian.

Voltairianism, deserted by the modern Liberals of France, has its chief
cultivation nowadays among the wits of the old 'regime.' They pick up
its light weapons on the battle-field on which their fathers perished,
and re-feather against the 'canaille' the shafts which had been pointed
against the 'noblesse.'

"Adieu, Count," said Alain, rising; "I do not thank you less for your
advice because I have not the wit to profit by it."

"'Au revoir,' my cousin; you will think better of it when you have been
a month or two at Paris. By the way, my wife receives every Wednesday;
consider our house yours."

"Count, can I enter into the world which Madame la Comtesse receives, in
the way that becomes my birth, on the income I take from my fortune?"

The Count hesitated. "No," said he at last, frankly; "not because you
will be less welcome or less respected, but because I see that you have
all the pride and sensitiveness of a 'seigneur de province.' Society
would therefore give you pain, not pleasure. More than this, I know, by
the remembrance of my own youth and the sad experience of my own
sons, that you would be irresistibly led into debt, and debt in your
circumstances would be the loss of Rochebriant. No; I invite you to
visit us. I offer you the most select but not the most brilliant circles
of Paris, because my wife is religious, and frightens away the birds
of gay plumage with the scarecrows of priests and bishops. But if you
accept my invitation and my offer, I am bound, as an old man of the
world to a young kinsman, to say that the chances are that you will be
ruined."

"I thank you, Count, for your candour; and I now acknowledge that I have
found a relation and a guide," answered the Marquis, with nobility of
mien that was not without a pathos which touched the hard heart of the
old man.

"Come at least whenever you want a sincere if a rude friend;" and though
he did not kiss his cousin's cheek this time, he gave him, with more
sincerity, a parting shake of the hand.

And these made the principal events in Alain's Paris life till he met
Frederic Lemercier. Hitherto he had received no definite answer from M.
Gandrin, who had postponed an interview, not having had leisure to make
himself master of all the details in the abstract sent to him.




CHAPTER IV.

The next day, towards the afternoon, Frederic Lemercier, somewhat
breathless from the rapidity at which he had ascended to so high an
eminence, burst into Alain's chamber.

"'Br-r! mon cher;' what superb exercise for the health--how it must
strengthen the muscles and expand the chest! After this who should
shrink from scaling Mont Blanc? Well, well. I have been meditating on
your business ever since we parted. But I would fain know more of its
details. You shall confide them to me as we drive through the Bois. My
coupe is below, and the day is beautiful; come."

To the young Marquis, the gayety, the heartiness of his college friend
were a cordial. How different from the dry counsels of the Count de
Vandemar! Hope, though vaguely, entered into his heart. Willingly he
accepted Frederic's invitation, and the young men were soon rapidly
borne along the Champs Elysees. As briefly as he could Alain described
the state of his affairs, the nature of his mortgages, and the result of
his interview with M. Gandrin.

Frederic listened attentively. "Then Gandrin has given you as yet no
answer?"

"None; but I have a note from him this morning asking me to call
to-morrow."

"After you have seen him, decide on nothing,--if he makes you any offer.
Get back your abstract, or a copy of it, and confide it to me.
Gandrin ought to help you; he transacts affairs in a large way. 'Belle
clientele' among the millionnaires. But his clients expect fabulous
profits, and so does he. As for your principal mortgagee, Louvier, you
know, of course, who he is."

"No, except that M. Hebert told me that he was very rich."

"'Rich' I should think so; one of the Kings of Finance, Ah! observe
those young men on horseback."

Alain looked forth and recognized the two cavaliers whom he had
conjectured to be the sons of the Count de Vandemar.

"Those 'beaux garcons' are fair specimens of your Faubourg," said
Frederic; "they would decline my acquaintance because my grandfather
kept a shop, and they keep a shop between them."

"A shop! I am mistaken, then. Who are they?"

"Raoul and Enguerrand, sons of that mocker of man, the Count de
Vandemar."

"And they keep a shop! You are jesting."

"A shop at which you may buy gloves and perfumes, Rue de la Chaussee
d'Antin. Of course they don't serve at the counter; they only invest
their pocket-money in the speculation; and, in so doing, treble at least
their pocket-money, buy their horses, and keep their grooms."

"Is it possible! nobles of such birth! How shocked the Count would be if
he knew it!"

"Yes, very much shocked if he was supposed to know it. But he is too
wise a father not to give his sons limited allowances and unlimited
liberty, especially the liberty to add to the allowances as they please.
Look again at them; no better riders and more affectionate brothers
since the date of Castor and Pollux. Their tastes indeed differ--Raoul
is religious and moral, melancholy and dignified; Enguerrand is a lion
of the first water,--elegant to the tips of his nails. These demigods
nevertheless are very mild to mortals. Though Enguerrand is the best
pistol-shot in Paris, and Raoul the best fencer, the first is so
good-tempered that you would be a brute to quarrel with him, the last so
true a Catholic, that if you quarrelled with him you need not fear his
sword. He would not die in the committal of what the Church holds a
mortal sin."

"Are you speaking ironically? Do you mean to imply that men of the name
of Vandemar are not brave?"

"On the contrary, I believe that, though masters of their weapons, they
are too brave to abuse their skill; and I must add that, though they
are sleeping partners in a shop, they would not cheat you of a farthing.
Benign stars on earth, as Castor and Pollux were in heaven."

"But partners in a shop!"

"Bah! when a minister himself, like the late M. de M______, kept a shop,
and added the profits of 'bons bons' to his revenue, you may form
some idea of the spirit of the age. If young nobles are not generally
sleeping partners in shops, still they are more or less adventurers
in commerce. The Bourse is the profession of those who have no other
profession. You have visited the Bourse?"

"No."

"No! this is just the hour. We have time yet for the Bois. Coachman,
drive to the Bourse."

"The fact is," resumed Frederic, "that gambling is one of the wants of
civilized men. The 'rouge-et-noir' and 'roulette' tables are forbidden;
the hells closed: but the passion for making money without working for
it must have its vent, and that vent is the Bourse. As instead of a
hundred wax-lights you now have one jet of gas, so instead of a hundred
hells you have now one Bourse, and--it is exceedingly convenient;
always at hand; no discredit being seen there as it was to be seen at
Frascati's; on the contrary, at once respectable, and yet the mode."

The coupe stops at the Bourse, our friends mount the steps, glide
through the pillars, deposit their canes at a place destined to guard
them, and the Marquis follows Frederic up a flight of stairs till he
gains the open gallery round a vast hall below. Such a din! such a
clamour! disputations, wrangling, wrathful.

Here Lemercier distinguished some friends, whom he joined for a few
minutes.

Alain left alone, looked down into the hall. He thought himself in some
stormy scene of the First Revolution. An English contested election in
the market-place of a borough when the candidates are running close on
each other--the result doubtful, passions excited, the whole borough in
civil war--is peaceful compared to the scene at the Bourse.

Bulls and bears screaming, bawling, gesticulating, as if one were about
to strangle the other; the whole, to an uninitiated eye, a confusion, a
Babel, which it seems absolutely impossible to reconcile to the notion
of quiet mercantile transactions, the purchase and sale of shares and
stocks. As Alain gazed bewildered, he felt himself gently touched, and,
looking round, saw the Englishman.

"A lively scene!" whispered Mr. Vane. "This is the heart of Paris: it
beats very loudly."

"Is your Bourse in London like this?"

"I cannot tell you: at our Exchange the general public are not admitted:
the privileged priests of that temple sacrifice their victims in closed
penetralia, beyond which the sounds made in the operation do not travel
to ears profane. But had we an Exchange like this open to all the world,
and placed, not in a region of our metropolis unknown to fashion, but
in some elegant square in St. James's or at Hyde Park Corner, I suspect
that our national character would soon undergo a great change, and that
all our idlers and sporting-men would make their books there every day,
instead of waiting long months in 'ennui' for the Doncaster and the
Derby. At present we have but few men on the turf; we should then
have few men not on Exchange, especially if we adopt your law, and can
contrive to be traders without risk of becoming bankrupts. Napoleon I.
called us a shopkeeping nation. Napoleon III. has taught France to excel
us in everything, and certainly he has made Paris a shopkeeping city."

Alain thought of Raoul and Enguerrand, and blushed to find that what he
considered a blot on his countrymen was so familiarly perceptible to a
foreigner's eye.

"And the Emperor has done wisely, at least for the time," continued the
Englishman, with a more thoughtful accent. "He has found vent thus for
that very dangerous class in Paris society to which the subdivision of
property gave birth; namely the crowd of well-born, daring young men
without fortune and without profession. He has opened the 'Bourse' and
said, 'There, I give you employment, resource, an 'avenir.'' He has
cleared the byways into commerce and trade, and opened new avenues of
wealth to the noblesse, whom the great Revolution so unwisely beggared.
What other way to rebuild a 'noblesse' in France, and give it a chance
of power be side an access to fortune? But to how many sides of your
national character has the Bourse of Paris magnetic attraction! You
Frenchmen are so brave that you could not be happy without facing
danger, so covetous of distinction that you would pine yourselves away
without a dash, coute quo coute, at celebrity and a red ribbon. Danger!
look below at that arena: there it is; danger daily, hourly. But there
also is celebrity; win at the Bourse, as of old in a tournament, and
paladins smile on you, and ladies give you their scarves, or, what
is much the same, they allow you to buy their cachemires. Win at
the Bourse,--what follows? the Chamber, the Senate, the Cross, the
Minister's 'portefeuille.' I might rejoice in all this for the sake
of Europe,--could it last, and did it not bring the consequences that
follow the demoralization which attends it. The Bourse and the Credit
Mobilier keep Paris quiet, at least as quiet as it can be. These are
the secrets of this reign of splendour; these the two lions couchants on
which rests the throne of the Imperial reconstructor."

Alain listened surprised and struck. He had not given the Englishman
credit for the cast of mind which such reflections evinced.

Here Lemercier rejoined them, and shook hands with Graham Vane, who,
taking him aside, said, "But you promised to go to the Bois, and indulge
my insane curiosity about the lady in the pearl-coloured robe?"

"I have not forgotten; it is not half-past two yet; you said three.
'Soyez tranquille;' I drive thither from the Bourse with Rochebriant."

"Is it necessary to take with you that very good-looking Marquis?"

"I thought you said you were not jealous, because not yet in love.
However, if Rochebriant occasions you the pang which your humble servant
failed to inflict, I will take care that he do not see the lady."

"No," said the Englishman; "on consideration, I should be very much
obliged to any one with whom she would fall in love. That would
disenchant me. Take the Marquis by all means."

Meanwhile Alain, again looking down, saw just under him, close by one of
the pillars, Lucien Duplessis. He was standing apart from the throng,
a small space cleared round himself, and two men who had the air of
gentlemen of the 'beau monde,' with whom he was conferring. Duplessis,
thus seen, was not like the Duplessis at the restaurant. It would be
difficult to explain what the change was, but it forcibly struck Alain:
the air was more dignified, the expression keener; there was a look of
conscious power and command about the man even at that distance; the
intense, concentrated intelligence of his eye, his firm lip, his marked
features, his projecting, massive brow, would have impressed a very
ordinary observer. In fact, the man was here in his native element; in
the field in which his intellect gloried, commanded, and had signalized
itself by successive triumphs. Just thus may be the change in the great
orator whom you deemed insignificant in a drawing-room, when you see his
crest rise above a reverential audience; or the great soldier, who was
not distinguishable from the subaltern in a peaceful club, could you see
him issuing the order to his aids-de-camp amidst the smoke and roar of
the battle-field.

"Ah, Marquis!" said Graham Vane, "are you gazing at Duplessis? He is the
modern genius of Paris. He is at once the Cousin, the Guizot, and
the Victor Hugo of speculation. Philosophy, Eloquence, audacious
Romance,--all Literature now is swallowed up in the sublime epic of
'Agiotage,' and Duplessis is the poet of the Empire."

"Well said, M. Grarm Varn," cried Frederic, forgetting his recent
lesson in English names. "Alain underrates that great man. How could an
Englishman appreciate him so well?"

"'Ma foi!'" returned Graham, quietly. "I am studying to think at Paris,
in order some day or other to know how to act in London. Time for the
Bois. Lemercier, we meet at seven,--Philippe's."




CHAPTER V.

"What do you think of the Bourse?" asked Lemercier, as their carriage
took the way to the Bois.

"I cannot think of it yet; I am stunned. It seems to me as if I had been
at a 'Sabbat,' of which the wizards were 'agents de change,' but not
less bent upon raising Satan."

"Pooh! the best way to exorcise Satan is to get rich enough not to be
tempted by him. The fiend always loved to haunt empty places; and of all
places nowadays he prefers empty purses and empty stomachs."

"But do all people get rich at the Bourse? or is not one man's wealth
many men's ruin?"

"That is a question not very easy to answer; but under our present
system Paris gets rich, though at the expense of individual Parisians. I
will try and explain. The average luxury is enormously increased even in
my experience; what were once considered refinements and fopperies are
now called necessary comforts. Prices are risen enormously, house-rent
doubled within the last five or six years; all articles of luxury are
very much dearer; the very gloves I wear cost twenty per cent more than
I used to pay for gloves of the same quality. How the people we meet
live, and live so well, is an enigma that would defy AEdipus if AEdipus
were not a Parisian. But the main explanation is this: speculation and
commerce, with the facilities given to all investments, have really
opened more numerous and more rapid ways to fortune than were known a
few years ago.

"Crowds are thus attracted to Paris, resolved to venture a small capital
in the hope of a large one; they live on that capital, not on their
income, as gamesters do. There is an idea among us that it is
necessary to seem rich in order to become rich. Thus there is a general
extravagance and profusion. English milords marvel at our splendour.
Those who, while spending their capital as their income, fail in their
schemes of fortune, after one, two, three, or four years, vanish. What
becomes of them, I know no more than I do what becomes of the old moons.
Their place is immediately supplied by new candidates. Paris is thus
kept perennially sumptuous and splendid by the gold it engulfs. But
then some men succeed,--succeed prodigiously, preternaturally; they make
colossal fortunes, which are magnificently expended. They set an example
of show and pomp, which is of course the more contagious because so many
men say, 'The other day those millionnaires were as poor as we are; they
never economized; why should we?' Paris is thus doubly enriched,--by the
fortunes it swallows up, and by the fortunes it casts up; the last
being always reproductive, and the first never lost except to the
individuals."

"I understand: but what struck me forcibly at the scene we have left was
the number of young men there; young men whom I should judge by their
appearance to be gentlemen, evidently not mere spectators,--eager,
anxious, with tablets in their hands. That old or middle-aged men should
find a zest in the pursuit of gain I can understand, but youth and
avarice seem to me a new combination, which Moliere never divined in his
'Avare.'"

"Young men, especially if young gentlemen, love pleasure; and pleasure
in this city is very dear. This explains why so many young men frequent
the Bourse. In the old gaining now suppressed, young men were the
majority; in the days of your chivalrous forefathers it was the young
nobles, not the old, who would stake their very mantles and swords on a
cast of the die. And, naturally enough, mon cher; for is not youth
the season of hope, and is not hope the goddess of gaming, whether at
rouge-et-noir or the Bourse?"

Alain felt himself more and more behind his generation. The acute
reasoning of Lemercier humbled his amour propre. At college Lemercier
was never considered Alain's equal in ability or book-learning. What
a stride beyond his school-fellow had Lemercier now made! How dull and
stupid the young provincial felt himself to be as compared with the easy
cleverness and half-sportive philosophy of the Parisian's fluent talk!

He sighed with a melancholy and yet with a generous envy. He had too
fine a natural perception not to acknowledge that there is a rank of
mind as well as of birth, and in the first he felt that Lemercier might
well walk before a Rochebriant; but his very humility was a proof that
he underrated himself.

Lemercier did not excel him in mind, but in experience. And just as the
drilled soldier seems a much finer fellow than the raw recruit, because
he knows how to carry himself, but after a year's discipline the
raw recruit may excel in martial air the upright hero whom he now
despairingly admires, and never dreams he can rival; so set a mind from
a village into the drill of a capital, and see it a year after; it may
tower a head higher than its recruiting-sergeant.




CHAPTER VI.

"I believe," said Lemercier, as the coupe rolled through the lively
alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, "that Paris is built on a loadstone,
and that every Frenchman with some iron globules in his blood is
irresistibly attracted towards it. The English never seem to feel for
London the passionate devotion that we feel for Paris. On the contrary,
the London middle class, the commercialists, the shopkeepers, the
clerks, even the superior artisans compelled to do their business in the
capital, seem always scheming and pining to have their home out of it,
though but in a suburb."

"You have been in London, Frederic?"

"Of course; it is the mode to visit that dull and hideous metropolis."

"If it be dull and hideous, no wonder the people who are compelled to do
business in it seek the pleasures of home out of it."

"It is very droll that though the middle class entirely govern the
melancholy Albion, it is the only country in Europe in which the middle
class seem to have no amusements; nay, they legislate against amusement.
They have no leisure-day but Sunday; and on that day they close
all their theatres, even their museums and picture-galleries. What
amusements there may be in England are for the higher classes and the
lowest."

"What are the amusements of the lowest class?"

"Getting drunk."

"Nothing else?"

"Yes. I was taken at night under protection of a policeman to some
cabarets, where I found crowds of that class which is the stratum below
the working class; lads who sweep crossings and hold horses, mendicants,
and, I was told, thieves, girls whom a servant-maid would not speak to,
very merry, dancing quadrilles and waltzes, and regaling themselves on
sausages,--the happiest-looking folks I found in all London; and, I must
say, conducting themselves very decently."

"Ah!" Here Lemercier pulled the check-string. "Will you object to a walk
in this quiet alley? I see some one whom I have promised the Englishman
to--But heed me, Alain, don't fall in love with her."




CHAPTER VII.

The lady in the pearl-coloured dress! Certainly it was a face that might
well arrest the eye and linger long on the remembrance.

There are certain "beauty-women" as there are certain "beauty-men," in
whose features one detects no fault, who are the show figures of any
assembly in which they appear, but who, somehow or other, inspire no
sentiment and excite no interest; they lack some expression, whether of
mind, or of soul, or of heart, without which the most beautiful face is
but a beautiful picture. This lady was not one of those "beauty-women."
Her features taken singly were by no means perfect, nor were they set
off by any brilliancy of colouring. But the countenance aroused and
impressed the imagination with a belief that there was some history
attached to it, which you longed to learn. The hair, simply parted over
a forehead unusually spacious and high for a woman, was of lustrous
darkness; the eyes, of a deep violet blue, were shaded with long lashes.

Their expression was soft and mournful, but unobservant. She did not
notice Alain and Lemercier as the two men slowly passed her. She seemed
abstracted, gazing into space as one absorbed in thought or revery. Her
complexion was clear and pale, and apparently betokened delicate health.

Lemercier seated himself on a bench beside the path, and invited Alain
to do the same. "She will return this way soon," said the Parisian, "and
we can observe her more attentively and more respectfully thus seated
than if we were on foot; meanwhile, what do you think of her? Is she
French? is she Italian? can she be English?"

"I should have guessed Italian, judging by the darkness of the hair and
the outline of the features; but do Italians have so delicate a fairness
of complexion?"

"Very rarely; and I should guess her to be French, judging by the
intelligence of her expression, the simple neatness of her dress, and
by that nameless refinement of air in which a Parisienne excels all
the descendants of Eve,--if it were not for her eyes. I never saw
a Frenchwoman with eyes of that peculiar shade of blue; and if a
Frenchwoman had such eyes, I flatter myself she would have scarcely
allowed us to pass without making some use of them."

"Do you think she is married?" asked Alain.

"I hope so; for a girl of her age, if comme il faut, can scarcely
walk alone in the Bois, and would not have acquired that look so
intelligent,--more than intelligent,--so poetic."

"But regard that air of unmistakable distinction; regard that expression
of face,-so pure, so virginal: comme il faut she must be."

As Alain said these last words, the lady, who had turned back, was
approaching them, and in full view of their gaze. She seemed unconscious
of their existence as before, and Lemercier noticed that her lips moved
as if she were murmuring inaudibly to herself.

She did not return again, but continued her walk straight on till at
the end of the alley she entered a carriage in waiting for her, and was
driven off.

"Quick, quick!" cried Lemercier, running towards his own coupe; "we must
give chase."

Alain followed somewhat less hurriedly, and, agreeably to instructions
Lemercier had already given to his coachman, the Parisian's coupe set
off at full speed in the track of the strange lady's, which was still in
sight.

In less than twenty minutes the carriage in chase stopped at the grille
of one of those charming little villas to be found in the pleasant
suburb of A-----; a porter emerged from the lodge, opened the gate; the
carriage drove in, again stopped at the door of the house, and the
two gentlemen could not catch even a glimpse of the lady's robe as she
descended from the carriage and disappeared within the house.

"I see a cafe yonder," said Lemercier; "let us learn all we can as to
the fair unknown, over a sorbet or a petit verre." Alain silently, but
not reluctantly, consented. He felt in the fair stranger an interest new
to his existence.

They entered the little cafe, and in a few minutes Lemercier, with the
easy savoir vivre of a Parisian, had extracted from the garcon as much
as probably any one in the neighbourhood knew of the inhabitants of the
villa.

It had been hired and furnished about two months previously in the name
of Signora Venosta; but, according to the report of the servants, that
lady appeared to be the gouvernante or guardian of a lady much younger,
out of whose income the villa was rented and the household maintained.

It was for her the coupe was hired from Paris. The elder lady very
rarely stirred out during the day, but always accompanied the younger in
any evening visits to the theatre or the houses of friends.

It was only within the last few weeks that such visits had been made.

The younger lady was in delicate health, and under the care of an
English physician famous for skill in the treatment of pulmonary
complaints. It was by his advice that she took daily walking exercise in
the Bois. The establishment consisted of three servants, all Italians,
and speaking but imperfect French. The garcon did not know whether
either of the ladies was married, but their mode of life was free from
all scandal or suspicion; they probably belonged to the literary or
musical world, as the garcon had observed as their visitors the eminent
author M. Savarin and his wife; and, still more frequently, an old man
not less eminent as a musical composer.

"It is clear to me now," said Lemercier, as the two friends reseated
themselves in the carriage, "that our pearly ange is some Italian singer
of repute enough in her own country to have gained already a competence;
and that, perhaps on account of her own health or her friend's, she is
living quietly here in the expectation of some professional engagement,
or the absence of some foreign lover."

"Lover! do you think that?" exclaimed Alain, in a tone of voice that
betrayed pain.

"It is possible enough; and in that case the Englishman may profit
little by the information I have promised to give him."

"You have promised the Englishman?"

"Do you not remember last night that he described the lady, and said
that her face haunted him: and I--"

"Ah! I remember now. What do you know of this Englishman? He is rich, I
suppose."

"Yes, I hear he is very rich now; that an uncle lately left him an
enormous sum of money. He was attached to the English Embassy many years
ago, which accounts for his good French and his knowledge of Parisian
life. He comes to Paris very often, and I have known him some time.
Indeed he has intrusted to me a difficult and delicate commission. The
English tell me that his father was one of the most eminent members of
their Parliament, of ancient birth, very highly connected, but ran
out his fortune and died poor; that our friend had for some years to
maintain himself, I fancy, by his pen; that he is considered very able;
and, now that his uncle has enriched him, likely to enter public life
and run a career as distinguished as his father's."

"Happy man! happy are the English," said the Marquis, with a sigh;
and as the carriage now entered Paris, he pleaded the excuse of an
engagement, bade his friend goodby, and went his way musing through the
crowded streets.




CHAPTER VIII.

LETTER FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

                         VILLA D'-----, A------.

I can never express to you, my beloved Eulalie, the strange charm which
a letter from you throws over my poor little lonely world for days after
it is received. There is always in it something that comforts, something
that sustains, but also a something that troubles and disquiets me.
I suppose Goethe is right, "that it is the property of true genius to
disturb all settled ideas," in order, no doubt, to lift them into a
higher level when they settle down again.

Your sketch of the new work you are meditating amid the orange groves of
Provence interests me intensely; yet, do you forgive me when I add
that the interest is not without terror? I do not find myself able
to comprehend how, amid those lovely scenes of Nature, your mind
voluntarily surrounds itself with images of pain and discord. I stand in
awe of the calm with which you subject to your analysis the infirmities
of reason and the tumults of passion. And all those laws of the social
state which seem to me so fixed and immovable you treat with so quiet
a scorn, as if they were but the gossamer threads which a touch of your
slight woman's hand could brush away. But I cannot venture to discuss
such subjects with you. It is only the skilled enchanter who can stand
safely in the magic circle, and compel the spirits that he summons, even
if they are evil, to minister to ends in which he foresees a good.

We continue to live here very quietly, and I do not as yet feel the
worse for the colder climate. Indeed, my wonderful doctor, who was
recommended to me as American, but is in reality English, assures me
that a single winter spent here under his care will suffice for my
complete re-establishment. Yet that career, to the training for which so
many years have been devoted, does not seem to me so alluring as it once
did.

I have much to say on this subject, which I defer till I can better
collect my own thoughts on it; at present they are confused and
struggling. The great Maestro has been most gracious.

In what a radiant atmosphere his genius lives and breathes! Even in
his cynical moods, his very cynicism has in it the ring of a jocund
music,--the laugh of Figaro, not of Mephistopheles.

We went to dine with him last week. He invited to meet us Madame S-----,
who has this year conquered all opposition, and reigns alone, the great
S-----; Mr. T--------, a pianist of admirable promise; your friend M.
Savarin, wit, critic, and poet, with his pleasant, sensible wife; and
a few others, who, the Maestro confided to me in a whisper, were
authorities in the press. After dinner S----- sang to us, magnificently,
of course. Then she herself graciously turned to me, said how much she
had heard from the Maestro in my praise, and so and so. I was persuaded
to sing after her. I need not say to what disadvantage. But I forgot my
nervousness; I forgot my audience; I forgot myself, as I always do when
once my soul, as it were, finds wing in music, and buoys itself in the
air, relieved from the sense of earth. I knew not that I had succeeded
till I came to a close, and then my eyes resting on the face of the
grand prima donna, I was seized with an indescribable sadness, with a
keen pang of remorse. Perfect artiste though she be, and with powers in
her own realm of art which admit of no living equal, I saw at once that
I had pained her: she had grown almost livid; her lips were quivering,
and it was only with a great effort that she muttered out some faint
words intended for applause. I comprehended by an instinct how gradually
there can grow upon the mind of an artist the most generous that
jealousy which makes the fear of a rival annihilate the delight in art.
If ever I should achieve S-----'s fame as a singer, should I feel the
same jealousy?--I think not now, but I have not been tested. She went
away abruptly. I spare you the recital of the compliments paid to me
by my other auditors, compliments that gave me no pleasure; for on
all lips, except those of the Maestro, they implied, as the height of
eulogy, that I had inflicted torture upon S-----. "If so," said he, "she
would be as foolish as a rose that was jealous of the whiteness of a
lily. You would do yourself great wrong, my child, if you tried to vie
with the rose in its own colour."

He patted my bended head as he spoke, with that kind of fatherly
king-like fondness with which he honours me; and I took his hand in
mine, and kissed it gratefully. "Nevertheless," said Savarin, "when the
lily comes out there will be a furious attack on it, made by the
clique that devotes itself to the rose: a lily clique will be formed en
revanche, and I foresee a fierce paper war. Do not be frightened at its
first outburst: every fame worth having must be fought for."

Is it so? have you had to fight for your fame, Eulalie? and do you hate
all contests as much as I do?

Our only other gayety since I last wrote was a soiree at M. Louvier's.
That republican millionaire was not slow in attending to the kind letter
you addressed to him recommending us to his civilities. He called at
once, placed his good offices at our disposal, took charge of my
modest fortune, which he has invested, no doubt, as safely as it is
advantageously in point of interest, hired our carriage for us, and in
short has been most amiably useful.

At his house we met many to me most pleasant, for they spoke with such
genuine appreciation of your works and yourself. But there were others
whom I should never have expected to meet under the roof of a Croesus
who has so great a stake in the order of things established. One young
man--a noble whom he specially presented to me, as a politician
who would be at the head of affairs when the Red Republic was
established--asked me whether I did not agree with him that all private
property was public spoliation, and that the great enemy to civilization
was religion, no matter in what form.

He addressed to me these tremendous questions with an effeminate lisp,
and harangued on them with small feeble gesticulations of pale dirty
fingers covered with rings.

I asked him if there were many who in France shared his ideas.

"Quite enough to carry them some day," he answered with a lofty smile.
"And the day may be nearer than the world thinks, when my confreres will
be so numerous that they will have to shoot down each other for the sake
of cheese to their bread."

That day nearer than the world thinks! Certainly, so far as one may
judge the outward signs of the world at Paris, it does not think of
such things at all. With what an air of self-content the beautiful city
parades her riches! Who can gaze on her splendid palaces, her gorgeous
shops, and believe that she will give ear to doctrines that would
annihilate private rights of property; or who can enter her crowded
churches, and dream that she can ever again install a republic too
civilized for religion?

Adieu. Excuse me for this dull letter. If I have written on much that
has little interest even for me, it is that I wish to distract my mind
from brooding over the question that interests me most, and on which I
most need your counsel. I will try to approach it in my next.

                         ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Eulalie, Eulalie!--What mocking spirit has been permitted in this modern
age of ours to place in the heart of woman the ambition which is the
prerogative of men? You indeed, so richly endowed with a man's genius,
have a right to man's aspirations. But what can justify such ambition in
me? Nothing but this one unintellectual perishable gift of a voice that
does but please in uttering the thoughts of others. Doubtless I could
make a name familiar for its brief time to the talk of Europe,--a name,
what name? a singer's name. Once I thought that name a glory. Shall I
ever forget the day when you first shone upon me; when, emerging from
childhood as from a dim and solitary bypath, I stood forlorn on the
great thoroughfare of life, and all the prospects before me stretched
sad in mists and in rain? You beamed on me then as the sun coming out
from the cloud and changing the face of earth; you opened to my sight
the fairy-land of poetry and art; you took me by the hand and said,
"Courage! there is at each step some green gap in the hedgerows, some,
soft escape from the stony thoroughfare. Beside the real life expands
the ideal life to those who seek it. Droop not, seek it: the ideal life
has its sorrows, but it never admits despair; as on the ear of him who
follows the winding course of a stream, the stream ever varies the note
of its music,--now loud with the rush of the falls; now low and calm as
it glides by the level marge of smooth banks; now sighing through the
stir of the reeds; now babbling with a fretful joy as some sudden curve
on the shore stays its flight among gleaming pebbles,--so to the soul of
the artist is the voice of the art ever fleeting beside and before him.
Nature gave thee the bird's gift of song: raise the gift into art, and
make the art thy companion.

"Art and Hope were twin-born, and they die together." See how faithfully
I remember, methinks, your very words. But the magic of the words, which
I then but dimly understood, was in your smile and in your eye, and the
queen-like wave of your hand as if beckoning to a world which lay before
you, visible and familiar as your native land. And how devotedly, with
what earnestness of passion, I gave myself up to the task of raising my
gift into an art! I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else;
and oh, now sweet to me then were words of praise! "Another year yet,"
at length said the masters, "and you ascend your throne among the queens
of song." Then--then--I would have changed for no other throne on earth
my hope of that to be achieved in the realms of my art. And then came
that long fever: my strength broke down, and the Maestro said, "Rest, or
your voice is gone, and your throne is lost forever." How hateful that
rest seemed to me! You again came to my aid. You said, "The time you
think lost should be but time improved. Penetrate your mind with other
songs than the trash of Libretti. The more you habituate yourself to the
forms, the more you imbue yourself with the spirit, in which passions
have been expressed and character delineated by great writers, the
more completely you will accomplish yourself in your own special art of
singer and actress." So, then, you allured me to a new study. Ah! in
so doing did you dream that you diverted me from the old ambition? My
knowledge of French and Italian, and my rearing in childhood, which had
made English familiar to me, gave me the keys to the treasure-houses of
three languages. Naturally I began with that in which your masterpieces
are composed. Till then I had not even read your works. They were the
first I chose. How they impressed, how they startled me! what depths in
the mind of man, in the heart of woman, they revealed to me! But I owned
to you then, and I repeat it now, neither they nor any of the works
in romance and poetry which form the boast of recent French literature
satisfied yearnings for that calm sense of beauty, that divine joy in
a world beyond this world, which you had led me to believe it was the
prerogative of ideal art to bestow. And when I told you this with the
rude frankness you had bid me exercise in talk with you, a thoughtful,
melancholy shade fell over your face, and you said quietly, "You
are right, child; we, the French of our time, are the offspring of
revolutions that settled nothing, unsettled all: we resemble those
troubled States which rush into war abroad in order to re-establish
peace at home. Our books suggest problems to men for reconstructing
some social system in which the calm that belongs to art may be found at
last: but such books should not be in your hands; they are not for
the innocence and youth of women as yet unchanged by the systems which
exist." And the next day you brought me 'l'asso's great poem, the
"Gerusalemme Liberata," and said, smiling, "Art in its calm is here."

You remember that I was then at Sorrento by the order of my physician.
Never shall I forget the soft autumn day when I sat amongst the lonely
rocklets to the left of the town,--the sea before me, with scarce
a ripple; my very heart steeped in the melodies of that poem, so
marvellous for a strength disguised in sweetness, and for a symmetry in
which each proportion blends into the other with the perfectness of a
Grecian statue. The whole place seemed to me filled with the presence of
the poet to whom it had given birth. Certainly the reading of that poem
formed an era in my existence: to this day I cannot acknowledge the
faults or weaknesses which your criticisms pointed out; I believe
because they are in unison with my own nature, which yearns for harmony,
and, finding that, rests contented. I shrink from violent contrasts, and
can discover nothing tame and insipid in a continuance of sweetness and
serenity. But it was not till after I had read "La Gerusalemme" again
and again, and then sat and brooded over it, that I recognized the main
charm of the poem in the religion which clings to it as the perfume
clings to a flower,--a religion sometimes melancholy, but never to me
sad. Hope always pervades it. Surely if, as you said, "Hope is twin-born
with art," it is because art at its highest blends itself unconsciously
with religion, and proclaims its affinity with hope by its faith in some
future good more perfect than it has realized in the past.

Be this as it may, it was in this poem so pre-eminently Christian that
I found the something which I missed and craved for in modern French
masterpieces; even yours,--a something spiritual, speaking to my own
soul, calling it forth; distinguishing it as an essence apart from mere
human reason; soothing, even when it excited; making earth nearer
to heaven. And when I ran on in this strain to you after my own wild
fashion, you took my head between your hands and kissed me, and said,
"Happy are those who believe! long may that happiness be thine!" Why did
I not feel in Dante the Christian charm that I felt in Tasso? Dante in
your eyes, as in those of most judges, is infinitely the greater
genius; but reflected on the dark stream of that genius the stars are so
troubled, the heaven so threatening.

Just as my year of holiday was expiring, I turned to English literature;
and Shakspeare, of course, was the first English poet put into my hands.
It proves how childlike my mind still was, that my earliest sensation in
reading him was that of disappointment. It was not only that, despite my
familiarity with English (thanks chiefly to the care of him whom I
call my second father), there is much in the metaphorical diction of
Shakspeare which I failed to comprehend; but he seemed to me so far like
the modern French writers who affect to have found inspiration in his
muse, that he obtrudes images of pain and suffering without cause or
motive sufficiently clear to ordinary understandings, as I had taught
myself to think it ought to be in the drama.

He makes Fate so cruel that we lose sight of the mild deity behind her.
Compare, in this, Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet." In the
first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are
blessed. The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed. But when
we have put down the English tragedy,--when Hamlet and Ophelia are
confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not
what good end for humanity is achieved. The passages that fasten on
our memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible
problems, to which they give us no solution.

In the "Horaces" of Corneille there are fierce contests, rude passions,
tears drawn from some of the bitterest sources of human pity; but then
through all stands out, large and visible to the eyes of all spectators,
the great ideal of devoted patriotism. How much of all that has been
grandest in the life of France, redeeming even its worst crimes of
revolution in the love of country, has had its origin in the "Horaces"
of Corneille. But I doubt if the fates of Coriolanus and Caesar and
Brutus and Antony, in the giant tragedies of Shakspeare, have made
Englishmen more willing to die for England. In fine, it was long
before--I will not say I understood or rightly appreciated Shakspeare,
for no Englishman would admit that I or even you could ever do so, but
before I could recognize the justice of the place his country claims
for him as the genius without an equal in the literature of Europe.
Meanwhile the ardour I had put into study, and the wear and tear of the
emotions which the study called forth, made themselves felt in a return
of my former illness, with symptoms still more alarming; and when the
year was out I was ordained to rest for perhaps another year before I
could sing in public, still less appear on the stage. How I rejoiced
when I heard that fiat! for I emerged from that year of study with a
heart utterly estranged from the profession in which I had centred my
hopes before--Yes, Eulalie, you had bid me accomplish myself for the
arts of utterance; by the study of arts in which thoughts originate the
words they employ; and in doing so I had changed myself into another
being. I was forbidden all fatigue of mind: my books were banished, but
not the new self which the books had formed. Recovering slowly through
the summer, I came hither two months since, ostensibly for the advice of
Dr. C-------, but really in the desire to commune with my own heart and
be still.

And now I have poured forth that heart to you, would you persuade me
still to be a singer? If you do, remember at least how jealous and
absorbing the art of the singer and the actress is,--how completely I
must surrender myself to it, and live among books or among dreams
no more. Can I be anything else but singer? and if not, should I be
contented merely to read and to dream?

I must confide to you one ambition which during the lazy Italian summer
took possession of me; I must tell you the ambition, and add that I have
renounced it as a vain one. I had hoped that I could compose, I mean
in music. I was pleased with some things I did: they expressed in music
what I could not express in words; and one secret object in coming here
was to submit them to the great Maestro. He listened to them patiently:
he complimented me on my accuracy in the mechanical laws of composition;
he even said that my favourite airs were "touchants et gracieux."

And so he would have left me, but I stopped him timidly, and said, "Tell
me frankly, do you think that with time and study I could compose music
such as singers equal to myself would sing to?"

"You mean as a professional composer?"

"Well, yes."

"And to the abandonment of your vocation as a singer?"

"Yes."

"My dear child, I should be your worst enemy if I encouraged such a
notion: cling to the career in which you call be greatest; gain but
health, and I wager my reputation on your glorious success on the stage.
What can you be as a composer? You will set pretty music to pretty
words, and will be sung in drawing-rooms with the fame a little more or
less that generally attends the compositions of female amateurs. Aim at
something higher, as I know you would do, and you will not succeed. Is
there any instance in modern times, perhaps in any times, of a female
composer who attains even to the eminence of a third-rate opera-writer?
Composition in letters may be of no sex. In that Madame Dudevant and
your friend Madame de Grantmesnil can beat most men; but the genius of
musical composition is homme, and accept it as a compliment when I say
that you are essentially femme."

He left me, of course, mortified and humbled; but I feel he is right as
regards myself, though whether in his depreciation of our whole sex I
cannot say. But as this hope has left me, I have become more disquieted,
still more restless. Counsel me, Eulalie; counsel, and, if possible,
comfort me.                         ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

No letter from you yet, and I have left you in peace for ten days.
How do you think I have spent them? The Maestro called on us with M.
Savarin, to insist on our accompanying them on a round of the theatres.
I had not been to one since my arrival. I divined that the kind-hearted
composer had a motive in this invitation. He thought that in witnessing
the applauses bestowed on actors, and sharing in the fascination in
which theatrical illusion holds an audience, my old passion for the
stage, and with it the longing for an artiste's fame, would revive.

In my heart I wished that his expectations might be realized. Well for
me if I could once more concentrate all my aspirations on a prize within
my reach!

We went first to see a comedy greatly in vogue, and the author
thoroughly understands the French stage of our day. The acting was
excellent in its way. The next night we went to the Odeon, a romantic
melodrama in six acts, and I know not how many tableaux. I found
no fault with the acting there. I do not give you the rest of our
programme. We visited all the principal theatres, reserving the opera
and Madame S------ for the last. Before I speak of the opera, let me say
a word or two on the plays.

There is no country in which the theatre has so great a hold on the
public as in France; no country in which the successful dramatist has
so high a fame; no country perhaps in which the state of the stage
so faithfully represents the moral and intellectual condition of the
people. I say this not, of course, from my experience of countries which
I have not visited, but from all I hear of the stage in Germany and in
England.

The impression left on my mind by the performances I witnessed is, that
the French people are becoming dwarfed. The comedies that please them
are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society.
They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no
luminous flashes of truth; their sentiment is not pure and noble,--it is
a sickly and false perversion of the impure and ignoble into travesties
of the pure and noble.

Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature: all that really
remains of the old French genius is its vaudeville. Great dramatists
create great parts. One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have
accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.

High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera.
I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined. I complain
that French intellect is lowered. The descent from "Polyeucte" to "Ruy
Blas" is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of
thought; but the descent from "Ruy Blas" to the best drama now produced
is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give
not even the glimpse of a mountain-top.

But now to the opera. S------ in Norma! The house was crowded, and its
enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine. You tell me that S------ never
rivalled Pasta, but certainly her Norma is a great performance. Her
voice has lost less of its freshness than I had been told, and what is
lost of it her practised management conceals or carries off.

The Maestro was quite right: I could never vie with her in her own line;
but conceited and vain as I may seem even to you in saying so, I feel in
my own line that I could command as large an applause,--of course taking
into account my brief-lived advantage of youth. Her acting, apart from
her voice, does not please me. It seems to me to want intelligence of
the subtler feelings, the under-current of emotion which constitutes the
chief beauty of the situation and the character. Am I jealous when I say
this? Read on and judge.

On our return that night, when I had seen the Venosta to bed, I went
into my own room, opened the window, and looked out. A lovely night,
mild as in spring at Florence,--the moon at her full, and the stars
looking so calm and so high beyond our reach of their tranquillity. The
evergreens in the gardens of the villas around me silvered over, and the
summer boughs, not yet clothed with leaves, were scarcely visible amid
the changeless smile of the laurels. At the distance lay Paris, only to
be known by its innumerable lights. And then I said to myself,

"No, I cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that
vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and
painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by
rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has its
drill!"

Then I gazed on those stars which provoke our questionings, and return
no answer, till my heart grew full,--so full,--and I bowed my head and
wept like a child.


FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

And still no letter from you! I see in the journals that you have left
Nice. Is it that you are too absorbed in your work to have leisure to
write to me? I know you are not ill, for if you were, all Paris would
know of it. All Europe has an interest in your health. Positively I will
write to you no more till a word from yourself bids me do so.

I fear I must give up my solitary walks in the Bois de Boulogne: they
were very dear to me, partly because the quiet path to which I confined
myself was that to which you directed me as the one you habitually
selected when at Paris, and in which you had brooded over and revolved
the loveliest of your romances; and partly because it was there that,
catching, alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from the genius that had
hallowed the place, and dreaming I might originate music, I nursed my
own aspirations and murmured my own airs. And though so close to
that world of Paris to which all artists must appeal for judgment or
audience, the spot was so undisturbed, so sequestered. But of late that
path has lost its solitude, and therefore its charm.

Six days ago the first person I encountered in my walk was a man whom
I did not then heed. He seemed in thought, or rather in revery, like
myself; we passed each other twice or thrice, and I did not notice
whether he was young or old, tall or short; but he came the next day,
and a third day, and then I saw that he was young, and, in so regarding
him, his eyes became fixed on mine. The fourth day he did not come, but
two other men came, and the look of one was inquisitive and offensive.
They sat themselves down on a bench in the walk, and though I did not
seem to notice them, I hastened home; and the next day, in talking with
our kind Madame Savarin, and alluding to these quiet walks of mine, she
hinted, with the delicacy which is her characteristic, that the customs
of Paris did not allow demoiselles comme il faut to walk alone even in
the most sequestered paths of the Bois.

I begin now to comprehend your disdain of customs which impose chains so
idly galling on the liberty of our sex.

We dined with the Savarins last evening: what a joyous nature he has!
Not reading Latin, I only know Horace by translations, which I am told
are bad; but Savarin seems to me a sort of half Horace,--Horace on
his town-bred side, so playfully well-bred, so good-humoured in his
philosophy, so affectionate to friends, and so biting to foes. But
certainly Savarin could not have lived in a country farm upon endives
and mallows. He is town-bred and Parisian, jusqu'au bout des ongles.
How he admires you, and how I love him for it! Only in one thing
he disappoints me there. It is your style that he chiefly praises:
certainly that style is matchless; but style is only the clothing of
thought, and to praise your style seems to me almost as invidious as the
compliment to some perfect beauty, not on her form and face, but on her
taste and dress.

We met at dinner an American and his wife,--a Colonel and Mrs. Morley:
she is delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally
are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them
from English women. She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew
very good friends.

She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine
upon the rights of Women, of which one reads more in the journals than
one hears discussed in salons. Naturally enough I felt great interest
in that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were
forbidden; and as long as she declaimed on the hard fate of the women
who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond
the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from
fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory as
men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not
say that I went with her cordially: you can guess that by my former
letters. But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact
wrongs and our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex and
shrank back in terror.

Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled
at me with a kind of saturnine mirth. "Mademoiselle, don't believe a
word she says: it is only tall talk! In America the women are absolute
tyrants, and it is I who, in concert with my oppressed countrymen, am
going in for a platform agitation to restore the Rights of Men."

Upon this there was a lively battle of words between the spouses, in
which, I must own, I thought the lady was decidedly worsted.

No, Eulalie, I see nothing in these schemes for altering our
relations towards the other sex which would improve our condition. The
inequalities we suffer are not imposed by law,--not even by convention:
they are imposed by nature.

Eulalie, you have had an experience unknown to me: you have loved. In
that day did you,--you, round whom poets and sages and statesmen gather,
listening to your words as to an oracle,--did you feel that your pride
of genius had gone out from you, that your ambition lived in whom you
loved, that his smile was more to you than the applause of a world?

I feel as if love in a woman must destroy her rights of equality, that
it gives to her a sovereign even in one who would be inferior to herself
if her love did not glorify and crown him. Ah! if I could but merge this
terrible egotism which oppresses me, into the being of some one who is
what I would wish to be were I man! I would not ask him to achieve
fame. Enough if I felt that he was worthy of it, and happier methinks
to console him when he failed than to triumph with him when he won. Tell
me, have you felt this? When you loved did you stoop as to a slave, or
did you bow down as to a master?

FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TO ISAURA CICOGNA.

Chere enfant,--All your four letters have reached me the same day. In
one of my sudden whims I set off with a few friends on a rapid tour
along the Riviera to Genoa, thence to Turin on to Milan. Not knowing
where we should rest even for a day, my letters were not forwarded.

I came back to Nice yesterday, consoled for all fatigues in having
insured that accuracy in description of localities which my work
necessitates.

You are, my poor child, in that revolutionary crisis through which
genius passes in youth before it knows its own self, and longs vaguely
to do or to be a something other than it has done or has been before.
For, not to be unjust to your own powers, genius you have,--that inborn
undefinable essence, including talent, and yet distinct from it. Genius
you have, but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you
are too diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of
singer, because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the
thorny crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should
be your worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a
dazzling success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true
vocation, you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be
impelled to it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of
poets.

Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so
reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their
own craft, do not wish their children to adopt it? The most successful
author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for
encouragement. This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the
sister arts.

The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite
disciples and welcome acolytes. As for those engaged in the practical
affairs of life, fathers mostly wish their sons to be as they have been.

The politician, the lawyer, the merchant, each says to his children,
"Follow my steps." All parents in practical life would at least agree
in this,--they would not wish their sons to be poets. There must be some
sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence of
digression from a road of which the travellers themselves say to those
whom they love best, "Beware!"

Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of
wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the
romance of youth as a thing

        "To case in periods and embalm in ink."

Enfant, have you need of a publisher to create romance? Is it not in
yourself? Do not imagine that genius requires for its enjoyment the
scratch of the pen and the types of the printer. Do not suppose that the
poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving,
struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize
the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of
flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them
is to say that they are lifelike: No: the poet's real delight is not
in the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the
sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and
form, and art and Nature, sympathies which are often found equally keen
in those who have not the same gift of language. The poet is but the
interpreter. What of?--Truths in the hearts of others. He utters what
they feel. Is the joy in the utterance? Nay, it is in the feeling
itself. So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, when I bade thee open,
out of the beaten thoroughfare, paths into the meads and river-banks
at either side of the formal hedgerows, rightly dost thou add that I
enjoined thee to make thine art thy companion. In the culture of that
art for which you are so eminently gifted, you will find the ideal life
ever beside the real. Are you not ashamed to tell me that in that
art you do but utter the thoughts of others? You utter them in music;
through the music you not only give to the thoughts a new character, but
you make them reproductive of fresh thoughts in your audience.

You said very truly that you found in composing you could put into
music thoughts which you could not put into words. That is the peculiar
distinction of music. No genuine musician can explain in words exactly
what he means to convey in his music.

How little a libretto interprets an opera; how little we care even to
read it! It is the music that speaks to us; and how?--Through the human
voice. We do not notice how poor are the words which the voice warbles.
It is the voice itself interpreting the soul of the musician which
enchants and enthralls us. And you who have that voice pretend to
despise the gift. What! despise the power of communicating delight!--the
power that we authors envy; and rarely, if ever, can we give delight
with so little alloy as the singer.

And when an audience disperses, can you guess what griefs the singer
may have comforted? what hard hearts he may have softened? what high
thoughts he may have awakened?

You say, "Out on the vamped-up hypocrite! Out on the stage-robes and
painted cheeks!"

I say, "Out on the morbid spirit which so cynically regards the mere
details by which a whole effect on the minds and hearts and souls of
races and nations can be produced!"

There, have I scolded you sufficiently? I should scold you more, if I
did not see in the affluence of your youth and your intellect the cause
of your restlessness. Riches are always restless. It is only to poverty
that the gods give content.

You question me about love; you ask if I have ever bowed to a master,
ever merged my life in another's: expect no answer on this from me.
Circe herself could give no answer to the simplest maid, who, never
having loved, asks, "What is love?"

In the history of the passions each human heart is a world in itself;
its experience profits no others. In no two lives does love play the
same part or bequeath the same record.

I know not whether I am glad or sorry that the word "love" now falls on
my ear with a sound as slight and as faint as the dropping of a leaf in
autumn may fall on thine.

I volunteer but this lesson, the wisest I can give, if thou canst
understand it: as I bade thee take art into thy life, so learn to look
on life itself as an art. Thou couldst discover the charm in Tasso; thou
couldst perceive that the requisite of all art, that which pleases, is
in the harmony of proportion. We lose sight of beauty if we exaggerate
the feature most beautiful.

Love proportioned adorns the homeliest existence; love disproportioned
deforms the fairest.

Alas! wilt thou remember this warning when the time comes in which it
may be needed?

E----- G-------.





BOOK II.




CHAPTER I.

It is several weeks after the date of the last chapter; the lime-trees
in the Tuileries are clothed in green.

In a somewhat spacious apartment on the ground-floor in the quiet
locality of the Rue d'Anjou, a man was seated, very still and evidently
absorbed in deep thought, before a writing-table placed close to the
window.

Seen thus, there was an expression of great power both of intellect and
of character in a face which, in ordinary social commune, might rather
be noticeable for an aspect of hardy frankness, suiting well with the
clear-cut, handsome profile, and the rich dark auburn hair, waving
carelessly over one of those broad open foreheads, which, according to
an old writer, seem the "frontispiece of a temple dedicated to Honour."

The forehead, indeed, was the man's most remarkable feature. It could
not but prepossess the beholder. When, in private theatricals, he had
need to alter the character of his countenance, he did it effectually,
merely by forcing down his hair till it reached his eyebrows. He no
longer then looked like the same man.

The person I describe has been already introduced to the reader as
Graham Vane. But perhaps this is the fit occasion to enter into
some such details as to his parentage and position as may make the
introduction more satisfactory and complete.

His father, the representative of a very ancient family, came into
possession, after a long minority, of what may be called a fair squire's
estate, and about half a million in moneyed investments, inherited on
the female side. Both land and money were absolutely at his disposal,
unencumbered by entail or settlement. He was a man of a brilliant,
irregular genius, of princely generosity, of splendid taste, of a
gorgeous kind of pride closely allied to a masculine kind of vanity. As
soon as he was of age he began to build, converting his squire's hall
into a ducal palace. He then stood for the county; and in days before
the first Reform Bill, when a county election was to the estate of
a candidate what a long war is to the debt of a nation. He won the
election; he obtained early successes in Parliament. It was said by good
authorities in political circles that, if he chose, he might aspire to
lead his party, and ultimately to hold the first rank in the government
of his country.

That may or may not be true; but certainly he did not choose to take the
trouble necessary for such an ambition. He was too fond of pleasure, of
luxury, of pomp. He kept a famous stud of racers and hunters. He was a
munificent patron of art. His establishments, his entertainments, were
on a par with those of the great noble who represented the loftiest (Mr.
Vane would not own it to be the eldest) branch of his genealogical tree.

He became indifferent to political contests, indolent in his attendance
at the House, speaking seldom, not at great length nor with much
preparation, but with power and fire, originality and genius; so that
he was not only effective as an orator, but combining with eloquence
advantages of birth, person, station, the reputation of patriotic
independence, and genial attributes of character, he was an authority of
weight in the scales of party.

This gentleman, at the age of forty, married the dowerless daughter of
a poor but distinguished naval officer, of noble family, first cousin to
the Duke of Alton.

He settled on her a suitable jointure, but declined to tie up any
portion of his property for the benefit of children by the marriage. He
declared that so much of his fortune was invested either in mines, the
produce of which was extremely fluctuating, or in various funds, over
rapid transfers in which it was his amusement and his interest to
have control, unchecked by reference to trustees, that entails and
settlements on children were an inconvenience he declined to incur.

Besides, he held notions of his own as to the wisdom of keeping children
dependent on their father. "What numbers of young men," said he, "are
ruined in character and in fortune by knowing that when their father
dies they are certain of the same provision, no matter how they
displease him; and in the meanwhile forestalling that provision by
recourse to usurers." These arguments might not have prevailed over the
bride's father a year or two later, when, by the death of intervening
kinsmen, he became Duke of Alton; but in his then circumstances
the marriage itself was so much beyond the expectations which the
portionless daughter of a sea-captain has the right to form that Mr.
Vane had it all his own way, and he remained absolute master of his
whole fortune, save of that part of his landed estate on which his
wife's jointure was settled; and even from this incumbrance he was very
soon freed. His wife died in the second year of marriage, leaving an
only son,--Graham. He grieved for her loss with all the passion of an
impressionable, ardent, and powerful nature. Then for a while he sought
distraction to his sorrow by throwing himself into public life with a
devoted energy he had not previously displayed.

His speeches served to bring his party into power, and he yielded,
though reluctantly, to the unanimous demand of that party that he should
accept one of the highest offices in the new Cabinet. He acquitted
himself well as an administrator, but declared, no doubt honestly, that
he felt like Sinbad released from the old man on his back, when, a year
or two afterwards, he went out of office with his party. No persuasions
could induce him to come in again; nor did he ever again take a very
active part in debate. "No," said he, "I was born to the freedom of
a private gentleman: intolerable to me is the thraldom of a public
servant. But I will bring up my son so that he may acquit the debt which
I decline to pay to my country." There he kept his word. Graham had been
carefully educated for public life, the ambition for it dinned into his
ear from childhood. In his school vacations his father made him learn
and declaim chosen specimens of masculine oratory; engaged an eminent
actor to give him lessons in elocution; bade him frequent theatres,
and study there the effect which words derive from looks and gesture;
encouraged him to take part himself in private theatricals. To all
this the boy lent his mind with delight. He had the orator's inborn
temperament; quick, yet imaginative, and loving the sport of rivalry and
contest. Being also, in his boyish years, good-humoured and joyous, he
was not more a favourite with the masters in the schoolroom than with
the boys in the play-ground. Leaving Eton at seventeen, he then entered
at Cambridge, and became, in his first term, the most popular speaker at
the Union.

But his father cut short his academical career, and decided, for reasons
of his own, to place him at once in diplomacy. He was attached to the
Embassy at Paris, and partook of the pleasures and dissipations of that
metropolis too keenly to retain much of the sterner ambition to which
he had before devoted himself. Becoming one of the spoiled darlings of
fashion, there was great danger that his character would relax into the
easy grace of the Epicurean, when all such loiterings in the Rose
Garden were brought to abrupt close by a rude and terrible change in his
fortunes.

His father was killed by a fall from his horse in hunting; and when his
affairs were investigated, they were found to be hopelessly involved:
apparently the assets would not suffice for the debts. The elder Vane
himself was probably not aware of the extent of his liabilities. He had
never wanted ready money to the last. He could always obtain that from a
money-lender, or from the sale of his funded investments. But it became
obvious, on examining his papers, that he knew at least how impaired
would be the heritage he should bequeath to a son whom he idolized. For
that reason he had given Graham a profession in diplomacy, and for that
reason he had privately applied to the Ministry for the Viceroyalty of
India, in the event of its speedy vacancy. He was eminent enough not to
anticipate refusal, and with economy in that lucrative post much of
his pecuniary difficulties might have been redeemed, and at least an
independent provision secured for his son.

Graham, like Alain de Rochebriant, allowed no reproach on his father's
memory; indeed, with more reason than Alain, for the elder Vane's
fortune had at least gone on no mean and frivolous dissipation.

It had lavished itself on encouragement to art, on great objects of
public beneficence, on public-spirited aid of political objects; and
even in more selfish enjoyments there was a certain grandeur in his
princely hospitalities, in his munificent generosity, in a warm-hearted
carelessness for money. No indulgence in petty follies or degrading
vices aggravated the offence of the magnificent squanderer.

"Let me look on my loss of fortune as a gain to myself," said Graham,
manfully. "Had I been a rich man, my experience of Paris tells me that I
should most likely have been a very idle one. Now that I have no gold, I
must dig in myself for iron."

The man to whom he said this was an uncle-in-law,--if I may use that
phrase,--the Right Hon. Richard King, popularly styled "the blameless
King."

This gentleman had married the sister of Graham's mother, whose loss in
his infancy and boyhood she had tenderly and anxiously sought to supply.
It is impossible to conceive a woman more fitted to invite love and
reverence than was Lady Janet King, her manners were so sweet and
gentle, her whole nature so elevated and pure.

Her father had succeeded to the dukedom when she married Mr. King, and
the alliance was not deemed quite suitable. Still it was not one to
which the Duke would have been fairly justified in refusing his assent.

Mr. King could not indeed boast of noble ancestry, nor was even a landed
proprietor; but he was a not-undistinguished member of Parliament, of
irreproachable character, and ample fortune inherited from a distant
kinsman, who had enriched himself as a merchant. It was on both sides a
marriage of love.

It is popularly said that a man uplifts a wife to his own rank: it as
often happens that a woman uplifts her husband to the dignity of her
own character. Richard King rose greatly in public estimation after his
marriage with Lady Janet.

She united to a sincere piety a very active and a very enlightened
benevolence. She guided his ambition aside from mere party politics into
subjects of social and religious interest, and in devoting himself to
these he achieved a position more popular and more respected than he
could ever have won in the strife of party.

When the Government of which the elder Vane became a leading Minister
was formed, it was considered a great object to secure a name as high
in the religious world, so beloved by the working classes, as that of
Richard King; and he accepted one of those places which, though not in
the cabinet, confers the rank of Privy Councillor.

When that brief-lived Administration ceased, he felt the same sensation
of relief that Vane had felt, and came to the same resolution never
again to accept office, but from different reasons, all of which need
not now be detailed. Amongst them, however, certainly this: he was
exceedingly sensitive to opinion, thin-skinned as to abuse, and very
tenacious of the respect due to his peculiar character of sanctity and
philanthropy. He writhed under every newspaper article that had made
"the blameless King" responsible for the iniquities of the Government to
which he belonged. In the loss of office he seemed to recover his former
throne.

Mr. King heard Graham's resolution with a grave approving smile, and his
interest in the young man became greatly increased. He devoted himself
strenuously to the object of saving to Graham some wrecks of his
paternal fortunes, and having a clear head and great experience in
the transaction of business, he succeeded beyond the most sanguine
expectations formed by the family solicitor. A rich manufacturer was
found to purchase at a fancy price the bulk of the estate with the
palatial mansion, which the estate alone could never have sufficed to
maintain with suitable establishments.

So that when all debts were paid, Graham found himself in possession of
a clear income of about L500 a year, invested in a mortgage secured on
a part of the hereditary lands, on which was seated an old hunting-lodge
bought by a brewer.

With this portion of the property Graham parted very reluctantly. It was
situated amid the most picturesque scenery on the estate, and the lodge
itself was a remnant of the original residence of his ancestors before
it had been abandoned for that which, built in the reign of Elizabeth,
had been expanded into a Trenthain-like palace by the last owner.

But Mr. King's argument reconciled him to the sacrifice. "I can manage,"
said the prudent adviser, "if you insist on it, to retain that remnant
of the hereditary estate which you are so loath to part with. But how?
by mortgaging it to an extent that will scarcely leave you L50. a year
net from the rents. This is not all. Your mind will then be distracted
from the large object of a career to the small object of retaining a few
family acres; you will be constantly hampered by private anxieties and
fears; you could do nothing for the benefit of those around you,--could
not repair a farmhouse for a better class of tenant, could not rebuild a
labourer's dilapidated cottage. Give up an idea that might be very well
for a man whose sole ambition was to remain a squire, however beggarly.
Launch yourself into the larger world of metropolitan life with energies
wholly unshackled, a mind wholly undisturbed, and secure of an income
which, however modest, is equal to that of most young men who enter that
world as your equals."

Graham was convinced, and yielded, though with a bitter pang. It is hard
for a man whose fathers have lived on the soil to give up all trace
of their whereabouts. But none saw in him any morbid consciousness of
change of fortune, when, a year after his father's death, he reassumed
his place in society. If before courted for his expectations, he was
still courted for himself; by many of the great who had loved his
father, perhaps even courted more.

He resigned the diplomatic career, not merely because the rise in
that profession is slow, and in the intermediate steps the chances of
distinction are slight and few, but more because he desired to cast
his lot in the home country, and regarded the courts of other lands as
exile.

It was not true, however, as Lemercier had stated on report, that he
lived on his pen. Curbing all his old extravagant tastes, L500 a year
amply supplied his wants. But he had by his pen gained distinction,
and created great belief in his abilities for a public career. He had
written critical articles, read with much praise, in periodicals of
authority, and had published one or two essays on political questions
which had created yet more sensation. It was only the graver literature,
connected more or less with his ultimate object of a public career, in
which he had thus evinced his talents of composition. Such writings were
not of a nature to bring him much money, but they gave him a definite
and solid station. In the old time, before the first Reform Bill, his
reputation would have secured him at once a seat in Parliament; but
the ancient nurseries of statesmen are gone, and their place is not
supplied.

He had been invited, however, to stand for more than one large and
populous borough, with very fair prospects of success; and, whatever the
expense, Mr. King had offered to defray it. But Graham would not have
incurred the latter obligation; and when he learned the pledges which
his supporters would have exacted, he would not have stood if success
had been certain and the cost nothing. "I cannot," he said to his
friends, "go into the consideration of what is best for the country with
my thoughts manacled; and I cannot be both representative and slave
of the greatest ignorance of the greatest number. I bide my time, and
meanwhile I prefer to write as I please, rather than vote as I don't
please."

Three years went by, passed chiefly in England, partly in travel; and at
the age of thirty, Graham Vane was still one of those of whom admirers
say, "He will be a great man some day;" and detractors reply, "Some day
seems a long way off."

The same fastidiousness which had operated against that entrance into
Parliament, to which his ambition not the less steadily adapted itself,
had kept him free from the perils of wedlock. In his heart he yearned
for love and domestic life, but he had hitherto met with no one who
realized the ideal he had formed. With his person, his accomplishments,
his connections, and his repute, he might have made many an advantageous
marriage. But somehow or other the charm vanished from a fair face, if
the shadow of a money-bag fell on it; on the other hand, his ambition
occupied so large a share in his thoughts that he would have fled in
time from the temptation of a marriage that would have overweighted
him beyond the chance of rising. Added to all, he desired in a wife an
intellect that, if not equal to his own, could become so by sympathy,--a
union of high culture and noble aspiration, and yet of loving womanly
sweetness which a man seldom finds out of books; and when he does find
it, perhaps it does not wear the sort of face that he fancies. Be that
as it may, Graham was still unmarried and heart-whole.

And now a new change in his life befell him. Lady Janet died of a fever
contracted in her habitual rounds of charity among the houses of the
poor. She had been to him as the most tender mother, and a lovelier soul
than hers never alighted on the earth. His grief was intense; but what
was her husband's?--one of those griefs that kill.

To the side of Richard King his Janet had been as the guardian angel.
His love for her was almost worship: with her, every object in a life
hitherto so active and useful seemed gone. He evinced no noisy passion
of sorrow. He shut himself up, and refused to see even Graham. But after
some weeks had passed, he admitted the clergyman in whom on spiritual
matters he habitually confided, and seemed consoled by the visits; then
he sent for his lawyer and made his will; after which he allowed Graham
to call on him daily, on the condition that there should be no reference
to his loss. He spoke to the young man on other subjects, rather drawing
him out about himself, sounding his opinion on various grave matters,
watching his face while he questioned, as if seeking to dive into his
heart, and sometimes pathetically sinking into silence, broken but by
sighs. So it went on for a few more weeks; then he took the advice
of his physician to seek change of air and scene. He went away alone,
without even a servant, not leaving word where he had gone. After a
little while he returned, more ailing, more broken than before. One
morning he was found insensible,--stricken by paralysis. He regained
consciousness, and even for some days rallied strength. He might have
recovered, but he seemed as if he tacitly refused to live. He expired at
last, peacefully, in Graham's arms.

At the opening of his will it was found that he had left Graham his sole
heir and executor. Deducting government duties, legacies to servants,
and donations to public charities, the sum thus bequeathed to his lost
wife's nephew was two hundred and twenty thousand pounds.

With such a fortune, opening indeed was made for an ambition so long
obstructed. But Graham affected no change in his mode of life; he still
retained his modest bachelor's apartments, engaged no servants, bought
no horses, in no way exceeded the income he had possessed before. He
seemed, indeed, depressed rather than elated by the succession to a
wealth which he had never anticipated.

Two children had been born from the marriage of Richard King: they had
died young, it is true, but Lady Janet at the time of her own decease
was not too advanced in years for the reasonable expectation of other
offspring; and even after Richard King became a widower, he had given
to Graham no hint of his testamentary dispositions. The young man was no
blood-relation to him, and naturally supposed that such relations
would become the heirs. But in truth the deceased seemed to have no
blood-relations: none had ever been known to visit him; none raised a
voice to question the justice of his will.

Lady Janet had been buried at Kensal Green; her husband's remains were
placed in the same vault.

For days and days Graham went his way lonelily to the cemetery. He might
be seen standing motionless by that tomb, with tears rolling down his
cheeks; yet his was not a weak nature,--not one of those that love
indulgence of irremediable grief. On the contrary, people who did not
know him well said "that he had more head than heart," and the character
of his pursuits, as of his writings, was certainly not that of a
sentimentalist. He had not thus visited the tomb till Richard King had
been placed within it. Yet his love for his aunt was unspeakably greater
than that which he could have felt for her husband. Was it, then, the
husband that he so much more acutely mourned; or was there something
that, since the husband's death, had deepened his reverence for the
memory of her whom he had not only loved as a mother, but honoured as a
saint?

These visits to the cemetery did not cease till Graham was confined to
his bed by a very grave illness,--the only one he had ever known. His
physician said it was nervous fever, and occasioned by moral shock or
excitement; it was attended with delirium. His recovery was slow, and
when it was sufficiently completed he quitted England; and we find him
now, with his mind composed, his strength restored, and his spirits
braced, in that gay city of Paris; hiding, perhaps, some earnest purpose
amid his participation in its holiday enjoyments. He is now, as I have
said, seated before his writing-table in deep thought. He takes up a
letter which he had already glanced over hastily, and reperuses it with
more care.

The letter is from his cousin, the Duke of Alton, who had succeeded
a few years since to the family honours,--an able man, with no small
degree of information, an ardent politician, but of very rational and
temperate opinions; too much occupied by the cares of a princely estate
to covet office for himself; too sincere a patriot not to desire office
for those to whose hands he thought the country might be most safely
entrusted; an intimate friend of Graham's. The contents of the letter
are these:--

   MY DEAR GRAHAM,--I trust that you will welcome the brilliant opening
   into public life which these lines are intended to announce to you.
   Vavasour has just been with me to say that he intends to resign his
   seat for the county when Parliament meets, and agreeing with me that
   there is no one so fit to succeed him as yourself, he suggests the
   keeping his intention secret until you have arranged your committee
   and are prepared to take the field. You cannot hope to escape a
   contest; but I have examined the Register, and the party has gained
   rather than lost since the last election, when Vavasour was so
   triumphantly returned. The expenses for this county, where there
   are so many outvoters to bring up, and so many agents to retain, are
   always large in comparison with some other counties; but that
   consideration is all in your favour, for it deters Squire Hunston,
   the only man who could beat you, from starting; and to your
   resources a thousand pounds more or less are a trifle not worth
   discussing. You know how difficult it is nowadays to find a seat
   for a man of moderate opinions like yours and mine. Our county
   would exactly suit you. The constituency is so evenly divided
   between the urban and rural populations, that its representative
   must fairly consult the interests of both. He can be neither an
   ultra-Tory nor a violent Radical. He is left to the enviable
   freedom, to which you say you aspire, of considering what is best
   for the country as a whole.

   Do not lose so rare an opportunity. There is but one drawback to
   your triumphant candidature. It will be said that you have no
   longer an acre in the county in which the Vanes have been settled so
   long. That drawback can be removed. It is true that you can never
   hope to buy back the estates which you were compelled to sell at
   your father's death: the old manufacturer gripes them too firmly to
   loosen his hold; and after all, even were your income double what it
   is, you would be overhoused in the vast pile in which your father
   buried so large a share of his fortune. But that beautiful old
   hunting-lodge, the Stamm Schloss of your family, with the adjacent
   farms, can be now repurchased very reasonably. The brewer who
   bought them is afflicted with an extravagant son, whom he placed in
   the--Hussars, and will gladly sell the property for L5,000 more than
   he gave: well worth the difference, as he has improved the farm-
   buildings and raised the rental. I think, in addition to the sum
   you have on mortgage, L3,000 will be accepted, and as a mere
   investment pay you nearly three per cent. But to you it is worth
   more than double the money; it once more identifies your ancient
   name with the county. You would be a greater personage with that
   moderate holding in the district in which your race took root, and
   on which your father's genius threw such a lustre, than you would be
   if you invested all your wealth in a county in which every squire
   and farmer would call you "the new man." Pray think over this most
   seriously, and instruct your solicitor to open negotiations with the
   brewer at once. But rather put yourself into the train, and come
   back to England straight to me. I will ask Vavasour to meet you.
   What news from Paris? Is the Emperor as ill as the papers
   insinuate? And is the revolutionary party gaining ground?

   Your affectionate cousin,

                  ALTON.

As he put down this letter, Graham heaved a short impatient sigh.

"The old Stamm Schloss," he muttered,--"a foot on the old soil once
more! and an entrance into the great arena with hands unfettered. Is it
possible!--is it?--is it?"

At this moment the door-bell of the apartment rang, and a servant whom
Graham had hired at Paris as a laquais de place announced "Ce Monsieur."

Graham hurried the letter into his portfolio, and said, "You mean the
person to whom I am always at home?"

"The same, Monsieur."

"Admit him, of course."

There entered a wonderfully thin man, middle-aged, clothed in black, his
face cleanly shaven, his hair cut very short, with one of those faces
which, to use a French expression, say "nothing." It was absolutely
without expression: it had not even, despite its thinness, one salient
feature. If you had found yourself anywhere seated next to that man,
your eye would have passed him over as too insignificant to notice;
if at a cafe, you would have gone on talking to your friend without
lowering your voice. What mattered it whether a bete like that overheard
or not? Had you been asked to guess his calling and station, you might
have said, minutely observing the freshness of his clothes and the
undeniable respectability of his tout ensemble, "He must be well off,
and with no care for customers on his mind,--a ci-devant chandler who
has retired on a legacy."

Graham rose at the entrance of his visitor, motioned him courteously
to a seat beside him, and waiting till the laquais had vanished, then
asked, "What news?"

"None, I fear, that will satisfy Monsieur. I have certainly hunted out,
since I had last the honour to see you, no less than four ladies of the
name of Duval, but only one of them took that name from her parents, and
was also christened Louise."

"Ah--Louise!"

"Yes, the daughter of a perfumer, aged twenty-eight. She, therefore, is
not the Louise you seek. Permit me to refer to your instructions." Here
M. Renard took out a note-book, turned over the leaves, and
resumed, "Wanted, Louise Duval, daughter of Auguste Duval, a French
drawing-master, who lived for many years at Tours, removed to Paris
in 1845, lived at No. 12, Rue de S---- at Paris for some years, but
afterwards moved to a different guartier of the town, and died 1848,
in Rue I----, No. 39. Shortly after his death, his daughter Louise
left that lodging, and could not be traced. In 1849 official documents
reporting her death were forwarded from Munich to a person (a friend of
yours, Monsieur). Death, of course, taken for granted; but nearly five
years afterwards, this very person encountered the said Louise Duval at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and never heard nor saw more of her. Demande submitted,
to find out said Louise Duval or any children of hers born in 1848-9;
supposed in 1852-3 to have one child, a girl, between four and five
years old. Is that right, Monsieur?"

"Quite right."

"And this is the whole information given to me. Monsieur on giving it
asked me if I thought it desirable that he should commence inquiries
at Aix-la-Chapelle, where Louise Duval was last seen by the
person interested to discover her. I reply, No; pains thrown away.
Aix-la-Chapelle is not a place where any Frenchwoman not settled there
by marriage would remain. Nor does it seem probable that the said Duval
would venture to select for her residence Munich, a city in which she
had contrived to obtain certificates of her death. A Frenchwoman who has
once known Paris always wants to get back to it; especially, Monsieur,
if she has the beauty which you assign to this lady. I therefore
suggested that our inquiries should commence in this capital.
Monsieur agreed with me, and I did not grudge the time necessary for
investigation."

"You were most obliging. Still I am beginning to be impatient if time is
to be thrown away."

"Naturally. Permit me to return to my notes. Monsieur informs me that
twenty-one years ago, in 1848, the Parisian police were instructed to
find out this lady and failed, but gave hopes of discovering her through
her relations. He asks me to refer to our archives; I tell him that
is no use. However, in order to oblige him, I do so. No trace of such
inquiry: it must have been, as Monsieur led me to suppose, a strictly
private one, unconnected with crime or with politics; and as I have the
honour to tell Monsieur, no record of such investigations is preserved
in our office. Great scandal would there be, and injury to the peace of
families, if we preserved the results of private inquiries intrusted
to us--by absurdly jealous husbands, for instance. Honour,--Monsieur,
honour forbids it. Next I suggest to Monsieur that his simplest
plan would be an advertisement in the French journals, stating, if I
understand him right, that it is for the pecuniary interest of Madame
or Mademoiselle Duval, daughter of Auguste Duval, artiste en dessin, to
come forward. Monsieur objects to that."

"I object to it extremely; as I have told you, this is a strictly
confidential inquiry; and an advertisement which in all likelihood would
be practically useless (it proved to be so in a former inquiry)
would not be resorted to unless all else failed, and even then with
reluctance."

"Quite so. Accordingly, Monsieur delegates to me, who have been
recommended to him as the best person he can employ in that department
of our police which is not connected with crime or political
surveillance, a task the most difficult. I have, through strictly
private investigations, to discover the address and prove the identity
of a lady bearing a name among the most common in France, and of whom
nothing has been heard for fifteen years, and then at so migratory an
endroit as Aix-la-Chapelle. You will not or cannot inform me if since
that time the lady has changed her name by marriage."

"I have no reason to think that she has; and there are reasons against
the supposition that she married after 1849."

"Permit me to observe that the more details of information Monsieur can
give me, the easier my task of research will be."

"I have given you all the details I can, and, aware of the difficulty of
tracing a person with a name so much the reverse of singular, I adopted
your advice in our first interview, of asking some Parisian friend of
mine, with a large acquaintance in the miscellaneous societies of your
capital, to inform me of any ladies of that name whom he might chance
to encounter; and he, like you, has lighted upon one or two, who alas!
resemble the right one in name and nothing more."

"You will do wisely to keep him on the watch as well as myself. If it
were but a murderess or a political incendiary, then you might trust
exclusively to the enlightenment of our corps, but this seems an affair
of sentiment, Monsieur. Sentiment is not in our way. Seek the trace of
that in the haunts of pleasure."

M. Renard, having thus poetically delivered himself of that
philosophical dogma, rose to depart.

Graham slipped into his hand a bank-note of sufficient value to justify
the profound bow he received in return.

When M. Renard had gone, Graham heaved another impatient sigh, and said
to himself, "No, it is not possible,--at least not yet."

Then, compressing his lips as a man who forces himself to something he
dislikes, he dipped his pen into the inkstand, and wrote rapidly thus to
his kinsman:

   MY DEAR COUSIN,--I lose not a post in replying to your kind and
   considerate letter. It is not in my power at present to return to
   England. I need not say how fondly I cherish the hope of
   representing the dear old county some day. If Vavasour could be
   induced to defer his resignation of the seat for another session, or
   at least for six or seven months, why then I might be free to avail
   myself of the opening; at present I am not. Meanwhile I am sorely
   tempted to buy back the old Lodge; probably the brewer would allow
   me to leave on mortgage the sum I myself have on the property, and a
   few additional thousands. I have reasons for not wishing to
   transfer at present much of the money now invested in the Funds. I
   will consider this point, which probably does not press.

   I reserve all Paris news till my next; and begging you to forgive so
   curt and unsatisfactory a reply to a letter so important that it
   excites me more than I like to own, believe me your affectionate
   friend and cousin,

               GRAHAM.




CHAPTER II.

AT about the same hour on the same day in which the Englishman held
the conference with the Parisian detective just related, the Marquis de
Rochebriant found himself by appointment in the cabinet d'affaires of
his avoue M. Gandrin that gentleman had hitherto not found time to give
him a definite opinion as to the case submitted to his judgment. The
avoue received Alain with a kind of forced civility, in which the
natural intelligence of the Marquis, despite his inexperience of life,
discovered embarrassment.

"Monsieur le Marquis," said Gandrin, fidgeting among the papers on his
bureau, "this is a very complicated business. I have given not only my
best attention to it, but to your general interests. To be plain,
your estate, though a fine one, is fearfully encumbered--fearfully--
frightfully."

"Sir," said the Marquis, haughtily, "that is a fact which was never
disguised from you."

"I do not say that it was, Marquis; but I scarcely realized the
amount of the liabilities nor the nature of the property. It will be
difficult--nay, I fear, impossible--to find any capitalist to advance a
sum that will cover the mortgages at an interest less than you now pay.
As for a Company to take the whole trouble off your hands, clear off the
mortgages, manage the forests, develop the fisheries, guarantee you an
adequate income, and at the end of twenty-one years or so render up to
you or your heirs the free enjoyment of an estate thus improved, we
must dismiss that prospect as a wild dream of my good friend M. Hebert.
People in the provinces do dream; in Paris everybody is wide awake."

"Monsieur," said the Marquis, with that inborn imperturbable loftiness
of sang froid which has always in adverse circumstances characterized
the French noblesse, "be kind enough to restore my papers. I see that
you are not the man for me. Allow me only to thank you, and inquire the
amount of my debt for the trouble I have given."

"Perhaps you are quite justified in thinking I am not the man for you,
Monsieur le Marquis; and your papers shall, if you decide on dismissing
me, be returned to you this evening. But as to my accepting remuneration
where I have rendered no service, I request M. le Marquis to put that
out of the question. Considering myself, then, no longer your avoue,
do not think I take too great a liberty in volunteering my counsel as a
friend,--or a friend at least to M. Hebert, if you do not vouchsafe my
right so to address yourself."

M. Gandrin spoke with a certain dignity of voice and manner which
touched and softened his listener.

"You make me your debtor far more than I pretend to repay," replied
Alain. "Heaven knows I want a friend, and I will heed with gratitude and
respect all your counsels in that character."

"Plainly and briefly, my advice is this: M. Louvier is the principal
mortgagee. He is among the six richest capitalists of Paris. He does
not, therefore, want money, but, like most self-made men, he is very
accessible to social vanities. He would be proud to think he had
rendered a service to a Rochebriant. Approach him, either through me,
or, far better, at once introduce yourself, and propose to consolidate
all your other liabilities in one mortgage to him, at a rate of interest
lower than that which is now paid to some of the small mortgagees. This
would add considerably to your income and would carry out M. Hebert's
advice."

"But does it not strike you, dear M. Gandrin, that such going
cap-in-hand to one who has power over my fate, while I have none
over his, would scarcely be consistent with my self-respect, not as
Rochebriant only, but as Frenchman?"

"It does not strike me so in the least; at all events, I could make the
proposal on your behalf, without compromising yourself, though I should
be far more sanguine of success if you addressed M. Louvier in person."

"I should nevertheless prefer leaving it in your hands; but even for
that I must take a few days to consider. Of all the mortgagees M.
Louvier has been hitherto the severest and most menacing, the one whom
Hebert dreads the most; and should he become sole mortgagee, my whole
estate would pass to him if, through any succession of bad seasons and
failing tenants, the interest was not punctually paid."

"It could so pass to him now."

"No; for there have been years in which the other mortgagees, who are
Bretons and would be loath to ruin a Rochebriant, have been lenient and
patient."

"If Louvier has not been equally so, it is only because he knew nothing
of you, and your father no doubt had often sorely tasked his endurance.
Come, suppose we manage to break the ice easily. Do me the honour to
dine here to meet him; you will find that he is not an unpleasant man."

The Marquis hesitated, but the thought of the sharp and seemingly
hopeless struggle for the retention of his ancestral home to which he
would be doomed if he returned from Paris unsuccessful in his errand
overmastered his pride. He felt as if that self-conquest was a duty he
owed to the very tombs of his fathers. "I ought not to shrink from the
face of a creditor," said he, smiling somewhat sadly, "and I accept the
proposal you so graciously make."

"You do well, Marquis, and I will write at once to Louvier to ask him to
give me his first disengaged day."

The Marquis had no sooner quitted the house than M. Gandrin opened a
door at the side of his office, and a large portly man strode into the
room,--stride it was rather than step,--firm, self-assured, arrogant,
masterful.

"Well, mon ami," said this man, taking his stand at the hearth, as a
king might take his stand in the hall of his vassal, "and what says our
petit muscadin?"

"He is neither petit nor muscadin, Monsieur Louvier," replied Gandrin,
peevishly; "and he will task your powers to get him thoroughly into your
net. But I have persuaded him to meet you here. What day can you dine
with me? I had better ask no one else."

"To-morrow I dine with my friend O-----, to meet the chiefs of the
Opposition," said M. Louvier, with a sort of careless rollicking
pomposity. "Thursday with Pereire; Saturday I entertain at home. Say
Friday. Your hour?"

"Seven."

"Good! Show me those Rochebriant papers again; there is something I had
forgotten to note. Never mind me. Go on with your work as if I were not
here."

Louvier took up the papers, seated himself in an armchair by the
fireplace, stretched out his legs, and read at his ease, but with a very
rapid eye, as a practised lawyer skims through the technical forms of a
case to fasten upon the marrow of it.

"Ah! as I thought. The farms could not pay even the interest on my
present mortgage; the forests come in for that. If a contractor for the
yearly sale of the woods was bankrupt and did not pay, how could I get
my interest? Answer me that, Gandrin."

"Certainly you must run the risk of that chance."

"Of course the chance occurs, and then I foreclose, seize,--Rochebriant
and its seigneuries are mine."

As he spoke he laughed, not sardonically,--a jovial laugh,--and opened
wide, to reshut as in a vice, the strong iron hand which had doubtless
closed over many a man's all.

"Thanks. On Friday, seven o'clock." He tossed the papers back on the
bureau, nodded a royal nod, and strode forth imperiously as he had
strode in.




CHAPTER III.

MEANWHILE the young Marquis pursued his way thoughtfully through the
streets, and entered the Champs Elysees. Since we first, nay, since we
last saw him, he is strikingly improved in outward appearances. He has
unconsciously acquired more of the easy grace of the Parisian in
gait and bearing. You would no longer detect the Provincial--perhaps,
however, because he is now dressed, though very simply, in habiliments
that belong to the style of the day. Rarely among the loungers in the
Champs Elysees could be seen a finer form, a comelier face, an air of
more unmistakable distinction.

The eyes of many a passing fair one gazed on him, admiringly or
coquettishly. But he was still so little the true Parisian that they got
no smile, no look in return. He was wrapped in his own thoughts; was he
thinking of M. Louvier?

He had nearly gained the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne, when he was
accosted by a voice behind, and turning round saw his friend Lemercier
arm-in-arm with Graham Vane.

"Bonjour, Alain," said Lemercier, hooking his disengaged arm into
Rochebriant's. "I suspect we are going the same way."

Alain felt himself change countenance at this conjecture, and replied
coldly, "I think not; I have got to the end of my walk, and shall turn
back to Paris;" addressing himself to the Englishman, he said with
formal politeness, "I regret not to have found you at home when I
called some weeks ago, and no less so to have been out when you had the
complaisance to return my visit."

"At all events," replied the Englishman, "let me not lose the
opportunity of improving our acquaintance which now offers. It is true
that our friend Lemercier, catching sight of me in the Rue de Rivoli,
stopped his coupe and carried me off for a promenade in the Bois. The
fineness of the day tempted us to get out of his carriage as the Bois
came in sight. But if you are going back to Paris I relinquish the Bois
and offer myself as your companion."

Frederic (the name is so familiarly English that the reader might think
me pedantic did I accentuate it as French) looked from one to the other
of his two friends, half amused and half angry.

"And am I to be left alone to achieve a conquest, in which, if I
succeed, I shall change into hate and envy the affection of my two best
friends? Be it so.

     "' Un veritable amant ne connait point d'amis.'"

"I do not comprehend your meaning," said the Marquis, with a compressed
lip and a slight frown.

"Bah!" cried Frederic; "come, franc jeu; cards on the table. M. Gram
Varn was going into the Bois at my suggestion on the chance of having
another look at the pearl-coloured angel; and you, Rochebriant, can't
deny that you were going into the Bois for the same object."

"One may pardon an enfant terrible," said the Englishman, laughing, "but
an ami terrible should be sent to the galleys. Come, Marquis, let us
walk back and submit to our fate. Even were the lady once more visible,
we have no chance of being observed by the side of a Lovelace so
accomplished and so audacious!"

"Adieu, then, recreants: I go alone. Victory or death." The Parisian
beckoned his coachman, entered his carriage, and with a mocking grimace
kissed his hand to the companions thus deserting or deserted.

Rochebriant touched the Englishman's arm, and said, "Do you think that
Lemercier could be impertinent enough to accost that lady?"

"In the first place," returned the Englishman, "Lemercier himself tells
me that the lady has for several weeks relinquished her walks in the
Bois, and the probability is, therefore, that he will not have the
opportunity to accost her. In the next place, it appears that when she
did take her solitary walk, she did not stray far from her carriage, and
was in reach of the protection of her laquais and coachman. But to speak
honestly, do you, who know Lemercier better than I, take him to be a man
who would commit an impertinence to a woman unless there were viveurs of
his own sex to see him do it?"

Alain smiled. "No. Frederic's real nature is an admirable one, and if
he ever do anything that he ought to be ashamed of, 'twill be from the
pride of showing how finely he can do it. Such was his character at
college, and such it still seems at Paris. But it is true that the lady
has forsaken her former walk; at least I--I have not seen her since the
day I first beheld her in company with Frederic. Yet--yet, pardon me,
you were going to the Bois on the chance of seeing her. Perhaps she has
changed the direction of her walk, and--and--"

The Marquis stopped short, stammering and confused.

The Englishman scanned his countenance with the rapid glance of a
practised observer of men and things, and after a short pause said: "If
the lady has selected some other spot for her promenade, I am ignorant
of it; nor have I ever volunteered the chance of meeting with her, since
I learned--first from Lemercier, and afterwards from others--that her
destination is the stage. Let us talk frankly, Marquis. I am accustomed
to take much exercise on foot, and the Bois is my favourite resort: one
day I there found myself in the allee which the lady we speak of used
to select for her promenade, and there saw her. Something in her face
impressed me; how shall I describe the impression? Did you ever open a
poem, a romance, in some style wholly new to you, and before you were
quite certain whether or not its merits justified the interest which the
novelty inspired, you were summoned away, or the book was taken out
of your hands? If so, did you not feel an intellectual longing to have
another glimpse of the book? That illustration describes my impression,
and I own that I twice again went to the same allee. The last time
I only caught sight of the young lady as she was getting into her
carriage. As she was then borne away, I perceived one of the custodians
of the Bois; and learned, on questioning him, that the lady was in the
habit of walking always alone in the same allee at the same hour on most
fine days, but that he did not know her name or address. A motive of
curiosity--perhaps an idle one--then made me ask Lemercier, who boasts
of knowing his Paris so intimately, if he could inform me who the lady
was. He undertook to ascertain."

"But," interposed the Marquis, "he did not ascertain who she was; he
only ascertained where she lived, and that she and an elder companion
were Italians;--whom he suspected, without sufficient ground, to be
professional singers."

"True; but since then I ascertained more detailed particulars from
two acquaintances of mine who happen to know her,--M. Savarin, the
distinguished writer, and Mrs. Morley, an accomplished and beautiful
American lady, who is more than an acquaintance. I may boast the honour
of ranking among her friends. As Savarin's villa is at A------, I
asked him incidentally if he knew the fair neighbour whose face had
so attracted me; and Mrs. Morley being present, and overhearing me, I
learned from both what I now repeat to you.

"The young lady is a Signorina Cicogna,--at Paris, exchanging (except
among particular friends), as is not unusual, the outlandish designation
of Signorina for the more conventional one of Mademoiselle. Her father
was a member of the noble Milanese family of the same name, therefore
the young lady is well born. Her father has been long dead; his widow
married again an English gentleman settled in Italy, a scholar and
antiquarian; his name was Selby. This gentleman, also dead, bequeathed
the Signorina a small but sufficient competence. She is now an orphan,
and residing with a companion, a Signora Venosta, who was once a singer
of some repute at the Neapolitan Theatre, in the orchestra of which her
husband was principal performer; but she relinquished the stage several
years ago on becoming a widow, and gave lessons as a teacher. She has
the character of being a scientific musician, and of unblemished
private respectability. Subsequently she was induced to give up general
teaching, and undertake the musical education and the social charge of
the young lady with her. This girl is said to have early given promise
of extraordinary excellence as a singer, and excited great interest
among a coterie of literary critics and musical cognoscenti. She was to
have come out at the Theatre of Milan a year or two ago, but her career
has been suspended in consequence of ill-health, for which she is now
at Paris under the care of an English physician, who has made remarkable
cures in all complaints of the respiratory organs. ------, the great
composer, who knows her, says that in expression and feeling she has no
living superior, perhaps no equal since Malibran."

"You seem, dear Monsieur, to have taken much pains to acquire this
information."

"No great pains were necessary; but had they been I might have taken
them, for, as I have owned to you, Mademoiselle Cicogna, while she was
yet a mystery to me, strangely interested my thoughts or my fancies.
That interest has now ceased. The world of actresses and singers lies
apart from mine."

"Yet," said Alain, in a tone of voice that implied doubt, "if I
understand Lemercier aright, you were going with him to the Bois on the
chance of seeing again the lady in whom your interest has ceased."

"Lemercier's account was not strictly accurate. He stopped his carriage
to speak to me on quite another subject, on which I have consulted him,
and then proposed to take me on to the Bois. I assented; and it was
not till we were in the carriage that he suggested the idea of seeing
whether the pearly-robed lady had resumed her walk in the allee. You may
judge how indifferent I was to that chance when I preferred turning back
with you to going on with him. Between you and me, Marquis, to men of
our age, who have the business of life before them, and feel that if
there be aught in which noblesse oblige it is a severe devotion to noble
objects, there is nothing more fatal to such devotion than allowing the
heart to be blown hither and thither at every breeze of mere fancy, and
dreaming ourselves into love with some fair creature whom we never could
marry consistently with the career we have set before our ambition. I
could not marry an actress,--neither, I presume, could the Marquis de
Rochebriant; and the thought of a courtship which excluded the idea of
marriage to a young orphan of name unblemished, of virtue unsuspected,
would certainly not be compatible with 'devotion to noble objects.'"

Alain involuntarily bowed his head in assent to the proposition, and, it
may be, in submission to an implied rebuke.

The two men walked in silence for some minutes, and Graham first spoke,
changing altogether the subject of conversation. "Lemercier tells me you
decline going much into this world of Paris, the capital of capitals,
which appears so irresistibly attractive to us foreigners."

"Possibly; but, to borrow your words, I have the business of life before
me."

"Business is a good safeguard against the temptations to excess in
pleasure, in which Paris abounds. But there is no business which does
not admit of some holiday, and all business necessitates commerce
with mankind. A propos, I was the other evening at the Duchese de
Tarascon's,--a brilliant assembly, filled with ministers, senators, and
courtiers. I heard your name mentioned."

"Mine?"

"Yes; Duplessis, the rising financier--who rather to my surprise was
not only present among these official and decorated celebrities, but
apparently quite at home among them--asked the Duchess if she had not
seen you since your arrival at Paris. She replied, 'No; that though you
were among her nearest connections, you had not called on her;' and bade
Duplessis tell you that you were a monstre for not doing so. Whether or
not Duplessis will take that liberty I know not; but you must pardon me
if I do. She is a very charming woman, full of talent; and that
stream of the world which reflects the stars, with all their mythical
influences on fortune, flows through her salons."

"I am not born under those stars. I am a Legitimist."

"I did not forget your political creed; but in England the leaders
of opposition attend the salons of the Prime Minister. A man is
not supposed to compromise his opinions because he exchanges social
courtesies with those to whom his opinions are hostile. Pray excuse me
if I am indiscreet, I speak as a traveller who asks for information: but
do the Legitimists really believe that they best serve their cause by
declining any mode of competing with its opponents? Would there not be
a fairer chance of the ultimate victory of their principles if they made
their talents and energies individually prominent; if they were known as
skilful generals, practical statesmen, eminent diplomatists, brilliant
writers? Could they combine,--not to sulk and exclude themselves from
the great battle-field of the world, but in their several ways to render
themselves of such use to their country that some day or other, in
one of those revolutionary crises to which France, alas! must long
be subjected, they would find themselves able to turn the scale of
undecided councils and conflicting jealousies."

"Monsieur, we hope for the day when the Divine Disposer of events
will strike into the hearts of our fickle and erring countrymen the
conviction that there will be no settled repose for France save under
the sceptre of her rightful kings. But meanwhile we are,--I see it more
clearly since I have quitted Bretagne,--we are a hopeless minority."

"Does not history tell us that the great changes of the world have been
wrought by minorities,--but on the one condition that the minorities
shall not be hopeless? It is almost the other day that the Bonapartists
were in a minority that their adversaries called hopeless, and the
majority for the Emperor is now so preponderant that I tremble for his
safety. When a majority becomes so vast that intellect disappears in the
crowd, the date of its destruction commences; for by the law of reaction
the minority is installed against it. It is the nature of things that
minorities are always more intellectual than multitudes, and intellect
is ever at work in sapping numerical force. What your party want is
hope; because without hope there is no energy. I remember hearing
my father say that when he met the Count de Chambord at Ems, that
illustrious personage delivered himself of a belle phrase much admired
by his partisans. The Emperor was then President of the Republic, in
a very doubtful and dangerous position. France seemed on the verge of
another convulsion. A certain distinguished politician recommended the
Count de Chambord to hold himself ready to enter at once as a candidate
for the throne. And the Count, with a benignant smile on his handsome
face, answered, 'All wrecks come to the shore: the shore does not go to
the wrecks.'"

"Beautifully said!" exclaimed the Marquis.

"Not if 'Le beau est toujours le vrai.' My father, no inexperienced nor
unwise politician, in repeating the royal words, remarked: 'The fallacy
of the Count's argument is in its metaphor. A man is not a shore. Do you
not think that the seamen on board the wrecks would be more grateful to
him who did not complacently compare himself to a shore, but considered
himself a human being like themselves, and risked his own life in
a boat, even though it were a cockleshell, in the chance of saving
theirs?"

Alain de Rochebriant was a brave man, with that intense sentiment of
patriotism which characterizes Frenchmen of every rank and persuasion,
unless they belong to the Internationalists; and, without pausing to
consider, he cried, "Your father was right."

The Englishman resumed: "Need I say, my dear Marquis, that I am not a
Legitimist? I am not an Imperialist, neither am I an Orleanist nor a
Republican. Between all those political divisions it is for Frenchmen
to make their choice, and for Englishmen to accept for France that
government which France has established. I view things here as a simple
observer. But it strikes me that if I were a Frenchman in your position,
I should think myself unworthy my ancestors if I consented to be an
insignificant looker-on."

"You are not in my position," said the Marquis, half mournfully, half
haughtily, "and you can scarcely judge of it even in imagination."

"I need not much task my imagination; I judge of it by analogy. I was
very much in your position when I entered upon what I venture to call
my career; and it is the curious similarity between us in circumstances,
that made me wish for your friendship when that similarity was made
known to me by Lemercier, who is not less garrulous than the true
Parisian usually is. Permit me to say that, like you, I was reared
in some pride of no inglorious ancestry. I was reared also in the
expectation of great wealth. Those expectations were not realized: my
father had the fault of noble natures,--generosity pushed to imprudence:
he died poor and in debt. You retain the home of your ancestors; I had
to resign mine."

The Marquis had felt deeply interested in this narrative, and as Graham
now paused, took his hand and pressed it. "One of our most eminent
personages said to me about that time, 'Whatever a clever man of your
age determines to do or to be, the odds are twenty to one that he has
only to live on in order to do or to be it.' Don't you think he spoke
truly? I think so."

"I scarcely know what to think," said Rochebriant; "I feel as if you had
given me so rough a shake when I was in the midst of a dull dream, that
I am not yet quite sure whether I am asleep or awake."

Just as he said this, and towards the Paris end of the Champs Elysees,
there was a halt, a sensation among the loungers round them; many of
them uncovered in salute.

A man on the younger side of middle age, somewhat inclined to
corpulence, with a very striking countenance, was riding slowly by.
He returned the salutations he received with the careless dignity of
a Personage accustomed to respect, and then reined in his horse by the
side of a barouche, and exchanged some words with a portly gentleman
who was its sole occupant. The loungers, still halting, seemed to
contemplate this parley--between him on horseback and him in the
carriage--with very eager interest. Some put their hands behind their
ears and pressed forward, as if trying to overhear what was said.

"I wonder," quoth Graham, "whether, with all his cleverness, the Prince
has in any way decided what he means to do or to be."

"The Prince!" said Rochebriant, rousing himself from revery; "what
Prince?"

"Do you not recognize him by his wonderful likeness to the first
Napoleon,--him on horseback talking to Louvier, the great financier."

"Is that stout bourgeois in the carriage Louvier,--my mortgagee,
Louvier?"

"Your mortgagee, my dear Marquis? Well, he is rich enough to be a very
lenient one upon pay-day."

"Hein!--I doubt his leniency," said Alain. "I have promised my avoue to
meet him at dinner. Do you think I did wrong?"

"Wrong! of course not; he is likely to overwhelm you with civilities.
Pray don't refuse if he gives you an invitation to his soiree next
Saturday; I am going to it. One meets there the notabilities most
interesting to study,--artists, authors, politicians, especially those
who call themselves Republicans. He and the Prince agree in one thing;
namely, the cordial reception they give to the men who would destroy the
state of things upon which Prince and financier both thrive. Hillo! here
comes Lemercier on return from the Bois."

Lemercier's coupe stopped beside the footpath. "What tidings of the
Belle Inconnue?" asked the Englishman. "None; she was not there. But I
am rewarded: such an adventure! a dame of the haute volee; I believe
she is a duchess. She was walking with a lap-dog, a pure Pomeranian. A
strange poodle flew at the Pomeranian, I drove off the poodle, rescued
the Pomeranian, received the most gracious thanks, the sweetest smile:
femme superbe, middle aged. I prefer women of forty. Au revoir, I am due
at the club."

Alain felt a sensation of relief that Lemercier had not seen the lady
in the pearl-coloured dress, and quitted the Englishman with a lightened
heart.




CHAPTER IV.

"Piccola, piccola! com e cortese! another invitation from M. Louvier for
next Saturday,--conversazione." This was said in Italian by an elderly
lady bursting noisily into the room,--elderly, yet with a youthful
expression of face, owing perhaps to a pair of very vivacious black
eyes. She was dressed, after a somewhat slatternly fashion, in a wrapper
of crimson merino much the worse for wear, a blue handkerchief twisted
turban-like round her head, and her feet encased in list slippers. The
person to whom she addressed herself was a young lady with dark hair,
which, despite its evident repugnance, was restrained into smooth glossy
braids over the forehead, and at the crown of the small graceful head
into the simple knot which Horace has described as "Spartan." Her dress
contrasted the speaker's by an exquisite neatness.

We have seen her before as the lady in the pearl-coloured robe; but
seen now at home she looks much younger. She was one of those whom,
encountered in the streets or in society, one might guess to be
married,--probably a young bride; for thus seen there was about her an
air of dignity and of self-possession which suits well with the ideal of
chaste youthful matronage; and in the expression of the face there was a
pensive thoughtfulness beyond her years. But as she now sat by the open
window arranging flowers in a glass bowl, a book lying open on her lap,
you would never have said, "What a handsome woman!" you would have said,
"What a charming girl!" All about her was maidenly, innocent, and fresh.
The dignity of her bearing was lost in household ease, the pensiveness
of her expression in an untroubled serene sweetness.

Perhaps many of my readers may have known friends engaged in some
absorbing cause of thought, and who are in the habit when they go out,
especially if on solitary walks, to take that cause of thought with
them. The friend may be an orator meditating his speech, a poet his
verses, a lawyer a difficult case, a physician an intricate malady. If
you have such a friend, and you observe him thus away from his home, his
face will seem to you older and graver. He is absorbed in the care that
weighs on him. When you see him in a holiday moment at his own
fireside, the care is thrown aside; perhaps he mastered while abroad the
difficulty that had troubled him; he is cheerful, pleasant, sunny. This
appears to be very much the case with persons of genius. When in their
own houses we usually find them very playful and childlike. Most
persons of real genius, whatever they may seem out of doors, are very
sweet-tempered at home, and sweet temper is sympathizing and genial in
the intercourse of private life. Certainly, observing this girl as she
now bends over the flowers, it would be difficult to believe her to be
the Isaura Cicogna whose letters to Madame de Grantinesnil exhibit the
doubts and struggles of an unquiet, discontented, aspiring mind. Only
in one or two passages in those letters would you have guessed at the
writer in the girl as we now see her. It is in those passages where she
expresses her love of harmony, and her repugnance to contest: those were
characteristics you might have read in her face.

Certainly the girl is very lovely: what long dark eyelashes! what
soft, tender, dark-blue eyes! now that she looks up and smiles, what
a bewitching smile it is! by what sudden play of rippling dimples the
smile is enlivened and redoubled! Do you notice one feature? In
very showy beauties it is seldom noticed; but I, being in my way a
physiognomist, consider that it is always worth heeding as an index of
character. It is the ear. Remark how delicately it is formed in
her: none of that heaviness of lobe which is a sure sign of sluggish
intellect and coarse perception. Hers is the artist's ear. Note
next those hands: how beautifully shaped! small, but not doll-like
hands,--ready and nimble, firm and nervous hands, that could work for a
helpmate. By no means very white, still less red, but somewhat embrowned
as by the sun, such as you may see in girls reared in southern climes,
and in her perhaps betokening an impulsive character which had not
accustomed itself, when at sport in the open air, to the thraldom of
gloves,--very impulsive people even in cold climates seldom do.

In conveying to us by a few bold strokes an idea of the sensitive,
quick-moved, warm-blooded Henry II., the most impulsive of the
Plantagenets, his contemporary chronicler tells us that rather than
imprison those active hands of his, even in hawking-gloves, he would
suffer his falcon to fix its sharp claws into his wrist. No doubt
there is a difference as to what is befitting between a burly bellicose
creature like Henry II. and a delicate young lady like Isaura Cicogna;
and one would not wish to see those dainty wrists of hers seamed and
scarred by a falcon's claws. But a girl may not be less exquisitely
feminine for slight heed of artificial prettiness. Isaura had no need
of pale bloodless hands to seem one of Nature's highest grade of
gentlewomen even to the most fastidious eyes. About her there was
a charm apart from her mere beauty, and often disturbed instead of
heightened by her mere intellect: it consisted in a combination of
exquisite artistic refinement, and of a generosity of character by which
refinement was animated into vigour and warmth.

The room, which was devoted exclusively to Isaura, had in it much that
spoke of the occupant. That room, when first taken furnished, had a good
deal of the comfortless showiness which belongs to ordinary furnished
apartments in France, especially in the Parisian suburbs, chiefly let
for the summer: thin limp muslin curtains that decline to draw; stiff
mahogany chairs covered with yellow Utrecht velvet; a tall secretaire in
a dark corner; an oval buhl-table set in tawdry ormolu, islanded in the
centre of a poor but gaudy Scotch carpet; and but one other table of
dull walnut-wood, standing clothless before a sofa to match the chairs;
the eternal ormolu clock flanked by the two eternal ormolu candelabra on
the dreary mantelpiece. Some of this garniture had been removed, others
softened into cheeriness and comfort. The room somehow or other--thanks
partly to a very moderate expenditure in pretty twills with pretty
borders, gracefully simple table-covers, with one or two additional
small tables and easy-chairs, two simple vases filled with flowers;
thanks still more to a nameless skill in re-arrangement, and the
disposal of the slight knick-knacks and well-bound volumes, which, even
in travelling, women who have cultivated the pleasures of taste carry
about them--had been coaxed into that quiet harmony, that tone of
consistent subdued colour, which corresponded with the characteristics
of the inmate. Most people might have been puzzled where to place the
piano, a semi-grand, so as not to take up too much space in the little
room; but where it was placed it seemed so at home that you might have
supposed the room had been built for it.

There are two kinds of neatness,--one is too evident, and makes
everything about it seem trite and cold and stiff; and another kind
of neatness disappears from our sight in a satisfied sense of
completeness,--like some exquisite, simple, finished style of writing,
an Addison's or a St. Pierre's.

This last sort of neatness belonged to Isaura, and brought to mind the
well-known line of Catullus when on recrossing his threshold he invokes
its welcome,--a line thus not inelegantly translated by Leigh Hunt,

        "Smile every dimple on the cheek of Home."

I entreat the reader's pardon for this long descriptive digression;
but Isaura is one of those characters which are called many-sided, and
therefore not very easy to comprehend. She gives us one side of her
character in her correspondence with Madame de Grantmesnil, and another
side of it in her own home with her Italian companion,--half nurse, half
chaperon.

"Monsieur Louvier is indeed very courteous," said Isaura, looking up
from the flowers with the dimpled smile we have noticed. "But I
think, Madre, that we should do well to stay at home on Saturday,--not
peacefully, for I owe you your revenge at Euchre."

"You can't mean it, Piecola!" exclaimed the Signora, in evident
consternation. "Stay at home!--why stay at home? Euchre is very well
when there is nothing else to do: but change is pleasant; le bon Dieu
likes it,

            "'Ne caldo ne gelo
             Resta mai in cielo.'

"And such beautiful ices one gets at M. Louvier's! Did you taste the
pistachio ice? What fine rooms, and so well lit up! I adore light. And
the ladies so beautifully dressed: one sees the fashions. Stay at home!
play at Euchre indeed! Piccola, you cannot be so cruel to yourself: you
are young."

"But, dear Madre, just consider; we are invited because we are
considered professional singers: your reputation as such is of course
established,--mine is not; but still I shall be asked to sing, as I was
asked before; and you know Dr. C. forbids me to do so except to a very
small audience; and it is so ungracious always to say 'No;' and besides,
did you not yourself say, when we came away last time from M. Louvier's,
that it was very dull, that you knew nobody, and that the ladies had
such superb toilets that you felt mortified--and--"

"Zitto! zitto! you talk idly, Piccola,--very idly. I was mortified
then in my old black Lyons silk; but have I not bought since then my
beautiful Greek jacket,--scarlet and gold lace? and why should I buy it
if I am not to show it?"

"But, dear Madre, the jacket is certainly very handsome, and will make
an effect in a little dinner at the Savarins or Mrs. Morley's; but in a
great formal reception like M. Louvier's will it not look--"

"Splendid!" interrupted the Signora.

"But singolare."

"So much the better; did not that great English Lady wear such a jacket,
and did not every one admire her, piu tosto invidia the compassione?"

Isaura sighed. Now the jacket of the Signora was a subject of
disquietude to her friend. It so happened that a young English lady of
the highest rank and the rarest beauty had appeared at M. Louvier's,
and indeed generally in the beau monde of Paris, in a Greek jacket that
became her very much. The jacket had fascinated, at M. Louvier's, the
eyes of the Signora. But of this Isaura was unaware. The Signora, on
returning home from M. Louvier's, had certainly lamented much over the
mesquin appearance of her old-fashioned Italian habiliments compared
with the brilliant toilette of the gay Parisiennes; and Isaura--quite
woman enough to sympathize with woman in such womanly vanities--proposed
the next day to go with the Signora to one of the principal couturieres
of Paris, and adapt the Signora's costume to the fashions of the place.
But the Signora having predetermined on a Greek jacket, and knowing
by instinct that Isaura would be disposed to thwart that splendid
predilection, had artfully suggested that it would be better to go
to the couturiere with Madame Savarin, as being a more experienced
adviser,--and the coupe only held two.

As Madame Savarin was about the same age as the Signora, and dressed
as became her years and in excellent taste, Isaura thought this an
admirable suggestion; and pressing into her chaperon's hand a billet de
banque sufficient to re-equip her cap-a pie, dismissed the subject from
her mind. But the Signora was much too cunning to submit her passion
for the Greek jacket to the discouraging comments of Madame Savarin.
Monopolizing the coupe, she became absolute mistress of the situation.
She went to no fashionable couturiere's. She went to a magasin that she
had seen advertised in the Petites Afiches as supplying superb costumes
for fancy-balls and amateur performers in private theatricals. She
returned home triumphant, with a jacket still more dazzling to the eye
than that of the English lady.

When Isaura first beheld it, she drew back in a sort of superstitious
terror, as of a comet or other blazing portent.

"Cosa stupenda!" (stupendous thing!) She might well be dismayed when
the Signora proposed to appear thus attired in M. Louvier's salon. What
might be admired as coquetry of dress in a young beauty of rank so great
that even a vulgarity in her would be called distinguee, was
certainly an audacious challenge of ridicule in the elderly ci-devant
music-teacher.

But how could Isaura, how can any one of common humanity, say to a woman
resolved upon wearing a certain dress, "You are not young and handsome
enough for that?" Isaura could only murmur, "For many reasons I would
rather stay at home, dear Madre."

"Ah! I see you are ashamed of me," said the Signora, in softened tones:
"very natural. When the nightingale sings no more, she is only an
ugly brown bird;" and therewith the Signora Venosta seated herself
submissively, and began to cry.

On this Isaura sprang up, wound her arms round the Signora's neck,
soothed her with coaxing, kissed and petted her, and ended by saying,
"Of course we will go;" and, "but let me choose you another dress,--a
dark-green velvet trimmed with blonde: blonde becomes you so well."

"No, no: I hate green velvet; anybody can wear that. Piccola, I am not
clever like thee; I cannot amuse myself like thee with books. I am in a
foreign land. I have a poor head, but I have a big heart" (another burst
of tears); "and that big heart is set on my beautiful Greek jacket."

"Dearest Madre," said Isaura, half weeping too, "forgive me, you are
right. The Greek jacket is splendid; I shall be so pleased to see you
wear it: poor Madre! so pleased to think that in the foreign land you
are not without something that pleases you!"




CHAPTER V.

CONFORMABLY with his engagement to meet M. Louvier, Alain found himself
on the day and at the hour named in M. Gandrin's salon. On this occasion
Madame Gandrin did not appear. Her husband was accustomed to give diners
d'hommes. The great man had not yet arrived. "I think, Marquis," said
M. Gandrin, "that you will not regret having followed my advice: my
representations have disposed Louvier to regard you with much favour,
and he is certainly flattered by being permitted to make your personal
acquaintance."

The avoue had scarcely finished this little speech, when M. Louvier was
announced. He entered with a beaming smile, which did not detract from
his imposing presence. His flatterers had told him that he had a look
of Louis Philippe; therefore he had sought to imitate the dress and the
bonhomie of that monarch of the middle class. He wore a wig, elaborately
piled up, and shaped his whiskers in royal harmony with the royal wig.
Above all, he studied that social frankness of manner with which the
able sovereign dispelled awe of his presence or dread of his astuteness.
Decidedly he was a man very pleasant to converse and to deal with--so
long as there seemed to him something to gain and nothing to lose by
being pleasant. He returned Alain's bow by a cordial offer of both
expansive hands, into the grasp of which the hands of the aristocrat
utterly disappeared. "Charmed to make your acquaintance, Marquis; still
more charmed if you will let me be useful during your sejour at Paris.
Ma foi, excuse my bluntness, but you are a fort beau garcon. Monsieur
your father was a handsome man, but you beat him hollow. Gandrin, my
friend, would not you and I give half our fortunes for one year of this
fine fellow's youth spent at Paris? Peste! what love-letters we should
have, with no need to buy them by billets de banque!" Thus he ran on,
much to Alain's confusion, till dinner was announced. Then there was
something grandiose in the frank bourgeois style wherewith he expanded
his napkin and twisted one end into his waistcoat; it was so manly a
renunciation of the fashions which a man so repandu in all circles might
be supposed to follow,--as if he were both too great and too much in
earnest for such frivolities. He was evidently a sincere bon vivant, and
M. Gandrin had no less evidently taken all requisite pains to gratify
his taste. The Montrachet served with the oysters was of precious
vintage; that vin de madere which accompanied the potage a la bisque
would have contented an American. And how radiant became Louvier's face
when amongst the entrees he came upon laitances de carpes! "The best
thing in the world," he cried, "and one gets it so seldom since the old
Rocher de Cancale has lost its renown. At private houses, what does one
get now? blanc de poulet, flavourless trash. After all, Gandrin, when we
lose the love-letters, it is some consolation that laitances de carpes
and sautes de foie gras are still left to fill up the void in our
hearts. Marquis, heed my counsel; cultivate betimes the taste for the
table,--that and whist are the sole resources of declining years. You
never met my old friend Talleyrand--ah, no! he was long before your
time. He cultivated both, but he made two mistakes. No man's intellect
is perfect on all sides. He confined himself to one meal a day, and
he never learned to play well at whist. Avoid his errors, my young
friend,--avoid them. Gandrin, I guess this pineapple is English,--it is
superb."

"You are right,--a present from the Marquis of H-------."

"Ah! instead of a fee, I wager. The Marquis gives nothing for nothing,
dear man! Droll people the English. You have never visited England, I
presume, cher Rochebriant?" The affable financier had already made vast
progress in familiarity with his silent fellow-guest.

When the dinner was over and the three men had reentered the salon for
coffee and liqueurs, Gandrin left Louvier and Alain alone, saying he was
going to his cabinet for cigars which he could recommend. Then Louvier,
lightly patting the Marquis on the shoulder, said with what the French
call effusion, "My dear Rochebriant, your father and I did not quite
understand each other. He took a tone of grand seigneur that sometimes
wounded me; and I in turn was perhaps too rude in asserting my
rights--as creditor, shall I say?--no, as fellow-citizen; and Frenchmen
are so vain, so over-susceptible; fire up at a word; take offence when
none is meant. We two, my dear boy, should be superior to such national
foibles. Bref--I have a mortgage on your lands. Why should that thought
mar our friendship? At my age, though I am not yet old, one is flattered
if the young like us, pleased if we can oblige them, and remove from
their career any little obstacle in its way. Gandrin tells me you wish
to consolidate all the charges on your estate into one on a lower rate
of interest. Is it so?"

"I am so advised," said the Marquis.

"And very rightly advised; come and talk with me about it some day next
week. I hope to have a large sum of money set free in a few days. Of
course, mortgages on land don't pay like speculations at the Bourse; but
I am rich enough to please myself. We will see, we will see."

Here Gandrin returned with the cigars; but Alain at that time never
smoked, and Louvier excused himself, with a laugh and a sly wink, on
the plea that he was going to pay his respects--as doubtless that joli
garcon was going to do likewise--to a belle dame who did not reckon the
smell of tobacco among the perfumes of Houbigant or Arabia.

"Meanwhile," added Louvier, turning to Gandrin, "I have something to say
to you on business about the contract for that new street of mine. No
hurry,--after our young friend has gone to his 'assignation.'"

Alain could not misinterpret the hint; and in a few moments took leave
of his host, more surprised than disappointed that the financier had not
invited him, as Graham had assumed he would, to his soiree the following
evening.

When Alain was gone, Louvier's jovial manner disappeared also, and
became bluffly rude rather than bluntly cordial. "Gandrin, what did
you mean by saying that that young man was no muscadin! Muscadin,
aristocrate, offensive from top to toe."

"You amaze me; you seemed to take to him so cordially."

"And pray, were you too blind to remark with what cold reserve he
responded to my condescensions; how he winced when I called him
Rochebriant; how he coloured when I called him 'dear boy'? These
aristocrats think we ought to thank them on our knees when they take our
money, and" here Louvier's face darkened--"seduce our women." "Monsieur
Louvier, in all France I do not know a greater aristocrat than
yourself."

I don't know whether M. Gandrin meant that speech as a compliment, but
M. Louvier took it as such,--laughed complacently and rubbed his hands.
"Ay, ay, millionnaires are the real aristocrats, for they have power, as
my beau Marquis will soon find. I must bid you good night. Of course I
shall see Madame Gandrin and yourself to-morrow. Prepare for a motley
gathering,--lots of democrats and foreigners, with artists and authors,
and such creatures."

"Is that the reason why you did not invite the Marquis?"

"To be sure; I would not shock so pure a Legitimist by contact with the
sons of the people, and make him still colder to myself. No; when he
comes to my house he shall meet lions and viveurs of the haut ton,
who will play into my hands by teaching him how to ruin himself in the
quickest manner and in the genre Regence. Bon soir, mon vieux."




CHAPTER VI.

The next night Graham in vain looked round for Alain in M. Louvier's
salons, and missed his high-bred mien and melancholy countenance.
M. Louvier had been for some four years a childless widower, but his
receptions were not the less numerously attended, nor his establishment
less magnificently monde for the absence of a presiding lady: very much
the contrary; it was noticeable how much he had increased his status and
prestige as a social personage since the death of his unlamented spouse.

To say truth, she had been rather a heavy drag on his triumphal car.
She had been the heiress of a man who had amassed a great deal of
money,--not in the higher walks of commerce, but in a retail trade.

Louvier himself was the son of a rich money-lender; he had entered life
with an ample fortune and an intense desire to be admitted into those
more brilliant circles in which fortune can be dissipated with eclat. He
might not have attained this object but for the friendly countenance of
a young noble who was then--

        "The glass of fashion and the mould of form;"

but this young noble, of whom later we shall hear more, came suddenly to
grief, and when the money-lender's son lost that potent protector, the
dandies, previously so civil, showed him a very cold shoulder.

Louvier then became an ardent democrat, and recruited the fortune he had
impaired by the aforesaid marriage, launched into colossal speculations,
and became enormously rich. His aspirations for social rank now revived,
but his wife sadly interfered with them. She was thrifty by nature;
sympathized little with her husband's genius for accumulation; always
said he would end in a hospital; hated Republicans; despised authors and
artists, and by the ladies of the beau monde was pronounced common and
vulgar.

So long as she lived, it was impossible for Louvier to realize his
ambition of having one of the salons which at Paris establish celebrity
and position. He could not then command those advantages of wealth which
he especially coveted. He was eminently successful in doing this now.
As soon as she was safe in Pere la Chaise, he enlarged his hotel by
the purchase and annexation of an adjoining house; redecorated and
refurnished it, and in this task displayed, it must be said to his
credit, or to that of the administrators he selected for the purpose, a
nobleness of taste rarely exhibited nowadays. His collection of pictures
was not large, and consisted exclusively of the French school, ancient
and modern, for in all things Louvier affected the patriot. But each of
those pictures was a gem; such Watteaus, such Greuzes, such landscapes
by Patel, and, above all, such masterpieces by Ingres, Horace Vernet,
and Delaroche were worth all the doubtful originals of Flemish and
Italian art which make the ordinary boast of private collectors.

These pictures occupied two rooms of moderate size, built for their
reception, and lighted from above. The great salon to which they led
contained treasures scarcely less precious; the walls were covered with
the richest silks which the looms of Lyons could produce. Every piece
of furniture here was a work of art in its way: console-tables of
Florentine mosaic, inlaid with pearl and lapis-lazuli; cabinets in which
the exquisite designs of the Renaissance were carved in ebony; colossal
vases of Russian malachite, but wrought by French artists. The very
knick-knacks scattered carelessly about the room might have been admired
in the cabinets of the Palazzo Pitti. Beyond this room lay the salle de
danse, its ceiling painted by ------, supported by white marble columns,
the glazed balcony and the angles of the room filled with tiers of
exotics. In the dining-room, on the same floor, on the other side of
the landing-place, were stored in glazed buffets not only vessels and
salvers of plate, silver and gold, but, more costly still, matchless
specimens of Sevres and Limoges, and mediaeval varieties of Venetian
glass. On the ground-floor, which opened on the lawn of a large garden,
Louvier had his suite of private apartments, furnished, as he said,
"simply, according to English notions of comfort;"--Englishmen would
have said, "according to French notions of luxury." Enough of these
details, which a writer cannot give without feeling himself somewhat
vulgarized in doing so, but without a loose general idea of which
a reader would not have an accurate conception of something not
vulgar,--of something grave, historical, possibly tragical,--the
existence of a Parisian millionaire at the date of this narrative.

The evidence of wealth was everywhere manifest at M. Louvier's, but it
was everywhere refined by an equal evidence of taste. The apartments
devoted to hospitality ministered to the delighted study of artists, to
whom free access was given, and of whom two or three might be seen
daily in the "show-rooms," copying pictures or taking sketches of rare
articles of furniture or effects for palatian interiors.

Among the things which rich English visitors of Paris most coveted to
see was M. Louvier's hotel, and few among the richest left it without
a sigh of envy and despair. Only in such London houses as belong to
a Sutherland or a Holford could our metropolis exhibit a splendour as
opulent and a taste as refined.

M. Louvier had his set evenings for popular assemblies. At these were
entertained the Liberals of every shade, from tricolor to rouge,
with the artists and writers most in vogue, pele-mele with decorated
diplomatists, ex-ministers, Orleanists, and Republicans, distinguished
foreigners, plutocrats of the Bourse, and lions male and female from
the arid nurse of that race, the Chaussee d'Antin. Of his more select
reunions something will be said later.

"And how does this poor Paris metamorphosed please Monsieur Vane?" asked
a Frenchman with a handsome, intelligent countenance, very carefully
dressed though in a somewhat bygone fashion, and carrying off his tenth
lustrum with an air too sprightly to evince any sense of the weight.
This gentleman, the Vicomte de Breze, was of good birth, and had a
legitimate right to his title of Vicomte,--which is more than can be
said of many vicomtes one meets at Paris. He had no other property,
however, than a principal share in an influential journal, to which he
was a lively and sparkling contributor. In his youth, under the reign
of Louis Philippe, he had been a chief among literary exquisites; and
Balzac was said to have taken him more than once as his model for those
brilliant young vauriens who figure in the great novelist's comedy of
Human Life. The Vicomte's fashion expired with the Orleanist dynasty.

"Is it possible, my dear Vicomte," answered Graham, "not to be pleased
with a capital so marvellously embellished?"

"Embellished it may be to foreign eyes," said the Vicomte, sighing, "but
not improved to the taste of a Parisian like me. I miss the dear Paris
of old,--the streets associated with my beaux jours are no more.
Is there not something drearily monotonous in those interminable
perspectives? How frightfully the way lengthens before one's eyes! In
the twists and curves of the old Paris one was relieved from the pain
of seeing how far one had to go from one spot to another,--each tortuous
street had a separate idiosyncrasy; what picturesque diversities,
what interesting recollections,--all swept away! Mon Dieu! and
what for,--miles of florid facades staring and glaring at one with
goggle-eyed pitiless windows; house-rents trebled, and the consciousness
that if you venture to grumble underground railways, like concealed
volcanoes, can burst forth on you at any moment with an eruption of
bayonets and muskets. This maudit empire seeks to keep its hold
on France much as a grand seigneur seeks to enchain a nymph of
the ballet,--tricks her out in finery and baubles, and insures her
infidelity the moment he fails to satisfy her whims."

"Vicomte," answered Graham, "I have had the honour to know you since I
was a small boy at a preparatory school home for the holidays, and you
were a guest at my father's country-house. You were then fete as one of
the most promising writers among the young men of the day, especially
favoured by the princes of the reigning family. I shall never forget
the impression made on me by your brilliant appearance and your no less
brilliant talk."

"Ah! ces beaux jours! ce bon Louis Philippe, ce cher petit Joinville,"
sighed the Vicomte.

"But at that day you compared le bon Louis Philippe to Robert Macaire.
You described all his sons, including, no doubt, ce cher petit
Joinville, in terms of resentful contempt, as so many plausible gamins
whom Robert Macaire was training to cheat the public in the interest of
the family firm. I remember my father saying to you in answer, 'No royal
house in Europe has more sought to develop the literature of an epoch
and to signalize its representatives by social respect and official
honours than that of the Orleans dynasty. You, Monsieur de Breze, do but
imitate your elders in seeking to destroy the dynasty under which you
flourish; should you succeed, you hommes de plume will be the first
sufferers and the loudest complainers.'"

"Cher Monsieur Vane," said the Vicomte, smiling complacently, "your
father did me great honour in classing me with Victor Hugo, Alexandre
Dumas, Emile de Girardin, and the other stars of the Orleanist galaxy,
including our friend here, M. Savarin. A very superior man was your
father."

"And," said Savarin, who, being an Orleanist, had listened to Graham's
speech with an approving smile,--"and if I remember right, my dear
De Breze, no one was more brilliantly severe than yourself on poor De
Lamartine and the Republic that succeeded Louis Philippe; no one more
emphatically expressed the yearning desire for another Napoleon to
restore order at home and renown abroad. Now you have got another
Napoleon."

"And I want change for my Napoleon," said De Breze, laughing.

"My dear Vicomte," said Graham, "one thing we may all grant,--that in
culture and intellect you are far superior to the mass of your fellow
Parisians; that you are therefore a favourable type of their political
character."

"Ah, mon cher, vous etes trop aimable."

"And therefore I venture to say this,--if the archangel Gabriel were
permitted to descend to Paris and form the best government for France
that the wisdom of seraph could devise, it would not be two years--I
doubt if it would be six months--before out of this Paris, which you
call the Foyer des Idees, would emerge a powerful party, adorned by
yourself and other hommes de plume, in favour of a revolution for the
benefit of ce bon Satan and ce cher petit Beelzebub."

"What a pretty vein of satire you have, mon cher!" said the Vicomte,
good-humouredly; "there is a sting of truth in your witticism. Indeed,
I must send you some articles of mine in which I have said much the same
thing,--les beaux, esprits se rencontrent. The fault of us French is
impatience, desire of change; but then it is that desire which keeps the
world going and retains our place at the head of it. However, at this
time we are all living too fast for our money to keep up with it, and
too slow for our intellect not to flag. We vie with each other on the
road to ruin, for in literature all the old paths to fame are shut up."

Here a tall gentleman, with whom the Vicomte had been conversing before
he accosted Vane, and who had remained beside De Breze listening in
silent attention to this colloquy, interposed, speaking in the slow
voice of one accustomed to measure his words, and with a slight but
unmistakable German accent. "There is that, Monsieur de Breze, which
makes one think gravely of what you say so lightly. Viewing things with
the unprejudiced eyes of a foreigner, I recognize much for which France
should be grateful to the Emperor. Under his sway her material resources
have been marvellously augmented; her commerce has been placed by the
treaty with England on sounder foundations, and is daily exhibiting
richer life; her agriculture had made a prodigious advance wherever it
has allowed room for capitalists, and escaped from the curse of petty
allotments and peasant-proprietors, a curse which would have ruined any
country less blessed by Nature; turbulent factions have been quelled;
internal order maintained; the external prestige of France, up at
least to the date of the Mexican war, increased to an extent that might
satisfy even a Frenchman's amour propre; and her advance in civilization
has been manifested by the rapid creation of a naval power which should
put even England on her mettle. But, on the other hand--"

"Ay, on the other hand," said the Vicomte.

"On the other hand there are in the imperial system two causes of decay
and of rot silently at work. They may not be the faults of the Emperor,
but they are such misfortunes as may cause the fall of the Empire.
The first is an absolute divorce between the political system and the
intellectual culture of the nation. The throne and the system rest
on universal suffrage,--on a suffrage which gives to classes the most
ignorant a power that preponderates over all the healthful elements of
knowledge. It is the tendency of all ignorant multitudes to personify
themselves, as it were, in one individual. They cannot comprehend you
when you argue for a principle; they do comprehend you when you talk
of a name. The Emperor Napoleon is to them a name, and the prefects
and officials who influence their votes are paid for incorporating all
principles in the shibboleth of that single name. You have thus sought
the well-spring of a political system in the deepest stratum of popular
ignorance. To rid popular ignorance of its normal revolutionary bias,
the rural peasants are indoctrinated with the conservatism that comes
from the fear which appertains to property. They have their roots
of land or their shares in a national loan. Thus you estrange the
crassitude of an ignorant democracy still more from the intelligence of
the educated classes by combining it with the most selfish and abject of
all the apprehensions that are ascribed to aristocracy and wealth. What
is thus embedded in the depths of your society makes itself shown on the
surface. Napoleon III. has been compared to Augustus; and there are
many startling similitudes between them in character and in fate. Each
succeeds to the heritage of a great name that had contrived to unite
autocracy with the popular cause; each subdued all rival competitors,
and inaugurated despotic rule in the name of freedom; each mingled
enough of sternness with ambitious will to stain with bloodshed the
commencement of his power,--but it would be an absurd injustice to fix
the same degree of condemnation on the coup d'etat as humanity fixes on
the earlier cruelties of Augustus; each, once firm in his seat, became
mild and clement,--Augustus perhaps from policy, Napoleon III. from a
native kindliness of disposition which no fair critic of character
can fail to acknowledge. Enough of similitudes; now for one salient
difference. Observe how earnestly Augustus strove, and how completely he
succeeded in the task, to rally round him all the leading intellects in
every grade and of every party,--the followers of Antony, the friends of
Brutus; every great captain, every great statesman, every great writer,
every mail who could lend a ray of mind to his own Julian constellation,
and make the age of Augustus an era in the annals of human intellect
and genius. But this has not been the good fortune of your Emperor.
The result of his system has been the suppression of intellect in
every department. He has rallied round him not one great statesman; his
praises are hymned by not one great poet. The celebrates of a former day
stand aloof; or, preferring exile to constrained allegiance, assail him
with unremitting missiles from their asylum in foreign shores. His
reign is sterile of new celebrites. The few that arise enlist themselves
against him. Whenever he shall venture to give full freedom to the press
and to the legislature, the intellect thus suppressed or thus hostile
will burst forth in collected volume. His partisans have not been
trained and disciplined to meet such assailants. They will be as weak as
no doubt they will be violent. And the worst is, that the intellect thus
rising in mass against him will be warped and distorted, like captives
who, being kept in chains, exercise their limbs on escaping in vehement
jumps without definite object. The directors of emancipated opinion may
thus be terrible enemies to the Imperial Government, but they will
be very unsafe councillors to France. Concurrently with this divorce
between the Imperial system and the national intellect,--a divorce
so complete that even your salons have lost their wit, and even your
caricatures their point,--a corruption of manners which the Empire, I
own, did not originate, but inherit, has become so common that every
one owns and nobody blames it. The gorgeous ostentation of the Court
has perverted the habits of the people. The intelligence abstracted from
other vents betakes itself to speculating for a fortune; and the greed
of gain and the passion for show are sapping the noblest elements of the
old French manhood. Public opinion stamps with no opprobrium a minister
or favourite who profits by a job; and I fear you will find that jobbing
pervades all your administrative departments."

"All very true," said De Breze, with a shrug of the shoulders and in
a tone of levity that seemed to ridicule the assertion he volunteered;
"Virtue and Honour banished from courts and salons and the cabinet of
authors ascend to fairer heights in the attics of ouvriers."

"The ouvriers, ouvriers of Paris!" cried this terrible German.

"Ay, Monsieur le Comte, what can you say against our ouvriers? A German
count cannot condescend to learn anything about ces petites gens."

"Monsieur," replied the German, "in the eyes of a statesman there are
no petites gens, and in those of a philosopher no petites choses. We in
Germany have too many difficult problems affecting our working classes
to solve, not to have induced me to glean all the information I can as
to the ouvriers of Paris. They have among them men of aspirations as
noble as can animate the souls of philosophers and poets, perhaps not
the less noble because common-sense and experience cannot follow their
flight; but as a body the ouvriers of Paris have not been elevated in
political morality by the benevolent aim of the Emperor to find them
ample work and good wages independent of the natural laws that regulate
the markets of labour. Accustomed thus to consider the State bound to
maintain them, the moment the State fails in that impossible task, they
will accommodate their honesty to a rush upon property under the name of
social reform.

"Have you not noticed how largely increased within the last few years is
the number of those who cry out, 'La Propriete, cest le vol'? Have you
considered the rapid growth of the International Association? I do not
say that for all these evils--the Empire is exclusively responsible.
To a certain degree they are found in all rich communities, especially
where democracy is more or less in the ascendant. To a certain extent
they exist in the large towns of Germany; they are conspicuously
increasing in England; they are acknowledged to be dangerous in the
United States of America; they are, I am told on good authority, making
themselves visible with the spread of civilization in Russia. But under
the French Empire they have become glaringly rampant, and I venture to
predict that the day is not far off when the rot at work throughout all
layers and strata of French society will insure a fall of the fabric at
the sound of which the world will ring.

"There is many a fair and stately tree which continues to throw out its
leaves and rear its crest till suddenly the wind smites it, and then,
and not till then, the trunk which seems so solid is found to be but the
rind to a mass of crumbled powder."

"Monsieur le Comte," said the Vicomte, "you are a severe critic and
a lugubrious prophet; but a German is so safe from revolution that he
takes alarm at the stir of movement which is the normal state of the
French esprit."

"French esprit may soon evaporate into Parisian betise. As to Germany
being safe from revolution, allow me to repeat a saying of Goethe's-but
has Monsieur le Vicomte ever heard of Goethe?"

"Goethe, of course,--tres joli ecrivain."

"Goethe said to some one who was making much the same remark as
yourself, 'We Germans are in a state of revolution now, but we do things
so slowly that it will be a hundred years before we Germans shall find
it out; but when completed, it will be the greatest revolution society
has yet seen, and will last like the other revolutions that, beginning,
scarce noticed, in Germany, have transformed the world.'"

"Diable, Monsieur le Comte! Germans transformed the world! What
revolutions do you speak of?"

"The invention of gunpowder, the invention of printing, and the
expansion of a monk's quarrel with his Pope into the Lutheran
revolution."

Here the German paused, and asked the Vicomte to introduce him to Vane,
which De Breze did by the title of Count von Rudesheim. On hearing
Vane's name, the Count inquired if he were related to the orator and
statesman, George Graham Vane, whose opinions, uttered in Parliament,
were still authoritative among German thinkers. This compliment to his
deceased father immensely gratified but at the same time considerably
surprised the Englishman. His father, no doubt, had been a man of much
influence in the British House of Commons,--a very weighty speaker, and,
while in office, a first-rate administrator; but Englishmen know what a
House of Commons reputation is,--how fugitive, how little cosmopolitan;
and that a German count should ever have heard of his father delighted
but amazed him. In stating himself to be the son of George Graham Vane,
he intimated not only the delight but the amaze, with the frank savoir
vivre which was one of his salient characteristics.

"Sir," replied the German, speaking in very correct English, but still
with his national accent, "every German reared to political service
studies England as the school for practical thought distinct from
impracticable theories. Long may you allow us to do so! Only excuse me
one remark,--never let the selfish element of the practical supersede
the generous element. Your father never did so in his speeches, and
therefore we admired him. At the present day we don't so much care to
study English speeches; they may be insular,--they are not European. I
honour England; Heaven grant that you may not be making sad mistakes
in the belief that you can long remain England if you cease to be
European." Herewith the German bowed, not uncivilly,--on the contrary,
somewhat ceremoniously,--and disappeared with a Prussian Secretary of
Embassy, whose arm he linked in his own, into a room less frequented.

"Vicomte, who and what is your German count?" asked Vane.

"A solemn pedant," answered the lively Vicomte,--"a German count, que
voulez-vous de plus?"




CHAPTER VII.

A LITTLE later Graham found himself alone amongst the crowd. Attracted
by the sound of music, he had strayed into one of the rooms whence it
came, and in which, though his range of acquaintance at Paris was for an
Englishman large and somewhat miscellaneous, he recognized no familiar
countenance. A lady was playing the pianoforte--playing remarkably
well--with accurate science, with that equal lightness and strength of
finger which produces brilliancy of execution; but to appreciate
her music one should be musical one's self. It wanted the charm
that fascinates the uninitiated. The guests in the room were musical
connoisseurs,--a class with whom Graham Vane had nothing in common. Even
if he had been more capable of enjoying the excellence of the player's
performance, the glance he directed towards her would have sufficed
to chill him into indifference. She was not young, and with prominent
features and puckered skin, was twisting her face into strange
sentimental grimaces, as if terribly overcome by the beauty and pathos
of her own melodies. To add to Vane's displeasure, she was dressed in
a costume wholly antagonistic to his views of the becoming,--in a Greek
jacket of gold and scarlet, contrasted by a Turkish turban.

Muttering "What she-mountebank have we here?" he sank into a chair
behind the door, and fell into an absorbed revery. From this he was
aroused by the cessation of the music and the hum of subdued approbation
by which it was followed. Above the hum swelled the imposing voice of M.
Louvier as he rose from a seat on the other side of the piano, by which
his bulky form had been partially concealed.

"Bravo! perfectly played! excellent! Can we not persuade your charming
young countrywoman to gratify us even by a single song?" Then turning
aside and addressing some one else invisible to Graham he said, "Does
that tyrannical doctor still compel you to silence, Mademoiselle?"

A voice so sweetly modulated that if there were any sarcasm in the words
it was lost in the softness of pathos, answered, "Nay, Monsieur Louvier,
he rather overtasks the words at my command in thankfulness to those who
like yourself, so kindly regard me as something else than a singer."

It was not the she-mountebank who thus spoke. Graham rose and looked
round with instinctive curiosity. He met the face that he said had
haunted him. She too had risen, standing near the piano, with one
hand tenderly resting on the she-mountebank's scarlet and gilded
shoulder,--the face that haunted him, and yet with a difference. There
was a faint blush on the clear pale cheek, a soft yet playful light in
the grave dark-blue eyes, which had not been visible in the countenance
of the young lady in the pearl-coloured robe. Graham did not hear
Louvier's reply, though no doubt it was loud enough for him to hear. He
sank again into revery. Other guests now came into the room, among them
Frank Morley, styled Colonel,--eminent military titles in the United
States do not always denote eminent military services,--a wealthy
American, and his sprightly and beautiful wife. The Colonel was a clever
man, rather stiff in his deportment, and grave in speech, but by no
means without a vein of dry humour. By the French he was esteemed
a high-bred specimen of the kind of grand seigneur which democratic
republics engender. He spoke French like a Parisian, had an imposing
presence, and spent a great deal of money with the elegance of a man of
taste and the generosity of a man of heart. His high breeding was not
quite so well understood by the English, because the English are apt to
judge breeding by little conventional rules not observed by the
American Colonel. He had a slight nasal twang, and introduced "sir" with
redundant ceremony in addressing Englishmen, however intimate he might
be with them, and had the habit (perhaps with a sly intention to startle
or puzzle them) of adorning his style of conversation with quaint
Americanisms.

Nevertheless, the genial amiability and the inherent dignity of his
character made him acknowledged as a thorough gentleman by every
Englishman, however conventional in tastes, who became admitted into his
intimate acquaintance.

Mrs. Morley, ten or twelve years younger than her husband, had no
nasal twang, and employed no Americanisms in her talk, which was frank,
lively, and at times eloquent. She had a great ambition to be esteemed
of a masculine understanding; Nature unkindly frustrated that ambition
in rendering her a model of feminine grace. Graham was intimately
acquainted with Colonel Morley; and with Mrs. Morley had contracted one
of those cordial friendships, which, perfectly free alike from polite
flirtation and Platonic attachment, do sometimes spring up between
persons of opposite sexes without the slightest danger of changing their
honest character into morbid sentimentality or unlawful passion. The
Morleys stopped to accost Graham, but the lady had scarcely said three
words to him, before, catching sight of the haunting face, she darted
towards it. Her husband, less emotional, bowed at the distance, and
said, "To my taste, sir, the Signorina Cicogna is the loveliest girl in
the present bee,* and full of mind, sir."

   [*Bee, a common expression in "the West" for a meeting or gathering
   ]of people.

"Singing mind," said Graham, sarcastically, and in the ill-natured
impulse of a man striving to check his inclination to admire.

"I have not heard her sing," replied the American, dryly; "and the words
'singing mind' are doubtless accurately English, since you employ them;
but at Boston the collocation would be deemed barbarous. You fly off the
handle. The epithet, sir, is not in concord with the substantive."

"Boston would be in the right, my dear Colonel. I stand rebuked; mind
has little to do with singing."

"I take leave to deny that, sir. You fire into the wrong flock,
and would not hazard the remark if you had conversed as I have with
Signorina Cicogna."

Before Graham could answer, Signorina Cicogna stood before him, leaning
lightly on Mrs. Morley's arm.

"Frank, you must take us into the refreshment-room," said Mrs. Morley to
her husband; and then, turning to Graham, added, "Will you help to make
way for us?"

Graham bowed, and offered his arm to the fair speaker. "No," said she,
taking her husband's. "Of course you know the Signorina, or, as we
usually call her, Mademoiselle Cicogna. No? Allow me to present you. Mr.
Graham Vane, Mademoiselle Cicogna. Mademoiselle speaks English like a
native."

And thus abruptly Graham was introduced to the owner of the haunting
face. He had lived too much in the great world all his life to retain
the innate shyness of an Englishman; but he certainly was confused and
embarrassed when his eyes met Isaura's, and he felt her hand on his
arm. Before quitting the room she paused and looked back. Graham's look
followed her own, and saw behind them the lady with the scarlet jacket
escorted by some portly and decorated connoisseur. Isaura's face
brightened to another kind of brightness,--a pleased and tender light.

"Poor dear Madre," she murmured to herself in Italian. "Madre!" echoed
Graham, also in Italian. "I have been misinformed, then; that lady is
your mother."

Isaura laughed a pretty, low, silvery laugh, and replied in English,
"She is not my mother; but I call her Madre, for I know no name more
loving."

Graham was touched, and said gently, "Your own mother was evidently very
dear to you."

Isaura's lip quivered, and she made a slight movement as if she would
have withdrawn her hand from his arm. He saw that he had offended or
wounded her, and with the straightforward frankness natural to him,
resumed quickly, "My remark was impertinent in a stranger; forgive it."

"There is nothing to forgive, Monsieur."

The two now threaded their way through the crowd, both silent. At last
Isaura, thinking she ought to speak first in order to show that Graham
had not offended her, said,

"How lovely Mrs. Morley is!"

"Yes; and I like the spirit and ease of her American manner. Have you
known her long, Mademoiselle?"

"No; we met her for the first time some weeks ago at M. Savarin's."

"Was she very eloquent on the rights of women?"

"What! you have heard her on that subject?"

"I have rarely heard her on any other, though she is the best and
perhaps the cleverest friend I have at Paris; but that may be my fault,
for I like to start it. It is a relief to the languid small-talk of
society to listen to any one thoroughly in earnest upon turning the
world topsy-turvy."

"Do you suppose poor Mrs. Morley would seek to do that if she had her
rights?" asked Isaura, with her musical laugh.

"Not a doubt of it; but perhaps you share her opinions."

"I scarcely know what her opinions are, but--"

"Yes?--but--"

"There is a--what shall I call it?--a persuasion, a sentiment, out of
which the opinions probably spring, that I do share."

"Indeed? a persuasion, a sentiment, for instance, that a woman should
have votes in the choice of legislators, and, I presume, in the task of
legislation?"

"No, that is not what I mean. Still, that is an opinion, right or wrong,
which grows out of the sentiment I speak of."

"Pray explain the sentiment."

"It is always so difficult to define a sentiment; but does it not strike
you that in proportion as the tendency of modern civilization has been
to raise women more and more to an intellectual equality with men,
in proportion as they read and study and think, an uneasy sentiment,
perhaps querulous, perhaps unreasonable, grows up within their minds
that the conventions of the world are against the complete development
of the faculties thus aroused and the ambition thus animated; that they
cannot but rebel, though it may be silently, against the notions of the
former age, when women were not thus educated, notions that the aim
of the sex should be to steal through life unremarked; that it is a
reproach to be talked of; that women are plants to be kept in a hothouse
and forbidden the frank liberty of growth in the natural air and
sunshine of heaven? This, at least, is a sentiment which has sprung up
within myself; and I imagine that it is the sentiment which has given
birth to many of the opinions or doctrines that seem absurd, and very
likely are so, to the general public. I don't pretend even to have
considered those doctrines; I don't pretend to say what may be the
remedies for the restlessness and uneasiness I feel. I doubt if on this
earth there be any remedies; all I know is, that I feel restless and
uneasy."

Graham gazed on her countenance as she spoke with an astonishment not
unmingled with tenderness and compassion, astonishment at the contrast
between a vein of reflection so hardy, expressed in a style of language
that seemed to him so masculine, and the soft velvet dreamy eyes, the
gentle tones, and delicate purity of hues rendered younger still by the
blush that deepened their bloom.

At this moment they had entered the refreshment-room; but a dense group
being round the table, and both perhaps forgetting the object for which
Mrs. Morley had introduced them to each other, they had mechancially
seated themselves on an ottoman in a recess while Isaura was yet
speaking. It must seem as strange to the reader as it did to Graham
that such a speech should have been spoken by so young a girl to an
acquaintance so new; but in truth Isaura was very little conscious of
Graham's presence. She had got on a subject that perplexed and tormented
her solitary thoughts; she was but thinking aloud.

"I believe," said Graham, after a pause, "that I comprehend your
sentiment much better than I do Mrs. Morley's opinions; but permit me
one observation. You say truly that the course of modern civilization
has more or less affected the relative position of woman cultivated
beyond that level on which she was formerly contented to stand,--the
nearer perhaps to the heart of man because not lifting her head to
his height,--and hence a sense of restlessness, uneasiness; but do you
suppose that, in this whirl and dance of the atoms which compose the
rolling ball of the civilized world, it is only women that are made
restless and uneasy? Do you not see amid the masses congregated in the
wealthiest cities of the world, writhings and struggles against the
received order of things? In this sentiment of discontent there is a
certain truthfulness, because it is an element of human nature, and how
best to deal with it is a problem yet unsolved; but in the opinions and
doctrines to which, among the masses, the sentiment gives birth, the
wisdom of the wisest detects only the certainty of a common ruin,
offering for reconstruction the same building-materials as the former
edifice,--materials not likely to be improved because they may be
defaced. Ascend from the working classes to all others in which
civilized culture prevails, and you will find that same restless
feeling,--the fluttering of untried wings against the bars between wider
space and their longings. Could you poll all the educated ambitious
young men in England,--perhaps in Europe,--at least half of them,
divided between a reverence for the past and a curiosity as to the
future, would sigh, 'I am born a century too late or a century too
soon!'"

Isaura listened to this answer with a profound and absorbing
interest. It was the first time that a clever young man talked thus
sympathetically to her, a clever young girl.

Then, rising, he said, "I see your Madre and our American friends are
darting angry looks at me. They have made room for us at the table, and
are wondering why I should keep you thus from the good things of this
little life. One word more ere we join them,--consult your own mind,
and consider whether your uneasiness and unrest are caused solely by
conventional shackles on your sex. Are they not equally common to the
youth of ours,--common to all who seek in art, in letters, nay, in the
stormier field of active life, to clasp as a reality some image yet seen
but as a dream?"




CHAPTER VIII.

No further conversation in the way of sustained dialogue took place that
evening between Graham and Isaura.

The Americans and the Savarins clustered round Isaura when they quitted
the refreshment-room. The party was breaking up. Vane would have
offered his arm again to Isaura, but M. Savarin had forestalled him. The
American was despatched by his wife to see for the carriage; and Mrs.
Morley said, with her wonted sprightly tone of command,

"Now, Mr. Vane, you have no option but to take care of me to the
shawl-room."

Madame Savarin and Signora Venosta had each found their cavaliers,
the Italian still retaining hold of the portly connoisseur, and the
Frenchwoman accepting the safeguard of the Vicomte de Breze. As they
descended the stairs, Mrs. Morley asked Graham what he thought of the
young lady to whom she had presented him.

"I think she is charming," answered Graham.

"Of course; that is the stereotyped answer to all such questions,
especially by you Englishmen. In public or in private, England is the
mouthpiece of platitudes."

"It is natural for an American to think so. Every child that has just
learned to speak uses bolder expressions than its grandmamma; but I am
rather at a loss to know by what novelty of phrase an American would
have answered your question."

"An American would have discovered that Isaura Cicogna had a soul, and
his answer would have confessed it."

"It strikes me that he would then have uttered a platitude more stolid
than mine. Every Christian knows that the dullest human being has a
soul. But, to speak frankly, I grant that my answer did not do justice
to the Signorina, nor to the impression she makes on me; and putting
aside the charm of the face, there is a charm in a mind that seems to
have gathered stores of reflection which I should scarcely have expected
to find in a young lady brought up to be a professional singer."

"You add prejudice to platitude, and are horribly prosaic to-night;
but here we are in the shawl-room. I must take another opportunity of
attacking you. Pray dine with us tomorrow; you will meet our Minister
and a few other pleasant friends."

"I suppose I must not say, 'I shall be charmed,'" answered Vane; "but I
shall be."

"Bon Dieu! that horrid fat man has deserted Signora Venosta,--looking
for his own cloak, I dare say; selfish monster! Go and hand her to her
carriage; quick, it is announced!"

Graham, thus ordered, hastened to offer his arm to the she-mountebank.
Somehow she had acquired dignity in his eyes, and he did not feel the
least ashamed of being in contact with the scarlet jacket.

The Signora grappled to him with a confiding familiarity. "I am afraid,"
she said in Italian, as they passed along the spacious hall to the porte
cochere,--"I am afraid that I did not make a good effect to-night. I was
nervous; did not you perceive it?"

"No, indeed; you enchanted us all;" replied the dissimulator.

"How amiable you are to say so! You must think that I sought for a
compliment. So I did; you gave me more than I deserved. Wine is the milk
of old men, and praise of old women; but an old man may be killed by too
much wine, and an old woman lives all the longer for too much praise.
Buona notte."

Here she sprang, lithesomely enough, into the carriage, and Isaura
followed, escorted by M. Savarin. As the two men returned towards the
shawl-room, the Frenchman said, "Madame Savarin and I complain that you
have not let us see so much of you as we ought. No doubt you are greatly
sought after; but are you free to take your soup with us the day after
to-morrow? You will meet the Count von Rudesheim, and a few others more
lively if less wise."

"The day after to-morrow I will mark with a white stone. To dine with M.
Savarin is an event to a man who covets distinction."

"Such compliments reconcile an author to his trade. You deserve the
best return I can make you. You will meet la belle Isaura. I have just
engaged her and her chaperon. She is a girl of true genius; and genius
is like those objects of virtu which belong to a former age, and become
every day more scarce and more precious."

Here they encountered Colonel Morley and his wife hurrying to their
carriage. The American stopped Vane, and whispered, "I am glad, sir, to
hear from my wife that you dine with us to-morrow. Sir, you will meet
Mademoiselle Cicogna, and I am not without a kinkle [notion] that you
will be enthused."

"This seems like a fatality," soliloquized Vane as he walked through the
deserted streets towards his lodging. "I strove to banish that haunting
face from my mind. I had half forgotten it, and now--" Here his murmur
sank into silence. He was deliberating in very conflicted thought
whether or not he should write to refuse the two invitations he had
accepted.

"Pooh!" he said at last, as he reached the door of his lodging, "is
my reason so weak that it should be influenced by a mere superstition?
Surely I know myself too well, and have tried myself too long, to fear
that I should be untrue to the duty and ends of my life, even if I found
my heart in danger of suffering."

Certainly the Fates do seem to mock our resolves to keep our feet from
their ambush, and our hearts from their snare! How our lives may be
coloured by that which seems to us the most trivial accident, the merest
chance! Suppose that Alain de Rochebriant had been invited to that
reunion at M. Louvier's, and Graham Vane had accepted some other
invitation and passed his evening elsewhere, Alain would probably have
been presented to Isaura--what then might have happened? The impression
Isaura had already made upon the young Frenchman was not so deep as
that made upon Graham; but then, Alain's resolution to efface it was but
commenced that day, and by no means yet confirmed. And if he had been
the first clever young man to talk earnestly to that clever young
girl, who can guess what impression he might have made upon her? His
conversation might have had less philosophy and strong sense than
Graham's, but more of poetic sentiment and fascinating romance.

However, the history of events that do not come to pass is not in the
chronicle of the Fates.





BOOK III.




CHAPTER I.

The next day the guests at the Morleys' had assembled when Vane entered.
His apology for unpunctuality was cut short by the lively hostess. "Your
pardon is granted without the humiliation of asking for it; we know that
the characteristic of the English is always to be a little behindhand."

She then proceeded to introduce him to the American Minister, to a
distinguished American poet, with a countenance striking for mingled
sweetness and power, and one or two other of her countrymen sojourning
at Paris; and this ceremony over, dinner was announced, and she bade
Graham offer his arm to Mademoiselle Cicogna.

"Have you ever visited the United States, Mademoiselle?" asked Vane, as
they seated themselves at the table.

"No."

"It is a voyage you are sure to make soon."

"Why so?"

"Because report says you will create a great sensation at the very
commencement of your career; and the New World is ever eager to welcome
each celebrity that is achieved in the Old,--more especially that which
belongs to your enchanting art."

"True, sir," said an American senator, solemnly striking into the
conversation; "we are an appreciative people; and if that lady be as
fine a singer as I am told, she might command any amount of dollars."

Isaura coloured, and turning to Graham, asked him in a low voice if he
were fond of music.

"I ought of course to say 'yes,'" answered Graham, in the same tone;
"but I doubt if that 'yes' would be an honest one. In some moods,
music--if a kind of music I like--affects me very deeply; in other
moods, not at all. And I cannot bear much at a time. A concert wearies
me shamefully; even an opera always seems to me a great deal too long.
But I ought to add that I am no judge of music; that music was never
admitted into my education; and, between ourselves, I doubt if there be
one Englishman in five hundred who would care for opera or concert if it
were not the fashion to say he did. Does my frankness revolt you?"

"On the contrary, I sometimes doubt, especially of late, if I am fond of
music myself."

"Signorina,--pardon me,--it is impossible that you should not be. Genius
can never be untrue to itself, and must love that in which it
excels, that by which it communicates joy, and," he added, with a
half-suppressed sigh, "attains to glory."

"Genius is a divine word, and not to be applied to a singer," said
Isaura, with a humility in which there was an earnest sadness.

Graham was touched and startled; but before he could answer, the
American Minister appealed to him across the table, asking if he had
quoted accurately a passage in a speech by Graham's distinguished
father, in regard to the share which England ought to take in the
political affairs of Europe.

The conversation now became general, very political and very serious.
Graham was drawn into it, and grew animated and eloquent.

Isaura listened to him with admiration. She was struck by what seemed to
her a nobleness of sentiment which elevated his theme above the level
of commonplace polemics. She was pleased to notice, in the attentive
silence of his intelligent listeners, that they shared the effect
produced on herself. In fact, Graham Vane was a born orator, and his
studies had been those of a political thinker. In common talk he was
but the accomplished man of the world, easy and frank and genial, with
a touch of good-natured sarcasm; but when the subject started drew
him upward to those heights in which politics become the science
of humanity, he seemed a changed being. His cheek glowed, his eye
brightened, his voice mellowed into richer tones, his language be
came unconsciously adorned. In such moments there might scarcely be
an audience, even differing from him in opinion, which would not have
acknowledged his spell.

When the party adjourned to the salon, Isaura said softly to Graham, "I
understand why you did not cultivate music; and I think, too, that I can
now understand what effects the human voice can produce on human minds
without recurring to the art of song."

"Ah," said Graham, with a pleased smile, "do not make me ashamed of my
former rudeness by the revenge of compliment; and, above all, do not
disparage your own art by supposing that any prose effect of voice in
its utterance of mind can interpret that which music alone can express,
even to listeners so uncultured as myself. Am I not told truly by
musical composers, when I ask them to explain in words what they say
in their music, that such explanation is impossible, that music has a
language of its own untranslatable by words?"

"Yes," said Isaura, with thoughtful brow but brightening eyes, "you are
told truly. It was only the other day that I was pondering over that
truth."

"But what recesses of mind, of heart, of soul, this untranslatable
language penetrates and brightens up! How incomplete the grand nature of
man--though man the grandest--would be, if you struck out of his reason
the comprehension of poetry, music, and religion! In each are reached
and are sounded deeps in his reason otherwise concealed from himself.
History, knowledge, science, stop at the point in which mystery begins.
There they meet with the world of shadow. Not an inch of that world can
they penetrate without the aid of poetry and religion, two necessities
of intellectual man much more nearly allied than the votaries of the
practical and the positive suppose. To the aid and elevation of both
those necessities comes in music, and there has never existed a religion
in the world which has not demanded music as its ally. If, as I said
frankly, it is only in certain moods of my mind that I enjoy music, it
is only because in certain moods of my mind I am capable of quitting
the guidance of prosaic reason for the world of shadow; that I am so
susceptible as at every hour, were my nature perfect, I should be to the
mysterious influences of poetry and religion. Do you understand what I
wish to express?"

"Yes, I do, and clearly."

"Then, Signorina, you are forbidden to undervalue the gift of song. You
must feel its power over the heart, when you enter the opera-house; over
the soul, when you kneel in a cathedral."

"Oh," cried Isaura, with enthusiasm, a rich glow mantling over her
lovely face, "how I thank you! Is it you who say you do not love music?
How much better you understand it than I did till this moment!"

Here Mrs. Morley, joined by the American poet, came to the corner in
which the Englishman and the singer had niched themselves. The poet
began to talk, the other guests gathered round, and every one listened
reverentially till the party broke up. Colonel Morley handed Isaura to
her carriage; the she-mountebank again fell to the lot of Graham.

"Signor," said she, as he respectfully placed her shawl round her
scarlet-and-gilt jacket, "are we so far from Paris that you cannot spare
the time to call? My child does not sing in public, but at home you can
hear her. It is not every woman's voice that is sweetest at home."

Graham bowed, and said he would call on the morrow. Isaura mused in
silent delight over the words which had so extolled the art of the
singer. Alas, poor child! she could not guess that in those words,
reconciling her to the profession of the stage, the speaker was pleading
against his own heart.

There was in Graham's nature, as I think it commonly is in that of
most true orators, a wonderful degree of intellectual conscience which
impelled him to acknowledge the benignant influences of song, and to
set before the young singer the noblest incentives to the profession
to which he deemed her assuredly destined; but in so doing he must have
felt that he was widening the gulf between her life and his own. Perhaps
he wished to widen it in proportion as he dreaded to listen to any voice
in his heart which asked if the gulf might not be overleapt.




CHAPTER II.

ON the morrow Graham called at the villa at A------. The two ladies
received him in Isaura's chosen sitting-room.

Somehow or other, conversation at first languished. Graham was reserved
and distant, Isaura shy and embarrassed. The Venosta had the frais of
making talk to herself. Probably at another time Graham would have been
amused and interested in the observation of a character new to him,
and thoroughly southern,--lovable not more from its naive simplicity of
kindliness than from various little foibles and vanities, all of which
were harmless, and some of them endearing as those of a child whom it is
easy to make happy, and whom it seems so cruel to pain; and with all the
Venosta's deviations from the polished and tranquil good taste of the
beau monde, she had that indescribable grace which rarely deserts a
Florentine, so that you might call her odd but not vulgar; while, though
uneducated, except in the way of her old profession, and never having
troubled herself to read anything but a libretto and the pious books
commended to her by her confessor, the artless babble of her talk
every now and then flashed out with a quaint humour, lighting up terse
fragments of the old Italian wisdom which had mysteriously embedded
themselves in the groundwork of her mind.

But Graham was not at this time disposed to judge the poor Venosta
kindly or fairly. Isaura had taken high rank in his thoughts. He felt an
impatient resentment mingled with anxiety and compassionate tenderness
at a companionship which seemed to him derogatory to the position he
would have assigned to a creature so gifted, and unsafe as a guide
amidst the perils and trials to which the youth, the beauty, and
the destined profession of Isaura were exposed. Like most
Englishmen--especially Englishmen wise in the knowledge of life--he
held in fastidious regard the proprieties and conventions by which
the dignity of woman is fenced round; and of those proprieties and
conventions the Venosta naturally appeared to him a very unsatisfactory
guardian and representative.

Happily unconscious of these hostile prepossessions, the elder Signora
chatted on very gayly to the visitor. She was in excellent spirits;
people had been very civil to her both at Colonel Morley's and M.
Louvier's. The American Minister had praised the scarlet jacket. She was
convinced she had made a sensation two nights running. When the amour
propre is pleased, the tongue is freed.

The Venosta ran on in praise of Paris and the Parisians; of Louvier and
his soiree and the pistachio ice; of the Americans, and a certain creme
de maraschino which she hoped the Signor Inglese had not failed to
taste,--the creme de maraschino led her thoughts back to Italy. Then she
grew mournful. How she missed the native beau ciel! Paris was pleasant,
but how absurd to call it "le Paradis des Femmes,"--as if les Femmes
could find Paradise in a brouillard!

"But," she exclaimed, with vivacity of voice and gesticulation, "the
Signor does not come to hear the parrot talk; he is engaged to come that
he may hear the nightingale sing. A drop of honey attracts the fly more
than a bottle of vinegar."

Graham could not help smiling at this adage. "I submit," said he, "to
your comparison as regards myself; but certainly anything less like a
bottle of vinegar than your amiable conversation I cannot well conceive.
However, the metaphor apart, I scarcely know how I dare ask Mademoiselle
to sing after the confession I made to her last night."

"What confession?" asked the Venosta.

"That I know nothing of music and doubt if I can honestly say that I am
fond of it."

"Not fond of music! Impossible! You slander yourself. He who loves not
music would have a dull time of it in heaven. But you are English, and
perhaps have only heard the music of your own country. Bad, very bad--a
heretic's music! Now listen."

Seating herself at the piano, she began an air from the "Lucia," crying
out to Isaura to come and sing to her accompaniment.

"Do you really wish it?" asked Isaura of Graham, fixing on him
questioning, timid eyes.

"I cannot say how much I wish to hear you."

Isaura moved to the instrument, and Graham stood behind her. Perhaps he
felt that he should judge more impartially of her voice if not subjected
to the charm of her face.

But the first note of the voice held him spell-bound. In itself the
organ was of the rarest order, mellow and rich, but so soft that its
power was lost in its sweetness, and so exquisitely fresh in every note.

But the singer's charm was less in voice than in feeling; she conveyed
to the listener so much more than was said by the words, or even
implied by the music. Her song in this caught the art of the painter who
impresses the mind with the consciousness of a something which the eye
cannot detect on the canvas.

She seemed to breathe out from the depths of her heart the intense
pathos of the original romance, so far exceeding that of the opera,-the
human tenderness, the mystic terror of a tragic love-tale more solemn in
its sweetness than that of Verona.

When her voice died away no applause came,--not even a murmur. Isaura
bashfully turned round to steal a glance at her silent listener,
and beheld moistened eyes and quivering lips. At that moment she was
reconciled to her art. Graham rose abruptly and walked to the window.

"Do you doubt now if you are fond of music?" cried the Venosta.

"This is more than music," answered Graham, still with averted face.
Then, after a short pause, he approached Isaura, and said, with a
melancholy half-smile,--

"I do not think, Mademoiselle, that I could dare to hear you often; it
would take me too far from the hard real world: and he who would not be
left behindhand on the road that he must journey cannot indulge frequent
excursions into fairyland."

"Yet," said Isaura, in a tone yet sadder, "I was told in my childhood,
by one whose genius gives authority to her words, that beside the real
world lies the ideal. The real world then seemed rough to me. 'Escape,'
said my counsellor, 'is granted from that stony thoroughfare into the
fields beyond its formal hedgerows. The ideal world has its sorrows,
but it never admits despair.' That counsel then, methought, decided my
choice of life. I know not now if it has done so."

"Fate," answered Graham, slowly and thoughtfully, "Fate, which is not
the ruler but the servant of Providence, decides our choice of life, and
rarely from outward circumstances. Usually the motive power is within.
We apply the word 'genius' to the minds of the gifted few; but in all
of us there is a genius that is inborn, a pervading something which
distinguishes our very identity, and dictates to the conscience that
which we are best fitted to do and to be. In so dictating it compels our
choice of life; or if we resist the dictate, we find at the close that
we have gone astray. My choice of life thus compelled is on the stony
thoroughfares, yours in the green fields."

As he thus said, his face became clouded and mournful. The Venosta,
quickly tired of a conversation in which she had no part, and having
various little household matters to attend to, had during this dialogue
slipped unobserved from the room; yet neither Isaura nor Graham felt
the sudden consciousness that they were alone which belongs to lovers.
"Why," asked Isaura, with that magic smile reflected in countless
dimples which, even when her words were those of a man's reasoning, made
them seem gentle with a woman's sentiment,--"why must your road through
the world be so exclusively the stony one? It is not from necessity,
it can not be from taste; and whatever definition you give to genius,
surely it is not your own inborn genius that dictates to you a constant
exclusive adherence to the commonplace of life."

"Ah, Mademoiselle, do not misrepresent me. I did not say that I could
not sometimes quit the real world for fairyland,--I said that I could
not do so often. My vocation is not that of a poet or artist."

"It is that of an orator, I know," said Isaura, kindling; "so they tell
me, and I believe them. But is not the orator somewhat akin to the poet?
Is not oratory an art?"

"Let us dismiss the word orator; as applied to English public life, it
is a very deceptive expression. The Englishman who wishes to influence
his countrymen by force of words spoken must mix with them in their
beaten thoroughfares; must make himself master of their practical views
and interests; must be conversant with their prosaic occupations and
business; must understand how to adjust their loftiest aspirations
to their material welfare; must avoid as the fault most dangerous to
himself and to others that kind of eloquence which is called oratory in
France, and which has helped to make the French the worst politicians
in Europe. Alas! Mademoiselle, I fear that an English statesman would
appear to you a very dull orator."

"I see that I spoke foolishly,--yes, you show me that the world of the
statesman lies apart from that of the artist. Yet--"

"Yet what?"

"May not the ambition of both be the same?"

"How so?"

"To refine the rude, to exalt the mean; to identify their own fame with
some new beauty, some new glory, added to the treasure-house of all."

Graham bowed his head reverently, and then raised it with the flush of
enthusiasm on his cheek and brow.

"Oh, Mademoiselle," he exclaimed, "what a sure guide and what a noble
inspirer to a true Englishman's ambition nature has fitted you to be,
were it not--" He paused abruptly.

This outburst took Isaura utterly by surprise. She had been accustomed
to the language of compliment till it had begun to pall, but a
compliment of this kind was the first that had ever reached her ear. She
had no words in answer to it; involuntarily she placed her hand on her
heart as if to still its beatings. But the unfinished exclamation, "Were
it not," troubled her more than the preceding words had flattered, and
mechanically she murmured, "Were it not--what?"

"Oh," answered Graham, affecting a tone of gayety, "I felt too ashamed
of my selfishness as man to finish my sentence."

"Do so, or I shall fancy you refrained lest you might wound me as
woman."

"Not so; on the contrary, had I gone on it would have been to say that
a woman of your genius, and more especially of such mastery in the
most popular and fascinating of all arts, could not be contented if she
inspired nobler thoughts in a single breast,--she must belong to the
public, or rather the public must belong to her; it is but a corner of
her heart that an individual can occupy, and even that individual must
merge his existence in hers, must be contented to reflect a ray of the
light she sheds on admiring thousands. Who could dare to say to you,
'Renounce your career; confine your genius, your art, to the petty
circle of home'? To an actress, a singer, with whose fame the world
rings, home would be a prison. Pardon me, pardon--"

Isaura had turned away her face to hide tears that would force their
way; but she held out her hand to him with a childlike frankness,
and said softly, "I am not offended." Graham did not trust himself to
continue the same strain of conversation. Breaking into a new subject,
he said, after a constrained pause, "Will you think it very impertinent
in so new an acquaintance, if I ask how it is that you, an Italian, know
our language as a native; and is it by Italian teachers that you have
been trained to think and to feel?"

"Mr. Selby, my second father, was an Englishman, and did not speak any
other language with comfort to himself. He was very fond of me; and
had he been really my father I could not have loved him more. We were
constant companions till--till I lost him."

"And no mother left to console you!"

Isaura shook her head mournfully, and the Venosta here re-entered.
Graham felt conscious that he had already stayed too long, and took
leave.

They knew that they were to meet that evening at the Savarins'.

To Graham that thought was not one of unmixed pleasure; the more he knew
of Isaura, the more he felt self-reproach that he had allowed himself to
know her at all.

But after he had left, Isaura sang low to herself the song which had
so affected her listener; then she fell into abstracted revery, but she
felt a strange and new sort of happiness. In dressing for M. Savarin's
dinner, and twining the classic ivy wreath in her dark locks, her
Italian servant exclaimed, "How beautiful the Signorina looks to-night!"




CHAPTER III.

M. Savarin was one of the most brilliant of that galaxy of literary men
which shed lustre on the reign of Louis Philippe.

His was an intellect peculiarly French in its lightness and grace.
Neither England nor Germany nor America has produced any resemblance to
it. Ireland has, in Thomas Moore; but then in Irish genius there is so
much that is French.

M. Savarin was free from the ostentatious extravagance which had come
into vogue with the Empire. His house and establishment were modestly
maintained within the limit of an income chiefly, perhaps entirely,
derived from literary profits.

Though he gave frequent dinners, it was but to few at a time, and
without show or pretence. Yet the dinners, though simple, were perfect
of their kind; and the host so contrived to infuse his own playful
gayety into the temper of his guests, that the feasts at his house were
considered the pleasantest at Paris. On this occasion the party extended
to ten, the largest number his table admitted.

All the French guests belonged to the Liberal party, though in changing
tints of the tricolor. Place aux dames! first to be named were the
Countess de Craon and Madame Vertot, both without husbands. The Countess
had buried the Count, Madame Vertot had separated from Monsieur. The
Countess was very handsome, but she was sixty; Madame Vertot was twenty
years younger, but she was very plain. She had quarrelled with the
distinguished author for whose sake she had separated from Monsieur, and
no man had since presumed to think that he could console a lady so plain
for the loss of an author so distinguished.

Both these ladies were very clever. The Countess had written lyrical
poems entitled "Cries of Liberty," and a drama of which Danton was the
hero, and the moral too revolutionary for admission to the stage; but at
heart the Countess was not at all a revolutionist,--the last person in
the world to do or desire anything that could bring a washerwoman an
inch nearer to a countess. She was one of those persons who play with
fire in order to appear enlightened.

Madame Vertot was of severer mould. She had knelt at the feet of M.
Thiers, and went into the historico-political line. She had written a
remarkable book upon the modern Carthage (meaning England), and more
recently a work that had excited much attention upon the Balance of
Power, in which she proved it to be the interest of civilization and the
necessity of Europe that Belgium should be added to France, and Prussia
circumscribed to the bounds of its original margraviate. She showed how
easily these two objects could have been effected by a constitutional
monarch instead of an egotistical Emperor. Madame Vertot was a decided
Orleanist.

Both these ladies condescended to put aside authorship in general
society. Next amongst our guests let me place the Count de Passy and
Madame son espouse. The Count was seventy-one, and, it is needless
to add, a type of Frenchman rapidly vanishing, and not likely to find
itself renewed. How shall I describe him so as to make my English reader
understand? Let me try by analogy. Suppose a man of great birth and
fortune, who in his youth had been an enthusiastic friend of Lord Byron
and a jocund companion of George IV.; who had in him an immense degree
of lofty romantic sentiment with an equal degree of well-bred worldly
cynicism, but who, on account of that admixture, which is so rare, kept
a high rank in either of the two societies into which, speaking broadly,
civilized life divides itself,--the romantic and the cynical. The
Count de Passy had been the most ardent among the young disciples of
Chateaubriand, the most brilliant among the young courtiers of Charles
X. Need I add that he had been a terrible lady-killer?

But in spite of his admiration of Chateaubriand and his allegiance to
Charles X., the Count had been always true to those caprices of the
French noblesse from which he descended,--caprices which destroyed them
in the old Revolution; caprices belonging to the splendid ignorance of
their nation in general and their order in particular. Speaking without
regard to partial exceptions, the French gentilhomme is essentially a
Parisian; a Parisian is essentially impressionable to the impulse or
fashion of the moment. Is it a la mode for the moment to be Liberal or
anti-Liberal? Parisians embrace and kiss each other, and swear through
life and death to adhere forever to the mode of the moment. The
Three Days were the mode of the moment,--the Count de Passy became an
enthusiastic Orleanist. Louis Philippe was very gracious to him. He
was decorated; he was named prefet of his department; he was created
senator; he was about to be sent Minister to a German Court when Louis
Philippe fell. The Republic was proclaimed. The Count caught the popular
contagion, and after exchanging tears and kisses with patriots whom a
week before he had called canaille, he swore eternal fidelity to the
Republic. The fashion of the moment suddenly became Napoleonic, and with
the coup d'etat the Republic was metamorphosed into an Empire. The Count
wept on the bosoms of all the Vieilles Moustaches he could find, and
rejoiced that the sun of Austerlitz had re-arisen. But after the affair
of Mexico the sun of Austerlitz waxed very sickly. Imperialism was
fast going out of fashion. The Count transferred his affection to Jules
Favre, and joined the ranks of the advanced Liberals. During all these
political changes, the Count had remained very much the same man in
private life; agreeable, good-natured, witty, and, above all, a devotee
of the fair sex. When he had reached the age of sixty-eight he was still
fort bel homme, unmarried, with a grand presence and charming manner. At
that age he said, "Je me range," and married a young lady of eighteen.
She adored her husband, and was wildly jealous of him; while the Count
did not seem at all jealous of her, and submitted to her adoration with
a gentle shrug of the shoulders.

The three other guests who, with Graham and the two Italian ladies,
made up the complement of ten, were the German Count von Rudesheim,
a celebrated French physician named Bacourt, and a young author whom
Savarin had admitted into his clique and declared to be of rare promise.
This author, whose real name was Gustave Rameau, but who, to prove, I
suppose, the sincerity of that scorn for ancestry which he professed,
published his verses under the patrician designation of Alphonse de
Valcour, was about twenty-four, and might have passed at the first
glance for younger; but, looking at him closely, the signs of old age
were already stamped on his visage.

He was undersized, and of a feeble slender frame. In the eyes of women
and artists the defects of his frame were redeemed by the extraordinary
beauty of the face. His black hair, carefully parted in the centre, and
worn long and flowing, contrasted the whiteness of a high though narrow
forehead, and the delicate pallor of his cheeks. His feature, were very
regular, his eyes singularly bright; but the expression of the face
spoke of fatigue and exhaustion; the silky locks were already thin,
and interspersed with threads of silver; the bright eyes shone out from
sunken orbits; the lines round the mouth were marked as they are in the
middle age of one who has lived too fast.

It was a countenance that might have excited a compassionate and
tender interest but for something arrogant and supercilious in the
expression,-something that demanded not tender pity but enthusiastic
admiration. Yet that expression was displeasing rather to men than
to women; and one could well conceive that, among the latter, the
enthusiastic admiration it challenged would be largely conceded.

The conversation at dinner was in complete contrast to that at the
Americans' the day before. There the talk, though animated, had been
chiefly earnest and serious; here it was all touch and go, sally and
repartee. The subjects were the light on lots and lively anecdotes of
the day, not free from literature and politics, but both treated as
matters of persiflage, hovered round with a jest and quitted with an
epigram. The two French lady authors, the Count de Passy, the physician,
and the host far outspoke all the other guests. Now and then, however,
the German Count struck in with an ironical remark condensing a great
deal of grave wisdom, and the young author with ruder and more biting
sarcasm. If the sarcasm told, he showed his triumph by a low-pitched
laugh; if it failed, he evinced his displeasure by a contemptuous sneer
or a grim scowl.

Isaura and Graham were not seated near each other, and were for the most
part contented to be listeners.

On adjourning to the salon after dinner, Graham, however, was
approaching the chair in which Isaura had placed herself, when the young
author, forestalling him, dropped into the seat next to her, and began a
conversation in a voice so low that it might have passed for a whisper.
The Englishman drew back and observed them. He soon perceived, with
a pang of jealousy not unmingled with scorn, that the author's talk
appeared to interest Isaura. She listened with evident attention; and
when she spoke in return, though Graham did not hear her words, he could
observe on her expressive countenance an increased gentleness of aspect.

"I hope," said the physician, joining Graham, as most of the other
guests gathered round Savarin, who was in his liveliest vein of anecdote
and wit,--"I hope that the fair Italian will not allow that ink-bottle
imp to persuade her that she has fallen in love with him."

"Do young ladies generally find him so seductive?" asked Graham, with a
forced smile.

"Probably enough. He has the reputation of being very clever and
very wicked, and that is a sort of character which has the serpent's
fascination for the daughters of Eve."

"Is the reputation merited?"

"As to the cleverness, I am not a fair judge. I dislike that sort of
writing which is neither manlike nor womanlike, and in which young
Rameau excels. He has the knack of finding very exaggerated phrases by
which to express commonplace thoughts. He writes verses about love
in words so stormy that you might fancy that Jove was descending upon
Semele; but when you examine his words, as a sober pathologist like
myself is disposed to do, your fear for the peace of households
vanishes,--they are Fox et proeterea nihil; no man really in love would
use them. He writes prose about the wrongs of humanity. You feel for
humanity; you say, 'Grant the wrongs, now for the remedy,'--and you find
nothing but balderdash. Still I am bound to say that both in verse and
prose Gustave Rameau is in unison with a corrupt taste of the day, and
therefore he is coming into vogue. So much as to his writings; as to his
wickedness, you have only to look at him to feel sure that he is not
a hundredth part so wicked as he wishes to seem. In a word, then, M.
Gustave Rameau is a type of that somewhat numerous class among the youth
of Paris, which I call 'the lost Tribe of Absinthe.' There is a set
of men who begin to live full gallop while they are still boys. As
a general rule, they are originally of the sickly frames which can
scarcely even trot, much less gallop without the spur of stimulants, and
no stimulant so fascinates their peculiar nervous system as absinthe.
The number of patients in this set who at the age of thirty are more
worn out than septuagenarians increases so rapidly as to make one dread
to think what will be the next race of Frenchmen. To the predilection
for absinthe young Rameau and the writers of his set add the imitation
of Heine, after, indeed, the manner of caricaturists, who effect a
likeness striking in proportion as it is ugly. It is not easy to imitate
the pathos and the wit of Heine; but it is easy to imitate his defiance
of the Deity, his mockery of right and wrong, his relentless war on that
heroic standard of thought and action which the writers who exalt their
nation intuitively preserve. Rameau cannot be a Heine, but he can be to
Heine what a misshapen snarling dwarf is to a mangled blaspheming Titan.
Yet he interests the women in general, and he evidently interests the
fair Signorina in especial."

Just as Bacourt finished that last sentence, Isaura lifted the head
which had hitherto bent in an earnest listening attitude that seemed to
justify the Doctor's remarks, and looked round. Her eyes met Graham's
with the fearless candour which made half the charm of their bright yet
soft intelligence; but she dropped them suddenly with a half-start and
a change of colour, for the expression of Graham's face was unlike that
which she had hitherto seen on it,--it was hard, stern, and somewhat
disdainful. A minute or so afterwards she rose, and in passing across
the room towards the group round the host, paused at a table covered
with books and prints near to which Graham was standing alone. The
Doctor had departed in company with the German Count.

Isaura took up one of the prints.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, "Sorrento, my Sorrento. Have you ever visited
Sorrento, Mr. Vane?"

Her question and her movement were evidently in conciliation. Was the
conciliation prompted by coquetry, or by a sentiment more innocent and
artless?

Graham doubted, and replied coldly, as he bent over the print,--

"I once stayed there a few days, but my recollection of it is not
sufficiently lively to enable me to recognize its features in this
design."

"That is the house, at least so they say, of Tasso's father; of course
you visited that?"

"Yes, it was a hotel in my time; I lodged there."

"And I too. There I first read 'The Gerusalemine.'" The last words were
said in Italian, with a low measured tone, inwardly and dreamily.

A somewhat sharp and incisive voice speaking in French here struck
in and prevented Graham's rejoinder: "Quel joli dessin! What is it,
Mademoiselle?"

Graham recoiled; the speaker was Gustave Rameau, who had, unobserved,
first watched Isaura, then rejoined her side.

"A view of Sorrento, Monsieur, but it does not do justice to the place.
I was pointing out the house which belonged to Tasso's father."

"Tasso! Hein! and which is the fair Eleonora's?"

"Monsieur," answered Isaura, rather startled at that question, from a
professed homme de lettres, "Eleonora did not live at Sorrento."

"Tant pis pour Sorrente," said the homme de lettres, carelessly. "No one
would care for Tasso if it were not for Eleonora."

"I should rather have thought," said Graham, "that no one would have
cared for Eleonora if it were not for Tasso."

Rameau glanced at the Englishman superciliously. "Pardon, Monsieur, in
every age a love-story keeps its interest; but who cares nowadays for le
clinquant du Tasse?"

"Le clinquant du Tasse!" exclaimed Isaura, indignantly.

"The expression is Boileau's, Mademoiselle, in ridicule of the 'Sot de
qualite,' who prefers--

        "'Le clinquant du Tasse a tout l'or de Virgile.'

"But for my part I have as little faith in the last as the first."

"I do not know Latin, and have therefore not read Virgil," said Isaura.

"Possibly," remarked Graham, "Monsieur does not know Italian, and has
therefore not read Tasso."

"If that be meant in sarcasm," retorted Rameau, "I construe it as a
compliment. A Frenchman who is contented to study the masterpieces of
modern literature need learn no language and read no authors but his
own."

Isaura laughed her pleasant silvery laugh. "I should admire the
frankness of that boast, Monsieur, if in our talk just now you had not
spoken as contemptuously of what we are accustomed to consider French
masterpieces as you have done of Virgil and Tasso."

"Ah, Mademoiselle! it is not my fault if you have had teachers of
taste so rococo as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted
tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people,
one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses
of the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state,
denounces the evils of superstition, kingcraft, and priestcraft, is
worth a library of the rubbish which pedagogues call 'the classics.' We
agree, at least, in one thing, Mademoiselle; we both do homage to the
genius of your friend Madame de Grantmesnil."

"Your friend, Signorina!" cried Graham, incredulously; "is Madame de
Grantmesnil your friend?"

"The dearest I have in the world."

Graham's face darkened; he turned away in silence, and in another minute
vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of
jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. "Her dearest
friend Madame de Grantmesnil!" he muttered.

A word now on Isaura's chief correspondent. Madame de Grantmesnil was
a woman of noble birth and ample fortune. She had separated from her
husband in the second year after marriage. She was a singularly eloquent
writer, surpassed among contemporaries of her sex in popularity and
renown only by Georges Sand.

At least as fearless as that great novelist in the frank exposition
of her views, she had commenced her career in letters by a work of
astonishing power and pathos, directed against the institution of
marriage as regulated in Roman Catholic communities. I do not know that
it said more on this delicate subject than the English Milton has said;
but then Milton did not write for a Roman Catholic community, nor adopt
a style likely to captivate the working classes. Madame de Grantmesnil's
first book was deemed an attack on the religion of the country, and
captivated those among the working classes who had already abjured that
religion. This work was followed up by others more or less in defiance
of "received opinions,"--some with political, some with social
revolutionary aim and tendency, but always with a singular purity of
style. Search all her books, and however you might revolt from her
doctrine, you could not find a hazardous expression. The novels of
English young ladies are naughty in comparison. Of late years, whatever
might be hard or audacious in her political or social doctrines softened
itself into charm amid the golden haze of romance. Her writings had
grown more and more purely artistic,--poetizing what is good and
beautiful in the realities of life rather than creating a false ideal
out of what is vicious and deformed. Such a woman, separated young
from her husband, could not enunciate such opinions and lead a life so
independent and uncontrolled as Madame de Grantmesnil had done, without
scandal, without calumny. Nothing, however, in her actual life had ever
been so proved against her as to lower the high position she occupied in
right of birth, fortune, renown. Wherever she went she was fetee, as
in England foreign princes, and in America foreign authors, are fetes.
Those who knew her well concurred in praise of her lofty, generous,
lovable qualities. Madame de Grantmesnil had known Mr. Selby; and when,
at his death, Isaura, in the innocent age between childhood and youth,
had been left the most sorrowful and most lonely creature on the face of
the earth, this famous woman, worshipped by the rich for her intellect,
adored by the poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan's friendless
side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for
the first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim
self-consciousness of a soul between sleep and waking.

But, my dear Englishman, put yourself in Graham's place, and suppose
that you were beginning to fall in love with a girl whom for many good
reasons you ought not to marry; suppose that in the same hour in which
you were angrily conscious of jealousy on account of a man whom it
wounds your self-esteem to consider a rival, the girl tells you that
her dearest friend is a woman who is famed for her hostility to the
institution of marriage!




CHAPTER IV.

On the same day in which Graham dined with the Savarins, M. Louvier
assembled round his table the elite of the young Parisians who
constituted the oligarchy of fashion, to meet whom he had invited his
new friend the Marquis de Rochebriant. Most of them belonged to the
Legitimist party, the noblesse of the faubourg; those who did not,
belonged to no political party at all,--indifferent to the cares of
mortal States as the gods of Epicurus. Foremost among this Jeunesse
doree were Alain's kinsmen, Raoul and Enguerrand de Vandemar. To these
Louvier introduced him with a burly parental bonhomie, as if he were the
head of the family. "I need not bid you, young folks, to make
friends with each other. A Vandemar and a Rochebriant are not made
friends,--they are born friends." So saying he turned to his other
guests.

Almost in an instant Alain felt his constraint melt away in the cordial
warmth with which his cousins greeted him. These young men had a
striking family likeness to each other, and yet in feature, colouring,
and expression, in all save that strange family likeness, they were
contrasts. Raoul was tall, and, though inclined to be slender, with
sufficient breadth of shoulder to indicate no inconsiderable strength of
frame. His hair worn short and his silky beard worn long were dark;
so were his eyes, shaded by curved drooping lashes; his complexion was
pale, but clear and healthful. In repose the expression of his face
was that of a somewhat melancholy indolence, but in speaking it became
singularly sweet, with a smile of the exquisite urbanity which no
artificial politeness can bestow; it must emanate from that native high
breeding which has its source in goodness of heart.

Enguerrand was fair, with curly locks of a golden chestnut. He wore no
beard, only a small mustache rather darker than his hair. His complexion
might in itself be called effeminate, its bloom was so fresh and
delicate; but there was so much of boldness and energy in the play of
his countenance, the hardy outline of the lips, and the open breadth of
the forehead, that "effeminate" was an epithet no one ever assigned to
his aspect. He was somewhat under the middle height, but beautifully
proportioned, carried himself well, and somehow or other did not look
short even by the side of tall men. Altogether he seemed formed to be
a mother's darling, and spoiled by women, yet to hold his own among men
with a strength of will more evident in his look and his bearing than it
was in those of his graver and statelier brother.

Both were considered by their young co-equals models in dress, but
in Raoul there was no sign that care or thought upon dress had been
bestowed; the simplicity of his costume was absolute and severe. On
his plain shirt-front there gleamed not a stud, on his fingers there
sparkled not a ring. Enguerrand, on the contrary, was not without
pretension in his attire; the broderie in his shirt-front seemed woven
by the Queen of the Fairies. His rings of turquoise and opal, his studs
and wrist-buttons of pearl and brilliants, must have cost double the
rental of Rochebriant, but probably they cost him nothing. He was one of
those happy Lotharios to whom Calistas make constant presents. All
about him was so bright that the atmosphere around seemed gayer for his
presence.

In one respect at least the brothers closely resembled each other,--in
that exquisite graciousness of manner for which the genuine French noble
is traditionally renowned; a graciousness that did not desert them even
when they came reluctantly into contact with roturiers or republicans;
but the graciousness became egalite, fraternite, towards one of their
caste and kindred.

"We must do our best to make Paris pleasant to you," said Raoul, still
retaining in his grasp the hand he had taken.

"Vilain cousin," said the livelier Enguerrand, "to have been in Paris
twenty-four hours, and without letting us know."

"Has not your father told you that I called upon him?"

"Our father," answered Raoul, "was not so savage as to conceal that
fact; but he said you were only here on business for a day or two, had
declined his invitation, and would not give your address. Pauvre pere!
we scolded him well for letting you escape from us thus. My mother has
not forgiven him yet; we must present you to her to-morrow. I answer for
your liking her almost as much as she will like you."

Before Alain could answer dinner was announced. Alain's place at dinner
was between his cousins. How pleasant they made themselves! It was
the first time in which Alain had been brought into such familiar
conversation with countrymen of his own rank as well as his own age. His
heart warmed to them. The general talk of the other guests was strange
to his ear; it ran much upon horses and races, upon the opera and the
ballet; it was enlivened with satirical anecdotes of persons whose names
were unknown to the Provincial; not a word was said that showed the
smallest interest in politics or the slightest acquaintance with
literature. The world of these well-born guests seemed one from which
all that concerned the great mass of mankind was excluded, yet the talk
was that which could only be found in a very polished society. In it
there was not much wit, but there was a prevalent vein of gayety, and
the gayety was never violent, the laughter was never loud; the scandals
circulated might imply cynicism the most absolute, but in language the
most refined. The Jockey Club of Paris has its perfume.

Raoul did not mix in the general conversation; he devoted himself
pointedly to the amusement of his cousin, explaining to him the point
of the anecdotes circulated, or hitting off in terse sentences the
characters of the talkers.

Enguerrand was evidently of temper more vivacious than his brother,
and contributed freely to the current play of light gossip and mirthful
sally.

Louvier, seated between a duke and a Russian prince, said little except
to recommend a wine or an entree, but kept his eye constantly on the
Vandemars and Alain.

Immediately after coffee the guests departed. Before they did so,
however, Raoul introduced his cousin to those of the party most
distinguished by hereditary rank or social position. With these the name
of Rochebriant was too historically famous not to insure respect of its
owner; they welcomed him among them as if he were their brother.

The French duke claimed him as a connection by an alliance in the
fourteenth century; the Russian prince had known the late Marquis, and
trusted that the son would allow him to improve into friendship the
acquaintance he had formed with the father.

Those ceremonials over, Raoul linked his arm in Alain's and said: "I am
not going to release you so soon after we have caught you. You must
come with me to a house in which I at least spend an hour or two every
evening. I am at home there. Bah! I take no refusal. Do not suppose
I carry you off to Bohemia,--a country which, I am sorry to say,
Enguerrand now and then visits, but which is to me as unknown as the
mountains of the moon. The house I speak of is comme il faut to the
utmost. It is that of the Contessa di Rimini,--a charming Italian by
marriage, but by birth and in character on ne peut plus Francaise. My
mother adores her."

That dinner at M. Louvier's had already effected a great change in the
mood and temper of Alain de Rochebriant; he felt, as if by magic, the
sense of youth, of rank, of station, which had been so suddenly checked
and stifled, warmed to life within his veins. He should have deemed
himself a boor had he refused the invitation so frankly tendered.

But on reaching the coupe which the brothers kept in common, and seeing
it only held two, he drew back.

"Nay, enter, mon cher," said Raoul, divining the cause of his
hesitation; "Enguerrand has gone on to his club."




CHAPTER V.

"Tell me," said Raoul, when they were in the carriage, "how you came to
know M. Louvier."

"He is my chief mortgagee."

"H'm! that explains it. But you might be in worse hands; the man has a
character for liberality."

"Did your father mention to you my circumstances, and the reason that
brings me to Paris?"

"Since you put the question point-blank, my dear cousin, he did."

"He told you how poor I am, and how keen must be my lifelong struggle to
keep Rochebriant as the home of my race?"

"He told us all that could make us still more respect the Marquis de
Rochebriant, and still more eagerly long to know our cousin and the
head of our house," answered Raoul, with a certain nobleness of tone and
manner.

Alain pressed his kinsman's hand with grateful emotion. "Yet," he said
falteringly, "your father agreed with me that my circumstances would not
allow me to--"

"Bah!" interrupted Raoul, with a gentle laugh; "my father is a very
clever man, doubtless, but he knows only the world of his own day,
nothing of the world of ours. I and Enguerrand will call on you
to-morrow, to take you to my mother, and before doing so, to consult as
to affairs in general. On this last matter Enguerrand is an oracle. Here
we are at the Contessa's."




CHAPTER VI.

The Contessa di Rimini received her visitors in a boudoir furnished with
much apparent simplicity, but a simplicity by no means inexpensive.
The draperies were but of chintz, and the walls covered with the same
material,--a lively pattern, in which the prevalents were rose-colour
and white; but the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the china stored in the
cabinets or arranged on the shelves, the small knickknacks scattered on
the tables, were costly rarities of art.

The Contessa herself was a woman who had somewhat passed her thirtieth
year,--not strikingly handsome, but exquisitely pretty. "There is," said
a great French writer, "only one way in which a woman can be handsome,
but a hundred thousand ways in which she can be pretty;" and it would
be impossible to reckon up the number of ways in which Adeline di Rimini
carried off the prize in prettiness.

Yet it would be unjust to the personal attractions of the Contessa
to class them all under the word "prettiness." When regarded more
attentively, there was an expression in her countenance that might
almost be called divine, it spoke so unmistakably of a sweet nature and
an untroubled soul. An English poet once described her by repeating the
old lines,

     "Her face is like the milky way I' the sky,
     --A meeting of gentle lights without a name."

She was not alone; an elderly lady sat on an armchair by the fire,
engaged in knitting; and a man, also elderly, and whose dress proclaimed
him an ecclesiastic, sat at the opposite corner, with a large Angora cat
on his lap.

"I present to you, Madame," said Raoul, "my new-found cousin, the
seventeenth Marquis de Rochebriant, whom I am proud to consider on the
male side the head of our house, representing its eldest branch. Welcome
him for my sake,--in future he will be welcome for his own."

The Contessa replied very graciously to this introduction, and made room
for Alain on the divan from which she had risen.

The old lady looked up from her knitting; the ecclesiastic removed
the cat from his lap. Said the old lady, "I announce myself to M. le
Marquis. I knew his mother well enough to be invited to his christening;
otherwise I have no pretension to the acquaintance of a cavalier si
beau, being old, rather deaf, very stupid, exceedingly poor--"

"And," interrupted Raoul, "the woman in all Paris the most adored for
bonte, and consulted for savoir vivre by the young cavaliers whom she
deigns to receive. Alain, I present you to Madame de Maury, the widow
of a distinguished author and academician, and the daughter of the brave
Henri de Gerval, who fought for the good cause in La Vendee. I present
you also to the Abbe Vertpre, who has passed his life in the vain
endeavour to make other men as good as himself."

"Base flatterer!" said the Abbe, pinching Raoul's ear with one hand,
while he extended the other to Alain. "Do not let your cousin frighten
you from knowing me, Monsieur le Marquis; when he was my pupil, he so
convinced me of the incorrigibility of perverse human nature, that I now
chiefly address myself to the moral improvement of the brute creation.
Ask the Contessa if I have not achieved a beau succes with her Angora
cat. Three months ago that creature had the two worst propensities of
man,--he was at once savage and mean; he bit, he stole. Does he ever
bite now? No. Does he ever steal? No. Why? I have awakened in that cat
the dormant conscience, and that done, the conscience regulates his
actions; once made aware of the difference between wrong and right, the
cat maintains it unswervingly, as if it were a law of nature. But if,
with prodigious labour, one does awaken conscience in a human sinner, it
has no steady effect on his conduct,--he continues to sin all the
same. Mankind at Paris, Monsieur le Marquis, is divided between two
classes,-one bites and the other steals. Shun both; devote yourself to
cats."

The Abbe delivered this oration with a gravity of mien and tone which
made it difficult to guess whether he spoke in sport or in earnest, in
simple playfulness or with latent sarcasm.

But on the brow and in the eye of the priest there was a general
expression of quiet benevolence, which made Alain incline to the belief
that he was only speaking as a pleasant humourist; and the Marquis
replied gayly,--

"Monsieur L'Abbe, admitting the superior virtue of cats when taught
by so intelligent a preceptor, still the business of human life is not
transacted by cats; and since men must deal with men, permit me, as a
preliminary caution, to inquire in which class I must rank yourself. Do
you bite or do you steal?"

This sally, which showed that the Marquis was already shaking off his
provincial reserve, met with great success. Raoul and the Contessa
laughed merrily; Madame de Maury clapped her hands, and cried "Bien!"

The Abbe replied, with unmoved gravity, "Both. I am a priest; it is my
duty to bite the bad and steal from the good, as you will see, Monsieur
le Marquis, if you will glance at this paper."

Here he handed to Alain a memorial on behalf of an afflicted family who
had been burnt out of their home, and reduced from comparative ease to
absolute want. There was a list appended of some twenty subscribers, the
last being the Contessa, fifty francs, and Madame de Maury, five.

"Allow me, Marquis," said the Abbe, "to steal from you. Bless you
two-fold, mon fils!" (taking the napoleon Alain extended to him) "first
for your charity; secondly, for the effect of its example upon the heart
of your cousin. Raoul de Vandemar, stand and deliver. Bah! what! only
ten francs."

Raoul made a sign to the Abbe, unperceived by the rest, as he answered,
"Abbe, I should excel your expectations of my career if I always
continue worth half as much as my cousin."

Alain felt to the bottom of his heart the delicate tact of his richer
kinsman in giving less than himself, and the Abbe replied, "Niggard,
you are pardoned. Humility is a more difficult virtue to produce than
charity, and in your case an instance of it is so rare that it merits
encouragement."

The "tea equipage" was now served in what at Paris is called the English
fashion; the Contessa presided over it, the guests gathered round the
table, and the evening passed away in the innocent gayety of a domestic
circle. The talk, if not especially intellectual, was at least not
fashionable. Books were not discussed, neither were scandals; yet
somehow or other it was cheery and animated, like that of a happy
family in a country-house. Alain thought still the better of Raoul that,
Parisian though he was, he could appreciate the charm of an evening so
innocently spent.

On taking leave, the Contessa gave Alain a general invitation to drop in
whenever he was not better engaged.

"I except only the opera nights," said she. "My husband has gone to
Milan on his affairs, and during his absence I do not go to parties; the
opera I cannot resist."

Raoul set Alain down at his lodgings. "Au revoir; tomorrow at one
o'clock expect Enguerrand and myself."




CHAPTER VII.

Raul and Enguerrand called on Alain at the hour fixed. "In the first
place," said Raoul, "I must beg you to accept my mother's regrets that
she cannot receive you to-day. She and the Contessa belong to a society
of ladies formed for visiting the poor, and this is their day; but
to-morrow you must dine with us en famille. Now to business. Allow me
to light my cigar while you confide the whole state of affairs to
Enguerrand. Whatever he counsels, I am sure to approve."

Alain, as briefly as he could, stated his circumstances, his mortgages,
and the hopes which his avow had encouraged him to place in the friendly
disposition of M. Louvier. When he had concluded, Enguerrand mused for a
few moments before replying. At last he said, "Will you trust me to call
on Louvier on your behalf? I shall but inquire if he is inclined to
take on himself the other mortgages; and if so, on what terms. Our
relationship gives me the excuse for my interference; and to say
truth, I have had much familiar intercourse with the man. I too am a
speculator, and have often profited by Louvier's advice. You may ask
what can be his object in serving me; he can gain nothing by it. To this
I answer, the key to his good offices is in his character. Audacious
though he be as a speculator, he is wonderfully prudent as a politician.
This belle France of ours is like a stage tumbler; one can never be
sure whether it will stand on its head or its feet. Louvier very wisely
wishes to feel himself safe whatever party comes uppermost. He has no
faith in the duration of the Empire; and as, at all events, the Empire
will not confiscate his millions, he takes no trouble in conciliating
Imperialists. But on the principle which induces certain savages
to worship the devil and neglect the bon Dieu, because the devil is
spiteful and the bon Dieu is too beneficent to injure them, Louvier,
at heart detesting as well as dreading a republic, lays himself out
to secure friends with the Republicans of all classes, and pretends
to espouse their cause; next to them, he is very conciliatory to the
Orleanists; lastly, though he thinks the Legitimists have no chance,
he desires to keep well with the nobles of that party, because they
exercise a considerable influence over that sphere of opinion which
belongs to fashion,--for fashion is never powerless in Paris. Raoul and
myself are no mean authorities in salons and clubs, and a good word from
us is worth having.

"Besides, Louvier himself in his youth set up for a dandy; and that
deposed ruler of dandies, our unfortunate kinsman, Victor de Mauleon,
shed some of his own radiance on the money-lender's son. But when
Victor's star was eclipsed, Louvier ceased to gleam. The dandies cut
him. In his heart he exults that the dandies now throng to his soirees.

"Bref, the millionaire is especially civil to me,--the more so as I know
intimately two or three eminent journalists; and Louvier takes pains to
plant garrisons in the press. I trust I have explained the grounds on
which I may be a better diplomatist to employ than your avoue; and with
your leave I will go to Louvier at once."

"Let him go," said Raoul. "Enguerrand never fails in anything he
undertakes; especially," he added, with a smile half sad, half tender,
"when one wishes to replenish one's purse."

"I too gratefully grant such an ambassador all powers to treat," said
Alain. "I am only ashamed to consign to him a post so much beneath
his genius," and "his birth" he was about to add, but wisely checked
himself. Enguerrand said, shrugging his shoulders, "You can't do me a
greater kindness than by setting my wits at work. I fall a martyr to
ennui when I am not in action;" he said, and was gone.

"It makes me very melancholy at times," said Raoul, flinging away the
end of his cigar, "to think that a man so clever and so energetic as
Enguerrand should be as much excluded from the service of his country as
if he were an Iroquois Indian. He would have made a great diplomatist."

"Alas!" replied Alain, with a sigh, "I begin to doubt whether we
Legitimists are justified in maintaining a useless loyalty to a
sovereign who renders us morally exiles in the land of our birth."

"I have no doubt on the subject," said Raoul. "We are not justified on
the score of policy, but we have no option at present on the score of
honour. We should gain so much for ourselves if we adopted the State
livery and took the State wages that no man would esteem us as patriots;
we should only be despised as apostates. So long as Henry V. lives,
and does not resign his claim, we cannot be active citizens; we must be
mournful lookers-on. But what matters it? We nobles of the old race
are becoming rapidly extinct. Under any form of government likely to be
established in France we are equally doomed. The French people,
aiming at an impossible equality, will never again tolerate a race of
gentilshommes. They cannot prevent, without destroying commerce and
capital altogether, a quick succession of men of the day, who form
nominal aristocracies much more opposed to equality than any hereditary
class of nobles; but they refuse these fleeting substitutes of born
patricians all permanent stake in the country, since whatever estate
they buy must be subdivided at their death my poor Alain, you are making
it the one ambition of your life to preserve to your posterity the home
and lands of your forefathers. How is that possible, even supposing you
could redeem the mortgages? You marry some day; you have children, and
Rochebriant must then be sold to pay for their separate portions. How
this condition of things, while rendering us so ineffective to perform
the normal functions of a noblesse in public life, affects us in private
life, may be easily conceived.

"Condemned to a career of pleasure and frivolity, we can scarcely escape
from the contagion of extravagant luxury which forms the vice of the
time. With grand names to keep up, and small fortunes whereon to keep
them, we readily incur embarrassment and debt. Then neediness conquers
pride. We cannot be great merchants, but we can be small gamblers on the
Bourse, or, thanks to the Credit Mobilier, imitate a cabinet minister,
and keep a shop under another name. Perhaps you have heard that
Enguerrand and I keep a shop. Pray, buy your gloves there. Strange
fate for men whose ancestors fought in the first Crusade--mais que
voulez-vous?"

"I was told of the shop," said Alain; "but the moment I knew you I
disbelieved the story."

"Quite true. Shall I confide to you why we resorted to that means of
finding ourselves in pocket-money? My father gives us rooms in his
hotel; the use of his table, which we do not much profit by; and an
allowance, on which we could not live as young men of our class live at
Paris. Enguerrand had his means of spending pocket-money, I mine; but
it came to the same thing,--the pockets were emptied. We incurred debts.
Two years ago my father straitened himself to pay them, saying, 'The
next time you come to me with debts, however small, you must pay them
yourselves, or you must marry, and leave it to me to find you wives.'
This threat appalled us both. A month afterwards, Enguerrand made a
lucky hit at the Bourse, and proposed to invest the proceeds in a shop.
I resisted as long as I could; but Enguerrand triumphed over me, as he
always does. He found an excellent deputy in a bonne who had nursed
us in childhood, and married a journeyman perfumer who understands the
business. It answers well; we are not in debt, and we have preserved our
freedom."

After these confessions Raoul went away, and Alain fell into a mournful
revery, from which he was roused by a loud ring at his bell. He opened
the door, and beheld M. Louvier. The burly financier was much out
of breath after making so steep an ascent. It was in gasps that he
muttered, "Bon jour; excuse me if I derange you." Then entering and
seating himself on a chair, he took some minutes to recover speech,
rolling his eyes staringly round the meagre, unluxurious room, and then
concentrating their gaze upon its occupier.

"Peste, my dear Marquis!" he said at last, "I hope the next time I visit
you the ascent may be less arduous. One would think you were in training
to ascend the Himalaya."

The haughty noble writhed under this jest, and the spirit inborn in his
order spoke in his answer.

"I am accustomed to dwell on heights, Monsieur Louvier; the castle of
Rochebriant is not on a level with the town." An angry gleam shot
out from the eyes of the millionaire, but there was no other sign of
displeasure in his answer. "Bien dit, mon cher; how you remind me of
your father! Now, give me leave to speak on affairs. I have seen your
cousin Enguerrand de Vandemar. Homme de moyens, though joli garcon.
He proposed that you should call on me. I said 'no' to the cher petit
Enguerrand,--a visit from me was due to you. To cut matters short, M.
Gandrin has allowed me to look into your papers. I was disposed to
serve you from the first; I am still more disposed to serve you now.
I undertake to pay off all your other mortgages, and become sole
mortgagee, and on terms that I have jotted down on this paper, and which
I hope will content you."

He placed a paper in Alain's hand, and took out a box, from which
he extracted a jujube, placed it in his mouth, folded his hands, and
reclined back in his chair, with his eyes half closed, as if exhausted
alike by his ascent and his generosity.

In effect, the terms were unexpectedly liberal. The reduced interest on
the mortgages would leave the Marquis an income of L1,000 a year instead
of L400. Louvier proposed to take on himself the legal cost of transfer,
and to pay to the Marquis 25,000 francs, on the completion of the deed,
as a bonus. The mortgage did not exempt the building-land, as Hebert
desired. In all else it was singularly advantageous, and Alain could
but feel a thrill of grateful delight at an offer by which his stinted
income was raised to comparative affluence.

"Well, Marquis," said Louvier, "what does the castle say to the town?"

"Monsieur Louvier," answered Alain, extending his hand with cordial
eagerness, "accept my sincere apologies for the indiscretion of my
metaphor. Poverty is proverbially sensitive to jests on it. I owe it to
you if I cannot hereafter make that excuse for any words of mine that
may displease you. The terms you propose are most liberal, and I close
with them at once."

"Bon," said Louvier, shaking vehemently the hand offered to him; "I will
take the paper to Gandrin, and instruct him accordingly. And now, may I
attach a condition to the agreement which is not put down on paper?
It may have surprised you perhaps that I should propose a gratuity of
25,000 francs on completion of the contract. It is a droll thing to
do, and not in the ordinary way of business, therefore I must explain.
Marquis, pardon the liberty I take, but you have inspired me with an
interest in your future. With your birth, connections, and figure you
should push your way in the world far and fast. But you can't do so in
a province. You must find your opening at Paris. I wish you to spend a
year in the capital, and live, not extravagantly, like a nouveau riche,
but in a way not unsuited to your rank, and permitting you all the
social advantages that belong to it. These 25,000 francs, in addition
to your improved income, will enable you to gratify my wish in this
respect. Spend the money in Paris; you will want every sou of it in the
course of the year. It will be money well spent. Take my advice, cher
Marquis. Au plaisir."

The financier bowed himself out. The young Marquis forgot all the
mournful reflections with which Raoul's conversation had inspired him.
He gave a new touch to his toilette, and sallied forth with the air of
a man on whose morning of life a sun heretofore clouded has burst forth
and bathed the landscape in its light.




CHAPTER VIII.

Since the evening spent at the Savarins', Graham had seen no more of
Isaura. He had avoided all chance of seeing her; in fact, the jealousy
with which he had viewed her manner towards Rameau, and the angry
amaze with which he had heard her proclaim her friendship for Madame
de Grantmesnil, served to strengthen the grave and secret reasons which
made him desire to keep his heart yet free and his hand yet unpledged.
But alas! the heart was enslaved already. It was under the most fatal of
all spells,--first love conceived at first sight. He was wretched; and
in his wretchedness his resolves became involuntarily weakened. He found
himself making excuses for the beloved. What cause had he, after all,
for that jealousy of the young poet which had so offended him; and if in
her youth and inexperience Isaura had made her dearest friend of a great
writer by whose genius she might be dazzled, and of whose opinions she
might scarcely be aware, was it a crime that necessitated her eternal
banishment from the reverence which belongs to all manly love? Certainly
he found no satisfactory answers to such self-questionings. And then
those grave reasons known only to himself, and never to be confided
to another--why he should yet reserve his hand unpledged--were not so
imperative as to admit of no compromise. They might entail a sacrifice,
and not a small one to a man of Graham's views and ambition. But what is
love if it can think any sacrifice, short of duty and honour, too great
to offer up unknown uncomprehended, to the one beloved? Still, while
thus softened in his feelings towards Isaura, he became, perhaps in
consequence of such softening, more and more restlessly impatient to
fulfil the object for which he had come to Paris, the great step towards
which was the discovery of the undiscoverable Louise Duval.

He had written more than once to M. Renard since the interview with that
functionary already recorded, demanding whether Renard had not made
some progress in the research on which he was employed, and had received
short unsatisfactory replies preaching patience and implying hope.

The plain truth, however, was that M. Renard had taken no further pains
in the matter. He considered it utter waste of time and thought to
attempt a discovery to which the traces were so faint and so obsolete.
If the discovery were effected, it must be by one of those chances which
occur without labour or forethought of our own. He trusted only to such
a chance in continuing the charge he had undertaken. But during the
last day or two Graham had become yet more impatient than before, and
peremptorily requested another visit from this dilatory confidant.

In that visit, finding himself pressed hard, and though naturally
willing, if possible, to retain a client unusually generous, yet being
on the whole an honest member of his profession, and feeling it to
be somewhat unfair to accept large remuneration for doing nothing, M.
Renard said frankly, "Monsieur, this affair is beyond me; the keenest
agent of our police could make nothing of it. Unless you can tell
me more than you have done, I am utterly without a clew. I resign,
therefore, the task with which you honoured me, willing to resume it
again if you can give me information that could render me of use."

"What sort of information?"

"At least the names of some of the lady's relations who may yet be
living."

"But it strikes me that, if I could get at that piece of knowledge, I
should not require the services of the police. The relations would tell
me what had become of Louise Duval quite as readily as they would tell a
police agent."

"Quite true, Monsieur. It would really be picking your pockets if I
did not at once retire from your service. Nay, Monsieur, pardon me, no
further payments; I have already accepted too much. Your most obedient
servant."

Graham, left alone, fell into a very gloomy revery. He could not but be
sensible of the difficulties in the way of the object which had brought
him to Paris, with somewhat sanguine expectations of success founded on
a belief in the omniscience of the Parisian police, which is only to
be justified when they have to deal with a murderess or a political
incendiary. But the name of Louise Duval is about as common in France
as that of Mary Smith in England; and the English reader may judge
what would be the likely result of inquiring through the ablest of our
detectives after some Mary Smith of whom you could give little more
information than that she was the daughter of a drawing-master who had
died twenty years ago, that it was about fifteen years since anything
had been heard of her, that you could not say if through marriage or for
other causes she had changed her name or not, and you had reasons for
declining resort to public advertisements. In the course of inquiry so
instituted, the probability would be that you might hear of a great many
Mary Smiths, in the pursuit of whom your employee would lose all sight
and scent of the one Mary Smith for whom the chase was instituted.

In the midst of Graham's despairing reflections his laquais announced M.
Frederic Lemercier.

"Cher Grarm-Varn. A thousand pardons if I disturb you at this late hour
of the evening; but you remember the request you made me when you first
arrived in Paris this season?"

"Of course I do,--in case you should ever chance in your wide round of
acquaintance to fall in with a Madame or Mademoiselle Duval of about the
age of forty, or a year or so less, to let me know; and you did fall in
with two ladies of that name, but they were not the right one, not the
person whom my friend begged me to discover; both much too young."

"Eh bien, mon cher. If you will come with me to the bal champetre in
the Champs Elysees to-night, I can show you a third Madame Duval,--her
Christian name is Louise, too, of the age you mention,--though she does
her best to look younger, and is still very handsome. You said your
Duval was handsome. It was only last evening that I met this lady at a
soiree given by Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin, coryphee distinguee, in
love with young Rameau."

"In love with young Rameau? I am very glad to hear it. He returns the
love?"

"I suppose so. He seems very proud of it. But apropos of Madame Duval,
she has been long absent from Paris, just returned, and looking out for
conquests. She says she has a great penchant for the English; promises
me to be at this ball. Come."

"Hearty thanks, my dear Lemercier. I am at your service."




CHAPTER IX.

The bal champetre was gay and brilliant, as such festal scenes are at
Paris. A lovely night in the midst of May, lamps below and stars above;
the society mixed, of course. Evidently, when Graham has singled out
Frederic Lemercier from all his acquaintances at Paris to conjoin with
the official aid of M. Renard in search of the mysterious lady, he had
conjectured the probability that she might be found in the Bohemian
world so familiar to Frederic; if not as an inhabitant, at least as an
explorer. Bohemia was largely represented at the bal champetre, but not
without a fair sprinkling of what we call the "respectable classes,"
especially English and Americans, who brought their wives there to take
care of them. Frenchmen, not needing such care, prudently left their
wives at home. Among the Frenchmen of station were the Comte de Passy
and the Vicomte de Breze.

On first entering the gardens, Graham's eye was attracted and dazzled
by a brilliant form. It was standing under a festoon of flowers extended
from tree to tree, and a gas jet opposite shone full upon the face,--the
face of a girl in all the freshness of youth. If the freshness owed
anything to art, the art was so well disguised that it seemed nature.
The beauty of the countenance was Hebe-like, joyous, and radiant;
and yet one could not look at the girl without a sentiment of deep
mournfulness. She was surrounded by a group of young men, and the ring
of her laugh jarred upon Graham's ear. He pressed Frederic's arm, and
directing his attention to the girl, asked who she was.

"Who? Don't you know? That is Julie Caumartin. A little while ago her
equipage was the most admired in the Bois, and great ladies condescended
to copy her dress or her coiffure; but she has lost her splendour, and
dismissed the rich admirer who supplied the fuel for its blaze, since
she fell in love with Gustave Rameau. Doubtless she is expecting him
to-night. You ought to know her; shall I present you?"

"No," answered Graham, with a compassionate expression in his manly
face. "So young; seemingly so gay. How I pity her!"

"What! for throwing herself away on Rameau? True. There is a great deal
of good in that girl's nature, if she had been properly trained. Rameau
wrote a pretty poem on her which turned her head and won her heart, in
which she is styled the 'Ondine of Paris,'--a nymph-like type of Paris
itself."

"Vanishing type, like her namesake; born of the spray, and vanishing
soon into the deep," said Graham. "Pray go and look for the Duval; you
will find me seated yonder."

Graham passed into a retired alley, and threw himself on a solitary
bench, while Lemercier went in search of Madame Duval. In a few minutes
the Frenchman reappeared. By his side was a lady well dressed, and as
she passed under the lamps Graham perceived that, though of a certain
age, she was undeniably handsome. His heart beat more quickly. Surely
this was the Louise Duval he sought.

He rose from his seat, and was presented in due form to the lady, with
whom Frederic then discreetly left him. "M. Lemercier tells me that you
think that we were once acquainted with each other."

"Nay, Madame; I should not fail to recognize you were that the case. A
friend of mine had the honour of knowing a lady of your name; and should
I be fortunate enough to meet that lady, I am charged with a commission
that may not be unwelcome to her. M. Lemercier tells me your nom de
bapteme is Louise."

"Louise Corinne, Monsieur."

"And I presume that Duval is the name you take from your parents?"

"No; my father's name was Bernard. I married, when I was a mere child,
M. Duval, in the wine trade at Bordeaux."

"Ah, indeed!" said Graham, much disappointed, but looking at her with a
keen, searching eye, which she met with a decided frankness. Evidently,
in his judgment, she was speaking the truth.

"You know English, I think, Madame," he resumed, addressing her in that
language.

"A leetle; speak un peu."

"Only a little?"

Madame Duval looked puzzled, and replied in French, with a laugh, "Is it
that you were told that I spoke English by your countryman, Milord Sare
Boulby? Petit scelerat, I hope he is well. He sends you a commission for
me,--so he ought; he behaved to me like a monster."

"Alas! I know nothing of Milord Sir Boulby. Were you never in England
yourself?"

"Never," with a coquettish side-glance; "I should like so much to go. I
have a foible for the English in spite of that vilain petit Boulby. Who
is it gave you the commission for me? Ha! I guess, le Capitaine Nelton."

"No. What year, Madame, if not impertinent, were you at
Aix-la-Chapelle?"

"You mean Baden? I was there seven years ago, when I met le Capitaine
Nelton, bel homme aux cheveux rouges."

"But you have been at Aix?"

"Never."

"I have, then, been mistaken, Madame, and have only to offer my most
humble apologies."

"But perhaps you will favour me with a visit, and we may on further
conversation find that you are not mistaken. I can't stay now, for I am
engaged to dance with the Belgian of whom, no doubt, M. Lemercier has
told you."

"No, Madame, he has not."

"Well, then, he will tell you. The Belgian is very jealous; but I am
always at home between three and four; this is my card."

Graham eagerly took the card, and exclaimed, "Is this you're your own
handwriting, Madame?"

"Yes, indeed."

"Tres belle ecriture," said Graham, and receded with a ceremonious bow.
"Anything so unlike her handwriting! Another disappointment," muttered
the Englishman as the lady went back to the ball.

A few minutes later Graham joined Lemercier, who was talking with De
Passy and De Breze.

"Well," said Lemercier, when his eye rested on Graham, "I hit the right
nail on the head this time, eh?"

Graham shook his head.

"What! is she not the right Louise Duval?"

"Certainly not."

The Count de Passy overheard the name, and turned. "Louise Duval," he
said; "does Monsieur Vane know a Louise Duval?"

"No; but a friend asked me to inquire after a lady of that name whom he
had met many years ago at Paris." The Count mused a moment, and said,
"Is it possible that your friend knew the family De Mauleon?"

"I really can't say. What then?"

"The old Vicomte de Mauleon was one of my most intimate associates. In
fact, our houses are connected. And he was extremely grieved, poor man,
when his daughter Louise married her drawing-master, Auguste Duval."

"Her drawing-master, Auguste Duval? Pray say on. I think the Louise
Duval my friend knew must have been her daughter. She was the only child
of a drawing-master or artist named Auguste Duval, and probably
enough her Christian name would have been derived from her mother. A
Mademoiselle de Mauleon, then, married M. Auguste Duval?"

"Yes; the old Vicomte had espoused en premieres noces Mademoiselle
Camille de Chavigny, a lady of birth equal to his own; had by her one
daughter, Louise. I recollect her well,--a plain girl, with a high nose
and a sour expression. She was just of age when the first Vicomtesse
died, and by the marriage settlement she succeeded at once to her
mother's fortune, which was not large. The Vicomte was, however, so
poor that the loss of that income was no trifle to him. Though much past
fifty, he was still very handsome. Men of that generation did not age
soon, Monsieur," said the Count, expanding his fine chest and laughing
exultingly.

"He married, en secondes noces, a lady of still higher birth than the
first, and with a much larger dot. Louise was indignant at this, hated
her stepmother; and when a son was born by the second marriage she left
the paternal roof, went to reside with an old female relative near the
Luxembourg, and there married this drawing-master. Her father and the
family did all they could to prevent it; but in these democratic days
a woman who has attained her majority can, if she persist in her
determination, marry to please herself and disgrace her ancestors. After
that mesalliance her father never would see her again. I tried in vain
to soften him. All his parental affections settled on his handsome
Victor.

"Ah! you are too young to have known Victor de Mauleon during his short
reign at Paris, as roi des viveurs."

"Yes, he was before my time; but I have heard of him as a young man of
great fashion; said to be very clever, a duellist, and a sort of Don
Juan."

"Exactly."

"And then I remember vaguely to have heard that he committed, or was
said to have committed, some villanous action connected with a great
lady's jewels, and to have left Paris in consequence."

"Ah, yes; a sad scrape. At that time there was a political crisis; we
were under a Republic; anything against a noble was believed. But I am
sure Victor de Mauleon was not the man to commit a larceny. However, it
is quite true that he left Paris, and I don't know what has become of
him since." Here he touched De Breze, who, though still near, had not
been listening to this conversation, but interchanging jest and laughter
with Lemercier on the motley scene of the dance.

"De Breze, have you ever heard what became of poor dear Victor de
Mauleon?--you knew him."

"Knew him? I should think so. Who could be in the great world and not
know le beau Victor? No; after he vanished I never heard more of him;
doubtless long since dead. A good-hearted fellow in spite of all his
sins."

"My dear Monsieur de Breze, did you know his half-sister?" asked
Graham,--"a Madame Duval?"

"No. I never heard he had a half-sister. Halt there; I recollect that
I met Victor once, in the garden at Versailles, walking arm-in-arm
with the most beautiful girl I ever saw; and when I complimented him
afterwards at the Jockey Club on his new conquest, he replied very
gravely that the young lady was his niece. 'Niece!' said I; 'why,
there can't be more than five or six years between you.' 'About that,
I suppose,' said he; 'my half-sister, her mother, was more than twenty
years older than I at the time of my birth.' I doubted the truth of his
story at the time; but since you say he really had a sister, my doubt
wronged him."

"Have you never seen that same young lady since?"

"Never."

"How many years ago was this?"

"Let me see, about twenty or twenty-one years ago. How time flies!"

Graham still continued to question, but could learn no further
particulars. He turned to quit the gardens just as the band was striking
up for a fresh dance, a wild German waltz air; and mingled with that
German music his ear caught the sprightly sounds of the French laugh,
one laugh distinguished from the rest by a more genuine ring of
light-hearted joy, the laugh that he had heard on entering the gardens,
and the sound of which had then saddened him. Looking towards the
quarter from which it came, he again saw the "Ondine of Paris." She was
not now the centre of a group. She had just found Gustave Rameau, and
was clinging to his arm with a look of happiness in her face, frank
and innocent as a child's; and so they passed amid the dancers down a
solitary lamplit alley, till lost to the Englishman's lingering gaze.




CHAPTER X.

The next morning Graham sent again for M. Renard. "Well," he cried, when
that dignitary appeared and took a seat beside him, "chance has favoured
me."

"I always counted on chance, Monsieur. Chance has more wit in its little
finger than the Paris police in its whole body."

"I have ascertained the relations, on the mother's side, of Louise
Duval, and the only question is how to get at them." Here Graham related
what he had heard, and ended by saying, "This Victor de Mauleon is
therefore my Louise Duval's uncle. He was, no doubt, taking charge of
her in the year that the persons interested in her discovery lost sight
of her in Paris; and surely he must know what became of her afterwards."

"Very probably; and chance may befriend us yet in the discovery of
Victor de Mauleon. You seem not to know the particulars of that story
about the jewels which brought him into some connection with the police,
and resulted in his disappearance from Paris."

"No; tell me the particulars."

"Victor de Mauleon was heir to some 60,000 or 70,000 francs a year,
chiefly on the mother's side; for his father, though the representative
of one of the most ancient houses in Normandy, was very poor, having
little of his own except the emoluments of an appointment in the Court
of Louis Philippe.

"But before, by the death of his parents, Victor came into that
inheritance, he very largely forestalled it. His tastes were
magnificent. He took to 'sport,' kept a famous stud, was a great
favourite with the English, and spoke their language fluently. Indeed
he was considered very accomplished, and of considerable intellectual
powers. It was generally said that some day or other, when he had sown
his wild oats, he would, if he took to politics, be an eminent man.
Altogether he was a very strong creature. That was a very strong age
under Louis Philippe. The viveurs of Paris were fine types for the
heroes of Dumas and Sue,--full of animal life and spirits. Victor de
Mauleon was a romance of Dumas, incarnated."

"Monsieur Renard, forgive me that I did not before do justice to your
taste in polite literature."

"Monsieur, a man in my profession does not attain even to my humble
eminence if he be not something else than a professional. He must study
mankind wherever they are described, even in les romans. To return to
Victor de Mauleon. Though he was a 'sportman,' a gambler, a Don Juan, a
duel list, nothing was ever said against his honour. On the contrary,
on matters of honour he was a received oracle; and even though he had
fought several duels (that was the age of duels), and was reported
without a superior, almost without an equal, in either weapon, the sword
or the pistol, he is said never to have wantonly provoked an encounter,
and to have so used his skill that he contrived never to slay, nor even
gravely to wound, an antagonist.

"I remember one instance of his generosity in this respect; for it
was much talked of at the time. One of your countrymen, who had never
handled a fencing-foil nor fired a pistol, took offence at something
M. de Mauleon had said in disparagement of the Duke of Wellington, and
called him out. Victor de Mauleon accepted the challenge, discharged his
pistol, not in the air--that might have been an affront--but so as to be
wide of the mark, walked up to the lines to be shot at, and when missed,
said, 'Excuse the susceptibility of a Frenchman loath to believe that
his countryman can be beaten save by accident, and accept every apology
one gentleman can make to another for having forgotten the respect due
to one of the most renowned of your national heroes.' The Englishman's
name was Vane. Could it have been your father?"

"Very probably; just like my father to call out any man who insulted
the honour of his country, as represented by its men. I hope the two
combatants became friends?"

"That I never heard; the duel was over; there my story ends."

"Pray go on."

"One day--it was in the midst of political events which would have
silenced most subjects of private gossip--the beau monde was startled by
the news that the Vicomte (he was then, by his father's death, Vicomte)
de Mauleon had been given into the custody of the police on the charge
of stealing the jewels of the Duchesse de (the wife of a distinguished
foreigner). It seems that some days before this event, the Duc, wishing
to make Madame his spouse an agreeable surprise, had resolved to have
a diamond necklace belonging to her, and which was of setting so
old-fashioned that she had not lately worn it, reset for her birthday.
He therefore secretly possessed himself of the key to an iron safe in
a cabinet adjoining her dressing-room (in which safe her more valuable
jewels were kept), and took from it the necklace. Imagine his dismay
when the jeweller in the Rue Vivienne to whom he carried it recognized
the pretended diamonds as imitation paste which he himself had some days
previously inserted into an empty setting brought to him by a Monsieur
with whose name he was unacquainted. The Duchesse was at that time
in delicate health; and as the Duc's suspicions naturally fell on the
servants, especially on the femme de chambre, who was in great favour
with his wife, he did not like to alarm Madame, nor through her to put
the servants on their guard. He resolved, therefore, to place the matter
in the hands of the famous --------, who was then the pride and ornament
of the Parisian police. And the very night afterwards the Vicomte de
Mauleon was caught and apprehended in the cabinet where the jewels
were kept, and to which he had got access by a false key, or at least
a duplicate key, found in his possession. I should observe that M. de
Mauleon occupied the entresol in the same hotel in which the upper rooms
were devoted to the Duc and Duchesse and their suite. As soon as this
charge against the Vicomte was made known (and it was known the next
morning), the extent of his debts and the utterness of his ruin (before
scarcely conjectured or wholly unheeded) became public through the
medium of the journals, and furnished an obvious motive for the crime
of which he was accused. We Parisians, Monsieur, are subject to the most
startling reactions of feeling. The men we adore one day we execrate the
next. The Vicomte passed at once from the popular admiration one
bestows on a hero to the popular contempt with which one regards a petty
larcener. Society wondered how it had ever condescended to receive
into its bosom the gambler, the duellist, the Don Juan. However, one
compensation in the way of amusement he might still afford to society
for the grave injuries he had done it. Society would attend his trial,
witness his demeanour at the bar, and watch the expression of his
face when he was sentenced to the galleys. But, Monsieur, this wretch
completed the measure of his iniquities. He was not tried at all. The
Duc and Duchesse quitted Paris for Spain, and the Duc instructed his
lawyer to withdraw his charge, stating his conviction of the Vicomte's
complete innocence of any other offence than that which he himself had
confessed."

"What did the Vicomte confess? You omitted to state that."

"The Vicomte, when apprehended, confessed that, smitten by an insane
passion for the Duchesse, which she had, on his presuming to declare it,
met with indignant scorn, he had taken advantage of his lodgment in the
same house to admit himself into the cabinet adjoining her dressing-room
by means of a key which he had procured, made from an impression of the
key-hole taken in wax.

"No evidence in support of any other charge against the Vicomte was
forthcoming,--nothing, in short, beyond the infraction du domicile
caused by the madness of youthful love, and for which there was no
prosecution. The law, therefore, could have little to say against him.
But society was more rigid; and exceedingly angry to find that a man who
had been so conspicuous for luxury should prove to be a pauper, insisted
on believing that M. de Mauleon was guilty of the meaner, though not
perhaps, in the eyes of husbands and fathers, the more heinous, of the
two offences. I presume that the Vicomte felt that he had got into a
dilemma from which no pistol-shot or sword-thrust could free him, for he
left Paris abruptly, and has not since reappeared. The sale of his stud
and effects sufficed, I believe, to pay his debts, for I will do him the
justice to say that they were paid."

"But though the Vicomte de Mauleon has disappeared, he must have left
relations at Paris, who would perhaps know what has become of him and of
his niece."

"I doubt it. He had no very near relations. The nearest was an old
celibataire of the same name, from whom he had some expectations, but
who died shortly after this esclandre, and did not name the Vicomte in
his will. M. Victor had numerous connections among the highest families,
the Rochebriants, Chavignys, Vandemars, Passys, Beauvilliers; but they
are not likely to have retained any connection with a ruined
vaurien, and still less with a niece of his who was the child of a
drawing-master. But now you have given me a clew, I will try to follow
it up. We must find the Vicomte, and I am not without hope of doing so.
Pardon me if I decline to say more at present. I would not raise false
expectations; but in a week or two I will have the honour to call again
upon Monsieur."

"Wait one instant. You have really a hope of discovering M. de Mauleon?"

"Yes. I cannot say more at present."

M. Renard departed. Still that hope, however faint it might prove,
served to reanimate Graham; and with that hope his heart, as if a load
had been lifted from its mainspring, returned instinctively to the
thought of Isaura. Whatever seemed to promise an early discharge of the
commission connected with the discovery of Louise Duval seemed to bring
Isaura nearer to him, or at least to excuse his yearning desire to see
more of her, to understand her better. Faded into thin air was the vague
jealousy of Gustave Rameau which he had so unreasonably conceived; he
felt as if it were impossible that the man whom the "Ondine of Paris"
claimed as her lover could dare to woo or hope to win an Isaura. He even
forgot the friendship with the eloquent denouncer of the marriage-bond,
which a little while ago had seemed to him an unpardonable offence. He
remembered only the lovely face, so innocent, yet so intelligent; only
the sweet voice, which had for the first time breathed music into his
own soul; only the gentle hand, whose touch had for the first time sent
through his veins the thrill which distinguishes from all her sex the
woman whom we love. He went forth elated and joyous, and took his way
to Isaura's villa. As he went, the leaves on the trees under which he
passed seemed stirred by the soft May breeze in sympathy with his own
delight. Perhaps it was rather the reverse: his own silent delight
sympathized with all delight in awakening Nature. The lover seeking
reconciliation with the loved one from whom some trifle has unreasonably
estranged him, in a cloudless day of May,--if he be not happy enough
to feel a brotherhood in all things happy,--a leaf in bloom, a bird in
song,--then indeed he may call himself lover, but he does not know what
is love.





BOOK IV.




CHAPTER I.

FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

It is many days since I wrote to you, and but for your delightful note
just received, reproaching me for silence, I should still be under the
spell of that awe which certain words of M. Savarin were well fitted to
produce. Chancing to ask him if he had written to you lately, he said,
with that laugh of his, good-humouredly ironical, "No, Mademoiselle, I
am not one of the Facheux whom Moliere has immortalized. If the meeting
of lovers should be sacred from the intrusion of a third person, however
amiable, more sacred still should be the parting between an author and
his work. Madame de Grantmesnil is in that moment so solemn to a genius
earnest as hers,--she is bidding farewell to a companion with whom, once
dismissed into the world, she can never converse familiarly again; it
ceases to be her companion when it becomes ours. Do not let us disturb
the last hours they will pass together."

These words struck me much. I suppose there is truth in them. I can
comprehend that a work which has long been all in all to its author,
concentrating his thoughts, gathering round it the hopes and fears of
his inmost heart, dies, as it were, to him when he has completed
its life for others, and launched it into a world estranged from the
solitude in which it was born and formed. I can almost conceive that, to
a writer like you, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth
chills your own love for it. The characters you created in a fairyland,
known but to yourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm
when you hear them discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if
they were really the creatures of streets and salons.

I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do
such other authors as I have known. M. Savarin, for instance, sets
down in his tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest
scribbler who wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is
food, dispraise is poison. Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me
I break on the wheel." M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energetic
administrator to his own reputation. He deals with it as if it were a
kingdom,--establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers
to fight for it. He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which
each is bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those
territories united constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin.
Don't think me an ungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our
brilliant friend. It is not I who here speak; it is himself. He avows
his policy with the naivete which makes the charm of his style as
writer. "It is the greatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk
of the Republic of Letters. Every author who wins a name is a sovereign
in his own domain, be it large or small. Woe to any republican who wants
to dethrone me!" Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel
as if he were betraying the cause of, genius. I cannot bring myself
to regard literature as a craft,--to me it is a sacred mission; and in
hearing this "sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his
state, I seem to listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion
he professes to teach. M. Savarin's favourite eleve now is a young
contributor to his journal, named Gustave Rameau. M. Savarin said the
other day in my hearing, "I and my set were Young France; Gustave Rameau
and his set are New Paris."

"And what is the distinction between the one and the other?" asked my
American friend, Mrs. Morley.

"The set of 'Young France,'" answered M. Savarin, "had in it the hearty
consciousness of youth; it was bold and vehement, with abundant vitality
and animal spirits; whatever may be said against it in other
respects, the power of thews and sinews must be conceded to its chief
representatives. But the set of 'New Paris' has very bad health, and
very indifferent spirits. Still, in its way, it is very clever; it can
sting and bite as keenly as if it were big and strong. Rameau is the
most promising member of the set. He will be popular in his time,
because he represents a good deal of the mind of his time,--namely, the
mind and the time of 'New Paris.'"

Do you know anything of this young Rameau's writings? You do not know
himself, for he told me so, expressing a desire, that was evidently very
sincere, to find some occasion on which to render you his homage. He
said this the first time I met him at M. Savarin's, and before he knew
how dear to me are yourself and your fame. He came and sat by me after
dinner, and won my interest at once by asking me if I had heard that you
were busied on a new work; and then, without waiting for my answer, he
launched forth into praises of you, which made a notable contrast to the
scorn with which he spoke of all your contemporaries,--except indeed M.
Savarin, who, however, might not have been pleased to hear his favourite
pupil style him "a great writer in small things." I spare you his
epigrams on Dumas and Victor Hugo and my beloved Lamartine. Though his
talk was showy, and dazzled me at first, I soon got rather tired of it,
even the first time we met. Since then I have seen him very often, not
only at M. Savarin's, but he calls here at least every other day, and we
have become quite good friends. He gains on acquaintance so far that one
cannot help feeling how much he is to be pitied. He is so envious! and
the envious must be so unhappy. And then he is at once so near and so
far from all the things that he envies. He longs for riches and luxury,
and can only as yet earn a bare competence by his labours. Therefore
he hates the rich and luxurious. His literary successes, instead of
pleasing him, render him miserable by their contrast with the fame of
the authors whom he envies and assails. He has a beautiful head, of
which he is conscious, but it is joined to a body without strength or
grace. He is conscious of this too,--but it is cruel to go on with this
sketch. You can see at once the kind of person who, whether he inspire
affection or dislike, cannot fail to create an interest, painful but
compassionate.

You will be pleased to hear that Dr. C. considers my health so improved
that I may next year enter fairly on the profession for which I was
intended and trained. Yet I still feel hesitating and doubtful. To
give myself wholly up to the art in which I am told I could excel must
alienate me entirely from the ambition that yearns for fields in
which, alas! it may perhaps never appropriate to itself a rood for
culture,--only wander, lost in a vague fairyland, to which it has not
the fairy's birthright. O thou great Enchantress, to whom are equally
subject the streets of Paris and the realm of Faerie, thou who hast
sounded to the deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human
life," and hast taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far
its courses are guided by orbs in heaven,--canst thou solve this riddle
which, if it perplexes me, must perplex so many? What is the real
distinction between the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls
that feel to the quick all the grandest and divinest things which the
rare genius places before them, sighing within themselves, "This rare
genius does but express that which was previously familiar to us, so
far as thought and sentiment extend"? Nay, the genius itself, however
eloquent, never does, never can, express the whole of the thought or the
sentiment it interprets; on the contrary, the greater the genius is, the
more it leaves a something of incomplete satisfaction on our minds,--it
promises so much more than it performs; it implies so much more than
it announces. I am impressed with the truth of what I thus say in
proportion as I re-peruse and re-study the greatest writers that have
come within my narrow range of reading; and by the greatest writers I
mean those who are not exclusively reasoners (of such I cannot judge),
nor mere poets (of whom, so far as concerns the union of words with
music, I ought to be able to judge), but the few who unite reason and
poetry, and appeal at once to the common-sense of the multitude and
the imagination of the few. The highest type of this union to me is
Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no criticism on him
which does not allow this sense of incomplete satisfaction augmenting
in proportion as the poet soars to his highest. I ask again, In what
consists this distinction between the rare genius and the commonalty of
minds that exclaim, "He expresses what we feel, but never the whole of
what we feel"? Is it the mere power over language, a larger knowledge of
dictionaries, a finer ear for period and cadence, a more artistic craft
in casing our thoughts and sentiments in well-selected words? Is it true
what Buffon says, "that the style is the man"? Is it true what I am told
Goethe said, "Poetry is form"? I cannot believe this; and if you tell me
it is true, then I no longer pine to be a writer. But if it be not
true, explain to me how it is that the greatest genius is popular in
proportion as it makes itself akin to us by uttering in better words
than we employ that which was already within us, brings to light what
in our souls was latent, and does but correct, beautify, and publish the
correspondence which an ordinary reader carries on privately every day
between himself and his mind or his heart. If this superiority in the
genius be but style and form, I abandon my dream of being something else
than a singer of words by another to the music of another. But then,
what then? My knowledge of books and art is wonderfully small. What
little I do know I gather from very few books and from what I hear said
by the few worth listening to whom I happen to meet; and out of these,
in solitude and revery, not by conscious effort, I arrive at some
results which appear to my inexperience original. Perhaps, indeed,
they have the same kind of originality as the musical compositions of
amateurs who effect a cantata or a quartette made up of borrowed details
from great masters, and constituting a whole so original that no real
master would deign to own it. Oh, if I could get you to understand how
unsettled, how struggling my whole nature at this moment is! I wonder
what is the sensation of the chrysalis which has been a silkworm, when
it first feels the new wings stirring within its shell,--wings, alas!
they are but those of the humblest and shortest-lived sort of moth,
scarcely born into daylight before it dies. Could it reason, it might
regret its earlier life, and say, "Better be the silkworm than the
moth."


FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Have you known well any English people in the course of your life? I say
well, for you must have had acquaintance with many. But it seems to
me so difficult to know an Englishman well. Even I, who so loved
and revered Mr. Selby,--I, whose childhood was admitted into his
companionship by that love which places ignorance and knowledge, infancy
and age, upon ground so equal that heart touches heart, cannot say that
I understand the English character to anything like the extent to which
I fancy I understand the Italian and the French. Between us of the
Continent and them of the island the British Channel always flows. There
is an Englishman here to whom I have been introduced, whom I have met,
though but seldom, in that society which bounds the Paris world to me.
Pray, pray tell me, did you ever know, ever meet him? His name is Graham
Vane. He is the only son, I am told, of a man who was a celebrite in
England as an orator and statesman, and on both sides he belongs to the
haute aristocratic. He himself has that indescribable air and mien to
which we apply the epithet 'distinguished.' In the most crowded salon
the eye would fix on him, and involuntarily follow his movements.
Yet his manners are frank and simple, wholly without the stiffness or
reserve which are said to characterize the English. There is an inborn
dignity in his bearing which consists in the absence of all dignity
assumed. But what strikes me most in this Englishman is an expression
of countenance which the English depict by the word 'open,'--that
expression which inspires you with a belief in the existence of
sincerity. Mrs. Morley said of him, in that poetic extravagance of
phrase by which the Americans startle the English, "That man's forehead
would light up the Mammoth Cave." Do you not know, Eulalie, what it
is to us cultivators of art--art being the expression of truth through
fiction--to come into the atmosphere of one of those souls in which
Truth stands out bold and beautiful in itself, and needs no idealization
through fiction? Oh, how near we should be to heaven could we live
daily, hourly, in the presence of one the honesty of whose word we could
never doubt, the authority of whose word we could never disobey! Mr.
Vane professes not to understand music, not even to care for it, except
rarely, and yet he spoke of its influence over others with an enthusiasm
that half charmed me once more back to my destined calling; nay, might
have charmed me wholly, but that he seemed to think that I--that any
public singer--must be a creature apart from the world,--the world in
which such men live. Perhaps that is true.




CHAPTER II.

It was one of those lovely noons towards the end of May in which a rural
suburb has the mellow charm of summer to him who escapes awhile from the
streets of a crowded capital. The Londoner knows its charm when he feels
his tread on the softening swards of the Vale of Health, or, pausing at
Richmond under the budding willow, gazes on the river glittering in the
warmer sunlight, and hears from the villa-gardens behind him the brief
trill of the blackbird. But the suburbs round Paris are, I think, a yet
more pleasing relief from the metropolis; they are more easily reached,
and I know not why, but they seem more rural,--perhaps because the
contrast of their repose with the stir left behind, of their redundance
of leaf and blossom compared with the prim efflorescence of trees in the
Boulevards and Tuileries, is more striking. However that may be, when
Graham reached the pretty suburb in which Isaura dwelt, it seemed to him
as if all the wheels of the loud busy life were suddenly smitten still.
The hour was yet early; he felt sure that he should find Isaura at
home. The garden-gate stood unfastened and ajar; he pushed it aside and
entered. I think I have before said that the garden of the villa was
shut out from the road and the gaze of neighbours by a wall and thick
belts of evergreens; it stretched behind the house somewhat far for the
garden of a suburban villa. He paused when he had passed the gateway,
for he heard in the distance the voice of one singing,--singing low,
singing plaintively. He knew it was the voice of Isaura-he passed on,
leaving the house behind him, and tracking the voice till he reached the
singer.

Isaura was seated within an arbour towards the farther end of the
garden,--an arbour which, a little later in the year, must indeed be
delicate and dainty with lush exuberance of jessamine and woodbine; now
into its iron trelliswork leaflets and flowers were insinuating their
gentle way. Just at the entrance one white rose--a winter rose that had
mysteriously survived its relations--opened its pale hues frankly to the
noonday sun. Graham approached slowly, noiselessly, and the last note of
the song had ceased when he stood at the entrance of the arbour. Isaura
did not perceive him at first, for her face was bent downward musingly,
as was often her wont after singing, especially when alone; but she felt
that the place was darkened, that something stood between her and the
sunshine. She raised her face, and a quick flush mantled over it as
she uttered his name, not loudly, not as in surprise, but inwardly and
whisperingly, as in a sort of fear.

"Pardon me, Mademoiselle," said Graham, entering; "but I heard your
voice as I came into the garden, and it drew me onward involuntarily.
What a lovely air! and what simple sweetness in such of the words as
reached me! I am so ignorant of music that you must not laugh at me if
I ask whose is the music and whose are the words? Probably both are so
well known as to convict me of a barbarous ignorance."

"Oh, no," said Isaura, with a still heightened colour, and in accents
embarrassed and hesitating. "Both the words and music are by an unknown
and very humble composer, yet not, indeed, quite original,--they have
not even that merit; at least they were suggested by a popular song in
the Neapolitan dialect which is said to be very old."

"I don't know if I caught the true meaning of the words, for they seemed
to me to convey a more subtle and refined sentiment than is common in
the popular songs of southern Italy."

"The sentiment in the original is changed in the paraphrase, and not, I
fear, improved by the change."

"Will you explain to me the sentiment in both, and let me judge which I
prefer?"

"In the Neapolitan song a young fisherman, who has moored his boat under
a rock on the shore, sees a beautiful face below the surface of the
waters; he imagines it to be that of a Nereid, and casts in his net
to catch this supposed nymph of the ocean. He only disturbs the water,
loses the image, and brings up a few common fishes. He returns home
disappointed, and very much enamoured of the supposed Nereid. The next
day he goes again to the same place, and discovers that the face which
had so charmed him was that of a mortal girl reflected on the waters
from the rock behind him, on which she had been seated, and on which she
had her home. The original air is arch and lively; just listen to it."
And Isaura warbled one of those artless and somewhat meagre tunes to
which light-stringed instruments are the fitting accompaniment.

"That," said Graham, "is a different music indeed from the other, which
is deep and plaintive, and goes to the heart."

"But do you not see how the words have been altered? In the song you
first heard me singing, the fisherman goes again to the spot, again and
again sees the face in the water, again and again seeks to capture the
Nereid, and never knows to the last that the face was that of the mortal
on the rock close behind him, and which he passed by without notice
every day. Deluded by an ideal image, the real one escapes from his
eye."

"Is the verse that is recast meant to symbolize a moral in love?"

"In love? nay, I know not; but in life, yes,--at least the life of the
artist."

"The paraphrase of the original is yours, Signorina, words and music
both. Am I not right? Your silence answers 'Yes.' Will you pardon me
if I say that, though there can be no doubt of the new beauty you have
given to the old song, I think that the moral of the old was the sounder
one, the truer to human life. We do not go on to the last duped by an
allusion. If enamoured by the shadow on the waters, still we do look
around us and discover the image it reflects."

Isaura shook her head gently, but made no answer. On the table before
her there were a few myrtle-sprigs and one or two buds from the last
winter rose, which she had been arranging into a simple nosegay;
she took up these, and abstractedly began to pluck and scatter the
rose-leaves.

"Despise the coming May flowers if you will, they will soon be so
plentiful," said Graham; "but do not cast away the few blossoms which
winter has so kindly spared, and which even summer will not give again;"
and placing his hand on the winter buds, it touched hers,--lightly,
indeed, but she felt the touch, shrank from it, coloured, and rose from
her seat.

"The sun has left this side of the garden, the east wind is rising, and
you must find it chilly here," she said, in an altered tone; "will you
not come into the house?"

"It is not the air that I feel chilly," said Graham, with a half-smile;
"I almost fear that my prosaic admonitions have displeased you."

"They were not prosaic; and they were kind and very wise," she added,
with her exquisite laugh,--laugh so wonderfully sweet and musical. She
now had gained the entrance of the arbour; Graham joined her, and they
walked towards the house. He asked her if she had seen much of the
Savarins since they had met.

"Once or twice we have been there of an evening."

"And encountered, no doubt, the illustrious young minstrel who despises
Tasso and Corneille?"

"M. Rameau? Oh, yes; he is constantly at the Savarins. Do not be severe
on him. He is unhappy, he is struggling, he is soured. An artist has
thorns in his path which lookers-on do not heed."

"All people have thorns in their path, and I have no great respect for
those who want lookers-on to heed them whenever they are scratched.
But M. Rameau seems to me one of those writers very common nowadays, in
France and even in England; writers who have never read anything worth
studying, and are, of course, presumptuous in proportion to their
ignorance. I should not have thought an artist like yourself could have
recognized an artist in a M. Rameau who despises Tasso without knowing
Italian."

Graham spoke bitterly; he was once more jealous.

"Are you not an artist yourself? Are you not a writer? M. Savarin told
me you were a distinguished man of letters."

"M. Savarin flatters me too much. I am not an artist, and I have a great
dislike to that word as it is now hackneyed and vulgarized in England
and in France. A cook calls himself an artist; a tailor does the same; a
man writes a gaudy melodrame, a spasmodic song, a sensational novel,
and straightway he calls Himself an artist, and indulges in a pedantic
jargon about 'essence' and 'form,' assuring us that a poet we can
understand wants essence, and a poet we can scan wants form. Thank
heaven, I am not vain enough to call myself artist. I have written some
very dry lucubrations in periodicals, chiefly political, or critical
upon other subjects than art. But why, a propos of M. Rameau, did you
ask me that question respecting myself?"

"Because much in your conversation," answered Isaura, in rather a
mournful tone, "made me suppose you had more sympathies with art and its
cultivators than you cared to avow; and if you had such sympathies,
you would comprehend what a relief it is to a poor aspirant to art like
myself to come into communication with those who devote themselves to
any art distinct from the common pursuits of the world, what a relief
it is to escape from the ordinary talk of society. There is a sort of
instinctive freemasonry among us, including masters and disciples; and
one art has a fellowship with other arts. Mine is but song and music,
yet I feel attracted towards a sculptor, a painter, a romance-writer, a
poet, as much as towards a singer, a musician. Do you understand why
I cannot contemn M. Rameau as you do? I differ from his tastes in
literature; I do not much admire such of his writings as I have read;
I grant that he overestimates his own genius, whatever that be,--yet I
like to converse with him. He is a struggler upwards, though with weak
wings, or with erring footsteps, like myself."

"Mademoiselle," said Graham, earnestly, "I cannot say how I thank you
for this candour. Do not condemn me for abusing it, if--" he paused.

"If what?"

"If I, so much older than yourself,--I do not say only in years, but
in the experience of life, I whose lot is cast among those busy and
'positive' pursuits, which necessarily quicken that unromantic faculty
called common-sense,--if, I say, the deep interest with which you must
inspire all whom you admit into an acquaintance even as unfamiliar as
that now between us makes me utter one caution, such as might be uttered
by a friend or brother. Beware of those artistic sympathies which you so
touchingly confess; beware how, in the great events of life, you allow
fancy to misguide your reason. In choosing friends on whom to rely,
separate the artist from the human being. Judge of the human being for
what it is in itself. Do not worship the face on the waters, blind to
the image on the rock. In one word, never see in an artist like a M.
Rameau the human being to whom you could intrust the destinies of your
life. Pardon me, pardon me; we may meet little hereafter, but you are
a creature so utterly new to me, so wholly unlike any woman I have ever
before encountered and admired, and to me seem endowed with such wealth
of mind and soul, exposed to such hazard, that--that--" again he paused,
and his voice trembled as he concluded--"that it would be a deep sorrow
to me if, perhaps years hence, I should have to say, 'Alas'! by what
mistake has that wealth been wasted!'"

While they had thus conversed, mechanically they had turned away from
the house, and were again standing before the arbour.

Graham, absorbed in the passion of his adjuration, had not till now
looked into the face of the companion by his side. Now, when he had
concluded, and heard no reply, he bent down and saw that Isaura was
weeping silently.

His heart smote him.

"Forgive me," he exclaimed, drawing her hand into his; "I have had no
right to talk thus; but it was not from want of respect; it was--it
was--"

The hand which was yielded to his pressed it gently, timidly, chastely.

"Forgive!" murmured Isaura; "do you think that I, an orphan, have never
longed for a friend who would speak to me thus?" And so saying, she
lifted her eyes, streaming still, to his bended countenance,--eyes,
despite their tears, so clear in their innocent limpid beauty, so
ingenuous, so frank, so virgin-like, so unlike the eyes of 'any other
woman he had encountered and admired.'

"Alas!" he said, in quick and hurried accents, "you may remember, when
we have before conversed, how I, though so uncultured in your art, still
recognized its beautiful influence upon human breasts; how I sought to
combat your own depreciation of its rank among the elevating agencies
of humanity; how, too, I said that no man could venture to ask you to
renounce the boards, the lamps,--resign the fame of actress, of singer.
Well, now that you accord to me the title of friend, now that you so
touchingly remind me that you are an orphan, thinking of all the perils
the young and the beautiful of your sex must encounter when they abandon
private life for public, I think that a true friend might put the
question, 'Can you resign the fame of actress, of singer?'"

"I will answer you frankly. The profession which once seemed to me so
alluring began to lose its charms in my eyes some months ago. It was
your words, very eloquently expressed, on the ennobling effects of music
and song upon a popular audience, that counteracted the growing distaste
to rendering up my whole life to the vocation of the stage; but now I
think I should feel grateful to the friend whose advice interpreted the
voice of my own heart, and bade me relinquish the career of actress."

Graham's face grew radiant. But whatever might have been his reply was
arrested; voices and footsteps were heard behind. He turned round and
saw the Venosta, the Savarins, and Gustave Rameau.

Isaura heard and saw also, started in a sort of alarmed confusion, and
then instinctively retreated towards the arbour. Graham hurried on to
meet the Signora and the visitors, giving time to Isaura to compose
herself by arresting them in the pathway with conventional salutations.

A few minutes later Isaura joined them, and there was talk to which
Graham scarcely listened, though he shared in it by abstracted
monosyllables. He declined going into the house, and took leave at the
gate. In parting, his eyes fixed themselves on Isaura. Gustave Rameau
was by her side. That nosegay which had been left in the arbour was in
her hand; and though she was bending over it, she did not now pluck and
scatter the rose-leaves. Graham at that moment felt no jealousy of the
fair-faced young poet beside her.

As he walked slowly back, he muttered to himself, "But am I yet in the
position to hold myself wholly free? Am I, am I? Were the sole choice
before me that between her and ambition and wealth, how soon it would be
made! Ambition has no prize equal to the heart of such a woman; wealth
no sources of joy equal to the treasures of her love."




CHAPTER III.

FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

The day after I posted my last, Mr. Vane called on us. I was in
our little garden at the time. Our conversation was brief, and soon
interrupted by visitors,--the Savarins and M. Rameau. I long for your
answer. I wonder how he impressed you, if you have met him; how he would
impress, if you met him now. To me he is so different from all others;
and I scarcely know why his words ring in my ears, and his image rests
in my thoughts. It is strange altogether; for though he is young,
he speaks to me as if he were so much older than I,--so kindly, so
tenderly, yet as if I were a child, and much as the dear Maestro might
do, if he thought I needed caution or counsel. Do not fancy, Eulalie,
that there is any danger of my deceiving myself as to the nature of such
interest as he may take in me. Oh, no! There is a gulf between us there
which he does not lose sight of, and which we could not pass. How,
indeed, I could interest him at all, I cannot guess. A rich, high-born
Englishman, intent on political life; practical, prosaic--no, not
prosaic; but still with the kind of sense which does not admit into its
range of vision that world of dreams which is familiar as their daily
home to Romance and to Art. It has always seemed to me that for love,
love such as I conceive it, there must be a deep and constant sympathy
between two persons,--not, indeed, in the usual and ordinary trifles
of taste and sentiment, but in those essentials which form the root of
character, and branch out in all the leaves and blooms that expand to
the sunshine and shrink from the cold,--that the worldling should wed
the worldling, the artist the artist. Can the realist and the idealist
blend together, and hold together till death and beyond death? If not,
can there be true love between them?

By true love, I mean the love which interpenetrates the soul, and once
given can never die. Oh, Eulalie, answer me, answer!

P. S.--I have now fully made up my mind to renounce all thought of the
stage.


FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TOISAURA CICOGNA.

MY DEAR CHILD,--how your mind has grown since you left me, the sanguine
and aspiring votary of an art which, of all arts, brings the most
immediate reward to a successful cultivator, and is in itself so divine
in its immediate effects upon human souls! Who shall say what may be the
after-results of those effects which the waiters on posterity presume to
despise because they are immediate? A dull man, to whose mind a ray of
that vague starlight undetected in the atmosphere of workday life has
never yet travelled; to whom the philosopher, the preacher, the poet
appeal in vain,--nay, to whom the conceptions of the grandest master of
instrumental music are incomprehensible; to whom Beethoven unlocks no
portal in heaven; to whom Rossini has no mysteries on earth unsolved
by the critics of the pit,--suddenly hears the human voice of the human
singer, and at the sound of that voice the walls which enclosed him
fall. The something far from and beyond the routine of his commonplace
existence becomes known to him. He of himself, poor man, can make
nothing of it. He cannot put it down on paper, and say the next morning,
"I am an inch nearer to heaven than I was last night;" but the feeling
that he is an inch nearer to heaven abides with him. Unconsciously he
is gentler, he is less earthly, and, in being nearer to heaven, he is
stronger for earth. You singers do not seem to me to understand that you
have--to use your own word, so much in vogue that it has become abused
and trite--a mission! When you talk of missions, from whom comes the
mission? Not from men. If there be a mission from man to men, it must be
appointed from on high.

Think of all this; and in being faithful to your art, be true to
yourself. If you feel divided between that art and the art of the
writer, and acknowledge the first to be too exacting to admit a rival,
keep to that in which you are sure to excel. Alas, my fair child! do not
imagine that we writers feel a happiness in our pursuits and aims more
complete than that which you can command. If we care for fame (and, to
be frank, we all do), that fame does not come up before us face to
face, a real, visible, palpable form, as it does to the singer, to the
actress. I grant that it may be more enduring, but an endurance on
the length of which we dare not reckon. A writer cannot be sure of
immortality till his language itself be dead; and then he has but a
share in an uncertain lottery. Nothing but fragments remains of the
Phrynichus who rivalled AEschylus; of the Agathon who perhaps excelled
Euripides; of the Alcaeus, in whom Horace acknowledged a master and a
model; their renown is not in their works, it is but in their names.
And, after all, the names of singers and actors last perhaps as long.
Greece retains the name of Polus, Rome of Roscius, England of Garrick,
France of Talma, Italy of Pasta, more lastingly than posterity is likely
to retain mine. You address to me a question, which I have often put
to myself,--"What is the distinction between the writer and the reader,
when the reader says, 'These are my thoughts, these are my feelings;
the writer has stolen them, and clothed them in his own words'?" And
the more the reader says this, the more wide is the audience, the more
genuine the renown, and, paradox though it seems, the more consummate
the originality, of the writer. But no, it is not the mere gift of
expression, it is not the mere craft of the pen, it is not the mere
taste in arrangement of word and cadence, which thus enables the one
to interpret the mind, the heart, the soul of the many. It is a power
breathed into him as he lay in his cradle, and a power that gathered
around itself, as he grew up, all the influences he acquired, whether
from observation of external nature, or from study of men and books, or
from that experience of daily life which varies with every human being.
No education could make two intellects exactly alike, as no culture
can make two leaves exactly alike. How truly you describe the sense of
dissatisfaction which every writer of superior genius communicates
to his admirers! how truly do you feel that the greater is the
dissatisfaction in proportion to the writer's genius, and the admirer's
conception of it! But that is the mystery which makes--let me borrow a
German phrase--the cloud-land between the finite and the infinite.
The greatest philosopher, intent on the secrets of Nature, feels that
dissatisfaction in Nature herself. The finite cannot reduce into logic
and criticism the infinite.

Let us dismiss these matters, which perplex the reason, and approach
that which touches the heart, which in your case, my child, touches
the heart of woman. You speak of love, and deem that the love which
lasts--the household, the conjugal love--should be based upon such
sympathies of pursuit that the artist should wed the artist.

This is one of the questions you do well to address to me; for
whether from my own experience, or from that which I have gained from
observation extended over a wide range of life, and quickened and
intensified by the class of writing that I cultivate, and which
necessitates a calm study of the passions, I am an authority on such
subjects, better than most women can be. And alas, my child, I come to
this result: there is no prescribing to men or to women whom to select,
whom to refuse. I cannot refute the axiom of the ancient poet, "In love
there is no wherefore." But there is a time--it is often but a moment
of time--in which love is not yet a master, in which we can say, "I will
love, I will not love."

Now, if I could find you in such a moment, I would say to you, "Artist,
do not love, do not marry, an artist." Two artistic natures rarely
combine. The artistic nature is wonderfully exacting. I fear it is
supremely egotistical,--so jealously sensitive that it writhes at the
touch of a rival. Racine was the happiest of husbands; his wife adored
his genius, but could not understand his plays. Would Racine have been
happy if he had married a Corneille in petticoats? I who speak have
loved an artist, certainly equal to myself. I am sure that he loved
me. That sympathy in pursuits of which you speak drew us together, and
became very soon the cause of antipathy. To both of us the endeavour to
coalesce was misery.

I don't know your M. Rameau. Savarin has sent me some of his writings;
from these I judge that his only chance of happiness would be to marry a
commonplace woman, with separation de biens. He is, believe me, but
one of the many with whom New Paris abounds, who because they have the
infirmities of genius imagine they have its strength.

I come next to the Englishman. I see how serious is your questioning
about him. You not only regard him as a being distinct from the crowd of
a salon; he stands equally apart in the chamber of your thoughts,--you
do not mention him in the same letter as that which treats of Rameau and
Savarin. He has become already an image not to be lightly mixed up with
others. You would rather not have mentioned him at all to me, but you
could not resist it. The interest you feel in him so perplexed you, that
in a kind of feverish impatience you cry out to me, "Can you solve
the riddle? Did you ever know well Englishmen? Can an Englishman
be understood out of his island?" etc. Yes, I have known well many
Englishmen; in affairs of the heart they are much like all other men.
No; I do not know this Englishman in particular, nor any one of his
name.

Well, my child, let us frankly grant that this foreigner has gained some
hold on your thoughts, on your fancy, perhaps also on your heart. Do
not fear that he will love you less enduringly, or that you will become
alienated from him, because he is not an artist. If he be a strong
nature, and with some great purpose in life, your ambition will fuse
itself in his; and knowing you as I do, I believe you would make an
excellent wife to an Englishman whom you honoured as well as loved;
and sorry though I should be that you relinquished the singer's fame, I
should be consoled in thinking you safe in the woman's best sphere,--a
contented home, safe from calumny, safe from gossip. I never had that
home; and there has been no part in my author's life in which I would
not have given all the celebrity it won for the obscure commonplace of
such woman-lot. Could I move human beings as pawns on a chessboard, I
should indeed say that the most suitable and congenial mate for you, for
a woman of sentiment and genius, would be a well-born and well-educated
German; for such a German unites, with domestic habits and a strong
sense of family ties, a romance of sentiment, a love of art, a
predisposition towards the poetic side of life, which is very rare among
Englishmen of the same class. But as the German is not forthcoming, I
give my vote for the Englishman, provided only you love him. Ah, child,
be sure of that. Do not mistake fancy for love. All women do not require
love in marriage, but without it that which is best and highest in you
would wither and die. Write to me often and tell me all. M. Savarin is
right. My book is no longer my companion. It is gone from me, and I am
once more alone in the world.

Yours affectionately.

P. S.--Is not your postscript a woman's? Does it not require a woman's
postscript in reply? You say in yours that you have fully made up your
mind to renounce all thoughts of the stage. I ask in mine, "What has the
Englishman to do with that determination?"




CHAPTER IV.

Some weeks have passed since Graham's talk with Isaura in the garden;
he has not visited the villa since. His cousins the D'Altons have passed
through Paris on their way to Italy, meaning to stay a few days; they
stayed nearly a month, and monopolized much of Graham's companionship.
Both these were reasons why, in the habitual society of the Duke,
Graham's persuasion that he was not yet free to court the hand of
Isaura became strengthened, and with that persuasion necessarily came a
question equally addressed to his conscience. "If not yet free to court
her hand, am I free to expose myself to the temptation of seeking to win
her affection?" But when his cousin was gone, his heart began to assert
its own rights, to argue its own case, and suggest modes of reconciling
its dictates to the obligations which seemed to oppose them. In this
hesitating state of mind he received the following note:--

                     VILLA ------, LAC D'ENGHIEN.

MY DEAR MR. VANE,--We have retreated from Paris to the banks of this
beautiful little lake. Come and help to save Frank and myself from
quarrelling with each other, which, until the Rights of Women are firmly
established, married folks always will do when left to themselves,
especially if they are still lovers, as Frank and I are. Love is a
terribly quarrelsome thing. Make us a present of a few days out of your
wealth of time. We will visit Montmorency and the haunts of Rousseau,
sail on the lake at moonlight, dine at gypsy restaurants under trees
not yet embrowned by summer heats, discuss literature and politics,
"Shakspeare and the musical glasses,"--and be as sociable and pleasant
as Boccaccio's tale-tellers, at Fiesole. We shall be but a small party,
only the Savarins, that unconscious sage and humourist Signora Venosta,
and that dimple-cheeked Isaura, who embodies the song of nightingales
and the smile of summer. Refuse, and Frank shall not have an easy moment
till he sends in his claims for thirty millions against the Alabama.

           Yours, as you behave,
                  LIZZIE MORLEY.

Graham did not refuse. He went to Enghien for four days and a quarter.
He was under the same roof as Isaura. Oh, those happy days! so happy
that they defy description. But though to Graham the happiest days he
had ever known, they were happier still to Isaura. There were drawbacks
to his happiness, none to hers,--drawbacks partly from reasons the
weight of which the reader will estimate later; partly from reasons the
reader may at once comprehend and assess. In the sunshine of her joy,
all the vivid colourings of Isaura's artistic temperament came forth, so
that what I may call the homely, domestic woman-side of her nature faded
into shadow. If, my dear reader, whether you be man or woman, you have
come into familiar contact with some creature of a genius to which, even
assuming that you yourself have a genius in its own way, you have no
special affinities, have you not felt shy with that creature? Have
you not, perhaps, felt how intensely you could love that creature,
and doubted if that creature could possibly love you? Now I think that
shyness and that disbelief are common with either man or woman, if,
however conscious of superiority in the prose of life, he or she
recognizes inferiority in the poetry of it. And yet this self-abasement
is exceedingly mistaken. The poetical kind of genius is so grandly
indulgent, so inherently deferential, bows with such unaffected modesty
to the superiority in which it fears it may fail (yet seldom does
fail),--the superiority of common-sense. And when we come to women, what
marvellous truth is conveyed by the woman who has had no superior in
intellectual gifts among her own sex! Corinne, crowned at the Capitol,
selects out of the whole world as the hero of her love no rival poet and
enthusiast, but a cold-blooded, sensible Englishman.

Graham Vane, in his strong masculine form of intellect--Graham Vane,
from whom I hope much, if he live to fulfil his rightful career--had,
not unreasonably, the desire to dominate the life of the woman whom he
selected as the partner of his own; but the life of Isaura seemed to
escape him. If at moments, listening to her, he would say to himself,
"What a companion! life could never be dull with her," at other moments
he would say, "True, never dull, but would it be always safe?" And then
comes in that mysterious power of love which crushes all beneath its
feet, and makes us end self-commune by that abject submission of reason,
which only murmurs, "Better be unhappy with the one you love than
happy with one whom you do not." All such self-communes were unknown to
Isaura. She lived in the bliss of the hour. If Graham could have read
her heart, he would have dismissed all doubt whether he could dominate
her life. Could a Fate or an Angel have said to her, "Choose,--on one
side I promise you the glories of a Catalani, a Pasta, a Sappho, a De
Stael, a Georges Sand, all combined into one immortal name; or, on the
other side, the whole heart of the man who would estrange himself from
you if you had such combination of glories,"--her answer would have
brought Graham Vane to her feet. All scruples, all doubts, would have
vanished; he would have exclaimed, with the generosity inherent in the
higher order of man, "Be glorious, if your nature wills it so. Glory
enough to me that you would have resigned glory itself to become mine."
But how is it that men worth a woman's loving become so diffident
when they love intensely? Even in ordinary cases of love there is so
ineffable a delicacy in virgin woman, that a man, be he how refined
soever, feels himself rough and rude and coarse in comparison; and while
that sort of delicacy was pre-eminent in this Italian orphan, there
came, to increase the humility of the man so proud and so confident in
himself when he had only men to deal with, the consciousness that his
intellectual nature was hard and positive beside the angel-like purity
and the fairy-like play of hers.

There was a strong wish on the part of Mrs. Morley to bring about the
union of these two. She had a great regard and a great admiration for
both. To her mind, unconscious of all Graham's doubts and prejudices,
they were exactly suited to each other. A man of intellect so cultivated
as Graham's, if married to a commonplace English "Miss," would surely
feel as if life had no sunshine and no flowers. The love of an
Isaura would steep it in sunshine, pave it with flowers. Mrs. Morley
admitted--all American Republicans of gentle birth do admit--the
instincts which lead "like" to match with "like," an equality of blood
and race. With all her assertion of the Rights of Woman, I do not think
that Mrs. Morley would ever have conceived the possibility of consenting
that the richest and prettiest and cleverest girl in the States could
become the wife of a son of hers if the girl had the taint of negro
blood, even though shown nowhere save the slight distinguishing hue of
her finger-nails. So had Isaura's merits been threefold what they were
and she had been the wealthy heiress of a retail grocer, this fair
Republican would have opposed (more strongly than many an English
duchess, or at least a Scotch duke, would do, the wish of a son), the
thought of an alliance between Graham Vane and the grocer's daughter!
But Isaura was a Cicogna, an offspring of a very ancient and very noble
house. Disparities of fortune, or mere worldly position, Mrs. Morley
supremely despised. Here were the great parities of alliance,--parities
in years and good looks and mental culture. So, in short, she in the
invitation given to them had planned for the union between Isaura and
Graham. To this plan she had an antagonist, whom she did not even guess,
in Madame Savarin. That lady, as much attached to Isaura as was Mrs.
Morley herself, and still more desirous of seeing a girl, brilliant and
parentless, transferred from the companionship of Signora Venosta to the
protection of a husband, entertained no belief in the serious attentions
of Graham Vane. Perhaps she exaggerated his worldly advantages, perhaps
she undervalued the warmth of his affections; but it was not within the
range of her experience, confined much to Parisian life, nor in harmony
with her notions of the frigidity and morgue of the English national
character, that a rich and high-born young man, to whom a great career
in practical public life was predicted, should form a matrimonial
alliance with a foreign orphan girl, who, if of gentle birth, had no
useful connections, would bring no correspondent dot, and had been
reared and intended for the profession of the stage. She much more
feared that the result of any attentions on the part of such a man would
be rather calculated to compromise the orphan's name, or at least to
mislead her expectations, than to secure her the shelter of a wedded
home. Moreover, she had cherished plans of her own for Isaura's future.
Madame Savarin had conceived for Gustave Rameau a friendly regard,
stronger than that which Mrs. Morley entertained for Graham Vane, for
it was more motherly. Gustave had been familiarized to her sight and her
thoughts since he had first been launched into the literary world under
her husband's auspices; he had confided to her his mortification in
his failures, his joy in his successes. His beautiful countenance, his
delicate health, his very infirmities and defects, had endeared him
to her womanly heart. Isaura was the wife of all others who, in Madame
Savarin's opinion, was made for Rameau. Her fortune, so trivial beside
the wealth of the Englishman, would be a competence to Rameau; then
that competence might swell into vast riches if Isaura succeeded on the
stage. She found with extreme displeasure that Isaura's mind had become
estranged from the profession to which she had been destined, and
divined that a deference to the Englishman's prejudices had something to
do with that estrangement. It was not to be expected that a Frenchwoman,
wife to a sprightly man of letters, who had intimate friends and allies
in every department of the artistic world, should cherish any prejudice
whatever against the exercise of an art in which success achieved riches
and renown; but she was prejudiced, as most Frenchwomen are, against
allowing to unmarried girls the same freedom and independence of action
that are the rights of women--French women--when married; and she would
have disapproved the entrance of Isaura on her professional career until
she could enter it as a wife, the wife of an artist, the wife of Gustave
Rameau.

Unaware of the rivalry between these friendly diplomatists and schemers,
Graham and Isaura glided hourly more and more down the current, which as
yet ran smooth. No words by which love is spoken were exchanged between
them; in fact, though constantly together, they were very rarely,
and then but for moments, alone with each other. Mrs. Morley artfully
schemed more than once to give them such opportunities for that mutual
explanation of heart which, she saw, had not yet taken place; with art
more practised and more watchful, Madame Savarin contrived to baffle her
hostess's intention. But, indeed, neither Graham nor Isaura sought to
make opportunities for themselves. He, as we know, did not deem himself
wholly justified in uttering the words of love by which a man of honour
binds himself for life; and she!--what girl pure-hearted and loving
truly does not shrink from seeking the opportunities which it is for
the man to court? Yet Isaura needed no words to tell her that she was
loved,--no, nor even a pressure of the hand, a glance of the eye; she
felt it instinctively, mysteriously, by the glow of her own being in
the presence of her lover. She knew that she herself could not so love
unless she were beloved.

Here woman's wit is keener and truthfuller than man's. Graham, as I have
said, did not feel confident that he had reached the heart of Isaura.
He was conscious that he had engaged her interest, that he had
attracted her fancy; but often, when charmed by the joyous play of her
imagination, he would sigh to himself, "To natures so gifted what single
mortal can be the all in all."

They spent the summer mornings in excursions round the beautiful
neighbourhood, dined early, and sailed on the calm lake at moonlight.
Their talk was such as might be expected from lovers of books in summer
holidays. Savarin was a critic by profession; Graham Vane, if not that,
at least owed such literary reputation as he had yet gained to essays in
which the rare critical faculty was conspicuously developed.

It was pleasant to hear the clash of these two minds encountering each
other; they differed perhaps less in opinions than in the mode by which
opinions are discussed. The Englishman's range of reading was wider than
the Frenchman's, and his scholarship more accurate; but the Frenchman
had a compact neatness of expression, a light and nimble grace,
whether in the advancing or the retreat of his argument, which covered
deficiencies, and often made them appear like merits. Graham was
compelled, indeed, to relinquish many of the forces of superior
knowledge or graver eloquence, which with less lively antagonists he
could have brought into the field, for the witty sarcasm of Savarin
would have turned them aside as pedantry or declamation. But though
Graham was neither dry nor diffuse, and the happiness at his
heart brought out the gayety of humour which had been his early
characteristic, and yet rendered his familiar intercourse genial
and playful, still there was this distinction between his humour and
Savarin's wit,--that in the first there was always something earnest, in
the last always something mocking. And in criticism Graham seemed ever
anxious to bring out a latent beauty, even in writers comparatively
neglected; Savarin was acutest when dragging forth a blemish never
before discovered in writers universally read.

Graham did not perhaps notice the profound attention with which
Isaura listened to him in these intellectual skirmishes with the more
glittering Parisian. There was this distinction she made between him
and Savarin,--when the last spoke she often chimed in with some happy
sentiment of her own; but she never interrupted Graham, never intimated
a dissent from his theories of art, or the deductions he drew from them;
and she would remain silent and thoughtful for some minutes when his
voice ceased. There was passing from his mind into hers an ambition
which she imagined, poor girl, that he would be pleased to think he had
inspired, and which might become a new bond of sympathy between them.
But as yet the ambition was vague and timid,--an idea or a dream to be
fulfilled in some indefinite future.

The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after
staying out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering
still on the lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted
to superficial studies of the positive sciences, including, of course,
the most popular of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening
to speculative conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of
Sirius, that very distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who
has led philosophers into mortifying reflections upon the utter
insignificance of our own poor little planet, capable of producing
nothing greater than Shakspeares and Newtons, Aristotles and
Caesars,--mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects proportioned to the
size of the world in which they flourish.

As it chanced, Isaura and Graham were then standing close to each other
and a little apart from the rest. "It is very strange," said Graham,
laughing low, "how little I care about Sirius. He is the sun of
some other system, and is perhaps not habitable at all, except by
Salamanders. He cannot be one of the stars with which I have established
familiar acquaintance, associated with fancies and dreams and hopes,
as most of us do, for instance, with Hesperus, the moon's harbinger and
comrade. But amid all those stars there is one--not Hesperus--which has
always had from my childhood a mysterious fascination for me. Knowing as
little of astrology as I do of astronomy, when I gaze upon that star I
become credulously superstitious, and fancy it has an influence on my
life. Have you, too, any favourite star?"

"Yes," said Isaura; "and I distinguish it now, but I do not even know
its name, and never would ask it."

"So like me. I would not vulgarize my unknown source of beautiful
illusions by giving it the name it takes in technical catalogues.
For fear of learning that name I never have pointed it out to any
one before. I too at this moment distinguish it apart from all its
brotherhood. Tell me which is yours."

Isaura pointed and explained. The Englishman was startled. By what
strange coincidence could they both have singled out from all the host
of heaven the same favourite star? "Cher Vane," cried Savarin, "Colonel
Morley declares that what America is to the terrestrial system Sirius is
to the heavenly. America is to extinguish Europe, and then Sirius is to
extinguish the world."

"Not for some millions of years; time to look about us," said the
Colonel, gravely. "But I certainly differ from those who maintain that
Sirius recedes from us. I say that he approaches. The principles of a
body so enlightened must be those of progress." Then addressing Graham
in English, he added, "there will be a mulling in this fogified planet
some day, I predicate. Sirius is a keener!"

"I have not imagination lively enough to interest myself in the
destinies of Sirius in connection with our planet at a date so remote,"
said Graham, smiling. Then he added in a whisper to Isaura, "My
imagination does not carry me further than to wonder whether this day
twelvemonth--the 8th of July-we two shall both be singling out that same
star, and gazing on it as now, side by side."

This was the sole utterance of that sentiment in which the romance of
love is so rich that the Englishman addressed to Isaura during those
memorable summer days at Enghien.




CHAPTER V.

The next morning the party broke up. Letters had been delivered both to
Savarin and to Graham, which, even had the day for departure not been
fixed, would have summoned them away. On reading his letter, Savarin's
brow became clouded. He made a sign to his wife after breakfast, and
wandered away with her down an alley in the little garden. His trouble
was of that nature which a wife either soothes or aggravates, according
sometimes to her habitual frame of mind, sometimes to the mood of
temper in which she may chance to be,--a household trouble, a pecuniary
trouble.

Savarin was by no means an extravagant man. His mode of living, though
elegant and hospitable, was modest compared to that of many French
authors inferior to himself in the fame which at Paris brings a very
good return in francs; but his station itself as the head of a powerful
literary clique necessitated many expenses which were too congenial to
his extreme good-nature to be regulated by strict prudence. His hand was
always open to distressed writers and struggling artists, and his sole
income was derived from his pen and a journal in which he was chief
editor and formerly sole proprietor. But that journal had of late
not prospered. He had sold or pledged a considerable share in the
proprietorship. He had been compelled also to borrow a sum large for
him, and the debt obtained from a retired bourgeois who lent out his
moneys "by way," he said, "of maintaining an excitement and interest
in life," would in a few days become due. The letter was not from that
creditor; but it was from his publisher, containing a very disagreeable
statement of accounts, pressing for settlement, and declining an offer
of Savarin for a new book (not yet begun) except upon terms that the
author valued himself too highly to accept. Altogether, the situation
was unpleasant. There were many times in which Madame Savarin presumed
to scold her distinguished husband for his want of prudence and thrift.
But those were never the times when scolding could be of no use.
It could clearly be of no use now. Now was the moment to cheer and
encourage him; to reassure him as to his own undiminished powers and
popularity, for he talked dejectedly of himself as obsolete and passing
out of fashion; to convince him also of the impossibility that the
ungrateful publisher whom Savarin's more brilliant successes had
enriched could encounter the odium of hostile proceedings; and to
remind him of all the authors, all the artists, whom he in their earlier
difficulties had so liberally assisted, and from whom a sum sufficing to
pay the bourgeois creditor when the day arrived could now be honourably
asked and would be readily contributed. In this last suggestion the
homely prudent good-sense of Madame Savarin failed her. She did not
comprehend that delicate pride of honour which, with all his Parisian
frivolities and cynicism, dignified the Parisian man of genius. Savarin
could not, to save his neck from a rope, have sent round the begging-hat
to friends whom he had obliged. Madame Savarin was one of those women
with large-lobed ears, who can be wonderfully affectionate, wonderfully
sensible, admirable wives and mothers, and yet are deficient in artistic
sympathies with artistic natures. Still, a really good honest wife is
such an incalculable blessing to her lord, that, at the end of the talk
in the solitary alley, this man of exquisite finesse, of the undefinably
high-bred temperament, and, alas! the painful morbid susceptibility,
which belongs to the genuine artistic character, emerged into the open
sunlit lawn with his crest uplifted, his lip curved upward in its joyous
mockery, and perfectly persuaded that somehow or other he should put
down the offensive publisher, and pay off the unoffending creditor when
the day for payment came. Still he had judgment enough to know that to
do this he must get back to Paris, and could not dawdle away precious
hours in discussing the principles of poetry with Graham Vane.

There was only one thing, apart from "the begging-hat," in which Savarin
dissented from his wife.--She suggested his starting a new journal in
conjunction with Gustave Rameau, upon whose genius and the expectations
to be formed from it (here she was tacitly thinking of Isaura wedded to
Rameau, and more than a Malibran on the stage) she insisted vehemently.
Savarin did not thus estimate Gustave Rameau, thought him a clever,
promising young writer in a very bad school of writing, who might do
well some day or other. But that a Rameau could help a Savarin to make
a fortune! No; at that idea he opened his eyes, patted his wife's
shoulder, and called her "enfant."

Graham's letter was from M. Renard, and ran thus:--

   MONSIEUR,--I had the honour to call at your apartment this morning,
   and I write this line to the address given to me by your concierge
   to say that I have been fortunate enough to ascertain that the
   relation of the missing lady is now at Paris. I shall hold myself
   in readiness to attend your summons. Deign to accept, Monsieur, the
   assurance of my profound consideration.
                       J. RENARD.

This communication sufficed to put Graham into very high spirits.
Anything that promised success to his research seemed to deliver his
thoughts from a burden and his will from a fetter. Perhaps in a few days
he might frankly and honourably say to Isaura words which would justify
his retaining longer, and pressing more ardently, the delicate hand
which trembled in his as they took leave.

On arriving at Paris, Graham despatched a note to M. Renard requesting
to see him, and received a brief line in reply that M. Renard feared he
should be detained on other and important business till the evening,
but hoped to call at eight o'clock. A few minutes before that hour he
entered Graham's apartment.

"You have discovered the uncle of Louise Duval!" exclaimed Graham; "of
course you mean M. de Mauleon, and he is at Paris?"

"True so far, Monsieur; but do not be too sanguine as to the results of
the information I can give you. Permit me, as briefly as possible, to
state the circumstances. When you acquainted me with the fact that M. de
Mauleon was the uncle of Louise Duval, I told you that I was not without
hopes of finding him out, though so long absent from Paris. I will
now explain why. Some months ago, one of my colleagues engaged in the
political department (which I am not) was sent to Lyons, in consequence
of some suspicions conceived by the loyal authorities there of a plot
against the emperor's life. The suspicions were groundless, the plot a
mare's nest. But my colleague's attention was especially drawn towards
a man not mixed up with the circumstances from which a plot had been
inferred, but deemed in some way or other a dangerous enemy to the
Government. Ostensibly, he exercised a modest and small calling as a
sort of courtier or agent de change; but it was noticed that certain
persons familiarly frequenting his apartment, or to whose houses he used
to go at night, were disaffected to the Government,--not by any means
of the lowest rank,--some of them rich malcontents who had been devoted
Orleanists; others, disappointed aspirants to office or the 'cross;'
one or two well-born and opulent fanatics dreaming of another Republic.
Certain very able articles in the journals of the excitable Midi,
though bearing another signature, were composed or dictated by this
man,--articles evading the censure and penalties of the law, but very
mischievous in their tone. All who had come into familiar communication
with this person were impressed with a sense of his powers; and also
with a vague belief that he belonged to a higher class in breeding and
education than that of a petty agent de change. My colleague set himself
to watch the man, and took occasions of business at his little office to
enter into talk with him. Not by personal appearance, but by voice, he
came to a conclusion that the man was not wholly a stranger to him,--a
peculiar voice with a slight Norman breadth of pronunciation, though a
Parisian accent; a voice very low, yet very distinct; very masculine,
yet very gentle. My colleague was puzzled till late one evening
he observed the man coming out of the house of one of these rich
malcontents, the rich malcontent himself accompanying him. My colleague,
availing himself of the dimness of light, as the two passed into a lane
which led to the agent's apartment, contrived to keep close behind and
listen to their conversation; but of this he heard nothing,--only,
when at the end of the lane, the rich man turned abruptly, shook his
companion warmly by the hand, and parted from him, saying, 'Never fear;
all shall go right with you, my dear Victor.' At the sound of that
name 'Victor,' my colleague's memories, before so confused, became
instantaneously clear. Previous to entering our service, he had been in
the horse business, a votary of the turf; as such he had often seen the
brilliant 'sportman,' Victor de Mauleon; sometimes talked to him. Yes,
that was the voice,--the slight Norman intonation (Victor de Mauleon's
father had it strongly, and Victor had passed some of his early
childhood in Normandy), the subdued modulation of speech which had
made so polite the offence to men, or so winning the courtship to
women,--that was Victor de Mauleon. But why there in that disguise? What
was his real business and object? My confrere had no time allowed to him
to prosecute such inquiries. Whether Victor or the rich malcontent had
observed him at their heels, and feared he might have overheard their
words, I know not; but the next day appeared in one of the popular
journals circulating among the ouvriers a paragraph stating that a
Paris spy had been seen at Lyons, warning all honest men against his
machinations, and containing a tolerably accurate description of his
person. And that very day, on venturing forth, my estimable colleague
suddenly found himself hustled by a ferocious throng, from whose hands
he was with great difficulty rescued by the municipal guard. He left
Lyons that night; and for recompense of his services received a sharp
reprimand from his chief. He had committed the worst offence in our
profession, trop de zele. Having only heard the outlines of this story
from another, I repaired to my confrere after my last interview with
Monsieur, and learned what I now tell you from his own lips. As he was
not in my branch of the service, I could not order him to return to
Lyons; and I doubt whether his chief would have allowed it. But I went
to Lyons myself, and there ascertained that our supposed Vicomte had
left that town for Paris some months ago, not long after the adventure
of my colleague. The man bore a very good character generally,--was
said to be very honest and inoffensive; and the notice taken of him by
persons of higher rank was attributed generally to a respect for his
talents, and not on account of any sympathy in political opinions. I
found that the confrere mentioned, and who alone could identify M. de
Mauleon in the disguise which the Vicomte had assumed, was absent on one
of those missions abroad in which he is chiefly employed. I had to wait
for his return, and it was only the day before yesterday that I obtained
the following particulars. M. de Mauleon bears the same name as he
did at Lyons,--that name is Jean Lebeau; he exercises the ostensible
profession of a 'letter-writer,' and a sort of adviser on business among
the workmen and petty bourgeoisie, and he nightly frequents the cafe
Jean Jacques, Rue Faubourg Montmartre. It is not yet quite half-past
eight, and, no doubt, you could see him at the cafe this very night, if
you thought proper to go."

"Excellent! I will go! Describe him!"

"Alas! that is exactly what I cannot do at present; for after hearing
what I now tell you, I put the same request you do to my colleague,
when, before he could answer me, he was summoned to the bureau of his
chief, promising to return and give me the requisite description. He did
not return; and I find that he was compelled, on quitting his chief,
to seize the first train starting for Lille upon an important political
investigation which brooked no delay. He will be back in a few days, and
then Monsieur shall have the description."

"Nay; I think I will seize time by the forelock, and try my chance
tonight. If the man be really a conspirator, and it looks likely enough,
who knows but what he may see quick reason to take alarm and vanish from
Paris at any hour?--Cafe Jean Jacques, Rue ------; I will go. Stay; you
have seen Victor de Mauleon in his youth: what was he like then?"

"Tall, slender, but broad-shouldered, very erect, carrying his head
high, a profusion of dark curls, a small black mustache, fair clear
complexion, light-coloured eyes with dark lashes, fort bel homme. But he
will not look like that now."

"His present age?"

"Forty-seven or forty-eight. But before you go, I must beg you to
consider well what you are about. It is evident that M. de Mauleon has
some strong reason, whatever it be, for merging his identity in that of
Jean Lebeau. I presume, therefore, that you could scarcely go up to
M. Lebeau, when you have discovered him, and say, 'Pray, Monsieur le
Vicomte, can you give me some tidings of your niece, Louise Duval?' If
you thus accosted him, you might possibly bring some danger on yourself,
but you would certainly gain no information from him."

"True."

"On the other hand, if you make his acquaintance as M. Lebeau, how can
you assume him to know anything about Louise Duval?"

"Parbleu! Monsieur Renard, you try to toss me aside on both horns of the
dilemma; but it seems to me that, if I once make his acquaintance as M.
Lebeau, I might gradually and cautiously feel my way as to the best mode
of putting the question to which I seek reply. I suppose, too, that the
man must be in very poor circumstances to adopt so humble a calling, and
that a small sum of money may smooth all difficulties."

"I am not so sure of that," said M. Renard, thoughtfully; "but grant
that money may do so, and grant also that the Vicomte, being a needy
man, has become a very unscrupulous one,--is there anything in your
motives for discovering Louise Duval which might occasion you trouble
and annoyance, if it were divined by a needy and unscrupulous man;
anything which might give him a power of threat or exaction? Mind, I am
not asking you to tell me any secret you have reasons for concealing,
but I suggest that it might be prudent if you did not let M. Lebeau know
your real name and rank; if, in short, you could follow his example, and
adopt a disguise. But no; when I think of it, you would doubtless be so
unpractised in the art of disguise that he would detect you at once
to be other than you seem; and if suspecting you of spying into his
secrets, and if those secrets be really of a political nature, your very
life might not be safe."

"Thank you for your hint; the disguise is an excellent idea, and
combines amusement with precaution. That this Victor de Mauleon must
be a very unprincipled and dangerous man is, I think, abundantly clear.
Granting that he was innocent of all design of robbery in the affair
of the jewels, still, the offence which he did own--that of admitting
himself at night by a false key into the rooms of a wife, whom he sought
to surprise or terrify into dishonour--was a villanous action; and his
present course of life is sufficiently mysterious to warrant the
most unfavourable supposition. Besides, there is another motive for
concealing my name from him: you say that he once had a duel with a
Vane, who was very probably my father, and I have no wish to expose
myself to the chance of his turning up in London some day, and seeking
to renew there the acquaintance that I had courted at Paris. As for my
skill in playing any part I may assume, do not fear; I am no novice in
that. In my younger days I was thought clever in private theatricals,
especially in the transformations of appearance which belong to light
comedy and farce. Wait a few minutes, and you shall see."

Graham then retreated into his bedroom, and in a few minutes reappeared
so changed, that Renard at first glance took him for a stranger. He had
doffed his dress--which habitually, when in Capitals, was characterized
by the quiet, indefinable elegance that to a man of the great world,
high-bred and young, seems "to the manner born"--for one of those coarse
suits which Englishmen are wont to wear in their travels, and by which
they are represented in French or German caricatures,--loose jacket of
tweed with redundant pockets, waistcoat to match, short dust-coloured
trousers. He had combed his hair straight over his forehead, which, as I
have said somewhere before, appeared in itself to alter the character
of his countenance, and, without any resort to paints or cosmetics,
had somehow or other given to the expression of his face an impudent,
low-bred expression, with a glass screwed on to his right eye,--such a
look as a cockney journeyman, wishing to pass for a "swell" about town,
may cast on a servant-maid in the pit of a suburban theatre.

"Will it do, old fellow?" he exclaimed, in a rollicking, swaggering tone
of voice, speaking French with a villanous British accent.

"Perfectly," said Renard, laughing. "I offer my compliments, and if ever
you are ruined, Monsieur, I will promise you a place in our police. Only
one caution,--take care not to overdo your part."

"Right. A quarter to nine; I'm off."




CHAPTER VI.

There is generally a brisk exhilaration of spirits in the return to any
special amusement or light accomplishment associated with the pleasant
memories of earlier youth; and remarkably so, I believe, when the
amusement or accomplishment has been that of the amateur stage-player.
Certainly I have known persons of very grave pursuits, of very dignified
character and position, who seem to regain the vivacity of boyhood when
disguising look and voice for a part in some drawing-room comedy or
charade. I might name statesmen of solemn repute rejoicing to raise and
to join in a laugh at their expense in such travesty of their habitual
selves.

The reader must not therefore be surprised, nor, I trust, deem it
inconsistent with the more serious attributes of Graham's character, if
the Englishman felt the sort of joyful excitement I describe, as, in his
way to the cafe Jean Jacques, he meditated the role he had undertaken;
and the joyousness was heightened beyond the mere holiday sense of
humouristic pleasantry by the sanguine hope that much to effect his
lasting happiness might result from the success of the object for which
his disguise was assumed.

It was just twenty minutes past nine when he arrived at the cafe Jean
Jacques. He dismissed the fiacre and entered.

The apartment devoted to customers comprised two large rooms. The first
was the cafe properly speaking; the second, opening on it, was the
billiard-room. Conjecturing that he should probably find the person
of whom he was in quest employed at the billiard-table, Graham passed
thither at once. A tall man, who might be seven-and-forty, with a long
black beard, slightly grizzled, was at play with a young man of perhaps
twenty-eight, who gave him odds,--as better players of twenty-eight
ought to give odds to a player, though originally of equal force, whose
eye is not so quick, whose hand is not so steady, as they were twenty
years ago. Said Graham to himself, "The bearded man is my Vicomte." He
called for a cup of coffee, and seated himself on a bench at the end of
the room.

The bearded man was far behind in the game. It was his turn to play; the
balls were placed in the most awkward position for him. Graham himself
was a fair billiard-player, both in the English and the French game.
He said to himself, "No man who can make a cannon there should accept
odds." The bearded man made a cannon; the bearded man continued to make
cannons; the bearded man did not stop till he had won the game. The
gallery of spectators was enthusiastic. Taking care to speak in very
bad, very English-French, Graham expressed to one of the enthusiasts
seated beside him his admiration of the bearded man's playing, and
ventured to ask if the bearded man were a professional or an amateur
player.

"Monsieur," replied the enthusiast, taking a short cutty-pipe from his
mouth, "it is an amateur, who has been a great player in his day, and is
so proud that he always takes less odds than he ought of a younger man.
It is not once in a month that he comes out as he has done to-night; but
to-night he has steadied his hand. He has had six petits verres."

"Ah, indeed! Do you know his name?"

"I should think so: he buried my father, my two aunts, and my wife."

"Buried?" said Graham, more and more British in his accent; "I don't
understand."

"Monsieur, you are English."

"I confess it."

"And a stranger to the Faubourg Montmartre."

"True."

"Or you would have heard of M. Giraud, the liveliest member of the State
Company for conducting funerals. They are going to play La Poule."

Much disconcerted, Graham retreated into the cafe, and seated himself
haphazard at one of the small tables. Glancing round the room, he saw no
one in whom he could conjecture the once brilliant Vicomte.

The company appeared to him sufficiently decent, and especially what may
be called local. There were some blouses drinking wine, no doubt of the
cheapest and thinnest; some in rough, coarse dresses, drinking beer.
These were evidently English, Belgian, or German artisans. At one table,
four young men, who looked like small journeymen, were playing cards.
At three other tables, men older, better dressed, probably shop-keepers,
were playing dominos. Graham scrutinized these last, but among them
all could detect no one corresponding to his ideal of the Vicomte de
Mauleon. "Probably," thought he, "I am too late, or perhaps he will not
be here this evening. At all events, I will wait a quarter of an hour."
Then, the garcon approaching his table, he deemed it necessary to call
for something, and, still in strong English accent, asked for lemonade
and an evening journal. The garcon nodded and went his way. A monsieur
at the round table next his own politely handed to him the "Galignani,"
saying in very good English, though unmistakably the good English of a
Frenchman, "The English journal, at your service."

Graham bowed his head, accepted the "Galignani," and inspected his
courteous neighbour. A more respectable-looking man no Englishman could
see in an English country town. He wore an unpretending flaxen wig, with
limp whiskers that met at the chin, and might originally have been
the same colour as the wig, but were now of a pale gray,--no beard,
no mustache. He was dressed with the scrupulous cleanliness of a sober
citizen,--a high white neckcloth, with a large old-fashioned pin,
containing a little knot of hair covered with glass or crystal,
and bordered with a black framework, in which were inscribed
letters,--evidently a mourning pin, hallowed to the memory of lost
spouse or child,--a man who, in England, might be the mayor of a
cathedral town, at least the town-clerk. He seemed suffering from some
infirmity of vision, for he wore green spectacles. The expression of
his face was very mild and gentle; apparently he was about sixty years
old,--somewhat more.

Graham took kindly to his neighbour, insomuch that, in return for the
"Galignani," he offered him a cigar, lighting one himself.

His neighbour refused politely.

"Merci! I never smoke, never; mon medecin forbids it. If I could be
tempted, it would be by, an English cigar. Ah, how you English beat us
in all things,--your ships, your iron, your tabac,--which you do not
grow!"

This speech rendered literally as we now render it may give the idea of
a somewhat vulgar speaker. But there was something in the man's manner,
in his smile, in his courtesy, which did not strike Graham as vulgar;
on the contrary, he thought within himself, "How instinctive to all
Frenchmen good breeding is!"

Before, however, Graham had time to explain to his amiable neighbour
the politico-economical principle according to which England, growing no
tobacco, had tobacco much better than France, which did grow it, a rosy
middle-aged monsieur made his appearance, saying hurriedly to Graham's
neighbour, "I'm afraid I'm late, but there is still a good half-hour
before us if you will give me my revenge."

"Willingly, Monsieur Georges. Garcon, the dominos."

"Have you been playing at billiards?" asked M. Georges.

"Yes, two games."

"With success?"

"I won the first, and lost the second through the defect of my
eyesight; the game depended on a stroke which would have been easy to an
infant,--I missed it."

Here the dominos arrived, and M. Georges began shuffling them; the other
turned to Graham and asked politely if he understood the game.

"A little, but not enough to comprehend why it is said to require so
much skill."

"It is chiefly an affair of memory with me; but M. Georges, my opponent,
has the talent of combination, which I have not."

"Nevertheless," replied M. Georges, gruffly, "you are not easily beaten;
it is for you to play first, Monsieur Lebeau." Graham almost started.
Was it possible! This mild, limp-whiskered, flaxen-wigged man Victor de
Mauleon, the Don Juan of his time; the last person in the room he should
have guessed. Yet, now examining his neighbour with more attentive
eye, he wondered at his stupidity in not having recognized at once the
ci-devant gentilhomme and beau garcon. It happens frequently that our
imagination plays us this trick; we form to ourselves an idea of some
one eminent for good or for evil,--a poet, a statesman, a general, a
murderer, a swindler, a thief. The man is before us, and our ideas have
gone into so different a groove that he does not excite a suspicion; we
are told who he is, and immediately detect a thousand things that ought
to have proved his identity.

Looking thus again with rectified vision at the false Lebeau, Graham
observed an elegance and delicacy of feature which might, in youth, have
made the countenance very handsome, and rendered it still good-looking,
nay, prepossessing. He now noticed, too, the slight Norman accent,
its native harshness of breadth subdued into the modulated tones which
bespoke the habits of polished society. Above all, as M. Lebeau moved
his dominos with one hand, not shielding his pieces with the other (as
M. Georges warily did), but allowing it to rest carelessly on the table,
he detected the hands of the French aristocrat,--hands that had never
done work; never (like those of the English noble of equal birth) been
embrowned or freckled, or roughened or enlarged by early practice in
athletic sports; but hands seldom seen save in the higher circles of
Parisian life,--partly perhaps of hereditary formation, partly owing
their texture to great care begun in early youth, and continued
mechanically in after life,--with long taper fingers and polished nails;
white and delicate as those of a woman, but not slight, not feeble;
nervous and sinewy as those of a practised swordsman.

Graham watched the play, and Lebeau good-naturedly explained to him
its complications as it proceeded; though the explanation, diligently
attended to by M. Georges, lost Lebeau the game.

The dominos were again shuffled, and during that operation M. Georges
said, "By the way, Monsieur Lebeau, you promised to find me a locataire
for my second floor; have you succeeded?"

"Not yet. Perhaps you had better advertise in 'Les Petites Affiches.'
You ask too much for the habitues of this neighbourhood,--one hundred
francs a month."

"But the lodging is furnished, and well too, and has four rooms. One
hundred francs are not much."

A thought flashed upon Graham. "Pardon, Monsieur," he said, "have you an
appartement de garcon to let furnished?"

"Yes, Monsieur, a charming one. Are you in search of an apartment?"

"I have some idea of taking one, but only by the month. I am but just
arrived at Paris, and I have business which may keep me here a few
weeks. I do but require a bedroom and a small cabinet, and the rent must
be modest. I am not a milord."

"I am sure we could arrange, Monsieur," said M. Georges, "though I
could not well divide my logement. But one hundred francs a month is not
much!"

"I fear it is more than I can afford; however, if you will give me your
address, I will call and see the rooms,--say the day after to-morrow.
Between this and then, I expect letters which may more clearly decide my
movements."

"If the apartments suit you," said M. Lebeau, "you will at least be in
the house of a very honest man, which is more than can be said of every
one who lets furnished apartments. The house, too, has a concierge, with
a handy wife who will arrange your rooms and provide you with coffee--or
tea, which you English prefer--if you breakfast at home." Here M.
Georges handed a card to Graham, and asked what hour he would call.

"About twelve, if that hour is convenient," said Graham, rising. "I
presume there is a restaurant in the neighbourhood where I could dine
reasonably."

"Je crois bien, half-a-dozen. I can recommend to you one where you can
dine en prince for thirty sous. And if you are at Paris on business,
and want any letters written in private, I can also recommend to you my
friend here, M. Lebeau. Ay, and on affairs his advice is as good as a
lawyer's, and his fee a bagatelle."

"Don't believe all that Monsieur Georges so flatteringly says of me,"
put in M. Lebeau, with a modest half-smile, and in English. "I should
tell you that I, like yourself, am recently arrived at Paris, having
bought the business and goodwill of my predecessor in the apartment I
occupy; and it is only to the respect due to his antecedents, and on the
score of a few letters of recommendation which I bring from Lyons,
that I can attribute the confidence shown to me, a stranger in this
neighbourhood. Still I have some knowledge of the world, and I am always
glad if I can be of service to the English. I love the English"--he said
this with a sort of melancholy earnestness which seemed sincere; and
then added in a more careless tone,--"I have met with much kindness from
them in the course of a chequered life."

"You seem a very good fellow,--in fact, a regular trump, Monsieur
Lebeau," replied Graham, in the same language. "Give me your address. To
say truth, I am a very poor French scholar, as you must have seen, and
am awfully bother-headed how to manage some correspondence on matters
with which I am entrusted by my employer, so that it is a lucky chance
which has brought me acquainted with you."

M. Lebeau inclined his head gracefully, and drew from a very neat
morocco case a card, which Graham took and pocketed. Then he paid for
his coffee and lemonade, and returned home well satisfied with the
evening's adventure.




CHAPTER VII.

The next morning Graham sent for M. Renard, and consulted with that
experienced functionary as to the details of the plan of action which he
had revolved during the hours of a sleepless night.

"In conformity with your advice," said he, "not to expose myself to the
chance of future annoyance, by confiding to a man so dangerous as the
false Lebeau my name and address, I propose to take the lodging offered
to me, as Mr. Lamb, an attorney's clerk, commissioned to get in
certain debts, and transact other matters of business, on behalf of
his employer's clients. I suppose there will be no difficulty with the
police in this change of name, now that passports for the English are
not necessary?"

"Certainly not. You will have no trouble in that respect."

"I shall thus be enabled very naturally to improve acquaintance with the
professional letter-writer, and find an easy opportunity to introduce
the name of Louise Duval. My chief difficulty, I fear, not being a
practical actor, will be to keep up consistently the queer sort of
language I have adopted, both in French and in English. I have too sharp
a critic in a man so consummate himself in stage trick and disguise
as M. Lebeau not to feel the necessity of getting through my role as
quickly as I can. Meanwhile, can you recommend me to some magasin
where I can obtain a suitable change of costume? I can't always wear a
travelling suit, and I must buy linen of coarser texture than mine, and
with the initials of my new name inscribed on it."

"Quite right to study such details; I will introduce you to a magasin
near the Temple, where you will find all you want."

"Next, have you any friends or relations in the provinces unknown to
M. Lebeau, to whom I might be supposed to write about debts or business
matters, and from whom I might have replies?"

"I will think over it, and manage that for you very easily. Your letters
shall find their way to me, and I will dictate the answers."

After some further conversation on that business, M. Renard made an
appointment to meet Graham at a cafe near the Temple later in the
afternoon, and took his departure.

Graham then informed his laquais de place that, though he kept on his
lodgings, he was going into the country for a few days, and should not
want the man's services till he returned. He therefore dismissed and
paid him off at once, so that the laquais might not observe, when he
quitted his rooms the next day, that he took with him no change of
clothes, etc.




CHAPTER VIII.

Graham Vane has been for some days in the apartment rented of M.
Georges. He takes it in the name of Mr. Lamb,--a name wisely chosen,
less common than Thompson and Smith, less likely to be supposed an
assumed name, yet common enough not to be able easily to trace it to any
special family. He appears, as he had proposed, in the character of an
agent employed by a solicitor in London to execute sundry commissions
and to collect certain outstanding debts. There is no need to mention
the name of the solicitor; if there were, he could give the name of his
own solicitor, to whose discretion he could trust implicitly. He dresses
and acts up to his assumed character with the skill of a man who, like
the illustrious Charles Fox, has, though in private representations,
practised the stage-play in which Demosthenes said the triple art of
oratory consisted; who has seen a great deal of the world, and has that
adaptability of intellect which knowledge of the world lends to one who
is so thoroughly in earnest as to his end that he agrees to be sportive
as to his means.

The kind of language he employs when speaking English to Lebeau is that
suited to the role of a dapper young underling of vulgar mind habituated
to vulgar companionships. I feel it due, if not to Graham himself, at
least to the memory of the dignified orator whose name he inherits, so
to modify and soften the hardy style of that peculiar diction in which
he disguises his birth and disgraces his culture, that it is only here
and there that I can venture to indicate the general tone of it; but in
order to supply my deficiencies therein, the reader has only to call
to mind the forms of phraseology which polite novelists in vogue,
especially young-lady novelists, ascribe to well-born gentlemen, and
more emphatically to those in the higher ranks of the Peerage. No doubt
Graham, in his capacity of critic, had been compelled to read, in
order to review, those contributions to refined literature, and had
familiarized himself to a vein of conversation abounding with "swell"
and "stunner" and "awfully jolly," in its libel on manners and outrage
on taste.

He has attended nightly the cafe Jean Jacques; he has improved
acquaintance with M. Georges and M. Lebeau; he has played at billiards,
he has played at dominos, with the latter. He has been much surprised
at the unimpeachable honesty which M. Lebeau has exhibited in both these
games. In billiards, indeed, a man cannot cheat except by disguising
his strength; it is much the same in dominos,--it is skill combined
with luck, as in whist; but in whist there are modes of cheating which
dominos do not allow,--you can't mark a domino as you can a card. It was
perfectly clear to Graham that M. Lebeau did not gain a livelihood by
billiards or dominos at the cafe Jean Jacques. In the former he was not
only a fair but a generous player. He played exceedingly well, despite
his spectacles; but he gave, with something of a Frenchman's lofty
fanfaronnade, larger odds to his adversary than his play justified. In
dominos, where such odds could not well be given, he insisted on playing
such small stakes as two or three francs might cover. In short, M.
Lebeau puzzled Graham. All about M. Lebeau, his manner, his talk, was
irreproachable, and baffled suspicion; except in this,--Graham gradually
discovered that the cafe had a quasi-political character. Listening to
talkers round him, he overheard much that might well have shocked the
notions of a moderate Liberal; much that held in disdain the objects
to which, in 1869, an English Radical directed his aspirations. Vote by
ballot, universal suffrage, etc.,--such objects the French had already
attained. By the talkers at the cafe Jean Jacques they were deemed to be
the tricky contrivances of tyranny. In fact, the talk was more scornful
of what Englishmen understand by radicalism or democracy than Graham
ever heard from the lips of an ultra-Tory. It assumed a strain
of philosophy far above the vulgar squabbles of ordinary party
politicians,--a philosophy which took for its fundamental principles
the destruction of religion and of private property. These two objects
seemed dependent the one on the other. The philosophers of the Jean
Jacques held with that expounder of Internationalism, Eugene Dupont,
"Nous ne voulons plus de religion, car les religions etouffent
l'intelligence."

   [Discours par Eugene Dupont a la Cloture du Congres de Bruxelles,
   Sept. 3, 1868]

Now and then, indeed, a dissentient voice was raised as to the existence
of a Supreme Being, but, with one exception, it soon sank into silence.
No voice was raised in defence of private property. These sages appeared
for the most part to belong to the class of ouvriers or artisans. Some
of them were foreigners,--Belgian, German, English; all seemed well off
for their calling. Indeed they must have had comparatively high wages,
to judge by their dress and the money they spent on regaling themselves.
The language of several was well chosen, at times eloquent. Some brought
with them women who seemed respectable, and who often joined in the
conversation, especially when it turned upon the law of marriage as a
main obstacle to all personal liberty and social improvement. If this
was a subject on which the women did not all agree, still they discussed
it, without prejudice and with admirable sang froid. Yet many of them
looked like wives and mothers. Now and then a young journeyman brought
with him a young lady of more doubtful aspect, but such a couple kept
aloof from the others. Now and then, too, a man evidently of higher
station than that of ouvrier, and who was received by the philosophers
with courtesy and respect, joined one of the tables and ordered a bowl
of punch for general participation. In such occasional visitors, Graham,
still listening, detected a writer of the press; now and then, a small
artist or actor or medical student. Among the habitues there was one
man, an ouvrier, in whom Graham could not help feeling an interest.
He was called Monnier, sometimes more familiarly Armand, his baptismal
appellation. This man had a bold and honest expression of countenance.
He talked like one who, if he had not read much, had thought much on the
subjects he loved to discuss. He argued against the capital of employers
quite as ably as Mr. Mill has argued against the rights of property
in land. He was still more eloquent against the laws of marriage and
Heritage. But his was the one voice not to be silenced in favour of
a Supreme Being. He had at least the courage of his opinions, and was
always thoroughly in earnest. M. Lebeau seemed to know this man, and
honoured him with a nod and a smile, when passing by him to the table
he generally occupied. This familiarity with a man of that class, and of
opinions so extreme, excited Graham's curiosity. One evening he said to
Lebeau, "A queer fellow that you have just nodded to.

"How so?"

"Well, he has queer notions."

"Notions shared, I believe, by many of your countrymen?"

"I should think not many. Those poor simpletons yonder may have caught
'em from their French fellow-workmen, but I don't think that even the
gobemouches in our National Reform Society open their mouths to swallow
such wasps."

"Yet I believe the association to which most of those ouvriers belong
had its origin in England."

"Indeed! what association?"

"The International."

"Ah, I have heard of that."

Lebeau turned his green spectacles full on Graham's face as he said
slowly, "And what do you think of it?"

Graham prudently checked the disparaging reply that first occurred to
him, and said, "I know so little about it that I would rather ask you."

"I think it might become formidable if it found able leaders who knew
how to use it. Pardon me, how came you to know of this cafe? Were you
recommended to it?"

"No; I happened to be in this neighbourhood on business, and walked in,
as I might into any other cafe."

"You don't interest yourself in the great social questions which are
agitated below the surface of this best of all possible worlds?"

"I can't say that I trouble my head much about them."

"A game at dominos before M. Georges arrives?"

"Willingly. Is M. Georges one of those agitators below the surface?"

"No, indeed. It is for you to play."

Here M. Georges arrived, and no further conversation on political or
social questions ensued.

Graham had already called more than once at M. Lebeau's office,
and asked him to put into good French various letters on matters of
business, the subjects of which had been furnished by M. Renard. The
office was rather imposing and stately, considering the modest nature of
M. Lebeau's ostensible profession. It occupied the entire ground-floor
of a corner house, with a front-door at one angle and a back-door at the
other. The anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to
wait some minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled,
and not only by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance,
might be fairly supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid
as polite letter-writers,--not only by servant-maids and grisettes,
by sailors, zouaves, and journeymen workmen,--but not unfrequently by
clients evidently belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class
of society,--men with clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again,
who, less fashionably attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers
of well-to-do families,--the first generally young, the last generally
middle-aged. All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by
a saturnine clerk into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in
precedence of the ouvriers and grisettes.

"What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this
humble business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy
concealed,--the International Association?" And so pondering, the clerk
one day singled him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau's
cabinet. Graham thought the time had now arrived when he might safely
approach the subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.

"You are very good," said Graham, speaking in the English of a young
earl in our elegant novels,--"you are very good to let me in while you
have so many swells and nobs waiting for you in the other room. But, I
say, old fellow, you have not the cheek to tell me that they want you to
correct their cocker or spoon for them by proxy?"

"Pardon me," answered M. Lebeau in French, "if I prefer my own language
in replying to you. I speak the English I learned many years ago, and
your language in the beau monde, to which you evidently belong, is
strange to me. You are quite right, however, in your surmise that I have
other clients than those who, like yourself, think I could correct their
verbs or their spelling. I have seen a great deal of the world,--I know
something of it, and something of the law; so that many persons come
to me for advice and for legal information on terms more moderate than
those of an avoue. But my ante-chamber is full, I am pressed for time;
excuse me if I ask you to say at once in what I can be agreeable to you
to-day."

"Ah!" said Graham, assuming a very earnest look, "you do know the world,
that is clear; and you do know the law of France, eh?"

"Yes, a little."

"What I wanted to say at present may have something to do with French
law, and I meant to ask you either to recommend to me a sharp lawyer, or
to tell me how I can best get at your famous police here."

"Police?"

"I think I may require the service of one of those officers whom we in
England call detectives; but if you are busy now, I can call to-morrow."

"I spare you two minutes. Say at once, dear Monsieur, what you want with
law or police."

"I am instructed to find out the address of a certain Louise Duval,
daughter of a drawing-master named Adolphe Duval, living in the Rue
----in the year 1848."

Graham, while he thus said, naturally looked Lebeau in the face,--not
pryingly, not significantly, but as a man generally does look in the
face the other man whom he accosts seriously. The change in the face he
regarded was slight, but it was unmistakable. It was the sudden meeting
of the eyebrows, accompanied with the sudden jerk of the shoulder and
bend of the neck, which betoken a man taken by surprise, and who pauses
to reflect before he replies. His pause was but momentary,

"For what object is this address required?"

"That I don't know; but evidently for some advantage to Madame or
Mademoiselle Duval, if still alive, because my employer authorizes me to
spend no less than L100 in ascertaining where she is, if alive, or where
she was buried, if dead; and if other means fail, I am instructed to
advertise to the effect that if Louise Duval, or, in case of her death,
any children of hers living in the year 1849, will communicate with some
person whom I may appoint at Paris, such intelligence, authenticated,
may prove to the advantage of the party advertised for. I am, however,
told not to resort to this means without consulting either with a legal
adviser or the police."

"Hem! have you inquired at the house where this lady was, you say,
living in 1848?"

"Of course I have done that; but very clumsily, I dare say, through
a friend, and learned nothing. But I must not keep you now. I think I
shall apply at once to the police. What should I say when I get to the
bureau?"

"Stop, Monsieur, stop. I do not advise you to apply to the police. It
would be waste of time and money. Allow me to think over the matter. I
shall see you this evening at the cafe Jean Jacques at eight o'clock.
Till then do nothing."

"All right; I obey you. The whole thing is out of my way of business
awfully. Bonjour."




CHAPTER IX.

Punctually at eight o'clock Graham Vane had taken his seat at a corner
table at the remote end of the cafe Jean Jacques, called for his cup of
coffee and his evening journal, and awaited the arrival of M. Lebeau.
His patience was not tasked long. In a few minutes the Frenchman
entered, paused at the comptoir, as was his habit, to address a polite
salutation to the well-dressed lady who there presided, nodded as usual
to Armand Monnier, then glanced round, recognized Graham with a smile,
and approached his table with the quiet grace of movement by which he
was distinguished.

Seating himself opposite to Graham, and speaking in a voice too low to
be heard by others, and in French, he then said,

"In thinking over your communication this morning, it strikes me as
probable, perhaps as certain, that this Louise Duval or her children,
if she have any, must be entitled to some moneys bequeathed to her by a
relation or friend in England. What say you to that assumption, Monsieur
Lamb?"

"You are a sharp fellow," answered Graham. "Just what I say to myself.
Why else should I be instructed to go to such expense in finding her
out? Most likely, if one can't trace her, or her children born before
the date named, any such moneys will go to some one else; and that some
one else, whoever he be, has commissioned my employer to find out. But
I don't imagine any sum due to her or her heirs can be much, or that the
matter is very important; for, if so, the thing would not be carelessly
left in the hands of one of the small fry like myself, and clapped in
along with a lot of other business as an off-hand job."

"Will you tell me who employed you?"

"No, I don't feel authorized to do that at present; and I don't see
the necessity of it. It seems to me, on consideration, a matter for the
police to ferret out; only, as I asked before, how should I get at the
police?"

"That is not difficult. It is just possible that I might help you better
than any lawyer or any detective."

"Why, did you ever know this Louise Duval?"

"Excuse me, Monsieur Lamb; you refuse me your full confidence; allow me
to imitate your reserve."

"Oho!" said Graham; "shut up as close as you like; it is nothing to me.
Only observe, there is this difference between us, that I am employed by
another. He does not authorize me to name him, and if I did commit
that indiscretion, I might lose my bread and cheese. Whereas you have
nobody's secret to guard but your own, in saying whether or not you ever
knew a Madame or Mademoiselle Duval; and if you have some reason for
not getting me the information I am instructed to obtain, that is also
a reason for not troubling you further. And after all, old boy" (with
a familiar slap on Lebeau's stately shoulder), "after all, it is I who
would employ you; you don't employ me. And if you find out the lady, it
is you who would get the L100., not I."

M. Lebeau mechanically brushed, with a light movement of hand, the
shoulder which the Englishman had so pleasantly touched, drew himself
and chair some inches back, and said slowly,--

"Monsieur Lamb, let us talk as gentleman to gentleman. Put aside the
question of money altogether; I must first know why your employer wants
to hunt out this poor Louise Duval. It may be to her injury, and I would
do her none if you offered thousands where you offer pounds. I forestall
the condition of mutual confidence; I own that I have known her,--it
is many years ago; and, Monsieur Lamb, though a Frenchman very often
injures a woman from love, he is in a worse plight for bread and cheese
than I am if he injures her for money."

"Is he thinking of the duchess's jewels?" thought Graham. "Bravo, mon
vieux," he said aloud; "but as I don't know what my employer's motive in
his commission is, perhaps you can enlighten me. How could his inquiry
injure Louise Duval?"

"I cannot say; but you English have the power to divorce your wives.
Louise Duval may have married an Englishman, separated from him, and he
wants to know where he can find, in order to criminate and divorce her,
or it may be to insist on her return to him."

"Bosh! that is not likely."

"Perhaps, then, some English friend she may have known has left her
a bequest, which would of course lapse to some one else if she be not
living."

"By gad!" cried Graham, "I think you hit the right nail on the head:
c'est cela. But what then?"

"Well, if I thought any substantial benefit to Louise Duval might result
from the success of your inquiry, I would really see if it were in my
power to help you. But I must have time to consider."

"How long?"

"I can't exactly say; perhaps three or four days."

"Bon! I will wait. Here comes M. Georges. I leave you to dominos and
him. Good-night."

Late that night M. Lebeau was seated alone in a chamber connected with
the cabinet in which he received visitors. A ledger was open before him,
which he scanned with careful eyes, no longer screened by spectacles.
The survey seemed to satisfy him. He murmured, "It suffices, the time
has come," closed the book, returned it to his bureau, which he locked
up, and then wrote in cipher the letter here reduced into English:--

   "DEAR AND NOBLE FRIEND,--Events march; the Empire is everywhere
   undermined. Our treasury has thriven in my hands; the sums
   subscribed and received by me through you have become more than
   quadrupled by advantageous speculations, in which M. Georges has
   been a most trustworthy agent. A portion of them I have continued
   to employ in the mode suggested,--namely, in bringing together men
   discreetly chosen as being in their various ways representatives and
   ringleaders of the motley varieties that, when united at the right
   moment, form a Parisian mob. But from that right moment we are as
   yet distant. Before we can call passion into action, we must
   prepare opinion for change. I propose now to devote no
   inconsiderable portion of our fund towards the inauguration of a
   journal which shall gradually give voice to our designs. Trust me
   to insure its success, and obtain the aid of writers who will have
   no notion of the uses to which they ultimately contribute. Now that
   the time has come to establish for ourselves an organ in the press,
   addressing higher orders of intelligence than those which are needed
   to destroy and incapable of reconstructing, the time has also
   arrived for the reappearance in his proper name and rank of the man
   in whom you take so gracious an interest. In vain you have pressed
   him to do so before; till now he had not amassed together, by the
   slow process of petty gains and constant savings, with such
   additions as prudent speculations on his own account might
   contribute, the modest means necessary to his resumed position; and
   as he always contended against your generous offers, no
   consideration should ever tempt him either to appropriate to his
   personal use a single sou intrusted to him for a public purpose, or
   to accept from friendship the pecuniary aid which would abase him
   into the hireling of a cause. No! Victor de Mauleon despises too
   much the tools that he employs to allow any man hereafter to say,
   'Thou also wert a tool, and hast been paid for thy uses.'

   "But to restore the victim of calumny to his rightful place in this
   gaudy world, stripped of youth and reduced in fortune, is a task
   that may well seem impossible. To-morrow he takes the first step
   towards the achievement of the impossible. Experience is no bad
   substitute for youth, and ambition is made stronger by the goad of
   poverty.

   "Thou shalt hear of his news soon."





BOOK V.




CHAPTER I.

The next day at noon M. Louvier was closeted in his study with M.
Gandrin.

"Yes," cried Louvier, "I have behaved very handsomely to the beau
Marquis. No one can say to the contrary."

"True," answered Gandrin. "Besides the easy terms for the transfer of
the mortgages, that free bonus of one thousand louis is a generous and
noble act of munificence."

"Is it not! and my youngster has already begun to do with it as I meant
and expected. He has taken a fine apartment; he has bought a coupe
and horses; he has placed himself in the hands of the Chevalier de
Finisterre; he is entered at the Jockey Club. Parbleu, the one thousand
louis will be soon gone."

"And then?"

"And then! why, he will have tasted the sweets of Parisian life; he will
think with disgust of the vieux manoir. He can borrow no more. I must
remain sole mortgagee, and I shall behave as handsomely in buying his
estates as I have behaved in increasing his income."

Here a clerk entered and said that a monsieur wished to see M. Louvier
for a few minutes in private, on urgent business.

"Tell him to send in his card."

"He has declined to do so, but states that he has already the honour of
your acquaintance."

"A writer in the press, perhaps; or is he an artist?"

"I have not seen him before, Monsieur, but he has the air tres comme il
faut."

"Well, you may admit him. I will not detain you longer, my dear Gandrin.
My homages to Madame. Bonjour."

Louvier bowed out M. Gandrin, and then rubbed his hands complacently.
He was in high spirits. "Aha, my dear Marquis, thou art in my trap now.
Would it were thy father instead," he muttered chucklingly, and then
took his stand on the hearth, with his back to the fireless grate. There
entered a gentleman exceedingly well dressed,--dressed according to the
fashion, but still as became one of ripe middle age, not desiring to
pass for younger than he was.

He was tall, with a kind of lofty ease in his air and his movements; not
slight of frame, but spare enough to disguise the strength and endurance
which belong to sinews and thews of steel, freed from all superfluous
flesh, broad across the shoulders, thin in the flanks. His dark hair had
in youth been luxuriant in thickness and curl; it was now clipped short,
and had become bare at the temples, but it still retained the lustre of
its colour and the crispness of its ringlets. He wore neither beard
nor mustache, and the darkness of his hair was contrasted by a clear
fairness of complexion, healthful, though somewhat pale, and eyes of
that rare gray tint which has in it no shade of blue,--peculiar eyes,
which give a very distinct character to the face. The man must have been
singularly handsome in youth; he was handsome still, though probably in
his forty-seventh or forty-eighth year, doubtless a very different kind
of comeliness. The form of the features and the contour of the face were
those that suit the rounded beauty of the Greek outline, and such beauty
would naturally have been the attribute of the countenance in earlier
days; but the cheeks were now thin, and with lines of care and
sorrow between nostril and lip, so that the shape of the face seemed
lengthened, and the features had become more salient.

Louvier gazed at his visitor with a vague idea that he had seen him
before, and could not remember where or when; but at all events he
recognized at the first glance a man of rank and of the great world.

"Pray be seated, Monsieur," he said, resuming his own easy-chair.

The visitor obeyed the invitation with a very graceful bend of his head,
drew his chair near to the financier's, stretched his limbs with the
ease of a man making himself at home, and fixing his calm bright eyes
quietly on Louvier, said, with a bland smile,--

"My dear old friend, do you not remember me? You are less altered than I
am."

Louvier stared hard and long; his lip fell, his cheek paled, and at last
he faltered out, "Ciel! is it possible! Victor, the Vicomte de Mauleon?"

"At your service, my dear Louvier."

There was a pause; the financier was evidently confused and embarrassed,
and not less evidently the visit of the "dear old friend" was unwelcome.

"Vicomte," he said at last, "this is indeed a surprise; I thought you
had long since quitted Paris for good."

"'L'homme propose,' etc. I have returned, and mean to enjoy the rest of
my days in the metropolis of the Graces and the Pleasures. What though
we are not so young as we were, Louvier,--we have more vigour in us than
the new generation; and though it may no longer befit us to renew the
gay carousals of old, life has still excitements as vivid for the social
temperament and ambitious mind. Yes, the roi des viveurs returns to
Paris for a more solid throne than he filled before."

"Are you serious?"

"As serious as the French gayety will permit one to be."

"Alas, Monsieur le Vicomte! can you flatter yourself that you will
regain the society you have quitted, and the name you have--"

Louvier stopped short; something in the Vicomte's eye daunted him.

"The name I have laid aside for convenience of travel. Princes travel
incognito, and so may a simple gentilhomme. 'Regain my place in
society,' say you? Yes; it is not that which troubles me."

"What does?"

"The consideration whether on a very modest income I can be sufficiently
esteemed for myself to render that society more pleasant than ever. Ah,
mon cher! why recoil? why so frightened? Do you think I am going to ask
you for money? Have I ever done so since we parted; and did I ever do
so before without repaying you? Bah! you roturiers are worse than the
Bourbons. You never learn or unlearn. 'Fors non mutat genus.'"

The magnificent millionaire, accustomed to the homage of grandees from
the Faubourg and lions from the Chaussee d'Antin, rose to his feet in
superb wrath, less at the taunting words than at the haughtiness of mien
with which they were uttered.

"Monsieur, I cannot permit you to address me in that tone. Do you mean
to insult me?"

"Certainly not. Tranquillize your nerves, reseat yourself, and
listen,--reseat yourself, I say."

Louvier dropped into his chair.

"No," resumed the Vicomte, politely, "I do not come here to insult you,
neither do I come to ask money; I assume that I am in my rights when I
ask Monsieur Louvier what has become of Louise Duval?"

"Louise Duval! I know nothing about her."

"Possibly not now; but you did know her well enough, when we two parted,
to be a candidate for her hand. You did know her enough to solicit my
good offices in promotion of your suit; and you did, at my advice, quit
Paris to seek her at Aix-la-Chapelle."

"What! have you, Monsieur de Mauleon, not heard news of her since that
day?"

"I decline to accept your question as an answer to mine. You went
to Aix-la-Chapelle; you saw Louise Duval, at my urgent request she
condescended to accept your hand."

"No, Monsieur de Mauleon, she did not accept my hand. I did not even see
her. The day before I arrived at Aix-la-Chapelle she had left it,--not
alone,--left it with her lover."

"Her lover! You do not mean the miserable Englishman who--"

"No Englishman," interrupted Louvier, fiercely. "Enough that the step
she took placed an eternal barrier between her and myself. I have never
even sought to hear of her since that day. Vicomte, that woman was the
one love of my life. I loved her, as you must have known, to folly, to
madness. And how was my love requited? Ah! you open a very deep wound,
Monsieur le Vicomte."

"Pardon me, Louvier; I did not give you credit for feelings so keen
and so genuine, nor did I think myself thus easily affected by matters
belonging to a past life so remote from the present. For whom did Louise
forsake you?"

"It matters not; he is dead."

"I regret to hear that; I might have avenged you."

"I need no one to avenge my wrong. Let this pass."

"Not yet. Louise, you say, fled with a seducer? So proud as she was, I
can scarcely believe it."

"Oh, it was not with a roturier she fled; her pride would not have
allowed that."

"He must have deceived her somehow. Did she continue to live with him?"

"That question, at least, I can answer; for though I lost all trace of
her life, his life was pretty well known to me till its end; and a very
few months after she fled he was enchained to another. Let us talk of
her no more."

"Ay, ay," muttered De Mauleon, "some disgraces are not to be redeemed,
and therefore not to be discussed. To me, though a relation, Louise
Duval was but little known, and after what you tell me, I cannot dispute
your right to say, 'Talk of her no more.' You loved her, and she wronged
you. My poor Louvier, pardon me if I made an old wound bleed afresh."

These words were said with a certain pathetic tenderness; they softened
Louvier towards the speaker.

After a short pause the Vicomte swept his hand over his brow, as if
to dismiss from his mind a painful and obtrusive thought; then with
a changed expression of countenance,--an expression frank and
winning,--with voice and with manner in which no vestige remained of the
irony or the haughtiness with which he had resented the frigidity of
his reception, he drew his chair still nearer to Louvier's, and resumed:
"Our situations, Paul Louvier, are much changed since we two became
friends. I then could say, 'Open sesame' to whatever recesses, forbidden
to vulgar footsteps, the adventurer whom I took by the hand might
wish to explore. In those days my heart was warm; I liked you,
Louvier,--honestly liked you. I think our personal acquaintance
commenced in some gay gathering of young viveurs, whose behaviour to you
offended my sense of good breeding?"

Louvier coloured and muttered inaudibly. De Mauleon continued: "I felt
it due to you to rebuke their incivilities, the more so as you evinced
on that occasion your own superiority in sense and temper, permit me to
add, with no lack of becoming spirit."

Louvier bowed his head, evidently gratified.

"From that day we became familiar. If any obligation to me were
incurred, you would not have been slow to return it. On more than one
occasion when I was rapidly wasting money--and money was plentiful with
you--you generously offered me your purse. On more than one occasion I
accepted the offer; and you would never have asked repayment if I had
not insisted on repaying. I was no less grateful for your aid." Louvier
made a movement as if to extend his hand, but he checked the impulse.

"There was another attraction which drew me towards you. I recognized
in your character a certain power in sympathy with that power which I
imagined lay dormant in myself, and not to be found among the freluquets
and lions who were my more habitual associates. Do you not remember
some hours of serious talk we have had together when we lounged in
the Tuileries, or sipped our coffee in the garden of the Palais
Royal?--hours when we forgot that those were the haunts of idlers, and
thought of the stormy actions affecting the history of the world of
which they had been the scene; hours when I confided to you, as I
confided to no other man, the ambitious hopes for the future which my
follies in the present, alas! were hourly tending to frustrate."

"Ay, I remember the starlit night; it was not in the gardens of the
Tuileries nor in the Palais Royal,--it was on the Pont de la Concorde,
on which we had paused, noting the starlight on the waters, that you
said, pointing towards the walls of the Corps Legislatif, 'Paul, when
I once get into the Chamber, how long will it take me to become First
Minister of France?'"

"Did I say so?--possibly; but I was too young then for admission to
the Chamber, and I fancied I had so many years yet to spare in idle
loiterings at the Fountain of Youth. Pass over these circumstances. You
became in love with Louise. I told you her troubled history; it did not
diminish your love; and then I frankly favoured your suit. You set out
for Aix-la-Chapelle a day or two afterwards; then fell the thunderbolt
which shattered my existence, and we have never met again till this
hour. You did not receive me kindly, Paul Louvier."

"But," said Louvier, falteringly, "but since you refer to that
thunderbolt, you cannot but be aware that--that--"

"I was subjected to a calumny which I expect those who have known me as
well as you did to assist me now to refute."

"If it be really a calumny."

"Heavens, man! could you ever doubt that?" cried De Mauleon, with heat;
"ever doubt that I would rather have blown out my brains than allowed
them even to conceive the idea of a crime so base?"

"Pardon me," answered Louvier, meekly, "but I did not return to Paris
for months after you had disappeared. My mind was unsettled by the news
that awaited me at Aix; I sought to distract it by travel,--visited
Holland and England; and when I did return to Paris, all that I heard
of your story was the darker side of it. I willingly listen to your own
account. You never took, or at least never accepted, the Duchesse de
------'s jewels; and your friend M. de ----- never sold them to one
jeweller and obtained their substitutes in paste from another?"

The Vicomte made a perceptible effort to repress an impulse of rage;
then reseating himself in his chair, and with that slight shrug of the
shoulder by which a Frenchman implies to himself that rage would be out
of place, replied calmly, "M. de N. did as you say, but of course not
employed by me, nor with my knowledge. Listen; the truth is this,--the
time has come to tell it. Before you left Paris for Aix I found myself
on the brink of ruin. I had glided towards it with my characteristic
recklessness, with that scorn of money for itself, that sanguine
confidence in the favour of fortune, which are vices common to every roi
des viveurs. Poor mock Alexanders that we spendthrifts are in youth! we
divide all we have among others, and when asked by some prudent friend,
'What have you left for your own share?' answer, 'Hope.' I knew, of
course, that my patrimony was rapidly vanishing; but then my horses
were matchless. I had enough to last me for years on their chance of
winning--of course they would win. But you may recollect when we
parted that I was troubled,--creditors' bills before me--usurers' bills
too,--and you, my dear Louvier, pressed on me your purse, were angry
when I refused it. How could I accept? All my chance of repayment was
in the speed of a horse. I believed in that chance for myself; but for
a trustful friend, no. Ask your own heart now,--nay, I will not say
heart,--ask your own common-sense, whether a man who then put aside your
purse--spendthrift, vaurien, though he might be--was likely to steal or
accept a woman's jewels. Va, mon pauvre Louvier, again I say, 'Fors non
mutat genus.'"

Despite the repetition of the displeasing patrician motto, such
reminiscences of his visitor's motley character--irregular, turbulent,
the reverse of severe, but, in its own loose way, grandly generous and
grandly brave--struck both on the common-sense and the heart of the
listener; and the Frenchman recognized the Frenchman. Louvier doubted De
Mauleon's word no more, bowed his head, and said, "Victor de Mauleon, I
have wronged you; go on."

"On the day after you left for Aix came that horse-race on which my
all depended: it was lost. The loss absorbed the whole of my remaining
fortune; it absorbed about twenty thousand francs in excess, a debt of
honour to De N., whom you called my friend. Friend he was not; imitator,
follower, flatterer, yes. Still I deemed him enough my friend to say to
him, 'Give me a little time to pay the money; I must sell my stud, or
write to my only living relation from whom I have expectations.' You
remember that relation,--Jacques de Mauleon, old and unmarried. By De
N.'s advice I did write to my kinsman. No answer came; but what did come
were fresh bills from creditors. I then calmly calculated my assets. The
sale of my stud and effects might suffice to pay every sou that I owed,
including my debt to De N.; but that was not quite certain. At all
events, when the debts were paid I should be beggared. Well, you know,
Louvier, what we Frenchmen are: how Nature has denied to us the quality
of patience; how involuntarily suicide presents itself to us when hope
is lost; and suicide seemed to me here due to honour, namely, to the
certain discharge of my liabilities,--for the stud and effects of Victor
de Mauleon, roi des viveurs, would command much higher prices if he died
like Cato than if he ran away from his fate like Pompey. Doubtless De N.
guessed my intention from my words or my manner; but on the very day
in which I had made all preparations for quitting the world from
which sunshine had vanished, I received in a blank envelope bank-notes
amounting to seventy thousand francs, and the post-mark on the envelope
was that of the town of Fontainebleau, near to which lived my rich
kinsman Jacques. I took it for granted that the sum came from him.
Displeased as he might have been with my wild career, still I was
his natural heir. The sum sufficed to pay my debt to De N., to all
creditors, and leave a surplus. My sanguine spirits returned. I would
sell my stud; I would retrench, reform, go to my kinsman as the penitent
son. The fatted calf would be killed, and I should wear purple yet. You
understand that, Louvier?"

"Yes, yes; so like you. Go on."

"Now, then, came the thunderbolt! Ah! in those sunny days you used
to envy me for being so spoilt by women. The Duchesse de ------ had
conceived for me one of those romantic fancies which women without
children and with ample leisure for the waste of affection do sometimes
conceive for very ordinary men younger than themselves, but in whom they
imagine they discover sinners to reform or heroes to exalt. I had been
honoured by some notes from the Duchesse in which this sort of romance
was owned. I had not replied to them encouragingly. In truth, my heart
was then devoted to another,--the English girl whom I had wooed as my
wife; who, despite her parents' retraction of their consent to our union
when they learned how dilapidated were my fortunes, pledged herself
to remain faithful to me, and wait for better days." Again De Mauleon
paused in suppressed emotion, and then went on hurriedly: "No, the
Duchesse did not inspire me with guilty passion, but she did inspire me
with an affectionate respect. I felt that she was by nature meant to be
a great and noble creature, and was, nevertheless, at that moment
wholly misled from her right place amongst women by an illusion of mere
imagination about a man who happened then to be very much talked about,
and perhaps resembled some Lothario in the novels which she was always
reading. We lodged, as you may remember, in the same house."

"Yes, I remember. I remember how you once took me to a great ball given
by the Duchesse; how handsome I thought her, though no longer young; and
you say right--how I did envy you, that night!"

"From that night, however, the Duc, not unnaturally, became jealous. He
reproved the Duchesse for her too amiable manner towards a mauvais sujet
like myself, and forbade her in future to receive my visits. It was then
that these notes became frequent and clandestine, brought to me by her
maid, who took back my somewhat chilling replies.

"But to proceed. In the flush of my high spirits, and in the insolence
of magnificent ease with which I paid De N------ the trifle I owed him,
something he said made my heart stand still."

"I told him that the money received had come from Jacques de Mauleon,
and that I was going down to his house that day to thank him. He
replied, 'Don't go; it did not come from him.' 'It must; see
the post-mark of the envelope,--Fontainebleau.' 'I posted it at
Fontainebleau.' 'You sent me the money, you!' 'Nay, that is beyond my
means. Where it came from,' said this miserable, 'much more may yet
come;' and then be narrated, with that cynicism so in vogue at Paris,
how he had told the Duchesse (who knew him as my intimate associate)
of my stress of circumstance, of his fear that I meditated something
desperate; how she gave him the jewels to sell and to substitute; how,
in order to baffle my suspicion and frustrate my scruples, he had
gone to Fontainebleau and there posted the envelope containing the
bank-notes, out of which he secured for himself the payment he deemed
otherwise imperilled. De N. having made this confession, hurried down
the stairs swiftly enough to save himself a descent by the window. Do
you believe me still?"

"Yes; you were always so hot-blooded, and De N. so considerate of self,
I believe you implicitly."

"Of course I did what any man would do; I wrote a hasty letter to the
Duchesse, stating all my gratitude for an act of pure friendship so
noble; urging also the reasons that rendered it impossible for a man of
honour to profit by such an act. Unhappily, what had been sent was paid
away ere I knew the facts; but I could not bear the thought of life till
my debt to her was acquitted; in short, Louvier, conceive for yourself
the sort of letter which I--which any honest man--would write, under
circumstances so cruel."

"H'm!" grunted Louvier.

"Something, however, in my letter, conjoined with what De N. had told
her as to my state of mind, alarmed this poor woman, who had deigned to
take in me an interest so little deserved. Her reply, very agitated and
incoherent, was brought to me by her maid, who had taken my letter, and
by whom, as I before said, our correspondence had been of late carried
on. In her reply she implored me to decide, to reflect on nothing till I
had seen her; stated how the rest of her day was pre-engaged; and since
to visit her openly had been made impossible by the Due's interdict,
enclosed the key to the private entrance to her rooms, by which I could
gain an interview with her at ten o'clock that night, an hour at which
the Duc had informed her he should be out till late at his club. Now,
however great the indiscretion which the Duchesse here committed, it is
due to her memory to say that I am convinced that her dominant idea was
that I meditated self-destruction; that no time was to be lost to
save me from it; and for the rest she trusted to the influence which
a woman's tears and adjurations and reasonings have over even the
strongest and hardest men. It is only one of those coxcombs in whom the
world of fashion abounds who could have admitted a thought that would
have done wrong to the impulsive, generous, imprudent eagerness of a
woman to be in time to save from death by his own hand a fellow-being
for whom she had conceived an interest. I so construed her note. At the
hour she named I admitted myself into the rooms by the key she sent. You
know the rest: I was discovered by the Duc and by the agents of police
in the cabinet in which the Duchesse's jewels were kept. The key that
admitted me into the cabinet was found in my possession."

De Mauleon's voice here faltered, and he covered his face with a
convulsive hand. Almost in the same breath he recovered from visible
sign of emotion, and went on with a half laugh.

"Ah! you envied me, did you, for being spoiled by the women? Enviable
position indeed was mine that night! The Duc obeyed the first impulse of
his wrath. He imagined that I had dishonoured him; he would dishonour
me in return. Easier to his pride, too, a charge against the robber of
jewels than against a favoured lover of his wife. But when I, obeying
the first necessary obligation of honour, invented on the spur of the
moment the story by which the Duchesse's reputation was cleared from
suspicion, accused myself of a frantic passion and the trickery of
a fabricated key, the Due's true nature of gentilhomme came back. He
retracted the charge which he could scarcely even at the first blush
have felt to be well-founded; and as the sole charge left was simply
that which men comme il faut do not refer to criminal courts and police
investigations, I was left to make my bow unmolested and retreat to my
own rooms, awaiting there such communciations as the Duc might deem it
right to convey to me on the morrow.

"But on the morrow the Duc, with his wife and personal suite, quitted
Paris en route for Spain; the bulk of his retinue, including the
offending Abigail, was discharged; and, whether through these servants
or through the police, the story before evening was in the mouth of
every gossip in club or cafe,--exaggerated, distorted, to my ignominy
and shame. My detection in the cabinet, the sale of the jewels, the
substitution of paste by De N., who was known to be my servile imitator
and reputed to be my abject tool, all my losses on the turf, my
debts,--all these scattered fibres of flax were twisted together in a
rope that would have hanged a dog with a much better name than mine. If
some disbelieved that I could be a thief, few of those who should have
known me best held me guiltless of a baseness almost equal to that of
theft,--the exaction of profit from the love of a foolish woman."

"But you could have told your own tale, shown the letters you had
received from the Duchesse, and cleared away every stain on your
honour."

"How?--shown her letters, ruined her character, even stated that she
had caused her jewels to be sold for the uses of a young roue! Ah, no,
Louvier! I would rather have gone to the galleys."

"H'm!" grunted Louvier again.

"The Duc generously gave me better means of righting myself. Three
days after he quitted Paris I received a letter from him, very politely
written, expressing his great regret that any words implying the
suspicion too monstrous and absurd to need refutation should have
escaped him in the surprise of the moment; but stating that since the
offence I had owned was one that he could not overlook, he was under
the necessity of asking the only reparation I could make. That if it
'deranged' me to quit Paris, he would return to it for the purpose
required; but that if I would give him the additional satisfaction
of suiting his convenience, he should prefer to await my arrival at
Bayonne, where he was detained by the indisposition of the Duchesse."

"You have still that letter?" asked Louvier, quickly. "Yes; with
other more important documents constituting what I may call my pieces
justificatives.

"I need not say that I replied stating the time at which I should arrive
at Bayonne, and the hotel at which I should await the Duc's command.
Accordingly I set out that same day, gained the hotel named, despatched
to the Duc the announcement of my arrival, and was considering how I
should obtain a second in some officer quartered in the town--for
my soreness and resentment at the marked coldness of my former
acquaintances at Paris had forbidden me to seek a second among any of
that faithless number--when the Due himself entered my room. Judge of my
amaze at seeing him in person; judge how much greater the amaze became
when he advanced with a grave but cordial smile, offering me his hand!

"'Monsieur de Mauleon,' said he, 'since I wrote to you, facts have
become known to me which would induce me rather to ask your friendship
than call on you to defend your life. Madame la Duchesse has been
seriously ill since we left Paris, and I refrained from all explanations
likely to add to the hysterical excitement under which she was
suffering. It is only this day that her mind became collected, and she
herself then gave me her entire confidence. Monsieur, she insisted on my
reading the letters that you addressed to her. Those letters, Monsieur,
suffice to prove your innocence of any design against my peace. The
Duchesse has so candidly avowed her own indiscretion, has so clearly
established the distinction between indiscretion and guilt, that I have
granted her my pardon with a lightened heart and a firm belief that we
shall be happier together than we have been yet.'

"The Due continued his journey the next day, but he subsequently
honoured me with two or three letters written as friend to friend, and
in which you will find repeated the substance of what I have stated him
to say by word of mouth."

"But why not then have returned to Paris? Such letters, at least, you
might have shown, and in braving your calumniators you would have soon
lived them down."

"You forget that I was a ruined man. When, by the sale of my horses,
etc., my debts, including what was owed to the Duchesse, and which I
remitted to the Duc, were discharged, the balance left to me would
not have maintained me a week at Paris. Besides, I felt so sore, so
indignant. Paris and the Parisians had become to me so hateful. And to
crown all, that girl, that English girl whom I had so loved, on whose
fidelity I had so counted--well, I received a letter from her, gently
but coldly bidding me farewell forever. I do not think she believed me
guilty of theft; but doubtless the offence I had confessed, in order to
save the honour of the Duchesse, could but seem to her all sufficient!
Broken in spirit, bleeding at heart to the very core, still
self-destruction was no longer to be thought of. I would not die till I
could once more lift up my head as Victor de Mauleon."

"What then became of you, my poor Victor?"

"Ah! that is a tale too long for recital. I have played so many parts
that I am puzzled to recognize my own identity with the Victor de
Mauleon whose name I abandoned. I have been a soldier in Algeria, and
won my cross on the field of battle,--that cross and my colonel's
letter are among my pieces justificatives; I have been a gold-digger in
California, a speculator in New York, of late in callings obscure and
humble. But in all my adventures, under whatever name, I have earned
testimonials of probity, could manifestations of so vulgar a virtue
be held of account by the enlightened people of Paris. I come now to a
close. The Vicomte de Mauleon is about to re-appear in Paris, and the
first to whom he announces that sublime avatar is Paul Louvier. When
settled in some modest apartment, I shall place in your hands my pieces
justificatives. I shall ask you to summon my surviving relations or
connections, among which are the Counts de Vandemar, Beauvilliers, De
Passy, and the Marquis de Rochebriant, with any friends of your own who
sway the opinions of the Great World. You will place my justification
before them, expressing your own opinion that it suffices; in a word,
you will give me the sanction of your countenance. For the rest, I trust
to myself to propitiate the kindly and to silence the calumnious. I have
spoken; what say you?"

"You overrate my power in society. Why not appeal yourself to your
high-born relations?"

"No, Louvier; I have too well considered the case to alter my decision.
It is through you, and you alone, that I shall approach my relations.
My vindicator must be a man of whom the vulgar cannot say, 'Oh, he is a
relation,--a fellow-noble; those aristocrats whitewash each other.'
It must be an authority with the public at large,--a bourgeois, a
millionaire, a roi de la Bourse. I choose you, and that ends the
discussion."

Louvier could not help laughing good-humouredly at the sang froid of the
Vicomte. He was once more under the domination of a man who had for a
time dominated all with whom he lived.

De Mauleon continued: "Your task will be easy enough. Society changes
rapidly at Paris. Few persons now exist who have more than a vague
recollection of the circumstances which can be so easily explained to my
complete vindication when the vindication comes from a man of your solid
respectability and social influence. Besides, I have political
objects in view. You are a Liberal; the Vandemars and Rochebriants are
Legitimists. I prefer a godfather on the Liberal side. Pardieu, mon ami,
why such coquettish hesitation? Said and done. Your hand on it."

"There is my hand then. I will do all I can to help you."

"I know you will, old friend; and you do both kindly and wisely." Here
De Mauleon cordially pressed the hand he held, and departed.

On gaining the street, the Vicomte glided into a neighbouring courtyard,
in which he had left his fiacre, and bade the coachman drive towards the
Boulevard Sebastopol. On the way, he took from a small bag that he
had left in the carriage the flaxen wig and pale whiskers which
distinguished M. Lebeau, and mantled his elegant habiliments in an
immense cloak, which he had also left in the fiacre. Arrived at the
Boulevard Sebastopol, he drew up the collar of the cloak so as to
conceal much of his face, stopped the driver, paid him quickly, and, bag
in hand, hurried on to another stand of fiacres at a little distance,
entered one, drove to the Faubourg Montmartre, dismissed the vehicle
at the mouth of a street not far from M. Lebeau's office, and gained
on foot the private side-door of the house, let himself in with his
latchkey, entered the private room on the inner side of his office,
locked the door, and proceeded leisurely to exchange the brilliant
appearance which the Vicomte de Mauleon had borne on his visit to the
millionaire for the sober raiment and bourgeois air of M. Lebeau, the
letter-writer.

Then after locking up his former costume in a drawer of his secretaire,
he sat himself down and wrote the following lines:--

   DEAR MONSIEUR GEORGES,--I advise you strongly, from information that
   has just reached me, to lose no time in pressing M. Savarin to repay
   the sum I recommended you to lend him, and for which you hold his
   bill due this day. The scandal of legal measures against a writer
   so distinguished should be avoided if possible. He will avoid it
   and get the money somehow; but he must be urgently pressed. If you
   neglect this warning, my responsibility is past. Agreez mes
   sentimens les plus sinceres.
                       J. L.




CHAPTER II.

The Marquis de Rochebriant is no longer domiciled in an attic in the
gloomy Faubourg. See him now in a charming appartement de garcon an
premier in the Rue du Helder, close by the promenades and haunts of
the mode. It had been furnished and inhabited by a brilliant young
provincial from Bordeaux, who, coming into an inheritance of one hundred
thousand francs, had rushed up to Paris to enjoy himself, and make his
million at the Bourse. He had enjoyed himself thoroughly,--he had been
a darling of the demi monde; he had been a successful and an inconstant
gallant. Zelie had listened to his vows of eternal love, and his offers
of unlimited cachemires; Desiree, succeeding Zelie, had assigned to him
her whole heart--or all that was left of it--in gratitude for the
ardour of his passion, and the diamonds and coupe which accompanied and
attested the ardour; the superb Hortense, supplanting Desiree,
received his visits in the charming apartment he furnished for her, and
entertained him and his friends at the most delicate little suppers, for
the moderate sum of four thousand francs a month. Yes, he had enjoyed
himself thoroughly, but he had not made a million at the Bourse. Before
the year was out, the one hundred thousand francs were gone. Compelled
to return to his province, and by his hard-hearted relations ordained,
on penalty of starvation, to marry the daughter of an avoue, for
the sake of her dot and a share in the hated drudgery of the avoue's
business,--his apartment was to be had for a tenth part of the original
cost of its furniture. A certain Chevalier de Finisterre, to whom
Louvier had introduced the Marquis as a useful fellow who knew Paris,
and would save him from being cheated, had secured this bijou of an
apartment for Alain, and concluded the bargain for the bagatelle of
L500. The Chevalier took the same advantageous occasion to purchase the
English well-bred hack and the neat coupe and horses which the Bordelais
was also necessitated to dispose of. These purchases made, the Marquis
had some five thousand francs (L200) left out of Louvier's premium of
L1,000. The Marquis, however, did not seem alarmed or dejected by the
sudden diminution of capital so expeditiously effected. The easy life
thus commenced seemed to him too natural to be fraught with danger;
and easy though it was, it was a very simple and modest sort of life
compared with that of many other men of his age to whom Enguerrand had
introduced him, though most of them had an income less than his, and
few, indeed, of them were his equals in dignity of birth. Could a
Marquis de Rochebriant, if he lived at Paris at all, give less than
three thousand francs a year for his apartment, or mount a more humble
establishment than that confined to a valet and a tiger, two horses for
his coupe and one for the saddle? "Impossible," said the Chevalier de
Finisterre, decidedly; and the Marquis bowed to so high an authority. He
thought within himself, "If I find in a few months that I am exceeding
my means, I can but dispose of my rooms and my horses, and return to
Rochebriant a richer man by far than I left it."

To say truth, the brilliant seductions of Paris had already produced
their effect, not only on the habits, but on the character and cast of
thought, which the young noble had brought with him from the feudal and
melancholy Bretagne.

Warmed by the kindness with which, once introduced by his popular
kinsmen, he was everywhere received, the reserve or shyness which is the
compromise between the haughtiness of self-esteem and the painful doubt
of appreciation by others rapidly melted away. He caught insensibly the
polished tone, at once so light and so cordial, of his new-made
friends. With all the efforts of the democrats to establish equality and
fraternity, it is among the aristocrats that equality and fraternity are
most to be found. All gentilshommes in the best society are equals;
and whether they embrace or fight each other, they embrace or fight
as brothers of the same family. But with the tone of manners Alain de
Rochebriant imbibed still more insensibly the lore of that philosophy
which young idlers in pursuit of pleasure teach to each other. Probably
in all civilized and luxurious capitals that philosophy is very much
the same among the same class of idlers at the same age; probably it
flourishes in Pekin not less than at Paris. If Paris has the credit,
or discredit, of it more than any other capital, it is because in Paris
more than in any other capital it charms the eye by grace and amuses
the ear by wit. A philosophy which takes the things of this life very
easily; which has a smile and a shrug of the shoulders for any
pretender to the Heroic; which subdivides the wealth of passion into the
pocket-money of caprices, is always in or out of love ankle-deep, never
venturing a plunge; which, light of heart as of tongue, turns "the
solemn plausibilities" of earth into subjects for epigrams and bons
mots,--jests at loyalty to kings and turns up its nose at enthusiasm
for commonwealths, abjures all grave studies and shuns all profound
emotions. We have crowds of such philosophers in London; but there they
are less noticed, because the agreeable attributes of the sect are there
dimmed and obfuscated. It is not a philosophy that flowers richly in
the reek of fogs and in the teeth of east winds; it wants for full
development the light atmosphere of Paris. Now this philosophy began
rapidly to exercise its charms upon Alain de Rochebriant. Even in the
society of professed Legitimists, he felt that faith had deserted the
Legitimist creed or taken refuge only as a companion of religion in
the hearts of high-born women and a small minority of priests. His
chivalrous loyalty still struggled to keep its ground, but its
roots were very much loosened. He saw--for his natural intellect was
keen--that the cause of the Bourbon was hopeless, at least for the
present, because it had ceased, at least for the present, to be a cause.
His political creed thus shaken, with it was shaken also that adherence
to the past which had stifled his ambition of a future. That ambition
began to breathe and to stir, though he owned it not to others, though,
as yet, he scarce distinguished its whispers, much less directed its
movements towards any definite object. Meanwhile, all that he knew of
his ambition was the new-born desire for social success.

We see him, then, under the quick operation of this change in sentiments
and habits, reclined on the fauteuil before his fireside, and listening
to his college friend, of whom we have so long lost sight, Frederic
Lemercier. Frederic had breakfasted with Alain,--a breakfast such as
might have contented the author of the "Almanach des Gourmands," and
provided from the cafe Anglais. Frederic has just thrown aside his
regalia.

"Pardieu! my dear Alain. If Louvier has no sinister object in the
generosity of his dealings with you, he will have raised himself
prodigiously in my estimation. I shall forsake, in his favour, my
allegiance to Duplessis, though that clever fellow has just made a
wondrous coup in the Egyptians, and I gain forty thousand francs by
having followed his advice. But if Duplessis has a head as long as
Louvier's, he certainly has not an equal greatness of soul. Still, my
dear friend, will you pardon me if I speak frankly, and in the way of a
warning homily?"

"Speak; you cannot oblige me more."

"Well, then, I know that you can no more live at Paris in the way you
are doing, or mean to do, without some fresh addition to your income,
than a lion could live in the Jardin des Plantes upon an allowance of
two mice a week."

"I don't see that. Deducting what I pay to my aunt,--and I cannot get
her to take more than six thousand francs a year,--I have seven hundred
napoleons left, net and clear. My rooms and stables are equipped, and
I have twenty-five hundred francs in hand. On seven hundred napoleons
a year, I calculate that I can very easily live as I do; and if I
fail--well, I must return to Pochebriant. Seven hundred napoleons a year
will be a magnificent rental there."

Frederic shook his head. "You do not know how one expense leads to
another. Above all, you do not calculate the chief part of one's
expenditure,--the unforeseen. You will play at the Jockey Club, and lose
half your income in a night."

"I shall never touch a card."

"So you say now, innocent as a lamb of the force of example. At all
events, beau seigneur, I presume you are not going to resuscitate the
part of the Ermite de la Chaussee d'Antin; and the fair Parisiennes are
demons of extravagance."

"Demons whom I shall not court."

"Did I say you would? They will court you. Before another month has
flown you will be inundated with billets-doux."

"It is not a shower that will devastate my humble harvest. But, mon
cher, we are falling upon very gloomy topics. Laissez-moi tranquille in
my illusions, if illusions they be. Ah, you cannot conceive what a new
life opens to the man who, like myself, has passed the dawn of his youth
in privation and fear, when he suddenly acquires competence and hope. If
it lasts only a year, it will be something to say 'Vixi.'"

"Alain," said Frederic; very earnestly, "believe me, I should not have
assumed the ungracious and inappropriate task of Mentor, if it were only
a year's experience at stake, or if you were in the position of men like
myself,--free from the encumbrance of a great name and heavily mortgaged
lands. Should you fail to pay regularly the interest due to Louvier,
he has the power to put up at public auction, and there to buy in for
himself, your chateau and domain."

"I am aware that in strict law he would have such power, though I doubt
if he would use it. Louvier is certainly a much better and more generous
fellow than I could have expected; and if I believe De Finisterre, he
has taken a sincere liking to me on account of affection to my poor
father. But why should not the interest be paid regularly? The revenues
from Rochebriant are not likely to decrease, and the charge on them is
lightened by the contract with Louvier. And I will confide to you a hope
I entertain of a very large addition to my rental."

"How?"

"A chief part of my rental is derived from forests, and De Finisterre
has heard of a capitalist who is disposed to make a contract for their
sale at the fall this year, and may probably extend it to future years,
at a price far exceeding that which I have hitherto obtained."

"Pray be cautious. De Finisterre is not a man I should implicitly trust
in such matters."

"Why? Do you know anything against him? He is in the best
society,--perfect gentilhomme,--and, as his name may tell you, a
fellow-Breton. You yourself allow, and so does Enguerrand, that the
purchases he made for me--in this apartment, my horses, etc.--are
singularly advantageous."

"Quite true; the Chevalier is reputed sharp and clever, is said to
be very amusing, and a first-rate piquet-player. I don't know him
personally,--I am not in his set. I have no valid reason to disparage
his character, nor do I conjecture any motive he could have to injure or
mislead you. Still, I say, be cautious how far you trust to his advice
or recommendation."

"Again I ask why?"

"He is unlucky to his friends. He attaches himself much to men younger
than himself; and somehow or other I have observed that most of them
have come to grief. Besides, a person in whose sagacity I have great
confidence warned me against making the Chevalier's acquaintance, and
said to me, in his blunt way, 'De Finisterre came to Paris with nothing;
he has succeeded to nothing; he belongs to no ostensible profession by
which anything can be made. But evidently now he has picked up a good
deal; and in proportion as any young associate of his becomes poorer,
De Finisterre seems mysteriously to become richer. Shun that sort of
acquaintance.'"

"Who is your sagacious adviser!"

"Duplessis."

"Ah, I thought so. That bird of prey fancies every other bird
looking out for pigeons. I fancy that Duplessis is, like all those
money-getters, a seeker after fashion, and De Finisterre has not
returned his bow."

"My dear Alain, I am to blame; nothing is so irritating as a dispute
about the worth of the men we like. I began it, now let it be dropped;
only make me one promise,--that if you should be in arrear, or if need
presses, you will come at once to me. It was very well to be absurdly
proud in an attic, but that pride will be out of place in your
appartement au premier."

"You are the best fellow in the world, Frederic, and I make you the
promise you ask," said Alain, cheerfully, but yet with a secret emotion
of tenderness and gratitude. "And now, mon cher, what day will you dine
with me to meet Raoul and Enguerrand, and some others whom you would
like to know?"

"Thanks, and hearty ones, but we move now in different spheres, and
I shall not trespass on yours. Je suis trop bourgeois to incur the
ridicule of le bourgeois gentilhomme."

"Frederic, how dare you speak thus? My dear fellow, my friends shall
honour you as I do."

"But that will be on your account, not mine. No; honestly that kind of
society neither tempts nor suits me. I am a sort of king in my own walk;
and I prefer my Bohemian royalty to vassalage in higher regions. Say no
more of it. It will flatter my vanity enough if you will now and then
descend to my coteries, and allow me to parade a Rochebriant as my
familiar crony, slap him on the shoulder, and call him Alain."

"Fie! you who stopped me and the English aristocrat in the Champs
Elysees, to humble us with your boast of having fascinated une grande
dame,--I think you said a duchesse."

"Oh," said Lemercier, conceitedly, and passing his hand through his
scented locks, "women are different; love levels all ranks. I don't
blame Ruy Blas for accepting the love of a queen, but I do blame him
for passing himself off as a noble,--a plagiarism, by the by, from an
English play. I do not love the English enough to copy them. A propos,
what has become of ce beau Grarm Varn? I have not seen him of late."

"Neither have I."

"Nor the belle Italienne?"

"Nor her," said Alain, slightly blushing.

At this moment Enguerrand lounged into the room. Alain stopped Lemercier
to introduce him to his kinsman. "Enguerrand, I present to you M.
Lemercier, my earliest and one of my dearest friends."

The young noble held out his hand with the bright and joyous grace
which accompanied all his movements, and expressed in cordial words
his delight to make M. Lemercier's acquaintance. Bold and assured as
Frederic was in his own circles, he was more discomposed than set at
ease by the gracious accost of a lion, whom he felt at once to be of a
breed superior to his own. He muttered some confused phrases, in which
ravi and flatte were alone audible, and evanished.

"I know M. Lemercier by sight very well," said Enguerrand, seating
himself. "One sees him very often in the Bois; and I have met him in
the Coulisses and the Bal Mabille. I think, too, that he plays at the
Bourse, and is lie with M. Duplessis, who bids fair to rival Louvier one
of these days. Is Duplessis also one of your dearest friends?"

"No, indeed. I once met him, and was not prepossessed in his favour."

"Nevertheless, he is a man much to be admired and respected."

"Why so?"

"Because he understands so well the art of making what we all
covet,--money. I will introduce you to him."

"I have been already introduced."

"Then I will re-introduce you. He is much courted in a society which I
have recently been permitted by my father to frequent,--the society, of
the Imperial Court."

"You frequent that society, and the Count permits it?"

"Yes; better the Imperialists than the Republicans; and my father begins
to own that truth, though he is too old or too indolent to act on it."

"And Raoul?"

"Oh, Raoul, the melancholy and philosophical Raoul, has no ambition
of any kind, so long as--thanks somewhat to me--his purse is always
replenished for the wants of his stately existence, among the foremost
of which wants are the means to supply the wants of others. That is the
true reason why he consents to our glove-shop. Raoul belongs, with some
other young men of the Faubourg, to a society enrolled under the name
of Saint Francois de Sales, for the relief of the poor. He visits their
houses, and is at home by their sickbeds as at their stinted boards.
Nor does he confine his visitations to the limits of our Faubourg; he
extends his travels to Montmartre and Belleville. As to our upper world,
he does not concern himself much with its changes. He says that we have
destroyed too much ever to rebuild solidly; and that whatever we do
build could be upset any day by a Paris mob, which he declares to be
the only institution we have left. A wonderful fellow is Raoul,--full of
mind, though he does little with it; full of heart, which he devotes
to suffering humanity, and to a poetic, knightly reverence (not to be
confounded with earthly love, and not to be degraded into that sickly
sentiment called Platonic affection) for the Comtesse di Rimini, who is
six years older than himself, and who is very faithfully attached to
her husband, Raoul's intimate friend, whose honour he would guard as
his own. It is an episode in the drama of Parisian life, and one not so
uncommon as the malignant may suppose. Di Rimini knows and approves of
his veneration; my mother, the best of women, sanctions it, and deems
truly that it preserves Raoul safe from all the temptations to which
ignobler youth is exposed. I mention this lest you should imagine there
was anything in Raoul's worship of his star less pure than it is.
For the rest, Raoul, to the grief and amazement of that disciple of
Voltaire, my respected father, is one of the very few men I know in our
circles who is sincerely religious,--an orthodox Catholic,--and the only
man I know who practises the religion he professes; charitable, chaste,
benevolent; and no bigot, no intolerant ascetic. His only weakness
is his entire submission to the worldly common-sense of his
good-for-nothing, covetous, ambitious brother Enguerrand. I cannot say
how I love him for that. If he had not such a weakness, his excellence
would gall me, and I believe I should hate him."

Alain bowed his head at this eulogium. Such had been the character that
a few months ago he would have sought as example and model. He seemed to
gaze upon a flattered portrait of himself as he had been.

"But," said Enguerrand, "I have not come here to indulge in the overflow
of brotherly affection. I come to take you to your relation, the
Duchesse of Tarascon. I have pledged myself to her to bring you, and she
is at home on purpose to receive you."

"In that case I cannot be such a churl as to refuse. And, indeed, I no
longer feel quite the same prejudices against her and the Imperialists
as I brought from Bretagne. Shall I order my carriage?"

"No; mine is at the door. Yours can meet you where you will, later.
Allons."




CHAPTER III.

The Duchesse de Tarascon occupied a vast apartment in the Rue Royale,
close to the Tuileries. She held a high post among the ladies who graced
the brilliant court of the Empress. She had survived her second husband
the duke, who left no issue, and the title died with him.

Alain and Enguerrand were ushered up the grand staircase, lined with
tiers of costly exotics as if for a fete; but in that and in all kinds
of female luxury, the Duchesse lived in a state of fete perpetuelle.
The doors on the landing-place were screened by heavy portieres of Genoa
velvet, richly embroidered in gold with the ducal crown and cipher. The
two salons through which the visitors passed to the private cabinet or
boudoir were decorated with Gobelin tapestries, fresh, with a mixture
of roseate hues, and depicting incidents in the career of the first
emperor; while the effigies of the late duke's father--the gallant
founder of a short-lived race figured modestly in the background. On a
table of Russian malachite within the recess of the central window lay,
preserved in glass cases, the baton and the sword, the epaulettes
and the decorations of the brave Marshal. On the consoles and the
mantelpieces stood clocks and vases of Sevres that could scarcely be
eclipsed by those in the Imperial palaces. Entering the cabinet, they
found the Duchesse seated at her writing-table, with a small Skye
terrier, hideous in the beauty of the purest breed, nestled at her
feet. This room was an exquisite combination of costliness and
comfort,--Luxury at home. The hangings were of geranium-coloured
silk, with double curtains of white satin; near to the writing-table a
conservatory, with a white marble fountain at play in the centre, and
a trellised aviary at the back. The walls were covered with small
pictures,--chiefly portraits and miniatures of the members of the
imperial family, of the late Duc, of his father the Marshal and Madame
la Marechale, of the present Duchesse herself, and of some of the
principal ladies of the court.

The Duchesse was still in the prime of life. She had passed her fortieth
year, but was so well "conserved" that you might have guessed her to
be ten years younger. She was tall; not large, but with rounded figure
inclined to en bon point; with dark hair and eyes, but fair complexion,
injured in effect rather than improved by pearl-powder, and that
atrocious barbarism of a dark stain on the eyelids which has of late
years been a baneful fashion; dressed,--I am a man, and cannot describe
her dress; all I know is that she had the acknowledged fame of the
best-dressed subject of France. As she rose from her seat there was in
her look and air the unmistakable evidence of grande dame,--a family
likeness in feature to Alain himself, a stronger likeness to the picture
of her first cousin (his mother) which was preserved at Rochebriant. Her
descent was indeed from ancient and noble houses. But to the distinction
of race she added that of fashion, crowning both with a tranquil
consciousness of lofty position and unblemished reputation.

"Unnatural cousin!" she said to Alain, offering her hand to him, with
a gracious smile,--"all this age in Paris, and I see you for the first
time. But there is joy on earth as in heaven over sinners who truly
repent. You repent truly--n'est ce pas?"

It is impossible to describe the caressing charm which the Duchesse
threw into her words, voice, and look. Alain was fascinated and subdued.

"Ah, Madame la Duchesse," said he, bowing over the fait hand he lightly
held, "it was not sin, unless modesty be a sin, which made a rustic
hesitate long before he dared to offer his homage to the queen of the
graces."

"Not badly said for a rustic," cried Enguerrand; "eh, Madame?"

"My cousin, you are pardoned," said the Duchesse. "Compliment is the
perfume of gentilhommerie; and if you brought enough of that perfume
from the flowers of Rochebriant to distribute among the ladies at
court, you will be terribly the mode there. Seducer!"--here she gave
the Marquis a playful tap on the cheek, not in a coquettish but in a
mother-like familiarity, and looking at him attentively, said: "Why,
you are even handsomer than your father. I shall be proud to present to
their Imperial Majesties so becoming a cousin. But seat yourselves here,
Messieurs, close to my arm-chair, caussons."

The Duchesse then took up the ball of the conversation. She talked
without any apparent artifice, but with admirable tact; put just the
questions about Rochebriant most calculated to please Alain, shunning
all that might have pained him; asking him for descriptions of the
surrounding scenery, the Breton legends; hoping that the old castle
would never be spoiled by modernizing restorations; inquiring tenderly
after his aunt, whom she had in her childhood once seen, and still
remembered with her sweet, grave face; paused little for replies; then
turned to Enguerrand with sprightly small-talk on the topics of the day,
and every now and then bringing Alain into the pale of the talk, leading
on insensibly until she got Enguerrand himself to introduce the subject
of the emperor, and the political troubles which were darkening a reign
heretofore so prosperous and splendid.

Her countenance then changed; it became serious, and even grave in its
expression.

"It is true," she said, "that the times grow menacing, menacing not only
to the throne, but to order and property and France. One by one they are
removing all the breakwaters which the empire had constructed between
the executive and the most fickle and impulsive population that ever
shouted 'long live' one day to the man whom they would send to the
guillotine the next. They are denouncing what they call personal
government. Grant that it has its evils; but what would they
substitute,--a constitutional monarchy like the English? That is
impossible with universal suffrage and without an hereditary chamber.
The nearest approach to it was the monarchy of Louis Philippe,--we
know how sick they became of that. A republic?--mon Dieu! composed of
Republicans terrified out of their wits at each other. The moderate
men, mimics of the Girondins, with the Reds and the Socialists and the
Communists, ready to tear them to pieces. And then--What then?--the
commercialists, the agriculturists, the middle class combining to elect
some dictator who will cannonade the mob and become a mimic Napoleon,
grafted on a mimic Necker or a mimic Danton. Oh, Messieurs, I am French
to the core. You inheritors of such names must be as French as I am; and
yet you men insist on remaining more useless to France in the midst of
her need than I am,--I, a woman who can but talk and weep."

The Duchesse spoke with a warmth of emotion which startled and
profoundly affected Alain. He remained silent, leaving it to Enguerrand
to answer.

"Dear Madame," said the latter, "I do not see how either myself or our
kinsman can merit your reproach. We are not legislators. I doubt if
there is a single department in France that would elect us, if we
offered ourselves. It is not our fault if the various floods of
revolution leave men of our birth and opinions stranded wrecks of a
perished world. The emperor chooses his own advisers, and if they are
bad ones, his Majesty certainly will not ask Alain and me to replace
them."

"You do not answer--you evade me," said the Duchesse; with a mournful
smile. "You are too skilled a man of the world, Monsieur Enguerrand, not
to know that it is not only legislators and ministers that are necessary
to the support of a throne, and the safeguard of a nation. Do you not
see how great a help it is to both throne and nation when that section
of public opinion which is represented by names illustrious in history,
identified with records of chivalrous deeds and loyal devotion, rallies
round the order established? Let that section of public opinion stand
aloof, soured and discontented, excluded from active life, lending no
counter-balance to the perilous oscillations of democratic passion,
and tell me if it is not an enemy to itself as well as a traitor to the
principles it embodies?"

"The principles it embodies, Madame," said Alain, "are those of fidelity
to a race of kings unjustly set aside, less for the vices than the
virtues of ancestors. Louis XV. was the worst of the Bourbons,--he was
the bien aime: he escapes. Louis XVI. was in moral attributes the best
of the Bourbons,--he dies the death of a felon. Louis XVIII., against
whom much may be said, restored to the throne by foreign bayonets,
reigning as a disciple of Voltaire might reign, secretly scoffing alike
at the royalty and the religion which were crowned in his person, dies
peacefully in his bed. Charles X., redeeming the errors of his youth
by a reign untarnished by a vice, by a religion earnest and sincere, is
sent into exile for defending established order from the very inroads
which you lament. He leaves an heir against whom calumny cannot invent
a tale, and that heir remains an outlaw simply because he descends from
Henry IV., and has a right to reign. Madame, you appeal to us as among
the representatives of the chivalrous deeds and loyal devotion which
characterized the old nobility of France. Should we deserve that
character if we forsook the unfortunate, and gained wealth and honour in
forsaking?"

"Your words endear you to me. I am proud to call you cousin," said the
Duchesse. "But do you, or does any man in his senses believe that if you
upset the Empire you could get back the Bourbons; that you would not
be in imminent danger of a Government infinitely more opposed to the
theories on which rests the creed of Legitimists than that of Louis
Napoleon? After all, what is there in the loyalty of you Bourbonites
that has in it the solid worth of an argument which can appeal to the
comprehension of mankind, except it be the principle of a hereditary
monarchy? Nobody nowadays can maintain the right divine of a single
regal family to impose itself upon a nation. That dogma has ceased to be
a living principle; it is only a dead reminiscence. But the institution
of monarchy is a principle strong and vital, and appealing to the
practical interests of vast sections of society. Would you sacrifice
the principle which concerns the welfare of millions, because you
cannot embody it in the person of an individual utterly insignificant
in himself? In a word, if you prefer monarchy to the hazard of
republicanism for such a country as France, accept the monarchy you
find, since it is quite clear you cannot rebuild the monarchy you would
prefer. Does it not embrace all the great objects for which you call
yourself Legitimist? Under it religion is honoured, a national Church
secured, in reality if not in name; under it you have united the
votes of millions to the establishment of the throne; under it all
the material interests of the country, commercial, agricultural, have
advanced with an unequalled rapidity of progress; under it Paris has
become the wonder of the world for riches, for splendour, for grace and
beauty; under it the old traditional enemies of France have been humbled
and rendered impotent. The policy of Richelieu has been achieved in the
abasement of Austria; the policy of Napoleon I. has been consummated
in the salvation of Europe from the semi-barbarous ambition of Russia.
England no longer casts her trident in the opposition scale of the
balance of European power. Satisfied with the honour of our alliance,
she has lost every other ally; and her forces neglected, her spirit
enervated, her statesmen dreaming believers in the safety of their
island, provided they withdraw from the affairs of Europe, may sometimes
scold us, but will certainly not dare to fight. With France she is but
an inferior satellite; without France she is--nothing. Add to all this
a court more brilliant than that of Louis XIV., a sovereign not
indeed without faults and errors, but singularly mild in his nature,
warm-hearted to friends, forgiving to foes, whom personally no one could
familiarly know and not be charmed with a bonte of character, lovable as
that of Henri IV.,--and tell me what more than all this could you expect
from the reign of a Bourbon?"

"With such results," said Alain, "from the monarchy you so eloquently
praise, I fail to discover what the emperor's throne could possibly gain
by a few powerless converts from an unpopular, and you say, no doubt
truly, from a hopeless cause."

"I say monarchy gains much by the loyal adhesion of any man of courage,
ability, and honour. Every new monarchy gains much by conversions from
the ranks by which the older monarchies were strengthened and adorned.
But I do not here invoke your aid merely to this monarchy, my cousin;
I demand your devotion to the interests of France; I demand that you
should not rest an outlaw from her service. Ah, you think that France is
in no danger, that you may desert or oppose the Empire as you list, and
that society will remain safe! You are mistaken. Ask Enguerrand."

"Madame," said Enguerrand, "you overrate my political knowledge in that
appeal; but, honestly speaking, I subscribe to your reasonings. I agree
with you that the empire sorely needs the support of men of honour; it
has one cause of rot which now undermines it,--dishonest jobbery in its
administrative departments; even in that of the army, which apparently
is so heeded and cared for. I agree with you that France is in danger,
and may need the swords of all her better sons, whether against the
foreigner or against her worst enemies,--the mobs of her great towns.
I myself received a military education, and but for my reluctance to
separate myself from my father and Raoul, I should be a candidate for
employments more congenial to me than those of the Bourse and my trade
in the glove-shop. But Alain is happily free from all family ties, and
Alain knows that my advice to him is not hostile to your exhortations."

"I am glad to think he is under so salutary an influence," said the
Duchesse; and seeing that Alain remained silent and thoughtful, she
wisely changed the subject, and shortly afterwards the two friends took
leave.




CHAPTER IV.

Three days elapsed before Graham again saw M. Lebeau. The letter-writer
did not show himself at the cafe, and was not to be found at his office,
the ordinary business of which was transacted by his clerk, saying that
his master was much engaged on important matters that took him from
home.

Graham naturally thought that these matters concerned the discovery
of Louise Duval, and was reconciled to suspense. At the cafe, awaiting
Lebeau, he had slid into some acquaintance with the ouvrier Armand
Monnier, whose face and talk had before excited his interest. Indeed,
the acquaintance had been commenced by the ouvrier, who seated himself
at a table near to Graham's, and, after looking at him earnestly for
some minutes, said, "You are waiting for your antagonist at dominos, M.
Lebeau,--a very remarkable man."

"So he seems. I know, however, but little of him. You, perhaps, have
known him longer?"

"Several months. Many of your countrymen frequent this cafe, but you do
not seem to care to associate with the blouses."

"It is not that; but we islanders are shy, and don't make acquaintance
with each other readily. By the way, since you so courteously accost me,
I may take the liberty of saying that I overheard you defend the other
night, against one of my countrymen, who seemed to me to talk great
nonsense, the existence of le bon Dieu. You had much the best of it. I
rather gathered from your argument that you went somewhat further, and
were not too enlightened to admit of Christianity."

Armand Monnier looked pleased. He liked praise; and he liked to hear
himself talk, and he plunged at once into a very complicated sort of
Christianity,--partly Arian, partly Saint Simonian, with a little of
Rousseau and a great deal of Armand Monnier. Into this we need not
follow him; but, in sum, it was a sort of Christianity, the main heads
of which consisted in the removal of your neighbour's landmarks, in the
right of the poor to appropriate the property of the rich, in the right
of love to dispense with marriage, and the duty of the State to provide
for any children that might result from such union,--the parents being
incapacitated to do so, as whatever they might leave was due to the
treasury in common. Graham listened to these doctrines with melancholy
not unmixed with contempt. "Are these opinions of yours," he asked,
"derived from reading or your own reflection?"

"Well, from both, but from circumstances in life that induced me to
read and reflect. I am one of the many victims of the tyrannical law of
marriage. When very young I married a woman who made me miserable, and
then forsook me. Morally, she has ceased to be my wife; legally, she is.
I then met with another woman who suits me, who loves me. She lives with
me; I cannot marry her; she has to submit to humiliations, to be called
contemptuously an ouvrier's mistress. Then, though before I was only a
Republican, I felt there was something wrong in society which needed
a greater change than that of a merely political government; and then,
too, when I was all troubled and sore, I chanced to read one of Madame
de Grantmesnil's books. A glorious genius that woman's!"

"She has genius, certainly," said Graham, with a keen pang at his
heart,--Madame de Grantmesnil, the dearest friend of Isaura! "But," he
added, "though I believe that eloquent author has indirectly assailed
certain social institutions, including that of marriage, I am perfectly
persuaded that she never designed to effect such complete overthrow
of the system which all civilized communities have hitherto held in
reverence as your doctrines would attempt; and, after all, she but
expresses her ideas through the medium of fabulous incidents and
characters. And men of your sense should not look for a creed in the
fictions of poets and romance-writers."

"Ah," said Monnier, "I dare say neither Madame de Grantmesnil nor even
Rousseau ever even guessed the ideas they awoke in their readers; but
one idea leads on to another. And genuine poetry and romance touch
the heart so much more than dry treatises. In a word, Madame de
Grantmesnil's book set me thinking; and then I read other books, and
talked with clever men, and educated myself. And so I became the man I
am." Here, with a self-satisfied air, Monnier bowed to the Englishman,
and joined a group at the other end of the room.

The next evening, just before dusk, Graham Vane was seated musingly in
his own apartment in the Faubourg Montmartre, when there came a slight
knock at his door. He was so wrapped in thought that he did not hear
the sound, though twice repeated. The door opened gently, and M. Lebeau
appeared on the threshold. The room was lighted only by the gas-lamp
from the street without.

Lebeau advanced through the gloom, and quietly seated himself in the
corner of the fireplace opposite to Graham before he spoke. "A thousand
pardons for disturbing your slumbers, Monsieur Lamb."

Startled then by the voice so near him, Graham raised his head, looked
round, and beheld very indistinctly the person seated so near him.

"Monsieur Lebeau?"

"At your service. I promise to give an answer to your question; accept
my apologies that it has been deferred so long. I shall not this evening
go to our cafe. I took the liberty of calling--"

"Monsieur Lebeau, you are a brick."

"A what, Monsieur!--a brique?"

"I forgot; you are not up to our fashionable London idioms. A brick
means a jolly fellow, and it is very kind in you to call. What is your
decision?"

"Monsieur, I can give you some information, but it is so slight that
I offer it gratis, and forego all thought of undertaking further
inquiries. They could only be prosecuted in another country, and it
would not be worth my while to leave Paris on the chance of gaining so
trifling a reward as you propose. Judge for yourself. In the year 1849,
and in the month of July, Louise Duval left Paris for Aix-la-Chapelle.
There she remained some weeks, and then left it. I can learn no further
traces of her movements."

"Aix-la-Chapelle! What could she do there?"

"It is a Spa in great request; crowded during the summer season with
visitors from all countries. She might have gone there for health or for
pleasure."

"Do you think that one could learn more at the Spa itself if one went
there?"

"Possibly. But it is so long,--twenty years ago."

"She might have revisited the place."

"Certainly; but I know no more."

"Was she there under the same name,--Duval?"

"I am sure of that."

"Do you think she left it alone or with others? You tell me she was
awfully belle; she might have attracted admirers."

"If," answered Lebeau, reluctantly, "I could believe the report of my
informant, Louise Duval left Aix not alone, but with some gallant; not
an Englishman. They are said to have parted soon, and the man is now
dead. But, speaking frankly, I do not think Mademoiselle Duval would
have thus compromised her honour and sacrificed her future. I believe
she would have scorned all proposals that were not those of marriage.
But all I can say for certainty is that nothing is known to me of her
fate since she quitted Aix-la-Chapelle."

"In 1849? She had then a child living."

"A child? I never heard that she had any child; and I do not believe she
could have had any child in 1849."

Graham mused. Somewhat less than five years after 1849 Louise Duval had
been seen at Aix-la-Chapelle. Possibly she found some attraction at
that place, and might yet be discovered there. "Monsieur Lebeau," said
Graham, "you know this lady by sight; you would recognize her in spite
of the lapse of years. Will you go to Aix and find out there what you
can? Of course, expenses will be paid, and the reward will be given if
you succeed."

"I cannot oblige you. My interest in this poor lady is not very strong,
though I should be willing to serve her, and glad to know that she were
alive. I have now business on hand which interests me much more, and
which will take me from Paris, but not in the direction of Aix."

"If I wrote to my employer, and got him to raise the reward to some
higher amount, that might make it worth your while?"

"I should still answer that my affairs will not permit such a journey.
But if there be any chance of tracing Louise Duval at Aix,--and there
may be,--you would succeed quite as well as I should. You must judge for
yourself if it be worth your trouble to attempt such a task; and if you
do attempt it, and do succeed, pray let me know.--A line to my office
will reach me for some little time, even if I am absent from Paris.
Adieu, Monsieur Lamb."

Here M. Lebeau Lose and departed.

Graham relapsed into thought; but a train of thought much more active,
much more concentred than before. "No," thus ran his meditations,--"no,
it would not be safe to employ that man further. The reasons that forbid
me to offer any very high reward for the discovery of this woman operate
still more strongly against tendering to her own relation a sum that
might indeed secure his aid, but would unquestionably arouse his
suspicions, and perhaps drag into light all that must be concealed.
Oh, this cruel mission! I am, indeed, an impostor to myself till it be
fulfilled. I will go to Aix, and take Renard with me. I am impatient
till I set out, but I cannot quit Paris without once more seeing Isaura.
She consents to relinquish the stage; surely I could wean her too from
intimate friendship with a woman whose genius has so fatal an effect
upon enthusiastic minds. And then--and then?"

He fell into a delightful revery; and contemplating Isaura as his future
wife, he surrounded her sweet image with all those attributes of
dignity and respect with which an Englishman is accustomed to invest the
destined bearer of his name, the gentle sovereign of his household,
the sacred mother of his children. In this picture the more brilliant
qualities of Isaura found, perhaps, but faint presentation. Her glow of
sentiment, her play of fancy, her artistic yearnings for truths remote,
for the invisible fairyland of beautiful romance, receded into the
background of the picture. It was all these, no doubt, that had so
strengthened and enriched the love at first sight, which had shaken the
equilibrium of his positive existence; and yet he now viewed all these
as subordinate to the one image of mild decorous matronage into which
wedlock was to transform the child of genius, longing for angel wings
and unlimited space.




CHAPTER V.

On quitting the sorry apartment of the false M. Lamb, Lebeau walked
on with slow steps and bended head, like a man absorbed in thought.
He threaded a labyrinth of obscure streets, no longer in the Faubourg
Montmartre, and dived at last into one of the few courts which preserve
the cachet of the moyen age untouched by the ruthless spirit of
improvement which during the second empire has so altered the face of
Paris. At the bottom of the court stood a large house, much dilapidated,
but bearing the trace of former grandeur in pilasters and fretwork in
the style of the Renaissance, and a defaced coat of arms, surmounted
with a ducal coronet, over the doorway. The house had the aspect of
desertion: many of the windows were broken; others were jealously closed
with mouldering shutters. The door stood ajar; Lebeau pushed it open,
and the action set in movement a bell within a porter's lodge.
The house, then, was not uninhabited; it retained the dignity of a
concierge. A man with a large grizzled beard cut square, and holding a
journal in his hand, emerged from the lodge, and moved his cap with a
certain bluff and surly reverence on recognizing Lebeau.

"What! so early, citizen?"

"Is it too early?" said Lebeau, glancing at his watch. "So it is; I
was not aware of the time. But I am tired with waiting; let me into
the salon. I will wait for the rest; I shall not be sorry for a little
repose."

"Bon," said the porter, sententiously; "while man reposes men advance."

"A profound truth, citizen Le Roux; though if they advance on a reposing
foe, they have blundering leaders unless they march through unguarded
by-paths and with noiseless tread."

Following the porter up a dingy broad staircase, Lebeau was admitted
into a large room, void of all other furniture than a table, two benches
at its sides, and a fauteuil at its head. On the mantelpiece there was a
huge clock, and some iron sconces were fixed on the panelled walls.

Lebeau flung himself, with a wearied air, into the fauteuil. The porter
looked at him with a kindly expression. He had a liking to Lebeau, whom
he had served in his proper profession of messenger or commissionnaire
before being placed by that courteous employer in the easy post he
now held. Lebeau, indeed, had the art, when he pleased, of charming
inferiors; his knowledge of mankind allowed him to distinguish
peculiarities in each individual, and flatter the amour propre by
deference to such eccentricities. Marc le Roux, the roughest of "red
caps," had a wife of whom he was very proud. He would have called the
empress Citoyenne Eugenie, but he always spoke of his wife as Madame.
Lebeau won his heart by always asking after Madame.

"You look tired, citizen," said the porter; "let me bring you a glass of
wine."

"Thank you, mon ami, no. Perhaps later, if I have time, after we break
up, to pay my respects to Madame."

The porter smiled, bowed, and retired muttering, "Nom d'un petit
bonhomme; il n'y a rien de tel que les belles manieres."

Left alone, Lebeau leaned his elbow on the table, resting his chin on
his hand, and gazing into the dim space,--for it was now, indeed, night,
and little light came through the grimy panes of the one window left
unclosed by shutters. He was musing deeply. This man was, in much, an
enigma to himself. Was he seeking to unriddle it? A strange compound
of contradictory elements. In his stormy youth there had been
lightning-like flashes of good instincts, of irregular honour, of
inconsistent generosity,--a puissant wild nature, with strong passions
of love and of hate, without fear, but not without shame. In other forms
of society that love of applause which had made him seek and exult in
the notoriety which he mistook for fame might have settled down into
some solid and useful ambition. He might have become great in the
world's eye, for at the service of his desires there were no ordinary
talents. Though too true a Parisian to be a severe student, still, on
the whole, he had acquired much general information, partly from books,
partly from varied commerce with mankind. He had the gift, both by
tongue and by pen, of expressing himself with force and warmth; time and
necessity had improved that gift. Coveting, during his brief career of
fashion, the distinctions which necessitate lavish expenditure, he had
been the most reckless of spendthrifts; but the neediness which follows
waste had never destroyed his original sense of personal honour.
Certainly Victor de Mauleon was not, at the date of his fall, a man to
whom the thought of accepting, much less of stealing, the jewels of
a woman who loved him could have occurred as a possible question of
casuistry between honour and temptation. Nor could that sort of question
have, throughout the sternest trials or the humblest callings to which
his after-life had been subjected, forced admission into his brain.
He was one of those men, perhaps the most terrible though unconscious
criminals, who are the offsprings produced by intellectual power and
egotistical ambition. If you had offered to Victor de Mauleon the crown
of the Caesars, on condition of his doing one of those base things
which "a gentleman" cannot do, pick a pocket, cheat at cards,--Victor
de Mauleon would have refused the crown. He would not have refused on
account of any laws of morality affecting the foundations of the
social system, but from the pride of his own personality. "I, Victor
de Mauleon! I pick a pocket! I cheat at cards! I!" But when something
incalculably worse for the interests of society than picking a pocket
or cheating at cards was concerned; when for the sake either of private
ambition or political experiment hitherto untested, and therefore very
doubtful, the peace and order and happiness of millions might be exposed
to the release of the most savage passions, rushing on revolutionary
madness or civil massacre, then this French dare-devil would have been
just as unscrupulous as any English philosopher whom a metropolitan
borough might elect as its representative. The system of the empire was
in the way of Victor de Mauleon,--in the way of his private ambition, in
the way of his political dogmas; and therefore it must be destroyed, no
matter what nor whom it crushed beneath its ruins. He was one of those
plotters of revolutions not uncommon in democracies, ancient and modern,
who invoke popular agencies with the less scruple because they have a
supreme contempt for the populace. A man with mental powers equal to De
Mauleon's, and who sincerely loves the people and respects the grandeur
of aspiration with which, in the great upheaving of their masses, they
so often contrast the irrational credulities of their ignorance and
the blind fury of their wrath, is always exceedingly loath to pass the
terrible gulf that divides reform from revolution. He knows how rarely
it happens that genuine liberty is not disarmed in the passage, and what
sufferings must be undergone by those who live by their labour during
the dismal intervals between the sudden destruction of one form of
society and the gradual settlement of another. Such a man, however, has
no type in a Victor de Mauleon. The circumstances of his life had placed
this strong nature at war with society, and corrupted into misanthropy
affections that had once been ardent. That misanthropy made his ambition
more intense, because it increased his scorn for the human instruments
it employed.

Victor de Mauleon knew that however innocent of the charges that had so
long darkened his name, and however--thanks to his rank, his manners,
his savoir vivre, the aid of Louvier's countenance and the support of
his own high-born connections--he might restore himself to his rightful
grade in private life, the higher prizes in public life would scarcely
be within reach, to a man of his antecedents and stinted means, in the
existent form and conditions of established political order. Perforce,
the aristocrat must make himself democrat if he would become a political
chief. Could he assist in turning upside down the actual state of
things, he trusted to his individual force of character to find himself
among the uppermost in the general bouleversement. And in the first
stage of popular revolution the mob has no greater darling than
the noble who deserts his order, though in the second stage it may
guillotine him at the denunciation of his cobbler. A mind so sanguine
and so audacious as that of Victor de Mauleon never thinks of the second
step if it sees a way to the first.




CHAPTER VI.

The room was in complete darkness, save where a ray from a gas-lamp at
the mouth of the court came aslant through the window, when citizen Le
Roux re-entered, closed the window, lighted two of the sconces, and drew
forth from a drawer in the table implements of writing, which he placed
thereon noiselessly, as if he feared to disturb M. Lebeau, whose head,
buried in his hands, rested on the table. He seemed in a profound
sleep. At last the porter gently touched the arm of the slumberer, and
whispered in his ear, "It is on the stroke of ten, citizen; they will be
here in a minute or so." Lebeau lifted his head drowsily.

"Eh," said he--"what?"

"You have been asleep."

"I suppose so, for I have been dreaming. Ha! I hear the door-bell. I am
wide awake now."

The porter left him, and in a few minutes conducted into the salon two
men wrapped in cloaks, despite the warmth of the summer night. Lebeau
shook hands with them silently, and not less silently they laid aside
their cloaks and seated themselves. Both these men appeared to belong to
the upper section of the middle class. One, strongly built, with a
keen expression of countenance, was a surgeon considered able in his
profession, but with limited practice, owing to a current suspicion
against his honour in connection with a forged will. The other, tall,
meagre, with long grizzled hair and a wild unsettled look about the
eyes, was a man of science; had written works well esteemed upon
mathematics and electricity, also against the existence of any other
creative power than that which he called "nebulosity," and defined to be
the combination of heat and moisture. The surgeon was about the age of
forty, the atheist a few years older. In another minute or so, a knock
was heard against the wall. One of the men rose and touched a spring
in the panel, which then flew back, and showed an opening upon a narrow
stair, by which, one after the other, entered three other members of the
society. Evidently there was more than one mode of ingress and exit.

The three new-comers were not Frenchmen,--one might see that at a
glance; probably they had reasons for greater precaution than those who
entered by the front door. One, a tall, powerfully-built man, with fair
hair and beard, dressed with a certain pretension to elegance,--faded
threadbare elegance,--exhibiting no appearance of linen, was a Pole.
One, a slight bald man, very dark and sallow, was an Italian. The third,
who seemed like an ouvrier in his holiday clothes, was a Belgian.

Lebeau greeted them all with an equal courtesy, and each with an equal
silence took his seat at the table.

Lebeau glanced at the clock. "Confreres," he said, "our number as fixed
for this seance still needs two to be complete, and doubtless they will
arrive in a few minutes. Till they come, we can but talk upon trifles.
Permit me to offer you my cigar-case." And so saying, he who professed
to be no smoker handed his next neighbour, who was the Pole, a large
cigar-case amply furnished; and the Pole, helping himself to two cigars,
handed the case to the man next him,--two only declining the luxury,
the Italian and the Belgian. But the Pole was the only man who took two
cigars.

Steps were now heard on the stairs, the door opened, and citizen Le
Toux ushered in, one after the other, two men, this time unmistakably
French,--to an experienced eye unmistakably Parisians: the one, a young
beardless man, who seemed almost boyish, with a beautiful face, and
a stinted, meagre frame; the other, a stalwart man of about eight-and
twenty, dressed partly as an ouvrier, not in his Sunday clothes, rather
affecting the blouse,--not that he wore that antique garment, but that
he was in rough costume unbrushed and stained, with thick shoes and
coarse stockings, and a workman's cap. But of all who gathered round
the table at which M. Lebeau presided, he had the most distinguished
exterior,--a virile honest exterior, a massive open forehead,
intelligent eyes, a handsome clear-cut incisive profile, and solid jaw.
The expression of the face was stern, but not mean,--an expression which
might have become an ancient baron as well as a modern workman; in it
plenty of haughtiness and of will, and still more of self-esteem.

"Confreres," said Lebeau, rising, and every eye turned to him, "our
number for the present seance is complete. To business. Since we last
met, our cause has advanced with rapid and not with noiseless stride. I
need not tell you that Louis Bonaparte has virtually abnegated Les idees
Napoleoniennes,--a fatal mistake for him, a glorious advance for us. The
liberty of the press must very shortly be achieved, and with it personal
government must end. When the autocrat once is compelled to go by the
advice of his ministers, look for sudden changes. His ministers will be
but weathercocks, turned hither and thither according as the wind chops
at Paris; and Paris is the temple of the winds. The new revolution is
almost at hand. [Murmurs of applause.] It would move the laughter of the
Tuileries and its ministers, of the Bourse and of its gamblers, of every
dainty salon of this silken city of would-be philosophers and wits, if
they were told that here within this mouldering baraque, eight men, so
little blessed by fortune, so little known to fame as ourselves, met
to concert the fall of an empire. The Government would not deem us
important enough to notice our existence."

"I know not that," interrupted the Pole.

"Ah, pardon," resumed the orator; "I should have confined my remark
to the five of us who are French. I did injustice to the illustrious
antecedents of our foreign allies. I know that you, Thaddeus Loubisky,
that you, Leonardo Raselli, have been too eminent for hands hostile to
tyrants not to be marked with a black cross in the books of the police;
I know that you, Jan Vanderstegen, if hitherto unscarred by those wounds
in defence of freedom which despots and cowards would fain miscall the
brands of the felon, still owe it to your special fraternity to
keep your movements rigidly concealed. The tyrant would suppress the
International Society, and forbids it the liberty of congress. To
you three is granted the secret entrance to our council-hall. But we
Frenchmen are as yet safe in our supposed insignificance. Confreres,
permit me to impress on you the causes why, insignificant as we seem, we
are really formidable. In the first place, we are few: the great mistake
in most secret associations has been to admit many councillors; and
disunion enters wherever many tongues can wrangle. In the next place,
though so few in council, we are legion when the time comes for action;
because we are representative men, each of his own section, and each
section is capable of an indefinite expansion.

"You, valiant Pole, you, politic Italian, enjoy the confidence of
thousands now latent in unwatched homes and harmless callings, but who,
when you lift a finger, will, like the buried dragon's teeth, spring
up into armed men. You, Jan Vanderstegen, the trusted delegate from
Verviers, that swarming camp of wronged labour in its revolt from the
iniquities of capital,--you, when the hour arrives, can touch the wire
that flashes the telegram 'Arise' through all the lands in which workmen
combine against their oppressors.

"Of us five Frenchmen, let me speak more modestly. You, sage and
scholar, Felix Ruvigny, honoured alike for the profundity of your
science and the probity of your manners, induced to join us by your
abhorrence of priestcraft and superstition,--you made a wide connection
among all the enlightened reasoners who would emancipate the mind of
man from the trammels of Church-born fable, and when the hour arrives in
which it is safe to say, 'Delenda est Roma,' you know where to find the
pens that are more victorious than swords against a Church and a Creed.
You" (turning to the surgeon)--"you, Gaspard le Noy, whom a vile calumny
has robbed of the throne in your profession so justly due to your skill,
you, nobly scorning the rich and great, have devoted yourself to tend
and heal the humble and the penniless, so that you have won the popular
title of the 'Medecin des Pauvres,' when the time comes wherein soldiers
shall fly before the sansculottes, and the mob shall begin the work
which they who move mobs will complete, the clients of Gaspard le Noy
will be the avengers of his wrongs.

"You, Armand Monnier, simple ouvrier, but of illustrious parentage, for
your grandsire was the beloved friend of the virtuous Robespierre, your
father perished a hero and a martyr in the massacre of the coup d'etat;
you, cultured in the eloquence of Robespierre himself, and in the
persuasive philosophy of Robespierre's teacher, Rousseau; you, the
idolized orator of the Red Republicans,--you will be indeed a chief of
dauntless bands when the trumpet sounds for battle. Young publicist and
poet, Gustave Rameau,--I care not which you are at present, I know what
you will be soon, you need nothing for the development of your powers
over the many but an organ for their manifestation. Of that anon. I now
descend into the bathos of egotism. I am compelled lastly to speak of
myself. It was at Marseilles and Lyons, as you already know, that I
first conceived the plan of this representative association. For
years before I had been in familiar intercourse with the friends of
freedom,--that is, with the foes of the Empire. They are not all poor;
some few are rich and generous. I do not say these rich and few concur
in the ultimate objects of the poor and many; 'but they concur in the
first object, the demolition of that which exists,--the Empire. In the
course of my special calling of negotiator or agent in the towns of the
Midi, I formed friendships with some of these prosperous malcontents;
and out of these friendships I conceived the idea which is embodied in
this council.

"According to that conception, while the council may communicate as it
will with all societies, secret or open, having revolution for their
object, the council refuses to merge itself in any other confederation;
it stands aloof and independent; it declines to admit into its code
any special articles of faith in a future beyond the bounds to which
it limits its design and its force. That design unites us; to go beyond
would divide. We all agree to destroy the Napoleonic dynasty; none of
us might agree as to what we should place in its stead. All of us here
present might say, 'A republic.' Ay, but of what kind? Vanderstegen
would have it socialistic; Monnier goes further, and would have it
communistic, on the principles of Fourier; Le Noy adheres to the policy
of Danton, and would commence the republic by a reign of terror; our
Italian ally abhors the notion of general massacre, and advocates
individual assassination. Ruvigny would annihilate the worship of a
Deity; Monnier holds with Voltaire and Robespierre, that, 'if there were
no Deity, it would be necessary to man to create one.' Bref, we could
not agree upon any plan for the new edifice, and therefore we refuse to
discuss one till the ploughshare has gone over the ruins of the old.
But I have another and more practical reason for keeping our council
distinct from all societies with professed objects beyond that of
demolition. We need a certain command of money. It is I who bring to you
that, and--how? Not from my own resources,--they but suffice to support
myself; not by contributions from ouvriers who, as you well know,
will subscribe only for their own ends in the victory of workmen over
masters. I bring money to you from the coffers of the rich malcontents.
Their politics are not those of most present; their politics are what
they term moderate. Some are indeed for a republic, but for a republic
strong in defence of order, in support of property; others--and they are
more numerous and the more rich--for a constitutional monarchy, and, if
possible, for the abridgment of universal suffrage, which in their eyes
tends only to anarchy in the towns and arbitrary rule under priestly
influence in the rural districts. They would not subscribe a sou if they
thought it went to further the designs whether of Ruvigny the atheist,
or of Monnier, who would enlist the Deity of Rousseau on the side of
the drapeau rouge; not a sou if they knew I had the honour to boast such
confreres as I see around me. They subscribe, as we concert, for the
fall of Bonaparte. The policy I adopt I borrow from the policy of the
English Liberals. In England, potent millionnaires, high-born dukes,
devoted Churchmen, belonging to the Liberal party, accept the services
of men who look forward to measures which would ruin capital, eradicate
aristocracy, and destroy the Church, provided these men combine with
them in some immediate step onward against the Tories. They have a
proverb which I thus adapt to French localities: if a train passes
Fontainebleau on its way to Marseilles, why should I not take it to
Fontainebleau because other passengers are going on to Marseilles?

"Confreres, it seems to me the moment has come when we may venture some
of the fund placed at my disposal to other purposes than those to which
it has been hitherto devoted. I propose, therefore, to set up a journal
under the auspices of Gustave Rameau as editor-in-chief,--a journal
which, if he listen to my advice, will create no small sensation.
It will begin with a tone of impartiality; it will refrain from all
violence of invective; it will have wit, it will have sentiment, and
eloquence; it will win its way into the salons and cafes of educated
men; and then, and then, when it does change from polished satire into
fierce denunciation and sides with the blouses, its effect will be
startling and terrific. Of this I will say more to citizen Rameau in
private. To you I need not enlarge upon the fact that, at Paris, a
combination of men, though immeasurably superior to us in status or
influence, without a journal at command is nowhere; with such a journal,
written not to alarm but to seduce fluctuating opinions, a combination
of men immeasurably inferior to us may be anywhere.

"Confreres, this affair settled, I proceed to distribute amongst you
sums of which each who receives will render me an account, except our
valued confrere the Pole. All that we can subscribe to the cause of
humanity a representative of Poland requires for himself." (A suppressed
laugh among all but the Pole, who looked round with a grave, imposing
air, as much as to say, "What is there to laugh at?--a simple truth.")

M. Lebeau then presented to each of his confreres a sealed envelope,
containing no doubt a bank-note, and perhaps also private instructions
as to its disposal. It was one of his rules to make the amount of any
sum granted to an individual member of the society from the fund at his
disposal a confidential secret between himself and the recipient.
Thus jealousy was avoided if the sums were unequal; and unequal they
generally were. In the present instance the two largest sums were given
to the "Medecin des Pauvres" and to the delegate from Verviers. Both
were no doubt to be distributed among "the poor," at the discretion of
the trustee appointed.

Whatever rules with regard to the distribution of money M. Lebeau
laid down were acquiesced in without demur, for the money was found
exclusively by himself, and furnished without the pale of the Secret
Council, of which he had made himself founder and dictator. Some other
business was then discussed, sealed reports from each member were handed
to the president, who placed them unopened in his pocket, and resumed,
"Confreres, our seance is now concluded. The period for our next meeting
must remain indefinite, for I myself shall leave Paris as soon as I
have set on foot the journal, on the details of which I will confer with
citizen Rameau. I am not satisfied with the progress made by the two
travelling missionaries who complete our Council of Ten; and though I do
not question their zeal, I think my experience may guide it if I take a
journey to the towns of Bordeaux and Marseilles, where they now are. But
should circumstances demanding concert or action arise, you may be sure
that I will either summon a meeting or transmit instructions to such
of our members as may be most usefully employed. For the present,
confreres, you are relieved. Remain only you, dear young author."




CHAPTER VII.

Left alone with Gustave Rameau, the President of the Secret Council
remained silently musing for some moments; but his countenance was no
longer moody and overcast,--his nostrils were dilated, as in triumph;
there was a half-smile of pride on his lips. Rameau watched him
curiously and admiringly. The young man had the impressionable,
excitable temperament common to Parisian genius,--especially when it
nourishes itself on absinthe. He enjoyed the romance of belonging to a
secret society; he was acute enough to recognize the sagacity by which
this small conclave was kept out of those crazed combinations for
impracticable theories more likely to lead adventurers to the Tarpeian
Rock than to the Capitol, while yet those crazed combinations might,
in some critical moment, become strong instruments in the hands of
practical ambition. Lebeau fascinated him, and took colossal proportions
in his intoxicated vision,--vision indeed intoxicated at this moment,
for before it floated the realized image of his aspirations,--a journal
of which he was to be the editor-in-chief; in which his poetry, his
prose, should occupy space as large as he pleased; through which his
name, hitherto scarce known beyond a literary clique, would resound
in salon and club and cafe, and become a familiar music on the lips of
fashion. And he owed this to the man seated there,--a prodigious man.

"Cher poete," said Lebeau, breaking silence, "it gives me no mean
pleasure to think I am opening a career to one whose talents fit him
for those goals on which they who reach write names that posterity
shall read. Struck with certain articles of yours in the journal made
celebrated by the wit and gayety of Savarin, I took pains privately to
inquire into your birth, your history, connections, antecedents. All
confirmed my first impression,--that you were exactly the writer I
wish to secure to our cause. I therefore sought you in your rooms,
unintroduced and a stranger, in order to express my admiration of your
compositions. Bref, we soon became friends; and after comparing minds,
I admitted you, at your request, into this Secret Council. Now, in
proposing to you the conduct of the journal I would establish, for
which I am prepared to find all necessary funds, I am compelled to
make imperative conditions. Nominally you will be editor-in-chief: that
station, if the journal succeeds, will secure you position and fortune;
if it fail, you fail with it. But we will not speak of failure; I must
have it succeed. Our interest, then, is the same. Before that
interest all puerile vanities fade away. Nominally, I say, you are
editor-in-chief; but all the real work of editing will, at first, be
done by others."

"Ah!" exclaimed Rameau, aghast and stunned. Lebeau resumed,

"To establish the journal I propose needs more than the genius of youth;
it needs the tact and experience of mature years."

Rameau sank back on his chair with a sullen sneer on his pale lips.
Decidedly Lebeau was not so great a man as he had thought.

"A certain portion of the journal," continued Lebeau, "will be
exclusively appropriated to your pen."

Rameau's lip lost the sneer.

"But your pen must be therein restricted to compositions of pure fancy,
disporting in a world that does not exist; or, if on graver themes
connected with the beings of the world that does exist, the subjects
will be dictated to you and revised. Yet even in the higher departments
of a journal intended to make way at its first start, we need the aid,
not indeed of men who write better than you, but of men whose fame is
established,--whose writings, good or bad, the public run to read, and
will find good even if they are bad. You must consign one column to the
playful comments and witticisms of Savarin."

"Savarin? But he has a journal of his own. He will not, as an author,
condescend to write in one just set up by me; and as a politician, he as
certainly will not aid in an ultrademocratic revolution. If he care for
politics at all, he is a constitutionalist, an Orleanist."

"Enfant! as an author Savarin will condescend to contribute to your
journal, first, because it in no way attempts to interfere with his own;
secondly,--I can tell you a secret, Savarin's journal no longer suffices
for his existence. He has sold more than two-thirds of its property;
he is in debt, and his creditor is urgent; and to-morrow you will offer
Savarin thirty thousand francs for one column from his pen, and signed
by his name, for two months from the day the journal starts. He will
accept, partly because the sum will clear off the debt that hampers him,
partly because he will take care that the amount becomes known; and
that will help him to command higher terms for the sale of the remaining
shares in the journal he now edits, for the new book which you told me
he intended to write, and for the new journal which he will be sure to
set up as soon as he has disposed of the old one. You say that, as a
politician, Savarin, an Orleanist, will not aid in an ultra-democratic
revolution. Who asks him to do so? Did I not imply at the meeting that
we commence our journal with politics the mildest? Though revolutions
are not made with rose-water, it is rose-water that nourishes their
roots. The polite cynicism of authors, read by those who float on the
surface of society, prepares the way for the social ferment in its
deeps. Had there been no Voltaire, there would have been no Camille
Desmoulins; had there been no Diderot, there would have been no Marat.
We start as polite cynics. Of all cynics Savarin is the politest. But
when I bid high for him, it is his clique that I bid for. Without his
clique he is but a wit; with his clique, a power. Partly out of that
clique, partly out of a circle beyond it, which Savarin can more or less
influence, I select ten. Here is the list of them; study it. Entre nous,
I esteem their writings as little as I do artificial flies; but they are
the artificial flies at which, in this particular season of the year,
the public rise. You must procure at least five of the ten; and I leave
you carte blanche as to the terms. Savarin gained, the best of them will
be proud of being his associates. Observe, none of these messieurs of
brilliant imagination are to write political articles; those will be
furnished to you anonymously, and inserted without erasure or omission.
When you have secured Savarin, and five at least of the collaborateurs
in the list, write to me at my office. I give you four days to do this;
and the day the journal starts you enter into the income of fifteen
thousand francs a year, with a rise in salary proportioned to profits.
Are you contented with the terms?"

"Of course I am; but supposing I do not gain the aid of Savarin, or five
at least of the list you give, which I see at a glance contains names
the most a la mode in this kind of writing, more than one of them of
high social rank, whom it is difficult for me even to approach,--if, I
say, I fail?"

"What! with a carte blanche of terms? fie! Are you a Parisian? Well, to
answer you frankly, if you fail in so easy a task, you are not the man
to edit our journal, and I shall find another. Allez, courage! Take my
advice; see Savarin the first thing to-morrow morning. Of course, my
name and calling you will keep a profound secret from him, as from all.
Say as mysteriously as you can that parties you are forbidden to name
instruct you to treat with M. Savarin, and offer him the terms I have
specified, the thirty thousand francs paid to him in advance the moment
he signs the simple memorandum of agreement. The more mysterious you
are, the more you will impose,--that is, wherever you offer money and
don't ask for it."

Here Lebeau took up his hat, and, with a courteous nod of adieu, lightly
descended the gloomy stairs.




CHAPTER VIII.

At night, after this final interview with Lebeau, Graham took leave for
good of his lodgings in Montmartre, and returned to his apartment in
the Rue d'Anjou. He spent several hours of the next morning in answering
numerous letters accumulated during his absence. Late in the afternoon
he had an interview with M. Renard, who, as at that season of the year
he was not over-busied with other affairs, engaged to obtain leave to
place his services at Graham's command during the time requisite for
inquiries at Aix, and to be in readiness to start the next day. Graham
then went forth to pay one or two farewell visits; and these over,
bent his way through the Champs Elysees towards Isaura's villa, when he
suddenly encountered Rochebriant on horseback. The Marquis courteously
dismounted, committing his horse to the care of the groom, and linking
his arm in Graham's, expressed his pleasure at seeing him again;
then, with some visible hesitation and embarrassment, he turned the
conversation towards the political aspects of France.

"There was," he said, "much in certain words of yours, when we last
walked together in this very path, that sank deeply into my mind at the
time, and over which I have of late still more earnestly reflected. You
spoke of the duties a Frenchman owed to France, and the 'impolicy' of
remaining aloof from all public employment on the part of those attached
to the Legitimist cause."

"True; it cannot be the policy of any party to forget that between the
irrevocable past and the uncertain future there intervenes the action of
the present time."

"Should you, as an impartial bystander, consider it dishonourable in me
if I entered the military service under the ruling sovereign?"

"Certainly not, if your country needed you."

"And it may, may it not? I hear vague rumours of coming war in almost
every salon I frequent. There has been gunpowder in the atmosphere
we breathe ever since the battle of Sadowa. What think you of German
arrogance and ambition? Will they suffer the swords of France to rust in
their scabbards?"

"My dear Marquis, I should incline to put the question otherwise. Will
the jealous amour propre of France permit the swords of Germany to
remain sheathed? But in either case, no politician can see without grave
apprehension two nations so warlike, close to each other, divided by a
borderland that one covets and the other will not yield, each armed
to the teeth,--the one resolved to brook no rival, the other equally
determined to resist all aggression. And therefore, as you say, war is
in the atmosphere; and we may also hear, in the clouds that give no sign
of dispersion, the growl of the gathering thunder. War may come any day;
and if France be not at once the victor--"

"France not at once the victor?" interrupted Alain, passionately; "and
against a Prussian! Permit me to say no Frenchman can believe that."

"Let no man despise a foe," said Graham, smiling half sadly. "However, I
must not incur the danger of wounding your national susceptibilities. To
return to the point you raise. If France needed the aid of her best
and bravest, a true descendant of Henri Quatre ought to blush for his
ancient noblesse were a Rochebriant to say, 'But I don't like the colour
of the flag.'"

"Thank you," said Alain, simply; "that is enough." There was a pause,
the young men walking on slowly, arm in arm. And then there flashed
across Graham's mind the recollection of talk on another subject in that
very path. Here he had spoken to Alain in deprecation of any possible
alliance with Isaura Cicogna, the destined actress and public; singer.
His cheek flushed; his heart smote him. What! had he spoken slightingly
of her--of her? What if she became his own wife? What! had he himself
failed in the respect which he would demand as her right from the
loftiest of his high-born kindred? What, too, would this man, of fairer
youth than himself, think of that disparaging counsel, when he heard
that the monitor had won the prize from which he had warned another?
Would it not seem that he had but spoken in the mean cunning dictated by
the fear of a worthier rival? Stung by these thoughts, he arrested his
steps, and, looking the Marquis full in the face, said, "You remind me
of one subject in our talk many weeks since; it is my duty to remind
you of another. At that time you, and, speaking frankly, I myself,
acknowledged the charm in the face of a young Italian lady. I told you
then that, on learning she was intended for the stage, the charm for me
had vanished. I said bluntly that it should vanish perhaps still more
utterly for a noble of your illustrious name; you remember?"

"Yes," answered Alain, hesitatingly, and with a look of surprise.

"I wish now to retract all I said thereon. Mademoiselle Cicogna is not
bent on the profession for which she was educated. She would willingly
renounce all idea of entering it. The only counterweight which, viewed
whether by my reason or my prejudices, could be placed in the opposite
scale to that of the excellences which might make any man proud to win
her, is withdrawn. I have become acquainted with her since the date of
our conversation. Hers is a mind which harmonizes with the loveliness of
her face. In one word, Marquis, I should deem myself honoured, as well
as blest, by such a bride. It was due to her that I should say this; it
was due also to you, in case you should retain the impression I sought
in ignorance to efface. And I am bound, as a gentleman, to obey this
twofold duty, even though in so doing I bring upon myself the affliction
of a candidate for the hand to which I would fain myself aspire,--a
candidate with pretensions in every way far superior to my own."

An older or a more cynical man than Alain de Rochebriant might well have
found something suspicious in a confession thus singularly volunteered;
but the Marquis was himself so loyal that he had no doubt of the loyalty
of Graham.

"I reply to you," he said, "with a frankness which finds an example in
your own. The first fair face which attracted my fancy since my arrival
at Paris was that of the Italian demoiselle of whom you speak in terms
of such respect. I do think if I had then been thrown into her society,
and found her to be such as you no doubt truthfully describe, that
fancy might have become a very grave emotion. I was then so poor, so
friendless, so despondent! Your words of warning impressed me at the
time, but less durably than you might suppose; for that very night as I
sat in my solitary attic I said to myself, 'Why should I shrink, with an
obsolete old-world prejudice, from what my forefathers would have termed
a mesalliance? What is the value of my birthright now? None,--worse than
none. It excludes me from all careers; my name is but a load that
weighs me down. Why should I make that name a curse as well as a burden?
Nothing is left to me but that which is permitted to all men,--wedded
and holy love. Could I win to my heart the smile of a woman who brings
me that dower, the home of my fathers would lose its gloom.' And
therefore, if at that time I had become familiarly acquainted with her
who had thus attracted my eye and engaged my thoughts, she might have
become my destiny; but now!"

"But now?"

"Things have changed. I am no longer poor, friendless, solitary. I have
entered the world of my equals as a Rochebriant; I have made myself
responsible for the dignity of my name. I could not give that name to
one, however peerless in herself, of whom the world would say, 'But
for her marriage she would have been a singer on the stage!' I will own
more: the fancy I conceived for the first fair face, other fair faces
have dispelled. At this moment, however, I have no thought of marriage;
and having known the anguish of struggle, the privations of poverty, I
would ask no woman to share the hazard of my return to them. You might
present me, then, safely to this beautiful Italian,--certain, indeed,
that I should be her admirer; equally certain that I could not become
your rival."

There was something in this speech that jarred upon Graham's sensitive
pride; but on the whole, he felt relieved, both in honour and in heart.
After a few more words, the two young men shook hands and parted. Alain
remounted his horse. The day was now declining. Graham hailed a vacant
fiacre, and directed the driver to Isaura's villa.




CHAPTER IX.

ISAURA.

The sun was sinking slowly as Isaura sat at her window, gazing dreamily
on the rose-hued clouds that made the western borderland between earth
and heaven. On the table before her lay a few sheets of manuscript
hastily written, not yet reperused. That restless mind of hers had left
its trace on the manuscript.

It is characteristic perhaps of the different genius of the sexes, that
woman takes to written composition more impulsively, more intuitively,
than man,--letter-writing, to him a task-work, is to her a recreation.
Between the age of sixteen and the date of marriage, six well-educated
clever girls out of ten keep a journal; not one well-educated man in ten
thousand does. So, without serious and settled intention of becoming an
author, how naturally a girl of ardent feeling and vivid fancy seeks
in poetry or romance a confessional,--an outpouring of thought and
sentiment, which are mysteries to herself till she has given them words,
and which, frankly revealed on the page, she would not, perhaps could
not, utter orally to a living ear.

During the last few days, the desire to create in the realm of fable
beings constructed by her own breath, spiritualized by her own soul, had
grown irresistibly upon this fair child of song. In fact, when
Graham's words had decided the renunciation of her destined career, her
instinctive yearnings for the utterance of those sentiments or thoughts
which can only find expression in some form of art, denied the one vent,
irresistibly impelled her to the other. And in this impulse she was
confirmed by the thought that here at least there was nothing which
her English friend could disapprove,--none of the perils that beset the
actress. Here it seemed as if, could she but succeed, her fame would be
grateful to the pride of all who loved her. Here was a career ennobled
by many a woman, and side by side in rivalry with renowned men. To her
it seemed that, could she in this achieve an honoured name, that name
took its place at once amid the higher ranks of the social world, and
in itself brought a priceless dowry and a starry crown. It was, however,
not till after the visit to Enghien that this ambition took practical
life and form. One evening after her return to Paris, by an effort
so involuntary that it seemed to her no effort, she had commenced a
tale,--without plan, without method, without knowing in one page what
would fill the next. Her slight fingers hurried on as if, like the
pretended spirit manifestations, impelled by an invisible agency without
the pale of the world. She was intoxicated by the mere joy of inventing
ideal images. In her own special art an elaborate artist, here she had
no thought of art; if art was in her work, it sprang unconsciously from
the harmony between herself and her subject,--as it is, perhaps, with
the early soarings of the genuine lyric poets, in contrast to the
dramatic. For the true lyric poet is intensely personal, intensely
subjective. It is himself that he expresses, that he represents; and he
almost ceases to be lyrical when he seeks to go out of his own existence
into that of others with whom he has no sympathy, no rapport. This
tale was vivid with genius as yet untutored,--genius in its morning
freshness, full of beauties, full of faults. Isaura distinguished not
the faults from the beauties. She felt only a vague persuasion that
there was a something higher and brighter--a something more true to her
own idiosyncrasy--than could be achieved by the art that "sings other
people's words to other people's music." From the work thus commenced
she had now paused; and it seemed to her fancies that between her inner
self and the scene without, whether in the skies and air and sunset, or
in the abodes of men stretching far and near till lost amid the roofs
and domes of the great city, she had fixed and riveted the link of a
sympathy hitherto fluctuating, unsubstantial, evanescent, undefined.
Absorbed in her revery, she did not notice the deepening of the short
twilight, till the servant entering drew the curtains between her and
the world without, and placed the lamp on the table beside her. Then she
turned away with a restless sigh; her eyes fell on the manuscript, but
the charm of it was gone. A sentiment of distrust in its worth had crept
into her thoughts, unconsciously to herself, and the page open before
her at an uncompleted sentence seemed unwelcome and wearisome as a
copy-book is to a child condemned to relinquish a fairy tale half told,
and apply himself to a task half done. She fell again into a revery,
when, starting as from a dream, she heard herself addressed by name, and
turning round saw Savarin and Gustave Rameau in the room.

"We are come, Signorina," said Savarin, "to announce to you a piece of
news, and to hazard a petition. The news is this: my young friend
here has found a Maecenas who has the good taste so to admire his
lucubrations under the nom de plume of Alphonse de Valcour as to
volunteer the expenses for starting a new journal, of which Gustave
Rameau is to be editor-in-chief; and I have promised to assist him
as contributor for the first two months. I have given him notes of
introduction to certain other feuilletonistes and critics whom he has on
his list. But all put together would not serve to float the journal like
a short roman from Madame de Grantmesnil. Knowing your intimacy with
that eminent artist, I venture to back Rameau's supplication that you
would exert your influence on his, behalf. As to the honoraires, she has
but to name them."

"Carte blanche," cried Rameau, eagerly.

"You know Eulalie too well, Monsieur Savarin," answered Isaura, with a
smile half reproachful, "to suppose that she is a mercenary in letters,
and sells her services to the best bidder."

"Bah, belle enfant!" said Savarin, with his gay light laugh. "Business
is business, and books as well as razors are made to sell. But, of
course, a proper prospectus of the journal must accompany your request
to write in it. Meanwhile Rameau will explain to you, as he has done
to me, that the journal in question is designed for circulation among
readers of haute classe it is to be pleasant and airy, full of bons mots
and anecdote; witty, but not ill-natured. Politics to be Liberal, of
course, but of elegant admixture,--champagne and seltzer-water. In
fact, however, I suspect that the politics will be a very inconsiderable
feature in this organ of fine arts and manners; some amateur scribbler
in the beau monde will supply them. For the rest, if my introductory
letters are successful, Madame de Grantmesnil will not be in bad
company."

"You will write to Madame de Grantmesnil?" asked Rameau, pleadingly.

"Certainly I will, as soon--"

"As soon as you have the prospectus, and the names of the
collaborateurs," interrupted Rameau. "I hope to send you these in a very
few days."

While Rameau was thus speaking, Savarin had seated himself by the table,
and his eye mechanically resting on the open manuscript lighted by
chance upon a sentence--an aphorism--embodying a very delicate sentiment
in very felicitous diction,--one of those choice condensations of
thought, suggesting so much more than is said, which are never found in
mediocre writers, and, rare even in the best, come upon us like truths
seized by surprise.

"Parbleu!" exclaimed Savarin, in the impulse of genuine admiration, "but
this is beautiful; what is more, it is original,"--and he read the words
aloud. Blushing with shame and resentment, Isaura turned and hastily
placed her hand on the manuscript.

"Pardon," said Savarin, humbly; "I confess my sin, but it was so
unpremeditated that it does not merit a severe penance. Do not look
at me so reproachfully. We all know that young ladies keep commonplace
books in which they enter passages that strike them in the works they
read; and you have but shown an exquisite taste in selecting this gem.
Do tell me where you found it. Is it somewhere in Lamartine?"

"No," answered Isaura, half inaudibly, and with an effort to withdraw
the paper. Savarin gently detained her hand, and looking earnestly into
her tell-tale face, divined her secret.

"It is your own, Signorina! Accept the congratulations of a very
practised and somewhat fastidious critic. If the rest of what you write
resembles this sentence, contribute to Rameau's journal, and I answer
for its success."

Rameau approached, half incredulous, half envious.

"My dear child," resumed Savarin, drawing away the manuscript from
Isaura's coy, reluctant clasp, "do permit me to cast a glance over these
papers. For what I yet know, there may be here more promise of fame than
even you could gain as a singer."

The electric chord in Isaura's heart was touched. Who cannot conceive
what the young writer feels, especially the young woman-writer, when
hearing the first cheery note of praise from the lips of a writer of
established fame?

"Nay, this cannot be worth your reading," said Isaura, falteringly; "I
have never written anything of the kind before, and this is a riddle to
me. I know not," she added, with a sweet low laugh, "why I began, nor
how I should end it."

"So much the better," said Savarin; and he took the manuscript, withdrew
to a recess by the farther window, and seated himself there, reading
silently and quickly, but now and then with a brief pause of reflection.

Rameau placed himself beside Isaura on the divan, and began talking with
her earnestly,--earnestly, for it was about himself and his aspiring
hopes. Isaura, on the other hand, more woman-like than author-like,
ashamed even to seem absorbed in herself and her hopes, and with her
back turned, in the instinct of that shame, against the reader of her
manuscript,--Isaura listened and sought to interest herself solely in
the young fellow-author. Seeking to do so she succeeded genuinely, for
ready sympathy was a prevalent characteristic of her nature.

"Oh," said Rameau, "I am at the turning-point of my life. Ever since
boyhood I have been haunted with the words of Andre Chenier on the
morning he was led to the scaffold 'And yet there was something here,'
striking his forehead. Yes, I, poor, low-born, launching myself headlong
in the chase of a name; I, underrated, uncomprehended, indebted even for
a hearing to the patronage of an amiable trifler like Savarin, ranked
by petty rivals in a grade below themselves,--I now see before me,
suddenly, abruptly presented, the expanding gates into fame and fortune.
Assist me, you!"

"But how?" said Isaura, already forgetting her manuscript; and certainly
Rameau did not refer to that.

"How!" echoed Rameau; "how! But do you not see--or at least, do you not
conjecture--this journal of which Savarin speaks contains my present and
my future? Present independence, opening to fortune and renown. Ay,--and
who shall say? renown beyond that of the mere writer. Behind the gaudy
scaffolding of this rickety Empire, a new social edifice unperceived
arises; and in that edifice the halls of State shall be given to the men
who help obscurely to build it,--to men like me." Here, drawing her
hand into his own, fixing on her the most imploring gaze of his dark
persuasive eyes, and utterly unconscious of bathos in his adjuration, he
added: "Plead for me with your whole mind and heart; use your uttermost
influence with the illustrious writer whose pen can assure the fates of
my journal."

Here the door suddenly opened, and following the servant, who announced
unintelligibly his name, there entered Graham Vane.




CHAPTER X.

The Englishman halted at the threshold. His eye, passing rapidly over
the figure of Savarin reading in the window-niche, rested upon Rameau
and Isaura seated on the same divan, he with her hand clasped in both
his own, and bending his face towards hers so closely that a loose tress
of her hair seemed to touch his forehead.

The Englishman halted, and no revolution which changes the habitudes and
forms of States was ever so sudden as that which passed without a word
in the depths of his unconjectured heart. The heart has no history
which philosophers can recognize. An ordinary political observer,
contemplating the condition of a nation, may very safely tell us what
effects must follow the causes patent to his eyes; but the wisest and
most far-seeing sage, looking at a man at one o'clock, cannot tell us
what revulsions of his whole being may be made ere the clock strike two.

As Isaura rose to greet her visitor, Savarin came from the window-niche,
the manuscript in his hand.

"Son of perfidious Albion," said Savarin, gayly, "we feared you had
deserted the French alliance. Welcome back to Paris, and the entente
cordiale."

"Would I could stay to enjoy such welcome! but I must again quit Paris."

"Soon to return, n'est ce pas? Paris is an irresistible magnet to les
beaux esprits. A propos of beaux esprits, be sure to leave orders with
your bookseller, if you have one, to enter your name as subscriber to a
new journal."

"Certainly, if Monsieur Savarin recommends it."

"He recommends it as a matter of course; he writes in it," said Rameau.

"A sufficient guarantee for its excellence. What is the name of the
journal?"

"Not yet thought of," answered Savarin. "Babes must be born before they
are christened; but it will be instruction enough to your bookseller to
order the new journal to be edited by Gustave Rameau."

Bowing ceremoniously to the editor in prospect, Graham said, half
ironically, "May I hope that in the department of criticism you will not
be too hard upon poor Tasso?"

"Never fear; the Signorina, who adores Tasso, will take him under her
special protection," said Savarin, interrupting Rameau's sullen and
embarrassed reply.

Graham's brow slightly contracted. "Mademoiselle," he said, "is then to
be united in the conduct of this journal with M. Gustave Rameau?"

"No, indeed!" exclaimed Isaura, somewhat frightened at the idea.

"But I hope," said Savarin, "that the Signorina may become a contributor
too important for an editor to offend by insulting her favourites, Tasso
included. Rameau and I came hither to entreat her influence with her
intimate and illustrious friend, Madame de Grantmesnil, to insure the
success of our undertaking by sanctioning the announcement of her name
as a contributor."

"Upon social questions,--such as the laws of marriage?" said Graham,
with a sarcastic smile, which concealed the quiver of his lip and the
pain in his voice.

"Nay," answered Savarin, "our journal will be too sportive, I hope, for
matters so profound. We would rather have Madame de Grantmesnil's aid
in some short roman, which will charm the fancy of all and offend the
opinions of none. But since I came into the room, I care less for
the Signorina's influence with the great authoress," and he glanced
significantly at the manuscript.

"How so?" asked Graham, his eye following the glance.

"If the writer of this manuscript will conclude what she has begun, we
shall be independent of Madame de Grantmesnil."

"Fie!" cried Isaura, impulsively, her face and neck bathed in
blushes,--"fie! such words are a mockery."

Graham gazed at her intently, and then turned his eyes on Savarin. He
guessed aright the truth. "Mademoiselle then is an author? In the style
of her friend Madame de Grantmesnil?"

"Bah!" said Savarin, "I should indeed be guilty of mockery if I paid
the Signorina so false a compliment as to say that in a first effort she
attained to the style of one of the most finished sovereigns of language
that has ever swayed the literature of France. When I say, 'Give us this
tale completed, and I shall be consoled if the journal does not gain the
aid of Madame de Grantmesnil,' I mean that in these pages there is
that nameless charm of freshness and novelty which compensates for many
faults never committed by a practised pen like Madame de Grantmesnil's.
My dear young lady, go on with this story,--finish it; when finished, do
not disdain any suggestions I may offer in the way of correction,--and I
will venture to predict to you so brilliant a career as author, that you
will not regret should you resign for that career the bravoes you could
command as actress and singer."

The Englishman pressed his hand convulsively to his heart, as if smitten
by a sudden spasm. But as his eyes rested on Isaura's face, which had
become radiant with the enthusiastic delight of genius when the path it
would select opens before it as if by a flash from heaven, whatever of
jealous irritation, whatever of selfish pain he might before have felt;
was gone, merged in a sentiment of unutterable sadness and compassion.
Practical man as he was, he knew so well all the dangers, all the
snares, all the sorrows, all the scandals menacing name and fame, that
in the world of Paris must beset the fatherless girl who, not less
in authorship than on the stage, leaves the safeguard of private life
forever behind her, who becomes a prey to the tongues of the public.
At Paris, how slender is the line that divides the authoress from the
Bohemienne! He sank into his chair silently, and passed his hand over
his eyes, as if to shut out a vision of the future.

Isaura in her excitement did not notice the effect on her English
visitor. She could not have divined such an effect as possible. On the
contrary, even subordinate to her joy at the thought that she had not
mistaken the instincts which led her to a nobler vocation than that of
the singer, that the cage-bar was opened, and space bathed in sunshine
was inviting the new-felt wings,--subordinate even to that joy was a joy
more wholly, more simply woman's. "If," thought she, in this joy, "if
this be true, my proud ambition is realized; all disparities of worth
and fortune are annulled between me and him to whom I would bring no
shame of mesalliance!" Poor dreamer, poor child!

"You will let me see what you have written," said Rameau, somewhat
imperiously, in the sharp voice habitual to him, and which pierced
Graham's ear like a splinter of glass.

"No, not now; when finished."

"You will finish it?"

"Oh, yes; how can I help it after such encouragement?" She held out
her hand to Savarin, who kissed it gallantly; then her eyes intuitively
sought Graham's. By that time he had recovered his self-possession. He
met her look tranquilly, and with a smile; but the smile chilled her,
she knew not why.

The conversation then passed upon books and authors of the day, and was
chiefly supported by the satirical pleasantries of Savarin, who was in
high good-spirits.

Graham, who, as we know, had come with the hope of seeing Isaura alone,
and with the intention of uttering words which, however guarded, might
yet in absence serve as links of union, now no longer coveted that
interview, no longer meditated those words. He soon rose to depart.

"Will you dine with me to-morrow?" asked Savarin. "Perhaps I may induce
the Signorina and Rameau to offer you the temptation of meeting them."

"By to-morrow I shall be leagues away."

Isaura's heart sank. This time the manuscript was fairly forgotten.

"You never said you were going so soon," cried Savarin. "When do you
come back, vile deserter?"

"I cannot even guess. Monsieur Rameau, count me among your subscribers.
Mademoiselle, my best regards to Signora Venosta. When I see you again,
no doubt you will have become famous."

Isaura here could not control herself. She rose impulsively, and
approached him, holding out her hand, and attempting a smile.

"But not famous in the way that you warned me from," she said in
whispered tones. "You are friends with me still?" It was like the
piteous wail of a child seeking to make it up with one who wants to
quarrel, the child knows not why. Graham was moved, but what could he
say? Could he have the right to warn her from this profession also;
forbid all desires, all roads of fame to this brilliant aspirant? Even a
declared and accepted lover might well have deemed that that would be to
ask too much. He replied, "Yes, always a friend, if you could ever need
one." Her hand slid from his, and she turned away wounded to the quick.

"Have you your coupe at the door?" asked Savarin.

"Simply a fiacre."

"And are going back at once to Paris?"

"Yes."

"Will you kindly drop me in the Rue de Rivoli?"

"Charmed to be of use."




CHAPTER XI.

As the fiacre bore to Paris Savarin and Graham, the former said, "I
cannot conceive what rich simpleton could entertain so high an opinion
of Gustave Rameau as to select a man so young, and of reputation though
promising so undecided, for an enterprise which requires such a degree
of tact and judgment as the conduct of a new journal,--and a journal,
too, which is to address itself to the beau monde. However, it is not
for me to criticise a selection which brings a god-send to myself."

"To yourself? You jest; you have a journal of your own. It can only be
through an excess of good-nature that you lend your name and pen to the
service of M. Gustave Rameau."

"My good-nature does not go to that extent. It is Rameau who confers a
service upon me. Peste! mon cher, we French authors have not the rents
of you rich English milords. And though I am the most economical of our
tribe, yet that journal of mine has failed me of late; and this morning
I did not exactly see how I was to repay a sum I had been obliged to
borrow of a money-lender,--for I am too proud to borrow of friends,
and too sagacious to borrow of publishers,--when in walks ce cher petit
Gustave with an offer, for a few trifles towards starting this new-born
journal, which makes a new man of me. Now I am in the undertaking, my
amour propre and my reputation are concerned in its success; and I shall
take care that collaborateurs of whose company I am not ashamed are in
the same boat. But that charming girl, Isaura! What an enigma the gift
of the pen is! No one can ever guess who has it until tried."

"The young lady's manuscript, then, really merits the praise you
bestowed on it?"

"Much more praise, though a great deal of blame, which I did not
bestow,--for in a first work faults insure success as much as beauties.
Anything better than tame correctness. Yes, her first work, to judge by
what is written, must make a hit,--a great hit. And that will decide her
career. A singer, an actress, may retire,--often does when she marries
an author; but once an author always an author."

"Ah! is it so? If you had a beloved daughter, Savarin, would you
encourage her to be an author?"

"Frankly, no: principally because in that case the chances are that she
would marry an author; and French authors, at least in the imaginative
school, make very uncomfortable husbands."

"Ah! you think the Signorina will marry one of those uncomfortable
husbands,--M. Rameau, perhaps?"

"Rameau! Hein! nothing more likely. That beautiful face of his has
its fascination. And to tell you the truth, my wife, who is a striking
illustration of the truth that what woman wills heaven wills, is bent
upon that improvement in Gustave's moral life which she thinks a union
with Mademoiselle Cicogna would achieve. At all events, the fair Italian
would have in Rameau a husband who would not suffer her to bury her
talents under a bushel. If she succeeds as a writer (by succeeding I
mean making money), he will see that her ink-bottle is never empty; and
if she don't succeed as a writer, he will take care that the world shall
gain an actress or a singer. For Gustave Rameau has a great taste for
luxury and show; and whatever his wife can make, I will venture to say
that he will manage to spend."

"I thought you had an esteem and regard for Mademoiselle Cicogna. It is
Madame your wife, I suppose, who has a grudge against her?"

"On the contrary, my wife idolizes her."

"Savages sacrifice to their idols the things they deem of value;
civilized Parisians sacrifice their idols themselves, and to a thing
that is worthless."

"Rameau is not worthless; he has beauty and youth and talent. My wife
thinks more highly of him than I do; but I must respect a man who has
found admirers so sincere as to set him up in a journal, and give him
carte blanche for terms to contributors. I know of no man in Paris more
valuable to me. His worth to me this morning is thirty thousand francs.
I own I do not think him likely to be a very safe husband; but then
French female authors and artists seldom take any husbands except upon
short leases. There are no vulgar connubial prejudices in the pure
atmosphere of art. Women of genius, like Madame de Grantmesnil, and
perhaps like our charming young friend, resemble canary-birds,--to sing
their best you must separate them from their mates."

The Englishman suppressed a groan, and turned the conversation.

When he had set down his lively companion, Vane dismissed his fiacre,
and walked to his lodgings musingly.

"No," he said inly; "I must wrench myself from the very memory of that
haunting face,--the friend and pupil of Madame de Grantmesnil, the
associate of Gustave Rameau, the rival of Julie Caumartin, the aspirant
to that pure atmosphere of art in which there are no vulgar connubial
prejudices! Could I--whether I be rich or poor--see in her the ideal of
an English wife? As it is--as it is--with this mystery which oppresses
me, which, till solved, leaves my own career insoluble,--as it is, how
fortunate that I did not find her alone; did not utter the words that
would fain have leaped from my heart; did not say, 'I may not be the
rich man I seem, but in that case I shall be yet more ambitious, because
struggle and labour are the sinews of ambition! Should I be rich, will
you adorn my station? Should I be poor, will you enrich poverty with
your smile? And can you, in either case, forego--really, painlessly
forego, as you led me to hope--the pride in your own art?' My ambition
were killed did I marry an actress, a singer. Better that than the
hungerer after excitements which are never allayed, the struggler in a
career which admits of no retirement,--the woman to whom marriage is no
goal, who remains to the last the property of the public, and glories
to dwell in a house of glass into which every bystander has a right to
peer. Is this the ideal of an Englishman's wife and home? No, no!--woe
is me, no!"





BOOK VI.




CHAPTER I.

A few weeks after the date of the preceding chapter, a gay party of
men were assembled at supper in one of the private salons of the Maison
Doree. The supper was given by Frederic Lemercier, and the guests were,
though in various ways, more or less distinguished. Rank and fashion
were not unworthily represented by Alain de Rochebriant and Enguerrand
de Vandemar, by whose supremacy as "lion" Frederic still felt rather
humbled, though Alain had contrived to bring them familiarly together.
Art, Literature, and the Bourse had also their representatives in Henri
Bernard, a rising young portrait-painter, whom the Emperor honoured with
his patronage, the Vicomte de Braze, and M. Savarin. Science was not
altogether forgotten, but contributed its agreeable delegate in
the person of the eminent physician to whom we have been before
introduced,--Dr. Bacourt. Doctors in Paris are not so serious as they
mostly are in London; and Bacourt, a pleasant philosopher of the school
of Aristippus, was no unfrequent nor ungenial guest at any banquet in
which the Graces relaxed their zones. Martial glory was also represented
at that social gathering by a warrior, bronzed and decorated, lately
arrived from Algiers, on which arid soil he had achieved many laurels
and the rank of Colonel. Finance contributed Duplessis. Well it might;
for Duplessis had just assisted the host to a splendid coup at the
Bourse.

"Ah, cher Monsieur Savarin," says Enguerrand de Vandemar, whose
patrician blood is so pure from revolutionary taint that he is always
instinctively polite, "what a masterpiece in its way is that little
paper of yours in the 'Sens Commun,' upon the connection between the
national character and the national diet! so genuinely witty!--for wit
is but truth made amusing."

"You flatter me," replied Savarin, modestly; "but I own I do think there
is a smattering of philosophy in that trifle. Perhaps, however, the
character of a people depends more on its drinks than its food. The
wines of Italy, heady, irritable, ruinous to the digestion, contribute
to the character which belongs to active brains and disordered livers.
The Italians conceive great plans, but they cannot digest them. The
English common-people drink beer, and the beerish character is stolid,
rude, but stubborn and enduring. The English middle-class imbibe
port and sherry; and with these strong potations their ideas become
obfuscated. Their character has no liveliness; amusement is not one of
their wants; they sit at home after dinner and doze away the fumes of
their beverage in the dulness of domesticity. If the English aristocracy
are more vivacious and cosmopolitan, it is thanks to the wines of
France, which it is the mode with them to prefer; but still, like all
plagiarists, they are imitators, not inventors; they borrow our wines
and copy our manners. The Germans--"

"Insolent barbarians!" growled the French Colonel, twirling his
mustache; "if the Emperor were not in his dotage, their Sadowa would ere
this have cost them their Rhine."

"The Germans," resumed Savarin, unheeding the interruption, "drink acrid
wines, varied with beer, to which last their commonalty owes a quasi
resemblance in stupidity and endurance to the English masses. Acrid
wines rot the teeth Germans are afflicted with toothache from infancy.
All people subject to toothache are sentimental. Goethe was a martyr
to toothache. 'Werther' was written in one of those paroxysms which
predispose genius to suicide. But the German character is not all
toothache; beer and tobacco step in to the relief of Rhenish acridities,
blend philosophy with sentiment, and give that patience in detail which
distinguishes their professors and their generals. Besides, the German
wines in themselves have other qualities than that of acridity. Taken
with sourkrout and stewed prunes, they produce fumes of self-conceit.
A German has little of French vanity; he has German self-esteem. He
extends the esteem of self to those around him; his home, his village,
his city, his country,--all belong to him. It is a duty he owes to
himself to defend them. Give him his pipe and his sabre, and, Monsieur
le Colonel, believe me, you will never take the Rhine from him."

"P-r-r," cried the Colonel; "but we have had the Rhine."

"We did not keep it. And I should not say I had a francpiece if I
borrowed it from your purse and had to give it back the next day."

Here there arose a very general hubbub of voices, all raised against
M. Savarin. Enguerrand, like a man of good ton, hastened to change the
conversation.

"Let us leave these poor wretches to their sour wines and toothaches. We
drinkers of the champagne, all our own, have only pity for the rest of
the human race. This new journal 'Le Sens Commun' has a strange title,
Monsieur Savarin."

"Yes; 'Le Sens Commun' is not common in Paris, where we all have too
much genius for a thing so vulgar."

"Pray," said the young painter, "tell me what you mean by the title 'Le
Sens Commun.' It is mysterious."

"True," said Savarin; "it may mean the Sensus communis of the Latins, or
the Good Sense of the English. The Latin phrase signifies the sense
of the common interest; the English phrase, the sense which persons of
understanding have in common. I suppose the inventor of our title meant
the latter signification."

"And who was the inventor?" asked Bacourt.

"That is a secret which I do not know myself," answered Savarin.

"I guess," said Enguerrand, "that it must be the same person who writes
the political leaders. They are most remarkable; for they are so unlike
the articles in other journals, whether those journals be the best
or the worst. For my own part, I trouble my head very little about
politics, and shrug my shoulders at essays which reduce the government
of flesh and blood into mathematical problems. But these articles seem
to be written by a man of the world, and as a man of the world myself, I
read them."

"But," said the Vicomte de Breze, who piqued himself on the polish
of his style, "they are certainly not the composition of any eminent
writer. No eloquence, no sentiment; though I ought not to speak
disparagingly of a fellow-contributor."

"All that may be very true;" said Savarin; "but M. Enguerrand is right.
The papers are evidently the work of a man of the world, and it is for
that reason that they have startled the public, and established the
success of 'Le Sens Commun.' But wait a week or two longer, Messieurs,
and then tell me what you think of a new roman by a new writer, which
we shall announce in our impression to-morrow. I shall be disappointed,
indeed, if that does not charm you. No lack of eloquence and sentiment
there."

"I am rather tired of eloquence and sentiment," said Enguerrand. "Your
editor, Gustave Rameau, sickens me of them with his 'Starlit Meditations
in the Streets of Paris,' morbid imitations of Heine's enigmatical
'Evening Songs.' Your journal would be perfect if you could suppress the
editor."

"Suppress Gustave Rameau!" cried Bernard, the painter; "I adore his
poems, full of heart for poor suffering humanity."

"Suffering humanity so far as it is packed up in himself," said the
physician, dryly,--"and a great deal of the suffering is bile. But a
propos of your new journal, Savarin, there is a paragraph in it to-day
which excites my curiosity. It says that the Vicomte de Mauleon
has arrived in Paris, after many years of foreign travel; and then,
referring modestly enough to the reputation for talent which he had
acquired in early youth, proceeds to indulge in a prophecy of the future
political career of a man who, if he have a grain of sens common, must
think that the less said about him the better. I remember him well;
a terrible mauvais sujet, but superbly handsome. There was a shocking
story about the jewels of a foreign duchess, which obliged him to leave
Paris."

"But," said Savarin, "the paragraph you refer to hints that that story
is a groundless calumny, and that the true reason for De Mauleon's
voluntary self-exile was a very common one among young Parisians,--he
had lavished away his fortune. He returns, when, either by heritage or
his own exertions, he has secured elsewhere a competence."

"Nevertheless I cannot think that society will receive him," said
Bacourt. "When he left Paris, there was one joyous sigh of relief
among all men who wished to avoid duels, and keep their wives out
of temptation. Society may welcome back a lost sheep, but not a
reinvigorated wolf."

"I beg your pardon, mon cher," said Enguerrand; "society has already
opened its fold to this poor ill-treated wolf. Two days ago Louvier
summoned to his house the surviving relations or connections of De
Mauleon--among whom are the Marquis de Rochebriant, the Counts de Passy,
De Beauvilliers, De Chavigny, my father, and of course his two sons--and
submitted to us the proofs which completely clear the Vicomte de Mauleon
of even a suspicion of fraud or dishonour in the affair of the jewels.
The proofs include the written attestation of the Duke himself, and
letters from that nobleman after De Mauleon's disappearance from Paris,
expressive of great esteem, and indeed, of great admiration, for the
Vicomte's sense of honour and generosity of character. The result
of this family council was that we all went in a body to call on De
Mauleon; and he dined with my father that same day. You know enough of
the Comte de Vandemar, and, I may add, of my mother, to be sure
that they are both, in their several ways, too regardful of social
conventions to lend their countenance even to a relation without well
weighing the pros and cons. And as for Raoul, Bayard himself could not
be a greater stickler on the point of honour."

This declaration was followed by a silence that had the character of
stupor.

At last Duplessis said, "But what has Louvier to do in this galere?
Louvier is no relation of that well-born vaurien; why should he summon
your family council?"

"Louvier excused his interference on the ground of early and intimate
friendship with De Mauleon, who, he said, came to consult him on
arriving at Paris, and who felt too proud or too timid to address
relations with whom he had long dropped all intercourse. An intermediary
was required, and Louvier volunteered to take that part on himself;
nothing more natural nor more simple. By the way, Alain, you dine with
Louvier to-morrow, do you not?--a dinner in honour of our rehabilitated
kinsman. I and Raoul go."

"Yes, I shall be charmed to meet again a man who, whatever might be
his errors in youth, on which," added Alain, slightly colouring, "it
certainly does not become me to be severe, must have suffered the most
poignant anguish a man of honour can undergo,--namely, honour suspected;
and who now, whether by years or sorrow, is so changed that I cannot
recognize a likeness to the character I have just heard given to him as
mauvais sujet and vaurien."

"Bravo!" cried Enguerrand; "all honour to courage!--and at Paris it
requires great courage to defend the absent."

"Nay," answered Alain, in a low voice. "The gentilhomme who will not
defend another gentilhomme traduced, would, as a soldier, betray a
citadel and desert a flag."

"You say M. de Mauleon is changed," said De Breze; "yes, he must be
growing old. No trace left of his good looks?"

"Pardon me," said Enguerrand; "he is bien conserve, and has still a very
handsome head and an imposing presence. But one cannot help doubting
whether he deserved the formidable reputation he acquired in youth; his
manner is so singularly mild and gentle, his conversation so winningly
modest, so void of pretence, and his mode of life is as simple as that
of a Spanish hidalgo."

"He does not, then, affect the role of Monte Cristo," said Duplessis,
"and buy himself into notice like that hero of romance?"

"Certainly not: he says very frankly that he has but a very small
income, but more than enough for his wants,--richer than in his youth,
for he has learned content. We may dismiss the hint in 'Le Sens
Commun' about his future political career,--at least he evinces no such
ambition."

"How could he as a Legitimist?" said Alain, bitterly. "What department
would elect him?"

"But is he a Legitimist?" asked De Breze.

"I take it for granted that he must be that," answered Alain, haughtily,
"for he is a De Mauleon."

"His father was as good a De Mauleon as himself, I presume," rejoined
De Breze, dryly; "and he enjoyed a place at the Court of Louis Philippe,
which a Legitimist could scarcely accept. Victor did not, I fancy,
trouble his head about politics at all, at the time I remember him; but
to judge by his chief associates, and the notice he received from
the Princes of the House of Orleans, I should guess that he had no
predilections in favour of Henri V."

"I should regret to think so," said Alain, yet more haughtily,
"since the De Mauleons acknowledge the head of their house in the
representative of the Rochebriants."

"At all events," said Duplessis, "M. de Mauleon appears to be a
philosopher of rare stamp. A Parisian who has known riches and is
contented to be poor is a phenomenon I should like to study."

"You have that chance to-morrow evening, Monsieur Duplessis," said
Enguerrand.

"What! at M. Louvier's dinner? Nay, I have no other acquaintance with M.
Louvier than that of the Bourse, and the acquaintance is not cordial."

"I did not mean at M. Louvier's dinner, but at the Duchesse de
Tarascon's ball. You, as one of her special favourites, will doubtless
honour her reunion."

"Yes; I have promised my daughter to go to the ball. But the Duchesse is
Imperialist. M. de Mauleon seems to be either a Legitimist, according to
Monsieur le Marquis, or an Orleanist, according to our friend De Breze."

"What of that? Can there be a more loyal Bourbonite than De
Rochebriant?--and he goes to the ball. It is given out of the season,
in celebration of a family marriage. And the Duchesse de Tarascon
is connected with Alain, and therefore with De Mauleon, though but
distantly."

"Ah! excuse my ignorance of genealogy."

"As if the genealogy of noble names were not the history of France,"
muttered Alain, indignantly.




CHAPTER II.

Yes, the "Sens Commun" was a success: it had made a sensation at
starting; the sensation was on the increase. It is difficult for an
Englishman to comprehend the full influence of a successful journal at
Paris; the station--political, literary, social--which it confers on
the contributors who effect the success. M. Lebeau had shown much more
sagacity in selecting Gustave Rameau for the nominal editor than Savarin
supposed or my reader might detect. In the first place, Gustave himself,
with all his defects of information and solidity of intellect, was not
without real genius,--and a sort of genius that when kept in restraint,
and its field confined to sentiment or sarcasm, was in unison with the
temper of the day; in the second place, it was only through Gustave that
Lebeau could have got at Savarin, and the names which that brilliant
writer had secured at the outset would have sufficed to draw attention
to the earliest numbers of the "Sens Commun," despite a title which
did not seem alluring. But these names alone could not have sufficed to
circulate the new journal to the extent it had already reached. This was
due to the curiosity excited by leading articles of a style new to the
Parisian public, and of which the authorship defied conjecture. They
were signed Pierre Firmin,--supposed to be a nom de plume, as, that name
was utterly unknown in the world of letters. They affected the tone of
an impartial observer; they neither espoused nor attacked any particular
party; they laid down no abstract doctrines of government. But somehow
or other, in language terse yet familiar, sometimes careless yet never
vulgar, they expressed a prevailing sentiment of uneasy discontent,
a foreboding of some destined change in things established, without
defining the nature of such change, without saying whether it would be
for good or for evil. In his criticisms upon individuals, the writer
was guarded and moderate--the keenest-eyed censor of the press could
not have found a pretext for interference with expression of opinions so
polite. Of the Emperor these articles spoke little, but that little was
not disrespectful; yet, day after day, the articles contributed to sap
the Empire. All malcontents of every shade comprehended, as by a secret
of freemasonry, that in this journal they had an ally. Against religion
not a word was uttered, yet the enemies of religion bought that journal;
still, the friends of religion bought it too, for those articles
treated with irony the philosophers on paper who thought that their
contradictory crotchets could fuse themselves into any single Utopia, or
that any social edifice, hurriedly run up by the crazy few, could become
a permanent habitation for the turbulent many, without the clamps of a
creed.

The tone of these articles always corresponded with the title of
the journal,--"Common-sense." It was to common-sense that it
appealed,--appealed in the utterance of a man who disdained the subtle
theories, the vehement declamation, the credulous beliefs, or the
inflated bombast, which constitute so large a portion of the Parisian
press. The articles rather resembled certain organs of the English
press, which profess to be blinded by no enthusiasm for anybody or
anything, which find their sale in that sympathy with ill-nature to
which Huet ascribes the popularity of Tacitus, and, always quietly
undermining institutions with a covert sneer, never pretend to a spirit
of imagination so at variance with common-sense as a conjecture how the
institutions should be rebuilt or replaced.

Well, somehow or other the journal, as I was saying, hit the taste
of the Parisian public. It intimated, with the easy grace of an
unpremeditated agreeable talker, that French society in all its classes
was rotten; and each class was willing to believe that all the others
were rotten, and agreed that unless the others were reformed, there was
something very unsound in itself.

The ball at the Duchesse de Tarascon's was a brilliant event. The summer
was far advanced; many of the Parisian holiday-makers had returned to
the capital, but the season had not commenced, and a ball at that time
of year was a very unwonted event. But there was a special occasion for
this fete,--a marriage between a niece of the Duchesse and the son of a
great official in high favour at the Imperial Court.

The dinner at Louvier's broke up early, and the music for the second
waltz was sounding when Enguerrand, Alain, and the Vicomte de Mauleon
ascended the stairs. Raoul did not accompany them; he went very rarely
to any balls,--never to one given by an Imperialist, however nearly
related to him the Imperialist might be. But in the sweet indulgence
of his good-nature, he had no blame for those who did go,--not for
Enguerrand, still less, of course, for Alain.

Something too might well here be said as to his feeling towards Victor
de Mauleon. He had joined in the family acquittal of that kinsman as to
the grave charge of the jewels; the proofs of innocence thereon seemed
to him unequivocal and decisive, therefore he had called on the Vicomte
and acquiesced in all formal civilities shown to him. But such acts of
justice to a fellow-gentilhomme and a kinsman duly performed, he desired
to see as little as possible of the Vicomte de Mauleon. He reasoned
thus: "Of every charge which society made against this man he is
guiltless; but of all the claims to admiration which society accorded to
him before it erroneously condemned, there are none which make me covet
his friendship, or suffice to dispel doubts as to what he may be when
society once more receives him. And the man is so captivating that I
should dread his influence over myself did I see much of him."

Raoul kept his reasonings to himself, for he had that sort of charity
which indisposes an amiable man to be severe on bygone offences. In the
eyes of Enguerrand and Alain, and such young votaries of the mode
as they could influence, Victor de Mauleon assumed almost heroic
proportions. In the affair which had inflicted on him a calumny so
odious, it was clear that he had acted with chivalrous delicacy of
honour. And the turbulence and recklessness of his earlier years,
redeemed as they were, in the traditions of his contemporaries, by
courage and generosity, were not offences to which young Frenchmen are
inclined to be harsh. All question as to the mode in which his life
might have been passed during his long absence from the capital was
merged in the respect due to the only facts known, and these were
clearly proved in his pieces justificatives: First, that he had
served under another name in the ranks of the army in Algiers; had
distinguished himself there for signal valour, and received, with
promotion, the decoration of the cross. His real name was known only
to his colonel, and on quitting the service, the colonel placed in his
hands a letter of warm eulogy on his conduct, and identifying him as
Victor de Mauleon. Secondly, that in California he had saved a wealthy
family from midnight murder, fighting single-handed against and
overmastering three ruffians, and declining all other reward from those
he had preserved than a written attestation of their gratitude. In all
countries, valour ranks high in the list of virtues; in no country does
it so absolve from vices as it does in France.

But as yet Victor de Mauleon's vindication was only known by a few, and
those belonging to the gayer circles of life. How he might be judged by
the sober middle class, which constitutes the most important section of
public opinion to a candidate for political trusts and distinctions, was
another question.

The Duchesse stood at the door to receive her visitors. Duplessis was
seated near the entrance, by the side of a distinguished member of
the Imperial Government, with whom he was carrying on a whispered
conversation. The eye of the financier, however, turned towards the
doorway as Alain and Enguerrand entered, and passing over their familiar
faces, fixed itself attentively on that of a mach older man whom
Enguerrand was presenting to the Duchesse, and in whom Duplessis
rightly divined the Vicomte de Mauleon. Certainly if no one could have
recognized M. Lebeau in the stately personage who had visited Louvier,
still less could one who had heard of the wild feats of the roi des
viveurs in his youth reconcile belief in such tales with the quiet
modesty of mien which distinguished the cavalier now replying, with
bended head and subdued accents, to the courteous welcome of the
brilliant hostess. But for such difference in attributes between the
past and the present De Mauleon, Duplessis had been prepared by the
conversation at the Maison Doree. And now, as the Vicomte, yielding his
place by the Duchesse to some new-comer, glided on, and, leaning against
a column, contemplated the gay scene before him with that expression of
countenance, half sarcastic, half mournful, with which men regard, after
long estrangement, the scenes of departed joys, Duplessis felt that no
change in that man had impaired the force of character which had made
him the hero of reckless coevals. Though wearing no beard, not even a
mustache, there was something emphatically masculine in the contour
of the close-shaven cheek and resolute jaw; in a forehead broad at the
temples, and protuberant in those organs over the eyebrows which are
said to be significant of quick perception and ready action; in the
lips, when in repose compressed, perhaps somewhat stern in their
expression, but pliant and mobile when speaking, and wonderfully
fascinating when they smiled. Altogether, about this Victor de Mauleon
there was a nameless distinction, apart from that of conventional
elegance. You would have said, "That is a man of some marked
individuality, an eminence of some kind in himself." You would not be
surprised to hear that he was a party-leader, a skilled diplomatist, a
daring soldier, an adventurous traveller; but you would not guess him to
be a student, an author, an artist.

While Duplessis thus observed the Vicomte de Mauleon, all the while
seeming to lend an attentive ear to the whispered voice of the Minister
by his side, Alain passed on into the ball-room. He was fresh enough to
feel the exhilaration of the dance. Enguerrand (who had survived that
excitement, and who habitually deserted any assembly at an early hour
for the cigar and whist of his club) had made his way to De Mauleon, and
there stationed himself. The lion of one generation has always a mixed
feeling of curiosity and respect for the lion of a generation before
him, and the young Vandemar had conceived a strong and almost an
affectionate interest in this discrowned king of that realm in fashion
which, once lost, is never to be regained; for it is only Youth that can
hold its sceptre and command its subjects.

"In this crowd, Vicomte," said Enguerrand, "there must be many old
acquaintances of yours?"

"Perhaps so, but as yet I have only seen new faces."

As he thus spoke, a middle-aged man, decorated with the grand cross of
the Legion and half-a-dozen foreign orders, lending his arm to a lady of
the same age radiant in diamonds, passed by towards the ball-room,
and in some sudden swerve of his person, occasioned by a pause of
his companion to adjust her train, he accidentally brushed against De
Mauleon, whom he had not before noticed. Turning round to apologize for
his awkwardness, he encountered the full gaze of the Vicomte, started,
changed countenance, and hurried on his companion.

"Do you not recognize his Excellency?" said Enguerrand, smiling. "His
cannot be a new face to you."

"Is it the Baron de Lacy?" asked De Mauleon.

"The Baron de Lacy, now Comte d'Epinay, ambassador at the Court of
-----, and, if report speak true, likely soon to exchange that post for
the porte feuille of Minister."

"He has got on in life since I saw him last, the little Baron. He was
then my devoted imitator, and I was not proud of the imitation."

"He has got on by always clinging to the skirts of some one stronger
than himself,--to yours, I dare say, when, being a parvenu despite his
usurped title of baron, he aspired to the entree into clubs and
salons. The entree thus obtained, the rest followed easily; he became a
millionaire through a wife's dot, and an ambassador through the wife's
lover, who is a power in the State."

"But he must have substance in himself. Empty bags can not be made to
stand upright. Ah! unless I mistake, I see some one I knew better.
Yon pale, thin man, also with the grand cross--surely that is Alfred
Hennequin. Is he too a decorated Imperialist? I left him a socialistic
Republican."

"But, I presume, even then an eloquent avocat. He got into the Chamber,
spoke well, defended the coup-d'etat. He has just been made Prefet
of the great department of the a popular appointment. He bears a high
character. Pray renew your acquaintance with him; he is coming this
way."

"Will so grave a dignitary renew acquaintance with me? I doubt it."

But as De Mauleon said this, he moved from the column, and advanced
towards the Prefet. Enguerrand followed him, and saw the Vicomte extend
his hand to his old acquaintance.

The Prefet stared, and said, with frigid courtesy, "Pardon me,--some
mistake."

"Allow me, Monsieur Hennequin," said Enguerrand, interposing, and
wishing good-naturedly to save De Mauleon the awkwardness of introducing
himself,--"allow me to reintroduce you to my kinsman, whom the lapse of
years may well excuse you for forgetting, the Vicomte de Mauleon."

Still the Prefet did not accept the hand. He bowed with formal ceremony,
said, "I was not aware that Monsieur le Vicomte had returned to Paris,"
and moving to the doorway, made his salutation to the hostess and
disappeared.

"The insolent!" muttered Enguerrand.

"Hush!" said De Mauleon, quietly, "I can fight no more
duels,--especially with a Prefet. But I own I am weak enough to
feel hurt at such a reception from Hennequin, for he owed me some
obligations,--small, perhaps, but still they were such as might have
made me select him, rather than Louvier, as the vindicator of my name,
had I known him to be so high placed. But a man who has raised himself
into an authority may well be excused for forgetting a friend whose
character needs defence. I forgive him."

There was something pathetic in the Vicomte's tone which touched
Enguerrand's warm if light heart. But De Mauleon did not allow him time
to answer. He went on quickly through an opening in the gay crowd,
which immediately closed behind him, and Enguerrand saw him no more that
evening.

Duplessis ere this had quitted his seat by the Minister, drawn thence by
a young and very pretty girl resigned to his charge by a cavalier with
whom she had been dancing. She was the only daughter of Duplessis, and
he valued her even more than the millions he had made at the Bourse.
"The Princess," she said, "has been swept off in the train of some
German Royalty; so, petit pere, I must impose myself on thee."

The Princess, a Russian of high rank, was the chaperon that evening of
Mademoiselle Valerie Duplessis.

"And I suppose I must take thee back into the ballroom," said the
financier, smiling proudly, "and find thee partners."

"I don't want your aid for that, Monsieur; except this quadrille, my
list is pretty well filled up."

"And I hope the partners will be pleasant. Let me know who they are," he
whispered, as they threaded their way into the ball-room.

The girl glanced at her tablet.

"Well, the first on the list is milord somebody, with an unpronounceable
English name."

"Beau cavalier?"

"No; ugly, old too; thirty at least."

Duplessis felt relieved. He did not wish his daughter to fall in love
with an Englishman.

"And the next?"

"The next?" she said hesitatingly, and he observed that a soft blush
accompanied the hesitation.

"Yes, the next. Not English too?"

"Oh, no; the Marquis de Rochebriant."

"Ah! who presented him to thee?"

"Thy friend, petit pere, M. de Braze."

Duplessis again glanced at his daughter's face; it was bent over her
bouquet.

"Is he ugly also?"

"Ugly!" exclaimed the girl, indignantly; "why, he is--" she checked
herself and turned away her head.

Duplessis became thoughtful. He was glad that he had accompanied his
child into the ball-room; he would stay there, and keep watch on her and
Rochebriant also.

Up to that moment he had felt a dislike to Rochebriant. That young
noble's too obvious pride of race had nettled him, not the less that the
financier himself was vain of his ancestry. Perhaps he still disliked
Alain, but the dislike was now accompanied with a certain, not hostile,
interest; and if he became connected with the race, the pride in it
might grow contagious.

They had not been long in the ball-room before Alain came up to claim
his promised partner. In saluting Duplessis, his manner was the same as
usual, not more cordial, not less ceremoniously distant. A man so able
as the financier cannot be without quick knowledge of the human heart.

"If disposed to fall in love with Valerie," thought Duplessis, "he would
have taken more pains to please her father. Well, thank heaven, there
are better matches to be found for her than a noble without fortune and
a Legitimist without career."

In fact, Alain felt no more for Valerie than for any other pretty girl
in the room. In talking with the Vicomte de Braze in the intervals of
the dance, he had made some passing remark on her beauty. De Braze had
said, "Yes, she is charming; I will present you," and hastened to do so
before Rochebriant even learned her name. So introduced, he could but
invite her to give him her first disengaged dance, and when that was
fixed, he had retired, without entering into conversation.

Now, as they took their places in the quadrille, he felt that effort
of speech had become a duty, if not a pleasure; and of course, he began
with the first commonplace which presented itself to his mind.

"Do you not think it a very pleasant ball, Mademoiselle?"

"Yes," dropped, in almost inaudible reply, from Valerie's rosy lips.

"And not over-crowded, as most balls are?"

Valerie's lips again moved, but this time quite inaudibly. The
obligations of the figure now caused a pause. Alain racked his brains
and began,

"They tell me the last season was more than usually gay; of that I
cannot judge, for it was well-nigh over when I came to Paris for the
first time."

Valerie looked up with a more animated expression than her childlike
face had yet shown, and said, this time distinctly, "This is my first
ball, Monsieur le Marquis."

"One has only to look at Mademoiselle to divine that fact," replied
Alain, gallantly.

Again the conversation was interrupted by the dance; but the ice between
the two was now broken; and when the quadrille was concluded, and
Rochebriant led the fair Valerie back to her father's side, she felt
as if she had been listening to the music of the spheres, and that the
music had now suddenly stopped. Alain, alas for her! was under no such
pleasing illusion. Her talk had seemed to him artless indeed, but
very insipid, compared with the brilliant conversation of the wedded
Parisiennes with whom he more habitually danced; and it was with rather
a sensation of relief that he made his parting bow, and receded into the
crowd of bystanders.

Meanwhile De Mauleon had quitted the assemblage, walking slowly through
the deserted streets towards his apartment. The civilities he had met
at Louvier's dinner-party, and the marked distinction paid to him by
kinsmen of rank and position so unequivocal as Alain and Enguerrand,
had softened his mood and cheered his spirits. He had begun to question
himself whether a fair opening to his political ambition was really
forbidden to him under the existent order of things, whether it
necessitated the employment of such dangerous tools as those to which
anger and despair had reconciled his intellect. But the pointed way in
which he had been shunned or slighted by the two men who belonged to
political life--two men who in youth had looked up to himself, and
whose dazzling career of honours was identified with the Imperial
system--reanimated his fiercer passions and his more perilous designs.
The frigid accost of Hennequin more especially galled him; it wounded
not only his pride but his heart; it had the venom of ingratitude, and
it is the peculiar privilege of ingratitude to wound hearts that have
learned to harden themselves to the hate or contempt of men to whom
no services have been rendered. In some private affair concerning his
property, De Mauleon had had occasion to consult Hennequin, then a
rising young avocat. Out of that consultation a friendship had sprung
up, despite the differing habits and social grades of the two men. One
day, calling on Hennequin, he found him in a state of great nervous
excitement. The avocat had received a public insult in the salon of a
noble, to whom De Mauleon had introduced him, from a man who pretended
to the hand of a young lady to whom Hennequin was attached, and indeed
almost affianced. The man was a notorious spadassin,--a duellist little
less renowned for skill in all weapons than De Mauleon himself. The
affair had been such that Hennequin's friends assured him he had no
choice but to challenge this bravo. Hennequin, brave enough at the bar,
was no hero before sword-point or pistol. He was utterly ignorant of the
use of either weapon; his death in the encounter with an antagonist
so formidable seemed to him certain, and life was so precious,--an
honourable and distinguished career opening before him, marriage with
the woman he loved. Still he had the Frenchman's point of honour. He had
been told that he must fight; well, then, he must. He asked De Mauleon
to be one of his seconds, and in asking him, sank in his chair, covered
his face with his hands, and burst into tears.

"Wait till to-morrow," said De Mauleon; "take no step till then.
Meanwhile, you are in my hands, and I answer for your honour."

On leaving Hennequin, Victor sought the spadassin at the club of which
they were both members, and contrived, without reference to Hennequin,
to pick a quarrel with him. A challenge ensued; a duel with swords took
place the next morning. De Mauleon disarmed and wounded his antagonist,
not gravely, but sufficiently to terminate the encounter. He assisted
to convey the wounded man to his apartment, and planted himself by his
bedside, as if he were a friend.

"Why on earth did you fasten a quarrel on me?" asked the spadassin; "and
why, having done so, did you spare my life; for your sword was at my
heart when you shifted its point, and pierced my shoulder?"

"I will tell you, and in so doing, beg you to accept my friendship
hereafter, on one condition. In the course of the day, write or dictate
a few civil words of apology to M. Hennequin. Ma foi! every one will
praise you for a generosity so becoming in a man who has given such
proofs of courage and skill to an avocat who has never handled a sword
nor fired a pistol."

That same day De Mauleon remitted to Hennequin an apology for heated
words freely retracted, which satisfied all his friends. For the service
thus rendered by De Mauleon, Hennequin declared himself everlastingly
indebted. In fact, he entirely owed to that friend his life, his
marriage, his honour, his career.

"And now," thought De Mauleon, "now, when he could so easily requite
me,--now he will not even take my hand. Is human nature itself at war
with me?"




CHAPTER III.

Nothing could be simpler than the apartment of the Vicomte de Mauleon,
in the second story of a quiet old-fashioned street. It had been
furnished at small cost out of his savings. Yet, on the whole, it
evinced the good taste of a man who had once been among the exquisites
of the polite world. You felt that you were in the apartment of a
gentleman, and a gentleman of somewhat severe tastes, and of sober
matured years. He was sitting the next morning in the room which he used
as a private study. Along the walls were arranged dwarf bookcases, as
yet occupied by few books, most of them books of reference, others cheap
editions of the French classics in prose--no poets, no romance-writers,
with a few Latin authors also in prose,--Cicero, Sallust, Tacitus. He
was engaged at his desk writing,--a book with its leaves open before
him, "Paul Louis Courier," that model of political irony and masculine
style of composition. There was a ring at his door-bell. The Vicomte
kept no servant. He rose and answered the summons. He recoiled a few
paces on recognizing his visitor in M. Hennequin.

The Prefet this time did not withdraw his hand; he extended it, but it
was with a certain awkwardness and timidity. "I thought it my duty to
call on you, Vicomte, thus early, having already seen M. Enguerrand de
Vandemar. He has shown me the copies of the pieces which were inspected
by your distinguished kinsmen, and which completely clear you of the
charge that--grant me your pardon when I say--seemed to me still to
remain unanswered when I had the honour to meet you last night."

"It appears to me, Monsieur Hennequin, that you, as an avocat so
eminent, might have convinced yourself very readily of that fact."

"Monsieur le Vicomte, I was in Switzerland with my wife at the time of
the unfortunate affair in which you were involved."

"But when you returned to Paris, you might perhaps have deigned to make
inquiries so affecting the honour of one you had called a friend, and
for whom you had professed"--De Mauleon paused; he disdained to add--"an
eternal gratitude."

Hennequin coloured slightly, but replied with self-possession.

"I certainly did inquire. I did hear that the charge against you with
regard to the abstraction of the jewels was withdrawn, that you were
therefore acquitted by law; but I heard also that society did not acquit
you, and that, finding this, you had quitted France. Pardon me again, no
one would listen to me when I attempted to speak on your behalf but
now that so many years have elapsed, that the story is imperfectly
remembered, that relations so high-placed receive you so cordially,--now
I rejoice to think that you will have no difficulty in regaining a
social position never really lost, but for a time resigned."

"I am duly sensible of the friendly joy you express. I was reading the
other day in a lively author some pleasant remarks on the effects of
medisance or calumny upon our impressionable Parisian public. 'If,'
says the writer, 'I found myself accused of having put the two towers
of Notre Dame into my waistcoat-pocket I should not dream of defending
myself; I should take to flight. And,' adds the writer, 'if my best
friend were under the same accusation, I should be so afraid of being
considered his accomplice that I should put my best friend outside the
door.' Perhaps, Monsieur Hennequin, I was seized with the first alarm.
Why should I blame you if seized with the second? Happily, this good
city of Paris has its reactions. And you can now offer me your hand.
Paris has by this time discovered that the two towers of Notre Dame are
not in my pocket."

There was a pause. De Mauleon had resettled himself at his desk, bending
over his papers, and his manner seemed to imply that he considered the
conversation at an end.

But a pang of shame, of remorse, of tender remembrance, shot across the
heart of the decorous, worldly, self-seeking man, who owed all that he
now was to the ci-devant vaurien before him. Again he stretched forth
his hand, and this time grasped De Mauleon's warmly. "Forgive me," he
said, feelingly and hoarsely; "forgive me, I was to blame. By character,
and perhaps by the necessities of my career, I am over-timid to public
opinion, public scandal. Forgive me. Say if in anything now I can
requite, though but slightly, the service I owe you."

De Mauleon looked steadily at the Prefet, and said slowly, "Would you
serve me in turn? Are you sincere?"

The Prefet hesitated a moment, then answered firmly, "Yes."

"Well, then, what I ask of you is a frank opinion,--not as lawyer, not
as Prefet, but as a man who knows the present state of French society.
Give that opinion without respect to my feelings one way or other. Let
it emanate solely from your practised judgment."

"Be it so," said Hennequin, wondering what was to come. De Mauleon
resumed, "As you may remember, during my former career I had no
political ambition. I did not meddle with politics. In the troubled
times that immediately succeeded the fall of Louis Philippe I was but
an epicurean looker-on. Grant that, so far as admission to the salons is
concerned, I shall encounter no difficulty in regaining position; but as
regards the Chamber, public life, a political career, can I have my
fair opening under the Empire? You pause. Answer as you have promised,
frankly."

"The difficulties in the way of a political career would be very great."

"Insuperable?"

"I fear so. Of course, in my capacity of Prefet, I have no small
influence in my department in support of a Government candidate. But
I do not think that the Imperial Government could, at this time
especially, in which it must be very cautious in selecting its
candidates, be induced to recommend you. The affair of the jewels would
be raked up; your vindication disputed, denied; the fact that for so
many years you have acquiesced in that charge without taking steps to
refute it; your antecedents, even apart from that charge; your present
want of property (M. Enguerrand tells me your income is but moderate);
the absence of all previous repute in public life. No; relinquish
the idea of political contest,--it would expose you to inevitable
mortifications, to a failure that would even jeopardize the admission
to the salons which you are now gaining. You could not be a Government
candidate."

"Granted. I may have no desire to be one; but an opposition candidate,
one of the Liberal party?"

"As an Imperialist," said Hennequin, smiling gravely, "and holding the
office I do, it would not become me to encourage a candidate against
the Emperor's Government. But speaking with the frankness you solicit, I
should say that your chances there are infinitely worse. The Opposition
are in a pitiful minority,--the most eminent of the Liberals can
scarcely gain seats for themselves; great local popularity or property,
high established repute for established patriotism, or proved talents
of oratory and statesmanship, are essential qualifications for a seat in
the Opposition; and even these do not suffice for a third of the persons
who possess them. Be again what you were before,--the hero of salons
remote from the turbulent vulgarity of politics."

"I am answered. Thank you once more. The service I rendered you once is
requited now."

"No, indeed,--no; but will you dine with me quietly today, and allow me
to present to you my wife and two children, born since we parted? I say
to-day, for to-morrow I return to my Prefecture."

"I am infinitely obliged by your invitation, but to-day I dine with the
Comte de Beauvilliers to meet some of the Corps Diplomatique. I must
make good my place in the salons, since you so clearly show me that I
have no chance of one in the Legislature--unless--"

"Unless what?"

"Unless there happen one of those revolutions in which the scum comes
uppermost."

"No fear of that. The subterranean barracks and railway have ended
forever the rise of the scum, the reign of the canaille and its
barricades."

"Adieu, my dear Hennequin. My respectful hommages a Madame."

After that day the writing of Pierre Firmin in "Le Sens Commun," though
still keeping within the pale of the law, became more decidedly hostile
to the Imperial system, still without committing their author to any
definite programme of the sort of government that should succeed it.




CHAPTER IV.

The weeks glided on. Isaura's manuscript bad passed into print; it came
out in the French fashion of feuilletons,--a small detachment at a time.
A previous flourish of trumpets by Savarin and the clique at his command
insured it attention, if not from the general public, at least from
critical and literary coteries. Before the fourth instalment appeared
it had outgrown the patronage of the coteries; it seized hold of the
public. It was not in the last school in fashion; incidents were not
crowded and violent,--they were few and simple, rather appertaining
to an elder school, in which poetry of sentiment and grace of diction
prevailed. That very resemblance to old favourites gave it the
attraction of novelty. In a word, it excited a pleased admiration, and
great curiosity was felt as to the authorship. When it oozed out that it
was by the young lady whose future success in the musical world had
been so sanguinely predicted by all who had heard her sing, the interest
wonderfully increased. Petitions to be introduced to her acquaintance
were showered upon Savarin. Before she scarcely realized her dawning
fame, she was drawn from her quiet home and retired habits; she was
fetee and courted in the literary circle of which Savarin was a chief.
That circle touched, on one side, Bohemia; on the other, that realm of
politer fashion which, in every intellectual metropolis, but especially
in Paris, seeks to gain borrowed light from luminaries in art and
letters. But the very admiration she obtained somewhat depressed,
somewhat troubled her; after all, it did not differ from that which was
at her command as a singer.

On the one hand, she shrank instinctively from the caresses of female
authors and the familiar greetings of male authors, who frankly lived
in philosophical disdain of the conventions respected by sober, decorous
mortals. On the other hand, in the civilities of those who, while they
courted a rising celebrity, still held their habitual existence apart
from the artistic world, there was a certain air of condescension,
of patronage, towards the young stranger with no other protector but
Signora Venosta, the ci-devant public singer, and who had made her debut
in a journal edited by M. Gustave Rameau, which, however disguised by
exaggerated terms of praise, wounded her pride of woman in flattering
her vanity as author. Among this latter set were wealthy, high-born men,
who addressed her as woman--as woman beautiful and young--with words of
gallantry that implied love, but certainly no thought of marriage,--many
of the most ardent were indeed married already. But once launched into
the thick of Parisian hospitalities, it was difficult to draw back. The
Venosta wept at the thought of missing some lively soiree, and Savarin
laughed at her shrinking fastidiousness as that of a child's ignorance
of the world. But still she had her mornings to herself; and in those
mornings, devoted to the continuance of her work (for the commencement
was in print before a third was completed), she forgot the commonplace
world that received her in the evenings. Insensibly to herself the tone
of this work had changed as it proceeded. It had begun seriously indeed,
but in the seriousness there was a certain latent joy. It might be the
joy of having found vent of utterance; it might be rather a joy still
more latent, inspired by the remembrance of Graham's words and looks,
and by the thought that she had renounced all idea of the professional
career which he had evidently disapproved. Life then seemed to her a
bright possession. We have seen that she had begun her roman without
planning how it should end. She had, however, then meant it to end,
somehow or other, happily. Now the lustre had gone from life; the tone
of the work was saddened; it foreboded a tragic close. But for the
general reader it became, with every chapter, still more interesting;
the poor child had a singularly musical gift of style,--a music which
lent itself naturally to pathos. Every very young writer knows how his
work, if one of feeling, will colour itself from the views of some
truth in his innermost self; and in proportion as it does so, how his
absorption in the work increases, till it becomes part and parcel of his
own mind and heart. The presence of a hidden sorrow may change the fate
of the beings he has created, and guide to the grave those whom, in a
happier vein, he would have united at the altar. It is not till a later
stage of experience and art that the writer escapes from the influence
of his individual personality, and lives in existences that take no
colourings from his own. Genius usually must pass through the subjective
process before it gains the objective. Even a Shakspeare represents
himself in the Sonnets before no trace of himself is visible in a
Falstaff or a Lear.

No news of the Englishman,--not a word. Isaura could not but feel that
in his words, his looks, that day in her own garden, and those yet
happier days at Enghien, there had been more than friendship; there
had been love,--love enough to justify her own pride in whispering to
herself, "And I love too." But then that last parting! how changed he
was! how cold! She conjectured that jealousy of Rameau might, in some
degree, account for the coldness when he first entered the room, but
surely not when he left; surely not when she had overpassed the reserve
of her sex, and implied by signs rarely misconstrued by those who love
that he had no cause for jealousy of another. Yet he had gone,--parted
with her pointedly as a friend, a mere friend. How foolish she had been
to think this rich ambitious foreigner could ever have meant to be more!
In the occupation of her work she thought to banish his image; but in
that work the image was never absent; there were passages in which
she pleadingly addressed it, and then would cease abruptly, stifled by
passionate tears. Still she fancied that the work would reunite them;
that in its pages he would hear her voice and comprehend her heart. And
thus all praise of the work became very, very dear to her.

At last, after many weeks, Savarin heard from Graham. The letter was
dated Aix-la-Chapelle, at which the Englishman said he might yet be some
time detained. In the letter Graham spoke chiefly of the new journal:
in polite compliment of Savarin's own effusions; in mixed praise
and condemnation of the political and social articles signed Pierre
Firmin,--praise of their intellectual power, condemnation of their moral
cynicism.

   "The writer," he said, "reminds me of a passage in which Montesquieu
   compares the heathen philosophers to those plants which the earth
   produces in places that have never seen the heavens. The soil of
   his experience does not grow a single belief; and as no community
   can exist without a belief of some kind, so a politician without
   belief can but help to destroy; he cannot reconstruct. Such writers
   corrupt a society; they do not reform a system."

He closed his letter with a reference to Isaura:

   "Do, in your reply, my dear Savarin, tell me something about your
   friends Signora Venosta and the Signorina, whose work, so far as yet
   published, I have read with admiring astonishment at the power of a
   female writer so young to rival the veteran practitioners of fiction
   in the creation of interest in imaginary characters, and in
   sentiments which, if they appear somewhat over-romantic and
   exaggerated, still touch very fine chords in human nature not
   awakened in our trite every-day existence. I presume that the
   beauty of the roman has been duly appreciated by a public so
   refined as the Parisian, and that the name of the author is
   generally known. No doubt she is now much the rage of the literary
   circles, and her career as a writer may be considered fixed. Pray
   present my congratulations to the Signorina when you see her."

Savarin had been in receipt of this letter some days before he called
on Isaura, and carelessly showed it to her. She took it to the window to
read, in order to conceal the trembling of her hands. In a few minutes
she returned it silently.

"Those Englishmen," said Savarin, "have not the heart of compliment. I
am by no means flattered by what he says of my trifles, and I dare say
you are still less pleased with this chilly praise of your charming
tale; but the man means to be civil."

"Certainly," said Isaura, smiling faintly.

"Only think of Rameau!" resumed Savarin. "On the strength of his salary
in the 'Sens Commun,' and on the chateaux en Espagne which he constructs
thereon, he has already furnished an apartment in the Chaussee d'Antin,
and talks of setting up a coupe in order to maintain the dignity of
letters when he goes to dine with the duchesses who are some day or
other to invite him. Yet I admire his self-confidence, though I laugh at
it. A man gets on by a spring in his own mechanism, and he should always
keep it wound up. Rameau will make a figure. I used to pity him; I begin
to respect. Nothing succeeds like success. But I see I am spoiling your
morning. Au revoir, mon enfant."

Left alone, Isaura brooded in a sort of mournful wonderment over the
words referring to herself in Graham's letter. Read though but once,
she knew them by heart. What! did he consider those characters she had
represented as wholly imaginary? In one--the most prominent, the
most attractive--could he detect no likeness to himself? What! did he
consider so "over-romantic and exaggerated" sentiments which couched
appeals from her heart to his? Alas! in matters of sentiment it is the
misfortune of us men that even the most refined of us often grate upon
some sentiment in a woman, though she may not be romantic,--not romantic
at all, as people go,--some sentiment which she thought must be so
obvious if we cared a straw about her, and which, though we prize
her above the Indies, is by our dim, horn-eyed, masculine vision
undiscernible. It may be something in itself the airiest of trifles: the
anniversary of a day in which the first kiss was interchanged, nay, of a
violet gathered, a misunderstanding cleared up; and of that anniversary
we remember no more than we do of our bells and coral. But she--she
remembers it; it is no bells and coral to her. Of course, much is to be
said in excuse of man, brute though he be. Consider the multiplicity
of his occupations, the practical nature of his cares. But granting the
validity of all such excuse, there is in man an original obtuseness of
fibre as regards sentiment in comparison with the delicacy of woman's.
It comes, perhaps, from the same hardness of constitution which forbids
us the luxury of ready tears. Thus it is very difficult for the wisest
man to understand thoroughly a woman. Goethe says somewhere that the
highest genius in man must have much of the woman in it. If this be
true, the highest genius alone in man can comprehend and explain the
nature of woman, because it is not remote from him, but an integral part
of his masculine self. I am not sure, however, that it necessitates the
highest genius, but rather a special idiosyncrasy in genius which the
highest may or may not have. I think Sophocles a higher genius than
Euripides; but Euripides has that idiosyncrasy, and Sophocles not. I
doubt whether women would accept Goethe as their interpreter with the
same readiness with which they would accept Schiller. Shakspeare, no
doubt, excels all poets in the comprehension of women, in his sympathy
with them in the woman-part of his nature which Goethe ascribes to the
highest genius; but, putting aside that "monster," I do not remember any
English poet whom we should consider conspicuously eminent in that lore,
unless it be the prose poet, nowadays generally underrated and little
read, who wrote the letters of Clarissa Harlowe. I say all this in
vindication of Graham Vane, if, though a very clever man in his way,
and by no means uninstructed in human nature, he had utterly failed in
comprehending the mysteries which to this poor woman-child seemed to
need no key for one who really loved her. But we have said somewhere
before in this book that music speaks in a language which cannot explain
itself except in music. So speaks, in the human heart, much which is
akin to music. Fiction (that is, poetry, whether in form of rhyme or
prose) speaks thus pretty often. A reader must be more commonplace
than, I trust, my gentle readers are, if he suppose that when Isaura
symbolized the real hero of her thoughts in the fabled hero of her
romance, she depicted him as one of whom the world could say, "That is
Graham Vane." I doubt if even a male poet would so vulgarize any woman
whom he thoroughly reverenced and loved. She is too sacred to him to
be thus unveiled to the public stare; as the sweetest of all ancient
love-poets says well--

        "Qui sapit in tacito gaudeat ille sinu."

But a girl, a girl in her first untold timid love, to let the world
know, "that is the man I love and would die for!"--if such a girl be,
she has no touch of the true woman-genius, and certainly she and Isaura
have nothing in common. Well, then, in Isaura's invented hero, though
she saw the archetypal form of Graham Vane,--saw him as in her young,
vague, romantic dreams idealized, beautified, transfigured,--he would
have been the vainest of men if he had seen therein the reflection of
himself. On the contrary he said, in the spirit of that jealousy to
which he was too prone, "Alas! this, then, is some ideal, already seen
perhaps, compared to which how commonplace am I!" and thus persuading
himself, no wonder that the sentiments surrounding this unrecognized
archetype appeared to him over-romantic. His taste acknowledged the
beauty of form which clothed them; his heart envied the ideal that
inspired them. But they seemed so remote from him; they put the
dreamland of the writer farther and farther from his workday real life.

In this frame of mind, then, he had written to Savarin, and the answer
he received hardened it still more. Savarin had replied, as was his
laudable wont in correspondence, the very day he received Graham's
letter, and therefore before he had even seen Isaura. In his reply,
he spoke much of the success her work had obtained; of the invitations
showered upon her, and the sensation she caused in the salons; of her
future career, with hope that she might even rival Madame de Grantmesnil
some day, when her ideas became emboldened by maturer experience, and
a closer study of that model of eloquent style,--saying that the young
editor was evidently becoming enamoured of his fair contributor; and
that Madame Savarin had ventured the prediction that the Signorina's
roman would end in the death of the heroine, and the marriage of the
writer.




CHAPTER V.

And still the weeks glided on: autumn succeeded to summer, the winter
to autumn; the season of Paris was at its height. The wondrous capital
seemed to repay its Imperial embellisher by the splendour and the joy
of its fetes. But the smiles on the face of Paris were hypocritical
and hollow. The Empire itself had passed out of fashion. Grave men
and impartial observers felt anxious. Napoleon had renounced les ideas
Napoleoniennes. He was passing into the category of constitutional
sovereigns, and reigning, not by his old undivided prestige, but by the
grace of party. The press was free to circulate complaints as to the
past and demands as to the future, beneath which the present reeled,
ominous of earthquake. People asked themselves if it were possible that
the Empire could co-exist with forms of government not imperial, yet not
genuinely constitutional, with a majority daily yielding to a minority.
The basis of universal suffrage was sapped. About this time the articles
in the "Sens Commun" signed Pierre Firmin were creating not only
considerable sensation, but marked effect on opinion; and the sale of
the journal was immense.

Necessarily the repute and the position of Gustave Rameau, as the avowed
editor of this potent journal, rose with its success. Nor only his
repute and position; bank-notes of considerable value were transmitted
to him by the publisher, with the brief statement that they were sent by
the sole proprietor of the paper as the editor's fair share of profit.
The proprietor was never named, but Rameau took it for granted that it
was M. Lebeau. M. Lebeau he had never seen since the day he had brought
him the list of contributors, and was then referred to the publisher,
whom he supposed M. Lebeau had secured, and received the first quarter
of his salary in advance. The salary was a trifle compared to the extra
profits thus generously volunteered. He called at Lebeau's office, and
saw only the clerk, who said that his chef was abroad.

Prosperity produced a marked change for the better, if not in the
substance of Rameau's character, at least in his manners and social
converse. He no longer exhibited that restless envy of rivals, which is
the most repulsive symptom of vanity diseased. He pardoned Isaura her
success; nay, he was even pleased at it. The nature of her work did not
clash with his own kind of writing. It was so thoroughly woman like
that one could not compare it to a man's. Moreover, that success had
contributed largely to the profits by which he had benefited, and to his
renown as editor of the journal which accorded place to this new-found
genius. But there was a deeper and more potent cause for sympathy with
the success of his fair young contributor. He had imperceptibly glided
into love with her,--a love very different from that with which poor
Julie Caumartin flattered herself she had inspired the young poet.
Isaura was one of those women for whom, even in natures the least
chivalric, love, however ardent, cannot fail to be accompanied with a
certain reverence,--the reverence with which the ancient knighthood, in
its love for women, honoured the ideal purity of womanhood itself. Till
then Rameau had never revered any one.

On her side, brought so frequently into communication with the young
conductor of the journal in which she wrote, Isaura entertained for him
a friendly, almost sister-like affection.

I do not think that, even if she had never known the Englishman, she
would have really become in love with Rameau, despite the picturesque
beauty of his countenance and the congeniality of literary pursuits; but
perhaps she might have fancied herself in love with him. And till one,
whether man or woman, has known real love, fancy is readily mistaken for
it. But little as she had seen of Graham, and that little not in itself
wholly favourable to him, she knew in her heart of hearts that his image
would never be replaced by one equally dear. Perhaps in those qualities
that placed him in opposition to her she felt his attractions. The
poetical in woman exaggerates the worth of the practical in man. Still
for Rameau her exquisitely kind and sympathizing nature conceived one of
those sentiments which in woman are almost angel-like. We have seen in
her letters to Madame de Grantmesnil that from the first he inspired her
with a compassionate interest; then the compassion was checked by her
perception of his more unamiable and envious attributes. But now those
attributes, if still existent, had ceased to be apparent to her, and the
compassion became unalloyed. Indeed, it was thus so far increased that
it was impossible for any friendly observer to look at the beautiful
face of this youth, prematurely wasted and worn, without the kindliness
of pity. His prosperity had brightened and sweetened the expression of
that face, but it had not effaced the vestiges of decay; rather perhaps
deepened them, for the duties of his post necessitated a regular labour,
to which he had been unaccustomed, and the regular labour necessitated,
or seemed to him to necessitate, an increase of fatal stimulants. He
imbibed absinthe with everything he drank, and to absinthe he united
opium. This, of course, Isaura knew not, any more than she knew of
his liaison with the "Ondine" of his muse; she saw only the increasing
delicacy of his face and form, contrasted by his increased geniality and
liveliness of spirits, and the contrast saddened her. Intellectually,
too, she felt for him compassion. She recognized and respected in him
the yearnings of a genius too weak to perform a tithe of what, in the
arrogance of youth, it promised to its ambition. She saw, too, those
struggles between a higher and a lower self, to which a weak degree of
genius united with a strong degree of arrogance is so often subjected.
Perhaps she overestimated the degree of genius, and what, if rightly
guided, it could do; but she did, in the desire of her own heavenlier
instinct, aspire to guide it heavenward. And as if she were twenty years
older than himself, she obeyed that desire in remonstrating and warning
and urging, and the young man took all these "preachments" with a
pleased submissive patience. Such, as the new year dawned upon the grave
of the old one, was the position between these two. And nothing more was
heard from Graham Vane.




CHAPTER VI.

It has now become due to Graham Vane, and to his place in the estimation
of my readers, to explain somewhat more distinctly the nature of the
quest in prosecution of which he had sought the aid of the Parisian
police, and under an assumed name made the acquaintance of M. Lebeau.

The best way of discharging this duty will perhaps be to place before
the reader the contents of the letter which passed under Graham's eyes
on the day in which the heart of the writer ceased to beat.

(Confidential. To be opened immediately after my death, and before the
perusal of my will.--Richard King.)

TO GRAHAM VANE, Esq.

My DEAR GRAHAM,--By the direction on the envelope of this letter,
"Before the perusal of my will," I have wished to save you from the
disappointment you would naturally experience if you learned my bequest
without being prevised of the conditions which I am about to impose upon
your honour. You will see ere you conclude this letter that you are the
only man living to whom I could intrust the secret it contains and the
task it enjoins.

You are aware that I was not born to the fortune that passed to me by
the death of a distant relation, who had, in my earlier youth, children
of his own. I was an only son, left an orphan at the age of sixteen
with a very slender pittance. My guardians designed me for the medical
profession. I began my studies at Edinburgh, and was sent to Paris to
complete them, It so chanced that there I lodged in the same house with
an artist named Auguste Duval, who, failing to gain his livelihood as a
painter, in what--for his style was ambitious--is termed the Historical
School, had accepted the humbler calling of a drawing-master. He had
practised in that branch of the profession for several years at Tours,
having a good clientele among English families settled there. This
clientele, as he frankly confessed, he had lost from some irregularities
of conduct. He was not a bad man, but of convivial temper, and easily
led into temptation. He had removed to Paris a few months before I made
his acquaintance. He obtained a few pupils, and often lost them as soon
as gained. He was unpunctual and addicted to drink. But he had a small
pension, accorded to him, he was wont to say mysteriously, by some
high-born kinsfolk, too proud to own connection with a drawing-master,
and on the condition that he should never name them. He never did name
them to me, and I do not know to this day whether the story of this
noble relationship was true or false. A pension, however, he did receive
quarterly from some person or other, and it was an unhappy provision for
him. It tended to make him an idler in his proper calling; and whenever
he received the payment he spent it in debauch, to the neglect, while it
lasted, of his pupils. This man had residing with him a young daughter,
singularly beautiful. You may divine the rest. I fell in love with
her,--a love deepened by the compassion with which she inspired me. Her
father left her so frequently that, living on the same floor, we saw
much of each other. Parent and child were often in great need,--lacking
even fuel or food. Of course I assisted them to the utmost of my scanty
means Much as I was fascinated by Louise Duval, I was not blind to great
defects in her character. She was capricious, vain, aware of her beauty,
and sighing for the pleasures or the gauds beyond her reach. I knew that
she did not love me,--there was little, indeed, to captivate her fancy
in a poor, thread-bare medical student,--and yet I fondly imagined that
my own persevering devotion would at length win her affections, I spoke
to her father more than once of my hope some day to make Louise my
wife. This hope, I must frankly acknowledge, he never encouraged. On the
contrary, he treated it with scorn,--"His child with her beauty
would look much higher;" but be continued all the same to accept my
assistance, and to sanction my visits. At length my slender purse was
pretty well exhausted, and the luckless drawing-master was so harassed
with petty debts that further credit became impossible. At this time
I happened to hear from a fellow-student that his sister, who was the
principal of a lady's school in Cheltenham, bad commissioned him to look
out for a first-rate teacher of drawing with whom her elder pupils
could converse in French, but who should be sufficiently acquainted with
English to make his instructions intelligible to the young. The salary
was liberal, the school large and of high repute, and his appointment
to it would open to an able teacher no inconsiderable connection among
private families. I communicated this intelligence to Duval. He caught
at it eagerly. He had learned at Tours to speak English fluently; and
as his professional skill was of high order, and he was popular with
several eminent artists, he obtained certificates as to his talents,
which my fellow-student forwarded to England with specimens of Duval's
drawings. In a few days the offer of an engagement arrived, was
accepted, and Duval and his daughter set out for Cheltenham. At the
eve of their departure, Louise, profoundly dejected at the prospect of
banishment to a foreign country, and placing no trust in her father's
reform to steady habits, evinced a tenderness for me hitherto new; she
wept bitterly; she allowed me to believe that her tears flowed at the
thought of parting with me, and even besought me to accompany them to
Cheltenham, if only for a few days. You may suppose how delightedly I
complied with the request. Duval had been about a week at the watering
place, and was discharging the duties he had undertaken with such
unwonted steadiness and regularity that I began sorrowfully to feel I
had no longer an excuse for not returning to my studies at Paris, when
the poor teacher was seized with a fit of paralysis. He lost the power
of movement, and his mind was affected. The medical attendant called
in said that he might linger thus for some time, but that, even if he
recovered his intellect, which was more than doubtful, he would never be
able to resume his profession. I could not leave Louise in circumstances
so distressing,--I remained. The little money Duval had brought from
Paris was now exhausted; and when the day on which he had been in the
habit of receiving his quarter's pension came round, Louise was unable
even to conjecture how it was to be applied for. It seems he had always
gone for it in person; but to whom he went was a secret which he had
never divulged, and at this critical juncture his mind was too enfeebled
even to comprehend us when we inquired. I had already drawn from the
small capital on the interest of which I had maintained myself; I now
drew out most of the remainder. But this was a resource that could
not last long. Nor could I, without seriously compromising Louise's
character, be constantly in the house with a girl so young, and whose
sole legitimate protector was thus afflicted. There seemed but one
alternative to that of abandoning her altogether,--namely, to make her
my wife, to conclude the studies necessary to obtain my diploma, and
purchase some partnership in a small country practice with the scanty
surplus that might be left of my capital. I placed this option before
Louise timidly, for I could not bear the thought of forcing her
inclinations. She seemed much moved by what she called my generosity:
she consented; we were married. I was, as you may conceive, wholly
ignorant of French law. We were married according to the English
ceremony and the Protestant ritual. Shortly after our marriage we all
three returned to Paris, taking an apartment in a quarter remote from
that in which we had before lodged, in order to avoid any, harassment
to which such small creditors as Duval had left behind him might
subject us. I resumed my studies with redoubled energy, and Louise was
necessarily left much alone with her poor father in the daytime. The
defects in her character became more and more visible. She reproached me
for the solitude to which I condemned her; our poverty galled her; she
had no kind greeting for me when I returned at evening, wearied out.
Before marriage she had not loved me; after marriage, alas! I fear she
hated. We had been returned to Paris some months when poor Duval died;
he had never recovered his faculties, nor had we ever learned from whom
his pension had been received. Very soon after her father's death I
observed a singular change in the humour and manner of Louise. She was
no longer peevish, irascible, reproachful; but taciturn and thoughtful.
She seemed to me under the influence of some suppressed excitement, her
cheeks flushed and her eye abstracted. At length, one evening when I
returned I found her gone. She did not come back that night nor the next
day. It was impossible for me to conjecture what had become of her.
She had no friends, so far as I knew; no one had visited at our squalid
apartment. The poor house in which we lodged had no concierge whom
I could question; but the ground-floor was occupied by a small
tobacconist's shop, and the woman at the counter told me that for some
days before my wife's disappearance, she had observed her pass the
shop-window in going out in the afternoon and returning towards the
evening. Two terrible conjectures beset me either in her walk she
had met some admirer, with whom she had fled; or, unable to bear the
companionship and poverty of a union which she had begun to loathe, she
had gone forth to drown herself in the Seine. On the third day from her
flight I received the letter I enclose. Possibly the handwriting may
serve you as a guide in the mission I intrust to you.

   MONSIEUR,--You have deceived me vilely,--taken advantage of my
   inexperienced youth and friendless position to decoy me into an
   illegal marriage. My only consolation under my calamity and
   disgrace is, that I am at least free from a detested bond. You will
   not see me again,--it is idle to attempt to do so. I have obtained
   refuge with relations whom I have been fortunate enough to discover,
   and to whom I intrust my fate; and even if you could learn the
   shelter I have sought, and have the audacity to molest me, you would
   but subject yourself to the chastisement you so richly deserve.

                    Louise DUVAL.

At the perusal of this cold-hearted, ungrateful letter, the love I had
felt for this woman--already much shaken by her wayward and perverse
temper--vanished from my heart, never to return. But as an honest
man, my conscience was terribly stung. Could it be possible that I
had unknowingly deceived her,--that our marriage was not legal? When
I recovered from the stun which was the first effect of her letter, I
sought the opinion of an avoue in the neighbourbood, named Sartiges, and
to my dismay, I learned that while I, marrying according to the customs
of my own country, was legally bound to Louise in England, and could
not marry another, the marriage was in all ways illegal for her,--being
without the consent of her relations while she was under age; without
the ceremonials of the Roman Catholic Church,--to which, though I never
heard any profession of religious belief from her or her father, it
might fairly be presumed that she belonged; and, above all, without the
form of civil contract which is indispensable to the legal marriage of a
French subject.

The avoue said that the marriage, therefore, in itself was null, and
that Louise could, without incurring legal penalties for bigamy,
marry again in France according to the French laws; but that under the
circumstances it was probable that her next of kin would apply on her
behalf to the proper court for the formal annulment of the marriage,
which would be the most effectual mode of saving her from any
molestation on my part, and remove all possible questions hereafter as
to her single state and absolute right to remarry. I had better remain
quiet, and wait for intimation of further proceedings. I knew not what
else to do, and necessarily submitted.

From this wretched listlessness of mind, alternated now by vehement
resentment against Louise, now by the reproach of my own sense of honour
in leaving that honour in so questionable a point of view, I was aroused
by a letter from the distant kinsman by whom hitherto I had been so
neglected. In the previous year he had lost one of his two children; the
other was just dead. No nearer relation now surviving stood between me
and my chance of inheritance from him. He wrote word of his domestic
affliction with a manly sorrow which touched me, said that his health
was failing, and begged me, as soon as possible, to come and visit him
in Scotland. I went, and continued to reside with him till his death,
some months afterwards. By his will I succeeded to his ample fortune on
condition of taking his name.

As soon as the affairs connected with this inheritance permitted, I
returned to Paris, and again saw M. Sartiges. I had never heard from
Louise, nor from any one connected with her since the letter you have
read. No steps had been taken to annul the marriage, and sufficient time
had elapsed to render it improbable that such steps would be taken now;
but if no such steps were taken, however free from the marriage-bond
Louise might be, it clearly remained binding on myself.

At my request, M. Sartiges took the most vigorous measures that occurred
to him to ascertain where Louise was, and what and who was the relation
with whom she asserted she had found refuge. The police were employed;
advertisements were issued, concealing names, but sufficiently clear to
be intelligible to Louise if they came under her eye, and to the effect
that if any informality in our marriage existed, she was implored for
her own sake to remove it by a second ceremonial--answer to be addressed
to the avoue. No answer came; the police had hitherto failed of
discovering her, but were sanguine of success, when a few weeks after
these advertisements a packet reached M. Sartiges, enclosing the
certificates annexed to this letter, of the death of Louise Duval at
Munich. The certificates, as you will see, are to appearance officially
attested and unquestionably genuine. So they were considered by M.
Sartiges as well as by myself. Here, then, all inquiry ceased; the
police were dismissed. I was free. By little and little I overcame the
painful impressions which my ill-starred union and the announcement of
Louise's early death bequeathed. Rich, and of active mind, I learned to
dismiss the trials of my youth as a gloomy dream. I entered into public
life; I made myself a creditable position; became acquainted with your
aunt; we were wedded, and the beauty of her nature embellished mine.
Alas, alas! two years after our marriage--nearly five years after I
had received the certificates of Louise's death--I and your aunt made a
summer excursion into the country of the Rhine; on our return we rested
at Aix-la-Chapelle. One day while there I was walking alone in the
environs of the town, when, on the road, a little girl, seemingly about
five years old, in chase of a butterfly, stumbled and fell just before
my feet; I took her up, and as she was crying more from the shock of the
fall than any actual hurt, I was still trying my best to comfort her,
when a lady some paces behind her came up, and in taking the child from
my arms as I was bending over her, thanked me in a voice that made my
heart stand still. I looked up, and beheld Louise.

It was not till I had convulsively clasped her hand and uttered her
name that she recognized me. I was, no doubt, the more altered of the
two,--prosperity and happiness had left little trace of the needy, care
worn, threadbare student. But if she were the last to recognize, she was
the first to recover self-possession. The expression of her face became
hard and set. I cannot pretend to repeat with any verbal accuracy the
brief converse that took place between us, as she placed the child on
the grass bank beside the path, bade her stay there quietly, and walked
on with me some paces as if she did not wish the child to hear what was
said.

The purport of what passed was to this effect: She refused to explain
the certificates of her death further than that, becoming aware of what
she called the "persecution" of the advertisements issued and inquiries
instituted, she had caused those documents to be sent to the address
given in the advertisement, in order to terminate all further
molestation. But how they could have been obtained, or by what art so
ingeniously forged as to deceive the acuteness of a practised lawyer, I
know not to this day. She declared, indeed, that she was now happy, in
easy circumstances, and that if I wished to make some reparation for
the wrong I had done her, it would be to leave her in peace; and in
case--which was not likely--we ever met again, to regard and treat her
as a stranger; that she, on her part, never would molest me, and that
the certified death of Louise Duval left me as free to marry again as
she considered herself to be.

My mind was so confused, so bewildered, while she thus talked, that
I did not attempt to interrupt her. The blow had so crushed me that I
scarcely struggled under it; only, as she turned to leave me, I suddenly
recollected that the child, when taken from my arms, had called her
"Maman," and, judging by the apparent age of the child, it must have
been born but a few months after Louise had left me,--that it must
be mine. And so, in my dreary woe, I faltered out, "But what of your
infant? Surely that has on me a claim that you relinquish for yourself.
You were not unfaithful to me while you deemed you were my wife?"

"Heavens! can you insult me by such a doubt? No!" she cried out,
impulsively and haughtily. "But as I was not legally your wife, the
child is not legally yours; it is mine, and only mine. Nevertheless, if
you wish to claim it"--here she paused as in doubt. I saw at once that
she was prepared to resign to me the child if I had urged her to do
so. I must own, with a pang of remorse, that I recoiled from such a
proposal. What could I do with the child? How explain to my wife the
cause of my interest in it? If only a natural child of mine, I should
have shrunk from owning to Janet a youthful error. But as it was,--the
child by a former marriage, the former wife still living!--my blood ran
cold with dread. And if I did take the child, invent what story I
might as to its parentage, should I not expose myself, expose Janet, to
terrible constant danger? The mother's natural affection might urge
her at any time to seek tidings of the child, and in so doing she might
easily discover my new name, and, perhaps years hence, establish on me
her own claim.

No, I could not risk such perils. I replied sullenly, "You say rightly;
the child is yours,--only yours." I was about to add an offer of
pecuniary provision for it, but Louise had already turned scornfully
towards the bank on which she had left the infant. I saw her snatch from
the child's hand some wild flowers the poor thing had been gathering;
and how often have I thought of the rude way in which she did it,--not
as a mother who loves her child. Just then other passengers appeared on
the road; two of them I knew,--an English couple very intimate with Lady
Janet and myself. They stopped to accost me, while Louise passed by with
the infant towards the town. I turned in the opposite direction, and
strove to collect my thoughts. Terrible as was the discovery thus
suddenly made, it was evident that Louise had as strong an interest
as myself to conceal it. There was little chance that it would ever be
divulged. Her dress and that of the child were those of persons in
the richer classes of life. After all, doubtless, the child needed not
pecuniary assistance from me, and was surely best off under the mother's
care. Thus I sought to comfort and to delude myself.

The next day Janet and I left Aix-la-Chapelle and returned to England.
But it was impossible for me to banish the dreadful thought that Janet
was not legally my wife; that could she even guess the secret lodged in
my breast she would be lost to me forever, even though she died of
the separation (you know well how tenderly she loved me). My nature
underwent a silent revolution. I had previously cherished the ambition
common to most men in public life,--the ambition for fame, for place,
for power. That ambition left me; I shrank from the thought of becoming
too well known, lest Louise or her connections, as yet ignorant of my
new name, might more easily learn what the world knew; namely that I had
previously borne another name,--the name of her husband,--and finding me
wealthy and honoured, might hereafter be tempted to claim for herself or
her daughter the ties she adjured for both while she deemed me poor and
despised. But partly my conscience, partly the influence of the angel
by my side, compelled me to seek whatever means of doing good to others
position and circumstances placed at my disposal. I was alarmed
when even such quiet exercise of mind and fortune acquired a sort of
celebrity. How pain fully I shrank from it! The world attributed my
dread of publicity to unaffected modesty. The world praised me, and
I knew myself an impostor. But the years stole on. I heard no more of
Louise or her child, and my fears gradually subsided. Yet I was consoled
when the two children born to me by Janet died in their infancy. Had
they lived, who can tell whether something might not have transpired to
prove them illegitimate.

I must hasten on. At last came the great and crushing calamity of my
life,--I lost the woman who was my all in all. At least she was spared
the discovery that would have deprived me of the right of tending her
deathbed, and leaving within her tomb a place vacant for myself.

But after the first agonies that followed her loss, the conscience I had
so long sought to tranquillize became terribly reproachful. Louise had
forfeited all right to my consideration, but my guiltless child had
not done so. Did it live still? If so, was it not the heir to my
fortunes,--the only child left to me? True, I have the absolute right to
dispose of my wealth: it is not in land; it is not entailed: but was
not the daughter I had forsaken morally the first claimant; was no
reparation due to her? You remember that my physician ordered me, some
little time after your aunt's death, to seek a temporary change of
scene. I obeyed, and went away no one knew whither. Well, I repaired to
Paris; there I sought M. Sartiges, the avoue. I found he had been
long dead. I discovered his executors, and inquired if any papers or
correspondence between Richard Macdonald and himself many years ago
were in existence. All such documents, with others not returned to
correspondents at his decease, had been burned by his desire. No
possible clew to the whereabouts of Louise, should any have been gained
since I last saw her, was left. What then to do I knew not. I did not
dare to make inquiries through strangers, which, if discovering my
child, might also bring to light a marriage that would have dishonoured
the memory of my lost saint. I returned to England, feeling that my days
were numbered. It is to you that I transmit the task of those researches
which I could not institute. I bequeath to you, with the exception of
trifling legacies and donations to public charities, the whole of my
fortune; but you will understand by this letter that it is to be held
on a trust which I cannot specify in my will. I could not, without
dishonouring the venerated name of your aunt, indicate as the heiress of
my wealth a child by a wife living at the time I married Janet. I cannot
form any words for such a devise which would not arouse gossip and
suspicion, and furnish ultimately a clew to the discovery I would shun.
I calculate that, after all deductions, the sum that will devolve to you
will be about L220,000. That which I mean to be absolutely and at once
yours is the comparatively trifling legacy of L20,000. If Louise's
child be not living, or if you find full reason to suppose that despite
appearances the child is not mine, the whole of my fortune lapses to
you; but should Louise be surviving and need pecuniary aid, you will
contrive that she may have such an annuity as you may deem fitting,
without learning whence it come. You perceive that it is your object, if
possible, even more than mine, to preserve free from slur the name and
memory of her who was to you a second mother. All ends we desire would
be accomplished could you, on discovering my lost child, feel that,
without constraining your inclinations, you could make her your wife.
She would then naturally share with you my fortune, and all claims of
justice and duty would be quietly appeased. She would now be of age
suitable to yours. When I saw her at Aix she gave promise of inheriting
no small share of her mother's beauty. If Louise's assurance of her easy
circumstances were true, her daughter has possibly been educated and
reared with tenderness and care. You have already assured me that you
have no prior attachment. But if, on discovering this child, you find
her already married, or one whom you could not love nor esteem, I leave
it implicitly to your honour and judgment to determine what share of
the L200,000 left in your hands should be consigned to her. She may have
been corrupted by her mother's principles. She may--Heaven forbid!--have
fallen into evil courses, and wealth would be misspent in her hands. In
that case a competence sufficing to save her from further degradation,
from the temptations of poverty, would be all that I desire you to
devote from my wealth. On the contrary, you may find in her one who, in
all respects, ought to be my chief inheritor. All this I leave in full
confidence to you, as being, of all the men I know, the one who unites
the highest sense of honour with the largest share of practical sense
and knowledge of life. The main difficulty, whatever this lost girl may
derive from my substance, will be in devising some means to convey it
to her so that neither she nor those around her may trace the bequest
to me. She can never be acknowledged as my child,--never! Your reverence
for the beloved dead forbids that. This difficulty your clear strong
sense must overcome; mine is blinded by the shades of death. You too
will deliberately consider how to institute the inquiries after mother
and child so as not to betray our secret. This will require great
caution. You will probably commence at Paris, through the agency of the
police, to whom you will be very guarded in your communications. It
is most unfortunate that I have no miniature of Louise, and that any
description of her must be so vague that it may not serve to discover
her; but such as it is, it may prevent your mistaking for her some other
of her name. Louise was above the common height, and looked taller than
she was, with the peculiar combination of very dark hair, very fair
complexion, and light-gray eyes. She would now be somewhat under the
age of forty. She was not without accomplishments, derived from the
companionship with her father. She spoke English fluently; she drew
with taste, and even with talent. You will see the prudence of confining
research at first to Louise, rather than to the child who is the
principal object of it; for it is not till you can ascertain what
has become of her that you can trust the accuracy of any information
respecting the daughter, whom I assume, perhaps after all erroneously,
to be mine. Though Louise talked with such levity of holding herself
free to marry, the birth of her child might be sufficient injury to her
reputation to become a serious obstacle to such second nuptials, not
having taken formal steps to annul her marriage with myself. If not thus
remarried, there would be no reason why she should not resume her maiden
name of Duval, as she did in the signature of her letter to me: finding
that I had ceased to molest her by the inquiries, to elude which she had
invented the false statement of her death. It seems probable, therefore,
that she is residing somewhere in Paris, and in the name of Duval. Of
course the burden of uncertainty as to your future cannot be left to
oppress you for an indefinite length of time. If at the end, say, of two
years, your researches have wholly failed, consider three-fourths of
my whole fortune to have passed to you, and put by the fourth to
accumulate, should the child afterwards be discovered, and satisfy your
judgment as to her claims on me as her father. Should she not, it will
be a reserve fund for your own children. But oh, if my child could be
found in time! and oh, if she be all that could win your heart, and be
the wife you would select from free choice! I can say no more. Pity me,
and judge leniently of Janet's husband.

                  R. K.

The key to Graham's conduct is now given,--the deep sorrow that took
him to the tomb of the aunt he so revered, and whose honoured memory
was subjected to so great a risk; the slightness of change in his
expenditure and mode of life, after an inheritance supposed to be so
ample; the abnegation of his political ambition; the subject of his
inquiries, and the cautious reserve imposed upon them; above all, the
position towards Isaura in which he was so cruelly placed.

Certainly, his first thought in revolving the conditions of his trust
had been that of marriage with this lost child of Richard King's,
should she be discovered single, disengaged, and not repulsive to his
inclinations. Tacitly he subscribed to the reasons for this course
alleged by the deceased. It was the simplest and readiest plan of
uniting justice to the rightful inheritor with care for a secret so
important to the honour of his aunt, of Richard King himself,--his
benefactor,--of the illustrious house from which Lady Janet had sprung.
Perhaps, too, the consideration that by this course a fortune so useful
to his career was secured was not without influence on the mind of a
man naturally ambitious. But on that consideration he forbade himself to
dwell. He put it away from him as a sin. Yet, to marriage with any one
else, until his mission was fulfilled, and the uncertainty as to the
extent of his fortune was dispelled, there interposed grave practical
obstacles. How could he honestly present himself to a girl and to her
parents in the light of a rich man, when in reality he might be but a
poor man? How could he refer to any lawyer the conditions which rendered
impossible any settlement that touched a shilling of the large sum which
at any day he might have to transfer to another? Still, when once fully
conspicuous how deep was the love with which Isaura had inspired him,
the idea of wedlock with the daughter of Richard King, if she yet lived
and was single, became inadmissible. The orphan condition of the young
Italian smoothed away the obstacles to proposals of marriage which
would have embarrassed his addresses to girls of his own rank, and with
parents who would have demanded settlements. And if he had found Isaura
alone on that day on which he had seen her last, he would doubtless have
yielded to the voice of his heart, avowed his love, wooed her own, and
committed both to the tie of betrothal. We have seen how rudely such
yearnings of his heart were repelled on that last interview. His English
prejudices were so deeply rooted, that, even if he had been wholly free
from the trust bequeathed to him, he would have recoiled from marriage
with a girl who, in the ardour for notoriety, could link herself
with such associates as Gustave Rameau, by habits a Bohemian, and by
principles a Socialist.

In flying from Paris, he embraced the resolve to banish all thought of
wedding Isaura, and to devote himself sternly to the task which had so
sacred a claim upon him. Not that he could endure the idea of marrying
another, even if the lost heiress should be all that his heart could
have worshipped, had that heart been his own to give; but he was
impatient of the burden heaped on him,--of the fortune which might not
be his, of the uncertainty which paralyzed all his ambitious schemes for
the future.

Yet, strive as he would--and no man could strive more resolutely--he
could not succeed in banishing the image of Isaura. It was with him
always; and with it a sense of irreparable loss, of a terrible void, of
a pining anguish.

And the success of his inquiries at Aix-la-Chapelle, while sufficient
to detain him in the place, was so slight, and advanced by such slow
degrees, that it furnished no continued occupation to his restless mind.
M. Renard was acute and painstaking. But it was no easy matter to obtain
any trace of a Parisian visitor to so popular a Spa so many years ago.
The name Duval, too, was so common, that at Aix, as we have seen at
Paris, time was wasted in the chase of a Duval who proved not to be the
lost Louise. At last M. Renard chanced on a house in which, in the year
1849, two ladies from Paris had lodged for three weeks. One was named
Madame Duval, the other Madame Marigny. They were both young, both very
handsome, and much of the same height and colouring. But Madame Marigny
was the handsomer of the two. Madame Duval frequented the gaming-tables
and was apparently of very lively temper. Madame Marigny lived very
quietly, rarely or never stirred out, and seemed in delicate health.
She, however, quitted the apartment somewhat abruptly, and, to the best
of the lodging-house-keeper's recollection, took rooms in the country
near Aix--she could not remember where. About two months after the
departure of Madame Marigny, Madame Duval also left Aix, and in company
with a French gentleman who had visited her much of late,--a handsome
man of striking appearance. The lodging house-keeper did not know what
or who he was. She remembered that he used to be announced to Madame
Duval by the name of M. Achille. Madame Duval had never been seen again
by the lodging-house-keeper after she had left. But Madame Marigny
she had once seen, nearly five years after she had quitted the
lodgings,--seen her by chance at the railway station, recognized her at
once, and accosted her, offering her the old apartment. Madame Marigny
had, however, briefly replied that she was only at Aix for a few hours,
and should quit it the same day.

The inquiry now turned towards Madame Marigny. The date on which the
lodging-house-keeper had last seen her coincided with the year in
which Richard King had met Louise. Possibly, therefore, she might have
accompanied the latter to Aix at that time, and could, if found, give
information as to her subsequent history and present whereabouts.

After a tedious search throughout all the environs of Aix, Graham
himself came, by the merest accident, upon the vestiges of Louise's
friend. He had been wandering alone in the country round Aix, when a
violent thunderstorm drove him to ask shelter in the house of a small
farmer, situated in a field, a little off the byway which he had taken.
While waiting for the cessation of the storm, and drying his clothes
by the fire in a room that adjoined the kitchen, he entered into
conversation with the farmer's wife, a pleasant, well-mannered person,
and made some complimentary observation on a small sketch of the house
in water-colours that hung upon the wall. "Ah," said the farmer's wife,
"that was done by a French lady who lodged here many years ago. She drew
very prettily, poor thing."

"A lady who lodged here many years ago,--how many?"

"Well, I guess somewhere about twenty."

"Ah, indeed! Was it a Madame Marigny?"

"Bon Dieu! That was indeed her name. Did you know her? I should be so
glad to hear she is well and--I hope--happy."

"I do not know where she is now, and am making inquiries to ascertain.
Pray help me. How long did Madame Marigny lodge with you?"

"I think pretty well two months; yes, two months. She left a month after
her confinement."

"She was confined here?"

"Yes. When she first came, I had no idea that she was enceinte. She had
a pretty figure, and no one would have guessed it, in the way she
wore her shawl. Indeed I only began to suspect it a few days before it
happened; and that was so suddenly, that all was happily over before we
could send for the accoucheur."

"And the child lived?--a girl or a boy?"

"A girl,--the prettiest baby."

"Did she take the child with her when she went?"

"No; it was put out to nurse with a niece of my husband who was confined
about the same time. Madame paid liberally in advance, and continued to
send money half-yearly, till she came herself and took away the little
girl."

"When was that,--a little less than five years after she had left it?"

"Why, you know all about it, Monsieur; yes, not quite five years after.
She did not come to see me, which I thought unkind, but she sent me,
through my niece-in-law, a real gold watch and a shawl. Poor dear
lady--for lady she was all over,--with proud ways, and would not bear to
be questioned. But I am sure she was none of your French light ones, but
an honest wife like myself, though she never said so."

"And have you no idea where she was all the five years she was away, or
where she went after reclaiming her child?"

"No, indeed, Monsieur."

"But her remittances for the infant must have been made by letters, and
the letters would have had post-marks?"

"Well, I dare say; I am no scholar myself. But suppose you see Marie
Hubert, that is my niece-in-law, perhaps she has kept the envelopes."

"''Where does Madame Hubert live?"

"It is just a league off by the short path; you can't miss the way. Her
husband has a bit of land of his own, but he is also a carrier--'Max
Hubert, carrier,'--written over the door, just opposite the first church
you get to. The rain has ceased, but it may be too far for you to-day."

"Not a bit of it. Many thanks."

"But if you find out the dear lady and see her, do tell her how pleased
I should be to hear good news of her and the little one."

Graham strode on under the clearing skies to the house indicated. He
found Madame Hubert at home, and ready to answer all questions; but,
alas! she had not the envelopes. Madame Marigny, on removing the child,
had asked for all the envelopes or letters, and carried them away with
her. Madame Hubert, who was as little of a scholar as her aunt-in-law
was, had never paid much attention to the post-marks on the envelopes;
and the only one that she did remember was the first, that contained a
bank-note, and that post-mark was "Vienna."

"But did not Madame Marigny's letters ever give you an address to which
to write with news of her child?"

"I don't think she cared much for her child, Monsieur. She kissed it
very coldly when she came to take it away. I told the poor infant that
that was her own mamma; and Madame said, 'Yes, you may call me maman,'
in a tone of voice--well, not at all like that of a mother. She brought
with her a little bag which contained some fine clothes for the child,
and was very impatient till the child had got them on."

"Are you quite sure it was the same lady who left the child?"

"Oh, there is no doubt of that. She was certainly tres belle, but I did
not fancy her as aunt did. She carried her head very high, and looked
rather scornful. However, I must say she behaved very generously."

"Still you have not answered my question whether her letters contained
no address."

"She never wrote more than two letters. One enclosing the first
remittance was but a few lines, saying that if the child was well and
thriving, I need not write; but if it died or became dangerously ill, I
might at any time write a line to Madame -----, Poste Restante, Vienna.
She was travelling about, but the letter would be sure to reach her
sooner or later. The only other letter I had was to apprise me that
she was coming to remove the child, and might be expected in three days
after the receipt of her letter."

"And all the other communications from her were merely remittances in
blank envelopes?"

"Exactly so."

Graham, finding he could learn no more, took his departure. On his way
home, meditating the new idea that his adventure that day suggested, he
resolved to proceed at once, accompanied by M. Renard, to Munich, and
there learn what particulars could be yet ascertained respecting those
certificates of the death of Louise Duval, to which (sharing Richard
King's very natural belief that they had been skilfully forged) he had
hitherto attached no importance.




CHAPTER VII.

No satisfactory result attended the inquiries made at Munich save indeed
this certainty,--the certificates attesting the decease of some person
calling herself Louise Duval had not been forged. They were indubitably
genuine. A lady bearing that name had arrived at one of the principal
hotels late in the evening, and had there taken handsome rooms. She was
attended by no servant, but accompanied by a gentleman, who, however,
left the hotel as soon as he had seen her lodged to her satisfaction.
The books of the hotel still retained the entry of her name,--Madame
Duval, Francaise rentiere. On comparing the handwriting of this entry
with the letter from Richard King's first wife, Graham found it to
differ; but then it was not certain, though probable, that the entry had
been written by the alleged Madame Duval herself. She was visited the
next day by the same gentleman who had accompanied her on arriving.
He dined and spent the evening with her. But no one at the hotel could
remember what was the gentleman's name, nor even if he were announced by
any name. He never called again. Two days afterwards, Madame Duval was
taken ill; a doctor was sent for, and attended her till her death. This
doctor was easily found. He remembered the case perfectly,--congestion
of the lungs, apparently caused by cold caught on her journey. Fatal
symptoms rapidly manifested themselves, and she died on the third day
from the seizure. She was a young and handsome woman. He had asked her
during her short illness if he should not write to her friends; if there
were no one she would wish to be sent for. She replied that there was
only one friend, to whom she had already written, and who would arrive
in a day or two; and on inquiring, it appeared that she had written such
a letter, and taken it herself to the post on the morning of the day she
was taken ill.

She had in her purse not a large sum, but money enough to cover all her
expenses, including those of her funeral, which, according to the law in
force at the place, followed very quickly on her decease. The arrival of
the friend to whom she had written being expected, her effects were, in
the meanwhile, sealed up. The day after her death a letter arrived for
her, which was opened. It was evidently written by a man, and apparently
by a lover. It expressed an impassioned regret that the writer was
unavoidably prevented returning to Munich so soon as he had hoped, but
trusted to see his dear bouton de rose in the course of the following
week; it was only signed Achille, and gave no address. Two or three
days after, a lady, also young and handsome, arrived at the hotel, and
inquired for Madame Duval. She was greatly shocked at hearing of her
decease. When sufficiently recovered to bear being questioned as to
Madame Duval's relations and position, she appeared confused; said,
after much pressing, that she was no relation to the deceased; that she
believed Madame Duval had no relations with whom she was on friendly
terms,--at least she had never heard her speak of any; and that her own
acquaintance with the deceased, though cordial, was very recent. She
could or would not give any clew to the writer of the letter signed
Achille, and she herself quitted Munich that evening, leaving the
impression that Madame Duval had been one of those ladies who, in
adopting a course of life at variance with conventional regulations,
are repudiated by their relations, and probably drop even their rightful
names.

Achille never appeared; but a few days after, a lawyer at Munich
received a letter from another at Vienna, requesting, in compliance
with a client's instructions, the formal certificates of Louise Duval's
death. These were sent as directed, and nothing more about the ill-fated
woman was heard of. After the expiration of the time required by law,
the seals were removed from the effects, which consisted of two malles
and a dressing-case. But they only contained the articles appertaining
to a lady's wardrobe or toilet,--no letters, not even another note
from Achille,--no clew, in short, to the family or antecedents of the
deceased. What then had become of these effects, no one at the hotel
could give a clear or satisfactory account. It was said by the mistress
of the hotel, rather sullenly, that they had, she supposed, been sold by
her predecessor, and by order of the authorities, for the benefit of the
poor.

If the lady who had represented herself as Louise Duval's acquaintance
had given her own name, which doubtless she did, no one recollected it.
It was not entered in the books of the hotel, for she had not
lodged there; nor did it appear that she had allowed time for formal
examination by the civil authorities. In fact, it was clear that poor
Louise Duval had been considered as an adventuress by the hotel-keeper
and the medical attendant at Munich; and her death had excited so little
interest, that it was strange that even so many particulars respecting
it could be gleaned.

After a prolonged but fruitless stay at Munich, Graham and M. Renard
repaired to Vienna; there, at least, Madame Marigny had given an
address, and there she might be heard of.

At Vienna, however, no research availed to discover a trace of any such
person; and in despair Graham returned to England in the January of
1870, and left the further prosecution of his inquiries to M. Renard,
who, though obliged to transfer himself to Paris for a time, promised
that he would leave no stone unturned for the discovery of Madame
Marigny; and Graham trusted to that assurance when M. Renard, rejecting
half of the large gratuity offered him, added, "Je suis Francais; this
with me has ceased to be an affair of money; it has become an affair
that involves my amour propre."




CHAPTER VIII.

If Graham Vane had been before caressed and courted for himself, he
was more than ever appreciated by polite society, now that he added the
positive repute of wealth to that of a promising intellect. Fine ladies
said that Graham Vane was a match for any girl. Eminent politicians
listened to him with a more attentive respect, and invited him to
selecter dinner-parties. His cousin the Duke urged him to announce
his candidature for the county, and purchase back, at least, the old
Stamm-schloss. But Graham obstinately refused to entertain either
proposal, continued to live as economically as before in his old
apartments, and bore with an astonishing meekness of resignation the
unsolicited load of fashion heaped upon his shoulders. At heart he was
restless and unhappy. The mission bequeathed to him by Richard King
haunted his thoughts like a spectre not to be exorcised. Was his whole
life to be passed in the weary sustainment of an imposture which in
itself was gall and wormwood to a nature constitutionally frank and
open? Was he forever to appear a rich man and live as a poor one? Was he
till his deathbed to be deemed a sordid miser whenever he refused a just
claim on his supposed wealth, and to feel his ambition excluded from the
objects it earnestly coveted, and which he was forced to appear too much
of an Epicurean philosopher to prize?

More torturing than all else to the man's innermost heart was the
consciousness that he had not conquered, could not conquer, the yearning
love with which Isaura had inspired him, and yet that against such love
all his reasonings, all his prejudices, more stubbornly than ever were
combined. In the French newspapers which he had glanced over while
engaged in his researches in Germany-nay, in German critical journals
themselves--he had seen so many notices of the young author,--highly
eulogistic, it is true, but which to his peculiar notions were more
offensive than if they had been sufficiently condemnatory of her work
to discourage her from its repetition; notices which seemed to him the
supreme impertinences which no man likes exhibited towards the woman to
whom he would render the chivalrous homage of respect. Evidently this
girl had become as much public property as if she had gone on the stage.
Minute details of her personal appearance,--of the dimples on her cheek,
of the whiteness of her arms, of her peculiar way of dressing her hair;
anecdotes of her from childhood (of course invented, but how could
Graham know that?); of the reasons why she had adopted the profession of
author instead of that of the singer; of the sensation she had created
in certain salons (to Graham, who knew Paris so well, salons in which he
would not have liked his wife to appear); of the compliments paid to her
by grands seigneurs noted for their liaisons with ballet-dancers, or by
authors whose genius soared far beyond the flammantia maenia of a world
confined by respect for one's neighbours' land-marks,--all this, which
belongs to ground of personal gossip untouched by English critics of
female writers, ground especially favoured by Continental, and, I am
grieved to say, by American journalists,--all this was to the sensitive
Englishman much what the minute inventory of Egeria's charms would have
been to Numa Pompilius. The nymph, hallowed to him by secret devotion,
was vulgarized by the noisy hands of the mob, and by the popular
voices, which said, "We know more about Egeria than you do." And when he
returned to England, and met with old friends familiar to Parisian life,
who said, "of course you have read the Cicogna's roman. What do you
think of it? Very fine writing, I dare say, but above me. I go in for
'Les Mysteres de Paris' or 'Monte Cristo;' but I even find Georges Sand
a bore," then as a critic Graham Vane fired up, extolled the roman he
would have given his ears for Isaura never to have written; but retired
from the contest muttering inly, "How can I--I, Graham Vane--how can
I be such an idiot; how can I in every hour of the twenty-four sigh to
myself, 'What are other women to me? Isaura, Isaura!'"





BOOK VII.




CHAPTER I.

It is the first week in the month of May, 1870. Celebrities are of rapid
growth in the salons of Paris. Gustave Rameau has gained the position
for which he sighed. The journal he edits has increased its hold on the
public, and his share of the profits has been liberally augmented by
the secret proprietor. Rameau is acknowledged as a power in literary
circles. And as critics belonging to the same clique praise each other
in Paris, whatever they may do in communities more rigidly virtuous, his
poetry has been declared by authorities in the press to be superior
to that of Alfred de Musset in vigour--to that of Victor Hugo in
refinement; neither of which assertions would much, perhaps, shock a
cultivated understanding.

It is true that it (Gustave's poetry) has not gained a wide audience
among the public. But with regard to poetry nowadays, there are plenty
of persons who say as Dr. Johnson said of the verse of Spratt, "I would
rather praise it than read."

At all events, Rameau was courted in gay and brilliant circles, and,
following the general example of French litterateurs in fashion,
lived well up to the income he received, had a delightful bachelor's
apartment, furnished with artistic effect, spent largely on the
adornment of his person, kept a coupe, and entertained profusely at the
cafe Anglais and the Maison Doree. A reputation that inspired a graver
and more unquiet interest had been created by the Vicomte de Mauleon.
Recent articles in the Sens Commun, written under the name of Pierre
Firmin on the discussions on the vexed question of the plebiscite, had
given umbrage to the Government, and Rameau had received an intimation
that he, as editor, was responsible for the compositions of the
contributors to the journal he edited; and that though, so long as
Pierre Firmin had kept his caustic spirit within proper bounds, the
Government had winked at the evasion of the law which required every
political article in a journal to be signed by the real name of its
author, it could do so no longer. Pierre Firmin was apparently a nom
de plume; if not, his identity must be proved, or Rameau would pay the
penalty which his contributor seemed bent on incurring.

Rameau, much alarmed for the journal that might be suspended, and for
himself who might be imprisoned, conveyed this information through the
publisher to his correspondent Pierre Firmin, and received the next
day an article signed Victor de Mauleon, in which the writer proclaimed
himself to be one and the same with Pierre Firmin, and, taking a yet
bolder tone than he had before assumed, dared the Government to attempt
legal measures against him. The Government was prudent enough to
disregard that haughty bravado, but Victor de Mauleon rose at once into
political importance. He had already in his real name and his quiet way
established a popular and respectable place in Parisian society. But if
this revelation created him enemies whom he had not before provoked, he
was now sufficiently acquitted, by tacit consent, of the sins formerly
laid to his charge, to disdain the assaults of party wrath. His old
reputation for personal courage and skill in sword and pistol served,
indeed, to protect him from such charges as a Parisian journalist does
not reply to with his pen. If he created some enemies, he created many
more friends, or, at least, partisans and admirers. He only needed fine
and imprisonment to become a popular hero.

A few days after he had thus proclaimed himself, Victor de Mauleon--who
had before kept aloof from Rameau, and from salons at which he was
likely to meet that distinguished minstrel--solicited his personal
acquaintance, and asked him to breakfast.

Rameau joyfully went. He had a very natural curiosity to see the
contributor whose articles had so mainly insured the sale of the Sens
Commun.

In the dark-haired, keen-eyed, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with
commanding port and courtly address, he failed to recognise any
resemblance to the flaxen-wigged, long-coated, be-spectacled, shambling
sexagenarian whom he had known as Lebeau. Only now and then a tone of
voice struck him as familiar, but he could not recollect where he had
heard the voice it resembled. The thought of Lebeau did not occur
to him; if it had occurred it would only have struck him as a chance
coincidence. Rameau, like most egotists, was rather a dull observer of
men. His genius was not objective.

"I trust, Monsieur Rameau," said the Vicomte, as he and his guest were
seated at the breakfast-table, "that you are not dissatisfied with the
remuneration your eminent services in the journal have received."

"The proprietor, whoever he be, has behaved most liberally," answered
Rameau.

"I take that compliment to myself, cher confrere; for though the
expenses of starting the Sens Commun, and the caution money lodged, were
found by a friend of mine, that was as a loan, which I have long since
repaid, and the property in the journal is now exclusively mine. I have
to thank you not only for your own brilliant contributions, but
for those of the colleagues you secured. Monsieur Savarin's piquant
criticisms were most valuable to us at starting. I regret to have lost
his aid. But as he has set up a new journal of his own, even he has not
wit enough to spare for another. A propos of our contributors, I shall
ask you to present me to the fair author of The Artist's Daughter. I am
of too prosaic a nature to appreciate justly the merits of a roman; but
I have heard warm praise of this story from the young--they are the best
judges of that kind of literature; and I can at least understand the
worth of a contributor who trebled the sale of our journal. It is a
misfortune to us, indeed, that her work is completed, but I trust that
the sum sent to her through our publisher suffices to tempt her to
favour us with another roman in series."

"Mademoiselle Cicogna," said Rameau, with a somewhat sharper intonation
of his sharp voice, "has accepted for the republication of her roman in
a separate form terms which attest the worth of her genius, and has had
offers from other journals for a serial tale of even higher amount than
the sum so generously sent to her through your publisher."

"Has she accepted them, Monsieur Rameau? If so, tant pis pour vous.
Pardon me, I mean that your salary suffers in proportion as the Sens
Commun declines in sale."

"She has not accepted them. I advised her not to do so until she could
compare them with those offered by the proprietor of the Sens Commun."

"And your advice guides her? Ah, cher confrere, you are a happy
man!--you have influence over this young aspirant to the fame of a De
Stael or a Georges Sand."

"I flatter myself that I have some," answered Rameau, smiling loftily
as he helped himself to another tumbler of. Volnay wine--excellent, but
rather heady.

"So much the better. I leave you free to arrange terms with Mademoiselle
Cicogna, higher than she can obtain elsewhere, and kindly contrive my
own personal introduction to her--you have breakfasted already?--permit
me to offer you a cigar--excuse me if I do not bear you company; I
seldom smoke--never of a morning. Now to business, and the state of
France. Take that easy-chair, seat yourself comfortably. So! Listen! If
ever Mephistopheles revisit the earth, how he will laugh at Universal
Suffrage and Vote by Ballot in an old country like France, as things to
be admired by educated men, and adopted by friends of genuine freedom!"

"I don't understand you," said Rameau.

"In this respect at least, let me hope that I can furnish you with
understanding.

"The Emperor has resorted to a plebiscite--viz., a vote by ballot and
universal suffrage--as to certain popular changes which circumstances
compel him to substitute for his former personal rule. Is there a single
intelligent Liberal who is not against that plebiscite?--is there any
such who does not know that the appeal of the Emperor to universal
suffrage and vote by ballot must result in a triumph over all the
variations of free thought, by the unity which belongs to Order,
represented through an able man at the head of the State? The multitude
never comprehend principles; principles are complex ideas; they
comprehend a single idea, and the simplest idea is, a Name that rids
their action of all responsibility to thought.

"Well, in France there are principles superabundant which you can pit
against the principle of Imperial rule. But there is not one name you
can pit against Napoleon the Third; therefore, I steer our little bark
in the teeth of the popular gale when I denounce the plebiscite, and
Le Sens Commun will necessarily fall in sale--it is beginning to fall
already. We shall have the educated men with us, the rest against. In
every country--even in China, where all are highly educated--a few must
be yet more highly educated than the many. Monsieur Rameau, I desire to
overthrow the Empire: in order to do that, it is not enough to have
on my side the educated men, I must have the canaille--the canaille
of Paris and of the manufacturing towns. But I use the canaille for
my purpose--I don't mean to enthrone it. You comprehend?--the canaille
quiescent is simply mud at the bottom of a stream; the canaille agitated
is mud at the surface. But no man capable of three ideas builds the
palaces and senates of civilised society out of mud, be it at the top or
the bottom of an ocean. Can either you or I desire that the destinies
of France shall be swayed by coxcombical artisans who think themselves
superior to every man who writes grammar, and whose idea of a
common-wealth is the confiscation of private property?" Rameau,
thoroughly puzzled by this discourse, bowed his head, and replied
whisperingly, "Proceed. You are against the Empire, yet against the
populace!--What are you for? not, surely, the Legitimists?--are you
Republican? Orleanist? or what?"

"Your questions are very pertinent," answered the Vicomte, courteously,
"and my answer shall be very frank. I am against absolute rule, whether
under a Buonaparte or a Bourbon. I am for a free State, whether under
a constitutional hereditary sovereign like the English or Belgian, or
whether, republican in name, it be less democratic than constitutional
monarchy in practice, like the American. But as a man interested in the
fate of le Sens Commun, I hold in profound disdain all crotchets for
revolutionising the elements of Human Nature. Enough of this abstract
talk. To the point. You are of course aware of the violent meetings held
by the Socialists, nominally against the plebiscite, really against the
Emperor himself?"

"Yes, I know at least that the working class are extremely discontented;
the numerous strikes last month were not on a mere question of
wages--they were against the existing forms of society. And the articles
by Pierre Firmin which brought me into collision with the Government,
seemed to differ from what you now say. They approve those strikes; they
appeared to sympathise with the revolutionary meetings at Belleville and
Montmartre."

"Of course--we use coarse tools for destroying; we cast them aside for
finer ones when we want to reconstruct.

"I attended one of those meetings last night. See, I have a pass for all
such assemblies, signed by some dolt who cannot even spell the name he
assumes--'Pom-de-Tair.' A commissary of police sat yawning at the end of
the orchestra, his secretary by his side, while the orators stammer
out fragments of would-be thunderbolts. Commissary of police yawns
more wearily than before, secretary disdains to use his pen, seizes
his penknife and pares his nails. Up rises a wild-haired, weak-limbed
silhouette of a man, and affecting a solemnity of mien which might have
become the virtuous Guizot, moves this resolution: 'The French people
condemns Charles Louis Napoleon the Third to the penalty of perpetual
hard labour.' Then up rises the commissary of police and says quietly,
'I declare this meeting at an end.'

"Sensation among the audience--they gesticulate--they screech--they
bellow--the commissary puts on his greatcoat--the secretary gives a last
touch to his nails and pockets his penknife--the audience disperses--the
silhouette of a man effaces itself--all is over."

"You describe the scene most wittily," said Rameau, laughing, but the
laugh was constrained. A would-be cynic himself, there was a something
grave and earnest in the real cynic that awed him.

"What conclusion do you draw from such a scene, cher poete" asked De
Mauleon, fixing his keen quiet eyes on Rameau.

"What conclusion? Well, that--that--"

"Yes, continue."

"That the audience were sadly degenerated from the time when Mirabeau
said to a Master of the Ceremonies, 'We are here by the power of the
French people, and nothing but the point of the bayonet shall expel
us.'"

"Spoken like a poet, a French poet. I suppose you admire M. Victor
Hugo. Conceding that he would have employed a more sounding phraseology,
comprising more absolute ignorance of men, times, and manners in
unintelligible metaphor and melodramatic braggadocio, your answer might
have been his; but pardon me if I add, it would not be that of Common
Sense."

"Monsieur le Vicomte might rebuke me more politely," said Rameau,
colouring high.

"Accept my apologies; I did not mean to rebuke, but to instruct. The
times are not those of 1789. And Nature, ever repeating herself in the
production of coxcombs and blockheads, never repeats herself in the
production of Mirabeaus. The Empire is doomed--doomed, because it
is hostile to the free play of intellect. Any Government that gives
absolute preponderance to the many is hostile to intellect, for
intellect is necessarily confined to the few.

"Intellect is the most revengeful of all the elements of society. It
cares not what the materials through which it insinuates or forces its
way to its seat.

"I accept the aid of Pom-de-Tair. I do not demean myself to the extent
of writing articles that may favor the principles of Pom-de-Tair, signed
in the name of Victor de Mauleon or of Pierre Firinin.

"I will beg you, my dear editor, to obtain clever, smart writers, who
know nothing about Socialists and Internationalists, who therefore will
not commit Le Sens Commun by advocating the doctrines of those idiots,
but who will flatter the vanity of the canaille--vaguely; write any
stuff they please about the renown of Paris, 'the eye of the world,'
'the sun of the European system,' &c., of the artisans of Paris as
supplying soul to that eye and fuel to that sun--any blague of that
sort--genre Victor Hugo; but nothing definite against life and
property, nothing that may not be considered hereafter as the harmless
extravagance of a poetic enthusiasm. You might write such articles
yourself. In fine, I want to excite the multitude, and yet not to commit
our journal to the contempt of the few. Nothing is to be admitted that
may bring the law upon us except it be signed by my name. There may be a
moment in which it would be desirable for somebody to be sent to prison:
in that case, I allow no substitute--I go myself.

"Now you have my most secret thoughts. I intrust them to your judgment
with entire confidence. Monsieur Lebeau gave you a high character, which
you have hitherto deserved. By the way, have you seen anything lately of
that bourgeois conspirator?"

"No, his professed business of letter-writer or agent is transferred to
a clerk, who says M. Lebeau is abroad."

"Ah! I don't think that is true. I fancy I saw him the other evening
gilding along the lanes of Belleville. He is too confirmed a conspirator
to be long out of Paris; no place like Paris for seething brains."

"Have you known M. Lebeau long?" asked Rameau. "Ay, many years. We are
both Norman by birth, as you may perceive by something broad in our
accent."

"Ha! I knew your voice was familiar to me; certainly it does remind me
of Lebeau's."

"Normans are like each other in many things besides voice and
accent--obstinacy, for instance, in clinging to ideas once formed; this
makes them good friends and steadfast enemies. I would advise no man to
make an enemy of Lebeau.

"Au revoir, cher confrere. Do not forget to present me to Mademoiselle
Cicogna."




CHAPTER II.

On leaving De Mauleon and regaining his coupe, Rameau felt at once
bewildered and humbled, for he was not prepared for the tone of careless
superiority which the Vicomte assumed over him. He had expected to be
much complimented, and he comprehended vaguely that he had been somewhat
snubbed. He was not only irritated--he was bewildered; for De Mauleon's
political disquisitions did not leave any clear or definite idea on his
mind as to the principles which as editor of the Sens Commun he was to
see adequately represented and carried out. In truth, Rameau was one of
those numerous Parisian politicians who have read little and reflected
less on the government of men and States. Envy is said by a great French
writer to be the vice of Democracies. Envy certainly had made Rameau
a democrat. He could talk and write glibly enough upon the themes
of equality and fraternity, and was so far an ultra-democrat that he
thought moderation the sign of a mediocre understanding.

De Mauleon's talk, therefore, terribly perplexed him. It was unlike
anything he had heard before. Its revolutionary professions, accompanied
with so much scorn for the multitude, and the things the multitude
desired, were Greek to him. He was not shocked by the cynicism which
placed wisdom in using the passions of mankind as tools for the
interests of an individual; but he did not understand the frankness of
its avowal.

Nevertheless the man had dominated over and subdued him. He recognized
the power of his contributor without clearly analysing its nature--a
power made up of large experience of life, of cold examination of
doctrines that heated others--of patrician calm--of intellectual
sneer--of collected confidence in self.

Besides, Rameau felt, with a nervous misgiving, that in this man, who so
boldly proclaimed his contempt for the instruments he used, he had found
a master. De Mauleon, then, was sole proprietor of the journal from
which Rameau drew his resources; might at any time dismiss him; might
at any time involve the journal in penalties which, even if Rameau could
escape in his official capacity as editor, still might stop the Sens
Commun, and with it Rameau's luxurious subsistence.

Altogether the visit to De Mauleon had been anything but a pleasant
one. He sought, as the carriage rolled on, to turn his thoughts to more
agreeable subjects, and the image of Isaura rose before him. To do him
justice he had learned to love this girl as well as his nature would
permit: he loved her with the whole strength of his imagination, and
though his heart was somewhat cold, his imagination was very ardent.
He loved her also with the whole strength of his vanity, and vanity was
even a more preponderant organ of his system than imagination. To carry
off as his prize one who had already achieved celebrity, whose beauty
and fascination of manner were yet more acknowledged than her genius,
would certainly be a glorious triumph.

Every Parisian of Rameau's stamp looks forward in marriage to a
brilliant salon. What salon more brilliant than that which he and Isaura
united could command? He had long conquered his early impulse of envy at
Isaura's success,--in fact that success had become associated with his
own, and had contributed greatly to his enrichment. So that to other
motives of love he might add the prudential one of interest. Rameau well
knew that his own vein of composition, however lauded by the cliques,
and however unrivalled in his own eyes, was not one that brings much
profit in the market. He compared himself to those poets who are too far
in advance of their time to be quite as sure of bread and cheese as they
are of immortal fame.

But he regarded Isaura's genius as of a lower order, and a thing in
itself very marketable. Marry her, and the bread and cheese were so
certain that he might elaborate as slowly as he pleased the verses
destined to immortal fame. Then he should be independent of inferior
creatures like Victor de Mauleon. But while Rameau convinced himself
that he was passionately in love with Isaura, he could not satisfy
himself that she was in love with him.

Though during the past year they had seen each other constantly,
and their literary occupations had produced many sympathies between
them--though he had intimated that many of his most eloquent love-poems
were inspired by her--though he had asserted in prose, very pretty
prose too, that she was all that youthful poets dream of,--yet she had
hitherto treated such declarations with a playful laugh, accepting them
as elegant compliments inspired by Parisian gallantry; and he felt an
angry and sore foreboding that if he were to insist too seriously on
the earnestness of their import and ask her plainly to be his wife,
her refusal would be certain, and his visits to her house might be
interdicted.

Still Isaura was unmarried, still she had refused offers of marriage
from men higher placed than himself,--still he divined no one whom she
could prefer. And as he now leaned back in his coupe he muttered to
himself, "Oh, if I could but get rid of that little demon Julie, I
would devote myself so completely to winning Isaura's heart that I
must succeed!--but how to get rid of Julie? She so adores me, and is
so headstrong! She is capable of going to Isaura--showing my
letters--making such a scene!"

Here he checked the carriage at a cafe on the Boulevard--descended,
imbibed two glasses of absinthe,--and then feeling much emboldened,
remounted his coupe and directed the driver to Isaura's apartment.




CHAPTER III.

Yes, celebrities are of rapid growth in the salons of Paris. Far more
solid than that of Rameau, far more brilliant than that of De Mauleon,
was the celebrity which Isaura had now acquired. She had been unable to
retain the pretty suburban villa at A------. The owner wanted to alter
and enlarge it for his own residence, and she had been persuaded by
Signora Venosta, who was always sighing for fresh salons to conquer,
to remove (towards the close of the previous year) to apartments in
the centre of the Parisian beau monde. Without formally professing to
receive, on one evening in the week her salon was open to those who had
eagerly sought her acquaintance--comprising many stars in the world of
fashion, as well as those in the world of art and letters. And as she
had now wholly abandoned the idea of the profession for which her voice
had been cultivated, she no longer shrank from the exercise of her
surpassing gift of song for the delight of private friends. Her
physician had withdrawn the interdict on such exercise. His skill,
aided by the rich vitality of her constitution, had triumphed over all
tendencies to the malady for which he had been consulted. To hear Isaura
Cicogna sing in her own house was a privilege sought and prized by many
who never read a word of her literary compositions. A good critic of
a book is rare; but good judges of a voice are numberless. Adding
this attraction of song to her youth, her beauty, her frank powers of
converse--an innocent sweetness of manner free from all conventional
affectation--and to the fresh novelty of a genius which inspired the
young with enthusiast and beguiled the old to indulgence, it was no
wonder that Isaura became a celebrity at Paris.

Perhaps it was a wonder that her head was not turned by the adulation
that surrounded her. But I believe, be it said with diffidence, that
a woman of mind so superior that the mind never pretends to efface the
heart, is less intoxicated with flattery than a man equally exposed to
it.

It is the strength of her heart that keeps her head sober. Isaura had
never yet overcome her first romance of love; as yet, amid all her
triumphs, there was not a day in which her thoughts did not wistfully,
mournfully, fly back to those blessed moments in which she felt her
cheek colour before a look, her heart beat at the sound of a footfall.
Perhaps if there had been the customary finis to this young romance--the
lover's deliberate renunciation, his formal farewell--the girl's
pride would ere this have conquered her affection,--possibly--who
knows?--replaced it.

But, reader, be you male or female, have you ever known this sore
trial of affection and pride, that from some cause or other, to you
mysterious, the dear intercourse to which you had accustomed the secret
life of your life, abruptly ceases; you know that a something has
come between you and the beloved which you cannot distinguish, cannot
measure, cannot guess, and therefore cannot surmount; and you say to
yourself at the dead of solitary night, "Oh for an explanation! Oh for
one meeting more! All might be so easily set right; or if not, I should
know the worst, and knowing it, could conquer!"

This trial was Isaura's. There had been no explanation, no last farewell
between her and Graham. She divined--no woman lightly makes a mistake
there--that he loved her! She knew that this dread something had
intervened between her and him when he took leave of her before others
so many months ago; that this dread something still continued--what was
it? She was certain that it would vanish, could they but once meet again
and not before others. Oh for such a meeting!

She could not herself destroy hope. She could not marry another. She
would have no heart to give to another while he was free, while in doubt
if his heart was still her own. And thus her pride did not help her to
conquer her affection.

Of Graham Vane she heard occasionally. He had ceased to correspond with
Savarin; but among those who most frequented her salon were the Morleys.
Americans so well educated and so well placed as the Morleys knew
something about every Englishman of the social station of Graham Vane.
Isaura learned from them that Graham, after a tour on the Continent, had
returned to England at the commencement of the year, had been invited
to stand for Parliament, had refused, that his name was in the list
published by the Morning Post of the elite whose arrivals in London,
or whose presence at dinner-tables, is recorded as an event. That the
Athenaeum had mentioned a rumour that Graham Vane was the author of
a political pamphlet which, published anonymously, had made no
inconsiderable sensation. Isaura sent to England for that pamphlet: the
subject was somewhat dry, and the style, though clear and vigorous, was
scarcely of the eloquence which wins the admiration of women; and yet
she learned every word of it by heart.

We know how little she dreamed that the celebrity which she hailed as an
approach to him was daily making her more remote. The sweet labours
she undertook for that celebrity continued to be sweetened yet more by
secret associations with the absent one. How many of the passages most
admired could never have been written had he been never known!

And she blessed those labours the more that they upheld her from the
absolute feebleness of sickened reverie, beguiled her from the gnawing
torture of unsatisfied conjecture. She did comply with Madame de
Grantmesnil's command--did pass from the dusty beaten road of life into
green fields and along flowery river-banks, and did enjoy that ideal
by-world.

But still the one image which reigned over her human heart moved beside
her in the gardens of fairyland.




CHAPTER IV.

Isaura was seated in her pretty salon, with the Venosta, M. Savarin, the
Morleys, and the financier Louvier, when Rameau was announced.

"Ha!" cried Savarin, "we were just discussing a matter which nearly
concerns you, cher poete. I have not seen you since the announcement
that Pierre Firmin is no other than Victor de Mauleon. Ma foi, that
worthy seems likely to be as dangerous with his pen as he was once with
his sword. The article in which he revealed himself makes a sharp lunge
on the Government. 'Take care of yourself. When hawks and nightingales
fly together the hawk may escape, and the nightingale complain of the
barbarity of kings, in a cage: 'flebiliter gemens infelix avis.''"

"He is not fit to conduct a journal," replied Rameau, magniloquently,
"who will not brave a danger for his body in defence of the right to
infinity for his thought."

"Bravo!" said Mrs. Morley, clapping her pretty hands. "That speech
reminds me of home. The French are very much like the Americans in their
style of oratory."

"So," said Louvier, "my old friend the Vicomte has come out as a writer,
a politician, a philosopher; I feel hurt that he kept this secret
from me despite our intimacy. I suppose you knew it from the first, M.
Rameau?"

"No, I was as much taken by surprise as the rest of the world. You have
long known M. de Mauleon?"

"Yes, I may say we began life together--that is, much at the same time."

"What is he like in appearance?" asked Mrs. Morley. "The ladies thought
him very handsome when he was young," replied Louvier. "He is still a
fine-looking man, about my height."

"I should like to know him!" cried Mrs. Morley, "if only to tease that
husband of mine. He refuses me the dearest of woman's rights.--I can't
make him jealous."

"You may have the opportunity of knowing this ci-devant Lovelace very
soon," said Rameau, "for he has begged me to present him to Mademoiselle
Cicogna, and I will ask her permission to do so, on Thursday evening
when she receives."

Isaura, who had hitherto attended very listlessly to the conversation,
bowed assent. "Any friend of yours will be welcome. But I own the
articles signed in the name of Pierre Firmin do not prepossess me in
favour of their author."

"Why so?" asked Louvier; "surely you are not an Imperialist?"

"Nay, I do not pretend to be a politician at all, but there is something
in the writing of Pierre Firmin that pains and chills me."

"Yet the secret of its popularity," said Savarin, "is that it says what
every one says--only better."

"I see now that it is exactly that which displeases me; it is the Paris
talk condensed into epigram: the graver it is the less it elevates--the
lighter it is, the more it saddens."

"That is meant to hit me," said Savarin, with his sunny laugh--"me whom
you call cynical."

"No, dear M. Savarin; for above all your cynicism is genuine gaiety,
and below it solid kindness. You have that which I do not find in M.
de Mauleon's writing, nor often in the talk of the salon--you have
youthfulness."

"Youthfulness at sixty--flatterer!"

"Genius does not count its years by the almanac," said Mrs. Morley. "I
know what Isaura means--she is quite right; there is a breath of winter
in M. de Mauleon's style, and an odour of fallen leaves. Not that his
diction wants vigour; on the contrary, it is crisp with hoar-frost. But
the sentiments conveyed by the diction are those of a nature sear and
withered. And it is in this combination of brisk words and decayed
feelings that his writing represents the talk and mind of Paris. He and
Paris are always fault-finding: fault-finding is the attribute of old
age."

Colonel Morley looked round with pride, as much as to say, "Clever
talker my wife."

Savarin understood that look, and replied to it courteously. "Madame has
a gift of expression which Emile de Girardin can scarcely surpass. But
when she blames us for fault-finding, can she expect the friends of
liberty to praise the present style of things?"

"I should be obliged to the friends of liberty," said the Colonel,
drily, "to tell me how that state of things is to be mended. I find
no enthusiasm for the Orleanists, none for a Republic; people sneer
at religion; no belief in a cause, no adherence to an opinion. But the
worst of it is that, like all people who are blases, the Parisians are
eager for strange excitement, and ready to listen to any oracle who
promises a relief from indifferentism. This it is which makes the Press
more dangerous in France than it is in any other country. Elsewhere the
Press sometimes leads, sometimes follows, public opinion. Here there
is no public opinion to consult, and instead of opinion the Press
represents passion."

"My dear Colonel Morley," said Savarin, "I hear you very often say that
a Frenchman cannot understand America. Permit me to observe that an
American cannot understand France--or at least Paris. Apropos of Paris
that is a large speculation of yours, Louvier, in the new suburb."

"And a very sound one; I advise you to invest in it. I can secure you at
present 5 per cent. on the rental; that is nothing--the houses will be
worth double when the Rue de Louvier is completed."

"Alas! I have no money; my new journal absorbs all my capital."

"Shall I transfer the money I hold for you, Signorina, and add to them
whatever you may have made by your delightful roman, as yet lying idle,
to this investment? I cannot say more in its favour than this: I have
embarked a very large portion of my capital in the Rue de Louvier, and I
flatter myself that I am not one of those men who persuade their friends
to do a foolish thing by setting them the example."

"Whatever you advise on such a subject," said Isaura, graciously, "is
sure to be as wise as it is kind!"

"You consent, then?"

"Certainly."

Here the Venosta, who had been listening with great attention to
Louvier's commendation of this investment, drew him aside, and whispered
in his ear: "I suppose, M. Louvier, that one can't put a little money-a
very little money--poco-poco pocolino, into your street."

"Into my street! Ah, I understand--into the speculation of the Rue de
Louvier! Certainly you can. Arrangements are made on purpose to suit the
convenience of the smallest capitalists--from 500 francs upwards."

"And you feel quite sure that we shall double our money when the street
is completed--I should not like to have my brains in my heels."

   ["'Avere il cervello nella calcagna,"--viz., to act without prudent
   reflection.]

"More than double it, I hope, long before the street is completed."

"I have saved a little money--very little. I have no relations, and I
mean to leave it all to the Signorina; and if it could be doubled, why,
there would be twice as much to leave her."

"So there would," said Louvier. "You can't do better than put it all
into the Rue de Louvier. I will send you the necessary papers to-morrow,
when I send hers to the Signorina."

Louvier here turned to address himself to Colonel Morley, but finding
that degenerate son of America indisposed to get cent. per cent. for his
money when offered by a Parisian, he very soon took his leave. The other
visitors followed his example, except Rameau, who was left alone with
the Venosta and Isaura. The former had no liking for Rameau, who showed
her none of the attentions her innocent vanity demanded, and she soon
took herself off to her own room to calculate the amount of her savings,
and dream of the Rue de Louvier and "golden joys."

Rameau approaching his chair to Isaura's then commenced conversation,
drily enough, upon pecuniary matters; acquitting himself of the mission
with which De Mauleon had charged him, the request for a new work from
her pen for the Sens Commun, and the terms that ought to be asked for
compliance. The young lady-author shrank from this talk. Her private
income, though modest, sufficed for her wants, and she felt a sensitive
shame in the sale of her thoughts and fancies.

Putting hurriedly aside the mercantile aspect of the question, she said
that she had no other work in her mind at present--that, whatever her
vein of invention might be, it flowed at its own will, and could not be
commanded.

"Nay," said Rameau, "this is not true. We fancy, in our hours of
indolence, that we must wait for inspiration; but once force ourselves
to work, and ideas spring forth at the wave of the pen. You may believe
me here, I speak from experience: I, compelled to work, and in modes not
to my taste--I do my task I know not how. I rub the lamp, 'the genius
comes.'"

"I have read in some English author that motive power is necessary to
continued labour: you have motive power, I have none."

"I do not quite understand you."

"I mean that a strong ruling motive is required to persist in any
regular course of action that needs effort: the motive with the majority
of men is the need of subsistence; with a large number (as in trades or
professions), not actually want, but a desire of gain, and perhaps of
distinction, in their calling: the desire of professional distinction
expands into the longings for more comprehensive fame, more exalted
honours, with the few who become great writers, soldiers, statesmen,
orators."

"And do you mean to say you have no such motive?"

"None in the sting of want, none in the desire of gain."

"But fame?"

"Alas! I thought so once. I know not now--I begin to doubt if fame
should be sought by women." This was said very dejectedly.

"Tut, dearest Signorina! what gadfly has stung you? Your doubt is a
weakness unworthy of your intellect; and even were it not, genius is
destiny and will be obeyed: you must write, despite yourself--and your
writing must bring fame, whether you wish it or not."

Isaura was silent, her head drooped on her breast--there were tears in
her downcast eyes.

Rameau took her hand, which she yielded to him passively, and clasping
it in both his own, he rushed on impulsively--

"Oh, I know what these misgivings are when we feel ourselves solitary,
unloved: how often have they been mine! But how different would labour
be if shared and sympathised with by a congenial mind, by a heart that
beats in unison with one's own!"

Isaura's breast heaved beneath her robe, she sighed softly.

"And then how sweet the fame of which the one we love is proud! how
trifling becomes the pang of some malignant depreciation, which a word
from the beloved one can soothe! O Signorina! O Isaura! are we not made
for each other? Kindred pursuits, hopes, and fears in common; the same
race to run, the same goal to win! I need a motive stronger than I have
yet known for the persevering energy that insures success: supply to me
that motive. Let me think that whatever I win in the strife of the world
is a tribute to Isaura. No, do not seek to withdraw this hand, let me
claim it as mine for life. I love you as man never loved before--do not
reject my love."

They say the woman who hesitates is lost. Isaura hesitated, but was not
yet lost. The words she listened to moved her deeply. Offers of marriage
she had already received: one from a rich middle-aged noble, a devoted
musical virtuoso; one from a young avocat fresh from the provinces,
and somewhat calculating on her dot; one from a timid but enthusiastic
admirer of her genius and her beauty, himself rich, handsome, of good
birth, but with shy manners and faltering tongue.

But these had made their proposals with the formal respect habitual to
French decorum in matrimonial proposals. Words so eloquently impassioned
as Gustave Rameau's had never before thrilled her ears; Yes, she was
deeply moved; and yet, by that very emotion she knew that it was not to
the love of this wooer that her heart responded.

There is a circumstance in the history of courtship familiar to the
experience of many women, that while the suitor is pleading his cause,
his language may touch every fibre in the heart of his listener, yet
substitute, as it were, another presence for his own. She may be saying
to herself, "Oh that another had said those words!" and be dreaming of
the other, while she hears the one. Thus it was with Isaura, and not
till Rameau's voice had ceased did that dream pass away, and with a
slight shiver she turned her face towards the wooer sadly and pityingly.
"It cannot be," she said, in a low whisper; "I were not worthy of your
love could I accept it. Forget that you have so spoken; let me still be
a friend admiring your genius, interested in your career. I cannot be
more. Forgive me if I unconsciously led you to think I could, I am so
grieved to pain you."

"Am I to understand," said Rameau, coldly, for his amour propre was
resentful, "that the proposals of another have been more fortunate than
mine?" And he named the youngest and comeliest of those whom she had
rejected. "Certainly not," said Isaura.

Rameau rose and went to the window, turning his face from her. In
reality he was striving to collect his thoughts and decide on the course
it were most prudent for him now to pursue. The fumes of the absinthe
which had, despite his previous forebodings, emboldened him to hazard
his avowal, had now subsided into the languid reaction which is
generally consequent on that treacherous stimulus, a reaction not
unfavourable to passionless reflection. He knew that if he said he
could not conquer his love, he would still cling to hope, and trust to
perseverance and time, he should compel Isaura to forbid his visits and
break off their familiar intercourse. This would be fatal to the chance
of yet winning her, and would also be of serious disadvantage to his
more worldly interests. Her literary aid might become essential to
the journal on which his fortunes depended; and at all events, in her
conversation, in her encouragement, in her sympathy with the pains and
joys of his career, he felt a support, a comfort, nay, an inspiration.
For the spontaneous gush of her fresh thoughts and fancies served
to recruit his own jaded ideas, and enlarge his own stinted range of
invention. No, he could not commit himself to the risk of banishment
from Isaura.

And mingled with meaner motives for discretion, there was one of which
he was but vaguely conscious, purer and nobler. In the society of this
girl, in whom whatever was strong and high in mental organisation became
so sweetened into feminine grace by gentleness of temper and kindliness
of disposition, Rameau felt himself a better man. The virgin-like
dignity with which she moved, so untainted by a breath of scandal, amid
salons in which the envy of virtues doubted sought to bring innocence
itself into doubt, warmed into a genuine reverence the cynicism of his
professed creed.

While with her, while under her chastening influence, he was sensible
of a poetry infused within him far more true to the Camoenae than all he
had elaborated into verse. In these moments he was ashamed of the vices
he had courted as distractions. He imagined that with her all his own,
it would be easy to reform.

No; to withdraw wholly from Isaura was to renounce his sole chance of
redemption.

While these thoughts, which it takes so long to detail, passed rapidly
through his brain, he felt a soft touch on his arm, and, turning his
face slowly, encountered the tender, compassionate eyes of Isaura.

"Be consoled, dear friend," she said, with a smile, half cheering, half
mournful. "Perhaps for all true artists the solitary lot is the best."

"I will try to think so," answered Rameau; "and meanwhile I thank you
with a full heart for the sweetness with which you have checked my
presumption--the presumption shall not be repeated. Gratefully I accept
the friendship you deign to tender me. You bid me forget the words I
uttered. Promise in turn that you will forget them--or at least consider
them withdrawn. You will receive me still as friend?"

"As friend, surely: yes. Do we not both need friends?" She held out
her hand as she spoke; he bent over it, kissed it with respect, and the
interview thus closed.




CHAPTER V.

It was late in the evening that day when a man who had the appearance
of a decent bourgeois, in the lower grades of that comprehensive class,
entered one of the streets in the Faubourg Montmartre, tenanted chiefly
by artisans. He paused at the open doorway of a tall narrow house, and
drew back as he heard footsteps descending a very gloomy staircase.

The light from a gas lamp on the street fell full on the face of the
person thus quitting the house--the face of a young and handsome man,
dressed with the quiet elegance which betokened one of higher rank
or fashion than that neighbourhood was habituated to find among its
visitors. The first comer retreated promptly into the shade, and, as by
sudden impulse, drew his hat low down over his eyes.

The other man did not, however, observe him, went his way with a quick
step along the street, and entered another house some yards distant.

"What can that pious Bourbonite do here?" muttered the first comer. "Can
he be a conspirator? Diable! 'tis as dark as Erebus on that staircase."

Taking cautious hold of the banister, the man now ascended the stairs.
On the landing of the first floor there was a gas lamp which threw
upward a faint ray that finally died at the third story. But at that
third story the man's journey ended; he pulled a bell at the door to the
right, and in another moment or so the door was opened by a young woman
of twenty-eight or thirty, dressed very simply, but with a certain
neatness not often seen in the wives of artisans in the Faubourg
Montmartre. Her face, which, though pale and delicate, retained much
of the beauty of youth, became clouded as she recognised the visitor;
evidently the visit was not welcome to her.

"Monsieur Lebeau again!" she exclaimed, shrinking back.

"At your service, chere dame. The goodman is of course at home? Ah,
I catch sight of him," and sliding by the woman, M. Lebeau passed the
narrow lobby in which she stood, through the open door conducting into
the room in which Armand Monnier was seated, his chin propped on his
hand, his elbow resting on a table, looking abstractedly into space. In
a corner of the room two small children were playing languidly with a
set of bone tablets, inscribed with the letters of the alphabet. But
whatever the children were doing with the alphabet, they were certainly
not learning to read from it.

The room was of fair size and height, and by no means barely or shabbily
furnished. There was a pretty clock on the mantelpiece. On the wall were
hung designs for the decoration of apartments, and shelves on which were
ranged a few books.

The window was open, and on the sill were placed flowerpots; you
could scent the odour they wafted into the room. Altogether it was an
apartment suited to a skilled artisan earning high wages. From the room
we are now in, branched on one side a small but commodious kitchen; on
the other side, on which the door was screened by a portiere, with a
border prettily worked by female hands--some years ago, for it was faded
now--was a bedroom, communicating with one of less size in which the
children slept. We do not enter those additional rooms, but it may be
well here to mention them as indications of the comfortable state of
an intelligent skilled artisan of Paris, who thinks he can better that
state by some revolution which may ruin his employer.

Monnier started up at the entrance of Lebeau, and his face showed that
he did not share the dislike to the visit which that of the female
partner of his life had evinced. On the contrary, his smile was cordial,
and there was a hearty ring in the voice which cried out--

"I am glad to see you--something to do? Eh!"

"Always ready to work for liberty, mon brave."

"I hope so: what's in the wind now?"

"O Armand, be prudent--be prudent!" cried the woman, piteously. "Do not
lead him into further mischief, Monsieur Lebeau;" as she faltered forth
the last words, she bowed her head over the two little ones, and her
voice died in sobs.

"Monnier," said Lebeau, gravely, "Madame is right. I ought not to lead
you into further mischief; there are three in the room who have better
claims on you than--"

"The cause of millions," interrupted Monnier.

"No."

He approached the woman and took up one of the children very tenderly,
stroking back its curls and kissing the face, which, if before surprised
and saddened by the mother's sob, now smiled gaily under the father's
kiss.

"Canst thou doubt, my Heloise," said the artisan, mildly, "that whatever
I do thou and these are not uppermost in my thoughts? I act for thine
interest and theirs--the world as it exists is the foe of you three. The
world I would replace it by will be more friendly."

The poor woman made no reply, but as he drew her towards him, she leant
her head upon his breast and wept quietly. Monnier led her thus from the
room, whispering words of soothing. The children followed the parents
into the adjoining chamber. In a few minutes Monnier returned, shutting
the door behind him, and drawing the portiere close.

"You will excuse me, Citizen, and my poor wife--wife she is to me and to
all who visit here, though the law says she is not."

"I respect Madame the more for her dislike to myself," said Lebeau, with
a somewhat melancholy smile.

"Not dislike to you personally, Citizen, but dislike to the business
which she connects with your visits, and she is more than usually
agitated on that subject this evening, because, just before you came,
another visitor had produced a great effect on her feelings--poor dear
Heloise!"

"Indeed! how?"

"Well, I was employed in the winter in redecorating the salon, and
boudoir, of Madame de Vandemar; her son, M. Raoul, took great interest
in superintending the details. He would sometimes talk to me very
civilly, not only on my work, but on other matters. It seems that Madame
now wants something done to the salle-a-manger, and asked old
Gerard--my late master, you know--to send me. Of course he said that was
impossible--for, though I was satisfied with my own wages, I had induced
his other men to strike, and was one of the ringleaders in the recent
strike of artisans in general--a dangerous man, and he would have
nothing more to do with me. So M. Raoul came to see and talk to
me--scarce gone before you rang at the bell--you might have almost met
him on the stairs."

"I saw a beau monsieur come out of the house. And so his talk has
affected Madame."

"Very much; it was quite brother-like. He is one of the religious set,
and they always get at the weak side of the soft sex."

"Ay," said Lebeau, thoughtfully; "if religion were banished from the
laws of men, it would still find a refuge in the hearts of women. But
Raoul de Vandemar did not presume to preach to Madame upon the sin of
loving you and your children?"

"I should like to have heard him preach to her," cried Monnier,
fiercely. "No, he only tried to reason with me about matters he could
not understand."

"Strikes?"

"Well, not exactly strikes--he did not contend that we workmen had not
full right to combine and to strike for obtaining fairer money's worth
for our work; but he tried to persuade me that where, as in my case, it
was not a matter of wages, but of political principle--of war against
capitalists--I could but injure myself and mislead others. He wanted to
reconcile me to old Gerard, or to let him find me employment elsewhere;
and when I told him that my honour forbade me to make terms for myself
till those with whom I was joined were satisfied, he said, 'But if
this lasts much longer, your children will not look so rosy;' then
poor Heloise began to wring her hands and cry, and he took me aside and
wanted to press money on me--as a loan. He spoke so kindly that I could
not be angry; but when he found I would take nothing, he asked me about
some families in the street of whom he had a list, and who, he was
informed, were in great distress. That is true; I am feeding some of
them myself out of my savings. You see, this young Monsieur belongs to
a society of men, many as young as he is, which visits the poor and
dispenses charity. I did not feel I had a right to refuse aid for
others, and I told him where his money would be best spent. I suppose he
went there when he left me."

"I know the society you mean, that of St. Francois de Sales. It
comprises some of the most ancient of that old noblesse to which the
ouvriers in the great Revolution were so remorseless."

"We ouvriers are wiser now; we see that in assailing them, we gave
ourselves worse tyrants in the new aristocracy of the capitalists. Our
quarrel now is that of artisans against employers."

"Of course, I am aware of that; but to leave general politics, tell me
frankly, How has the strike affected you as yet? I mean in purse? Can
you stand its pressure? If not, you are above the false pride of not
taking help from me, a fellow-conspirator, though you were justified
in refusing it when offered by Raoul de Vandemar, the servant of the
Church."

"Pardon, I refuse aid from any one, except for the common cause. But do
not fear for me, I am not pinched as yet. I have had high wages for some
years, and since I and Heloise came together, I have not wasted a sous
out of doors, except in the way of public duty, such as making converts
at the Jean Jacques and elsewhere; a glass of beer and a pipe don't cost
much. And Heloise is such a house-wife, so thrifty, scolds me if I buy
her a ribbon, poor love! No wonder that I would pull down a society that
dares to scoff at her--dares to say she is not my wife, and her children
are base born. No, I have some savings left yet. War to society, war to
the knife!"

"Monnier," said Lebeau, in a voice that evinced emotion, "listen to
me: I have received injuries from society which, when they were fresh,
half-maddened me--that is twenty years ago. I would then have thrown
myself into any plot against society that proffered revenge; but
society, my friend, is a wall of very strong masonry, as it now stands;
it may be sapped in the course of a thousand years, but stormed in a
day--no. You dash your head against it--you scatter your brains, and
you dislodge a stone. Society smiles in scorn, effaces the stain, and
replaces the stone. I no longer war against society. I do war against
a system in that society which is hostile to me--systems in France are
easily overthrown. I say this because I want to use you, and I do not
want to deceive."

"Deceive me, bah! You are an honest man," cried Monnier; and he seized
Lebeau's hand, and shook it with warmth and vigour.

"But for you I should have been a mere grumbler. No doubt I should have
cried out where the shoe pinched, and railed against laws that vex
me; but from the moment you first talked to me I became a new man. You
taught me to act, as Rousseau and Madame de Grantmesnil had taught me to
think and to feel. There is my brother, a grumbler too, but professes
to have a wiser head than mine. He is always warning me against
you--against joining a strike--against doing any thing to endanger my
skin. I always went by his advice till you taught me that it was well
enough for women to talk and complain; men should dare and do."

"Nevertheless," said Lebeau, "your brother is a safer counsellor to a
pere de famille than I. I repeat what I have so often said before:
I desire, and I resolve, that the Empire of M. Bonaparte shall be
overthrown. I see many concurrent circumstances to render that desire
and resolve of practicable fulfilment. You desire and resolve the same
thing. Up to that point we can work together. I have encouraged your
action only so far as it served my design; but I separate from you the
moment you would ask me to aid your design in the hazard of experiments
which the world has never yet favoured, and trust me, Monnier, the world
never will favour."

"That remains to be seen," said Monnier, with compressed, obstinate
lips. "Forgive me, but you are not young; you belong to an old school."

"Poor young man!" said Lebeau, readjusting his spectacles, "I recognise
in you the genius of Paris, be the genius good or evil. Paris is never
warned by experience. Be it so. I want you so much, your enthusiasm is
so fiery, that I can concede no more to the mere sentiment which makes
me say to myself, 'It is a shame to use this great-hearted, wrong-headed
creature for my personal ends.' I come at once to the point--that is,
the matter on which I seek you this evening. At my suggestion, you have
been a ringleader in strikes which have terribly shaken the Imperial
system, more than its Ministers deem; now I want a man like you to
assist in a bold demonstration against the Imperial resort to a rural
priest-ridden suffrage, on the part of the enlightened working class of
Paris."

"Good!" said Monnier.

"In a day or two the result of the plebiscite will be known. The
result of universal suffrage will be enormously in favour of the desire
expressed by one man."

"I don't believe it," said Monnier, stoutly. "France cannot be so
hoodwinked by the priests."

"Take what I say for granted," resumed Lebeau, calmly. "On the 8th of
this month we shall know the amount of the majority--some millions of
French votes. I want Paris to separate itself from France, and declare
against those blundering millions. I want an emeute, or rather a
menacing demonstration--not a premature revolution, mind. You must avoid
bloodshed."

"It is easy to say that beforehand; but when a crowd of men once meets
in the streets of Paris--"

"It can do much by meeting, and cherishing resentment if the meeting be
dispersed by an armed force, which it would be waste of life to resist."

"We shall see when the time comes," said Monnier, with a fierce gleam in
his bold eyes.

"I tell you, all that is required at this moment is an evident protest
of the artisans of Paris against the votes of the 'rurals' of France. Do
you comprehend me?"

"I think so; if not, I obey. What we ouvriers want is what we have not
got--a head to dictate action to us."

"See to this, then. Rouse the men you can command. I will take care that
you have plentiful aid from foreigners. We may trust to the confreres of
our council to enlist Poles and Italians; Gaspard le Noy will turn out
the volunteer rioters at his command. Let the emeute be within, say a
week, after the vote of the plebiscite is taken. You will need that time
to prepare."

"Be contented--it shall be done."

"Good night, then." Lebeau leisurely took up his hat and drew on his
gloves--then, as if struck by a sudden thought, he turned briskly on the
artisan and said in quick blunt tones:

"Armand Monnier, explain to me why it is that you--a Parisian artisan,
the type of a class the most insubordinate, the most self-conceited that
exists on the face of earth--take without question, with so docile
a submission, the orders of a man who plainly tells you he does not
sympathise in your ultimate objects, of whom you really know very
little, and whose views you candidly own you think are those of an old
and obsolete school of political reasoners."

"You puzzle me to explain," said Monnier, with an ingenuous laugh, that
brightened up features stern and hard, though comely when in repose.
"Partly, because you are so straightforward, and do not talk blague;
partly, because I don't think the class I belong to would stir an inch
unless we had a leader of another class--and you give me at least that
leader. Again, you go to that first stage which we all agree to take,
and--well, do you want me to explain more?"

"Yes."

"Et bien! you have warned me, like an honest man; like an honest man I
warn you. That first step we take together; I want to go a step further;
you retreat, you say, 'No:' I reply you are committed; that further
step you must take, or I cry 'Traitre!--au la lanterne!' You talk of
'superior experience:' bah! what does experience really tell you? Do you
suppose that Philippe Egalite, when he began to plot against Louis XVI.,
meant to vote for his kinsman's execution by the guillotine? Do you
suppose that Robespierre, when he commenced his career as the foe of
capital punishment, foresaw that he should be the Minister of the Reign
of Terror? Not a bit of it. Each was committed by his use of those he
designed for his tools: so must you be--or you perish."

Lebeau, leaning against the door, heard the frank avowal he had courted
without betraying a change of countenance. But when Armand Monnier had
done, a slight movement of his lips showed emotion; was it of fear or
disdain?

"Monnier," he said, gently; "I am so much obliged to you for the manly
speech you have made. The scruples which my conscience had before
entertained are dispelled. I dreaded lest I, a declared wolf, might
seduce into peril an innocent sheep. I see I have to deal with a wolf of
younger vigour and sharper fangs than myself, so much the better: obey
my orders now; leave it to time to say whether I obey yours later. Au
revoir."




CHAPTER VI.

Isaura's apartment, on the following Thursday evening, was more filled
than usual. Besides her habitual devotees in the artistic or literary
world, there were diplomatists and deputies commixed with many fair
chiefs of la jeunesse doree; amongst the latter the brilliant Enguerrand
de Vandemar, who, deeming the acquaintance of every celebrity essential
to his own celebrity in either Carthage, the beau monde, or the
demi-monde, had, two Thursdays before, made Louvier attend her soiree
and present him. Louvier, though gathering to his own salons authors and
artists, very rarely favoured their rooms with his presence; he did
not adorn Isaura's party that evening. But Duplessis was there, in
compensation. It had chanced that Valerie had met Isaura at some house
in the past winter, and conceived an enthusiastic affection for her:
since then, Valerie came very often to see her, and made a point of
dragging with her to Isaura's Thursday reunions her obedient father.
Soirees, musical or literary, were not much in his line; but he had no
pleasure like that of pleasing his spoilt child. Our old friend Frederic
Lemercier was also one of Isaura's guests that night. He had become more
and more intimate with Duplessis, and Duplessis had introduced him to
the fair Valerie as "un jeune homme plein de moyens, qui ira loin."

Savarin was there of course, and brought with him an English gentleman
of the name of Bevil, as well known at Paris as in London--invited
everywhere--popular everywhere,--one of those welcome contributors to
the luxuries of civilised society who trade in gossip, sparing no pains
to get the pick of it, and exchanging it liberally sometimes for a
haunch of venison, sometimes for a cup of tea. His gossip not being
adulterated with malice was in high repute for genuine worth.

If Bevil said, "This story is a fact," you no more thought of doubting
him than you would doubt Rothschild if he said, "This is Lafitte of
'48."

Mr. Bevil was at present on a very short stay at Paris, and, naturally
wishing to make the most of his time, he did not tarry beside Savarin,
but, after being introduced to Isaura, flitted here and there through
the assembly.

            "Apis Matinae--
             More modoque--
             Grata carpentis thyma"--

The bee proffers honey, but bears a sting.

The room was at its fullest when Gustave Rameau entered, accompanied by
Monsieur de Mauleon.

Isaura was agreeably surprised by the impression made on her by the
Vicomte's appearance and manner. His writings, and such as she had heard
of his earlier repute, had prepared her to see a man decidedly old, of
withered aspect and sardonic smile--aggressive in demeanour--forward or
contemptuous in his very politeness--a Mephistopheles engrafted on the
stem of a Don Juan. She was startled by the sight of one who, despite
his forty-eight years--and at Paris a man is generally older at
forty-eight than he is elsewhere--seemed in the zenith of ripened
manhood--startled yet more by the singular modesty of a deportment
too thoroughly high-bred not to be quietly simple--startled most by a
melancholy expression in eyes that could be at times soft, though always
so keen, and in the grave pathetic smile which seemed to disarm censure
of past faults in saying, "I have known sorrows."

He did not follow up his introduction to his young hostess by any of the
insipid phrases of compliment to which she was accustomed; but, after
expressing in grateful terms his thanks for the honour she had permitted
Rameau to confer on him, he moved aside, as if he had no right to detain
her from other guests more worthy her notice, towards the doorway,
taking his place by Enguerrand amidst a group of men of whom Duplessis
was the central figure.

At that time--the first week in May, 1870--all who were then in Paris
will remember that there were two subjects uppermost in the mouths
of men: first, the plebiscite; secondly, the conspiracy to murder the
Emperor--which the disaffected considered to be a mere fable, a pretence
got up in time to serve the plebiscite and prop the Empire.

Upon this latter subject Duplessis had been expressing himself with
unwonted animation. A loyal and earnest Imperialist, it was only with
effort that he could repress his scorn of that meanest sort of gossip
which is fond of ascribing petty motives to eminent men.

To him nothing could be more clearly evident than the reality of this
conspiracy, and he had no tolerance for the malignant absurdity of
maintaining that the Emperor or his Ministers could be silly and wicked
enough to accuse seventy-two persons of a crime which the police had
been instructed to invent.

As De Mauleon approached, the financier brought his speech to an abrupt
close. He knew in the Vicomte de Mauleon the writer of articles which
had endangered the Government, and aimed no pointless shafts against its
Imperial head.

"My cousin," said Enguerrand, gaily, as he exchanged a cordial shake
of the hand with Victor, "I congratulate you on the fame of journalist,
into which you have vaulted, armed cap-a pie, like a knight of old into
his saddle; but I don't sympathise with the means you have taken to
arrive at that renown. I am not myself an Imperialist--a Vandemar can be
scarcely that. But if I am compelled to be on board a ship, I don't
wish to take out its planks and let in an ocean, when all offered to me
instead is a crazy tub and a rotten rope."

"Tres bien," said Duplessis, in Parliamentary tone and phrase.

"But," said De Mauleon, with his calm smile, "would you like the captain
of the ship, when the sky darkened and the sea rose, to ask the common
sailors 'whether they approved his conduct on altering his course or
shortening his sail'? Better trust to a crazy tub and a rotten rope than
to a ship in which the captain consults a plebiscite."

"Monsieur," said Duplessis, "your metaphor is ill chosen no metaphor
indeed is needed. The head of the State was chosen by the voice of the
people, and, when required to change the form of administration which
the people had sanctioned, and inclined to do so from motives the most
patriotic and liberal, he is bound again to consult the people from
whom he holds his power. It is not, however, of the plebiscite we were
conversing, so much as of the atrocious conspiracy of assassins--so
happily discovered in time. I presume that Monsieur de Mauleon must
share the indignation which true Frenchmen of every party must feel
against a combination united by the purpose of murder."

The Vicomte bowed as in assent. "But do you believe," asked a Liberal
Depute, "that such a combination existed, except in the visions of the
police or the cabinet of a Minister?"

Duplessis looked keenly at De Mauleon while this question was put to
him. Belief or disbelief in the conspiracy was with him, and with many,
the test by which a sanguinary revolutionist was distinguished from an
honest politician.

"Ma foi," answered De Mauleon, shrugging his shoulders, "I have only one
belief left; but that is boundless. I believe in the folly of mankind
in general, and of Frenchmen in particular. That seventy-two men
should plot the assassination of a sovereign on whose life interests so
numerous and so watchful depend, and imagine they could keep a secret
which any drunkard amongst them would blab out, any tatterdemalion would
sell, is a betise so gross that I think it highly probable. But pardon
me if I look upon the politics of Paris much as I do upon its mud--one
must pass through it when one walks in the street. One changes one's
shoes before entering the salon. A word with you, Enguerrand,"--and
taking his kinsman's arm he drew him aside from the circle. "What has
become of your brother? I see nothing of him now."

"Oh, Raoul," answered Enguerrand, throwing himself on a couch in a
recess, and making room for De Mauleon beside him--"Raoul is devoting
himself to the distressed ouvriers who have chosen to withdraw from
work. When he fails to persuade them to return, he forces food and
fuel on their wives and children. My good mother encourages him in this
costly undertaking, and no one but you who believe in the infinity of
human folly would credit me when I tell you that his eloquence has drawn
from me all the argent de poche I get from our shop. As for himself,
he has sold his horses, and even grudges a cab-fare, saying, 'That is a
meal for a family.' Ah! if he had but gone into the Church, what a saint
would have deserved canonisation!"

"Do not lament--he will probably have what is a better claim than mere
saintship on Heaven--martyrdom," said De Mauleon, with a smile in which
sarcasm disappeared in melancholy. "Poor Raoul!--and what of my other
cousin, the beau Marquis? Several months ago his Legitimist faith seemed
vacillating--he talked to me very fairly about the duties a Frenchman
owed to France, and hinted that he should place his sword at the command
of Napoleon III. I have not yet heard of him as a soldat de France--I
hear a great deal of him as a viveur de Paris."

"Don't you know why his desire for a military career was frost-bitten?"

"No! why?"

"Alain came from Bretagne profoundly ignorant of most things known to a
gamin of Paris. When he conscientiously overcame the scruples natural to
one of his name and told the Duchesse de Tarascon that he was ready
to fight under the flag of France whatever its colour, he had a vague
reminiscence of ancestral Rochebriants earning early laurels at the head
of their regiments. At all events he assumed as a matter of course that
he, in the first rank as gentilhomme, would enter the army, if as a
sous-lieutenant, still as gentilhomme. But when told that, as he had
been at no military college, he could only enter the ranks as a private
soldier--herd with private soldiers--for at least two years before,
passing through the grade of corporal, his birth, education, habits
of life could, with great favour, raise him to the station of a
sous-lieutenant, you may conceive that the martial ardour of a
Rochebriant was somewhat cooled."

"If he knew what the dormitory of French privates is, and how difficult
a man well educated well brought up, finds it, first, to endure the
coarsest ribaldry and the loudest blasphemy, and then, having endured
and been compelled to share them, ever enforce obedience and discipline
as a superior among those with whom just before he was an equal, his
ardour would not have been merely cooled--it would have been changed
into despair for the armies of France, if hereafter they are met by
those whose officers have been trained to be officers from the outset
and have imbibed from their cradle an education not taught to the
boy-pedants from school--the two-fold education how with courtesy to
command, how with dignity to obey. To return to Rochebriant, such salons
as I frequent are somewhat formal--as befits my grave years and my
modest income; I may add, now that you know my vocation, befits me also
as a man who seeks rather to be instructed than amused. In those salons
I did, last year sometimes, however, meet Rochebriant--as I sometimes
still meet you; but of late he has deserted such sober reunions, and I
hear with pain that he is drifting among those rocks against which my
own youth was shipwrecked. Is the report true?"

"I fear," said Enguerrand, reluctantly, "that at least the report is not
unfounded. And my conscience accuses me of having been to blame in the
first instance. You see, when Alain made terms with Louvier by which he
obtained a very fair income, if prudently managed, I naturally wished
that a man of so many claims to social distinction, and who represents
the oldest branch of my family, should take his right place in our world
of Paris. I gladly therefore presented him to the houses and the
men most a la mode--advised him as to the sort of establishment,
in apartments, horses, &c., which it appeared to me that he might
reasonably afford--I mean such as, with his means, I should have
prescribed to myself--"

"Ah! I understand. But you, dear Enguerrand, are a born Parisian,
every inch of you: and a born Parisian is, whatever be thought to the
contrary, the best manager in the world. He alone achieves the difficult
art of uniting thrift with show. It is your Provincial who comes to
Paris in the freshness of undimmed youth, who sows his whole life on
its barren streets. I guess the rest: Alain is ruined." Enguerrand, who
certainly was so far a born Parisian that with all his shrewdness and
savoir faire, he had a wonderfully sympathetic heart, very easily moved,
one way or the other--Enguerrand winced at his elder kinsman's words
complimentarily reproachful, and said in unwonted tones of humility:
"Cousin, you are cruel, but you are in the right. I did not calculate
sufficiently on the chances of Alain's head being turned. Hear my
excuse. He seemed to me so much more thoughtful than most at our age
are, so much more stately and proud; well, also so much more pure, so
impressed with the responsibilities of station, so bent on retaining
the old lands in Bretagne; by habit and rearing so simple and
self-denying,--that I took it for granted he was proof against stronger
temptations than those which a light nature like my own puts aside with
a laugh. And at first I had no reason to think myself deceived, when,
some months ago, I heard that he was getting into debt, losing at play,
paying court to female vampires, who drain the life-blood of those on
whom they fasten their fatal lips. Oh, then I spoke to him earnestly!"

"And in vain?"

"In vain. A certain Chevalier de Finisterre, whom you may have heard
of--"

"Certainly, and met; a friend of Louvier's--"

"The same man--has obtained over him an influence which so far subdues
mine, that he almost challenged me when I told him his friend was a
scamp. In fine, though Alain and I have not actually quarrelled, we pass
each other with, 'Bon jour, mon ami.'"

"Hum! My dear Enguerrand, you have done all you could. Flies will be
flies, and spiders, spiders, till the earth is destroyed by a comet.
Nay, I met a distinguished naturalist in America who maintained that we
shall find flies and spiders in the next world."

"You have been in America? Ah, true--I remember, California!"

"Where have I not been? Tush! music--shall I hear our fair hostess
sing?"

"I am afraid not to-night: because Madame S---------- is to favour us,
and the Signorina makes it a rule not to sing at her own house when
professional artists do. You must hear the Cicogna quietly some day;
such a voice, nothing like it."

Madame S---------, who, since she had learned that there was no cause to
apprehend that Isaura might become her professional rival, conceived
for her a wonderful affection, and willingly contributed her magnificent
gifts of song to the charms of Isaura's salon, now began a fragment from
I Puritani, which held the audience as silent as the ghosts listening
to Sappho, and when it was over, several of the guests slipped away,
especially those who disliked music, and feared Madame S--------- might
begin again. Enguerrand was not one of such soulless recreants, but he
had many other places to go to. Besides, Madame S-------- was no novelty
to him.

De Mauleon now approached Isaura, who was seated next to Valerie, and
after well-merited encomium on Madame S------'s performance, slid into
some critical comparisons between that singer and those of a former
generation, which interested Isaura, and evinced to her quick
perceptions that kind of love for music which has been refined by more
knowledge of the art than is common to mere amateurs.

"You have studied music, Monsieur de Mauleon," she said. "Do you not
perform yourself?"

"I? No. But music has always had a fatal attraction for me. I ascribe
half the errors of my life to that temperament which makes me too
fascinated by harmonies--too revolted by discords."

"I should have thought such a temperament would have led from
errors--are not errors discords?"

"To the inner sense, yes; but to the outer sense not always. Virtues
are often harsh to the ear--errors very sweet-voiced. The sirens did not
sing out of tune. Better to stop one's ears than glide on Scylla or be
merged into Charybdis."

"Monsieur," cried Valerie, with a pretty brusquerie which became her
well, "you talk like a Vandal."

"It is, I think, by Mademoiselle Duplessis that I have the honour to be
rebuked. Is Monsieur your father very susceptible to music?"

"Well, I cannot say that he cares much for it. But then his mind is so
practical--"

"And his life so successful. No Scylla, no Charybdis for him. However,
Mademoiselle, I am not quite the Vandal you suppose, I do not say
that susceptibility to the influence of music may not be safe, nay,
healthful, to others it was not so to me in my youth. It can do me no
harm now."

Here Duplessis came up and whispered his daughter "it was time to leave;
they had promised the Duchesse de Tarascon to assist at the soiree she
gave that night." Valerie took her father's arm with a brightening smile
and a heightened colour. Alain de Rochebriant might probably be at the
Duchesse's.

"Are you not going also to the Hotel de Tarascon, M. de Mauleon?" asked
Duplessis.

"No; I was never there but once. The Duchesse is an Imperialist, at once
devoted and acute, and no doubt very soon divined my lack of faith in
her idols."

Duplessis frowned, and hastily led Valerie away.

In a few minutes the room was comparatively deserted. De Mauleon,
however, lingered by the side of Isaura till all the other guests
were gone. Even then he lingered still, and renewed the interrupted
conversation with her, the Venosta joining therein; and so agreeable did
he make himself to her Italian tastes by a sort of bitter-sweet wisdom
like that of her native proverbs--comprising much knowledge of mankind
on the unflattering side of humanity in that form of pleasantry which
has a latent sentiment of pathos--that the Venosta exclaimed, "Surely
you must have been brought up in Florence!"

There was that in De Mauleon's talk hostile to all which we call romance
that excited the imagination of Isaura, and compelled her instinctive
love for whatever is more sweet, more beautiful, more ennobling on the
many sides of human life, to oppose what she deemed the paradoxes of
a man who had taught himself to belie even his own nature. She became
eloquent, and her countenance, which in ordinary moments owed much of
its beauty to an expression of meditative gentleness, was now lighted
up by the energy of earnest conviction--the enthusiasm of an impassioned
zeal.

Gradually De Mauleon relaxed his share in the dialogue, and listened
to her, rapt and dreamily as in his fiery youth he had listened to the
songs of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause,
though unconsciously--defending the vocation of art as the embellisher
of external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells
crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a
new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it
accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and
material nature, which is finite; for ever seeking in the unseen and
the spiritual the goals in the infinite which it is their instinct to
divine. "That which you contemptuously call romance," said Isaura, "is
not essential only to poets and artists. The most real side of every
life, from the earliest dawn of mind in the infant, is the romantic."

"When the child is weaving flower-chains, chasing butterflies, or
sitting apart and dreaming what it will do in the future, is not that
the child's real life, and yet is it not also the romantic?"

"But there comes a time when we weave no flower-chains, and chase no
butterflies."

"Is it so?--still on one side of life, flowers and butterflies may be
found to the last; and at least to the last are there no dreams of the
future? Have you no such dreams at this moment? and without the romance
of such dreams, would there be any reality to human life which could
distinguish it from the life of the weed that rots on Lethe?"

"Alas, Mademoiselle," said De Mauleon, rising to take leave, "your
argument must rest without answer. I would not, if I could, confute the
beautiful belief that belongs to youth, fusing into one rainbow all
the tints that can colour the world. But the Signora Venosta will
acknowledge the truth of an old saying expressed in every civilised
language, but best, perhaps in that of the Florentine--'You might as
well physic the dead as instruct the old.'"

"But you are not old!" said the Venosta, with Florentine politeness,--
"you! not a grey hair."

"'Tis not by the grey of the hair that one knows the age of the heart,"
answered De Mauleon, in another paraphrase of Italian proverb, and he
was gone.

As he walked homeward, through deserted streets, Victor de Mauleon
thought to himself, "Poor girl, how I pity her! married to a Gustave
Rameau--married to any man--nothing in the nature of man, be he the best
and the cleverest, can ever realise the dream of a girl who is pure and
has genius. Ah, is not the converse true? What girl, the best and the
cleverest, comes up to the ideal of even a commonplace man--if he ever
dreamed of an ideal!"

Then he paused, and in a moment or so afterwards his thought knew such
questionings no more. It turned upon personalities, on stratagems and
plots, on ambition. The man had more than his share of that
peculiar susceptibility which is one of the characteristics of his
countrymen--susceptibility to immediate impulse--susceptibility to
fleeting impressions. It was a key to many mysteries in his character
when he owned his subjection to the influence of music, and in music
recognised not the seraph's harp, but the siren's song. If you could
have permanently fixed Victor de Mauleon in one of the good moments
of his life--even now--some moment of exquisite kindness--of superb
generosity--of dauntless courage--you would have secured a very rare
specimen of noble humanity. But so to fix him was impossible.

That impulse of the moment vanished the moment after; swept aside by the
force of his very talents--talents concentrated by his intense sense
of individuality--sense of wrongs or of rights--interests or objects
personal to himself. He extended the royal saying, "L'etat, c'est moi,"
to words far more grandiloquent. "The universe, 'tis I." The Venosta
would have understood him and smiled approvingly, if he had said with
good-humoured laugh, "I dead, the world is dead!" That is an Italian
proverb, and means much the same thing.





BOOK VIII.




CHAPTER I.

On the 8th of May the vote of the plebiscite was recorded,--between
seven and eight millions of Frenchmen in support of the Imperial
programme--in plain words, of the Emperor himself--against a minority of
1,500,000. But among the 1,500,000 were the old throne-shakers-those who
compose and those who lead the mob of Paris. On the 14th, as Rameau was
about to quit the editorial bureau of his printing-office, a note
was brought in to him which strongly excited his nervous system.
It contained a request to see him forthwith, signed by those two
distinguished foreign members of the Secret Council of Ten, Thaddeus
Loubinsky and Leonardo Raselli.

The meetings of that Council had been so long suspended that Rameau
had almost forgotten its existence. He gave orders to admit the
conspirators. The two men entered, the Pole, tall, stalwart, and with
martial stride--the Italian, small, emaciated, with skulking, noiseless,
cat-like step, both looking wondrous threadbare, and in that state
called "shabby genteel," which belongs to the man who cannot work for
his livelihood, and assumes a superiority over the man who can.
Their outward appearance was in notable discord with that of the
poet-politician--he all new in the last fashions of Parisian elegance,
and redolent of Parisian prosperity and extrait de Mousseline!

"Confrere," said the Pole, seating himself on the edge of the table,
while the Italian leaned against the mantelpiece, and glanced round the
room with furtive eye, as if to detect its innermost secrets, or decide
where safest to drop a Lucifer-match for its conflagration,--"confrere,"
said the Pole, "your country needs you--"

"Rather the cause of all countries," interposed the Italian
softly,--"Humanity."

"Please to explain yourselves; but stay, wait a moment," said Rameau;
and rising, he went to the door, opened it, looked forth, ascertained
that the coast was clear, then reclosed the door as cautiously as a
prudent man closes his pocket whenever shabby-genteel visitors appeal
to him in the cause of his country, still more if they appeal in that of
Humanity.

"Confrere," said the Pole, "this day a movement is to be made--a
demonstration on behalf of your country--"

"Of Humanity," again softly interposed the Italian. "Attend and share
it," said the Pole.

"Pardon me," said Rameau, "I do not know what you mean. I am now
the editor of a journal in which the proprietor does not countenance
violence; and if you come to me as a member of the Council, you must be
aware that I should obey no orders but that of its president, whom I--I
have not seen for nearly a year; indeed I know not if the Council still
exists."

"The Council exists, and with it the obligation it imposes," replied
Thaddeus.

"Pampered with luxury," here the Pole raised his voice, "do you dare to
reject the voice of Poverty and Freedom?"

"Hush, dear but too vehement confrere," murmured the bland Italian;
"permit me to dispel the reasonable doubts of our confrere," and he took
out of his breast-pocket a paper which he presented to Rameau; on it
were written these words:

"This evening May 24th. Demonstration.--Faubourg du Temple.--Watch
events, under orders of A. M. Bid the youngest member take that first
opportunity to test nerves and discretion. He is not to act, but to
observe."

No name was appended to this instruction, but a cipher intelligible to
all members of the Council as significant of its president, Jean Lebeau.

"If I err not," said the Italian, "Citizen Rameau is our youngest
confrere."

Rameau paused. The penalties for disobedience to an order of the
President of the Council were too formidable to be disregarded. There
could be no doubt that,--though his name was not mentioned, he, Rameau,
was accurately designated as the youngest member of the Council. Still,
however he might have owed his present position to the recommendation
of Lebeau, there was nothing in the conversation of M. de Mauleon which
would warrant participation in a popular emeute by the editor of a
journal belonging to that mocker of the mob. Ah! but--and here again he
glanced over the paper--he was asked "not to act; but to observe." To
observe was the duty of a journalist. He might go to the demonstration
as De Mauleon confessed he had gone to the Communist Club, a
philosophical spectator.

"You do not disobey this order?" said the Pole, crossing his arms.

"I shall certainly go into the Faubourg du Temple this evening,"
answered Rameau, drily, "I have business that way."

"Bon!" said the Pole; "I did not think you would fail us, though you do
edit a journal which says not a word on the duties that bind the French
people to the resuscitation of Poland."

"And is not pronounced in decided accents upon the cause of the human
race," put in the Italian, whispering.

"I do not write the political articles in Le Seas Commun," answered
Rameau; "and I suppose that our president is satisfied with them since
he recommended me to the preference of the person who does. Have you
more to say? Pardon me, my time is precious, for it does not belong to
me."

"Eno'!" said the Italian, "we will detain you no longer." Here, with a
bow and a smile, he glided towards the door.

"Confrere," muttered the Pole, lingering, "you must have become
very rich!--do not forget the wrongs of Poland--I am their
Representative--I--speaking in that character, not as myself
individually--I have not breakfasted!"

Rameau, too thoroughly Parisian not to be as lavish of his own money as
he was envious of another's, slipped some pieces of gold in the Pole's
hand. The Pole's bosom heaved with manly emotion: "These pieces bear the
effigies of the tyrant--I accept them as redeemed from disgrace by their
uses to Freedom."

"Share them with Signor Raselli in the name of the same cause,"
whispered Rameau, with a smile he might have plagiarised from De
Mauleon.

The Italian, whose ear was inured to whispers, heard and turned round as
he stood at the threshold.

"No, confrere of France--no, confrere of Poland--I am Italian. All ways
to take the life of an enemy are honourable--no way is honourable which
begs money from a friend."

An hour or so later, Rameau was driven in his comfortable coupe to the
Faubourg du Temple.

Suddenly, at the angle of a street, his coachman was stopped--a
rough-looking man appeared at the door--__"Descends, mon petit
bourgeois__." Behind the rough-looking man were menacing faces.

Rameau was not physically a coward--very few Frenchmen are, still fewer
Parisians; and still fewer no matter what their birthplace, the men whom
we call vain--the men who over-much covet distinction, and over-much
dread reproach.

"Why should I descend at your summons?" said Rameau, haughtily. "Bah!
Coachman, drive on!"

The rough-looking man opened the door, and silently extended a hand to
Rameau, saying gently: "Take my advice, mon bourgeois. Get out--we want
your carriage. It is a day of barricades--every little helps, even your
coupe!"

While this man spoke others gesticulated; some shrieked out, "He is an
employer! he thinks he can drive over the employed!"

Some leader of the crowd--a Parisian crowd always has a classical
leader, who has never read the classics--thundered forth,
"Tarquin's car! Down with Tarquin!" Therewith came a yell, "A la
lanterne--Tarquin!"

We Anglo-Saxons, of the old country or the new, are not familiarised
to the dread roar of a populace delighted to have a Roman authority for
tearing us to pieces; still Americans know what is Lynch law. Rameau
was in danger of Lynch law, when suddenly a face not unknown to him
interposed between himself and the rough-looking man.

"Ha!" cried this new comer, "my young confrere, Gustave Rameau, welcome!
Citizens, make way. I answer for this patriot--I, Armand Monnier. He
comes to help use! Is this the way you receive him?" Then in a low voice
to Rameau, "Come out. Give your coupe to the barricade. What matters
such rubbish? Trust to me--I expected you. Hist!--Lebeau bids me
see that you are safe." Rameau then, seeking to drape himself in
majesty,--as the aristocrats of journalism in a city wherein no other
aristocracy is recognised naturally and commendably do, when ignorance
combined with physical strength asserts itself to be a power,
beside which the power of knowledge is what a learned poodle is to a
tiger--Rameau then descended from his coupe, and said to this Titan of
labour, as a French marquis might have said to his valet, and as, when
the French marquis has become a ghost of the past, the man who keeps
a coupe says to the man who mends its wheels, "Honest fellow, I trust
you."

Monnier led the journalist through the mob to the rear of the barricade
hastily constructed. Here were assembled very motley groups.

The majority were ragged boys, the gamins of Paris, commingled with
several women of no reputable appearance, some dingily, some gaudily
apparelled. The crowd did not appear as if the business in hand was a
very serious one. Amidst the din of voices the sounds of laughter rose
predominant, jests and bon mots flew from lip to lip. The astonishing
good-humour of the Parisians was not yet excited into the ferocity that
grows out of it by a street contest. It was less like a popular emeute
than a gathering of schoolboys, bent not less on fun than on mischief.
But, still, amid this gayer crowd were sinister, lowering faces; the
fiercest were not those of the very poor, but rather of artisans, who,
to judge by their dress, seemed well off of men belonging to yet higher
grades. Rameau distinguished amongst these the medecin des pauvres, the
philosophical atheist, sundry young, long-haired artists, middle aged
writers for the Republican press, in close neighbourhood with ruffians
of villainous aspect, who might have been newly returned from the
galleys. None were regularly armed; still revolvers and muskets and long
knives were by no means unfrequently interspersed among the rioters. The
whole scene was to Rameau a confused panorama, and the dissonant tumult
of yells and laughter, of menace and joke, began rapidly to act on his
impressionable nerves. He felt that which is the prevalent character of
a Parisian riot--the intoxication of an impulsive sympathy; coming there
as a reluctant spectator, if action commenced he would have been borne
readily into the thick of the action--he could not have helped it;
already he grew impatient of the suspense of strife. Monnier having
deposited him safely with his back to a wall, at the corner of a street
handy for flight, if flight became expedient, had left him for several
minutes, having business elsewhere. Suddenly the whisper of the Italian
stole into his ear--"These men are fools. This is not the way to do
business; this does not hurt the robber of Nice--Garibaldi's Nice: they
should have left it to me."

"What would you do?"

"I have invented a new machine," whispered the Friend of humanity; "it
would remove all at one blow--lion and lioness, whelp and jackals--and
then the Revolution if you will! not this paltry tumult. The cause of
the human race is being frittered away. I am disgusted with Lebeau.
Thrones are not overturned by gamins."

Before Rameau could answer, Monnier rejoined him. The artisan's face
was overcast--his lips compressed, yet quivering with indignation.
"Brother," he said to Rameau, "to-day the cause is betrayed"--(the word
trahi was just then coming into vogue at Paris)--"the blouses I counted
on are recreant. I have just learned that all is quiet in the other
quartiers where the rising was to have been simultaneous with this. We
are in a guet-apens--the soldiers will be down on us in a few minutes;
hark! don't you hear the distant tramp? Nothing for us but to die like
men. Our blood will be avenged later. Here," and he thrust a revolver
into Rameau's hand. Then with a lusty voice that rang through the crowd,
he shouted "Vive le peuple!" The rioters caught and re-echoed the
cry, mingled with other cries,' "Vive la Republique!" "Vive le drapeau
rouge!"

The shouts were yet at their full when a strong hand grasped Monnier's
arm, and a clear, deep, but low voice thrilled through his ear: "Obey!
I warned you. No fight to-day. Time not ripe. All that is needed is
done--do not undo it. Hist! the sergens de ville are force enough to
disperse the swarm of those gnats. Behind the sergens come soldiers who
will not fraternise. Lose not one life to-day. The morrow when we shall
need every man--nay, every gamin--will dawn soon. Answer not. Obey!" The
same strong hand quitting its hold on Monnier, then seized Rameau by the
wrist, and the same deep voice said, "Come with me." Rameau, turning in
amaze, not unmixed with anger, saw beside him a tall man with sombrero
hat pressed close over his head, and in the blouse of a labourer, but
through such disguise he recognized the pale grey whiskers and green
spectacles of Lebeau. He yielded passively to the grasp that led him
away down the deserted street at the angle.

At the further end of that street, however, was heard the steady thud of
hoofs.

"The soldiers are taking the mob at its rear," said Lebeau, calmly;
"we have not a moment to lose--this way," and he plunged into a dismal
court, then into a labyrinth of lanes, followed mechanically by Rameau.
They issued at last on the Boulevards, in which the usual loungers were
quietly sauntering, wholly unconscious of the riot elsewhere. "Now, take
that fiacre and go home; write down your impressions of what you have
seen, and take your MS. to M. de Mauleon." Lebeau here quitted him.

Meanwhile all happened as Lebeau had predicted. The sergens de ville
showed themselves in front of the barricades, a small troop of mounted
soldiers appeared in the rear. The mob greeted the first with yells
and a shower of stones; at the sight of the last they fled in all
directions; and the sergens de ville, calmly scaling the barricades,
carried off in triumph, as prisoners of war, 4 gamins, 3 women, and 1
Irishman loudly protesting innocence, and shrieking "Murther!" So ended
the first inglorious rise against the plebiscite and the Empire, on the
14th of May, 1870.

From Isaura Cicogna to Madame de Grantmesnil. Saturday. May 21.

"I am still, dearest Eulalie, under the excitement of impressions wholly
new to me. I have this day witnessed one of those scenes which take us
out of our private life, not into the world of fiction, but of history,
in which we live as in the life of a nation. You know how intimate I
have become with Valerie Duplessis. She is in herself so charming in her
combination of petulant wilfulness and guileless naivete, that she might
sit as a model for one of your exquisite heroines. Her father, who is in
great favour at Court, had tickets for the Salle des Etats of the
Louvre today--when, as the journals will tell you, the results of the
plebiscite were formally announced to the Emperor--and I accompanied him
and Valerie. I felt, on entering the hall, as if I had been living for
months in an atmosphere of false rumours, for those I chiefly meet in
the circles of artists and men of letters, and the wits and flaneurs who
haunt such circles, are nearly all hostile to the Emperor. They agree,
at least, in asserting the decline of his popularity--the failure of his
intellectual powers; in predicting his downfall--deriding the notion
of a successor in his son. Well, I know not how to reconcile these
statements with the spectacle I have beheld to-day.

"In the chorus of acclamation amidst which the Emperor entered the hall,
it seemed as if one heard the voice of the France he had just appealed
to. If the Fates are really weaving woe and shame in his woof, it is in
hues which, to mortal eyes, seem brilliant with glory and joy.

"You will read the address of the President of the Corps Legislatif; I
wonder how it will strike you! I own fairly that me it wholly carried
away. At each sentiment I murmured to myself, 'Is not this true? and, if
true, are France and human nature ungrateful?'

"'It is now,' said the President, 'eighteen years since France, wearied
with confusion, and anxious for security, confiding in your genuis and
the Napoleonic dynasty, placed in your hands, together with the Imperial
Crown, the authority which the public necessity demanded.' Then the
address proceeded to enumerate the blessings that ensued--social
order speedily restored--the welfare of all classes of society
promoted--advances in commerce and manufactures to an extent hitherto
unknown. Is not this true? and, if so, are you, noble daughter of
France, ungrateful?

"Then came words which touched me deeply--me, who, knowing nothing of
politics, still feel the link that unites Art to Freedom: 'But from
the first your Majesty has looked forward to the time when this
concentration of power would no longer correspond to the aspirations of
a tranquil and reassured country, and, foreseeing the progress of
modern society, you proclaimed that 'Liberty must be the crowning of the
edifice.'' Passing then over the previous gradual advances in popular
government, the President came to the 'present self-abnegation,
unprecedented in history,' and to the vindication of that plebiscite
which I have heard so assailed--viz., Fidelity to the great principle
upon which the throne was founded, required that so important a
modification of a power bestowed by the people should not be made
without the participation of the people themselves. Then, enumerating
the millions who had welcomed the new form of government--the President
paused a second or two, as if with suppressed emotion--and every one
present held his breath, till, in a deeper voice, through which there
ran a quiver that thrilled through the hall, he concluded with--'France
is with you; France places the cause of liberty under the protection of
your dynasty and the great bodies of the State.' Is France with him? I
know not; but if the malcontents of France had been in the hall at
that moment, I believe they would have felt the power of that wonderful
sympathy which compels all the hearts in great audiences to beat in
accord, and would have answered, 'It is true.'

"All eyes now fixed on the Emperor, and I noticed few eyes which were
not moist with tears. You know that calm unrevealing face of his--a face
which sometimes disappoints expectation. But there is that in it which
I have seen in no other, but which I can imagine to have been common
to the Romans of old, the dignity that arises from self-control--an
expression which seems removed from the elation of joy, the depression
of sorrow--not unbecoming to one who has known great vicissitudes of
Fortune, and is prepared alike for her frowns or her smiles.

"I had looked at that face while M. Schneider was reading the
address--it moved not a muscle, it might have been a face of marble.
Even when at moments the words were drowned in applause and the Empress,
striving at equal composure, still allowed us to see a movement of
her eye lids, a tremble on her lips. The boy at his right, heir to his
dynasty, had his looks fixed on the President, as if eagerly swallowing
each word in the address, save once or twice, when he looked around the
hall curiously, and with a smile as a mere child might look. He struck
me as a mere child. Next to the Prince was one of those countenances
which once seen are never to be forgotten--the true Napoleonic type,
brooding, thoughtful, ominous, beautiful. But not with the serene energy
that characterises the head of the first Napoleon when Emperor, and
wholly without the restless eagerness for action which is stamped in the
lean outline of Napoleon when First Consul: no--in Prince Napoleon there
is a beauty to which, as woman, I could never give my heart--were I a
man, the intellect that would not command my trust. But, nevertheless,
in beauty, it is signal, and in that beauty the expression of intellect
is predominant.

"Oh, dear Eulalie, how I am digressing! The Emperor spoke--and believe
me, Eulalie, whatever the journals or your compatriots may insinuate,
there is in that man no sign of declining intellect or failing health. I
care not what may be his years, but that man is in mind and in health as
young as Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon.

"The old cling to the past--they do not go forward to the future. There
was no going back in that speech of the Emperor. There was something
grand and something young in the modesty with which he put aside all
references to that which his Empire had done in the past, and said with
a simple earnestness of manner which I cannot adequately describe--

"'We must more than ever look fearlessly forward to the future. Who
can be opposed to the progressive march of a regime founded by a great
people in the midst of political disturbance, and which now is fortified
by liberty?'

"As he closed, the walls of that vast hall seemed to rock with an
applause that must have been heard on the other side of the Seine.

"'Vive l'Empereur!'" "'Vive l'Imperatrice!'" "'Vive le Prince
Imperial!'"--and the last cry was yet more prolonged than the others, as
if to affirm the dynasty.

"Certainly I can imagine no Court in the old days of chivalry more
splendid than the audience in that grand hall of the Louvre. To the
right of the throne all the ambassadors of the civilised world in the
blaze of their rich costumes and manifold orders. In the gallery at the
left, yet more behind, the dresses and jewels of the dames d'honneur
and of the great officers of State. And when the Empress rose to depart,
certainly my fancy cannot picture a more queenlike image, or one that
seemed more in unison with the representation of royal pomp and power.
The very dress, of colour which would have been fatal to the beauty of
most women equally fair--a deep golden colour--(Valerie profanely called
it buff)--seemed so to suit the splendour of the ceremony and the day;
it seemed as if that stately form stood in the midst of a sunlight
reflected from itself. Day seemed darkened when that sunlight passed
away.

"I fear you will think I have suddenly grown servile to the gauds and
shows of mere royalty. I ask myself if that be so--I think not. Surely
it is a higher sense of greatness which has been impressed on me by the
pageant of to-day I feel as if there were brought vividly before me
the majesty of France, through the representation of the ruler she has
crowned.

"I feel also as if there, in that hall, I found a refuge from all the
warring contests in which no two seem to me in agreement as to the sort
of government to be established in place of the present. The 'Liberty'
clamoured for by one would cut the throat of the 'Liberty' worshipped by
another.

"I see a thousand phantom forms of LIBERTY--but only one living symbol
of ORDER--that which spoke from a throne to-day."

Isaura left her letter uncompleted. On the following Monday she was
present at a crowded soiree given by M. Louvier. Among the guests were
some of the most eminent leaders of the Opposition, including that
vivacious master of sharp sayings, M. P-------, whom Savarin entitled
"the French Sheridan;" if laws could be framed in epigrams he would be
also the French Solon.

There, too, was Victor de Mauleon, regarded by the Republican party with
equal admiration and distrust. For the distrust, he himself pleasantly
accounted in talk with Savarin.

"How can I expect to be trusted? I represent 'Common Sense;' every
Parisian likes Common Sense in print, and cries 'Je suis trahi' when
Common Sense is to be put into action."

A group of admiring listeners had collected round one (perhaps the most
brilliant) of those oratorical lawyers by whom, in France, the respect
for all laws has been so often talked away: he was speaking of the
Saturday's ceremonial with eloquent indignation. It was a mockery
to France to talk of her placing Liberty under the protection of the
Empire.

There was a flagrant token of the military force under which civil
freedom was held in the very dress of the Emperor and his insignificant
son: the first in the uniform of a General of Division; the second,
forsooth, in that of a sous-lieutenant. The other liberal chiefs chimed
in: "The army," said one, "was an absurd expense; it must be put down:"
"The world was grown too civilised for war," said another: "The Empress
was priest-ridden," said a third: "Churches might be tolerated; Voltaire
built a church, but a church simply to the God of Nature, not of
priestcraft,"--and so on.

Isaura, whom any sneer at religion pained and revolted, here turned
away from the orators to whom she had before been listening with earnest
attention, and her eyes fell on the countenance of De Mauleon, who was
seated opposite.

The countenance startled her, its expression was so angrily scornful;
that expression, however, vanished at once as De Mauleon's eyes met her
own, and drawing his chair near to her, he said, smiling: "Your look
tells me that I almost frightened you by the ill-bred frankness with
which my face must have betrayed my anger, at hearing such imbecile
twaddle from men who aspire to govern our turbulent France. You remember
that after Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake a quack advertised
'pills against earthquakes.' These messieurs are not so cunning as the
quack; he did not name the ingredients of his pills."

"But, M. de Mauleon," said Isaura, "if you, being opposed to the Empire,
think so ill of the wisdom of those who would destroy it, are you
prepared with remedies for earthquakes more efficacious than their
pills?"

"I reply as a famous English statesman, when in opposition, replied to a
somewhat similar question,--'I don't prescribe till I'm called in.'"

"To judge by the seven millions and a half whose votes were announced
on Saturday, and by the enthusiasm with which the Emperor was greeted,
there is too little fear of an earthquake for a good trade of the
pills of these messieurs, or for fair play to the remedies you will not
disclose till called in."

"Ah, Mademoiselle! playful wit from lips not formed for politics makes
me forget all about emperors and earthquakes. Pardon that commonplace
compliment--remember I am a Frenchman, and cannot help being frivolous."

"You rebuke my presumption too gently. True, I ought not to intrude
political subjects on one like you--I understand so little about
them--but this is my excuse, I do so desire to know more."

M. de Mauleon paused, and looked at her earnestly with a kindly, half
compassionate look, wholly free from the impertinence of gallantry.
"Young poetess," he said, softly, "you care for politics. Happy, indeed,
is he--and whether he succeed or fail in his ambition abroad, proud
should he be of an ambition crowned at home--he who has made you desire
to know more of politics!"

The girl felt the blood surge to her temples. How could she have been so
self-confessed? She made no reply, nor did M. de Mauleon seem to expect
one; with that rare delicacy of high breeding which appears in France
to belong to a former generation, he changed his tone, and went on as if
there had been no interruption to the question her words implied.

"You think the Empire secure--that it is menaced by on earthquake? You
deceive yourself. The Emperor began with a fatal mistake, but a mistake
it needs many years to discover. He disdained the slow natural process
of adjustment between demand and supply--employer and workmen. He
desired--no ignoble ambition--to make Paris the wonder of the world,
the eternal monument of his reign. In so doing, he sought to create
artificial modes of content for revolutionary workmen. Never has any
ruler had such tender heed of manual labour to the disparagement of
intellectual culture. Paris is embellished; Paris is the wonder of the
world; other great towns have followed its example; they, too, have
their rows of palaces and temples. Well, the time comes when the
magician can no longer give work to the spirits he raises; then they
must fall on him and rend: out of the very houses he built for the
better habitation of workmen will flock the malcontents who cry, 'Down
with the Empire!' On the 21st of May you witnessed the pompous ceremony
which announces to the Empire a vast majority of votes, that will be
utterly useless to it except as food for gunpowder in the times that are
at hand. Seven days before, on the 14th of May, there was a riot in the
Faubourg d'Temple--easily put down--you scarcely hear of it. That riot
was not the less necessary to those who would warn the Empire that it is
mortal. True, the riot disperses--but it is unpunished; riot unpunished
is a revolution begun. The earthquake is nearer than you think; and for
that earthquake what are the pills you quacks advertise? They prate
of an age too enlightened for war; they would mutilate the army--nay,
disband it if they could--with Prussia next door to France. Prussia,
desiring, not unreasonably, to take that place in the world which France
now holds, will never challenge France; if she did, she would be too
much in the wrong to find a second: Prussia knowing that she has to do
with the vainest, the most conceited, the rashest antagonist that ever
flourished a rapier in the face of a spadassin--Prussia will make France
challenge her.

"And how do ces messieurs deal with the French army? Do they dare to say
to the ministers, 'Reform it'? Do they dare say, 'Prefer for men
whose first duty it is to obey, discipline to equality--insist on the
distinction between the officer and the private, and never confound it;
Prussian officers are well-educated gentlemen, see that yours are'? Oh
no; they are democrats too stanch not to fraternise with an armed mob;
they content themselves with grudging an extra sou to the Commissariat,
and winking at the millions fraudulently pocketed by some 'Liberal
contractor.' Dieu des dieux! France to be beaten, not as at Waterloo
by hosts combined, but in fair duel by a single foe! Oh, the shame! the
shame! But as the French army is now organised, beaten she must be, if
she meets the march of the German."

"You appal me with your sinister predictions," said Isaura; "but,
happily, there is no sign of war. M. Duplessis, who is in the confidence
of the Emperor, told us only the other day that Napoleon, on learning
the result of the plebiscite, said: 'The foreign journalists who have
been insisting that the Empire cannot coexist with free institutions,
will no longer hint that it can be safely assailed from without.' And
more than ever I may say L'Empire c'est la paix!"

Monsieur de Mauleon shrugged his shoulders. "The old story--Troy and the
wooden horse."

"Tell me, M. de Mauleon, why do you, who so despise the Opposition, join
with it in opposing the Empire?"

"Mademoiselle, the Empire opposes me; while it lasts I cannot be even a
Depute; when it is gone, Heaven knows that I may be, perhaps Dictator;
one thing, you may rely upon, that I would, if not Dictator myself,
support any man who was better fitted for that task."

"Better fitted to destroy the liberty which he pretended to fight for."

"Not exactly so," replied M. de Mauleon, imperturbably--"better fitted
to establish a good government in lieu of the bad one he had fought
against, and the much worse governments that would seek to turn France
into a madhouse, and make the maddest of the inmates the mad doctor!" He
turned away, and here their conversation ended.

But it so impressed Isaura, that the same night she concluded her letter
to Madame de Grantmesnil, by giving a sketch of its substance, prefaced
by an ingenuous confession that she felt less sanguine confidence in
the importance of the applauses which had greeted the Emperor at the
Saturday's ceremonial, and ending thus: "I can but confusedly transcribe
the words of this singular man, and can give you no notion of the manner
and the voice which made them eloquent. Tell me, can there be any truth
in his gloomy predictions? I try not to think so, but they seem to rest
over that brilliant hall of the Louvre like an ominous thunder-cloud."




CHAPTER II.

The Marquis de Rochebriant was seated in his pleasant apartment,
glancing carelessly at the envelopes of many notes and letters lying yet
unopened on his breakfast-table. He had risen late at noon, for he had
not gone to bed till dawn. The night had been spent at his club--over
the card-table--by no means to the pecuniary advantage of the Marquis.
The reader will have learned, through the conversation recorded in a
former chapter between De Mauleon and Enguerrand de Vandemar, that the
austere Seigneur Breton had become a fast viveur of Paris. He had long
since spent the remnant of Louvier's premium of L10,000., and he owed
a year's interest. For this last there was an excuse. M. Collot, the
contractor to whom he had been advised to sell the yearly fall of his
forest-trees, had removed the trees, but had never paid a sou beyond
the preliminary deposit; so that the revenue, out of which the mortgagee
should be paid his interest, was not forthcoming. Alain had instructed
M. Hebert to press the contractor; the contractor had replied, that if
not pressed he could soon settle all claims--if pressed, he must declare
himself bankrupt. The Chevalier de Finisterre had laughed at the alarm
which Alain conceived when he first found himself in the condition
of debtor for a sum he could not pay--creditor for a sum he could not
recover.

"Bagatelle!" said the Chevalier. "Tschu! Collot, if you give him time,
is as safe as the Bank of France, and Louvier knows it. Louvier will not
trouble you--Louvier, the best fellow in the world! I'll call on him and
explain matters."

It is to be presumed that the Chevalier did so explain; for though both
at the first, and quite recently at the second default of payment, Alain
received letters from M. Louvier's professional agent, as reminders of
interest due, and as requests for its payment, the Chevalier assured him
that these applications were formalities of convention--that Louvier, in
fact, knew nothing about them; and when dining with the great financier
himself, and cordially welcomed and called "Mon cher," Alain had taken
him aside and commenced explanation and excuse, Louvier had cut him
short. "Peste! don't mention such trifles. There is such a thing as
business--that concerns my agent; such a thing as friendship--that
concerns me. Allez!"

Thus M. de Rochebriant, confiding in debtor and in creditor, had
suffered twelve months to glide by without much heed of either, and more
than live up to an income amply sufficient indeed for the wants of an
ordinary bachelor, but needing more careful thrift than could well be
expected from the head of one of the most illustrious houses in France,
cast so young into the vortex of the most expensive capital in the
world.

The poor Marquis glided into the grooves that slant downward, much as
the French Marquis of tradition was wont to glide; not that he appeared
to live extravagantly, but he needed all he had for his pocket-money,
and had lost that dread of being in debt which he had brought up from
the purer atmosphere of Bretagne.

But there were some debts which; of course, a Rochebriant must
pay--debts of honour--and Alain had, on the previous night, incurred
such a debt and must pay it that day. He had been strongly tempted, when
the debt rose to the figure it had attained, to risk a change of luck;
but whatever his imprudence, he was incapable of dishonesty. If the luck
did not change, and he lost more, he would be without means to meet his
obligations. As the debt now stood, he calculated that he could just
discharge it by the sale of his coupe and horses. It is no wonder he
left his letters unopened, however charming they might be; he was quite
sure they would contain no cheque which would enable him to pay his debt
and retain his equipage.

The door opened, and the valet announced M. le Chevalier de
Finisterre--a man with smooth countenance and air distinque, a pleasant
voice and perpetual smile.

"Well, mon cher," cried the Chevalier, "I hope that you recovered the
favour of Fortune before you quitted her green table last night. When I
left she seemed very cross with you."

"And so continued to the end," answered Alain, with well-simulated
gaiety--much too bon gentilhomme to betray rage or anguish for pecuniary
loss.

"After all," said de Finisterre, lighting his cigarette, "the uncertain
goddess could not do you much harm; the stakes were small, and your
adversary, the Prince, never goes double or quits."

"Nor I either. 'Small,' however, is a word of relative import; the
stakes might be small to you, to me large. Entre nous, cher ami, I am
at the end of my purse, and I have only this consolation-I am cured of
play: not that I leave the complaint, the complaint leaves me; it can no
more feed on me than a fever can feed on a skeleton."

"Are you serious?"

"As serious as a mourner who has just buried his all."

"His all? Tut, with such an estate as Rochebriant!"

For the first time in that talk Alain's countenance became overcast.

"And how long will Rochebriant be mine? You know that I hold it at the
mercy of the mortgagee, whose interest has not been paid, and who could
if, he so pleased, issue notice, take proceedings--that--"

"Peste!" interrupted de Finisterre; "Louvier take proceedings! Louvier,
the best fellow in the world! But don't I see his handwriting on that
envelope? No doubt an invitation to dinner."

Alain took up the letter thus singled forth from a miscellany of
epistles, some in female handwritings, unsealed but ingeniously
twisted into Gordian knots--some also in female handwritings, carefully
sealed--others in ill-looking envelopes, addressed in bold, legible,
clerk-like caligraphy. Taken altogether, these epistles had a character
in common; they betokened the correspondence of a viveur, regarded from
the female side as young, handsome, well-born--on the male side, as a
viveur who had forgotten to pay his hosier and tailor.

Louvier wrote a small, not very intelligible, but very masculine hand,
as most men who think cautiously and act promptly do write. The letter
ran thus:

"Cher petit Marquis" (at that commencement Alain haughtily raised his
head and bit his lips).

   "CHER PETIT MARQUIS,--It is an age since I have seen you. No
   doubt my humble soirees are too dull for a beau seigueur so
   courted. I forgive you. Would I were a beau seigneur at your age!
   Alas! I am only a commonplace man of business, growing old, too.
   Aloft from the world in which I dwell, you can scarcely be aware
   that I have embarked a great part of my capital in building
   speculations. There is a Rue de Louvier that runs its drains right
   through my purse. I am obliged to call in the moneys due to me. My
   agent informs me that I am just 7000 louis short of the total I
   need--all other debts being paid in--and that there is a trifle more
   than 7000 louis owned to me as interest on my hypotheque on
   Rochebriant: kindly pay into his hands before the end of this week
   that sum. You have been too lenient to Collot, who must owe you
   more than that. Send agent to him. Desole to trouble you, and am
   au desespoir to think that my own pressing necessities compel me
   to urge you to take so much trouble. Mais que faire? The Rue de
   Louvier stops the way, and I must leave it to my agent to clear it.

   "Accept all my excuses, with the assurance of my sentiments the most
   cordial. PAUL LOUVIER."

Alain tossed the letter to De Finisterre. "Read that from the best
fellow in the world."

The Chevalier laid down his cigarette and read. "Diable!" he said, when
he returned the letter and resumed the cigarette--"Diable! Louvier must
be much pressed for money, or he would not have written in this strain.
What does it matter? Collot owes you more than 7000 louis. Let your
lawyer get them, and go to sleep with both ears on your pillow."

"Ah! you think Collot can pay if he will?"

"Ah! foi! did not M. Gandrin tell you that M. Collot was safe to buy
your wood at more money than any one else would give?"

"Certainly," said Alain, comforted. "Gandrin left that impression on my
mind. I will set him on the man. All will come right, I dare say; but if
it does not come right, what would Louvier do?"

"Louvier do!" answered Finisterre, reflectively. "Well do you ask my
opinion and advice?"

"Earnestly, I ask."

"Honestly, then, I answer. I am a little on the Bourse myself--most
Parisians are. Louvier has made a gigantic speculation in this new
street, and with so many other irons in the fire he must want all the
money he can get at. I dare say that if you do not pay him what you owe,
he must leave it to his agent to take steps for announcing the sale
of Rochebriant. But he detests scandal; he hates the notion of being
severe; rather than that, in spite of his difficulties, he will buy
Rochebriant of you at a better price than it can command at public sale.
Sell it to him. Appeal to him to act generously, and you will flatter
him. You will get more than the old place is worth. Invest the
surplus--live as you have done, or better--and marry an heiress.
Morbleu! a Marquis de Rochebriant, if he were sixty years old, would
rank high in the matrimonial market. The more the democrats have sought
to impoverish titles and laugh down historical names, the more do rich
democrat fathers-in-law seek to decorate their daughters with titles
and give their grandchildren the heritage of historical names. You look
shocked, pauvre anti. Let us hope, then, that Collot will pay. Set your
dog--I mean your lawyer--at him; seize him by the throat!"

Before Alain had recovered from the stately silence with which he had
heard this very practical counsel, the valet again appeared, and ushered
in M. Frederic Lemercier.

There was no cordial acquaintance between the visitors. Lemercier was
chafed at finding himself supplanted in Alain's intimate companionship
by so new a friend, and De Finisterre affected to regard Lemercier as a
would-be exquisite of low birth and bad taste.

Alain, too, was a little discomposed at the sight of Lemercier,
remembering the wise cautious which that old college friend had wasted
on him at the commencement of his Parisian career, and smitten with vain
remorse that the cautions had been so arrogantly slighted.

It was with some timidity that he extended his hand to Frederic, and he
was surprised as well as moved by the more than usual warmth with which
it was grasped by the friend he had long neglected. Such affectionate
greeting was scarcely in keeping with the pride which characterised
Frederic Lemercier.

"Ma foi!" said the Chevalier, glancing towards the clock, "how time
flies! I had no idea it was so late. I must leave you now, my dear
Rochebriant. Perhaps we shall meet at the club later--I dine there
to-day. Au plaisir, M. Lemercier."




CHAPTER III.

When the door had closed on the Chevalier, Frederic's countenance became
very grave. Drawing his chair near to Alain, he said: "We have not seen
much of each other lately,--nay, no excuses; I am well aware that it
could scarcely be otherwise. Paris has grown so large and so subdivided
into sets, that the best friends belonging to different sets become
as divided as if the Atlantic flowed between them. I come to-day in
consequence of something I have just heard from Duplessis. Tell me, have
you got the money for the wood you sold to M. Collot a year ago?"

"No," said Alain, falteringly.

"Good heavens! none of it?"

"Only the deposit of ten per cent., which of course I spent, for it
formed the greater part of my income. What of Collot? Is he really
unsafe?"

"He is ruined, and has fled the country. His flight was the talk of the
Bourse this morning. Duplessis told me of it."

Alain's face paled. "How is Louvier to be paid? Read that letter!"

Lemercier rapidly scanned his eye over the contents of Louvier's letter.

"It is true, then, that you owe this man a year's interest--more than
7,000 louis?"

"Somewhat more--yes. But that is not the first care that troubles
me--Rochebriant may be lost, but with it not my honour. I owe the
Russian Prince 300 louis, lost to him last night at ecarte. I must
find a purchaser for my coupe and horses; they cost me 600 louis last
year,--do you know any one who will give me three?"

"Pooh! I will give you six; your alezan alone is worth half the money!"

"My dear Frederic, I will not sell them to you on any account. But you
have so many friends--"

"Who would give their soul to say, 'I bought these horses of
Rochebriant.' Of course I do. Ha! young Rameau, you are acquainted with
him?"

"Rameau! I never heard of him!"

"Vanity of vanities, then what is fame? Rameau is the editor of Le Sens
Commun. You read that journal?"

"Yes, it has clever articles, and I remember how I was absorbed in the
eloquent romance which appeared in it."

"Ah! by the Signora Cicogna, with whom I think you were somewhat smitten
last year."

"Last year--was I? How a year can alter a man! But my debt to the
Prince. What has Le Sens Commun to do with my horses?"

"I met Rameau at Savarin's the other evening. He was making himself out
a hero and a martyr! his coupe had been taken from him to assist in a
barricade in that senseless emeute ten days ago; the coupe got smashed,
the horses disappeared. He will buy one of your horses and coupe.

"Leave it to me! I know where to dispose of the other two horses. At
what hour do you want the money?"

"Before I go to dinner at the club."

"You shall have it within two hours; but you must not dine at the club
to-day. I have a note from Duplessis to invite you to dine with him
to-day!"

"Duplessis! I know so little of him!"

"You should know him better. He is the only man who can give you sound
advice as to this difficulty with Louvier; and he will give it the more
carefully and zealously because he has that enmity to Louvier which one
rival financier has to another. I dine with him too. We shall find an
occasion to consult him quietly; he speaks of you most kindly. What a
lovely girl his daughter is!"

"I dare say. Ah! I wish I had been less absurdly fastidious. I wish I
had entered the army as a private soldier six months ago; I should have
been a corporal by this time! Still it is not too late. When Rochebriant
is gone, I can yet say with the Mouszquetaire in the melodrame: 'I am
rich--I have my honour and my sword!'"

"Nonsense! Rochebriant shall be saved; meanwhile I hasten to Rameau. Au
revoir, at the Hotel Duplessis--seven o'clock."

Lemercier went, and in less than two hours sent the Marquis bank-notes
for 600 louis, requesting an order for the delivery of the horses and
carriage.

That order written and signed, Alain hastened to acquit himself of his
debt of honour, and contemplating his probable ruin with a lighter heart
presented himself at the Hotel Duplessis.

Duplessis made no pretensions to vie with the magnificent existence of
Louvier. His house, though agreeably situated and flatteringly styled
the Hotel Duplessis, was of moderate size, very unostentatiously
furnished; nor was it accustomed to receive the brilliant motley crowds
which assembled in the salons of the elder financier.

Before that year, indeed, Duplessis had confined such entertainments as
he gave to quiet men of business, or a few of the more devoted and loyal
partisans of the Imperial dynasty; but since Valerie came to live with
him he had extended his hospitalities to wider and livelier circles,
including some celebrities in the world of art and letters as well as of
fashion. Of the party assembled that evening at dinner were Isaura, with
the Signora Venosta, one of the Imperial Ministers, the Colonel
whom Alain had already met at Lemercier's supper, Deputes (ardent
Imperialists), and the Duchesse de Tarascon; these, with Alain and
Frederic, made up the party. The conversation was not particularly gay.
Duplessis himself, though an exceedingly well-read and able man, had not
the genial accomplishments of a brilliant host. Constitutionally grave
and habitually taciturn--though there were moments in which he was
roused out of his wonted self into eloquence or wit--he seemed to-day
absorbed in some engrossing train of thought. The Minister, the Deputes
and the Duchesse de Tarascon talked politics, and ridiculed the trumpery
emeute of the 14th; exulted in the success of the plebiscite; and
admitting, with indignation, the growing strength of Prussia, and--with
scarcely less indignation, but more contempt, censuring the selfish
egotism of England in disregarding the due equilibrium of the European
balance of power,--hinted at the necessity of annexing Belgium as a
set-off against the results of Sadowa.

Alain found himself seated next to Isaura--to the woman who had so
captivated his eye and fancy on his first arrival in Paris.

Remembering his last conversation with Graham nearly a year ago, he felt
some curiosity to ascertain whether the rich Englishman had proposed to
her, and if so, been refused or accepted.

The first words that passed between them were trite enough, but after a
little pause in the talk, Alain said:

"I think Mademoiselle and myself have an acquaintance in common-Monsieur
Vane, a distinguished Englishman. Do you know if he be in Paris at
present? I have not seen him for many months."

"I believe he is in London; at least, Colonel Morley met the other day a
friend of his who said so."

Though Isaura strove to speak in a tone of indifference, Alain's ear
detected a ring of pain in her voice; and watching her countenance, he
was impressed with a saddened change in its expression. He was touched,
and his curiosity was mingled with a gentler interest as he said "When I
last saw M. Vane I should have judged him to be too much under the spell
of an enchantress to remain long without the pale of the circle she
draws around her."

Isaura turned her face quickly towards the speaker, and her lips moved,
but she said nothing audibly.

"Can there have been quarrel or misunderstanding?" thought Alain; and
after that question his heart asked itself, "Supposing Isaura were free,
her affections disengaged, could he wish to woo and to win her?" and his
heart answered--"Eighteen months ago thou wert nearer to her than now.
Thou wert removed from her for ever when thou didst accept the world
as a barrier between you; then, poor as thou wert, thou wouldst have
preferred her to riches. Thou went then sensible only of the ingenuous
impulses of youth, but the moment thou saidst, 'I am Rochebriant, and
having once owned the claims of birth and station, I cannot renounce
them for love, Isaura became but a dream. Now that ruin stares thee in
the face--now that thou must grapple with the sternest difficulties of
adverse fate--thou hast lost the poetry of sentiment which could alone
give to that dream the colours and the form of human life." He could not
again think of that fair creature as a prize that he might even dare to
covet. And as he met her inquiring eyes, and saw her quivering lip,
he felt instinctively that Graham was dear to her, and that the tender
interest with which she inspired himself was untroubled by one pang of
jealousy. He resumed:

"Yes, the last time I saw the Englishman he spoke with such respectful
homage of one lady, whose hand he would deem it the highest reward of
ambition to secure, that I cannot but feel deep compassion for him
if that ambition has been foiled; and thus only do I account for his
absence from Paris."

"You are an intimate friend of Mr. Vane's?"

"No, indeed, I have not that honour; our acquaintance is but slight,
but it impressed me with the idea of a man of vigorous intellect, frank
temper, and perfect honour."

Isaura's face brightened with the joy we feel when we hear the praise of
those we love.

At this moment, Duplessis, who had been observing the Italian and the
young Marquis, for the first time during dinner, broke silence.

"Mademoiselle," he said, addressing Isaura across the table, "I hope I
have not been correctly informed that your literary triumph has induced
you to forego the career in which all the best judges concur that your
successes would be not less brilliant; surely one art does not exclude
another."

Elated by Alain's report of Graham's words, by the conviction that these
words applied to herself, and by the thought that her renunciation of
the stage removed a barrier between them, Isaura answered, with a sort
of enthusiasm:

"I know not, M. Duplessis, if one art excludes another; if there be
desire to excel in each. But I have long lost all desire to excel in
the art you refer to, and resigned all idea of the career in which it
opens."

"So M. Vane told me," said Alain, in a whisper.

"When?"

"Last year--on the day that he spoke in terms of admiration so merited
of the lady whom M. Duplessis has just had the honour to address."

All this while, Valerie, who was seated at the further end of the table
beside the Minister, who had taken her in to dinner, had been watching,
with eyes, the anxious tearful sorrow of which none but her father had
noticed, the low-voiced confidence between Alain and the friend, whom
till that day she had so enthusiastically loved. Hitherto she had been
answering in monosyllables all attempts of the great man to draw her
into conversation; but now, observing how Isaura blushed and looked
down, that strange faculty in women, which we men call dissimulation,
and which in them is truthfulness to their own nature, enabled her to
carry off the sharpest anguish she had ever experienced, by a sudden
burst of levity of spirit. She caught up some commonplace the Minister
had adapted to what he considered the poverty of her understanding, with
a quickness of satire which startled that grave man, and he gazed at her
astonished. Up to that moment he had secretly admired her as a girl well
brought up--as girls fresh from a French convent are supposed to be;
now, hearing her brilliant rejoinder to his stupid observation, he said
inly: "Dame! the low birth of a financier's daughter shows itself."

But, being a clever man himself, her retort put him on his mettle, and
he became, to his own amazement, brilliant himself. With that matchless
quickness which belongs to Parisians, the guests around him seized the
new esprit de conversation which had been evoked between the statesman
and the childlike girl beside him; and as they caught up the ball,
lightly flung among them, they thought within themselves how much
more sparkling the financier's pretty, lively daughter was than that
dark-eyed young muse, of whom all the journalists of Paris were writing
in a chorus of welcome and applause, and who seemed not to have a word
to say worth listening to, except to the handsome young Marquis, whom,
no doubt, she wished to fascinate.

Valerie fairly outshone Isaura in intellect and in wit; and neither
Valerie nor Isaura cared, to the value of a bean-straw, about that
distinction. Each was thinking only of the prize which the humblest
peasant women have in common with the most brilliantly accomplished of
their sex--the heart of a man beloved.




CHAPTER IV.

On the Continent generally, as we all know, men do not sit drinking wine
together after the ladies retire. So when the signal was given all the
guests adjourned to the salon; and Alain quitted Isaura to gain the ear
of the Duchesse de Tarascon.

"It is long--at, least long for Paris life," said the Marquis--"since
my first visit to you, in company with Enguerrand de Vandemar. Much that
you then said rested on my mind, disturbing the prejudices I took from
Bretagne."

"I am proud to hear it, my kinsman."

"You know that I would have taken military service under the Emperor,
but for the regulation which would have compelled me to enter the ranks
as a private soldier."

"I sympathise with that scruple; but you are aware that the Emperor
himself could not have ventured to make any exception even in your
favour."

"Certainly not. I repent me of my pride; perhaps I may enlist still in
some regiment sent to Algiers."

"No; there are other ways in which a Rochebriant can serve a throne.
There will be an office at Court vacant soon, which would not misbecome
your birth."

"Pardon me; a soldier serves his country--a courtier owns a master; and
I cannot take the livery of the Emperor, though I could wear the uniform
of France."

"Your distinction is childish, my kinsman," said the Duchesse,
impetuously. "You talk as if the Emperor had an interest apart from the
nation. I tell you that he has not a corner of his heart--not even one
reserved for his son and his dynasty--in which the thought of France
does not predominate."

"I do not presume, Madame la Duchesse, to question the truth of what
you say; but I have no reason to suppose that the same thought does not
predominate in the heart of the Bourbon. The Bourbon would be the first
to say to me: 'If France needs your sword against her foes, let it
not rest in the scabbard.' But would the Bourbon say, 'The place of a
Rochebriant is among the valetaille of the Corsican's successor'?"

"Alas for poor France!" said the Duchesse; "and alas for men like you,
my proud cousin, if the Corsican's successors or successor be--"

"Henry V." interrupted Alain, with a brightening eye. "Dreamer! No;
some descendant of the mob-kings who gave Bourbons and nobles to the
guillotine."

While the Duchesse and Alain were thus conversing, Isaura had seated
herself by Valerie, and, unconscious of the offence she had given,
addressed her in those pretty caressing terms with which young-lady
friends are wont to compliment each other; but Valerie answered curtly
or sarcastically, and turned aside to converse with the Minister. A
few minutes more, and the party began to break up. Lemercier, however,
detained Alain, whispering, "Duplessis will see us on your business so
soon as the other guests have gone."




CHAPTER V.

"Monsieur le Marquis," said Duplessis, when the salon was cleared of all
but himself and the two friends, "Lemercier has confided to me the
state of your affairs in connection with M. Louvier, and flatters me by
thinking my advice may be of some service; if so, command me."

"I shall most gratefully accept your advice," answered Alain, "but I
fear my condition defies even your ability and skill."

"Permit me to hope not, and to ask a few necessary questions. M. Louvier
has constituted himself your sole mortgagee; to what amount, at what
interest, and from what annual proceeds is the interest paid?"

Herewith Alain gave details already furnished to the reader. Duplessis
listened, and noted down the replies.

"I see it all," he said, when Alain had finished. "M. Louvier had
predetermined to possess himself of your estate: he makes himself
mortgagee at a rate of interest so low, that I tell you fairly, at the
present value of money, I doubt if you could find any capitalist who
would accept the transfer of the mortgage at the same rate. This is not
like Louvier, unless he had an object to gain, and that object is your
land. The revenue from your estate is derived chiefly from wood, out
of which the interest due to Louvier is to be paid. M. Gandrin, in a
skilfully-guarded letter, encourages you to sell the wood from your
forests to a man who offers you several thousand francs more than it
could command from customary buyers. I say nothing against M. Gandrin,
but every man who knows Paris as I do, knows that M. Louvier can
put, and has put, a great deal of money into M. Gandrin's pocket. The
purchaser of your wood does not pay more than his deposit, and has
just left the country insolvent. Your purchaser, M. Collot, was an
adventurous speculator; he would have bought anything at any price,
provided he had time to pay; if his speculations had been lucky he would
have paid. M. Louvier knew, as I knew, that M. Collot was a gambler,
and the chances were that he would not pay. M. Louvier allows a year's
interest on his hypotheque to become due-notice thereof duly given
to you by his agent--now you come under the operation of the law. Of
course, you know what the law is?"

"Not exactly," answered Alain, feeling frostbitten by the congealing
words of his counsellor; "but I take it for granted that if I cannot pay
the interest of a sum borrowed on my property, that property itself is
forfeited."

"No, not quite that--the law is mild. If the interest which should be
paid half-yearly remains unpaid at the end of a year, the mortgagee has
a right to be impatient, has he not?"

"Certainly he has."

"Well, then, on fait un commandement tendant de saisie immobiliere, viz:
The mortgagee gives a notice that the property shall be put up for sale.
Then it is put up for sale, and in most cases the mortgagee buys it in.
Here, certainly, no competitors in the mere business way would vie with
Louvier; the mortgage at three and a half per cent. covers more than the
estate is apparently worth. Ah! but stop, M. le Marquis; the notice is
not yet served: the whole process would take six months from the day it
is served to the taking possession after the sale; in the meanwhile, if
you pay the interest due, the action drops. Courage, M. le Marquis! Hope
yet, if you condescend to call me friend."

"And me," cried Lemercier; "I will sell out of my railway shares
to-morrow-see to it, Duplessis--enough to pay off the damnable interest.
See to it, mon ami."

"Agree to that, M. le Marquis, and you are safe for another year," said
Duplessis, folding up the paper on which he had made his notes, but
fixing on Alain quiet eyes half concealed under drooping lids.

"Agree to that!" cried Rochebriant, rising--"agree to allow even my
worst enemy to pay for me moneys I could never hope to repay--agree
to allow the oldest and most confiding friends to do so--M. Duplessis,
never! If I carried the porter's knot of an Auverguat, I should still
remain gentilhomme and Breton."

Duplessis, habitually the driest of men, rose with a moistened eye and
flushing cheek--"Monsieur le Marquis, vouchsafe me the honour to shake
hands with you. I, too, am by descent gentilhomme, by profession a
speculator on the Bourse. In both capacities I approve the sentiment you
have uttered. Certainly, if our friend Frederic lent you 7000 Louis or
so this year, it would be impossible for you even to foresee the year
in which you could repay it; but,"--here Duplessis paused a minute, and
then lowering the tone of his voice, which had been somewhat vehement
and enthusiastic, into that of a colloquial good-fellowship, equally
rare to the measured reserve of the financier, he asked, with a lively
twinkle of his grey eye, "Did you never hear, Marquis, of a little
encounter between me and M. Louvier?"

"Encounter at arms--does Louvier fight?" asked Alain, innocently.

"In his own way he is always fighting; but I speak metaphorically. You
see this small house of mine--so pinched in by the houses next to
it that I can neither get space for a ball-room for Valerie, nor a
dining-room for more than a friendly party like that which has honoured
me to-day. Eh bien! I bought this house a few years ago, meaning to buy
the one next to it and throw the two into one. I went to the proprietor
of the next house, who, as I knew, wished to sell. 'Aha,' he thought,
'this is the rich Monsieur Duplessis;' and he asked me 2000 louis more
than the house was worth. We men of business cannot bear to be too much
cheated; a little cheating we submit to--much cheating raises our gall.
Bref--this was on Monday. I offered the man 1000 louis above the fair
price, and gave him till Thursday to decide. Somehow or other Louvier
hears of this. 'Hillo!' says Louvier, 'here is a financier who desires a
hotel to vie with mine!' He goes on Wednesday to my next-door neighbour.
'Friend, you want to sell your house. I want to buy--the price?' The
proprietor, who does not know him by sight, says: 'It is as good as
sold. M. Duplessis and I shall agree.' 'Bah! What sum did you ask M.
Duplessis?' He names the sum; 2000 louis more than he can get elsewhere.
'But M. Duplessis will give me the sum.' 'You ask too little. I will
give 3000. A fig for M. Duplessis. I am Monsieur Louvier.' So when I
call on Thursday the house is sold. I reconcile myself easily enough to
the loss of space for a larger dining-room; but though Valerie was then
a child at a convent, I was sadly disconcerted by the thought that I
could have no salle de bal ready for her when she came to reside with
me. Well, I say to myself, patience; I owe M. Louvier a good turn; my
time to pay him off will come. It does come, and very soon. M. Louvier
buys an estate near Paris--builds a superb villa. Close to his property
is a rising forest ground for sale. He goes to the proprietor: says the
proprietor to himself, 'The great Louvier wants this,' and adds 5000
louis to its market price. Louvier, like myself, can't bear to be
cheated egregiously. Louvier offers 2000 louis more than the man
could fairly get, and leaves him till Saturday to consider. I hear of
this--speculators hear of everything. On Friday night I go to the man
and I give him 6000 louis, where he had asked 5000. Fancy Louvier's face
the next day! But there my revenge only begins," continued Duplessis,
chuckling inwardly. "My forest looks down on the villa he is building. I
only wait till his villa is built, in order to send to my architect
and say, Build me a villa at least twice as grand as M. Louvier's, then
clear away the forest trees, so that every morning he may see my palace
dwarfing into insignificance his own."

"Bravo!" cried Lemercier, clapping his hands. Lemercier had the spirit
of party, and felt for Duplessis against Louvier much as in England Whig
feels against Tory, or vice versa.

"Perhaps now," resumed Duplessis, more soberly,--"perhaps now, M.
le Marquis, you may understand why I humiliate you by no sense of
obligation if I say that M. Louvier shall not be the Seigneur de
Rochebriant if I can help it. Give me a line of introduction to your
Breton lawyer and to Mademoiselle your aunt--let me have your letters
early to-morrow. I will take the afternoon train. I know not how many
days I may be absent, but I shall not return till I have carefully
examined the nature and conditions of your property. If I see my way to
save your estate, and give a mauvais quart d'heure to Louvier, so much
the better for you, M. le Marquis; if I cannot, I will say frankly,
'Make the best terms you can with your creditor.'"

"Nothing can be more delicately generous than the way you put it,"
said Alain; "but pardon me, if I say that the pleasantry with which you
narrate your grudge against M. Louvier does not answer its purpose in
diminishing my sense of obligation." So, linking his arm in Lemercier's,
Alain made his bow and withdrew.

When his guests had gone, Duplessis remained seated in
meditation--apparently pleasant meditation, for he smiled while
indulging it; he then passed through the reception-rooms to one at the
far end appropriated to Valerie as a boudoir or morning-room, adjoining
her bed-chamber; he knocked gently at the door, and, all remaining
silent within, he opened it noiselessly and entered. Valerie was
reclining on the sofa near the window-her head drooping, her hands
clasped on her knees. Duplessis neared her with tender stealthy steps,
passed his arm round her, and drew her head towards his bosom. "Child!"
he murmured; "my child, my only one!"

At that soft loving voice, Valerie flung her arms round him, and wept
aloud like an infant in trouble. He seated himself beside her, and
wisely suffered her to weep on, till her passion had exhausted itself;
he then said, half fondly, half chillingly: "Have you forgotten our
conversation only three days ago? Have you forgotten that I then drew
forth the secret of your heart? Have you forgotten what I promised you
in return for your confidence? and a promise to you have I ever yet
broken?"

"Father! father! I am so wretched and so ashamed of myself for being
wretched! Forgive me. No, I do not forget your promise; but who can
promise to dispose of the heart of another? and that heart will never be
mine. But bear with me a little, I shall soon recover."

"Valerie, when I made you the promise you now think I cannot keep, I
spoke only from that conviction of power to promote the happiness of a
child which nature implants in the heart of parents; and it may be also
from the experience of my own strength of will, since that which I have
willed I have always won. Now I speak on yet surer ground. Before the
year is out you shall be the beloved wife of Alain de Rochebriant. Dry
your tears and smile on me, Valerie. If you will not see in me mother
and father both, I have double love for you, motherless child of her
who shared the poverty of my youth, and did not live to enjoy the wealth
which I hold as a trust for that heir to mine all which she left me."

As this man thus spoke you would scarcely have recognized in him the
old saturnine Duplessis, his countenance became so beautified by the
one soft feeling which care and contest, ambition and money-seeking, had
left unaltered in his heart. Perhaps there is no country in which the
love of parent and child, especially of father and daughter, is so
strong as it is in France; even in the most arid soil, among the
avaricious, even among the profligate, it forces itself into flower.
Other loves fade away: in the heart of the true Frenchman that parent
love blooms to the last. Valerie felt the presence of that love as a
divine protecting guardianship. She sank on her knees and covered his
hand with grateful kisses.

"Do not torture yourself, my child, with jealous fears of the fair
Italian. Her lot and Alain de Rochebriant's can never unite; and
whatever you may think of their whispered converse, Alain's heart at
this moment is too filled with anxious troubles to leave one spot in it
accessible even to a frivolous gallantry. It is for us to remove these
troubles; and then, when he turns his eyes towards you, it will be
with the gaze of one who beholds his happiness. You do not weep now,
Valerie!"





BOOK IX.




CHAPTER I.

On waking some morning, have you ever felt, reader, as if a change for
the brighter in the world, without and within you, had suddenly come to
pass-some new glory has been given to the sunshine, some fresh balm to
the air-you feel younger, and happier, and lighter, in the very beat of
your heart-you almost fancy you hear the chime of some spiritual music
far off, as if in the deeps of heaven? You are not at first conscious
how, or wherefore, this change has been brought about. Is it the effect
of a dream in the gone sleep, that has made this morning so different
from mornings that have dawned before? And while vaguely asking yourself
that question, you become aware that the cause is no mere illusion,
that it has its substance in words spoken by living lips, in things that
belong to the work-day world.

It was thus that Isaura woke the morning after the conversation with
Alain de Rochebriant, and as certain words, then spoken, echoed back on
her ear, she knew why she was so happy, why the world was so changed.

In those words she heard the voice of Graham Vane--nor she had not
deceived herself--she was loved! she was loved! What mattered that long
cold interval of absence? She had not forgotten--she could not believe
that absence had brought forgetfulness. There are moments when we insist
on judging another's heart by our own. All would be explained some
day--all would come right.

How lovely was the face that reflected itself in the glass as she stood
before it, smoothing back her long hair, murmuring sweet snatches of
Italian love-song, and blushing with sweeter love-thoughts as she sang!
All that had passed in that year so critical to her outer life--the
authorship, the fame, the public career, the popular praise--vanished
from her mind as a vapour that rolls from the face of a lake to which
the sunlight restores the smile of a brightened heaven.

She was more the girl now than she had ever been since the day on which
she sat reading Tasso on the craggy shore of Sorrento.

Singing still as she passed from her chamber, and entering the
sitting-room, which fronted the east, and seemed bathed in the sunbeams
of deepening May, she took her bird from its cage, and stopped her song
to cover it with kisses, which perhaps yearned for vent somewhere.

Later in the day she went out to visit Valerie. Recalling the altered
manner of her young friend, her sweet nature became troubled. She
divined that Valerie had conceived some jealous pain which she longed
to heal; she could not bear the thought of leaving any one that day
unhappy. Ignorant before of the girl's feelings towards Alain, she now
partly guessed them--one woman who loves in secret is clairvoyante as to
such secrets in another.

Valerie received her visitor with a coldness she did not attempt to
disguise. Not seeming to notice this, Isaura commenced the conversation
with frank mention of Rochebriant. "I have to thank you so much, dear
Valerie, for a pleasure you could not anticipate--that of talking about
an absent friend, and hearing the praise he deserved from one so capable
of appreciating excellence as M. de Rochebriant appears to be."

"You were talking to M. de Rochebriant of an absent friend--ah! you
seemed indeed very much interested in the conversation--"

"Do not wonder at that, Valerie; and do not grudge me the happiest
moments I have known for months."

"In talking with M. de Rochebriant! No doubt, Mademoiselle Cicogna, you
found him very charming."

To her surprise and indignation, Valerie here felt the arm of Isaura
tenderly entwining her waist, and her face drawn towards Isaura's
sisterly kiss.

"Listen to me, naughty child-listen and believe. M. de Rochebriant can
never be charming to me--never touch a chord in my heart or my fancy
except as friend to another, or--kiss me in your turn, Valerie--as
suitor to yourself."

Valerie here drew back her pretty childlike head, gazed keenly a moment
into Isaura's eyes, felt convinced by the limpid candour of their
unmistakable honesty, and flinging herself on her friend's bosom, kissed
her passionately, and burst into tears.

The complete reconciliation between the two girls was thus peacefully
effected; and then Isaura had to listen, at no small length, to the
confidences poured into her ears by Valerie, who was fortunately too
engrossed by her own hopes and doubts to exact confidences in return.
Valerie's was one of those impulsive eager natures that longs for a
confidante. Not so Isaura's. Only when Valerie had unburthened her
heart, and been soothed and caressed into happy trust in the future,
did she recall Isaura's explanatory words, and said, archly: "And your
absent friend? Tell me about him. Is he as handsome as Alain?"

"Nay," said Isaura, rising to take up the mantle and hat she had laid
aside on entering, "they say that the colour of a flower is in our
vision, not in the leaves." Then with a grave melancholy in the look
she fixed upon Valerie, she added: "Rather than distrust of me should
occasion you pain, I have pained myself, in making clear to you the
reason why I felt interest in M. de Rochebriant's conversation. In turn,
I ask of you a favour--do not on this point question me farther. There
are some things in our past which influence the present, but to which
we dare not assign a future--on which we cannot talk to another. What
soothsayer can tell us if the dream of a yesterday will be renewed on
the night of a morrow? All is said--we trust one another, dearest."




CHAPTER II.

That evening the Morleys looked in at Isaura's on their way to a crowded
assembly at the house of one of those rich Americans, who were then
outvying the English residents at Paris in the good graces of Parisian
society. I think the Americans get on better with the French than the
English do--I mean the higher class of Americans. They spend more money;
their men speak French better; the women are better dressed, and, as a
general rule, have read more largely, and converse more frankly. Mrs.
Morley's affection for Isaura had increased during the last few months.
As so notable an advocate of the ascendancy of her sex, she felt a
sort of grateful pride in the accomplishments and growing renown of
so youthful a member of the oppressed sisterhood. But, apart from that
sentiment, she had conceived a tender mother-like interest for the girl
who stood in the world so utterly devoid of family ties, so destitute of
that household guardianship and protection which, with all her assertion
of the strength and dignity of woman, and all her opinions as to woman's
right of absolute emancipation from the conventions fabricated by the
selfishness of man, Mrs. Morley was too sensible not to value for the
individual, though she deemed it not needed for the mass. Her great
desire was that Isaura should marry well, and soon. American women
usually marry so young that it seemed to Mrs. Morley an anomaly in
social life, that one so gifted in mind and person as Isaura should
already have passed the age in which the belles of the great Republic
are enthroned as wives and consecrated as mothers. We have seen that
in the past year she had selected from our unworthy but necessary sex,
Graham Vane as a suitable spouse to her young friend. She had divined
the state of his heart--she had more than suspicions of the state of
Isaura's. She was exceedingly perplexed and exceedingly chafed at the
Englishman's strange disregard to his happiness and her own projects.
She had counted, all this past winter, on his return to Paris; and
she became convinced that some misunderstanding, possibly some lover's
quarrel, was the cause of his protracted absence, and a cause that,
if ascertained, could be removed. A good opportunity now presented
itself--Colonel Morley was going to London the next day. He had business
there which would detain him at least a week. He would see Graham; and
as she considered her husband the shrewdest and wisest person in the
world--I mean of the male sex--she had no doubt of his being able
to turn Graham's mind thoroughly inside out, and ascertain his exact
feelings and intentions. If the Englishman, thus assayed, were found
of base metal, then, at least, Mrs. Morley would be free to cast him
altogether aside, and coin for the uses of the matrimonial market some
nobler effigy in purer gold.

"My dear child," said Mrs. Morley, in a low voice, nestling herself
close to Isaura, while the Colonel, duly instructed, drew off the
Venosta, "have you heard anything lately of our pleasant friend Mr.
Vane?"

You can guess with what artful design Mrs. Morley put that question
point-blank, fixing keen eyes on Isaura while she put it. She saw the
heightened colour, the quivering lip of the girl thus abruptly appealed
to, and she said inly: "I was right--she loves him!"

"I heard of Mr. Vane last night--accidentally."

"Is he coming to Paris soon?"

"Not that I know of. How charmingly that wreath becomes you! it suits
the earrings so well, too."

"Frank chose it; he has good taste for a man. I trust him with my
commissions to Hunt and Roskell's but I limit him as to price, he is
so extravagant--men are, when they make presents. They seem to think we
value things according to their cost. They would gorge us with jewels,
and let us starve for want of a smile. Not that Frank is so bad as the
rest of them. But a propos of Mr. Vane--Frank will be sure to see him,
and scold him well for deserting us all. I should not be surprised if he
brought the deserter back with him, for I send a little note by Frank,
inviting him to pay us a visit. We have spare rooms in our apartments."

Isaura's heart heaved beneath her robe, but she replied in a tone of
astonishing indifference: "I believe this is the height of the London
season, and Mr. Vane would probably be too engaged to profit even by an
invitation so tempting."

"Nous verrons. How pleased he will be to hear of your triumphs! He
admired you so much before you were famous: what will be his admiration
now! men are so vain--they care for us so much more when people praise
us. But till we have put the creatures in their proper place, we must
take them for what they are."

Here the Venosta, with whom the poor Colonel had exhausted all the arts
at his command for chaining her attention, could be no longer withheld
from approaching Mrs. Morley, and venting her admiration of that lady's
wreath, earrings, robes, flounces. This dazzling apparition had on her
the effect which a candle has on a moth--she fluttered round it,
and longed to absorb herself in its blaze. But the wreath especially
fascinated her--a wreath which no prudent lady with colourings less
pure, and features less exquisitely delicate than the pretty champion
of the rights of women, could have fancied on her own brows without a
shudder. But the Venosta in such matters was not prudent. "It can't be
dear," she cried piteously, extending her arms towards Isaura. "I must
have one exactly like. Who made it? Cara signora, give me the address."

"Ask the Colonel, dear Madame; he chose and bought it," and Mrs. Morley
glanced significantly at her well-tutored Frank.

"Madame," said the Colonel, speaking in English, which he usually did
with the Venosta--who valued herself on knowing that language and was
flattered to be addressed in it--while he amused himself by introducing
into its forms the dainty Americanisms with which he puzzled the
Britisher--he might well puzzle the Florentine,--"Madame, I am too
anxious for the appearance of my wife to submit to the test of a rival
schemer like yourself in the same apparel. With all the homage due to a
sex of which I am enthused dreadful, I decline to designate the florist
from whom I purchased Mrs. Morley's head-fixings."

"Wicked man!" cried the Venosta, shaking her finger at him coquettishly.
"You are jealous! Fie! a man should never be jealous of a woman's
rivalry with women;" and then, with a cynicism that might have become
a greybeard, she added, "but of his own sex every man should be
jealous--though of his dearest friend. Isn't it so, Colonello?"

The Colonel looked puzzled, bowed, and made no reply. "That only shows,"
said Mrs. Morley, rising, "what villains the Colonel has the misfortune
to call friends and fellow-men."

"I fear it is time to go," said Frank, glancing at the clock.

In theory the most rebellious, in practice the most obedient, of wives,
Mrs. Morley here kissed Isaura, resettled her crinoline, and shaking
hands with the Venosta, retreated to the door.

"I shall have the wreath yet," cried the Venosta, impishly. "La speranza
e fenamina" (Hope is female).

"Alas!" said Isaura, half mournfully, half smiling, "alas! do you
not remember what the poet replied when asked what disease was most
mortal?--'the hectic fever caught from the chill of hope.'"




CHAPTER III.

Graham Vane was musing very gloomily in his solitary apartment one
morning, when his servant announced Colonel Morley.

He received his visitor with more than the cordiality with which every
English politician receives an American citizen. Graham liked the
Colonel too well for what he was in himself to need any national title
to his esteem. After some preliminary questions and answers as to the
health of Mrs. Morley, the length of the Colonel's stay in London, what
day he could dine with Graham at Richmond or Gravesend, the Colonel took
up the ball. "We have been reckoning to see you at Paris, sir, for the
last six months."

"I am very much flattered to hear that you have thought of me at all;
but I am not aware of having warranted the expectation you so kindly
express."

"I guess you must have said something to my wife which led her to do
more than expect--to reckon on your return. And, by the way, sir, I am
charged to deliver to you this note from her, and to back the request it
contains that you will avail yourself of the offer. Without summarising
the points I do so."

Graham glanced over the note addressed to him

   "DEAR MR. VANE,--Do you forget how beautiful the environs of Paris
   are in May and June? how charming it was last year at the lake of
   Enghien? how gay were our little dinners out of doors in the garden
   arbours, with the Savarins and the fair Italian, and her
   incomparably amusing chaperon? Frank has my orders to bring you
   back to renew these happy days, while the birds are in their first
   song, and the leaves are in their youngest green. I have prepared
   your rooms chez nous--a chamber that looks out on the Champs
   Elysees, and a quiet cabinet de travail at the back, in which you
   can read, write, or sulk undisturbed. Come, and we will again visit
   Enghien and Montmorency. Don't talk of engagements. If man
   proposes, woman disposes. Hesitate not--obey. Your sincere little
   friend, Lizzy."

"My dear Morley," said Graham, with emotion, "I cannot find words to
thank your wife sufficiently for an invitation so graciously conveyed.
Alas! I cannot accept it."

"Why?" asked the Colonel, drily.

"I have too much to do in London."

"Is that the true reason, or am I to suspicion that there is anything,
sir, which makes you dislike a visit to Paris?"

The Americans enjoy the reputation of being the frankest putters of
questions whom liberty of speech has yet educated into la recherche de
la verite, and certainly Colonel Morley in this instance did not impair
the national reputation.

Graham Vane's brow slightly contracted, and he bit his lip as if
stung by a sudden pang; but after a moment's pause, he answered with a
good-humoured smile:

"No man who has taste enough to admire the most beautiful city, and
appreciate the charms of the most brilliant society in the world, can
dislike Paris."

"My dear sir, I did not ask you if you disliked Paris, but if there were
anything that made you dislike coming back to it on a visit."

"What a notion! and what a cross-examiner you would have made if you had
been called to the bar! Surely, my dear friend, you can understand that
when a man has in one place business which he cannot neglect, he may
decline going to another place, whatever pleasure it would give him
to do so. By the way, there is a great ball at one of the Ministers'
to-night; you should go there, and I will point out to you all those
English notabilities in whom Americans naturally take interest. I will
call for you at eleven o'clock. Lord ------, who is a connection of
mine, would be charmed to know you."

Morley hesitated; but when Graham said, "How your wife will scold you if
you lose such an opportunity of telling her whether the Duchess of ----
is as beautiful as report says, and whether Gladstone or Disraeli seems
to your phrenological science to have the finer head!" the Colonel gave
in, and it was settled that Graham should call for him at the Langham
Hotel.

That matter arranged, Graham probably hoped that his inquisitive visitor
would take leave for the present, but the Colonel evinced no such
intention. On the contrary, settling himself more at ease in his
arm-chair, he said, "if I remember aright, you do not object to the
odour of tobacco?"

Graham rose and presented to his visitor a cigar-box which he took from
the mantelpiece.

The Colonel shook his head, and withdrew from his breast pocket a
leather case, from which he extracted a gigantic regalia; this he
lighted from a gold match-box in the shape of a locket attached to his
watch-chain, and took two or three preliminary puffs, with his head
thrown back and his eyes meditatively intent upon the ceiling.

We know already that strange whim of the Colonel's (than whom, if he so
pleased, no man could speak purer English as spoken by the Britisher) to
assert the dignity of the American citizen by copious use of expressions
and phrases familiar to the lips of the governing class of the great
Republic--delicacies of speech which he would have carefully shunned in
the polite circles of the Fifth Avenue in New York. Now the Colonel
was much too experienced a man of the world not to be aware that the
commission with which his Lizzy had charged him was an exceedingly
delicate one; and it occurred to his mother wit that the best way to
acquit himself of it, so as to avoid the risk of giving or of receiving
serious affront, would be to push that whim of his into more than wonted
exaggeration. Thus he could more decidedly and briefly come to the
point; and should he, in doing so, appear too meddlesome, rather provoke
a laugh than a frown-retiring from the ground with the honours due to a
humorist. Accordingly, in his deepest nasal intonation, and withdrawing
his eyes from the ceiling, he began:

"You have not asked, sir, after the signorina, or as we popularly call
her, Mademoiselle Cicogna?"

"Have I not? I hope she is quite well, and her lively companion, Signora
Venosta."

"They are not sick, sir; or at least they were not so last night when
my wife and I had the pleasure to see them. Of course you have read
Mademoiselle Cicogna's book--a bright performance, sir, age considered."

"Certainly, I have read the book; it is full of unquestionable genius.
Is Mademoiselle writing another? But of course she is."

"I am not aware of the fact, sir. It may be predicated; such a mind
cannot remain inactive; and I know from M. Savarin and that rising
young man Gustave Rameau, that the publishers bid high for her brains
considerable. Two translations have already appeared in our country.
Her fame, sir, will be world-wide. She may be another George Sand, or at
least another Eulalie Grantmesnil."

Graham's cheek became as white as the paper I write on. He inclined his
head as in assent, but without a word. The Colonel continued:

"We ought to be very proud of her acquaintance, sir. I think you
detected her gifts while they were yet unconjectured. My wife says so.
You must be gratified to remember that, sir--clear grit, sir, and no
mistake."

"I certainly more than once have said to Mrs. Morley, that I esteemed
Mademoiselle's powers so highly that I hoped she would never become a
stage-singer and actress. But this M. Rameau? You say he is a rising
man. It struck me when at Paris that he was one of those charlatans
with a great deal of conceit and very little information, who are always
found in scores on the ultra-Liberal side of politics;-possibly I was
mistaken."

"He is the responsible editor of Le Sens Commun, in which talented
periodical Mademoiselle Cicogna's book was first raised."

"Of course, I know that; a journal which, so far as I have looked into
its political or social articles, certainly written by a cleverer and
an older man than M. Rameau, is for unsettling all things and settling
nothing. We have writers of that kind among ourselves--I have no
sympathy with them. To me it seems that when a man says, 'Off with
your head,' he ought to let us know what other head he would put on our
shoulders, and by what process the change of heads shall be effected.
Honestly speaking, if you and your charming wife are intimate friends
and admirers of Mademoiselle Cicogna, I think you could not do her a
greater service than that of detaching her from all connection with men
like M. Rameau, and journals like La Sens Commun."

The Colonel here withdrew his cigar from his lips, lowered his head to a
level with Graham's, and relaxing into an arch significant smile, said:
"Start to Paris, and dissuade her yourself. Start--go ahead--don't
be shy--don't seesaw on the beam of speculation. You will have more
influence with that young female than we can boast." Never was England
in greater danger of quarrel with America than at that moment; but
Graham curbed his first wrathful impulse, and replied coldly:

"It seems to me, Colonel, that you, though very unconsciously, derogate
from the respect due to Mademoiselle Cicogna. That the counsel of a
married couple like yourself and Mrs. Morley should be freely given to
and duly heeded by a girl deprived of her natural advisers in parents,
is a reasonable and honourable supposition; but to imply that the most
influential adviser of a young lady so situated is a young single man,
in no way related to her, appears to me a dereliction of that regard to
the dignity of her sex which is the chivalrous characteristic of your
countrymen--and to Mademoiselle Cicogna herself, a surmise which she
would be justified in resenting as an impertinence."

"I deny both allegations," replied the Colonel serenely. "I maintain
that a single man whips all connubial creation when it comes to
gallantising a single young woman; and that no young lady would be
justified in resenting as impertinence my friendly suggestion to the
single man so deserving of her consideration as I estimate you to be, to
solicit the right to advise her for life. And that's a caution."

Here the Colonel resumed his regalia, and again gazed intent on the
ceiling.

"Advise her for life! You mean, I presume, as a candidate for her hand."

"You don't Turkey now. Well, I guess, you are not wide of the mark
there, sir."

"You do me infinite honour, but I do not presume so far."

"So, so--not as yet. Before a man who is not without gumption runs
himself for Congress, he likes to calculate how the votes will run.
Well, sir, suppose we are in caucus, and let us discuss the chances of
the election with closed doors."

Graham could not help smiling at the persistent officiousness of his
visitor, but his smile was a very sad one.

"Pray change the subject, my dear Colonel Morley--it is not a pleasant
one to me; and as regards Mademoiselle Cicogna, can you think it would
not shock her to suppose that her name was dragged into the discussions
you would provoke, even with closed doors?"

"Sir," replied the Colonel, imperturbably, "since the doors are closed,
there is no one, unless it be a spirit-listener under the table, who can
wire to Mademoiselle Cicogna the substance of debate. And, for my part,
I do not believe in spiritual manifestations. Fact is, that I have
the most amicable sentiments towards both parties, and if there is a
misunderstanding which is opposed to the union of the States, I wish to
remove it while yet in time. Now, let us suppose that you decline to be
a candidate; there are plenty of others who will run; and as an elector
must choose one representative or other, so a gal must choose one
husband or other. And then you only repent when it is too late. It is a
great thing to be first in the field. Let us approximate to the point;
the chances seem good-will you run? Yes or no?"

"I repeat, Colonel Morley, that I entertain no such presumption."

The Colonel here, rising, extended his hand, which Graham shook with
constrained cordiality, and then leisurely walked to the door; there he
paused, as if struck by a new thought, and said gravely, in his natural
tone of voice, "You have nothing to say, sir, against the young lady's
character and honour?"

"I!--heavens, no! Colonel Morley, such a question insults me."

The Colonel resumed his deepest nasal bass: "It is only, then, because
you don't fancy her now so much as you did last year--fact, you are
soured on her and fly off the handle. Such things do happen. The same
thing has happened to myself, sir. In my days of celibacy, there was a
gal at Saratoga whom I gallantised, and whom, while I was at Saratoga,
I thought Heaven had made to be Mrs. Morley: I was on the very point of
telling her so, when I was suddenly called off to Philadelphia; and at
Philadelphia, sir, I found that Heaven had made another Mrs. Morley. I
state this fact, sir, though I seldom talk of my own affairs, even when
willing to tender my advice in the affairs of another, in order to prove
that I do not intend to censure you if Heaven has served you in the
same manner. Sir, a man may go blind for one gal when he is not yet
dry behind the ears, and then, when his eyes are skinned, go in for one
better. All things mortal meet with a change, as my sisters little
boy said when, at the age of eight, he quitted the Methodys and turned
Shaker. Threep and argue as we may, you and I are both mortals--more's
the pity. Good morning, sir (glancing at the clock, which proclaimed the
hour of 3 P.M.),--I err--good evening."

By the post that day the Colonel transmitted a condensed and laconic
report of his conversation with Graham Vane. I can state its substance
in yet fewer words. He wrote word that Graham positively declined the
invitation to Paris; that he had then, agreeably to Lizzy's instruction,
ventilated the Englishman, in the most delicate terms, as to his
intentions with regard to Isaura, and that no intentions at all existed.
The sooner all thoughts of him were relinquished, as a new suitor on
the ground, the better it would be for the young lady's happiness in the
only state in which happiness should be, if not found, at least sought,
whether by maid or man.

Mrs. Morley was extremely put out by this untoward result of the
diplomacy she had intrusted to the Colonel; and when, the next day, came
a very courteous letter from Graham, thanking her gratefully for the
kindness of her invitation, and expressing his regret briefly, though
cordially, at his inability to profit by it, without the most distant
allusion to the subject which the Colonel had brought on the tapis, or
even requesting his compliments to the Signoras Venosta and Cicogna,
she was more than put out, more than resentful,--she was deeply grieved.
Being, however, one of those gallant heroes of womankind who do not give
in at the first defeat, she began to doubt whether Frank had not rather
overstrained the delicacy which he said he had put into his "soundings."
He ought to have been more explicit. Meanwhile she resolved to call
on Isaura, and, without mentioning Graham's refusal of her invitation,
endeavour to ascertain whether the attachment which she felt persuaded
the girl secretly cherished for this recalcitrant Englishman were
something more than the first romantic fancy--whether it were
sufficiently deep to justify farther effort on Mrs. Morley's part to
bring it to a prosperous issue.

She found Isaura at home and alone; and, to do her justice, she
exhibited wonderful tact in the fulfilment of the task she had set
herself. Forming her judgment by manner and look--not words--she
returned home, convinced that she ought to seize the opportunity
afforded to her by Graham's letter. It was one to which she might very
naturally reply, and in that reply she might convey the object at her
heart more felicitously than the Colonel had done. "The cleverest man
is," she said to herself, "stupid compared to an ordinary woman in
the real business of life, which does not consist of fighting and
moneymaking."

Now there was one point she had ascertained by words in her visit to
Isaura--a point on which all might depend. She had asked Isaura when
and where she had seen Graham last; and when Isaura had given her that
information, and she learned it was on the eventful day on which Isaura
gave her consent to the publication of her MS. if approved by Savarin,
in the journal to be set up by the handsome-faced young author, she
leapt to the conclusion that Graham had been seized with no unnatural
jealousy, and was still under the illusive glamoury of that green-eyed
fiend. She was confirmed in this notion, not altogether an unsound one,
when asking with apparent carelessness, "And in that last interview, did
you see any change in Mr. Vane's manner, especially when he took leave?"

Isaura turned away pale, and involuntarily clasping her hands-as women
do when they would suppress pain-replied, in a low murmur, "His manner
was changed."

Accordingly, Mrs. Morley sat down and wrote the following letter:

"DEAR MR. VANE,--I am very angry indeed with you for refusing my
invitation--I had so counted on you, and I don't believe a word of your
excuse. Engagements! To balls and dinners, I suppose, as if you were not
much too clever to care about such silly attempts to enjoy solitude in
crowds. And as to what you men call business, you have no right to have
any business at all. You are not in commerce; you are not in Parliament;
you told me yourself that you had no great landed estates to give you
trouble; you are rich, without any necessity to take pains to remain
rich, or to become richer; you have no business in the world except to
please yourself: and when you will not come to Paris to see one of your
truest friends--which I certainly am--it simply means, that no matter
how such a visit would please me, it does not please yourself. I call
that abominably rude and ungrateful.

"But I am not writing merely to scold you. I have something else on my
mind, and it must come out. Certainly, when you were at Paris last year
you did admire, above all other young ladies, Isaura Cicogna. And I
honoured you for doing so. I know no other young lady to be called her
equal. Well, if you admired her then, what would you do now if you
met her? Then she was but a girl--very brilliant, very charming, it is
true--but undeveloped, untested. Now she is a woman, a princess among
women, but retaining all that is most lovable in a girl; so courted, yet
so simple--so gifted, yet so innocent. Her head is not a bit turned
by all the flattery that surrounds her. Come and judge for yourself. I
still hold the door of the rooms destined to you open for repentance.

"My dear Mr. Vane, do not think me a silly match-making little woman,
when I write to you thus, a coeur ouvert.

"I like you so much that I would fain secure to you the rarest prize
which life is ever likely to offer to your ambition. Where can you hope
to find another Isaura? Among the stateliest daughters of your English
dukes, where is there one whom a proud man would be more proud to show
to the world, saying, 'She is mine!' where one more distinguished--I
will not say by mere beauty, there she might be eclipsed--but by
sweetness and dignity combined--in aspect, manner, every movement, every
smile?

"And you, who are yourself so clever, so well read--you who would be so
lonely with a wife who was not your companion, with whom you could not
converse on equal terms of intellect,--my dear friend, where could you
find a companion in whom you would not miss the poet-soul of Isaura?
Of course I should not dare to obtrude all these questionings on your
innermost reflection, if I had not some idea, right or wrong, that since
the days when at Enghien and Montmorency, seeing you and Isaura side by
side, I whispered to Frank, 'So should those two be through life,' some
cloud has passed between your eyes and the future on which they gazed.
Cannot that cloud be dispelled? Were you so unjust to yourself as to
be jealous of a rival, perhaps of a Gustave Rameau? I write to you
frankly--answer me frankly; and if you answer, 'Mrs. Morley, I don't
know, what you mean; I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna as I might admire
any other pretty, accomplished girl, but it is really nothing to me
whether she marries Gustave Rameau or any one else,'--why, then, burn
this letter--forget that it has been written; and may you never know
the pang of remorseful sigh, if, in the days to come, you see her--whose
name in that case I should profane did I repeat it--the comrade of
another man's mind, the half of another man's heart, the pride and
delight of another man's blissful home."




CHAPTER IV.

There is somewhere in Lord Lytton's writings--writings so numerous that
I may be pardoned if I cannot remember where-a critical definition of
the difference between dramatic and narrative art of story, instanced by
that marvellous passage in the loftiest of Sir Walter Scott's works, in
which all the anguish of Ravenswood on the night before he has to meet
Lucy's brother in mortal combat is conveyed without the spoken words
required in tragedy. It is only to be conjectured by the tramp of his
heavy boots to and fro all the night long in his solitary chamber,
heard below by the faithful Caleb. The drama could not have allowed that
treatment; the drama must have put into words, as "soliloquy," agonies
which the non-dramatic narrator knows that no soliloquy can describe.
Humbly do I imitate, then, the great master of narrative in declining
to put into words the conflict between love and reason that tortured the
heart of Graham Vane when, dropping noiselessly the letter I have just
transcribed, he covered his face with his hands and remained--I know
not how long--in the same position, his head bowed, not a sound escaping
from his lips.

He did not stir from his rooms that day; and had there been a Caleb's
faithful ear to listen, his tread, too, might have been heard all that
sleepless night passing to and fro, but pausing oft, along his solitary
floors.

Possibly love would have borne down all opposing seasonings, doubts, and
prejudices, but for incidents that occurred the following evening. On
that evening Graham dined en famille with his cousins the Altons. After
dinner, the Duke produced the design for a cenotaph inscribed to the
memory of his aunt, Lady Janet King, which he proposed to place in the
family chapel at Alton.

"I know," said the Duke, kindly, "you would wish the old house from
which she sprang to preserve some such record of her who loved you as
her son; and even putting you out of the question, it gratifies me to
attest the claim of our family to a daughter who continues to be famous
for her goodness, and made the goodness so lovable that envy forgave it
for being famous. It was a pang to me when poor Richard King decided on
placing her tomb among strangers; but in conceding his rights as to
her resting-place, I retain mine to her name,--Nostris liberis virtutis
exemplar."

Graham wrung his cousin's hand-he could not speak, choked by suppressed
tears.

The Duchess, who loved and honoured Lady Janet almost as much as did
her husband, fairly sobbed aloud. She had, indeed, reason for grateful
memories of the deceased: there had been some obstacles to her marriage
with the man who had won her heart, arising from political differences
and family feuds between their parents, which the gentle meditation of
Lady Janet had smoothed away. And never did union founded on mutual and
ardent love more belie the assertions of the great Bichat (esteemed by
Dr. Buckle the finest intellect which practical philosophy has exhibited
since Aristotle), that "Love is a sort of fever which does not last
beyond two years," than that between those eccentric specimens of a
class denounced as frivolous and artless by philosophers, English and
French, who have certainly never heard of Bichat.

When the emotion the Duke had exhibited was calmed down, his wife pushed
towards Graham a sheet of paper, inscribed with the epitaph composed by
his hand. "Is it not beautiful," she said, falteringly--"not a word too
much or too little?"

Graham read the inscription slowly, and with very dimmed eyes. It
deserved the praise bestowed on it; for the Duke, though a shy and
awkward speaker, was an incisive and graceful writer.

Yet, in his innermost self, Graham shivered when he read that epitaph,
it expressed so emphatically the reverential nature of the love which
Lady Janet had inspired--the genial influences which the holiness of
a character so active in doing good had diffused around it. It brought
vividly before Graham that image of perfect spotless womanhood. And
a voice within him asked, "Would that cenotaph be placed amid the
monuments of an illustrious lineage if the secret known to thee could
transpire? What though the lost one were really as unsullied by sin as
the world deems, would the name now treasured as an heirloom not be a
memory of gall and a sound of shame?"

He remained so silent after putting down the inscription, that the Duke
said modestly: "My dear Graham, I see that you do not like what I have
written. Your pen is much more practised than mine. If I did not ask
you to compose the epitaph, it was because I thought it would please
you more in coming, as a spontaneous tribute due to her, from the
representative of her family. But will you correct my sketch, or give me
another according to your own ideas?"

"I see not a word to alter," said Graham; "forgive me if my silence
wronged my emotion; the truest eloquence is that which holds us too mute
for applause."

"I knew you would like it. Leopold is always so disposed to underrate
himself," said the duchess, whose hand was resting fondly on her
husband's shoulder. "Epitaphs are so difficult to write-especially
epitaphs on women of whom in life the least said the better. Janet was
the only woman I ever knew whom one could praise in safety."

"Well expressed," said the Duke, smiling: "and I wish you would make
that safety clear to some lady friends of yours, to whom it might serve
as a lesson. Proof against every breath of scandal herself, Janet King
never uttered and never encouraged one ill-natured word against another.
But I am afraid, my dear fellow, that I must leave you to a tete-a-tete
with Eleanor. You know that I must be at the House this evening--I only
paired till half-past nine."

"I will walk down to the House with you, if you are going on foot."

"No," said the Duchess; "you must resign yourself to me for at least
half an hour. I was looking over your aunt's letters to-day, and I found
one which I wish to show you; it is all about yourself, and written
within the last few months of her life." Here she put her arm into
Graham's, and led him into her own private drawing-room, which, though
others might call it a boudoir, she dignified by the name of her study.
The Duke remained for some minutes thoughtfully leaning his arm on the
mantelpiece. It was no unimportant debate in the Lords that night, and
on a subject in which he took great interest, and the details of which
he had thoroughly mastered. He had been requested to speak, if only a
few words, for his high character and his reputation for good sense gave
weight to the mere utterance of his opinion. But though no one had more
moral courage in action, the Duke had a terror at the very thought of
addressing an audience, which made him despise himself.

"Ah!" he muttered, "if Graham Vane were but in Parliament, I could trust
him to say exactly what I would rather be swallowed up by an earthquake
than stand up and say for myself. But now he has got money he seems to
think of nothing but saving it."




CHAPTER V.

The letter from Lady Janet, which the Duchess took from the desk and
placed in Graham's hand, was in strange coincidence with the subject
that for the last twenty-four hours had absorbed his thoughts and
tortured his heart. Speaking of him in terms of affectionate eulogy, the
writer proceeded to confide her earnest wish that he should not longer
delay that change in life which, concentrating so much that is vague in
the desires and aspirations of man, leaves his heart and his mind, made
serene by the contentment of home, free for the steadfast consolidation
of their warmth and their light upon the ennobling duties that unite the
individual to his race.

"There is no one," wrote Lady Janet, "whose character and career a
felicitous choice in marriage can have greater influence over than this
dear adopted son of mine. I do not fear that in any case he will be
liable to the errors of his brilliant father. His early reverse of
fortune here seems to me one of those blessings which Heaven conceals
in the form of affliction. For in youth, the genial freshness of his gay
animal spirits, a native generosity mingled with desire of display
and thirst for applause, made me somewhat alarmed for his future. But,
though he still retains these attributes of character, they are no
longer predominant; they are modified and chastened. He has learned
prudence. But what I now fear most for him is that which he does not
show in the world, which neither Leopold nor you seem to detect,--it is
an exceeding sensitiveness of pride. I know not how else to describe it.
It is so interwoven with the highest qualities, that I sometimes dread
injury to them could it be torn away from the faultier ones which it
supports.

"It is interwoven with that lofty independence of spirit which has made
him refuse openings the most alluring to his ambition; it communicates a
touching grandeur to his self-denying thrift; it makes him so tenacious
of his word once given, so cautious before he gives it. Public life to
him is essential; without it he would be incomplete; and yet I sigh to
think that whatever success he may achieve in it will be attended with
proportionate pain. Calumny goes side by side with fame, and courting
fame as a man, he is as thin-skinned to calumny as a woman.

"The wife for Graham should have qualities, not taken individually,
uncommon in English wives, but in combination somewhat rare.

"She must have mind enough to appreciate his--not to clash with it.
She must be fitted with sympathies to be his dearest companion, his
confidante in the hopes and fears which the slightest want of sympathy
would make him keep ever afterwards pent within his breast. In herself
worthy of distinction, she must merge all distinction in his. You have
met in the world men who, marrying professed beauties, or professed
literary geniuses, are spoken of as the husband of the beautiful Mrs.
A------, or of the clever Mrs. B-------: can you fancy Graham Vane in
the reflected light of one of those husbands? I trembled last year when
I thought he was attracted by a face which the artists raved about, and
again by a tongue which dropped bons mots that went the round of the
club. I was relieved, when, sounding him, he said, laughingly, 'No, dear
aunt, I should be one sore from head to foot if I married a wife that
was talked about for anything but goodness.'

"No,--Graham Vane will have pains sharp enough if he live to be talked
about himself. But that tenderest half of himself, the bearer of the
name he would make, and for the dignity of which he alone would be
responsible,--if that were the town talk, he would curse the hour he
gave any one the right to take on herself his man's burden of calumny
and fame. I know not which I should pity the most, Graham Vane or his
wife.

"Do you understand me, dearest Eleanor? No doubt you do so far, that you
comprehend that the women whom men most admire are not the women we, as
women ourselves, would wish our sons or brothers to marry. But perhaps
you do not comprehend my cause of fear, which is this--for in such
matters men do not see as we women do--Graham abhors, in the girls of
our time, frivolity and insipidity. Very rightly, you will say. True,
but then he is too likely to be allured by contrasts. I have seen him
attracted by the very girls we recoil from more than we do from those
we allow to be frivolous and insipid. I accused him of admiration for a
certain young lady whom you call 'odious,' and whom the slang that has
come into vogue calls 'fast;' and I was not satisfied with his answer,
'Certainly I admire her; she is not a doll--she has ideas.' I would
rather of the two see Graham married to what men call a doll, than to a
girl with ideas which are distasteful to women."

Lady Janet then went on to question the Duchess about a Miss Asterisk,
with whom this tale will have nothing to do, but who, from the little
which Lady Janet had seen of her, might possess all the requisites that
fastidious correspondent would exact for the wife of her adopted son.

This Miss Asterisk had been introduced into the London world by the
Duchess. The Duchess had replied to Lady Janet, that if earth could be
ransacked, a more suitable wife for Graham Vane than Miss Asterisk could
not be found; she was well born--an heiress; the estates she inherited
were in the county of--(viz., the county in which the ancestors of
D'Altons and Vanes had for centuries established their whereabout). Miss
Asterisk was pretty enough to please any man's eye, but not with the
beauty of which artists rave; well informed enough to be companion to a
well-informed man, but certainly not witty enough to supply bons mots to
the clubs. Miss Asterisk was one of those women of whom a husband might
be proud, yet with whom a husband would feel safe from being talked
about.

And in submitting the letter we have read to Graham's eye, the Duchess
had the cause of Miss Asterisk pointedly in view. Miss Asterisk had
confided to her friend, that, of all men she had seen, Mr. Graham Vane
was the one she would feel the least inclined to refuse.

So when Graham Vane returned the letter to the Duchess, simply saying,
"How well my dear aunt divined what is weakest in me!" the Duchess
replied quickly, "Miss Asterisk dines here to-morrow; pray come; you
would like her if you knew more of her."

"To-morrow I am engaged--an American friend of mine dines with me; but
'tis no matter, for I shall never feel more for Miss Asterisk than I
feel for Mont Blanc."




CHAPTER VI.

On leaving his cousin's house Graham walked on, he scarce knew or
cared whither, the image of the beloved dead so forcibly recalled the
solemnity of the mission with which he had been intrusted, and which
hitherto he had failed to fulfil. What if the only mode by which he
could, without causing questions and suspicions that might result in
dragging to day the terrible nature of the trust he held, enrich the
daughter of Richard King, repair all wrong hitherto done to her, and
guard the sanctity of Lady Janet's home,--should be in that union which
Richard King had commended to him while his heart was yet free? In such
a case, would not gratitude to the dead, duty to the living, make that
union imperative at whatever sacrifice of happiness to himself? The two
years to which Richard King had limited the suspense of research were
not yet expired. Then, too, that letter of Lady Janet's,--so tenderly
anxious for his future, so clear-sighted as to the elements of his
own character in its strength or its infirmities--combined with graver
causes to withhold his heart from its yearning impulse, and--no, not
steel it against Isaura, but forbid it to realise, in the fair creature
and creator of romance, his ideal of the woman to whom an earnest,
sagacious, aspiring man commits all the destinies involved in the
serene dignity of his hearth. He could not but own that this gifted
author--this eager seeker after fame--this brilliant and bold competitor
with men on their own stormy battle-ground-was the very person from whom
Lady Janet would have warned away his choice. She (Isaura) merge her own
distinctions in a husband's;--she leave exclusively to him the burden of
fame and calumny!--she shun "to be talked about!" she who could feel
her life to be a success or a failure, according to the extent and the
loudness of the talk which it courted!

While these thoughts racked his mind, a kindly hand was laid on his arm,
and a cheery voice accosted him. "Well met, my dear Vane! I see we are
bound to the same place; there will be a good gathering to-night."

"What do you mean, Bevil? I am going nowhere, except to my own quiet
rooms."

"Pooh! Come in here at least for a few minutes,"--and Bevil drew him
up to the door-step of a house close by, where, on certain evenings,
a well-known club drew together men who seldom meet so familiarly
elsewhere--men of all callings; a club especially favoured by wits,
authors, and the flaneurs of polite society.

Graham shook his head, about to refuse, when Bevil added, "I have just
come from Paris, and can give you the last news, literary, political,
and social. By the way, I saw Savarin the other night at the
Cicogna's--he introduced me there." Graham winced; he was spelled by the
music of a name, and followed his acquaintance into the crowded room,
and, after returning many greetings and nods, withdrew into a remote
corner, and motioned Bevil to a seat beside him.

"So you met Savarin? Where, did you say?"

"At the house of the new lady-author--I hate the word
authoress--Mademoiselle Cicogna! Of course you have read her book?"

"Yes."

"Full of fine things, is it not?--though somewhat highflown and
sentimental: however, nothing succeeds like success. No book has been
more talked about at Paris: the only thing more talked about is the
lady-author herself."

"Indeed, and how?"

"She doesn't look twenty, a mere girl--of that kind of beauty which
so arrests the eye that you pass by other faces to gaze on it, and the
dullest stranger would ask, 'Who, and what is she?' A girl, I say, like
that--who lives as independently as if she were a middle-aged widow,
receives every week (she has her Thursdays), with no other chaperon than
an old ci-devant Italian singing woman, dressed like a guy--must set
Parisian tongues into play even if she had not written the crack book of
the season."

"Mademoiselle Cicogna receives on Thursdays,--no harm in that; and if
she have no other chaperon than the Italian lady you mention, it is
because Mademoiselle Cicogna is an orphan, and having a fortune, such as
it is, of her own, I do not see why she should not live as independently
as many an unmarried woman in London placed under similar circumstances.
I suppose she receives chiefly persons in the literary or artistic
world, and if they are all as respectable as the Savarins, I do not
think ill-nature itself could find fault with her social circle."

"Ah! you know the Cicogna, I presume. I am sure I did not wish to say
anything that could offend her best friends, only I do think it is a
pity she is not married, poor girl!"

"Mademoiselle Cicogna, accomplished, beautiful, of good birth (the
Cicogna's rank among the oldest of Lombard families), is not likely to
want offers."

"Offers of marriage,--h'm--well, I dare say, from authors and artists.
You know Paris better even than I do, but I don't suppose authors and
artists there make the most desirable husbands; and I scarcely know a
marriage in France between a man-author and lady-author which does not
end in the deadliest of all animosities--that of wounded amour propre.
Perhaps the man admires his own genius too much to do proper homage to
his wife's."

"But the choice of Mademoiselle Cicogna need not be restricted to
the pale of authorship--doubtless she has many admirers beyond that
quarrelsome borderland."

"Certainly-countless adorers. Enguerrand de Vandemar--you know that
diamond of dandies?"

"Perfectly--is he an admirer?"

"Cela va sans dire--he told me that though she was not the handsomest
woman in Paris, all other women looked less handsome since he had seen
her. But, of course, French lady-killers like Enguerrand, when it comes
to marriage, leave it to their parents to choose their wives and arrange
the terms of the contract. Talking of lady-killers, I beheld amid the
throng at Mademoiselle Cicogna's the ci-devant Lovelace whom I remember
some twenty-three years ago as the darling of wives and the terror of
husbands-Victor de Mauleon."

"Victor de Mauleon at Mademoiselle Cicogna's!--what, is that man
restored to society?"

"Ah! you are thinking of the ugly old story about the jewels--oh,
yes, he has got over that; all his grand relations, the Vandemars,
Beauvilliers, Rochebriant, and others, took him by the hand when he
reappeared at Paris last year; and though I believe he is still avoided
by many, he is courted by still more--and avoided, I fancy, rather from
political than social causes. The Imperialist set, of course, execrate
and prescribe him. You know he is the writer of those biting articles
signed Pierre Firmin in the Sens Commun; and I am told he is the
proprietor of that very clever journal, which has become a power."

"So, so--that is the journal in which Mademoiselle Cicogna's roman
first appeared. So, so--Victor de Mauleon one of her associates, her
counsellor and friend--ah!"

"No, I didn't say that; on the contrary, he was presented to her the
first time the evening I was at the house. I saw that young silk-haired
coxcomb, Gustave Rameau, introduce him to her. You don't perhaps know
Rameau, editor of the Sens Commun--writes poems and criticisms. They say
he is a Red Republican, but De Mauleon keeps truculent French politics
subdued if not suppressed in his cynical journal. Somebody told me
that the Cicogna is very much in love with Rameau; certainly he has a
handsome face of his own, and that is the reason why she was so rude to
the Russian Prince X-----."

"How rude! Did the Prince propose to her?"

"Propose! you forget--he is married. Don't you know the Princess? Still
there are other kinds of proposals than those of marriage which a rich
Russian prince may venture to make to a pretty novelist brought up for
the stage."

"Bevil!" cried Graham, grasping the man's arm fiercely, "how dare you?"

"My dear boy," said Bevil, very much astonished, "I really did not know
that your interest in the young lady was so great. If I have wounded
you in relating a mere on dit picked up at the Jockey Club, I beg you a
thousand pardons. I dare say there was not a word of truth in it."

"Not a word of truth, you may be sure, if the on dit was injurious to
Mademoiselle Cicogna. It is true, I have a strong interest in her; any
man--any gentleman--would have such interest in a girl so brilliant and
seemingly so friendless. It shames one of human nature to think that
the reward which the world makes to those who elevate its platitudes,
brighten its dulness, delight its leisure, is Slander! I have had
the honour to make the acquaintance of this lady before she became a
'celebrity,' and I have never met in my paths through life a purer
heart or a nobler nature. What is the wretched on dit you condescend to
circulate? Permit me to add:

"'He who repeats a slander shares the crime.'"

"Upon my honour, my dear Vane," said Bevil seriously (he did not want
for spirit), "I hardly know you this evening. It is not because duelling
is out of fashion that a man should allow himself to speak in a tone
that gives offence to another who intended none; and if duelling is out
of fashion in England, it is still possible in France.--Entre nous, I
would rather cross the Channel with you than submit to language that
conveys unmerited insult."

Graham's cheek, before ashen pale, flushed into dark red. "I understand
you," he said quietly, "and will be at Boulogne to-morrow."

"Graham Vane," replied Bevil, with much dignity, "you and I have known
each other a great many years, and neither of us has cause to question
the courage of the other; but I am much older than yourself--permit
me to take the melancholy advantage of seniority. A duel between us in
consequence of careless words said about a lady in no way connected
with either, would be a cruel injury to her; a duel on grounds so slight
would little injure me--a man about town, who would not sit an hour in
the House of Commons if you paid him a thousand pounds a minute. But
you, Graham Vane--you whose destiny it is to canvass electors and make
laws--would it not be an injury to you to be questioned at the hustings
why you broke the law, and why you sought another man's life? Come,
come! shake hands and consider all that seconds, if we chose them, would
exact, is said, every affront on either side retracted, every apology on
either side made."

"Bevil, you disarm and conquer me. I spoke like a hotheaded fool; forget
it--forgive. But--but--I can listen calmly now--what is that on dit?"

"One that thoroughly bears out your own very manly upholding of the
poor young orphan, whose name I shall never again mention without such
respect as would satisfy her most sensitive champion. It was said that
the Prince X------ boasted that before a week was out Mademoiselle
Cicogna should appear in his carriage at the Bois de Boulogne, and wear
at the opera diamonds he had sent to her; that this boast was enforced
by a wager, and the terms of the wager compelled the Prince to confess
the means he had taken to succeed, and produce the evidence that he
had lost or won. According to this on dit, the Prince had written to
Mademoiselle Cicogna, and the letter had been accompanied by a parure
that cost him half a million of francs; that the diamonds had been
sent back with a few words of such scorn as a queen might address to
an upstart lackey. But, my dear Vane, it is a mournful position for the
girl to receive such offers; and you must agree with me in wishing she
were safely married, even to Monsieur Rameau, coxcomb though he be.
Let us hope that they will be an exception to French authors, male and
female, in general, and live like turtle-doves."




CHAPTER VII.

A few days after the date of the last chapter, Colonel Morley returned
to Paris. He had dined with Graham at Greenwich, had met him afterwards
in society, and paid him a farewell visit on the day before the
Colonel's departure; but the name of Isaura Cicogna had not again been
uttered by either. Morley was surprised that his wife did not question
him minutely as to the mode in which he had executed her delicate
commission, and the manner as well as words with which Graham had
replied to his "ventilations." But his Lizzy cut him short when he began
his recital:

"I don't want to hear anything more about the man. He has thrown away a
prize richer than his ambition will ever gain, even if it gained him a
throne."

"That it can't gain him in the old country. The people are loyal to the
present dynasty, whatever you may be told to the contrary."

"Don't be so horribly literal, Frank; that subject is done with. How was
the Duchess of ------ dressed?"

But when the Colonel had retired to what the French call the cabinet de
traivail--and which he more accurately termed his "smoke den"--and
there indulged in the cigar which, despite his American citizenship,
was forbidden in the drawing-room of the tyrant who ruled his life,
Mrs. Morley took from her desk a letter received three days before,
and brooded over it intently, studying every word. When she had
thus reperused it, her tears fell upon the page. "Poor Isaura!" she
muttered--"poor Isaura! I know she loves him--and how deeply a nature
like hers can love! But I must break it to her. If I did not, she would
remain nursing a vain dream, and refuse every chance of real happiness
for the sake of nursing it." Then she mechanically folded up the
letter--I need not say it was from Graham Vane--restored it to the desk,
and remained musing till the Colonel looked in at the door and said
peremptorily, "Very late--come to bed."

The next day Madame Savarin called on Isaura.

"Chere enfant," said she, "I have bad news for you. Poor Gustave is very
ill--an attack of the lungs and fever; you know how delicate he is."

"I am sincerely grieved," said Isaura, in earnest tender tones; "it must
be a very sudden attack: he was here last Thursday."

"The malady only declared itself yesterday morning, but surely you must
have observed how ill he has been looking for several days past? It
pained me to see him."

"I did not notice any change in him," said Isaura, somewhat
conscience-stricken. Wrapt in her own happy thoughts, she would not have
noticed change in faces yet more familiar to her than that of her young
admirer.

"Isaura," said Madame Savarin, "I suspect there are moral causes for our
friend's failing health. Why should I disguise my meaning? You know well
how madly he is in love with you, and have you denied him hope?"

"I like M. Rameau as a friend; I admire him--at times I pity him."

"Pity is akin to love."

"I doubt the truth of that saying, at all events as you apply it now. I
could not love M. Rameau; I never gave him cause to think I could."

"I wish for both your sakes that you could make me a different answer;
for his sake, because, knowing his faults and failings, I am persuaded
that they would vanish in a companionship so pure, so elevating as
yours: you could make him not only so much happier but so much better a
man. Hush! let me go on, let me come to yourself,--I say for your sake
I wish it. Your pursuits, your ambition, are akin to his; you should
not marry one who could not sympathise with you in these. If you did,
he might either restrict the exercise of your genius or be chafed at its
display. The only authoress I ever knew whose married lot was serenely
happy to the last, was the greatest of English poetesses married to a
great English poet. You cannot, you ought not, to devote yourself to the
splendid career to which your genius irresistibly impels you, without
that counsel, that support, that protection, which a husband alone
can give. My dear child, as the wife myself of a man of letters, and
familiarised to all the gossip, all the scandal, to which they who
give their names to the public are exposed, I declare that if I had a
daughter who inherited Savarin's talents, and was ambitious of attaining
to his renown, I would rather shut her up in a convent than let her
publish a book that was in every one's hands until she had sheltered
her name under that of a husband; and if I say this of my child, with a
father so wise in the world's ways, and so popularly respected as my bon
homme, what must I feel to be essential to your safety, poor stranger
in our land! poor solitary orphan! with no other advice or guardian
than the singing mistress whom you touchingly call 'Madre!' I see how
I distress and pain you--I cannot help it. Listen! The other evening
Savarin came back from his favourite cafe in a state of excitement that
made me think he came to announce a revolution. It was about you; he
stormed, he wept--actually wept--my philosophical laughing Savarin.
He had just heard of that atrocious wager made by a Russian barbarian.
Every one praised you for the contempt with which you had treated the
savage's insolence. But that you should have been submitted to such an
insult without one male friend who had the right to resent and chastise
it,--you cannot think how Savarin was chafed and galled. You know how he
admires, but you cannot guess how he reveres you; and since then he says
to me every day: 'That girl must not remain single. Better marry any
man who has a heart to defend a wife's honour and the nerve to fire a
pistol: every Frenchman has those qualifications!'"

Here Isaura could no longer restrain her emotions; she burst into sobs
so vehement, so convulsive, that Madame Savarin became alarmed; but when
she attempted to embrace and soothe her, Isaura recoiled with a visible
shudder, and gasping out, "Cruel, cruel!" turned to the door, and rushed
to her own room.

A few minutes afterwards a maid entered the salon with a message to
Madame Savarin that Mademoiselle was so unwell that she must beg Madame
to excuse her return to the salon.

Later in the day Mrs. Morley called, but Isaura would not see her.

Meanwhile poor Rameau was stretched on his sick-bed, and in sharp
struggle between life and death. It is difficult to disentangle, one by
one, all the threads in a nature so complex as Rameau's; but if we
may hazard a conjecture, the grief of disappointed love was not the
immediate cause of his illness, and yet it had much to do with it. The
goad of Isaura's refusal had driven him into seeking distraction in
excesses which a stronger frame could not have courted with impunity.
The man was thoroughly Parisian in many things, but especially in
impatience of any trouble. Did love trouble him--love could be drowned
in absinthe; and too much absinthe may be a more immediate cause of
congested lungs than the love which the absinthe had lulled to sleep.

His bedside was not watched by hirelings. When first taken thus ill--too
ill to attend to his editorial duties--information was conveyed to the
publisher of the Sens Commun, and in consequence of that information,
Victor de Mauleon came to see the sick man. By his bed he found Savarin,
who had called, as it were by chance, and seen the doctor, who had said,
"It is grave. He must be well nursed." Savarin whispered to De Mauleon,
"Shall we call in a professional nurse, or a soeur de charite?"

De Mauleon replied, also in a whisper, "Somebody told me that the man
had a mother."

It was true--Savarin had forgotten it. Rameau never mentioned his
parents--he was not proud of them.

They belonged to a lower class of the bourgeoisie, retired shopkeepers,
and a Red Republican is sworn to hate of the bourgeoisie, high or low;
while a beautiful young author pushing his way into the Chaussee d'Antin
does not proclaim to the world that his parents had sold hosiery in the
Rue St. Denis.

Nevertheless Savarin knew that Rameau had such parents still living,
and took the hint. Two hours afterwards Rameau was leaning his burning
forehead on his mother's breast.

The next morning the doctor said to the mother, "You are worth ten of
me. If you can stay here we shall pull him through."

"Stay here!--my own boy!" cried indignantly the poor mother.




CHAPTER VIII.

The day which had inflicted on Isaura so keen an anguish was marked by a
great trial in the life of Alain de Rochebriant.

In the morning he received the notice "of un commandement tendant a
saisie immobiliere," on the part of his creditor, M. Louvier; in plain
English, an announcement that his property at Rochebriant would be
put up to public sale on a certain day, in case all debts due to the
mortgagee were not paid before. An hour afterwards came a note from
Duplessis stating that "he had returned from Bretagne on the previous
evening, and would be very happy to see the Marquis de Rochebriant
before two o'clock, if not inconvenient to call."

Alain put the "commandement" into his pocket, and repaired to the Hotel
Duplessis.

The financier received him with very cordial civility. Then he began:
"I am happy to say I left your excellent aunt in very good health.
She honoured the letter of introduction to her which I owe to your
politeness with the most amiable hospitalities; she insisted on my
removing from the auberge at which I first put up and becoming a guest
under your venerable roof-tree--a most agreeable lady, and a most
interesting chateau."

"I fear your accommodation was in striking contrast to your comforts
at Paris; my chateau is only interesting to an antiquarian enamoured of
ruins."

"Pardon me, 'ruins' is an exaggerated expression. I do not say that the
chateau does not want some repairs, but they would not be costly; the
outer walls are strong enough to defy time for centuries to come, and
a few internal decorations and some modern additions of furniture would
make the old manoir a home fit for a prince. I have been over the whole
estate, too, with the worthy M. Hebert,--a superb property."

"Which M. Louvier appears to appreciate," said Alain, with a somewhat
melancholy smile, extending to Duplessis the menacing notice.

Duplessis glanced at it, and said drily: "M. Louvier knows what he is
about. But I think we had better put an immediate stop to formalities
which must be painful to a creditor so benevolent. I do not presume
to offer to pay the interest due on the security you can give for the
repayment. If you refused that offer from so old a friend as Lemercier,
of course you could not accept it from me. I make another proposal, to
which you can scarcely object. I do not like to give my scheming rival
on the Bourse the triumph of so profoundly planned a speculation. Aid
me to defeat him. Let me take the mortgage on myself, and become sole
mortgagee--hush!--on this condition,--that there should be an entire
union of interests between us two; that I should be at liberty to make
the improvements I desire, and when the improvements be made, there
should be a fair arrangement as to the proportion of profits due to me
as mortgagee and improver, to you as original owner. Attend, my dear
Marquis,--I am speaking as a mere man of business. I see my way to
adding more than a third, I might even say a half--to the present
revenues of Rochbriant. The woods have been sadly neglected, drainage
alone would add greatly to their produce. Your orchards might be
rendered magnificent supplies to Paris with better cultivation. Lastly,
I would devote to building purposes or to market gardens all the lands
round the two towns of ------ and ---------. I think I can lay my hands
on suitable speculators for these last experiments. In a word, though
the market value of Rochebriant, as it now stands, would not be
equivalent to the debt on it, in five or six years it could be made
worth--well, I will not say how much--but we shall be both well
satisfied with the result. Meanwhile, if you allow me to find purchasers
for your timber, and if you will not suffer the Chevalier de Finisterre
to regulate your expenses, you need have no fear that the interest due
to me will not be regularly paid, even though I shall be compelled, for
the first year or two at least, to ask a higher rate of interest than
Louvier exacted--say a quarter per cent. more; and in suggesting that,
you will comprehend that this is now a matter of business between us,
and not of friendship."

Alain turned his head aside to conceal his emotion, and then, with the
quick affectionate impulse of the genuine French nature, threw himself
on the financier's breast and kissed him on both cheeks.

"You save me! you save the home and the tombs of my ancestors! Thank
you I cannot; but I believe in God--I pray--I will pray for you as for
a father; and if ever," he hurried on in broken words, "I am mean enough
to squander on idle luxuries one franc that I should save for the debt
due to you, chide me as a father would chide a graceless son."

Moved as Alain was, Duplessis was moved yet more deeply. "What father
would not be proud of such a son? Ah, if I had such a one!" he said
softly. Then, quickly recovering his wonted composure, he added, with
the sardonic smile which often chilled his friends and alarmed his foes,
"Monsieur Louvier is about to pass that which I ventured to promise him,
a 'mauvais quart-d'heure.' Lend me that commandement tendant a saisie.
I must be off to my avoue with instructions. If you have no better
engagement, pray dine with me to-day and accompany Valerie and myself to
the opera."

I need not say that Alain accepted the invitation. How happy Valerie was
that evening!




CHAPTER IX.

The next day Duplessis was surprised by a visit from M. Louvier--that
magnate of millionaires had never before set foot in the house of his
younger and less famous rival.

The burly man entered the room with a face much flushed, and with more
than his usual mixture of jovial brusquerie and opulent swagger.

"Startled to see me, I dare say," began Louvier, as soon as the door was
closed. "I have this morning received a communication from your agent
containing a cheque for the interest due to me from M. Rochebriant, and
a formal notice of your intention to pay off the principal on behalf of
that popinjay prodigal. Though we two have not hitherto been the best
friends in the world, I thought it fair to a man in your station to come
to you direct and say, 'Cher confrere, what swindler has bubbled you?
You don't know the real condition of this Breton property, or you
would never so throw away your millions. The property is not worth the
mortgage I have on it by 30,000 louis."

"Then, M. Louvier, you will be 30,000 louis the richer if I take the
mortgage off your hands."

"I can afford the loss--no offence--better than you can; and I may
have fancies which I don't mind paying for, but which cannot influence
another. See, I have brought with me the exact schedule of all details
respecting this property. You need not question their accuracy; they
have been arranged by the Marquis's own agents, M. Gandrin and M.
Hebert. They contain, you will perceive, every possible item of revenue,
down to an apple-tree. Now, look at that, and tell me if you are
justified in lending such a sum on such a property."

"Thank you very much for an interest in my affairs that I scarcely
ventured to expect M. Louvier to entertain; but I see that I have a
duplicate of this paper, furnished to me very honestly by M. Hebert
himself. Besides, I, too, have fancies which I don't mind paying for,
and among them may be a fancy for the lands of Rochebriant."

"Look you, Duplessis, when a man like me asks a favour, you may be sure
that he has the power to repay it. Let me have my whim here, and ask
anything you like from me in return!"

"Desole not to oblige you, but this has become not only a whim of mine,
but a matter of honour; and honour you know, my dear M. Louvier, is
the first principle of sound finance. I have myself, after careful
inspection of the Rochebriant property, volunteered to its owner to
advance the money to pay off your hypotheque; and what would be said on
the Bourse if Lucien Duplessis failed in an obligation?"

"I think I can guess what will one day be said of Lucien Duplessis if he
make an irrevocable enemy of Paul Louvier. Corbleu! mon cher, a man
of thrice your capital, who watched every speculation of yours with a
hostile eye, might some beau jour make even you a bankrupt!"

"Forewarned, forearmed!" replied Duplessis, imperturbably, "Fas est ab
hoste doceri,--I mean, 'It is right to be taught by an enemy;' and
I never remember the day when you were otherwise, and yet I am not a
bankrupt, though I receive you in a house which, thanks to you, is so
modest in point of size!"

"Bah! that was a mistake of mine,--and, ha! ha! you had your revenge
there--that forest!"

"Well, as a peace offering, I will give you up the forest, and content
my ambition as a landed proprietor with this bad speculation of
Rochebriant!"

"Confound the forest, I don't care for it now! I can sell my place for
more than it has cost me to one of your imperial favourites. Build a
palace in your forest. Let me have Rochebriant, and name your terms."

"A thousand pardons! but I have already had the honour to inform you,
that I have contracted an obligation which does not allow me to listen
to terms."

As a serpent, that, after all crawlings and windings, rears itself on
end, Louvier rose, crest erect:

"So then it is finished. I came here disposed to offer peace--you
refuse, and declare war."

"Not at all, I do not declare war; I accept it if forced on me."

"Is that your last word, M. Duplessis?"

"Monsieur Louvier, it is."

"Bon jour!"

And Louvier strode to the door; here he paused: "Take a day to
consider."

"Not a moment."

"Your servant, Monsieur,--your very humble servant." Louvier vanished.

Duplessis leaned his large thoughtful forehead on his thin nervous hand.
"This loan will pinch me," he muttered. "I must be very wary now with
such a foe. Well, why should I care to be rich? Valerie's dot, Valerie's
happiness, are secured."




CHAPTER X.

Madame Savarin wrote a very kind and very apologetic letter to Isaura,
but no answer was returned to it. Madame Savarin did not venture to
communicate to her husband the substance of a conversation which had
ended so painfully. He had, in theory, a delicacy of tact, which, if he
did not always exhibit it in practice, made him a very severe critic of
its deficiency in others. Therefore, unconscious of the offence given,
he made a point of calling at Isaura's apartments, and leaving word with
her servant that "he was sure she would be pleased to hear M. Rameau was
somewhat better, though still in danger."

It was not till the third day after her interview with Madame Savarin
that Isaura left her own room,--she did so to receive Mrs. Morley.

The fair American was shocked to see the change in Isaura's countenance.
She was very pale, and with that indescribable appearance of exhaustion
which betrays continued want of sleep; her soft eyes were dim, the play
of her lips was gone, her light step weary and languid.

"My poor darling!" cried Mrs. Morley, embracing her, "you have indeed
been ill! What is the matter?--who attends you?"

"I need no physician, it was but a passing cold--the air of Paris is
very trying. Never mind me, dear--what is the last news?"

Therewith Mrs. Morley ran glibly through the principal topics of the
hour: the breach threatened between M. Ollivier and his former
liberal partisans; the tone unexpectedly taken by M. de Girardin; the
speculations as to the result of the trial of the alleged conspirators
against the Emperor's life, which was fixed to take place towards the
end of that month of June,--all matters of no slight importance to the
interests of an empire. Sunk deep into the recesses of her fauteuil,
Isaura seemed to listen quietly, till, when a pause came, she said in
cold clear tones:

"And Mr. Graham Vane--he has refused your invitation?"

"I am sorry to say he has--he is so engaged in London."

"I knew he had refused," said Isaura, with a low bitter laugh.

"How? who told you?"

"My own good sense told me. One may have good sense, though one is a
poor scribbler."

"Don't talk in that way; it is beneath you to angle for compliments."

"Compliments, ah! And so Mr. Vane has refused to come to Paris; never
mind, he will come next year. I shall not be in Paris then. Did Colonel
Morley see Mr. Vane?"

"Oh, yes; two or three times."

"He is well?"

"Quite well, I believe--at least Frank did not say to the contrary; but,
from what I hear, he is not the person I took him for. Many people told
Frank that he is much changed since he came into his fortune--is grown
very stingy, quite miserly indeed; declines even a seat in Parliament
because of the expense. It is astonishing how money does spoil a man."

"He had come into his fortune when he was here. Money had not spoiled
him then."

Isaura paused, pressing her hands tightly together; then she suddenly
rose to her feet, the colour on her cheek mantling and receding
rapidly, and fixing on her startled visitor eyes no longer dim, but
with something half fierce, half imploring in the passion of their gaze,
said: "Your husband spoke of me to Mr. Vane: I know he did. What did Mr.
Vane answer? Do not evade my question. The truth! the truth! I only ask
the truth!"

"Give me your hand; sit here beside me, dearest child."

"Child!--no, I am a woman!--weak as a woman, but strong as a woman
too!--The truth!"

Mrs. Morley had come prepared to carry out the resolution she had formed
and "break" to Isaura "the truth," that which the girl now demanded. But
then she had meant to break the truth in her own gentle, gradual way.
Thus suddenly called upon, her courage failed her. She burst into tears.
Isaura gazed at her dry-eyed.

"Your tears answer me. Mr. Vane has heard that I have been insulted. A
man like him does not stoop to love for a woman who has known an insult.
I do not blame him; I honour him the more--he is right."

"No-no-no!--you insulted! Who dared to insult you? (Mrs. Morley had
never heard the story about the Russian Prince.) Mr. Vane spoke to
Frank, and writes of you to me as of one whom it is impossible not
to admire, to respect; but--I cannot say it--you will have the
truth,--there, read and judge for yourself." And Mrs. Morley drew forth
and thrust into Isaura's hands the letter she had concealed from her
husband. The letter was not very long; it began with expressions of
warm gratitude to Mrs. Morley, not for her invitation only, but for the
interest she had conceived in his happiness. It went on thus "I join
with my whole heart in all that you say, with such eloquent justice, of
the mental and personal gifts so bounteously lavished by nature on the
young lady whom you name.

"No one can feel more sensible than I of the charm of so exquisite a
loveliness; no one can more sincerely join in the belief that the praise
which greets the commencement of her career is but the whisper of the
praise that will cheer its progress with louder and louder plaudits.

"He only would be worthy of her hand, who, if not equal to herself in
genius, would feel raised into partnership with it by sympathy with its
objects and joy in its triumphs. For myself, the same pain with which I
should have learned she had adopted the profession which she originally
contemplated, saddened and stung me when, choosing a career that confers
a renown yet more lasting than the stage, she no less left behind her
the peaceful immunities of private life. Were I even free to consult
only my own heart in the choice of the one sole partner of my destinies
(which I cannot at present honestly say that I am, though I had
expected to be so ere this, when I last saw you at Paris); could I even
hope--which I have no right to do--that I could chain to myself any
private portion of thoughts which now flow into the large channels
by which poets enrich the blood of the world,--still (I say it in
self-reproach, it may be the fault of my English rearing, it may rather
be the fault of an egotism peculiar to myself)--still I doubt if I could
render happy any woman whose world could not be narrowed to the Home
that she adorned and blessed.

"And yet not even the jealous tyranny of man's love could dare to say to
natures like hers of whom we speak, 'Limit to the household glory of
one the light which genius has placed in its firmament for the use and
enjoyment of all.'"

"I thank you so much," said Isaura, calmly; "suspense makes a woman so
weak--certainty so strong." Mechanically she smoothed and refolded the
letter--mechanically, with slow, lingering hands--then she extended it
to her friend, smiling.

"Nay, will you not keep it yourself?" said Mrs. Morley. "The more you
examine the narrow-minded prejudices, the English arrogant man's jealous
dread of superiority--nay, of equality--in the woman he 'can only
value as he does his house or his horse, because she is his exclusive
property, the more you will be rejoiced to find yourself free for a more
worthy choice. Keep the letter; read it till you feel for the writer
forgiveness and disdain."

Isaura took back the letter, and leaned her cheek on her hand, looking
dreamily into space. It was some moments before she replied, and her
words then had no reference to Mrs. Morley's consolatory exhortation.

"He was so pleased when he learned that I renounced the career on which
I had set my ambition. I thought he would have been so pleased when I
sought in another career to raise myself nearer to his level--I see
now how sadly I was mistaken. All that perplexed me before in him is
explained. I did not guess how foolishly I had deceived myself till
three days ago,--then I did guess it; and it was that guess which
tortured me so terribly that I could not keep my heart to myself when I
saw you to-day; in spite of all womanly pride it would force its way--to
the truth.

"Hush! I must tell you what was said to me by another friend of mine--a
good friend, a wise and kind one. Yet I was so angry when she said it
that I thought I could never see her more."

"My sweet darling! who was this friend, and what did she say to you?"

"The friend was Madame Savarin."

"No woman loves you more except myself--and she said?"

"That she would have suffered no daughter of hers to commit her name to
the talk of the world as I have done--be exposed to the risk of insult
as I have been--until she had the shelter and protection denied to
me. And I have thus overleaped the bound that a prudent mother would
prescribe to her child, have become one whose hand men do not seek,
unless they themselves take the same roads to notoriety. Do you not
think she was right?"

"Not as you so morbidly put it, silly girl,--certainly not right. But
I do wish that you had the shelter and protection which Madame Savarin
meant to express; I do wish that you were happily married to one very
different from Mr. Vane--one who would be more proud of your genius than
of your beauty--one who would say, 'My name, safer far in its enduring
nobility than those that depend on titles and lands--which are held on
the tenure of the popular breath--must be honoured by posterity, for
She has deigned to make it hers. No democratic revolution can disennoble
me."

"Ay, ay, you believe that men will be found to think with complacency
that they owe to a wife a name they could not achieve for themselves.
Possibly there are such men. Where?--among those that are already united
by sympathies in the same callings, the same labours, the same hopes and
fears with the women who have left behind them the privacies of home.
Madame de Grantmesnil was wrong. Artists should wed with artists.
True--true!"

Here she passed her hand over her forehead--it was a pretty way of hers
when seeking to concentrate thought--and was silent a moment or so.

"Did you ever feel," she then asked dreamily, "that there are moments in
life when a dark curtain seems to fall over one's past that a day before
was so clear, so blended with the present? One cannot any longer look
behind; the gaze is attracted onward, and a track of fire flashes upon
the future,--the future which yesterday was invisible. There is a line
by some English poet--Mr. Vane once quoted it, not to me, but to M.
Savarin, and in illustration of his argument, that the most complicated
recesses of thought are best reached by the simplest forms of
expression. I said to myself, 'I will study that truth if ever I take to
literature as I have taken to song;' and--yes--it was that evening
that the ambition fatal to woman fixed on me its relentless fangs--at
Enghien--we were on the lake--the sun was setting."

"But you do not tell me the line that so impressed you," said Mrs.
Morley, with a woman's kindly tact.

"The line--which line? Oh, I remember; the line was this:

"'I see as from a tower the end of all."

"And now--kiss me, dearest--never a word again to me about this
conversation: never a word about Mr. Vane--the dark curtain has fallen
on the past."




CHAPTER XI.

Men and women are much more like each other in certain large elements
of character than is generally supposed, but it is that very resemblance
which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other;
just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things
disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in
points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the
more sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching the
speck of a pin-prick.

Now there are certain grand meeting-places between man and woman--the
grandest of all is on the ground of love, and yet here also is the great
field of quarrel. And here the teller of a tale such as mine ought,
if he is sufficiently wise to be humble, to know that it is almost
profanation if, as man, he presumes to enter the penetralia of a woman's
innermost heart, and repeat, as a man would repeat, all the vibrations
of sound which the heart of a woman sends forth undistinguishable even
to her own ear.

I know Isaura as intimately as if I had rocked her in her cradle, played
with her in her childhood, educated and trained her in her youth; and
yet I can no more tell you faithfully what passed in her mind during
the forty-eight hours that intervened between her conversation with that
American lady and her reappearance in some commonplace drawing-room,
than I can tell you what the Man in the Moon might feel if the sun that
his world reflected were blotted out of creation.

I can only say that when she reappeared in that commonplace drawing-room
world, there was a change in her face not very perceptible to the
ordinary observer. If anything, to his eye she was handsomer--the eye
was brighter--the complexion (always lustrous, though somewhat pale,
the limpid paleness that suits so well with dark hair) was yet more
lustrous,--it was flushed into delicate rose hues--hues that still
better suit with dark hair. What, then, was the change, and change not
for the better? The lips, once so pensively sweet, had grown hard; on
the brow that had seemed to laugh when the lips did, there was no longer
sympathy between brow and lip; there was scarcely seen a fine threadlike
line that in a few years would be a furrow on the space between the
eyes; the voice was not so tenderly soft; the step was haughtier. What
all such change denoted it is for a woman to decide-I can only guess.
In the mean while, Mademoiselle Cicogna had sent her servant daily to
inquire after M. Rameau. That, I think, she would have done under any
circumstances. Meanwhile, too, she had called on Madame Savarin--made it
up with her--sealed the reconciliation by a cold kiss. That, too, under
any circumstances, I think she would have done--under some circumstances
the kiss might have been less cold.

There was one thing unwonted in her habits. I mention it, though it is
only a woman who can say if it means anything worth noticing.

For six days she had left a letter from Madame de Grantmesnil
unanswered. With Madame de Grantmesnil was connected the whole of her
innermost life--from the day when the lonely desolate child had seen,
beyond the dusty thoroughfares of life, gleams of the faery land
in poetry and art-onward through her restless, dreamy, aspiring
youth-onward--onward--till now, through all that constitutes the
glorious reality that we call romance.

Never before had she left for two days unanswered letters which were to
her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions
to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within.
For six days Madame de Grantmesnil's letter remained unanswered, unread,
neglected, thrust out of sight; just as when some imperious necessity
compels us to grapple with a world that is, we cast aside the romance
which, in our holiday hours, had beguiled us to a world with which we
have interests and sympathies no more.




CHAPTER XII.

Gustave recovered, but slowly. The physician pronounced him out of all
immediate danger, but said frankly to him, and somewhat more guardedly
to his parents, "There is ample cause to beware." "Look you, my young
friend," he added to Rameau, "mere brain-work seldom kills a man
once accustomed to it like you; but heart-work, and stomach-work, and
nerve-work, added to brain-work, may soon consign to the coffin a frame
ten times more robust than yours. Write as much as you will--that is
your vocation; but it is not your vocation to drink absinthe--to preside
at orgies in the Maison Doree. Regulate yourself, and not after the
fashion of the fabulous Don Juan. Marry--live soberly and quietly--and
you may survive the grandchildren of viveurs. Go on as you have done,
and before the year is out you are in Pere la Chaise."

Rameau listened languidly, but with a profound conviction that the
physician thoroughly understood his case.

Lying helpless on his bed, he had no desire for orgies at the Maison
Doree; with parched lips thirsty for innocent tisane of lime-blossoms,
the thought of absinthe was as odious to him as the liquid fire of
Phlegethon. If ever sinner became suddenly convinced that there was
a good deal to be said in favour of a moral life, that sinner at the
moment I speak of was Gustave Rameau: Certainly a moral life--'Domus
et placens uxor',--was essential to the poet who, aspiring to immortal
glory, was condemned to the ailments of a very perishable frame.

"Ah," he murmured plaintively to himself, "that girl Isaura can have no
true sympathy with genius! It is no ordinary man that she will kill in
me!"

And so murmuring he fell asleep. When he woke and found his head
pillowed on his mother's breast, it was much as a sensitive, delicate
man may wake after having drunk too much the night before. Repentant,
mournful, maudlin, he began to weep, and in the course of his weeping he
confided to his mother the secret of his heart.

Isaura had refused him--that refusal had made him desperate.

"Ah! with Isaura how changed would be his habits! how pure! how
healthful!" His mother listened fondly, and did her best to comfort him
and cheer his drooping spirits.

She told him of Isaura's messages of inquiry duly twice a day. Rameau,
who knew more about women in general, and Isaura in particular, than his
mother conjectured, shook his head mournfully. "She could not do less,"
he said. "Has no one offered to do more?"--he thought of Julie when he
asked that--Madame Rameau hesitated.

The poor Parisians! it is the mode to preach against them; and before
my book closes, I shall have to preach--no, not to preach, but to
imply--plenty of faults to consider and amend. Meanwhile I try my best
to take them, as the philosophy of life tells us to take other people,
for what they are.

I do not think the domestic relations of the Parisian bourgeoisie are
as bad as they are said to be in French novels. Madame Rameau is not
an uncommon type of her class. She had been when she first married
singularly handsome. It was from her that Gustave inherited his beauty;
and her husband was a very ordinary type of the French shopkeeper--very
plain, by no means intellectual, but gay, good-humoured, devotedly
attached to his wife, and with implicit trust in her conjugal virtue.
Never was trust better placed. There was not a happier nor a more
faithful couple in the quartier in which they resided. Madame Rameau
hesitated when her boy, thinking of Julie, asked if no one had done more
than send to inquire after him as Isaura had done.

After that hesitating pause she said, "Yes--a young lady calling herself
Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin wished to instal herself here as your
nurse. When I said, 'But I am his mother--he needs no other nurses,' she
would have retreated, and looked ashamed--poor thing! I don't blame her
if she loved my son. But, my son, I say this,--if you love her, don't
talk to me about that Mademoiselle Cicogna; and if you love Mademoiselle
Cicogna, why, then your father will take care that the poor girl
who loved you not knowing that you loved another is not left to the
temptation of penury."

Rameau's pale lips withered into a phantom-like sneer! Julie! the
resplendent Julie!--true, only a ballet-dancer, but whose equipage in
the Bois had once been the envy of duchesses--Julie! who had sacrificed
fortune for his sake--who, freed from him, could have millionaires again
at her feet!--Julie! to be saved from penury, as a shopkeeper would save
an erring nursemaid--Julie! the irrepressible Julie! who had written
to him, the day before his illness, in a pen dipped, not in ink, but in
blood from a vein she had opened in her arm:

   "Traitor!--I have not seen thee for three days. Dost thou dare to
   love another? If so, I care not how thou attempt to conceal it--woe
   to her! Ingrat! woe to thee! Love is not love, unless, when
   betrayed by Love, it appeals to death. Answer me quick--quick.
   JULIE."

Poor Gustave thought of that letter and groaned. Certainly his mother
was right--he ought to get rid of Julie; but he did not clearly see
how Julie was to be got rid of. He replied to Madame Rameau peevishly,
"Don't trouble your head about Mademoiselle Caumartin; she is in no want
of money. Of course, if I could hope for Isaura--but, alas! I dare not
hope. Give me my tisane."

When the doctor called next day, he looked grave, and, drawing Madame
Rameau into the next room, he said, "We are not getting on so well as
I had hoped; the fever is gone, but there is much to apprehend from the
debility left behind. His spirits are sadly depressed." Then added the
doctor, pleasantly, and with that wonderful insight into our complex
humanity in which physicians excel poets, and in which Parisian
physicians are not excelled by any physicians in the world: "Can't you
think of any bit of good news--that 'M. Thiers raves about your son's
last poem! that 'it is a question among the Academicians between him and
Jules Janin'--or that 'the beautiful Duchesse de ------- has been placed
in a lunatic asylum because she has gone mad for love of a certain young
Red Republican whose name begins with R.'--can't you think of any bit of
similar good news? If you can, it will be a tonic to the relaxed state
of your dear boy's amour propre, compared to which all the drugs in the
Pharmacopoeia are moonshine and water; and meanwhile be sure to remove
him to your own house, and out of the reach of his giddy young friends,
as soon as you possibly can."

When that great authority thus left his patient's case in the hands of
the mother, she said, "The boy shall be saved."




CHAPTER XIII.

Isaura was seated beside the Venosta,--to whom, of late, she seemed
to cling with greater fondness than ever,--working at some piece of
embroidery--a labour from which she had been estranged for years; but
now she had taken writing, reading, music, into passionate disgust.
Isaura was thus seated, silently intent upon her work, and the Venosta
in full talk, when the servant announced Madame Rameau.

The name startled both; the Venosta had never heard that the poet had
a mother living, and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Madame
Rameau must be a wife he had hitherto kept unrevealed. And when a woman,
still very handsome, with a countenance grave and sad, entered the
salon, the Venosta murmured, "The husband's perfidy reveals itself on
a wife's face," and took out her handkerchief in preparation for
sympathising tears.

"Mademoiselle," said the visitor, halting, with eyes fixed on Isaura.
"Pardon my intrusion-my son has the honour to be known to you. Every one
who knows him must share in my sorrow--so young--so promising, and in
such danger--my poor boy!" Madame Rameau stopped abruptly. Her tears
forced their way--she turned aside to conceal them.

In her twofold condition of being--womanhood and genius--Isaura was
too largely endowed with that quickness of sympathy which distinguishes
woman from man, and genius from talent, not to be wondrously susceptible
to pity.

Already she had wound her arm round the grieving mother--already drawn
her to the seat from which she herself had risen--and bending over her
had said some words--true, conventional enough in themselves,--but cooed
forth in a voice the softest I ever expect to hear, save in dreams, on
this side of the grave.

Madame Rameau swept her hand over her eyes, glanced round the room, and
noticing the Venosta in dressing-robe and slippers, staring with those
Italian eyes, in seeming so quietly innocent, in reality so searchingly
shrewd, she whispered pleadingly, "May I speak to you a few minutes
alone?" This was not a request that Isaura could refuse, though she was
embarrassed and troubled by the surmise of Madame Rameau's object in
asking it; accordingly she led her visitor into the adjoining room, and
making an apologetic sign to the Venosta, closed the door.




CHAPTER XIV.

When they were alone, Madame Rameau took Isaura's hand in both her
own, and, gazing wistfully into her face, said, "No wonder you are so
loved--yours is the beauty that sinks into the hearts and rests there.
I prize my boy more, now that I have seen you. But, oh, Mademoiselle!
pardon me--do not withdraw your hand--pardon the mother who comes from
the sick-bed of her only son and asks if you will assist to save him! A
word from you is life or death to him!"

"Nay, nay, do not speak thus, Madame; your son knows how much I value,
how sincerely I return, his friendship; but--but," she paused a moment,
and continued sadly and with tearful eyes--"I have no heart to give to
him-to any one."

"I do not--I would not if I dared--ask what it would be violence to
yourself to promise. I do not ask you to bid me return to my son and
say, 'Hope and recover,' but let me take some healing message from your
lips. If I understand your words rightly, I at least may say that you do
not give to another the hopes you, deny to him?"

"So far you understand me rightly, Madame. It has been said, that
romance-writers give away so much of their hearts to heroes or heroines
of their own creation, that they leave nothing worth the giving to human
beings like themselves. Perhaps it is so; yet, Madame," added Isaura,
with a smile of exquisite sweetness in its melancholy, "I have heart
enough left to feel for you."

Madame Rameau was touched. "Ah, Mademoiselle, I do not believe in the
saying you have quoted. But I must not abuse your goodness by pressing
further upon you subjects from which you shrink. Only one word more:
you know that my husband and I are but quiet tradesfolks, not in the
society, nor aspiring to it, to which my son's talents have raised
himself; yet dare I ask that you will not close here the acquaintance
that I have obtruded on you?--dare I ask, that I may, now and then, call
on you--that now and then I may see you at my own home? Believe that I
would not here ask anything which your own mother would disapprove if
she overlooked disparities of station. Humble as our home is, slander
never passed its threshold."

"Ah, Madame, I and the Signora Venosta, whom in our Italian tongue I
call mother, can but feel honoured and grateful whenever it pleases you
to receive visits from us."

"It would be a base return for such gracious compliance with my request
if I concealed from you the reason why I pray Heaven to bless you for
that answer. The physician says that it may be long before my son is
sufficiently convalescent to dispense with a mother's care, and resume
his former life and occupation in the great world. It is everything
for us if we can coax him into coming under our own roof-tree. This is
difficult to do. It is natural for a young man launched into the world
to like his own chez lui. Then what will happen to Gustave? He,
lonely and heart-stricken, will ask friends, young as himself, but
far stronger, to come and cheer him; or he will seek to distract his
thoughts by the overwork of his brain; in either case he is doomed. But
I have stronger motives yet to fix him a while at our hearth. This
is just the moment, once lost never to be regained, when soothing
companionship, gentle reproachless advice, can fix him lastingly in the
habits and modes of life which will banish all fears of his future from
the hearts of his parents. You at least honour him with friendship, with
kindly interest--you at least would desire to wean him from all that a
friend may disapprove or lament--a creature whom Providence meant to be
good, and perhaps great. If I say to him, 'It will be long before you
can go out and see your friends, but at my house your friends shall come
and see you--among them Signora Venosta and Mademoiselle Cicogna will
now and then drop in'--my victory is gained, and my son is saved."

"Madame," said Isaura, half sobbing, "what a blessing to have a mother
like you! Love so noble ennobles those who hear its voice. Tell your son
how ardently I wish him to be well, and to fulfil more than the promise
of his genius; tell him also this--how I envy him his mother."




CHAPTER XV.

It needs no length of words to inform thee, my intelligent reader,
be thou man or woman--but more especially woman--of the consequences
following each other, as wave follows wave in a tide, that resulted from
the interview with which my last chapter closed. Gustave is removed to
his parents' house; he remains for weeks confined within doors, or, on
sunny days, takes an hour or so in his own carriage, drawn by the horse
bought from Rochebriant, into by-roads remote from the fashionable
world; Isaura visits his mother, liking, respecting, influenced by her
more and more; in those visits she sits beside the sofa on which Rameau
reclines. Gradually, gently--more and more by his mother's lips--is
impressed on her the belief that it is in her power to save a human
life, and to animate its career towards those goals which are never
based wholly upon earth in the earnest eyes of genius, or perhaps in the
yet more upward vision of pure-souled believing woman.

And Gustave himself, as he passes through the slow stages of
convalescence, seems so gratefully to ascribe to her every step in his
progress--seems so gently softened in character--seems so refined from
the old affectations, so ennobled above the old cynicism--and, above
all, so needing her presence, so sunless without it, that--well, need I
finish the sentence?--the reader will complete what I leave unsaid.

Enough, that one day Isaura returned home from a visit at Madame
Rameau's with the knowledge that her hand was pledged--her future life
disposed of; and that, escaping from the Venosta, whom she so fondly,
and in her hunger for a mother's love, called Madre, the girl shut
herself up in her own room with locked doors.

Ah, poor child! ah, sweet-voiced Isaura! whose delicate image I feel
myself too rude and too hard to transfer to this page in the purity of
its outlines, and the blended softnesses of its hues--thou who,
when saying things serious in the words men use, saidst them with a
seriousness so charming, and with looks so feminine--thou, of whom no
man I ever knew was quite worthy--ah, poor, simple, miserable girl, as I
see thee now in the solitude of that white-curtained virginal room; hast
thou, then, merged at last thy peculiar star into the cluster of all
these commonplace girls whose lips have said "Ay," when their hearts
said "No"?--thou, O brilliant Isaura! thou, O motherless child!

She had sunk into her chair--her own favourite chair, the covering of it
had been embroidered by Madame de Grantmesnil, and bestowed on her as a
birthday present last year--the year in which she had first learned what
it is to love--the year in which she had first learned what it is to
strive for fame. And somehow uniting, as many young people do, love and
fame in dreams of the future, that silken seat had been to her as the
Tripod of Delphi was to the Pythian: she had taken to it, as it were
intuitively, in all those hours, whether of joy or sorrow, when youth
seeks to prophesy, and does but dream.

There she sat now, in a sort of stupor--a sort of dreary
bewilderment--the illusion of the Pythian gone--desire of dream and of
prophecy alike extinct--pressing her hands together, and muttering to
herself, "What has happened?--what have I done?"

Three hours later you would not have recognised the same face that you
see now. For then the bravery, the honour, the loyalty of the girl's
nature had asserted their command. Her promise had been given to one
man--it could not be recalled. Thought itself of any other man must be
banished. On her hearth lay ashes and tinder--the last remains of every
treasured note from Graham Vane; of the hoarded newspaper extracts that
contained his name; of the dry treatise he had published, and which had
made the lovely romance-writer first desire "to know something about
politics." Ay, if the treatise had been upon fox-hunting, she would have
desired "to know something about" that! Above all, yet distinguishable
from the rest--as the sparks still upon stem and leaf here and there
faintly glowed and twinkled--the withered flowers which recorded that
happy hour in the arbour, and the walks of the forsaken garden--the hour
in which she had so blissfully pledged herself to renounce that career
in art wherein fame would have been secured, but which would not have
united Fame with Love--in dreams evermore over now.





BOOK X.




CHAPTER I.

Graham Vane had heard nothing for months from M. Renard, when one
morning he received the letter I translate:

"MONSIEUR,--I am happy to inform you that I have at last obtained one
piece of information which may lead to a more important discovery. When
we parted after our fruitless research in Vienna, we had both concurred
in the persuasion that, for some reason known only to the two ladies
themselves, Madame Marigny and Madame Duval had exchanged names--that
it was Madame Marigny who had deceased in the name of Madame Duval, and
Madame Duval who had survived in that of Marigny.

"It was clear to me that the beau Monsieur who had visited the false
Duval must have been cognisant of this exchange of name, and that, if
his name and whereabouts could be ascertained, he, in all probability,
would know what had become of the lady who is the object of our
research; and after the lapse of so many years he would probably have
very slight motive to preserve the concealment of facts which might,
no doubt, have been convenient at the time. The lover of the soi-disant
Mademoiselle Duval was by such accounts as we could gain a man of some
rank--very possibly a married man; and the liaison, in short, was one of
those which, while they last, necessitate precautions and secrecy.

"Therefore, dismissing all attempts at further trace of the missing
lady, I resolved to return to Vienna as soon as the business that
recalled me to Paris was concluded, and devote myself exclusively to the
search after the amorous and mysterious Monsieur.

"I did not state this determination to you, because, possibly, I
might be in error--or, if not in error, at least too sanguine in my
expectations--and it is best to avoid disappointing an honourable
client.

"One thing was clear, that, at the time of the soi-disant Duval's
decease, the beau Monsieur was at Vienna.

"It appeared also tolerably clear that when the lady friend of the
deceased quitted Munich so privately, it was to Vienna she repaired,
and from Vienna comes the letter demanding the certificates of Madame
Duval's death. Pardon me, if I remind you of all these circumstances no
doubt fresh in your recollection. I repeat them in order to justify the
conclusions to which they led me.

"I could not, however, get permission to absent myself from Paris for
the time I might require till the end of last April. I had meanwhile
sought all private means of ascertaining what Frenchmen of rank and
station were in that capital in the autumn of 1849. Among the list of
the very few such Messieurs I fixed upon one as the most likely to be
the mysterious Achille--Achille was, indeed, his nom de bapteme.

"A man of intrigue--a bonnes fortunes--of lavish expenditure withal;
very tenacious of his dignity, and avoiding any petty scandals by
which it might be lowered; just the man who, in some passing affair of
gallantry with a lady of doubtful repute, would never have signed his
titular designation to a letter, and would have kept himself as much
incognito as he could. But this man was dead--had been dead some years.
He had not died at Vienna--never visited that capital for some years
before his death. He was then, and had long been, the ami de la maison
of one of those grandes dames of whose intimacy grands seigneurs are not
ashamed. They parade there the bonnes fortunes they conceal elsewhere.
Monsieur and the grande dame were at Baden when the former died. Now,
Monsieur, a Don Juan of that stamp is pretty sure always to have a
confidential Leporello. If I could find Leporello alive I might learn
the secrets not to be extracted from a Don Juan defunct. I ascertained,
in truth, both at Vienna, to which I first repaired in order to verify
the renseignements I had obtained at Paris, and at Baden, to which I
then bent my way, that this brilliant noble had a favourite valet who
had lived with him from his youth--an Italian, who had contrived in
the course of his service to lay by savings enough to set up a hotel
somewhere in Italy, supposed to be Pisa. To Pisa I repaired, but the man
had left some years; his hotel had not prospered--he had left in debt.
No one could say what had become of him. At last, after a long and
tedious research, I found him installed as manager of a small hotel at
Genoa--a pleasant fellow enough; and after friendly intercourse with
him (of course I lodged at his hotel), I easily led him to talk of his
earlier life and adventures, and especially of his former master, of
whose splendid career in the army of 'La Belle Deesse' he was not a
little proud. It was not very easy to get him to the particular subject
in question. In fact, the affair with the poor false Duval had been so
brief and undistinguished an episode in his master's life, that it was
not without a strain of memory that he reached it.

"By little and little, however, in the course of two or three evenings,
and by the aid of many flasks of Orviette or bottles of Lacrima (wines,
Monsieur, that I do not commend to any one who desires to keep his
stomach sound and his secrets safe), I gathered these particulars.

"Our Don Juan, since the loss of a wife in the first year of marriage,
had rarely visited Paris where he had a domicile--his ancestral hotel
there he had sold.

"But happening to visit that capital of Europe a few months before we
come to our dates at Aix-la-Chapelle, he made acquaintance with Madame
Marigny, a natural daughter of high-placed parents, by whom, of course,
she had never been acknowledged, but who had contrived that she should
receive a good education at a convent; and on leaving it also contrived
that an old soldier of fortune--which means an officer without
fortune--who had served in Algiers with some distinction, should offer
her his hand, and add the modest dot they assigned her to his yet more
modest income. They contrived also that she should understand the
offer must be accepted. Thus Mademoiselle 'Quelque Chose' became Madame
Marigny, and she, on her part, contrived that a year or so later she
should be left a widow. After a marriage, of course the parents washed
their hands of her--they had done their duty. At the time Don Juan made
this lady's acquaintance nothing could be said against her character;
but the milliners and butchers had begun to imply that they would rather
have her money than trust to her character. Don Juan fell in love with
her, satisfied the immediate claims of milliner and butcher, and
when they quitted Paris it was agreed that they should meet later at
Aix-la-Chapelle. But when he resorted to that sultry and, to my mind,
unalluring spa, he was surprised by a line from her saying that she had
changed her name of Marigny for that of Duval.

"'I recollect,' said Leporello, 'that two days afterwards my master said
to me, 'Caution and secrecy. Don't mention my name at the house to which
I may send you with any note for Madame Duval. I don't announce my name
when I call. La petite Marigny has exchanged her name for that of Louise
Duval; and I find that there is a Louise Duval here, her friend, who
is niece to a relation of my own, and a terrible relation to quarrel
with--a dead shot and unrivalled swordsman--Victor de Mauleon. My master
was brave enough, but he enjoyed life, and he did not think la petite
Marigny worth being killed for.'

"Leporello remembered very little of what followed. All he did remember
is that Don Juan, when at Vienna, said to him one morning, looking less
gay than usual, 'It is finished with ca petite Marigny-she is no more.'
Then he ordered his bath, wrote a note, and said with tears in his eyes,
'Take this to Mademoiselle Celeste; not to be compared to la petite
Marigny; but la petite Celeste is still alive.' Ah, Monsieur! if only
any man in France could be as proud of his ruler as that Italian was of
my countrymen! Alas! we Frenchmen are all made to command--or at least
we think ourselves so--and we are insulted by one who says to us, 'Serve
and obey.' Nowadays, in France, we find all Don Juans and no Leporellos.

"After strenuous exertions upon my part to recall to Leporello's mind
the important question whether he had ever seen the true Duval, passing
under the name of Marigny--whether she had not presented herself to his
master at Vienna or elsewhere--he rubbed his forehead, and drew from it
these reminiscences.

"'On the day that his Excellency,'--Leporello generally so styled his
master--'Excellency,' as you are aware, is the title an Italian would
give to Satan if taking his wages,'told me that la petite Marigny was no
more, he had received previously a lady veiled and mantled, whom I did
not recognise as any one I had seen before, but I noticed her way of
carrying herself--haughtily--her head thrown back; and I thought to
myself, that lady is one of his grandes dames. She did call again two or
three times, never announcing her name; then she did not reappear. She
might be Madame Duval--I can't say.'

"'But did you never hear his Excellency speak of the real Duval after
that time?'

"'No--non mi ricordo--I don't remember.'

"'Nor of some living Madame Marigny, though the real one was dead?'

"'Stop, I do recollect; not that he ever named such a person to me, but
that I have posted letters for him to a Madame Marigny--oh, yes! even
years after the said petite Marigny was dead; and once I did venture to
say, 'Pardon me, Eccellenza, but may I ask if that poor lady is really
dead, since I have to prepay this letter to her?'"

"'Oh,' said he, 'Madame Marigny! Of course the one you know is dead, but
there are others of the same name; this lady is of my family. Indeed,
her house, though noble in itself, recognises the representative of mine
as its head, and I am too bon prince not to acknowledge and serve any
one who branches out of my own tree.'"

"A day after this last conversation on the subject, Leporello said to
me: 'My friend, you certainly have some interest in ascertaining what
became of the lady who took the name of Marigny (I state this frankly,
Monsieur, to show how difficult even for one so prudent as I am to beat
about a bush long but what you let people know the sort of bird you are
in search of).

"'Well,' said I, 'she does interest me. I knew something of that Victor
de Mauleon, whom his Excellency did not wish to quarrel with; and it
would be a kindly act to her relation if one could learn what became of
Louise Duval.'

"'I can put you on the way of learning all that his Excellency was
likely to have known of her through correspondence. I have often heard
him quote, with praise, a saying so clever that it might have been
Italian, "Never write, never burn;" that is, never commit yourself by
a letter--keep all letters that could put others in your power. All the
letters he received were carefully kept and labelled. I sent them to his
son in four large trunks. His son, no doubt, has them still.'

"Now, however, I have exhausted my budget. I arrived at Paris last
night. I strongly advise you to come hither at once, if you still desire
to prosecute your search.

"You, Monsieur, can do what I could not venture to do; you can ask the
son of Don Juan if, amid the correspondence of his father, which he may
have preserved, there be any signed Marigny or Duval--any, in
short, which can throw light on this very obscure complication of
circumstances. A grand seigneur would naturally be more complaisant to
a man of your station than he would be to an agent of police. Don
Juan's son, inheriting his father's title, is Monsieur le Marquis de
Rochebriant; and permit me to add, that at this moment, as the journals
doubtless inform you, all Paris resounds with the rumour of the coming
war; and Monsieur de Rochebriant--who is, as I have ascertained, now
in Paris--it may be difficult to find anywhere on earth a month or
two hence.--I have the honour, with profound consideration, &c., &c.,
RENARD."

The day after the receipt of this letter Graham Vane was in Paris.




CHAPTER II.

Among things indescribable is that which is called "Agitation" in
Paris--"Agitation" without riot or violence--showing itself by no
disorderly act, no turbulent outburst. Perhaps the cafes are more
crowded; passengers in the streets stop each other more often, and
converse in small knots and groups; yet, on the whole, there is little
externally to show how loudly the heart of Paris is beating. A traveller
may be passing through quiet landscapes, unconscious that a great battle
is going on some miles off, but if he will stop and put his ear to the
ground he will recognise by a certain indescribable vibration, the voice
of the cannon.

But at Paris an acute observer need not stop and put his ear to the
ground; he feels within himself a vibration--a mysterious inward
sympathy which communicates to the individual a conscious thrill--when
the passions of the multitude are stirred, no matter how silently.

Tortoni's cafe was thronged when Duplessis and Frederic Lemercier
entered it: it was in vain to order breakfast; no table was vacant
either within the rooms or under the awnings without.

But they could not retreat so quickly as they had entered. On catching
sight of the financier several men rose and gathered round him, eagerly
questioning:

"What do you think, Duplessis? Will any insult to France put a drop of
warm blood into the frigid veins of that miserable Ollivier?"

"It is not yet clear that France has been insulted, Messieurs," replied
Duplessis, phlegmatically.

"Bah! Not insulted! The very nomination of a Hohenzollern to the crown
of Spain was an insult--what would you have more?"

"I tell you what it is, Duplessis," said the Vicomte de Breze, whose
habitual light good temper seemed exchanged for insolent swagger--"I
tell you what it is, your friend the Emperor has no more courage than a
chicken. He is grown old, and infirm, and lazy; he knows that he can't
even mount on horseback. But if, before this day week, he has not
declared war on the Prussians, he will be lucky if he can get off as
quietly as poor Louis Philippe did under shelter of his umbrella, and
ticketed 'Schmidt.' Or could you not, M. Duplessis, send him back to
London in a bill of exchange?"

"For a man of your literary repute, M. le Vicomte," said Duplessis, "you
indulge in a strange confusion of metaphors. But, pardon me, I came here
to breakfast, and I cannot remain to quarrel. Come, Lemercier, let us
take our chance of a cutlet at the Trois Freres."

"Fox, Fox," cried Lemercier, whistling to a poodle that had followed him
into the cafe, and, frightened by the sudden movement and loud voices of
the habitues, had taken refuge under the table.

"Your dog is poltron," said De Breze; "call him Nap." At this stroke
of humour there was a general laugh, in the midst of which Duplessis
escaped, and Frederic, having discovered and caught his dog, followed
with that animal tenderly clasped in his arms.

"I would not lose Fox for a great deal," said Lemercier with
effusion; "a pledge of love and fidelity from an English lady the most
distinguished: the lady left me--the dog remains."

Duplessis smiled grimly: "What a thoroughbred Parisian you are, my dear
Frederic! I believe if the tramp of the last angel were sounding, the
Parisians would be divided into two sets: one would be singing the
Marseillaise, and parading the red flag; the other would be shrugging
their shoulders and saying, 'Bah! as if le Bon Dieu would have the bad
taste to injure Paris--the Seat of the Graces, the School of the Arts,
the Fountain of Reason, the Eye of the World;' and so be found by
the destroying angel caressing poodles and making bons mots about les
femmes."

"And quite right, too," said Lemercier, complacently; "what other people
in the world could retain lightness of heart under circumstances so
unpleasant? But why do you take things so solemnly? Of course there will
be war idle now to talk of explanations and excuses. When a Frenchman
says, 'I am insulted,' he is not going to be told that he is not
insulted. He means fighting, and not apologising. But what if there be
war? Our brave soldiers beat the Prussians--take the Rhine--return
to Paris covered with laurels; a new Boulevard de Berlin eclipses the
Boulevard Sebastopol. By the way, Duplessis, a Boulevard de Berlin will
be a good speculation--better than the Rue de Louvier. Ah! is not that
my English friend, Grarm Varn?" here, quitting the arm of Duplessis,
Lemercier stopped a gentleman who was about to pass him unnoticing. "Bon
jour, mon ami! how long have you been at Paris?"

"I only arrived last evening," answered Graham, "and my stay will be so
short that it is a piece of good luck, my dear Lemercier, to meet with
you, and exchange a cordial shake of the hand."

"We are just going to breakfast at the Trois Freres--Duplessis and
I--pray join us."

"With great pleasure--ah, M. Duplessis, I shall be glad to hear from
you that the Emperor will be firm enough to check the advances of that
martial fever which, to judge by the persons I meet, seems to threaten
delirium."

Duplessis looked very keenly at Graham's face, as he replied slowly:
"The English, at least, ought to know that when the Emperor by his last
reforms resigned his personal authority for constitutional monarchy, it
ceased to be a question whether he could or could not be firm in
matters that belonged to the Cabinet and the Chambers. I presume that
if Monsieur Gladstone advised Queen Victoria to declare war upon the
Emperor of Russia, backed by a vast majority in Parliament, you would
think me very ignorant of constitutional monarchy and Parliamentary
government if I said, 'I hope Queen Victoria will resist that martial
fever.'"

"You rebuke me very fairly, M. Duplessis, if you can show me that the
two cases are analogous; but we do not understand in England that,
despite his last reforms, the Emperor has so abnegated his individual
ascendency, that his will, clearly and resolutely expressed, would not
prevail in his Council and silence opposition in the Chambers. Is it so?
I ask for information."

The three men were walking on towards the Palais Royal side by side
while this conversation proceeded.

"That all depends," replied Duplessis, "upon what may be the increase
of popular excitement at Paris. If it slackens, the Emperor, no doubt,
could turn to wise account that favourable pause in the fever. But if
it continues to swell, and Paris cries, 'War,' in a voice as loud as
it cried to Louis Philippe 'Revolution,' do you think that the Emperor
could impose on his ministers the wisdom of peace? His ministers would
be too terrified by the clamour to undertake the responsibility of
opposing it--they would resign. Where is the Emperor to find another
Cabinet? a peace Cabinet? What and who are the orators for peace?--whom
a handful!--who? Gambetta, Jules Favre, avowed Republicans,--would they
even accept the post of ministers to Louis Napoleon? If they did,
would not their first step be the abolition of the Empire? Napoleon is
therefore so far a constitutional monarch in the same sense as Queen
Victoria, that the popular will in the country (and in France in such
matters Paris is the country) controls the Chambers, controls the
Cabinet; and against the Cabinet the Emperor could not contend. I say
nothing of the army--a power in France unknown to you in England,
which would certainly fraternise with no peace party. If war is
proclaimed,--let England blame it if she will--she can't lament it more
than I should: but let England blame the nation; let her blame, if she
please, the form of the government, which rests upon popular suffrage;
but do not let her blame our sovereign more than the French would blame
her own, if compelled by the conditions on which she holds her crown to
sign a declaration of war, which vast majorities in a Parliament just
elected, and a Council of Ministers whom she could not practically
replace, enforced upon her will."

"Your observations, M. Duplessis, impress me strongly, and add to the
deep anxieties with which, in common with all my countrymen, I regard
the menacing aspect of the present hour. Let us hope the best. Our
Government, I know, is exerting itself to the utmost verge of its power,
to remove every just ground of offence that the unfortunate nomination
of a German Prince to the Spanish throne could not fail to have given to
French statesmen."

"I am glad you concede that such a nomination was a just ground of
offence," said Lemercier, rather bitterly; "for I have met Englishmen
who asserted that France had no right to resent any choice of a
sovereign that Spain might make."

"Englishmen in general are not very reflective politicians in foreign
affairs," said Graham; "but those who are must see that France could
not, without alarm the most justifiable, contemplate a cordon of hostile
states being drawn around her on all sides,--Germany, is, itself so
formidable since the field of Sadowa, on the east; a German prince
in the southwest; the not improbable alliance between Prussia and the
Italian kingdom, already so alienated from the France to which it
owed so much. If England would be uneasy were a great maritime power
possessed of Antwerp, how much more uneasy might France justly be if
Prussia could add the armies of Spain to those of Germany, and launch
them both upon France. But that cause of alarm is over--the Hohenzollern
is withdrawn. Let us hope for the best."

The three men had now seated themselves at a table in the Trois Freres,
and Lemercier volunteered the task of inspecting the menu and ordering
the repast, still keeping guard on Fox.

"Observe that man," said Duplessis, pointing towards a gentleman who
had just entered; "the other day he was the popular hero--now, in the
excitement of threatened war, he is permitted to order his bifteck
uncongratulated, uncaressed; such is fame at Paris! here to-day and gone
to-morrow."

"How did the man become famous?"

"He is a painter, and refused a decoration--the only French painter who
ever did."

"And why refuse?"

"Because he is more stared at as the man who refused than he would have
been as the man who accepted. If ever the Red Republicans have their
day, those among them most certain of human condemnation will be the
coxcombs who have gone mad for the desire of human applause."

"You are a profound philosopher, M. Duplessis."

"I hope not--I have an especial contempt for philosophers. Pardon me a
moment--I see a man to whom I would say a word or two."

Duplessis crossed over to another table to speak to a middle-aged man of
somewhat remarkable countenance, with the red ribbon in his buttonhole,
in whom Graham recognised an ex-minister of the Emperor, differing from
most of those at that day in his Cabinet, in the reputation of being
loyal to his master and courageous against a mob. Left thus alone with
Lemercier, Graham said:

"Pray tell me where I can find your friend the Marquis de Rochebriant. I
called at his apartment this morning, and I was told that he had gone on
some visit into the country, taking his valet, and the concierge could
not give me his address. I thought myself so lucky on meeting with you,
who are sure to know."

"No, I do not; it is some days since I saw Alain. But Duplessis will be
sure to know." Here the financier rejoined them.

"Mon cher, Grarm Varn wants to know for what Sabine shades Rochebriant
has deserted the 'fumum opes strepitumque' of the capital."

"Ah! the Marquis is a friend of yours, Monsieur?"

"I can scarcely boast that honour, but he is an acquaintance whom I
should be very glad to see again."

"At this moment he is at the Duchesse de Tarascon's country-house near
Fontainebleau; I had a hurried line from him two days ago stating
that he was going there on her urgent invitation. But he may return
to-morrow; at all events he dines with me on the 8th, and I shall be
charmed if you will do me the honour to meet him at my house."

"It is an invitation too agreeable to refuse, and I thank you very much
for it."

Nothing worth recording passed further in conversation between Graham
and the two Frenchmen. He left them smoking their cigars in the garden,
and walked homeward by the Rue de Rivoli. As he was passing beside the
Magasin du Louvre he stopped, and made way for a lady crossing quickly
out of the shop towards her carriage at the door. Glancing at him with
a slight inclination of her head in acknowledgment of his courtesy, the
lady recognised his features,--

"Ah, Mr. Vane!" she cried, almost joyfully--"you are then at Paris,
though you have not come to see me."

"I only arrived last night, dear Mrs. Morley," said Graham, rather
embarrassed, "and only on some matters of business which unexpectedly
summoned me. My stay will probably be very short."

"In that case let me rob you of a few minutes--no, not rob you even of
them; I can take you wherever you want to go, and as my carriage moves
more quickly than you do on foot, I shall save you the minutes instead
of robbing you of them."

"You are most kind, but I was only going to my hotel, which is close
by."

"Then you have no excuse for not taking a short drive with me in the
Champs Elysees--come."

Thus bidden, Graham could not civilly disobey. He handed the fair
American into her carriage, and seated himself by her side.




CHAPTER III.

"Mr. Vane, I feel as if I had many apologies to make for the interest in
your life which my letter to you so indiscreetly betrayed."

"Oh, Mrs. Morley! you cannot guess how deeply that interest touched me."

"I should not have presumed so far," continued Mrs. Morley, unheeding
the interruption, "if I had not been altogether in error as to the
nature of your sentiments in a certain quarter. In this you must blame
my American rearing. With us there are many flirtations between boys and
girls which come to nothing; but when in my country a man like you meets
with a woman like Mademoiselle Cicogna, there cannot be flirtation. His
attentions, his looks, his manner, reveal to the eyes of those who care
enough for him to watch, one of two things--either he coldly admires
and esteems, or he loves with his whole heart and soul a woman worthy to
inspire such a love. Well, I did watch, and I was absurdly mistaken. I
imagined that I saw love, and rejoiced for the sake of both of you to
think so. I know that in all countries, our own as well as yours, love
is so morbidly sensitive and jealous that it is always apt to invent
imaginary foes to itself. Esteem and admiration never do that. I thought
that some misunderstanding, easily removed by the intervention of a
third person, might have impeded the impulse of two hearts towards each
other--and so I wrote. I had assumed that you loved--I am humbled to the
last degree--you only admired and esteemed."

"Your irony is very keen, Mrs. Morley, and to you it may seem very
just."

"Don't call me Mrs. Morley in that haughty tone of voice,--can't
you talk to me as you would talk to a friend? You only esteemed and
admired--there is an end of it."

"No, there is not an end of it," cried Graham, giving way to an
impetuosity of passion, which rarely, indeed, before another, escaped
his self-control; "the end of it to me is a life out of which is ever
stricken such love as I could feel for woman. To me true love can only
come once. It came with my first look on that fatal face--it has never
left me in thought by day, in dreams by night. The end of it to me
is farewell to all such happiness as the one love of a life can
promise--but--"

"But what?" asked Mrs. Morley, softly, and very much moved by the
passionate earnestness of Graham's voice and words.

"But," he continued with a forced smile, "we Englishmen are trained to
the resistance of absolute authority; we cannot submit all the elements
that make up our being to the sway of a single despot. Love is the
painter of existence, it should not be its sculptor."

"I do not understand the metaphor."

"Love colours our life, it should not chisel its form."

"My dear Mr. Vane, that is very cleverly said, but the human heart is
too large and too restless to be quietly packed up in an aphorism. Do
you mean to tell me that if you found you had destroyed Isaura Cicogna's
happiness as well as resigned your own, that thought would not somewhat
deform the very shape you would give to your life? Is it colour alone
that your life would lose?"

"Ah, Mrs. Morley, do not lower your friend into an ordinary girl in whom
idleness exaggerates the strength of any fancy over which it dreamily
broods. Isaura Cicogna has her occupations--her genius--her fame--her
career. Honestly speaking, I think that in these she will find a
happiness that no quiet hearth could bestow. I will say no more. I feel
persuaded that were we two united I could not make her happy. With the
irresistible impulse that urges the genius of the writer towards its
vent in public sympathy and applause, she would chafe if I said, 'Be
contented to be wholly mine.' And if I said it not, and felt I had no
right to say it, and allowed the full scope to her natural ambition,
what then? She would chafe yet more to find that I had no fellowship in
her aims and ends--that where I should feel pride, I felt humiliation.
It would be so; I cannot help it, 'tis my nature."

"So be it then. When, next year perhaps, you visit Paris, you will
be safe from my officious interference! Isaura will be the wife of
another."

Graham pressed his hand to his heart with the sudden movement of one who
feels there an agonising spasm--his cheek, his very lips were bloodless.

"I told you," he said bitterly, "that your fears of my influence over
the happiness of one so gifted, and so strong in such gifts, were
groundless; you allow that I should be very soon forgotten?"

"I allow no such thing--I wish I could. But do you know so little of a
woman's heart (and in matters of heart, I never yet heard that genius
had a talisman against emotion),--do you know so little of a woman's
heart as not to know that the very moment in which she may accept a
marriage the least fitted to render her happy, is that in which she has
lost all hope of happiness in another?"

"Is it indeed so?" murmured Graham--"Ay, I can conceive it."

"And have you so little comprehension of the necessities which that
fame, that career to which you allow she is impelled by the instincts of
genius, impose on this girl, young, beautiful, fatherless, motherless?
No matter how pure her life, can she guard it from the slander of
envious tongues? Will not all her truest friends--would not you, if you
were her brother--press upon her by all the arguments that have most
weight with the woman who asserts independence in her modes of life, and
yet is wise enough to know that the world can only judge of virtue by
its shadow--reputation, not to dispense with the protection which a
husband can alone secure? And that is why I warn you, if it be yet time,
that in resigning your own happiness you may destroy Isaura's. She will
wed another, but she will not be happy. What a chimera or dread your
egotism as man conjures up! Oh! forsooth, the qualities that charm and
delight a world are to unfit a woman to be helpmate to a man. Fie on
you!--fie!"

Whatever answer Graham might have made to these impassioned reproaches
was here checked.

Two men on horseback stopped the carriage. One was Enguerrand de
Vandemar, the other was the Algerine Colonel whom we met at the supper
given at the Maison Doree by Frederic Lemercier.

"Pardon, Madame Morley," said Enguerrand; "but there are symptoms of a
mob-epidemic a little further up the fever began at Belleville, and is
threatening the health of the Champs Elysees. Don't be alarmed--it may
be nothing, though it may be much. In Paris, one can never calculate
an hour beforehand the exact progress of a politico-epidemic fever. At
present I say, 'Bah! a pack of ragged boys, gamins de Paris;' but my
friend the Colonel, twisting his moustache en souriant amerement, says,
'It is the indignation of Paris at the apathy of the Government under
insult to the honour of France;' and Heaven only knows how rapidly
French gamins grow into giants when Colonels talk about the indignation
of Paris and the honour of France!"

"But what has happened?" asked Mrs. Morley, turning to the Colonel.

"Madame," replied the warrior, "it is rumoured that the King of Prussia
has turned his back upon the ambassador of France; and that the pekin
who is for peace at any price--M. Ollivier--will say tomorrow in the
Chamber, that France submits to a slap in the face."

"Please, Monsieur de Vandemar, to tell my coachman to drive home," said
Mrs. Morley.

The carriage turned and went homeward. The Colonel lifted his hat, and
rode back to see what the gamins were about. Enguerrand, who had no
interest in the gamins, and who looked on the Colonel as a bore, rode by
the side of the carriage.

"Is there anything serious in this?" asked Mrs. Morley.

"At this moment, nothing. What it may be this hour to-morrow I cannot
say. Ah! Monsieur Vane, bon jour I did not recognise you at first. Once,
in a visit at the chateau of one of your distinguished countrymen, I saw
two game-cocks turned out facing each other: they needed no pretext for
quarrelling--neither do France and Prussia--no matter which game-cock
gave the last offence, the two game-cocks must have it out. All that
Ollivier can do, if he be wise, is to see that the French cock has
his steel spurs as long as the Prussians. But this I do say, that if
Ollivier attempts to put the French cock back into its bag, the Empire
is gone in forty-eight hours. That to me is a trifle--I care nothing for
the Empire; but that which is not a trifle is anarchy and chaos. Better
war and the Empire than peace and Jules Favre. But let us seize the
present hour, Mr. Vane; whatever happens to-morrow, shall we dine
together to-day? Name your restaurant."

"I am so grieved," answered Graham, rousing himself, "I am here only on
business, and engaged all the evening."

"What a wonderful thing is this life of ours!" said Enguerrand. "The
destiny of France at this moment hangs on a thread--I, a Frenchman,
say to an English friend, 'Let us dine--a cutlet to-day and a fig for
to-morrow;' and my English friend, distinguished native of a country
with which we have the closest alliance, tells me that in this crisis
of France he has business to attend to! My father is quite right; he
accepts the Voltairean philosophy, and cries, Vivent les indifferents!"

"My dear M. de Vandemar," said Graham, "in every country you will find
the same thing. All individuals massed together constitute public life.
Each individual has a life of his own, the claims and the habits and
the needs of which do not suppress his sympathies with public life,
but imperiously overrule them. Mrs. Morley, permit me to pull the
check-string--I get out here."

"I like that man," said Enguerrand, as he continued to ride by the fair
American, "in language and esprit he is so French."

"I use to like him better than you can," answered Mrs. Morley, "but
in prejudice and stupidity he is so English. As it seems you are
disengaged, come and partake, pot au feu, with Frank and me."

"Charmed to do so," answered the cleverest and best bred of all Parisian
beaux garcons, "but forgive me if I quit you soon. This poor France!
Entre nous, I am very uneasy about the Parisian fever. I must run away
after dinner to clubs and cafes to learn the last bulletins."

"We have nothing like that French Legitimist in the States," said the
fair American to herself, "unless we should ever be so silly as to make
Legitimists of the ruined gentlemen of the South."

Meanwhile Graham Vane went slowly back to his apartment. No false excuse
had he made to Enguerrand; this evening was devoted to M. Renard, who
told him little he had not known before; but his private life overruled
his public, and all that night he, professed politician, thought
sleeplessly, not over the crisis to France, which might alter the
conditions of Europe, but the talk on his private life of that
intermeddling American woman.




CHAPTER IV.

The next day, Wednesday, July 6th, commenced one of those eras in
the world's history in which private life would vainly boast that it
overrules Life Public. How many private lives does such a terrible time
influence, absorb, darken with sorrow, crush into graves?

It was the day when the Duc de Gramont uttered the fatal speech which
determined the die between peace and war. No one not at Paris on that
day can conceive the popular enthusiasm with which that speech was
hailed--the greater because the warlike tone of it was not anticipated;
because there had been a rumour amidst circles the best informed that
a speech of pacific moderation was to be the result of the Imperial
Council. Rapturous indeed were the applauses with which the sentences
that breathed haughty defiance were hailed by the Assembly. The ladies
in the tribune rose with one accord, waving their handkerchiefs. Tall,
stalwart, dark, with Roman features and lofty presence, the Minister
of France seemed to say with Catiline in the fine tragedy: "Lo! where I
stand, I am war!"

Paris had been hungering for some hero of the hour--the Duc de Gramont
became at once raised to that eminence. All the journals, save the
very few which were friendly to peace, because hostile to the Emperor,
resounded with praise, not only of the speech, but of the speaker. It is
with a melancholy sense of amusement that one recalls now to mind those
organs of public opinion--with what romantic fondness they dwelt on the
personal graces of the man who had at last given voice to the chivalry
of France: "The charming gravity of his countenance--the mysterious
expression of his eye!"

As the crowd poured from the Chambers, Victor de Mauleon and Savarin,
who had been among the listeners, encountered.

"No chance for my friends the Orleanists now," said Savarin. "You who
mock at all parties are, I suppose, at heart for the Republican--small
chance, too, for that."

"I do not agree with you. Violent impulses have quick reactions."

"But what reaction could shake the Emperor after he returns a conqueror,
bringing in his pocket the left bank of the Rhine?"

"None--when he does that. Will he do it? Does he himself think he will
do it? I doubt--"

"Doubt the French army against the Prussian?"

"Against the German people united--yes, very much."

"But war will disunite the German people. Bavaria will surely assist
us--Hanover will rise against the spoliator--Austria at our first
successes must shake off her present enforced neutrality?"

"You have not been in Germany, and I have. What yesterday was a Prussian
army, to-morrow will be a German population; far exceeding our own in
numbers, in hardihood of body, in cultivated intellect, in military
discipline. But talk of something else. How is my ex-editor--poor
Gustave Rameau?"

"Still very weak, but on the mend. You may have him back in his office
soon."

"Impossible! even in his sick-bed his vanity was more vigorous than
ever. He issued a war-song, which has gone the round of the war journals
signed by his own name. He must have known very well that the name of
such a Tyrtaeus cannot reappear as the editor of Le Sens Commun; that in
launching his little firebrand he burned all vessels that could waft him
back to the port he had quitted. But I dare say he has done well for his
own interests; I doubt if Le Sens Commun can much longer hold its ground
in the midst of the prevalent lunacy."

"What! it has lost subscribers?--gone off in sale already, since it
declared for peace?"

"Of course it has; and after the article which, if I live over to-night,
will appear to-morrow, I should wonder if it sell enough to cover the
cost of the print and paper."

"Martyr to principle! I revere, but I do not envy thee."

"Martyrdom is not my ambition. If Louis Napoleon be defeated, what then?
Perhaps he may be the martyr; and the Favres and Gambettas may roast
their own eggs on the gridiron they heat for his majesty."

Here an English gentleman, who was the very able correspondent to a
very eminent journal, and in that capacity had made acquaintance with De
Mauleon, joined the two Frenchmen; Savarin, however, after an exchange
of salutations, went his way.

"May I ask a frank answer to a somewhat rude question, M. le Vicomte?"
said the Englishman. "Suppose that the Imperial Government had to-day
given in their adhesion to the peace party, how long would it have been
before their orators in the Chamber and their organs in the press would
have said that France was governed by poltrons?"

"Probably for most of the twenty-four hours. But there are a few who are
honest in their convictions; of that few I am one."

"And would have supported the Emperor and his Government?"

"No, Monsieur--I do not say that."

"Then the Emperor would have turned many friends into enemies, and no
enemies into friends."

"Monsieur--you in England know that a party in opposition is not
propitiated when the party in power steals its measures. Ha!--pardon
me, who is that gentleman, evidently your countryman, whom I see yonder
talking to the Secretary of your Embassy?"

"He.--Mr. Vane-Graham Vane. Do you not know him? He has been much in
Paris, attached to our Embassy formerly; a clever man--much is expected
from him."

"Ah! I think I have seen him before, but am not quite sure. Did you
say Vane? I once knew a Monsieur Vane, a distinguished parliamentary
orator."

"That gentleman is his son--would you like to be introduced to him?"

"Not to-day--I am in some hurry." Here Victor lifted his hat in parting
salutation, and as he walked away cast at Graham another glance keen
and scrutinising. "I have seen that man before," he muttered,
"where?--when?--can it be only a family likeness to the father? No, the
features are different; the profile is--ha!--Mr. Lamb, Mr. Lamb--but why
call himself by that name?--why disguised?--what can he have to do
with poor Louise? Bah--these are not questions I can think of now. This
war--this war--can it yet be prevented? How it will prostrate all the
plans my ambition so carefully schemed! Oh!--at least if I were but in
the Chamber. Perhaps I yet may be before the war is ended--the Clavignys
have great interest in their department."




CHAPTER V.

Graham had left a note with Rochebriant's concierge requesting an
interview on the Marquis's return to Paris, and on the evening after
the day just commemorated he received a line, saying that Alain had come
back, and would be at home at nine o'clock. Graham found himself in the
Breton's apartment punctually at the hour indicated.

Alain was in high spirits: he burst at once into enthusiastic
exclamations on the virtual announcement of war.

"Congratulate me, mon cher!" he cried--"the news was a joyous surprise
to me. Only so recently as yesterday morning I was under the gloomy
apprehension that the Imperial Cabinet would continue to back Ollivier's
craven declaration 'that France had not been affronted!' The Duchesse
de Tarascon, at whose campagne I was a guest, is (as you doubtless know)
very much in the confidence of the Tuileries. On the first signs of war,
I wrote to her, saying that whatever the objections of my pride to enter
the army as a private in time of peace, such objections ceased on the
moment when all distinctions of France must vanish in the eyes of sons
eager to defend her banners. The Duchesse in reply begged me to come to
her campagne and talk over the matter. I went; she then said that if
war should break out it was the intention to organise the Mobiles and
officer them with men of birth and education, irrespective of previous
military service, and in that case I might count on my epaulets. But
only two nights ago she received a letter--I know not of course from
whom--evidently from some high authority--that induced her to think the
moderation of the Council would avert the war, and leave the swords of
the Mobiles in their sheaths. I suspect the decision of yesterday must
have been a very sudden one. Ce cher Gramont! See what it is to have a
well-born man in a sovereign's councils."

"If war must come, I at least wish all renown to yourself. But--"

"Oh! spare me your 'buts'; the English are always too full of them where
her own interests do not appeal to her. She had no 'buts' for war in
India or a march into Abyssinia."

Alain spoke petulantly; at that moment the French were very much
irritated by the monitory tone of the English journals. Graham prudently
avoided the chance of rousing the wrath of a young hero yearning for his
epaulets.

"I am English enough," said he, with good-humoured courtesy, "to care
for English interests; and England has no interest abroad dearer to her
than the welfare and dignity of France. And now let me tell you why
I presumed on an acquaintance less intimate than I could desire, to
solicit this interview on a matter which concerns myself, and in which
you could perhaps render me a considerable service."

"If I can, count it rendered; move to this sofa--join me in a cigar, and
let us talk at ease comme de vieux amis, whose fathers or brothers might
have fought side by side in the Crimea." Graham removed to the sofa
beside Rochebriant, and after one or two whiffs laid aside the cigar and
began:

"Among the correspondence which Monsieur your father has left, are there
any letters of no distant date signed Marigny--Madame Marigny? Pardon
me, I should state my motive in putting this question. I am intrusted
with a charge, the fulfilment of which may prove to the benefit of this
lady or her child; such fulfilment is a task imposed upon my honour. But
all the researches to discover this lady which I have instituted stop
at a certain date, with this information,--viz., that she corresponded
occasionally with the late Marquis de Rochebriant; that he habitually
preserved the letters of his correspondents; and that these letters were
severally transmitted to you at his decease."

Alain's face had taken a very grave expression while Graham spoke, and
he now replied with a mixture of haughtiness and embarrassment:

"The boxes containing the letters my father received and preserved
were sent to me as you say--the larger portion of them were from
ladies--sorted and labelled, so that in glancing at any letter in each
packet I could judge of the general tenor of these in the same packet
without the necessity of reading them. All packets of that kind,
Monsieur Vane, I burned. I do not remember any letters signed 'Marigny!"

"I perfectly understand, my dear Marquis, that you would destroy all
letters which your father himself would have destroyed if his last
illness had been sufficiently prolonged. But I do not think the letters
I mean would have come under that classification; probably they were
short, and on matters of business relating to some third person--some
person, for instance, of the name of Louise, or of Duval!"

"Stop! let me think. I have a vague remembrance of one or two letters
which rather perplexed me, they were labelled, 'Louise D--. Mem.: to
make further inquiries as to the fate of her uncle.'"

"Marquis, these are the letters I seek. Thank heaven, you have not
destroyed them?"

"No; there was no reason why I should destroy, though I really cannot
state precisely any reason why I kept them. I have a very vague
recollection of their existence."

"I entreat you to allow me at least a glance at the handwriting, and
compare it with that of a letter I have about me; and if the several
handwritings correspond, I would ask you to let me have the address,
which, according to your father's memorandum, will be found in the
letters you have preserved."

"To compliance with such a request I not only cannot demur, but perhaps
it may free me from some responsibility which I might have thought the
letters devolved upon my executorship. I am sure they did not concern
the honour of any woman of any family, for in that case I must have
burned them."

"Ah, Marquis, shake hands there! In such concord between man and man,
there is more entente cordiale between England and France than there was
at Sebastopol. Now let me compare the handwritings."

"The box that contained the letters is not here--I left it at
Rochebriant; I will telegraph to my aunt to send it; the day after
to-morrow it will no doubt arrive. Breakfast with me that day--say at
one o'clock, and after breakfast the Box!"

"How can I thank you?"

"Thank me! but you said your honour was concerned in your
request--requests affecting honour between men comma il faut is a
ceremony of course, like a bow between them. One bows, the other returns
the bow--no thanks on either side. Now that we have done with that
matter, let me say that I thought your wish for our interview originated
in a very different cause."

"What could that be?"

"Nay, do you not recollect that last talk between us, when with such
loyalty you spoke to me about Mademoiselle Cicogna, and supposing that
there might be rivalship between us, retracted all that you might have
before said to warn me against fostering the sentiment with which she
had inspired me; even at the first slight glance of a face which cannot
be lightly forgotten by those who have once seen it."

"I recollect perfectly every word of that talk, Marquis," answered
Graham, calmly, but with his hand concealed within his vest and pressed
tightly to his heart. The warning of Mrs. Morley flashed upon him. "Was
this the man to seize the prize he had put aside--this man, younger than
himself--handsomer than himself--higher in rank?"

"I recollect that talk, Marquis! Well, what then?"

"In my self-conceit I supposed that you might have heard how much I
admired Mademoiselle Cicogna--how, having not long since met her at the
house of Duplessis (who by the way writes me word that I shall meet you
chez lui tomorrow), I have since sought her society wherever there was a
chance to find it. You may have heard, at our club, or elsewhere, how I
adore her genius--how, I say, that nothing so Breton--that is, so
pure and so lofty--has appeared and won readers since the days of
Chateaubriand,--and--you, knowing that les absents ont toujours tort,
come to me and ask Monsieur de Rochebriant, Are we rivals? I expected a
challenge--you relieve my mind--you abandon the field to me?"

At the first I warned the reader how improved from his old mauvaise
honte a year or so of Paris life would make our beau Marquis. How a year
or two of London life with its horsey slang and its fast girls of the
period would have vulgarised an English Rochebriant! Graham gnawed his
lips and replied quietly, "I do not challenge! Am I to congratulate
you?"

"No, that brilliant victory is not for me. I thought that was made clear
in the conversation I have referred to. But if you have done me the
honour to be jealous I am exceedingly flattered. Speaking, seriously, if
I admired Mademoiselle Cicogna when you and I last met, the admiration
is increased by the respect with which I regard a character so simply
noble. How many women older than she would have been spoiled by the
adulation that has followed her literary success!--how few women so
young, placed in a position so critical, having the courage to lead
a life so independent, would have maintained the dignity of their
character free from a single indiscretion! I speak not from my own
knowledge, but from the report of all, who would be pleased enough to
censure if they could find a cause. Good society is the paradise of
mauvaises langues."

Graham caught Alain's hand and pressed it, but made no answer.

The young Marquis continued:

"You will pardon me for speaking thus freely in the way that I would
wish any friend to speak of the demoiselle who might become my wife.
I owe you much, not only for the loyalty with which you address me in
reference to this young lady, but for words affecting my own position
in France, which sank deep into my mind--saved me from deeming myself
a proscrit in my own land--filled me with a manly ambition, not stifled
amidst the thick of many effeminate follies--and, in fact, led me to the
career which is about to open before me, and in which my ancestors have
left me no undistinguished examples. Let us speak, then, a coeur ouvert,
as one friend to another. Has there been any misunderstanding between
you and Mademoiselle Cicogna which has delayed your return to Paris? If
so, is it over now?"

"There has been no such misunderstanding."

"Do you doubt whether the sentiments you expressed in regard to her when
we met last year, are returned?"

"I have no right to conjecture her sentiments. You mistake altogether."

"I do not believe that I am dunce enough to mistake your feelings
towards Mademoiselle--they may be read in your face at this moment.
Of course I do not presume to hazard a conjecture as to those of
Mademoiselle towards yourself. But when I met her not long since at the
house of Duplessis, with whose daughter she is intimate, I chanced to
speak to her of you; and if I may judge, by looks and manner, I chose no
displeasing theme. You turn away--I offend you?"

"Offend!--no, indeed; but on this subject I am not prepared to converse.
I came to Paris on matters of business much complicated and which ought
to absorb my attention. I cannot longer trespass on your evening. The
day after to-morrow, then, I will be with you at one o'clock."

"Yes, I hope then to have the letters you wish to consult; and,
meanwhile, we meet to-morrow at the Hotel Duplessis."




CHAPTER VI.

Graham had scarcely quitted Alain, and the young Marquis was about to
saunter forth to his club, when Duplessis was announced.

These two men had naturally seen much of each other since Duplessis had
returned from Bretagne and delivered Alain from the gripe of Louvier.
Scarcely a day had passed but what Alain had been summoned to enter into
the financier's plans for the aggrandisement of the Rochebriant
estates, and delicately made to feel that he had become a partner in
speculations, which, thanks to the capital and the abilities Duplessis
brought to bear, seemed likely to result in the ultimate freedom of his
property from all burdens, and the restoration of his inheritance to a
splendour correspondent with the dignity of his rank.

On the plea that his mornings were chiefly devoted to professional
business, Duplessis arranged that these consultations should take place
in the evenings. From those consultations Valerie was not banished;
Duplessis took her into the council as a matter of course. "Valerie,"
said the financier to Alain, "though so young, has a very clear head for
business, and she is so interested in all that interests myself, that
even where I do not take her opinion, I at least feel my own made
livelier and brighter by her sympathy."

So the girl was in the habit of taking her work or her book into the
cabinet de travail, and never obtruding a suggestion unasked, still,
when appealed to, speaking with a modest good sense which justified her
father's confidence and praise; and a propos of her book, she had taken
Chateaubriand into peculiar favour. Alain had respectfully presented to
her beautifully bound copies of Atala and Ls Genie du Christianisme;
it is astonishing, indeed, how he had already contrived to regulate
her tastes in literature. The charms of those quiet family evenings had
stolen into the young Breton's heart.

He yearned for none of the gayer reunions in which he had before sought
for a pleasure that his nature had not found; for, amidst the amusements
of Paris, Alain remained intensely Breton--viz., formed eminently for
the simple joys of domestic life, associating the sacred hearthstone
with the antique religion of his fathers; gathering round it all the
images of pure and noble affections which the romance of a poetic
temperament had evoked from the solitude which had surrounded a
melancholy boyhood-an uncontaminated youth.

Duplessis entered abruptly, and with a countenance much disturbed from
its wonted saturnine composure.

"Marquis, what is this I have just heard from the Duchesse de Tarascon?
Can it be? You ask military service in this ill-omened war?--you?"

"My dear and best friend," said Alain, very much startled, "I should
have thought that you, of all men in the world, would have most approved
of my request--you, so devoted an Imperialist--you, indignant that the
representative of one of these families, which the First Napoleon
so eagerly and so vainly courted, should ask for the grade of
sous-lieutenant in the armies of Napoleon the Third--you, who of all men
know how ruined are the fortunes of a Rochebriant--you, feel surprised
that he clings to the noblest heritage his ancestors have left to
him--their sword! I do not understand you."

"Marquis," said Duplessis, seating himself, and regarding Alain with
a look in which were blended the sort of admiration and the sort of
contempt with which a practical man of the world, who, having himself
gone through certain credulous follies, has learned to despise the
follies, but retains a reminiscence of sympathy with the fools they
bewitch, "Marquis, pardon me; you talk finely, but you do not talk
common sense. I should be extremely pleased if your Legitimist scruples
had allowed you to solicit, or rather to accept, a civil appointment
not unsuited to your rank, under the ablest sovereign, as a civilian,
to whom France can look for rational liberty combined with established
order. Such openings to a suitable career you have rejected; but who
on earth could expect you, never trained to military service, to draw
a sword hitherto sacred to the Bourbons, on behalf of a cause which
the madness, I do not say of France but of Paris, has enforced on a
sovereign against whom you would fight to-morrow if you had a chance of
placing the descendant of Henry IV. on his throne."

"I am not about to fight for any sovereign, but for my country against
the foreigner."

"An excellent answer if the foreigner had invaded your country; but
it seems that your country is going to invade the foreigner--a very
different thing. Chut! all this discussion is most painful to me. I feel
for the Emperor a personal loyalty, and for the hazards he is about to
encounter a prophetic dread, as an ancestor of yours might have felt for
Francis I. could he have foreseen Pavia. Let us talk of ourselves and
the effect the war should have upon our individual action. You are
aware, of course, that, though M. Louvier has had notice of our
intention to pay off his mortgage, that intention cannot be carried into
effect for six months; if the money be not then forthcoming his hold on
Rochebriant remains unshaken--the sum is large."

"Alas! yes."

"The war must greatly disturb the money-market, affect many speculative
adventures and operations when at the very moment credit may be most
needed. It is absolutely necessary that I should be daily at my post
on the Bourse, and hourly watch the ebb and flow of events. Under these
circumstances I had counted, permit me to count still, on your presence
in Bretagne. We have already begun negotiations on a somewhat extensive
scale, whether as regards the improvement of forests and orchards, or
the plans for building allotments, as soon as the lands are free for
disposal--for all these the eye of a master is required. I entreat you,
then, to take up your residence at Rochebriant."

"My dear friend, this is but a kindly and delicate mode of relieving me
from the dangers of war. I have, as you must be conscious, no practical
knowledge of business. Hebert can be implicitly trusted, and will carry
out your views with a zeal equal to mine, and with infinitely more
ability."

"Marquis, pray neither to Hercules nor to Hebert; if you wish to get
your own cart out of the ruts, put your own shoulder to the wheel."

Alain coloured high, unaccustomed to be so bluntly addressed, but he
replied with a kind of dignified meekness: "I shall ever remain grateful
for what you have done, and wish to do for me. But, assuming that you
suppose rightly, the estates of Rochebriant would, in your hands, become
a profitable investment, and more than redeem the mortgage, and the sum
you have paid Louvier on my account, let it pass to you irrespectively
of me. I shall console myself in the knowledge that the old place will
be restored, and those who honoured its old owners prosper in hands so
strong, guided by a heart so generous."

Duplessis was deeply affected by these simple words; they seized him on
the tenderest side of his character--for his heart was generous, and
no one, except his lost wife and his loving child, had ever before
discovered it to be so. Has it ever happened to you, reader, to be
appreciated on the one point of the good or the great that is in you--on
which secretly you value yourself most--but for which nobody, not
admitted into your heart of hearts, has given you credit? If that
has happened to you, judge what Duplessis felt when the fittest
representative of that divine chivalry which, if sometimes deficient
in head, owes all that exalts it to riches of heart, spoke thus to the
professional moneymaker, whose qualities of head were so acknowledged
that a compliment to them would be a hollow impertinence, and whose
qualities of heart had never yet received a compliment!

Duplessis started from his seat and embraced Alain, murmuring, "Listen
to me, I love you--I never had a son--be mine--Rochebriant shall be my
daughter's dot."

Alain returned the embrace, and then recoiling, said: "Father, your
first desire must be honour for your son. You have guessed my secret--I
have learned to love Valerie. Seeing her out in the world, she seemed
like other girls, fair and commonplace--seeing her--at your house, I
have said to myself, 'There is the one girl fairer than all others in my
eyes, and the one individual to whom all other girls are commonplace.'"

"Is that true?--is it?"

"True! does a gentilhomme ever lie? And out of that love for her has
grown this immovable desire to be something worthy of her--something
that may lift me from the vulgar platform of men who owe all to
ancestors, nothing to themselves. Do you suppose for one moment that I,
saved from ruin and penury by Valerie's father, could be base enough
to say to her, 'In return be Madame la Marquise de Rochebriant'? Do you
suppose that I, whom you would love and respect as son, could come
to you and say: 'I am oppressed by your favours--I am crippled with
debts--give me your millions and we are quits.' No, Duplessis! You, so
well descended yourself--so superior as man amongst men that you
would have won name and position had you been born the son of a
shoeblack,--you would eternally despise the noble who, in days when
all that we Bretons deem holy in noblesse are subjected to ridicule and
contempt, should so vilely forget the only motto which the scutcheons
of all gentilhommes have in common, 'Noblesse oblige.' War, with all
its perils and all its grandeur,--war lifts on high the banners of
France,--war, in which every ancestor of mine whom I care to recall
aggrandised the name that descends to me. Let me then do as those before
me have done; let me prove that I am worth something in myself, and
then you and I are equals; and I can say with no humbled crest, 'Your
benefits are accepted:' the man who has fought not ignobly for France
may aspire to the hand of her daughter. Give me Valerie; as to her
dot,--be it so, Rochebriant,--it will pass to her children."

"Alain! Alain! my friend! my son!--but if you fall."

"Valerie will give you a nobler son."

Duplessis moved away, sighing heavily; but he said no more in
deprecation of Alain's martial resolves.

A Frenchman, however practical, however worldly, however philosophical
he may be, who does not sympathise with the follies of honour--who
does not concede indulgence to the hot blood of youth when he says, "My
country is insulted and her banner is unfurled," may certainly be a man
of excellent common sense; but if such men had been in the majority,
Gaul would never have been France--Gaul would have been a province of
Germany.

And as Duplessis walked homeward--he the calmest and most far-seeing of
all authorities on the Bourse--the man who, excepting only De Mauleon,
most decidedly deemed the cause of the war a blunder, and most
forebodingly anticipated its issues, caught the prevalent enthusiasm.
Everywhere he was stopped by cordial hands, everywhere met by
congratulating smiles. "How right you have been, Duplessis, when you
have laughed at those who have said, 'The Emperor is ill, decrepit, done
up.'"

"Vive l'Empereur! at least we shall be face to face with those insolent
Prussians!"

Before he arrived at his home, passing along the Boulevards, greeted by
all the groups enjoying the cool night air before the cafes, Duplessis
had caught the war epidemic.

Entering his hotel, he went at once to Valerie's chamber. "Sleep well
to-night, child; Alain has told me that he adores thee, and if he will
go to the war, it is that he may lay his laurels at thy feet. Bless
thee, my child, thou couldst not have made a nobler choice."

Whether, after these words, Valerie slept well or not 'tis not for me
to say; but if she did sleep, I venture to guess that her dreams were
rose-coloured.




CHAPTER VII.

All the earlier part of that next day, Graham Vane remained in-doors--a
lovely day at Paris that 8th of July, and with that summer day
all hearts at Paris were in unison. Discontent was charmed into
enthusiasm--Belleville and Montmartre forgot the visions of Communism
and Socialism and other "isms" not to be realised except in some
undiscovered Atlantis!

The Emperor was the idol of the day--the names of Jules Favre and
Gambetta were by-words of scorn. Even Armand Monnier, still out of work,
beginning to feel the pinch of want, and fierce for any revolution that
might turn topsy-turvy the conditions of labour,--even Armand Monnier
was found among groups that were laying immortelles at the foot of the
column in the Place Vendome, and heard to say to a fellow malcontent,
with eyes uplifted to the statue of the First Napoleon, "Do you not
feel at this moment that no Frenchman can be long angry with the Little
Corporal? He denied La Liberte, but he gave La Gloire."

Heeding not the stir of the world without, Graham was compelling into
one resolve the doubts and scruples which had so long warred against the
heart which they ravaged, but could not wholly subdue.

The conversations with Mrs. Morley and Rochebriant had placed in a light
in which he had not before regarded it, the image of Isaura.

He had reasoned from the starting-point of his love for her, and had
sought to convince himself that against that love it was his duty to
strive.

But now a new question was addressed to his conscience as well as to
his heart. What though he had never formally declared to her his
affection--never, in open words, wooed her as his own--never even
hinted to her the hopes of a union which at one time he had fondly
entertained,--still was it true that his love had been too transparent
not to be detected by her, and not to have led her on to return it?

Certainly he had, as we know, divined that he was not indifferent to
her: at Enghien, a year ago, that he had gained her esteem, and perhaps
interested her fancy.

We know also how he had tried to persuade himself that the artistic
temperament, especially when developed in women, is too elastic to
suffer the things of real life to have lasting influence over happiness
or sorrow,--that in the pursuits in which her thought and imagination
found employ, in the excitement they sustained, and the fame to which
they conduced, Isaura would be readily consoled for a momentary pang
of disappointed affection. And that a man so alien as himself, both by
nature and by habit, from the artistic world, was the very last person
who could maintain deep and permanent impression on her actual life or
her ideal dreams. But what if, as he gathered from the words of the fair
American--what if, in all these assumptions, she was wholly mistaken?
What if, in previously revealing his own heart, he had decoyed
hers--what if, by a desertion she had no right to anticipate, he had
blighted her future? What if this brilliant child of genius could love
as warmly, as deeply, as enduringly as any simple village girl to whom
there is no poetry except love? If this were so--what became the first
claim on his honour, his conscience, his duty?

The force which but a few days ago his reasonings had given to the
arguments that forbade him to think of Isaura, became weaker and weaker,
as now in an altered mood of reflection he resummoned and reweighed
them.

All those prejudices--which had seemed to him such rational common-sense
truths, when translated from his own mind into the words of Lady Janet's
letter,--was not Mrs. Morley right in denouncing them as the crotchets
of an insolent egotism? Was it not rather to the favour than to the
disparagement of Isaura, regarded even in the man's narrow-minded view
of woman's dignity, that this orphan girl could, with character so
unscathed, pass through the trying ordeal of the public babble, the
public gaze-command alike the esteem of a woman so pure as Mrs. Morley,
the reverence of a man so chivalrously sensitive to honour as Alain de
Rochebriant?

Musing thus, Graham's countenance at last brightened--a glorious joy
entered into and possessed him. He felt as a man who had burst asunder
the swathes and trammels which had kept him galled and miserable with
the sense of captivity, and from which some wizard spell that took
strength from his own superstition had forbidden to struggle.

He was free!--and that freedom was rapture!--yes, his resolve was taken.

The day was now far advanced. He should have just time before the dinner
with Duplessis to drive to A------, where he still supposed Isaura
resided. How, as his fiacre rolled along the well-remembered road--how
completely he lived in that world of romance of which he denied himself
to be a denizen.

Arrived at the little villa, he found it occupied only by workmen--it
was under repair. No one could tell him to what residence the ladies who
occupied it the last year had removed.

"I shall learn from Mrs. Morley," thought Graham, and at her house he
called in going back, but Mrs. Morley was not at home; he had only just
time, after regaining his apartment, to change his dress for the
dinner to which he was invited. As it was, he arrived late, and
while apologising to his host for his want of punctuality, his tongue
faltered. At the farther end of the room he saw a face, paler and
thinner than when he had seen it last--a face across which a something
of grief had gone.

The servant announced that dinner was served.

"Mr. Vane," said Duplessis, "will you take into dinner Mademoiselle
Cicogna?"





BOOK XI.




CHAPTER I.

Amoung the frets and checks to the course that "never did run smooth,"
there is one which is sufficiently frequent, for many a reader will
remember the irritation it caused him. You have counted on a meeting
with the beloved one unwitnessed by others, an interchange of
confessions and vows which others may not hear. You have arranged almost
the words in which your innermost heart is to be expressed; pictured to
yourself the very looks by which those words will have their sweetest
reply. The scene you have thus imagined appears to you vivid and
distinct, as if foreshown in a magic glass. And suddenly, after long
absence, the meeting takes place in the midst of a common companionship:
nothing that you wished to say can be said. The scene you pictured is
painted out by the irony of Chance; and groups and backgrounds of which
you had never dreamed start forth from the disappointing canvas. Happy
if that be all! But sometimes, by a strange, subtle intuition, you feel
that the person herself is changed; and sympathetic with that change, a
terrible chill comes over your own heart.

Before Graham had taken his seat at the table beside Isaura, he felt
that she was changed to him. He felt it by her very touch as their hands
met at the first greeting,--by the tone of her voice in the few words
that passed between them,--by the absence of all glow in the smile which
had once lit up her face, as a burst of sunshine lights up a day in
spring, and gives a richer gladness of colour to all its blooms. Once
seated side by side they remained for some moments silent. Indeed, it
would have been rather difficult for anything less than the wonderful
intelligence of lovers between whom no wall can prevent the stolen
interchange of tokens, to have ventured private talk of their own amid
the excited converse which seemed all eyes, all tongues, all ears,
admitting no one present to abstract himself from the common emotion.
Englishmen do not recognise the old classic law which limited the number
of guests, where banquets are meant to be pleasant, to that of the
Nine-Muses. They invite guests so numerous, and so shy of launching talk
across the table, that you may talk to the person next to you not less
secure from listeners than you would be in talking with the stranger
whom you met at a well in the Sahara. It is not so, except on state
occasions, at Paris. Difficult there to retire into solitude with your
next neighbour. The guests collected by Duplessis completed with himself
the number of the Sacred Nine--the host, Valerie, Rochebriant, Graham,
Isaura, Signora Venosta, La Duchesse de Tarascon, the wealthy and
high-born Imperialist, Prince --------, and last and least, one who
shall be nameless.

I have read somewhere, perhaps in one of the books which American
superstition dedicates to the mysteries of Spiritualism, how a gifted
seer, technically styled medium, sees at the opera a box which to other
eyes appears untenanted and empty, but to him is full of ghosts, well
dressed in costume de-regle, gazing on the boards and listening to
the music. Like such ghosts are certain beings whom I call Lookers-on.
Though still living, they have no share in the life they survey, they
come as from another world to hear and to see what is passing in ours.
In ours they lived once, but that troubled sort of life they have
survived. Still we amuse them as stage-players and puppets amuse
ourselves. One of these Lookers-on completed the party at the house of
Duplessis.

How lively, how animated the talk was at the financier's pleasant table
that day, the 8th of July! The excitement of the coming war made itself
loud in every Gallic voice, and kindled in every Gallic eye. Appeals at
every second minute were made, sometimes courteous, sometimes sarcastic,
to the Englishman--promising son of an eminent statesman, and native
of a country in which France is always coveting an ally, and always
suspecting an enemy. Certainly Graham could not have found a less
propitious moment for asking Isaura if she really were changed. And
certainly the honour of Great Britain was never less ably represented
(that is saying a great deal) than it was on this occasion by the young
man reared to diplomacy and aspiring to Parliamentary distinction.
He answered all questions with a constrained voice and an insipid
smile,--all questions pointedly addressed to him as to what
demonstrations of admiring sympathy with the gallantry of France
might be expected from the English Government and people; what his
acquaintance with the German races led him to suppose would be the
effect on the Southern States of the first defeat of the Prussians;
whether the man called Moltke was not a mere strategist on paper, a
crotchety pedant; whether, if Belgium became so enamoured of the glories
of France as to solicit fusion with her people, England would have a
right to offer any objection,&c., &c. I do not think that during that
festival Graham once thought one-millionth so much about the fates of
Prussia and France as he did think, "Why is that girl so changed to me?
Merciful heaven! is she lost to my life?"

By training, by habit, even by passion, the man was a genuine
politician, cosmopolitan as well as patriotic, accustomed to consider
what effect every vibration in that balance of European power, which
no deep thinker can despise, must have on the destinies of civilised
humanity, and on those of the nation to which he belongs. But are
there not moments in life when the human heart suddenly narrows the
circumference to which its emotions are extended? As the ebb of a tide,
it retreats from the shores it had covered on its flow, drawing on with
contracted waves the treasure-trove it has selected to hoard amid its
deeps.




CHAPTER II.

On quitting the dining-room, the Duchesse de Tarascon said to her host,
on whose arm she was leaning, "Of course you and I must go with the
stream. But is not all the fine talk that has passed to-day at your
table, and in which we too have joined, a sort of hypocrisy? I may say
this to you; I would say it to no other."

"And I say to you, Madame la Duchesse, that which I would say to no
other. Thinking over it as I sit alone, I find myself making a 'terrible
hazard;' but when I go abroad and become infected by the general
enthusiasm, I pluck up gaiety of spirit, and whisper to myself, 'True,
but it may be an enormous gain.' To get the left bank of the Rhine is
a trifle; but to check in our next neighbour a growth which a few years
hence would overtop us,--that is no trifle. And, be the gain worth the
hazard or not, could the Emperor, could any Government likely to hold
its own for a week, have declined to take the chance of the die?"

The Duchesse mused a moment, and meanwhile the two seated themselves on
a divan in the corner of the salon. Then she said very slowly--

"No Government that held its tenure on popular suffrage could have done
so. But if the Emperor had retained the personal authority which once
allowed the intellect of one man to control and direct the passions of
many, I think the war would have been averted. I have reason to know
that the Emperor gave his emphatic support to the least bellicose
members of the Council, and that Gramont's speech did not contain the
passage that precipitates hostilities when the Council in which it
was framed broke up. These fatal Ministers found the Chamber, and the
reports of the popular excitement which could not be resisted without
imminent danger of revolution. It is Paris that has forced the war on
the Emperor. But enough of this subject. What must be, must, and, as you
say, the gain may be greater than the hazard. I come to something else
you whispered to me before we went in to dinner,--a sort of complaint
which wounds me sensibly. You say I had assisted to a choice of danger
and possibly of death a very distant connection of mine, who might have
been a very near connection of yours. You mean Alain de Rochebriant?"

"Yes; I accept him as a suitor for the hand of my only daughter."

"I am so glad, not for your sake so much as for his. No one can know
him well without appreciating in him the finest qualities of the finest
order of the French noble; but having known your pretty Valerie so long,
my congratulations are for the man who can win her. Meanwhile, hear my
explanation: when I promised Alain any interest I can command for
the grade of officer in a regiment of Mobiles, I knew not that he had
formed, or was likely to form, ties or duties to keep him at home. I
withdraw my promise."

"No, Duchesse, fulfil it. I should be disloyal indeed if I robbed a
sovereign under whose tranquil and prosperous reign I have acquired,
with no dishonour, the fortune which Order proffers to Commerce, of one
gallant defender in the hour of need. And, speaking frankly, if Alain
were really my son, I think I am Frenchman enough to remember that
France is my mother."

"Say no more, my friend--say no more," cried the Duchesse, with the
warm blood of the heart rushing through all the delicate coatings of
pearl-powder. "If every Frenchman felt as you do; if in this Paris of
ours all hostilities of class may merge in the one thought of the common
country; if in French hearts there yet thrills the same sentiment as
that which, in the terrible days when all other ties were rent asunder,
revered France as mother, and rallied her sons to her aid against the
confederacy of Europe,--why, then, we need not grow pale with dismay
at the sight of a Prussian needle-gun. Hist! look yonder: is not that a
tableau of Youth in Arcady? Worlds rage around, and Love, unconcerned,
whispers to Love!" The Duchesse here pointed to a corner of the
adjoining room in which Alain and Valerie sat apart, he whispering into
her ear; her cheek downcast, and, even seen at that distance, brightened
by the delicate tenderness of its blushes.




CHAPTER III.

But in that small assembly there were two who did not attract the notice
of Duplessis or of the lady of the Imperial Court. While the Prince ----
and the placid Looker-on were engaged at a contest of ecarte, with the
lively Venosta, for the gallery, interposing criticisms and admonitions,
Isaura was listlessly turning over a collection of photographs, strewed
on a table that stood near to an open window in the remoter angle of the
room, communicating with a long and wide balcony filled partially
with flowers and overlooking the Champs Elysees, softly lit up by the
innumerable summer stars. Suddenly a whisper, the command of which she
could not resist, thrilled through her ear, and sent the blood rushing
back to her heart.

"Do you remember that evening at Enghien? how I said that our
imagination could not carry us beyond the question whether we two should
be gazing together that night twelve months on that star which each of
us had singled out from the hosts of heaven? That was the 8th of
July. It is the 8th of July once more. Come and seek for our chosen
star--come. I have something to say, which say I must. Come."

Mechanically, as it were,--mechanically, as they tell us the
Somnambulist obeys the Mesmeriser,--Isaura obeyed that summons. In a
kind of dreamy submission she followed his steps, and found herself on
the balcony, flowers around her and stars above, by the side of the man
who had been to her that being ever surrounded by flowers and lighted by
stars,--the ideal of Romance to the heart of virgin Woman.

"Isaura," said the Englishman, softly. At the sound of her own name for
the first time heard from those lips, every nerve in her frame quivered.
"Isaura, I have tried to live without you. I cannot. You are all in all
to me: without you it seems to me as if earth had no flowers, and
even heaven had withdrawn its stars. Are there differences between us,
differences of taste, of sentiments, of habits, of thought? Only let me
hope that you can love me a tenth part so much as I love you, and such
differences cease to be discord. Love harmonises all sounds, blends all
colours into its own divine oneness of heart and soul. Look up! is not
the star which this time last year invited our gaze above, is it not
still there? Does it not still invite our gaze? Isaura, speak!"

"Hush, hush, hush,"--the girl could say no more, but she recoiled from
his side.

The recoil did not wound him: there was no hate in it. He advanced, he
caught her hand, and continued, in one of those voices which become so
musical in summer nights under starry skies:

"Isaura, there is one name which I can never utter without a reverence
due to the religion which binds earth to heaven--a name which to man
should be the symbol of life cheered and beautified, exalted, hallowed.
That name is 'wife.' Will you take that name from me?"

And still Isaura made no reply. She stood mute, and cold, and rigid as
a statue of marble. At length, as if consciousness had been arrested
and was struggling back, she sighed heavily, and passed her hands slowly
over her forehead.

"Mockery, mockery," she said then, with a smile half bitter, half
plaintive, on her colourless lips. "Did you wait to ask me that question
till you knew what my answer must be? I have pledged the name of wife to
another."

"No, no; you say that to rebuke, to punish me! Unsay it! unsay it!"

Isaura beheld the anguish of his face with bewildered eyes. "How can
my words pain you?" she said, drearily. "Did you not write that I had
unfitted myself to be wife to you?"

"I?"

"That I had left behind me the peaceful immunities of private life? I
felt you were so right! Yes! I am affianced to one who thinks that in
spite of that misfortune--"

"Stop, I command you--stop! You saw my letter to Mrs. Morley. I have
not had one moment free from torture and remorse since I wrote it. But
whatever in that letter you might justly resent--"

"I did not resent--"

Graham heard not the interruption, but hurried on. "You would forgive
could you read my heart. No matter. Every sentiment in that letter,
except those which conveyed admiration, I retract. Be mine, and instead
of presuming to check in you the irresistible impulse of genius to the
first place in the head or the heart of the world, I teach myself to
encourage, to share, to exult in it. Do you know what a difference there
is between the absent one and the present one--between the distant image
against whom our doubts, our fears, our suspicions, raise up hosts of
imaginary giants, barriers of visionary walls, and the beloved face
before the sight of which the hosts are fled, the walls are vanished?
Isaura, we meet again. You know now from my own lips that I love you.
I think your lips will not deny that you love me. You say that you are
affianced to another. Tell the man frankly, honestly, that you mistook
your heart. It is not yours to give. Save yourself, save him, from a
union in which there can be no happiness."

"It is too late," said Isaura, with hollow tones, but with no trace of
vacillating weakness on her brow and lips. "Did I say now to that other
one, 'I break the faith that I pledged to you,' I should kill him, body
and soul. Slight thing though I be, to him I am all in all; to you, Mr.
Vane, to you a memory--the memory of one whom a year, perhaps a month,
hence, you will rejoice to think you have escaped."

She passed from him--passed away from the flowers and the starlight; and
when Graham,--recovering from the stun of her crushing words, and with
the haughty mien and stop of the man who goes forth from the ruin of his
hopes, leaning for support upon his pride,--when Graham re-entered
the room, all the guests had departed save only Alain, who was still
exchanging whispered words with Valerie.




CHAPTER IV.

The next day, at the hour appointed, Graham entered Alain's apartment.
"I am glad to tell you," said the Marquis, gaily, "that the box has
arrived, and we will very soon examine its contents. Breakfast claims
precedence." During the meal Alain was in gay spirits, and did not at
first notice the gloomy countenance and abstracted mood of his guest. At
length, surprised at the dull response to his lively sallies on the part
of a man generally so pleasant in the frankness of his speech, and
the cordial ring of his sympathetic laugh, it occurred to him that the
change in Graham must be ascribed to something that had gone wrong in
the meeting with Isaura the evening before; and remembering the curtness
with which Graham had implied disinclination to converse about the fair
Italian, he felt perplexed how to reconcile the impulse of his good
nature with the discretion imposed on his good-breeding. At all events,
a compliment to the lady whom Graham had so admired could do no harm.

"How well Mademoiselle Cicogna looked last night!"

"Did she? It seemed to me that, in health at least, she did not look
very well. Have you heard what day M. Thiers will speak on the war?"

"Thiers? No. Who cares about Thiers? Thank heaven his day is past!
I don't know any unmarried woman in Paris, not even Valerie--I mean
Mademoiselle Duplessis--who has so exquisite a taste in dress as
Mademoiselle Cicogna. Generally speaking, the taste of a female author
is atrocious."

"Really--I did not observe her dress. I am no critic on subjects so
dainty as the dress of ladies, or the tastes of female authors."

"Pardon me," said the beau Marquis, gravely. "As to dress, I think that
so essential a thing in the mind of woman, that no man who cares about
women ought to disdain critical study of it. In woman, refinement of
character is never found in vulgarity of dress. I have only observed
that truth since I came up from Bretagne."

"I presume, my dear Marquis, that you may have read in Bretagne books
which very few not being professed scholars have ever read at Paris;
and possibly you may remember that Horace ascribes the most exquisite
refinement in dress, denoted by the untranslatable words, 'simplex
munditiis,' to a lady who was not less distinguished by the ease and
rapidity with which she could change her affection. Of course that
allusion does not apply to Mademoiselle Cicogna, but there are many
other exquisitely dressed ladies at Paris of whom an ill-fated admirer

                 'fidem
          Mutatosque deos flebit.'

"Now, with your permission, we will adjourn to the box of letters."

The box being produced and unlocked, Alain looked with conscientious
care at its contents before he passed over to Graham's inspection a
few epistles, in which the Englishman immediately detected the same
handwriting as that of the letter from Louise which Richard King had
bequeathed to him.

They were arranged and numbered chronologically.

   LETTER I.

   DEAR M. LE MARQUIS,--How can I thank you sufficiently for obtaining
   and remitting to me those certificates? You are too aware of the
   unhappy episode in my life not to know how inestimable is the
   service you render me. I am saved all further molestation from the
   man who had indeed no right over my freedom, but whose persecution
   might compel me to the scandal and disgrace of an appeal to the law
   for protection, and the avowal of the illegal marriage into which I
   was duped. I would rather be torn limb from limb by wild horses,
   like the Queen in the history books, than dishonour myself and the
   ancestry which I may at least claim on the mother's side, by
   proclaiming that I had lived with that low Englishman as his wife,
   when I was only--O heavens, I cannot conclude the sentence!

   "No, Mons. le Marquis, I am in no want of the pecuniary aid you so
   generously wish to press on me. Though I know not where to address
   my poor dear uncle,--though I doubt, even if I did, whether I could
   venture to confide to him the secret known only to yourself as to
   the name I now bear--and if he hear of me at all he must believe me
   dead,--yet I have enough left of the money he last remitted to me
   for present support; and when that fails, I think, what with my
   knowledge of English and such other slender accomplishments as I
   possess, I could maintain myself as a teacher or governess in some
   German family. At all events, I will write to you again soon, and I
   entreat you to let me know all you can learn about my uncle. I feel
   so grateful to you for your just disbelief of the horrible calumny
   which must be so intolerably galling to a man so proud, and,
   whatever his errors, so incapable of a baseness.

   "Direct to me Poste restante, Augsburg.

   "Yours with all consideration,
LETTER II.

(Seven months after the date of Letter 1.)

   "AUGSBURG.

   "DEAR M. LE MARQUIS,--I thank you for your kind little note
   informing me of the pains you have taken, as yet with no result, to
   ascertain what has become of my unfortunate uncle. My life since I
   last wrote has been a very quiet one. I have been teaching among a
   few families here; and among my pupils are two little girls of very
   high birth. They have taken so great a fancy to me that their
   mother has just asked me to come and reside at their house as
   governess. What wonderfully kind hearts those Germans have,--so
   simple, so truthful! They raise no troublesome questions,--accept
   my own story implicitly." Here follow a few commonplace sentences
   about the German character, and a postscript. "I go into my new
   home next week. When you hear more of my uncle, direct to me at the
   Countess von Rudesheim, Schloss --------, near Berlin."

"Rudesheim!" Could this be the relation, possibly the wife, of the Count
von Rudesheim with whom Graham had formed acquaintance last year? LETTER
III.

(Between three and four years after the date of the last.)

   "You startle me indeed, dear M. le Marquis. My uncle said to have
   been recognised in Algeria under another name, a soldier in the
   Algerian army? My dear, proud, luxurious uncle! Ah, I cannot
   believe it, any more than you do: but I long eagerly for such
   further news as you can learn of him. For myself, I shall perhaps
   surprise you when I say I am about to be married. Nothing can
   exceed the amiable kindness I have received from the Rudesheims
   since I have been in their house. For the last year especially I
   have been treated on equal terms as one of the family. Among the
   habitual visitors at the house is a gentleman of noble birth, but
   not of rank too high, nor of fortune too great, to make a marriage
   with the French widowed governess a misalliance. I am sure that he
   loves me sincerely; and he is the only man I ever met whose love I
   have cared to win. We are to be married in the course of the year.
   Of course he is ignorant of my painful history, and will never learn
   it. And after all, Louise D---- is dead. In the home to which I am
   about to remove, there is no probability that the wretched
   Englishman can ever cross my path. My secret is as safe with you as
   in the grave that holds her whom in the name of Louise D---- you
   once loved. Henceforth I shall trouble you no more with my letters;
   but if you hear anything decisively authentic of my uncle's fate,
   write me a line at any time, directed as before to Madame ----,
   enclosed to the Countess von Rudesheim.

   "And accept, for all the kindness you have ever shown me, as to one
   whom you did not disdain to call a kinswoman, the assurance of my
   undying gratitude. In the alliance she now makes, your kinswoman
   does not discredit the name through which she is connected with the
   yet loftier line of Rochebriant."

To this letter the late Marquis had appended in pencil. "Of course
Rochebriant never denies the claim of a kinswoman, even though a
drawing-master's daughter. Beautiful creature, Louise, but a termagant.
I could not love Venus if she were a termagant. L.'s head turned by the
unlucky discovery that her mother was noble. In one form or other,
every woman has the same disease--vanity. Name of her intended not
mentioned--easily found out."

The next letter was dated May 7, 1859, on black-edged paper, and
contained but these lines: "I was much comforted by your kind visit
yesterday, dear Marquis. My affliction has been heavy: but for the last
two years my poor husband's conduct has rendered my life unhappy, and I
am recovering the shock of his sudden death. It is true that I and
the children are left very ill provided for; but I cannot accept your
generous offer of aid. Have no fear as to my future fate. Adieu, my
dear Marquis! This will reach you just before you start for Naples.
Bon voyage." There was no address on this note-no postmark on the
envelope-evidently sent by hand.

The last note, dated 1861, March 20, was briefer than its predecessor.
"I have taken your advice, dear Marquis; and, overcoming all scruples,
I have accepted his kind offer, on the condition that I am never to be
taken to England. I had no option in this marriage. I can now own to you
that my poverty had become urgent.--Yours, with inalienable gratitude.
This last note, too, was without postmark, and was evidently sent by
hand.

"There are no other letters, then, from this writer?" asked Graham; "and
no further clue as to her existence?"

"None that I have discovered; and I see now why I preserved these
letters. There is nothing in their contents not creditable to my poor
father. They show how capable he was of good-natured disinterested
kindness towards even a distant relation of whom he could certainly not
have been proud, judging not only by his own pencilled note, or by the
writer's condition as a governess, but by her loose sentiments as to the
marriage tie. I have not the slightest idea who she could be. I never at
least heard of one connected, however distantly, with my family, whom I
could identify with the writer of these letters."

"I may hold them a short time in my possession?"

"Pardon me a preliminary question. If I may venture to form a
conjecture, the object of your search must be connected with your
countryman, whom the lady politely calls the 'wretched Englishman;' but
I own I should not like to lend, through these letters, a pretence to
any steps that may lead to a scandal in which my father's name or that
of any member of my family could be mixed up."

"Marquis, it is to prevent the possibility of all scandal that I ask you
to trust these letters to my discretion."

"Foi de gentilhomme?"

"Foi de gentilhomme!"

"Take them. When and where shall we meet again?"

"Soon, I trust; but I must leave Paris this evening. I am bound to
Berlin in quest of this Countess von Rudesheim: and I fear that in a
very few days intercourse between France and the German frontier will be
closed upon travellers."

After a few more words not worth recording, the two young men shook
hands and parted.




CHAPTER V.

It was with an interest languid and listless indeed, compared with
that which he would have felt a day before, that Graham mused over the
remarkable advances towards the discovery of Louise Duval which were
made in the letters he had perused. She had married, then, first a
foreigner, whom she spoke of as noble, and whose name and residence
could be easily found through the Countess von Rudesheim. The marriage
did not seem to have been a happy one. Left a widow in reduced
circumstances, she had married again, evidently without affection. She
was living so late as 1861, and she had children living is 1859: was the
child referred to by Richard King one of them?

The tone and style of the letters served to throw some light on the
character of the writer: they evinced pride, stubborn self-will, and
unamiable hardness of nature; but her rejection of all pecuniary aid
from a man like the late Marquis de Rochebriant betokened a certain
dignity of sentiment. She was evidently, whatever her strange ideas
about her first marriage with Richard King, no vulgar woman of
gallantry; and there must have been some sort of charm about her to
have excited a friendly interest in a kinsman so remote, and a man of
pleasure so selfish, as her high-born correspondent.

But what now, so far as concerned his own happiness, was the hope, the
probable certainty, of a speedy fulfilment of the trust bequeathed to
him? Whether the result, in the death of the mother, and more especially
of the child, left him rich, or, if the last survived, reduced his
fortune to a modest independence, Isaura was equally lost to him, and
fortune became valueless. But his first emotions on recovering from the
shock of hearing from Isaura's lips that she was irrevocably affianced
to another, were not those of self-reproach. They were those of intense
bitterness against her who, if really so much attached to him as he had
been led to hope, could within so brief a time reconcile her heart
to marriage with another. This bitterness was no doubt unjust; but I
believe it to be natural to men of a nature so proud and of affections
so intense as Graham's, under similar defeats of hope. Resentment is
the first impulse in a man loving with the whole ardour of his soul,
rejected, no matter why or wherefore, by the woman by whom he had cause
to believe he himself was beloved; and though Graham's standard of
honour was certainly the reverse of low, yet man does not view honour in
the same light as woman does, when involved in analogous difficulties of
position. Graham conscientiously thought that if Isaura so loved him
as to render distasteful an engagement to another which could only very
recently have been contracted, it would be more honourable frankly so to
tell the accepted suitor than to leave him in ignorance that her heart
was estranged. But these engagements are very solemn things with girls
like Isaura, and hers was no ordinary obligation of woman-honour. Had
the accepted one been superior in rank-fortune--all that flatters the
ambition of woman in the choice of marriage; had he been resolute, and
strong, and self-dependent amid the trials and perils of life--then
possibly the woman's honour might find excuse in escaping the penalties
of its pledge. But the poor, ailing, infirm, morbid boy-poet, who looked
to her as his saving angel in body, in mind, and soul-to say to him,
"Give me back my freedom," would be to abandon him to death and to sin.
But Graham could not of course divine why what he as a man thought right
was to Isaura as woman impossible: and he returned to his old prejudiced
notion that there is no real depth and ardour of affection for human
lovers in the poetess whose mind and heart are devoted to the creation
of imaginary heroes. Absorbed in reverie, he took his way slowly and
with downcast looks towards the British embassy, at which it was well to
ascertain whether the impending war yet necessitated special passports
for Germany.

"Bon-jour, cher ami," said a pleasant voice; "and how long have you been
at Paris?"

"Oh, my dear M. Savarin! charmed to see you looking so well! Madame well
too, I trust? My kindest regards to her. I have been in Paris but a day
or two, and I leave this evening."

"So soon? The war frightens you away, I suppose. Which way are you going
now?"

"To the British embassy."

"Well, I will go with you so far--it is in my own direction. I have to
call at the charming Italian's with my congratulations--on news I only
heard this morning."

"You mean Mademoiselle Cicogna--and the news that demands
congratulations--her approaching marriage!"

"Mon Dieu! when could you have heard of that?"

"Last night at the house of M. Duplessis."

"Parbleu! I shall scold her well for confiding to her new friend Valerie
the secret she kept from her old friends, my wife and myself."

"By the way," said Graham, with a tone of admirably-feigned
indifference, "who is the happy man? That part of the secret I did not
hear."

"Can't you guess?" "NO."

"Gustave Rameau."

"Ah!" Graham almost shrieked, so sharp and shrill was his cry. "Ah! I
ought indeed to have guessed that!"

"Madame Savarin, I fancy, helped to make up the marriage. I hope it may
turn out well; certainly it will be his salvation. May it be for her
happiness!"

"No doubt of that! Two poets-born for each other, I dare say. Adieu, my
dear Savarin! Here we are at the embassy."




CHAPTER VI.

That evening Graham found himself in the coupe of the express train to
Strasbourg. He had sent to engage the whole coupe to himself, but that
was impossible. One place was bespoken as far as C-------, after which
Graham might prosecute his journey alone on paying for the three places.

When he took his seat another man was in the further corner whom he
scarcely noticed. The train shot rapidly on for some leagues. Profound
silence in the coupe, save at moments those heavy impatient sighs that
came from the very depths of the heart, and of which he who sighs is
unconscious, burst from the Englishman's lips, and drew on him the
observant side-glance of his fellow-traveller.

At length the fellow-traveller said in very good English, though
with French accent, "Would you object, sir, to my lighting my little
carriage-lantern? I am in the habit of reading in the night train, and
the wretched lamp they give us does not permit that. But if you wish to
sleep, and my lantern would prevent you doing so, consider my request
unasked."

"You are most courteous, sir. Pray light your lantern--that will not
interfere with my sleep."

As Graham thus answered, far away from the place and the moment as his
thoughts were, it yet faintly struck him that he had heard that voice
before.

The man produced a small lantern, which he attached to the window-sill,
and drew forth from a small leathern bag sundry newspapers and
pamphlets. Graham flung himself back, and in a minute or so again came
his sigh.

"Allow me to offer you those evening journals--you may not have had
time to read them before starting," said the fellow-traveller, leaning
forward, and extending the newspapers with one hand, while with the
other he lifted his lantern. Graham turned, and the faces of the two men
were close to each other--Graham with his travelling-cap drawn over his
brows, the other with head uncovered.

"Monsieur Lebeau!"

"Bon soir, Mr. Lamb!"

Again silence for a moment or so. Monsieur Lebeau then broke it--

"I think, Mr. Lamb, that in better society than that of the Faubourg
Montmartre you are known under another name." Graham had no heart then
for the stage-play of a part, and answered, with quiet haughtiness,
"Possibly--and what name?"

"Graham Vane. And, sir," continued Lebeau, with a haughtiness equally
quiet, but somewhat more menacing, "since we two gentlemen find
ourselves thus close, do I ask too much if I inquire why you condescend
to seek my acquaintance in disguise?"

"Monsieur le Vicomte de Mauleon, when you talk of disguise, is it too
much to inquire why my acquaintance was accepted by Monsieur Lebeau?"

"Ha! Then you confess that it was Victor de Mauleon whom you sought when
you first visited the cafe Jean Jacques?"

"Frankly I confess it."

Monsieur Lebeau drew himself back, and seemed to reflect.

"I see! Solely for the purpose of learning whether Victor de Mauleon
could give you any information about Louise Duval. Is it so?"

"Monsieur le Vicomte, you say truly."

Again M. Lebeau paused as if in reflection; and Graham, in that state
of mind when a man who may most despise and detest the practice of
duelling, may yet feel a thrill of delight if some homicide would be
good enough to put him out of his misery, flung aside his cap, lifted
his broad frank forehead, and stamped his foot impatiently as if to
provoke a quarrel.

M. Lebeau lowered his spectacles, and, with those calm, keen, searching
eyes of his, gazed at the Englishman.

"It strikes me," he said, with a smile, the fascination of which not
even those faded whiskers could disguise--"it strikes me that there are
two ways in which gentlemen such as you and I are can converse: firstly,
with reservation and guard against each other; secondly, with perfect
openness. Perhaps of the two I have more need of reservation and wary
guard against any stranger than you have. Allow me to propose the
alternative--perfect openness. What say you?" and he extended his hand.

"Perfect openness," answered Graham, softened into sudden liking for
this once terrible swordsman, and shaking, as an Englishman shakes, the
hand held out to him in peace by the man from whom he had anticipated
quarrel.

"Permit me now, before you address any questions to me, to put one to
you. How did you learn that Victor de Mauleon was identical with Jean
Lebeau?"

"I heard that from an agent of the police."

"Ah!"

"Whom I consulted as to the means of ascertaining whether Louise Duval
was alive,--if so, where she could be found."

"I thank you very much for your information. I had no notion that the
police of Paris had divined the original alias of poor Monsieur Lebeau,
though something occurred at Lyons which made me suspect it. Strange
that the Government, knowing through the police that Victor de Mauleon,
a writer they had no reason to favour, had been in so humble a position,
should never, even in their official journals, have thought it prudent
to say so! But, now I think of it, what if they had? They could prove
nothing against Jean Lebeau. They could but say, 'Jean Lebeau is
suspected to be too warm a lover of liberty, too earnest a friend of
the people, and Jean Lebeau is the editor of La Sens Commun.' Why, that
assertion would have made Victor de Mauleon the hero of the Reds, the
last thing a prudent Government could desire. I thank you cordially for
your frank reply. Now, what question would you put to me?"

"In one word, all you can tell me about Louise Duval."

"You shall have it. I had heard vaguely in my young days that a
half-sister of mine by my father's first marriage with Mademoiselle
de Beauvilliers had--when in advanced middle life he married a second
time--conceived a dislike for her mother-in-law, and, being of age, with
an independent fortune of her own, had quitted the house, taken up her
residence with an elderly female relative, and there had contracted
a marriage with a man who gave her lessons in drawing. After that
marriage, which my father in vain tried to prevent, my sister was
renounced by her family. That was all I knew till, after I came into my
inheritance by the death of both my parents, I learned from my father's
confidential lawyer that the drawing-master, M. Duval, had soon
dissipated his wife's fortune, become a widower with one child--a
girl--and fallen into great distress. He came to my father, begging for
pecuniary aid. My father, though by no means rich, consented to allow
him a yearly pension, on condition that he never revealed to his child
her connection with our family. The man agreed to the condition, and
called at my father's lawyer quarterly for his annuity. But the lawyer
informed me that this deduction from my income had ceased, that M. Duval
had not for a year called or sent for the sum due to him, and that he
must therefore be dead. One day my valet informed me that a young lady
wished to see me--in those days young ladies very often called on me. I
desired her to be shown in. There entered a young creature, almost of my
own age, who, to my amazement saluted me as uncle. This was the child of
my half-sister. Her father had been dead several months, fulfilling very
faithfully the condition on which he had held his pension, and the girl
never dreaming of the claims that, if wise, poor child, she ought not
to have cared for, viz.,--to that obsolete useless pauper birthright,
a branch on the family tree of a French noble. But in pinch of
circumstance, and from female curiosity, hunting among the papers her
father had left for some clue to the reasons for the pension he had
received, she found letters from her mother, letters from my father,
which indisputably proved that she was grandchild to the fue Vicomte de
Mauleon, and niece to myself. Her story as told to me was very pitiable.
Conceiving herself to be nothing higher in birth than daughter to this
drawing-master, at his death, poor, penniless orphan that she was, she
had accepted the hand of an English student of medicine whom she did not
care for. Miserable with this man, on finding by the documents I refer
to that she was my niece, she came to me for comfort and counsel. What
counsel could I or any man give to her but to make the best of what
had happened, and live with her husband? But then she started another
question. It seems that she had been talking with some one, I think her
landlady, or some other woman with whom she had made acquaintance--was
she legally married to this man? Had he not entrapped her ignorance into
a false marriage? This became a grave question, and I sent at once to
my lawyer. On hearing the circumstances, he at once declared that the
marriage was not legal according to the laws of France. But, doubtless,
her English soi-disant husband was not cognisant of the French law, and
a legal marriage could, with his assent, be at once solemnised. Monsieur
Vane, I cannot find words to convey to you the joy that poor girl showed
in her face and in her words when she learned that she was not bound
to pass her life with that man as his wife. It was in vain to talk and
reason with her. Then arose the other question, scarcely less important.
True, the marriage was not legal, but would it not be better on all
accounts to take steps to have it formally annulled, thus freeing her
from the harassment of any claim the Englishman might advance, and
enabling her to establish the facts in a right position, not injurious
to her honour in the eyes of any future suitor to her hand? She would
not hear of such a proposal. She declared that she could not bring to
the family she pined to re-enter the scandal of disgrace. To allow that
she had made such a misalliance would be bad enough in itself; but to
proclaim to the world that, though nominally the wife, she had in fact
been only the mistress of this medical student--she would rather throw
herself into the Seine. All she desired was to fund some refuge, some
hiding-place for a time, whence she could write to the man informing him
that he had no lawful hold on her. Doubtless he would not seek then to
molest her. He would return to his own country, and be effaced from
her life. And then, her story unknown, she might form a more suitable
alliance. Fiery young creature though she was--true De Mauleon in
being so fiery--she interested me strongly. I should say that she was
wonderfully handsome; and though imperfectly educated, and brought up in
circumstances so lowly, there was nothing common about her--a certain je
ne sais quoi of stateliness and race. At all events she did with me what
she wished. I agreed to aid her desire of a refuge and hiding-place. Of
course I could not lodge her in my own apartment, but I induced a female
relation of her mother's, an old lady living at Versailles, to receive
her, stating her birth, but of course concealing her illegal marriage.

"From time to time I went to see her. But one day I found this restless
bright-plumaged bird flown. Among the ladies who visited at her
relative's house was a certain Madame Marigny, a very pretty young
widow. Madame Marigny and Louise formed a sudden and intimate
friendship. The widow was moving from Versailles into an apartment at
Paris, and invited Louise to share it. She had consented. I was
not pleased at this; for the widow was too young, and too much of a
coquette, to be a safe companion to Louise. But though professing much
gratitude and great regard for me, I had no power of controlling the
poor girl's actions. Her nominal husband, meanwhile, had left France,
and nothing more was heard or known of him. I saw that the best thing
that could possibly befall Louise was marriage with some one rich enough
to gratify her taste for luxury and pomp; and that if such a marriage
offered itself, she might be induced to free it from all possible
embarrassment by procuring the annulment of the former, from which she
had hitherto shrunk in such revolt. This opportunity presented itself.
A man already rich, and in a career that promised to make him
infinitely richer, an associate of mine in those days when I was rapidly
squandering the remnant of my inheritance--this man saw her at the opera
in company with Madame Marigny, fell violently in love with her, and
ascertaining her relationship to me, besought an introduction. I was
delighted to give it; and, to say the truth, I was then so reduced to
the bottom of my casket, I felt that it was becoming impossible for me
to continue the aid I had hitherto given to Louise, and--what then would
become of her? I thought it fair to tell Louvier--"

"Louvier--the financier?"

"Ah, that was a slip of the tongue, but no matter; there is no reason
for concealing his name. I thought it right, I say, to tell Louvier
confidentially the history of the unfortunate illegal marriage. It did
not damp his ardour. He wooed her to the best of his power, but she
evidently took him into great dislike. One day she sent for me in much
excitement, showed me some advertisements in the French journals which,
though not naming her, evidently pointed at her, and must have been
dictated by her soi-disant husband. The advertisements might certainly
lead to her discovery if she remained in Paris. She entreated my consent
to remove elsewhere. Madame Marigny had her own reason for leaving
Paris, and would accompany her. I supplied her with the necessary
means, and a day or two afterwards she and her friend departed, as I
understood, for Brussels. I received no letter from her; and my own
affairs so seriously pre-occupied me, that poor Louise might have passed
altogether out of my thoughts, had it not been for the suitor she had
left in despair behind. Louvier besought me to ascertain her address;
but I could give him no, other clue to it than that she said she was
going to Brussels, but should soon remove to some quiet village. It
was not for a long time--I can't remember how long--it might be several
weeks, perhaps two or three months, that I received a short note from
her stating that she waited for a small remittance, the last she would
accept from me, as she was resolved, so soon as her health would permit,
to find means to maintain herself--and telling me to direct to her,
Poste restante, Aix-la-Chapelle. I sent her the sum she asked, perhaps a
little more, but with a confession reluctantly wrung from me that I was
a ruined man; and I urged her to think very seriously before she refused
the competence and position which a union with M. Louvier would insure.

"This last consideration so pressed on me that, when Louvier called on
me, I think that day or the nests I gave him Louise's note, and told him
that, if he were still as much in love with her as ever, les absents ont
toujours tort, and he had better go to Aix-la-Chapelle and find her
out; that he had my hearty approval of his wooing, and consent to his
marriage, though I still urged the wisdom and fairness, if she would
take the preliminary step--which, after all, the French law frees as
much as possible from pain and scandal--of annulling the irregular
marriage into which her childlike youth had been decoyed.

"Louvier left me for Aix-la-Chapelle. The very next day came that cruel
affliction which made me a prey to the most intolerable calumny, which
robbed me of every friend, which sent me forth from my native country
penniless, and resolved to be nameless--until--until--well, until my
hour could come again--every dog, if not hanged, has its day;--when that
affliction befell me, I quitted France, heard no more of Louvier nor of
Louise; indeed, no letter addressed to me at Paris would have reached--"

The man paused here, evidently with painful emotion. He resumed in the
quiet matter-of-fact way in which he had commenced his narrative.

"Louise had altogether faded out of my remembrance until your question
revived it. As it happened, the question came at the moment when I
meditated resuming my real name and social position. In so doing, I
should of course come in contact with my old acquaintance Louvier; and
the name of Louise was necessarily associated with us. I called on him,
and made myself known. The slight information I gave you as to my niece
was gleaned from him.

"I may now say more. It appears that when he arrived at Aix-la-Chapelle
he found that Louise Duval had left it a day or two previously, and
according to scandal had been for some time courted by a wealthy and
noble lover, whom she had gone to Munich to meet. Louvier believed
this tale: quitted Aix indignantly, and never heard more of her. The
probability is, M. Vane, that she must have been long dead. But if
living still, I feel quite sure that she will communicate with me
some day or other. Now that I have reappeared in Paris in my own
name--entered into a career that, for good or for evil, must ere long
bring my name very noisily before the public--Louise cannot fail to hear
of my existence and my whereabouts; and unless I am utterly mistaken
as to her character, she will assuredly inform me of her own. Oblige
me with your address, and in that case I will let you know. Of course
I take for granted the assurance you gave me last year, that you only
desire to discover her in order to render her some benefit, not to
injure or molest her?"

"Certainly. To that assurance I pledge my honour. Any letter with which
you may favour me had better be directed to my London address; here is
my card. But, M. le Vicomte, there is one point on which pray pardon me
if I question you still. Had you no suspicion that there was one reason
why this lady might have quitted Paris so hastily, and have so shrunk
from the thought of a marriage so advantageous, in a worldly point
of view, as that with M. Louvier,--namely, that she anticipated the
probability of becoming the mother of a child by the man whom she
refused to acknowledge as a husband?"

"That idea did not strike me until you asked me if she had a child.
Should your conjecture be correct, it would obviously increase her
repugnance to apply for the annulment of her illegal marriage. But if
Louise is still living and comes across me, I do not doubt that, the
motives for concealment no longer operating, she will confide to me the
truth. Since we have been talking together thus frankly, I suppose I
may fairly ask whether I do not guess correctly in supposing that this
soi-disant husband, whose name I forget,--Mac--something, perhaps,
Scotch-I think she said he was Ecossais,--is dead and has left by will
some legacy to Louise and any child she may have borne to him?"

"Not exactly so. The man, as you say, is dead; but he bequeathed no
legacy to the lady who did not hold herself married to him. But there
are those connected with him who, knowing the history, think that some
compensation is due for the wrong so unconsciously done to her, and yet
more to any issue of a marriage not meant to be irregular or illegal.
Permit me now to explain why I sought you in another guise and name than
my own. I could scarcely place in M. Lebeau the confidence which I now
unreservedly place in the Vicomte de Mauleon."

"Cela va sans dire. You believed, then, that calumny about the jewels;
you do not believe it now?"

"Now! my amazement is, that any one who had known you could believe it."

"Oh, how often, and with tears of rage in my exile--my wanderings--have
I asked that question of myself! That rage has ceased; and I have but
one feeling left for that credulous, fickle Paris, of which one day I
was the idol, the next the byword. Well, a man sometimes plays chess
more skilfully for having been long a mere bystander. He understands
better how to move, and when to sacrifice the pieces. Politics, M. Vane,
is the only exciting game left to me at my years. At yours, there is
still that of love. How time flies! we are nearing the station at which
I descend. I have kinsfolk of my mother's in these districts. They are
not Imperialists; they are said to be powerful in the department. But
before I apply to them in my own name, I think it prudent that M. Lebeau
should quietly ascertain what is their real strength, and what would be
the prospects of success if Victor de Mauleon offered himself as depute
at the next election. Wish him joy, M. Vane! If he succeed, you will
hear of him some day crowned in the Capitol, or hurled from the Tarpeian
rock."

Here the train stopped. The false Lebeau gathered up his papers,
readjusted his spectacles and his bag, descended lightly, and, pressing
Graham's hand as he paused at the door, said, "Be sure I will not forget
your address if I have anything to say. Bon voyage!"




CHAPTER VII.

Graham continued his journey to Strasbourg. On arriving there he felt
very unwell. Strong though his frame was, the anguish and self-struggle
through which he had passed since the day he had received in London
Mrs. Morley's letter, till that on which he had finally resolved on
his course of conduct at Paris, and the shock which had annihilated his
hopes in Isaura's rejection, had combined to exhaust its endurance,
and fever had already commenced when he took his place in the coupe.
If there be a thing which a man should not do when his system is
undermined, and his pulse between 90 and 100, it is to travel all night
by a railway express. Nevertheless, as the Englishman's will was yet
stronger than his frame, he would not give himself more than an hour's
rest, and again started for Berlin. Long before he got to Berlin,
the will failed him--as well as the frame. He was lifted out of the
carriage, taken to a hotel in a small German town, and six hours
afterwards he was delirious. It was fortunate for him that under such
circumstances plenty of money and Scott's circular-notes for some
hundreds were found in his pocketbook, so that he did not fail to
receive attentive nursing and skilful medical treatment. There, for
the present, I must leave him--leave him for how long? But any village
apothecary could say that fever such as his must run its course. He was
still in bed, and very dimly--and that but at times--conscious, when the
German armies were gathering round the penfold of Sedan.




CHAPTER VIII.

When the news of the disastrous day at Sedan reached Paris, the first
effect was that of timid consternation. There were a few cries of
Decheance! fewer still of Vive la Republique among the motley crowds;
but they were faint, and chiefly by ragged gamins. A small body repaired
to Trochu and offered him the sceptre, which he politely declined. A
more important and respectable body--for it comprised the majority
of the Corps Legislatif--urged Palikao to accept the temporary
dictatorship, which the War Minister declined with equal politeness. In
both these overtures it was clear that the impulse of the proposers was
towards any form of government rather than republican. The sergens de
ville were sufficient that day to put down riot. They did make a charge
on a mob, which immediately ran away.

The morning of that day the Council of Ten were summoned by
Lebeau--minus only Rameau, who was still too unwell to attend, and the
Belgian, not then at Paris; but their place was supplied by the
two travelling members, who had been absent from the meeting before
recorded. These were conspirators better known in history than those I
have before described; professional conspirators--personages who from
their youth upwards had done little else but conspire. Following the
discreet plan pursued elsewhere throughout this humble work, I give
their names other than they bore. One, a very swarthy and ill-favoured
man, between forty and fifty, I call Paul Grimm--by origin a German, but
by rearing and character French; from the hair on his head, staring up
rough and ragged as a bramblebush, to the soles of small narrow feet,
shod with dainty care, he was a personal coxcomb, and spent all he
could spare on his dress. A clever man, not ill-educated--a vehement and
effective speaker at a club. Vanity and an amorous temperament had made
him a conspirator, since he fancied he interested the ladies more in
that capacity than any other. His companion, Edgar Ferrier, would have
been a journalist, only hitherto his opinions had found no readers; the
opinions were those of Marat. He rejoiced in thinking that his hour for
glory, so long deferred, had now arrived. He was thoroughly sincere:
his father and grandfather had died in a madhouse. Both these men,
insignificant in ordinary times, were likely to become of terrible
importance in the crisis of a revolution. They both had great power with
the elements that form a Parisian mob. The instructions given to these
members of the Council by Lebeau were brief: they were summed up in the
one word, Decheance. The formidable nature of a council apparently so
meanly constituted became strikingly evident at that moment, because it
was so small in number, while each one of these could put in movement a
large section of the populace; secondly, because, unlike a revolutionary
club or a numerous association, no time was wasted in idle speeches, and
all were under the orders of one man of clear head and resolute purpose;
and thirdly, and above all, because one man supplied the treasury, and
money for an object desired was liberally given and promptly at hand.
The meeting did not last ten minutes, and about two hours afterwards
its effects were visible. From Montmartre and Belleville and Montretout
poured streams of ouvriers, with whom Armand Monnier was a chief,
and the Medecin des Pauvres an oracle. Grimm and Ferrier headed other
detachments that startled the well-dressed idlers on the Boulevards.
The stalwart figure of the Pole was seen on the Place de la Concorde,
towering amidst other refugees, amid which glided the Italian champion
of humanity. The cry of Decheance became louder. But as yet there were
only few cries of Vive la Republique!--such a cry was not on the orders
issued by Lebeau. At midnight the crowd round the hall of the Corps
Legislatif is large: cries of La Dechaeance loud--a few cries, very
feeble, of Vive la Republique!

What followed on the 4th--the marvellous audacity with which
half-a-dozen lawyers belonging to a pitiful minority in a Chamber
elected by universal suffrage walked into the Hotel de Ville and said,
"The Republic is established, and we are its Government," history has
told too recently for me to narrate. On the evening of the 5th the
Council of Ten met again: the Pole; the Italian radiant; Grimm
and Ferrier much excited and rather drunk; the Medecin des Pauvres
thoughtful; and Armand Monnier gloomy. A rumour has spread that General
Trochu, in accepting the charge imposed on him, has exacted from the
Government the solemn assurance of respect for God, and for the rights
of Family and Property. The Atheist is very indignant at the assent of
the Government to the first proposition; Monnier equal indignant at the
assent to the second and third. What has that honest ouvrier conspired
for?--what has he suffered for?--of late nearly starved for?--but to
marry another man's wife, getting rid of his own, and to legalise a
participation in the property of his employer,--and now he is no better
off than before. "There must be another revolution," he whispers to the
Atheist.

"Certainly," whispers back the Atheist; "he who desires to better this
world must destroy all belief in another." The conclave was assembled
when Lebeau entered by the private door. He took his place at the head
of the table; and, fixing on the group eyes that emitted a cold gleam
through the spectacles, thus spoke:

"Messieurs, or Citoyens, which ye will--I no longer call ye
confreres--you have disobeyed or blundered my instructions. On such an
occasion disobedience and blunder are crimes equally heinous."

Angry murmurs.

"Silence! Do not add mutiny to your other offences. My instructions were
simple and short. Aid in the abolition of the Empire. Do not aid in any
senseless cry for a Republic or any other form of government. Leave
that to the Legislature. What have you done? You swelled the crowd that
invaded the Corps Ligislatif. You, Dombinsky, not even a Frenchman, dare
to mount the President's rostrum, and brawl forth your senseless jargon.
You, Edgar Ferrier, from whom I expected better, ascend the tribune, and
invite the ruffians in the crowd to march to the prisons and release
the convicts; and all of you swell the mob at the Hotel de Ville, and
inaugurate the reign of folly by creating an oligarchy of lawyers to
resist the march of triumphal armies. Messieurs, I have done with you.
You are summoned for the last time: the Council is dissolved."

With these words Lebeau put on his hat, and turned to depart. But the
Pole, who was seated near him, sprang to his feet, exclaiming, "Traitor,
thou shalt not escape! Comrades, he wants to sell us!"

"I have a right to sell you at least, for I bought you, and a very bad
bargain I made," said Lebeau, in a tone of withering sarcasm.

"Liar!" cried the Pole, and seized Lebeau by the left hand, while with
the right he drew forth a revolver. Ferrier and Grimm, shouting, "A
bas le renegat!" would have rushed forward in support of the Pole, but
Monnier thrust himself between them and their intended victim, crying
with a voice that dominated their yell, "Back!--we are not assassins."
Before he had finished the sentence the Pole was on his knees. With a
vigour which no one could have expected from the seeming sexagenarian,
Lebeau had caught the right arm of his assailant, twisted it back so
mercilessly as almost to dislocate elbow and shoulder joint. One barrel
of the revolver discharged itself harmlessly against the opposite wall,
and the pistol itself then fell from the unnerved hand of the would-be
assassin; and what with the pain and the sudden shock, the stalwart
Dombinsky fell in the attitude of a suppliant at the feet of his
unlooked-for vanquisher.

Lebeau released his hold, possessed himself of the pistol, pointing the
barrels towards Edgar Ferrier, who stood with mouth agape and lifted arm
arrested, and said quietly: "Monsieur, have the goodness to open that
window." Ferrier mechanically obeyed. "Now, hireling," continued
Lebeau, addressing the vanquished Pole, "choose between the door and the
window."

"Go, my friend," whispered the Italian. The Pole did not utter a word;
but rising nimbly, and rubbing his arm, stalked to the door. There
he paused a moment and said, "I retire overpowered by numbers," and
vanished.

"Messieurs," resumed Lebeau, calmly, "I repeat that the Council is
dissolved. In fact its object is fulfilled more abruptly than any of us
foresaw, and by means which I at least had been too long out of Paris
to divine as possible. I now see that every aberration of reason is
possible to the Parisians. The object that united us was the fall of the
Empire. As I have always frankly told you, with that object achieved,
separation commences. Each of us has his own crotchet, which differs
from the other man's. Pursue yours as you will--I pursue mine--you will
find Jean Lebeau no more in Paris: il s'eface. Au plaisir, mais pas au
revoir."

He retreated to the masked door and disappeared.

Marc le Roux, the porter or custos of that ruinous council-hall, alarmed
at the explosion of the pistol, had hurried into the room, and now
stood unheeded by the door with mouth agape, while Lebeau thus curtly
dissolved the assembly. But when the president vanished through the
secret doorway, Le Roux also retreated. Hastily descending the stairs,
he made as quickly as his legs could carry him for the mouth of the
alley in the rear of the house, through which he knew that Lebeau must
pass. He arrived, panting and breathless, in time to catch hold of
the ex-president's arm. "Pardon, citizen," stammered he, "but do I
understand that you have sent the Council of Ten to the devil?"

"I? Certainly not, my good Paul; I dismiss them to go where they
like. If they prefer the direction you name, it is their own choice. I
declined to accompany them, and I advise you not to do so."

"But, citizen, have you considered what is to become of Madame? Is she
to be turned out of the lodge? Are my wages to stop, and Madame to be
left without a crust to put into her soup?"

"Not so bad as that; I have just paid the rent of the baraque for three
months in advance, and there is your quarter's pay, in advance also.
My kind regards to Madame, and tell her to keep your skin safe from the
schemes of these lunatics." Thrusting some pieces of gold into the hands
of the porter, Lebeau nodded his adieu, and hastened along his way.

Absorbed in his own reflections, he did not turn to look behind. But if
he had, he could not have detected the dark form of the porter, creeping
in the deep shadow of the streets with distant but watchful footsteps.




CHAPTER, IX.

The conspirators, when left by their president, dispersed in deep, not
noisy resentment. They were indeed too stunned for loud demonstration;
and belonging to different grades of life, and entertaining different
opinions, their confidence in each other seemed lost now that the chief
who had brought and kept them together was withdrawn from their union.
The Italian and the Atheist slunk away, whispering to each other. Grimm
reproached Ferrier for deserting Dombinsky and obeying Lebeau. Ferrier
accused Grimm of his German origin, and hinted at denouncing him as a
Prussian spy. Gaspard le Noy linked his arm in Monnier's, and when they
had gained the dark street without, leading into a labyrinth of desolate
lanes, the Medicin des Pauvres said to the mechanic: "You are a brave
fellow, Monnier. Lebeau owes you a good turn. But for your cry, 'We are
not assassins,' the Pole might not have been left without support. No
atmosphere is so infectious as that in which we breathe the same air
of revenge: when the violence of one man puts into action the anger or
suspicion of others, they become like a pack of hounds, which follow the
spring of the first hound, whether on the wild boar or their own master.
Even I, who am by no means hot-headed, had my hand on my case-knife when
the word 'assassin' rebuked and disarmed me."

"Nevertheless," said Monnier, gloomily, "I half repent the impulse which
made me interfere to save that man. Better he should die than live to
betray the cause we allowed him to lead."

"Nay, mon ami, speaking candidly, we must confess that he never from the
first pretended to advocate the cause for which you conspired. On the
contrary, he always said that with the fall of the Empire our union
would cease, and each become free to choose his own way towards his own
after-objects."

"Yes," answered Armand, reluctantly; "he said that to me privately, with
still greater plainness than he said it to the Council. But I answered
as plainly."

"How?"

"I told him that the man who takes the first step in a revolution, and
persuades others to go along with him, cannot in safety stand still or
retreat when the next step is to be taken. It is 'en avant' or 'a la
lanterne.' So it shall be with him. Shall a fellow-being avail himself
of the power over my mind which he derives from superior education or
experience,--break into wild fragments my life, heretofore tranquil,
orderly, happy,--make use of my opinions, which were then but harmless
desires, to serve his own purpose, which was hostile to the opinions he
roused into action,--say to me, 'Give yourself up to destroy the
first obstacle in the way of securing a form of society which your
inclinations prefer,' and then, that first obstacle destroyed, cry,
'Halt! I go with you no further; I will not help you to piece together
the life I have induced you to shatter; I will not aid you to substitute
for the society that pained you the society that would please; I leave
you, struggling, bewildered, maddened, in the midst of chaos within and
without you'? Shall a fellow-being do this, and vanish with a mocking
cry: 'Tool! I have had enough of thee; I cast thee aside as worthless
lumber'? Ah! let him beware! The tool is of iron, and can be shaped
to edge and point." The passion with which this rough eloquence was
uttered, and the fierce sinister expression that had come over a
countenance habitually open and manly, even when grave and stern,
alarmed and startled Le Noy. "Pooh, my friend!" he said, rather
falteringly, "you are too excited now to think justly. Go home and kiss
your children. Never do anything that may make them shrink from their
father. And as to Lebeau, try and forget him. He says he shall disappear
from Paris. I believe him. It is clear to me that the man is not what
he seemed to us. No man of sixty could by so easy a sleight of hand have
brought that giant Pole to his knee. If Lebeau reappear it will be
in some other form. Did you notice that in the momentary struggle his
flaxen wig got disturbed, and beneath it I saw a dark curl. I suspect
that the man is not only younger than he seemed, but of higher rank--a
conspirator against one throne, perhaps, in order to be minister under
another. There are such men."

Before Monnier, who seemed struck by these conjectures, collected his
thoughts to answer, a tall man in the dress of a sous lieutenant stopped
under a dim gas-lamp, and, catching sight of the artisan's face, seized
him by the hand, exclaiming, "Armand, mon frere! well met; strange
times, eh? Come and discuss them at the cafe de Lyon yonder over a bowl
of punch. I'll stand treat."

"Agreed, dear Charles."

"And if this monsieur is a friend of yours, perhaps he will join us."

"You are too obliging, Monsieur," answered Le Noy, not ill-pleased to
get rid of his excited companion; "but it has been a busy day with me,
and I am only fit for bed. Be abstinent of the punch, Armand. You are
feverish already. Good-night, Messieurs."

The cafe de Lyon, in vogue among the National Guard of the quartier, was
but a few yards off, and the brothers turned towards it arm in arm. "Who
is the friend?" asked Charles; "I don't remember to have seen him with
thee before."

"He belongs to the medical craft--a good patriot and a kind man--attends
the poor gratuitously. Yes, Charles, these are strange times; what dost
thou think will come of them?"

They had now entered the cafe; and Charles had ordered the punch, and
seated himself at a vacant table before he replied. "What will come of
these times? I will tell thee. National deliverance and regeneration
through the ascendency of the National Guard."

"Eh? I don't take," said Armand, bewildered.

"Probably not," answered Charles, with an air of compassionate conceit;
"thou art a dreamer, but I am a politician." He tapped his forehead
significantly. "At this custom-house, ideas are examined before they are
passed."

Armand gazed at his brother wistfully, and with a defence he rarely
manifested towards any one who disputed his own claims to superior
intelligence. Charles was a few years older than Monnier; he was of
large build; he had shaggy lowering eyebrows, a long obstinate
upper lip, the face of a man who was accustomed to lay down the law.
Inordinate self-esteem often gives that character to a physiognomy
otherwise commonplace. Charles passed for a deep thinker in his own
set, which was a very different set from Armand's--not among workmen but
small shopkeepers. He had risen in life to a grade beyond Armand's; he
had always looked to the main chance, married the widow of a hosier and
glover much older than himself, and in her right was a very respectable
tradesman, comfortably well off; a Liberal, of course, but a Liberal
bourgeois, equally against those above him and those below. Needless
to add that he had no sympathy with his brother's socialistic opinions.
Still he loved that brother as well as he could love any one except
himself. And Armand, who was very affectionate, and with whom family
ties were very strong, returned that love with ample interest; and
though so fiercely at war with the class to which Charles belonged, was
secretly proud of having a brother who was of that class. So in
England I have known the most violent antagonist of the landed
aristocracy--himself a cobbler--who interrupts a discourse on the crimes
of the aristocracy by saying, "Though I myself descend from a county
family."

In an evil day Charles Monnier, enrolled in the National Guard, had
received promotion in that patriotic corps. From that date he began to
neglect his shop, to criticise military matters, and to think that if
merit had fair play he should be a Cincinnatus or a Washington, he had
not decided which.

"Yes," resumed Charles, ladling out the punch, "thou hast wit enough
to perceive that our generals are imbeciles or traitors; that gredin
Bonaparte has sold the army for ten millions of francs to Bismarck, and
I have no doubt that Wimpffen has his share of the bargain. McMahon was
wounded conveniently, and has his own terms for it. The regular army is
nowhere. Thou wilt see--thou wilt see--they will not stop the march of
the Prussians. Trochu will be obliged to come to the National Guard.
Then we shall say, 'General, give us our terms, and go to sleep.'

"I shall be summoned to the council of war. I have my plan. I explain
it--'tis accepted--it succeeds. I am placed in supreme command--the
Prussians are chased back to their sour-krout. And I--well--I don't like
to boast, but thou'lt see--thou'lt see--what will happen."

"And thy plan, Charles--thou hast formed it already?"

"Ay, ay,--the really military genius is prompt, mon petit Armand--a
flash of the brain. Hark ye! Let the Vandals come to Paris and invest
it. Whatever their numbers on paper, I don't care a button; they can
only have a few thousands at any given point in the vast circumference
of the capital. Any fool must grant that--thou must grant it eh?"

"It seems just."

"Of course. Well, then, we proceed by sorties of 200,000 men repeated
every other day, and in twelve days the Prussians are in full flight.
The country rises on their flight--they are cut to pieces. I depose
Trochu--the National Guard elects the Saviour of France. I have a
place in my eye for thee. Thou art superb as a decorator--thou shalt be
Minister des Beaux Arts. But keep clear of the canaille. No more strikes
then--thou wilt be an employer--respect thy future order."

   [Charles Monnier seems to have indiscreetly blabbed out his "idea,"
   for it was plagiarised afterwards at a meeting of the National
   Guards in the Salle de la Bourse by Citizen Rochebrune (slain 19th
   January, 1871, in the affair of Montretout). The plan, which he
   developed nearly in the same words as Charles Monnier, was received
   with lively applause; and at the close of his speech it was proposed
   to name at once Citizen Rochebrune General of the National Guard, an
   honour which, unhappily for his country, the citizen had the modesty
   to decline.]

Armand smiled mournfully. Though of intellect which, had it been
disciplined, was far superior to his brother's, it was so estranged
from practical opinions, so warped, so heated, so flawed and cracked
in parts, that he did not see the ridicule of Charles's braggadocio.
Charles had succeeded in life, Armand had failed; and Armand believed in
the worldly wisdom of the elder born. But he was far too sincere for any
bribe to tempt him to forsake his creed and betray his opinions. And
he knew that it must be a very different revolution from that which his
brother contemplated, that could allow him to marry another man's wife,
and his "order" to confiscate other people's property.

"Don't talk of strikes, Charles. What is done is done. I was led into
heading a strike, not on my own account, for I was well paid and well
off, but for the sake of my fellow-workmen. I may regret now what I
did, for the sake of Marie and the little ones. But it is an affair
of honour, and I cannot withdraw from the cause till my order, as thou
namest my class, has its rights."

"Bah! thou wilt think better of it when thou art an employer. Thou hast
suffered enough already. Remember that I warned thee against that old
fellow in spectacles whom I met once at thy house. I told thee he would
lead thee into mischief, and then leave thee to get out of it. I saw
through him. I have a head! Va!"

"Thou wert a true prophet--he has duped me. But in moving me he has set
others in movement; and I suspect he will find he has duped himself.
Time will show."

Here the brothers were joined by some loungers belonging to the National
Guard. The talk became general, the potations large. Towards daybreak
Armand reeled home, drunk for the first time in his life. He was one
of those whom drink makes violent. Marie had been sitting up for him,
alarmed at his lengthened absence. But when she would have thrown
herself on his breast, her pale face and her passionate sobs enraged
him. He flung her aside roughly. From that night the man's nature was
changed. If, as a physiognomist has said, each man has in him a portion
of the wild beast, which is suppressed by mild civilising circumstances,
and comes uppermost when self-control is lost, the nature of many an
honest workman, humane and tender-hearted as the best of us, commenced
a change into the wild beast that raged through the civil war of the
Communists, on the day when half-a-dozen Incapables, with no more claim
to represent the people of Paris than half-a-dozen monkeys would have,
were allowed to elect themselves to supreme power, and in the very fact
of that election released all the elements of passion, and destroyed all
the bulwarks of order.




CHAPTER X.

No man perhaps had more earnestly sought and more passionately striven
for the fall of the Empire than Victor de Mauleon; and perhaps no man
was more dissatisfied and disappointed by the immediate consequences
of that fall, In first conspiring against the Empire, he had naturally
enough, in common with all the more intelligent enemies of the dynasty,
presumed that its fate would be worked out by the normal effect of civil
causes--the alienation of the educated classes, the discontent of
the artisans, the eloquence of the press and of popular meetings,
strengthened in proportion as the Emperor had been compelled to relax
the former checks upon the license of either. And De Mauleon had no less
naturally concluded that there would be time given for the preparation
of a legitimate and rational form of government to succeed that which
was destroyed. For, as has been hinted or implied, this remarkable man
was not merely an instigator of revolution through the Secret Council,
and the turbulent agencies set in movement through the lower strata of
society;--he was also in confidential communication with men eminent for
wealth, station, and political repute, from whom he obtained the funds
necessary for the darker purposes of conspiracy, into the elaboration of
which they did not inquire; and these men, though belonging like himself
to the Liberal party, were no hot-blooded democrats. Most of them
were in favour of constitutional monarchy; all of them for forms of
government very different from any republic in which socialists or
communists could find themselves uppermost. Among these politicians were
persons ambitious and able, who, in scheming for the fall of the Empire,
had been prepared to undertake the task of conducting to ends compatible
with modern civilisation the revolution they were willing to allow a mob
at Paris to commence. The opening of the war necessarily suspended
their designs. How completely the events of the 4th September mocked the
calculations of their ablest minds, and paralysed the action of their
most energetic spirits, will appear in the conversation I am about to
record. It takes place between Victor de Mauleon and the personage
to whom he had addressed the letter written on the night before the
interview with Louvier, in which Victor had announced his intention of
reappearing in Paris in his proper name and rank. I shall designate this
correspondent as vaguely as possible; let me call him the Incognito. He
may yet play so considerable a part in the history of France as a potent
representative of the political philosophy of De Tocqueville--that is,
of Liberal principles incompatible with the absolute power either of a
sovereign or a populace, and resolutely opposed to experiments on the
foundations of civilised society--that it would be unfair to himself and
his partisans if, in a work like this, a word were said that could
lead malignant conjecture to his identity with any special chief of the
opinions of which I here present him only as a type.

The Incognito, entering Victor's apartment:

"My dear friend, even if I had not received your telegram, I should have
hastened hither on the news of this astounding revolution. It is only in
Paris that such a tragedy could be followed by such a farce. You were on
the spot--a spectator. Explain it if you can."

DE MAULEON.--"I was more than a spectator; I was an actor. Hiss me--I
deserve it. When the terrible news from Sedan reached Paris, in the
midst of the general stun and bewilderment I noticed a hesitating
timidity among all those who had wares in their shops and a good coat on
their backs. They feared that to proclaim the Empire defunct would be to
install the Red Republic with all its paroxysm of impulsive rage and all
its theories of wholesale confiscation. But since it was impossible
for the object we had in view to let slip the occasion of deposing the
dynasty which stood in its way, it was necessary to lose no time
in using the revolutionary part of the populace for that purpose. I
assisted in doing so; my excuse is this--that in a time of crisis a
man of action must go straight to his immediate object, and in so doing
employ the instruments at his command. I made, however, one error in
judgment which admits no excuse: I relied on all I had heard, and all I
had observed, of the character of Trochu, and I was deceived, in common,
I believe, with all his admirers, and three parts of the educated
classes of Paris."

INCOGNITO.--"I should have been equally deceived! Trochu's conduct is a
riddle that I doubt if he himself can ever solve. He was master of the
position; he had the military force in his hands if he combined with
Palikao, which, whatever the jealousies between the two, it was his
absolute duty to do. He had a great prestige--"

DE MAULEON.--"And for the moment a still greater popularity. His ipse
dixit could have determined the wavering and confused spirits of the
population. I was prepared for his abandonment of the Emperor--even of
the Empress and the Regency. But how could I imagine that he, the man of
moderate politics, of Orleanistic leanings, the clever writer, the fine
talker, the chivalrous soldier, the religious Breton, could abandon
everything that was legal, everything that could save France against
the enemy, and Paris against civil discord; that he would connive at the
annihilation of the Senate, of the popular Assembly, of every form of
Government that could be recognised as legitimate at home or abroad,
accept service under men whose doctrines were opposed to all his
antecedents, all his professed opinions, and inaugurate a chaos under
the name of a Republic!"

INCOGNITO.--"How, indeed? How suppose that the National Assembly, just
elected by a majority of seven millions and a half, could be hurried
into a conjuring-bog, and reappear as the travesty of a Venetian
oligarchy, composed of half-a-dozen of its most unpopular members!
The sole excuse for Trochu is, that he deemed all other considerations
insignificant compared with the defence of Paris, and the united action
of the nation against the invaders. But if that were his honest desire
in siding with this monstrous usurpation of power, he did everything
by which the desire could be frustrated. Had there been any provisional
body composed of men known and esteemed, elected by the Chambers,
supported by Trochu and the troops at his back, there would have been
a rallying-point for the patriotism of the provinces; and in the wise
suspense of any constitution to succeed that Government until the enemy
were chased from the field, all partisans--Imperialists, Legitimists,
Orleanists, Republicans--would have equally adjourned their differences.
But a democratic Republic, proclaimed by a Parisian mob for a nation in
which sincere democratic Republicans are a handful, in contempt of
an Assembly chosen by the country at large; headed by men in whom the
provinces have no trust, and for whom their own representatives are
violently cashiered;--can you conceive such a combination of wet
blankets supplied by the irony of Fate for the extinction of every spark
of ardour in the population from which armies are to be gathered in
haste, at the beck of usupers they distrust and despise? Paris has
excelled itself in folly. Hungering for peace, it proclaims a Government
which has no legal power to treat for it. Shrieking out for allies among
the monarchies, it annihilates the hope of obtaining them; its sole
chance of escape from siege, famine, and bombardment, is in the
immediate and impassioned sympathy of the provinces; and it revives
all the grudges which the provinces have long sullenly felt against
the domineering pretensions of the capital, and invokes the rural
populations, which comprise the pith and sinew of armies, in the name
of men whom I verily believe they detest still more than they do the
Prussians. Victor, it is enough to make one despair of his country! All
beyond the hour seems anarchy and ruin."

"Not so!" exclaimed De Mauleon. "Everything comes to him who knows how
to wait. The Empire is destroyed; the usurpation that follows it has
no roots. It will but serve to expedite the establishment of such a
condition as we have meditated and planned--a constitution adapted to
our age and our people, not based wholly on untried experiments, taking
the best from nations that do not allow Freedom and Order to be the
sport of any popular breeze. From the American Republic we must borrow
the only safeguards against the fickleness of the universal suffrage
which, though it was madness to concede in any ancient community, once
conceded cannot be safely abolished,--viz., the salutary law that no
article of the Constitution, once settled, can be altered without the
consent of two-thirds of the legislative body. By this law we insure
permanence, and that concomitant love for institutions which is
engendered by time and custom. Secondly, the formation of a senate on
such principles as may secure to it in all times of danger a confidence
and respect which counteract in public opinion the rashness and heat of
the popular assembly. On what principles that senate should be formed,
with what functions invested, what share of the executive--especially
in foreign affairs, declarations of war, or treaties of peace--should
be accorded to it, will no doubt need the most deliberate care of the
ablest minds. But a senate I thus sketch has alone rescued America from
the rashness of counsel incident to a democratic Chamber; and it is
still more essential to France, with still more favourable elements for
its creation. From England we must borrow the great principle that has
alone saved her from revolution--that the head of the State can do
no wrong. He leads no armies, he presides over no Cabinet. All
responsibility rests with his advisers; and where we upset a dynasty,
England changes an administration. Whether the head of the State should
have the title of sovereign or president, whether he be hereditary or
elected, is a question of minor importance impossible now to determine,
but on which I heartily concur with you that hereditary monarchy is
infinitely better adapted to the habits of Frenchmen, to their love
of show and of honours--and infinitely more preservative from all the
dangers which result from constant elections to such a dignity, with
parties so heated, and pretenders to the rank so numerous--than any
principle by which a popular demagogue or a successful general is
enabled to destroy the institutions he is elected to guard. On these
fundamental doctrines for the regeneration of France I think we are
agreed. And I believe when the moment arrives to promulgate them,
through an expounder of weight like yourself, they will rapidly commend
themselves to the intellect of France. For they belong to common sense;
and in the ultimate prevalence of common-sense I have a faith which I
refuse to medievalists who would restore the right divine; and still
more to fanatical quacks, who imagine that the worship of the Deity, the
ties of family, and the rights of property are errors at variance with
the progress of society. Qui vivera, verra."

INCOGNITO.--"In the outlines of the policy you so ably enunciate I
heartily concur. But if France is, I will not say to be regenerated, but
to have fair play among the nations of Europe, I add one or two items
to the programme. France must be saved from Paris, not by subterranean
barracks and trains, the impotence of which we see to-day with a
general in command of the military force, but by conceding to France
its proportionate share of the power now monopolised by Paris. All
this system of centralisation, equally tyrannical and corrupt, must be
eradicated. Talk of examples from America, of which I know little--from
England, of which I know much,--what can we more advantageously borrow
from England than that diffusion of all her moral and social power
which forbids the congestion of blood in one vital part? Decentralise!
decentralise! decentralise! will be my incessant cry, if ever the time
comes when my cry will be heard. France can never be a genuine France
until Paris has no more influence over the destinies of France than
London has over those of England. But on this theme I could go on till
midnight. Now to the immediate point: what do you advise me to do in
this crisis, and what do you propose to do yourself?"

De Mauleon put his hand to his brow, and remained a few moments silent
and thoughtful. At last he looked up with that decided expression of
face which was not the least among his many attributes for influence
over those with whom he came into contact.

"For you, on whom so much of the future depends, my advice is
brief--have nothing to do with the present. All who join this present
mockery of a Government will share the fall that attends it--a fall from
which one or two of their body may possibly recover by casting blame on
their confreres,--you never could. But it is not for you to oppose that
Government with an enemy on its march to Paris. You are not a soldier;
military command is not in your rode. The issue of events is uncertain;
but whatever it be, the men in power cannot conduct a prosperous war nor
obtain an honourable peace. Hereafter you may be the Deus ex machina. No
personage of that rank and with that mission appears till the end of
the play: we are only in the first act. Leave Paris at once, and abstain
from all action."

INCOGNITO (dejectedly).--"I cannot deny the soundness of your advice,
though in accepting it I feel unutterably saddened. Still you, the
calmest and shrewdest observer among my friends, think there is cause
for hope, not despair. Victor, I have more than most men to make life
pleasant, but I would lay down life at this moment with you. You know me
well enough to be sure that I utter no melodramatic fiction when I
say that I love my country as a young man loves the ideal of his
dreams--with my whole mind and heart and soul! and the thought that I
cannot now aid her in the hour of her mortal trial is--is--"

The man's voice broke down, and he turned aside, veiling his face with a
hand that trembled.

DE MAULEON--"Courage--patience! All Frenchmen have the first; set them
an example they much need in the second. I, too, love my country, though
I owe to it little enough, heaven knows. I suppose love of country is
inherent in all who are not Internationalists. They profess only to love
humanity, by which, if they mean anything practical, they mean a rise in
wages."

INCOGNITO (rousing himself, and with a half smile). "Always cynical,
Victor--always belying yourself. But now that you have advised my
course, what will be your own? Accompany me, and wait for better times."

"No, noble friend; our positions are different. Yours is made--mine yet
to make. But for this war I think I could have secured a seat in the
Chamber. As I wrote you, I found that my kinsfolk were of much influence
in their department, and that my restitution to my social grade, and the
repute I had made as an Orleanist, inclined them to forget my youthful
errors and to assist my career. But the Chamber ceases to exist. My
journal I shall drop. I cannot support the Government; it is not a
moment to oppose it. My prudent course is silence."

INCOGNITO.--"But is not your journal essential to your support?"

DE MAULEON.--"Fortunately not. Its profits enabled me to lay by for the
rainy day that has come; and having reimbursed you and all friends
the sums necessary to start it, I stand clear of all debt, and, for
my slender wants, a rich man. If I continued the journal I should be
beggared; for there would be no readers to Common Sense in this interval
of lunacy. Nevertheless, during this interval, I trust to other ways for
winning a name that will open my rightful path of ambition whenever we
again have a legislature in which Common Sense can be heard."

INCOGNITO.--"But how win that name, silenced as a writer?"

DE MAULEON.--"You forget that I have fought in Algeria. In a few days
Paris will be in a state of siege; and then--and then," he added,
and very quietly dilated on the renown of a patriot or the grave of a
soldier.

"I envy you the chance of either," said the Incognito; and after a few
more brief words he departed, his hat drawn over his brows, and entering
a hired carriage which he had left at the corner of the quiet street,
was consigned to the station du --------, just in time for the next
train.




CHAPTER XI.

Victor dressed and went out. The streets were crowded. Workmen were
everywhere employed in the childish operation of removing all insignia,
and obliterating all names that showed where an Empire had existed. One
greasy citizen, mounted on a ladder, was effacing the words "Boulevard
Haussman," and substituting for Haussman, "Victor Hugo."

Suddenly De Mauleon came on a group of blouses, interspersed with
women holding babies and ragged boys holding stones, collected round a
well-dressed slender man, at whom they were hooting and gesticulating,
with menaces of doing something much worse. By an easy effort of his
strong frame the Vicomte pushed his way through the tormentors, and gave
his arm to their intended victim.

"Monsieur, allow me to walk home with you." Therewith the shrieks and
shouts and gesticulations increased. "Another impertinent! Another
traitor! Drown him! Drown them both! To the Seine! To the Seine!" A
burly fellow rushed forward, and the rest made a plunging push. The
outstretched arm of De Mauleon kept the ringleader at bay. "Mes enfans,"
cried Victor with a calm clear voice, "I am not an Imperialist. Many
of you have read the articles signed Pierre Firmin, written against the
tyrant Bonaparte when he was at the height of his power. I am Pierre
Firmin--make way for me." Probably not one in the crowd had ever read a
word written by Pierre Firmin, nor even heard of the name. But they
did not like to own ignorance; and that burly fellow did not like to
encounter that arm of iron which touched his throat. So he cried out,
"Oh! if you are the great Pierre Firmin, that alters the case. Make way
for the patriot Pierre!"

"But," shrieked a virago, thrusting her baby into De Mauleon's face,
"the other is the Imperialist, the capitalist, the vile Duplessis. At
least we will have him."

De Mauleon suddenly snatched the baby from her, and said, with
imperturbable good temper, "Exchange of prisoners. I resign the man, and
I keep the baby."

No one who does not know the humours of a Parisian mob can comprehend
the suddenness of popular change, or the magical mastery over crowds
which is effected by quiet courage and a ready joke. The group was
appeased at once. Even the virago laughed; and when De Mauleon restored
the infant to her arms, with a gold piece thrust into its tiny clasp,
she eyed the gold, and cried, "God bless you, citizen!" The two
gentlemen made their way safely now.

"M. de Mauleon," said Duplessis, "I know not how to thank you. Without
your seasonable aid I should have been in great danger of life;
and--would you believe it?--the woman who denounced and set the mob on
me was one of the objects of a charity which I weekly dispense to the
poor."

"Of course I believe that. At the Red clubs no crime is more denounced
than that of charity. It is the 'fraud against Egalite'--a vile trick
of the capitalist to save to himself the millions he ought to share with
all by giving a sou to one. Meanwhile, take my advice, M. Duplessis,
and quit Paris with your young daughter. This is no place for rich
Imperialists at present."

"I perceived that before to-day's adventure. I distrust the looks of my
very servants, and shall depart with Valerie this evening for Bretagne."

"Ah! I heard from Louvier that you propose to pay off his mortgage on
Rochebriant, and make yourself sole proprietor of my young kinsman's
property."

"I trust you only believe half what you hear. I mean to save Rochebriant
from Louvier, and consign it, free of charge, to your kinsman, as the
dot of his bride, my daughter."

"I rejoice to learn such good news for the head of my house. But Alain
himself--is he not with the prisoners of war?"

"No, thank heaven. He went forth an officer of a regiment of Parisian
Mobiles--went full of sanguine confidence; he came back with his
regiment in mournful despondency. The undiscipline of his regiment,
of the Parisian Mobiles generally, appears incredible. Their
insolent disobedience to their officers, their ribald scoffs at their
general--oh, it is sickening to speak of it! Alain distinguished himself
by repressing a mutiny and is honoured by a signal compliment from
the commander in a letter of recommendation to Palikao. But Palikao is
nobody now. Alain has already been sent into Bretagne, commissioned to
assist in organising a corps of Mobiles in his neighbourhood. Trochu,
as you know, is a Breton. Alain is confident of the good conduct of the
Bretons. What will Louvier do? He is an arch Republican; is he pleased
now he has got what he wanted?"

"I suppose he is pleased, for he is terribly frightened. Fright is one
of the great enjoyments of a Parisian. Good day. Your path to your hotel
is clear now. Remember me kindly to Alain."

De Mauleon continued his way through streets sometimes deserted,
sometimes thronged. At the commencement of the Rue de Florentin he
encountered the brothers Vandemar walking arm in arm.

"Ha, De Mauleon!" cried Enguerrand; "what is the last minute's news?"

"I can't guess. Nobody knows at Paris how soon one folly swallows up
another. Saturn here is always devouring one or other of his children."

"They say that Vinoy, after a most masterly retreat, is almost at our
gates with 80,000 men."

"And this day twelvemonth we may know what he does with them."

Here Raoul, who seemed absorbed in gloomy reflections, halted before
the hotel in which the Contessa di Rimini lodged, and with a nod to his
brother, and a polite, if not cordial salutation to Victor, entered the
porte cochere.

"Your brother seems out of spirits,--a pleasing contrast to the
uproarious mirth with which Parisians welcome the advance of calamity."

"Raoul, as you know, is deeply religious. He regards the defeat we have
sustained, and the peril that threatens us, as the beginning of a divine
chastisement, justly incurred by our sins--I mean, the sins of Paris. In
vain my father reminds him of Voltaire's story, in which the ship goes
down with a fripon on board. In order to punish the fripon, the honest
folks are drowned."

"Is your father going to remain on board the ship, and share the fate of
the other honest folks?"

"Pas si bete. He is off to Dieppe for sea-bathing. He says that Paris
has grown so dirty since the 4th September, that it is only fit for
the feet of the Unwashed. He wished my mother to accompany him; but she
replies, 'No; there are already too many wounded not to need plenty of
nurses.' She is assisting to inaugurate a society of ladies in aid of
the Soeurs de Charite. Like Raoul, she is devout, but she has not his
superstitions. Still his superstitions are the natural reaction of a
singularly earnest and pure nature from the frivolity and corruption
which, when kneaded well up together with a slice of sarcasm, Paris
calls philosophy."

"And what, my dear Enguerrand, do you propose to do?"

"That depends on whether we are really besieged. If so, of course I
become a soldier."

"I hope not a National Guard?"

"I care not in what name I fight, so that I fight for France."

As Enguerrand said these simple words, his whole countenance, seemed
changed. The crest rose; his eyes sparkled; the fair and delicate
beauty which had made him the darling of women--the joyous sweetness
of expression and dainty grace of high breeding which made him the most
popular companion to men,--were exalted in a masculine nobleness of
aspect, from which a painter might have taken hints for a study of the
young Achilles separated for ever from effeminate companionship at the
sight of the weapons of war. De Mauleon gazed on him admiringly. We have
seen that he shared the sentiments uttered--had resolved on the same
course of action. But it was with the tempered warmth of a man who seeks
to divest his thoughts and his purpose of the ardour of romance,
and who, in serving his country, calculates on the gains to his own
ambition. Nevertheless he admired in Enguerrand the image of his own
impulsive and fiery youth.

"And you, I presume," resumed Enguerrand, "will fight too, but rather
with pen than with sword."

"Pens will now only be dipped in red ink, and commonsense never writes
in that colour; as for the sword, I have passed the age of forty-five,
at which military service halts. But if some experience in active
service, some knowledge of the art by which soldiers are disciplined
and led, will be deemed sufficient title to a post of command, however
modest the grade be, I shall not be wanting among the defenders of
Paris."

"My brave dear Vicomte, if you are past the age to serve, you are in the
ripest age to command; and with the testimonials and the cross you
won in Algeria, your application for employment will be received with
gratitude by any general so able as Trochu."

"I don't know whether I shall apply to Trochu. I would rather be elected
to command even by the Mobiles or the National Guard, of whom I have
just spoken disparagingly; and no doubt both corps will soon claim and
win the right to choose their officers. But if elected, no matter by
whom, I shall make a preliminary condition; the men under me shall
train, and drill, and obey,--soldiers of a very different kind from the
youthful Pekins nourished on absinthe and self-conceit, and applauding
that Bombastes Furioso, M. Hugo, when he assures the enemy that Paris
will draw an idea from its scabbard. But here comes Savarin. Bon jour,
my dear poet."

"Don't say good day. An evil day for journalists and writers who do not
out-Herod Blanqui and Pyat. I know not how I shall get bread and cheese.
My poor suburban villa is to be pulled down by way of securing Paris;
my journal will be suppressed by way of establishing the liberty of the
press. I ventured to suggest that the people of France should have some
choice in the form of their government."

"That was very indiscreet, my poor Savarin," said Victor; "I wonder your
printing-office has not been pulled down. We are now at the moment when
wise men hold their tongues."

"Perhaps so, M. de Mauleon. It might have been wiser for all of us,
you as well as myself, if we had not allowed our tongues to be so free
before this moment arrived. We live to learn; and if we ever have what
may be called a passable government again, in which we may say pretty
much what we like, there is one thing I will not do, I will not
undermine that government without seeing a very clear way to the
government that is to follow it. What say you, Pierre Firmin?"

"Frankly, I say that I deserve your rebuke," answered De Mauleon
thoughtfully. "But, of course, you are going to take or send Madame
Savarin out of Paris."

"Certainly. We have made a very pleasant party for our hegira this
evening-among others the Morleys. Morley is terribly disgusted. A Red
Republican slapped him on the shoulder and said, 'American, we have
a republic as well as you.' 'Pretty much you know about republics,'
growled Morley; 'a French republic is as much like ours as a baboon is
like a man.' On which the Red roused the mob, who dragged the American
off to the nearest station of the National Guard, where he was accused
of being a Prussian spy. With some difficulty, and lots of brag about
the sanctity of the stars and stripes, he escaped with a reprimand, and
caution how to behave himself in future. So he quits a city in which
there no longer exists freedom of speech. My wife hoped to induce
Mademoiselle Cicogna to accompany us; I grieve to say she refuses. You
know she is engaged in marriage to Gustave Rameau; and his mother dreads
the effect that these Red Clubs and his own vanity may have upon his
excitable temperament if the influence of Mademoiselle Cicogna be
withdrawn."

"How could a creature so exquisite as Isaura Cicogna ever find
fascination in Gustave Rameau!" exclaimed Enguerrand.

"A woman like her," answered De Mauleon, "always finds a fascination in
self-sacrifice."

"I think you divine the truth," said Savarin, rather mournfully. "But
I must bid you good-bye. May we live to shake hands reunis sons des
meilleurs auspices."

Here Savarin hurried off, and the other two men strolled into the Champs
Elysees, which were crowded with loungers, gay and careless, as if there
had been no disaster at Sedan, no overthrow of an Empire, no enemy on
its road to Paris.

In fact the Parisians, at once the most incredulous and the most
credulous of all populations, believed that the Prussians would never be
so impertinent as to come in sight of the gates. Something would occur
to stop them! The king had declared he did not war on Frenchmen, but on
the Emperor: the Emperor gone, the war was over. A democratic republic
was instituted. A horrible thing in its way, it is true; but how could
the Pandour tyrant brave the infection of democratic doctrines among
his own barbarian armies? Were not placards, addressed to our "German
brethren," posted upon the walls of Paris, exhorting the Pandours to
fraternise with their fellow-creatures? Was not Victor Hugo going to
publish "a letter to the German people"? Had not Jules Favre graciously
offered peace, with the assurance that "France would not cede a stone of
her fortresses--an inch of her territory? She would pardon the
invaders and not march upon Berlin!" To all these, and many more such
incontestable proofs, that the idea of a siege was moonshine, did
Enguerrand and Victor listen as they joined group after group of
their fellow-countrymen: nor did Paris cease to harbour such pleasing
illusions, amusing itself with piously laying crowns at the foot of the
statue of Strasbourg, swearing "they would be worthy of their Alsatian
brethren," till on the 19th of September the last telegram was received,
and Paris was cut of from the rest of the world by the iron line of
the Prussian invaders. "Tranquil and terrible," says Victor Hugo, "she
awaits the invasion! A volcano needs no assistance."




CHAPTER XII.

We left Graham Vane slowly recovering from the attack of fever which had
arrested his journey to Berlin in quest of the Count von Rudesheimn. He
was, however, saved the prosecution of that journey, and his direction
turned back to France by a German newspaper which informed him that
the King of Prussia was at Rheims, and that the Count von Rudesheim was
among the eminent personages gathered there around their sovereign. In
conversing the same day with the kindly doctor who attended him, Graham
ascertained that this German noble held a high command in the German
armies, and bore a no less distinguished reputation as a wise political
counsellor than he had earned as a military chief. As soon as he
was able to travel, and indeed before the good doctor sanctioned his
departure, Graham took his way to Rheims, uncertain, however, whether
the Count would still be found there. I spare the details of his
journey, interesting as they were. On reaching the famous and, in the
eyes of Legitimists, the sacred city, the Englishman had no difficulty
in ascertaining the house, not far from the cathedral, in which the
Count von Rudesheim had taken his temporary abode. Walking towards it
from the small hotel in which he had been lucky enough to find a room
disengaged--slowly, for he was still feeble--he was struck by the quiet
conduct of the German soldiery, and, save in their appearance, the
peaceful aspect of the streets. Indeed, there was an air of festive
gaiety about the place, as in an English town in which some popular
regiment is quartered. The German soldiers thronged the shops, buying
largely; lounged into the cafes; here and there attempted flirtations
with the grisettes, who laughed at their French and blushed at their
compliments; and in their good-humoured, somewhat bashful cheeriness,
there was no trace of the insolence of conquest.

But as Graham neared the precincts of the cathedral his ear caught a
grave and solemn music, which he at first supposed to come from within
the building. But as he paused and looked round, he saw a group of the
German military, on whose stalwart forms and fair manly earnest faces
the setting sun cast its calm lingering rays. They were chanting, in
voices not loud but deep, Luther's majestic hymn:

"Nun danket alle Gott." The chant awed even the ragged beggar boys who
had followed the Englishman, as they followed any stranger, would have
followed King William himself, whining for alms. "What a type of the
difference between the two nations!" thought Graham; "the Marseillaise,
and Luther's Hymn!" While thus meditating and listening, a man in a
general's uniform came slowly out of the cathedral, with his hands
clasped behind his back, and his head bent slightly downwards. He, too,
paused on hearing the hymn; then unclasped his hand and beckoned to one
of the officers, to whom approaching he whispered a word or two, and
passed on towards the Episcopal palace. The hymn hushed, and the singers
quietly dispersed. Graham divined rightly that the general had thought
a hymn thanking the God of battles might wound the feelings of the
inhabitants of the vanquished city--not, however, that any of them were
likely to understand the language in which the thanks were uttered.
Graham followed the measured steps of the general, whose hands were
again clasped behind his back--the musing habit of Von Moltke, as it
had been of Napoleon the First. Continuing his way, the Englishman soon
reached the house in which the Count von Rudesheim was lodged, and,
sending in his card, was admitted at once through an anteroom in which
sate two young men, subaltern officers apparently employed in draughting
maps, into the presence of the Count.

"Pardon me," said Graham, after the first conventional salutation, "if
I interrupt you for a moment or so in the midst of events so grave, on a
matter that must seem to you very trivial."

"Nay," answered the Count, "there is nothing so trivial in this world
but what there will be some one to whom it is important. Say how I can
serve you."

"I think, M. le Comte, that you once received in your household, as
teacher or governess, a French lady, Madame Marigny."

"Yes, I remember her well--a very handsome woman. My wife and daughter
took great interest in her. She was married out of my house."

"Exactly--and to whom?"

"An Italian of good birth, who was then employed by the Austrian
Government in some minor post, and subsequently promoted to a better one
in the Italian dominion, which then belonged to the house of Hapsburg,
after which we lost sight of him and his wife."

"An Italian--what was his name?"

"Ludovico Cicogna."

"Cicogna!" exclaimed Graham, turning very pale. "Are you sure that was
the name?"

"Certainly. He was a cadet of a very noble house, and disowned by
relations too patriotic to forgive him for accepting employment under
the Austrian Government."

"Can you not give me the address of the place in Italy to which he was
transferred on leaving Austria?"

"No; but if the information be necessary to you, it can be obtained
easily at Milan, where the head of the family resides, or indeed in
Vienna, through any ministerial bureau."

"Pardon me one or two questions more. Had Madame Marigny any children by
a former husband?"

"Not that I know of: I never heard so. Signor Cicogna was a widower,
and had, if I remember right, children by his first wife, who was also
a Frenchwoman. Before he obtained office in Austria, he resided, I
believe, in France. I do not remember how many children he had by his
first wife. I never saw them. Our acquaintance began at the baths of
Toplitz, where he saw and fell violently in love with Madame Marigny.
After their marriage, they went to his post, which was somewhere, I
think, in the Tyrol. We saw no more of them; but my wife and daughter
kept up a correspondence with the Signora Cicogna for a short time. It
ceased altogether when she removed into Italy."

"You do not even know if the Signora is still living?"

"No."

"Her husband, I am told, is dead."

"Indeed! I am concerned to hear it. A good-looking, lively, clever man.
I fear he must have lost all income when the Austrian dominions passed
to the house of Savoy."

"Many thanks for your information. I can detain you no longer," said
Graham, rising.

"Nay, I am not very busy at this moment; but I fear we Germans have
plenty of work on our hands."

"I had hoped that, now the French Emperor, against whom your king made
war, was set aside, his Prussian majesty would make peace with the
French people."

"Most willingly would he do so if the French people would let him. But
it must be through a French Government legally chosen by the people.
And they have chosen none! A mob at Paris sets up a provisional
administration, that commences by declaring that it will not give up 'an
inch of its territory nor a stone of its fortresses.' No terms of peace
can be made with such men holding such talk." After a few words more
over the state of public affairs,--in which Graham expressed the English
side of affairs, which was all for generosity to the vanquished; and the
Count argued much more ably on the German, which was all for security
against the aggressions of a people that would not admit itself to be
vanquished,--the short interview closed.

As Graham at night pursued his journey to Vienna, there came into his
mind Isaura's song of the Neapolitan fisherman. Had he, too, been blind
to the image on the rock? Was it possible that all the while he had been
resisting the impulse of his heart, until the discharge of the mission
entrusted to him freed his choice and decided his fortunes, the very
person of whom he was in search had been before him, then to be for
ever won, lost to him now for ever? Could Isaura Cicogna be the child
of Louise Duval by Richard King? She could not have been her child by
Cicogna: the dates forbade that hypothesis. Isaura must have been five
years old when Louise married the Italian. Arrived at Milan, Graham
quickly ascertained that the post to which Ludovico Cicogna had been
removed was in Verona, and that he had there died eight years ago.
Nothing was to be learned as to his family or his circumstances at the
time of his death. The people of whose history we know the least are
the relations we refuse to acknowledge. Graham continued his journey
to Verona. There he found on inquiry that the Cicognas had occupied an
apartment in a house which stood at the outskirts of the town and had
been since pulled down to make way for some public improvements. But
his closest inquiries could gain him no satisfactory answers to the
all-important questions as to Ludovico Cicogna's family. His political
alienation from the Italian cause, which was nowhere more ardently
espoused than at Verona, had rendered him very unpopular. He visited at
no Italian houses. Such society as he had was confined to the Austrian
military within the Quadrilateral or at Venice, to which city he made
frequent excursions: was said to lead there a free and gay life, very
displeasing to the Signora, whom he left in Verona. She was but little
seen, and faintly remembered as very handsome and proud-looking. Yes,
there were children--a girl, and a boy several years younger than the
girl; but whether she was the child of the Signora by a former marriage,
or whether the Signora was only the child's stepmother, no one could
say. The usual clue, in such doubtful matters obtainable through
servants, was here missing. The Cicognas had only kept two servants, and
both were Austrian subjects, who had long left the country,--their very
names forgotten.

Graham now called to mind the Englishman Selby, for whom Isaura had such
grateful affection, as supplying to her the place of her father. This
must have been the Englishman whom Louise Duval had married after
Cicogna's death. It would be no difficult task, surely, to ascertain
where he had resided. Easy enough to ascertain all that Graham wanted to
know from Isaura herself, if a letter could reach her. But, as he knew
by the journals, Paris was now invested--cut off from all communication
with the world beyond. Too irritable, anxious, and impatient to wait for
the close of the siege, though he never suspected it could last so long
as it did, he hastened to Venice, and there learned through the
British consul that the late Mr. Selby was a learned antiquarian, an
accomplished general scholar, a fanatico in music, a man of gentle
temper though reserved manners; had at one time lived much at Venice:
after his marriage with the Signora Cicogna he had taken up his abode
near Florence. To Florence Graham now went. He found the villa on the
skirts of Fiesole at which Mr. Selby had resided. The peasant who had
officiated as gardener and shareholder in the profits of vines and
figs, was still, with his wife, living on the place. Both man and wife
remembered the Inglese well; spoke of him with great affection, of his
wife with great dislike. They said her manners were very haughty, her
temper very violent; that she led the Inglese a very unhappy life; that
there were a girl and a boy, both hers by a former marriage; but
when closely questioned whether they were sure that the girl was the
Signora's child by the former husband, or whether she was not the child
of that husband by a former wife, they could not tell; they could only
say that both were called by the same name--Cicogna; that the boy was
the Signora's favourite--that indeed she seemed wrapt up in him; that
he died of a rapid decline a few months after Mr. Selby had hired the
place, and that shortly after his death the Signora left the place and
never returned to it; that it was little more than a year that she had
lived with her husband before this final separation took place. The girl
remained with Mr. Selby, who cherished and loved her as his own child.
Her Christian name was Isaura, the boy's Luigi. A few years later, Mr.
Selby left the villa and went to Naples, where they heard he had died.
They could give no information as to what had become of his wife: Since
the death of her boy that lady had become very much changed--her spirits
quite broken, no longer violent. She would sit alone and weep bitterly.
The only person out of her family she would receive was the priest; till
the boy's death she had never seen the priest, nor been known to attend
divine service.

"Was the priest living?"

"Oh, no; he had been dead two years. A most excellent man--a saint,"
said the peasant's wife.

"Good priests are like good women," said the peasant, drily; "there are
plenty of them, but they are all underground."

On which remark the wife tried to box his ears. The contadino had
become a freethinker since the accession of the house of Savoy. His wife
remained a good Catholic. Said the peasant as, escaping from his wife,
he walked into the high-road with Graham, "My belief, Eccellenza, is,
that the priest did all the mischief."

"What mischief?"

"Persuaded the Signora to leave her husband. The Inglese was not a
Catholic. I heard the priest call him a heretic. And the padre, who,
though not so bad as some of his cloth, was a meddling bigot, thought it
perhaps best for her soul that it should part company with a heretic's
person. I can't say for sure, but I think that was it. The padre seemed
to triumph when the Signora was gone." Graham mused. The peasant's
supposition was not improbable. A woman such as Louise Duval appeared to
be--of vehement passions and ill-regulated mind--was just one of those
who, in a moment of great sorrow, and estranged from the ordinary
household affections, feel, though but imperfectly, the necessity of a
religion, and, ever in extremes, pass at once from indifferentism into
superstition.

Arrived at Naples, Graham heard little of Selby except as a literary
recluse, whose only distraction from books was the operatic stage. But
he heard much of Isaura; of the kindness which Madame de Grantmesnil
had shown to her, when left by Selby's death alone in the world; of the
interest which the friendship and the warm eulogies of one so eminent as
the great French writer had created for Isaura in the artistic circles;
of the intense sensation her appearance, her voice, her universal
genius, had made in that society, and the brilliant hopes of her
subsequent career on the stage the cognoscenti had formed. No one knew
anything of her mother; no one entertained a doubt that Isaura was
by birth a Cicogna. Graham could not learn the present whereabouts of
Madame de Grantmesnil. She had long left Naples, and had been last heard
of at Genoa; was supposed to have returned to France a little before the
war. In France she had no fixed residence.

The simplest mode of obtaining authentic information whether Isaura
was the daughter of Ludovico Cicogna by his first wife--namely, by
registration of her birth--failed him; because, as von Rudesheim had
said, his first wife was a Frenchwoman. The children had been born
somewhere in France, no one could even guess where. No one had ever seen
the first wife, who had never appeared in Italy, nor had even heard what
was her maiden name.

Graham, meanwhile, was not aware that Isaura was still in the besieged
city, whether or not already married to Gustave Rameau; so large a
number of the women had quitted Paris before the siege began, that he
had reason to hope she was among them. He heard through an American that
the Morleys had gone to England before the Prussian investment; perhaps
Isaura had gone with them. He wrote to Mrs. Morley, inclosing his letter
to the Minister of the United States at the Court of St. James's, and
while still at Naples received her answer. It was short, and malignantly
bitter. "Both myself and Madame Savarin, backed by Signora Venosta,
earnestly entreated Mademoiselle Cicogna to quit Paris, to accompany us
to England. Her devotion to her affianced husband would not permit
her to listen to us. It is only an Englishman who could suppose Isaura
Cicogna to be one of those women who do not insist on sharing the perils
of those they love. You ask whether she was the daughter of Ludovico
Cicogna by his former marriage, or of his second wife by him. I cannot
answer. I don't even know whether Signor Cicogna ever had a former wife.
Isaura Cicogna never spoke to me of her parents. Permit me to ask--what
business is it of yours now? Is it the English pride that makes you
wish to learn whether on both sides she is of noble family? How can that
discovery alter your relations towards the affianced bride of another?"

On receipt of this letter, Graham quitted Naples, and shortly afterwards
found himself at Versailles. He obtained permission to establish himself
there, though the English were by no means popular. Thus near to Isaura,
thus sternly separated from her, Graham awaited the close of the siege.
Few among those at Versailles believed that the Parisians would endure
it much longer. Surely they would capitulate before the bombardment,
which the Germans themselves disliked to contemplate as a last resource,
could commence.

In his own mind Graham was convinced that Isaura was the child of
Richard King. It seemed to him probable that Louise Duval, unable
to assign any real name to the daughter of the marriage she
disowned,--neither the name borne by the repudiated husband, nor her
own maiden name,--would, on taking her daughter to her new home, have
induced Cicogna to give the child his name, or that after Cicogna's
death she herself had so designated the girl. A dispassionate confidant,
could Graham have admitted any confidant whatever, might have suggested
the more than equal probability that Isaura was Cicogna's daughter by
his former espousal. But then what could have become of Richard King's
child? To part with the fortune in his hands, to relinquish all the
ambitious dreams which belonged to it, cost Graham Vane no pang: but he
writhed with indignant grief when he thought that the wealth of Richard
King's heiress was to pass to the hands of Gustave Rameau,--that this
was to be the end of his researches--this the result of the sacrifice
his sense of honour imposed on him. And now that there was the
probability that he must convey to Isaura this large inheritance, the
practical difficulty of inventing some reason for such a donation, which
he had, while at a distance made light of, became seriously apparent.
How could he say to Isaura that he had L200,000. in trust for her,
without naming any one so devising it? Still more, how constitute
himself her guardian, so as to secure it to herself, independently
of her husband? Perhaps Isaura was too infatuated with Rameau, or too
romantically unselfish, to permit the fortune so mysteriously conveyed
being exclusively appropriated to herself. And if she were already
married to Rameau, and if he were armed with the right to inquire into
the source of this fortune, how exposed to the risks of disclosure would
become the secret Graham sought to conceal. Such a secret affecting
the memory of the sacred dead, affixing a shame on the scutcheon of
the living, in the irreverent hands of a Gustave Rameau,--it was too
dreadful to contemplate such a hazard. And yet, if Isaura were
the missing heiress, could Graham Vane admit any excuse for basely
withholding from her, for coolly retaining to himself the wealth for
which he was responsible? Yet, torturing as were these communings with
himself, they were mild in their torture compared to the ever-growing
anguish of the thought that in any case the only woman he had ever
loved--ever could love,--who might but for his own scruples and
prejudices have been the partner of his life, was perhaps now actually
the wife of another, and, as such, in what terrible danger! Famine
within the walls of the doomed city: without, the engines of death
waiting for a signal. So near to her, and yet so far! So willing to die
for her, if for her he could not live: and with all his devotion, all
his intellect, all his wealth, so powerless!




CHAPTER XIII.

It is now the middle of November-a Sunday. The day has been mild, and
is drawing towards its close. The Parisians have been enjoying the
sunshine. Under the leafless trees in the public gardens and the Champs
Elysees children have been at play. On the Boulevards the old elegance
of gaiety is succeeded by a livelier animation. Itinerant musicians
gather round them ragged groups. Fortune-tellers are in great request,
especially among the once brilliant Laises and Thaises, now looking
more shabby, to whom they predict the speedy restoration of Nabobs and
Russians, and golden joys. Yonder Punch is achieving a victory over the
Evil One, who wears the Prussian spiked helmet, and whose face has been
recently beautified into a resemblance to Bismarck. Punch draws to his
show a laughing audience of Moblots and recruits to the new companies
of the National Guard. Members of the once formidable police, now
threadbare and hunger-pinched, stand side by side with unfortunate
beggars and sinister-looking patriots who have served their time in the
jails or galleys.

Uniforms of all variety are conspicuous--the only evidence visible of
an enemy at the walls. But the aspects of the wearers of warlike
accoutrements are debonnaire and smiling, as of revellers on a holiday
of peace. Among these defenders of their country, at the door of
a crowded cafe, stands Frederic Lemercier, superb in the costume,
bran-new, of a National Guard,--his dog Fox tranquilly reposing on its
haunches, with eyes fixed upon its fellow-dog philosophically musing on
the edge of Punch's show, whose master is engaged in the conquest of the
Bismarck fiend.

"Lemercier," cried the Vicomte de Breze, approaching the cafe, "I
scarcely recognise you in that martial guise. You look magnifique--the
galons become you. Peste! an officer already?"

"The National Guards and Mobiles are permitted to choose their own
officers, as you are aware. I have been elected, but to subaltern grade,
by the warlike patriots of my department. Enguerrand de Vandemar is
elected a captain of the Mobiles in his, and Victor de Mauleon is
appointed to the command of a battalion of the National Guards. But I
soar above jealousy at such a moment,--

        "'Rome a choisi mon bras; je n'examine rien.'"

"You have no right to be jealous. De Mauldon has had experience and won
distinction in actual service, and from all I hear is doing wonders with
his men--has got them not only to keep but to love drill. I heard no
less an authority than General V---- say that if all the officers of the
National Guard were like De Mauleon, that body would give an example of
discipline to the line."

"I say nothing as to the promotion of a real soldier like the
Vicomte--but a Parisian dandy like Euguerrand de Vande--"

"You forget that Enguerrand received a military education--an advantage
denied to you."

"What does that matter? Who cares for education nowadays? Besides, have
I not been training ever since the 4th of September, to say nothing of
the hard work on the ramparts?"

"Parlez moi de cela it is indeed hard work on the ramparts. Infandum
dolorem quorum pars magna fui. Take the day duty. What with rising at
seven o'clock, and being drilled between a middle-aged and corpulent
grocer on one side and a meagre beardless barber's apprentice on the
other; what with going to the bastions at eleven, and seeing half one's
companions drunk before twelve; what with trying to keep their fists
off one's face when one politely asks them not to call one's general a
traitor or a poltroon,--the work of the ramparts would be insupportable,
if I did not take a pack of cards with me, and enjoy a quiet rubber
with three other heroes in some sequestered corner. As for night work,
nothing short of the indomitable fortitude of a Parisian could sustain
it; the tents made expressly not to be waterproof, like the groves of
the Muses,

                      "' per
          Quos et aquea subeant et aurae.'

A fellow-companion of mine tucks himself up on my rug, and pillows his
head on my knapsack. I remonstrate--he swears--the other heroes wake
up and threaten to thrash us both; and just when peace is made, and one
hopes for a wink of sleep, a detachment of spectators, chiefly gamins,
coming to see that all is safe in the camp, strike up the Marseillaise.
Ah, the world will ring to the end of time with the sublime attitude of
Paris in the face of the Vandal invaders, especially when it learns that
the very shoes we stand in are made of cardboard. In vain we complain.
The contractor for shoes is a staunch Republican, and jobs by right
divine. May I ask if you have dined yet?"

"Heavens! no, it is too early. But I am excessively hungry. I had only
a quarter of jugged cat for breakfast, and the brute was tough. In reply
to your question, may I put another--Did you lay in plenty of stores?"

"Stores? no; I am a bachelor, and rely on the stores of my married
friends."

"Poor De Breze! I sympathise with you, for I am in the same boat, and
dinner invitations have become monstrous rare."

"Oh, but you are so confoundedly rich! What to you are forty francs for
a rabbit, or eighty francs for a turkey?"

"Well, I suppose I am rich, but I have no money, and the ungrateful
restaurants will not give me credit. They don't believe in better days."

"How can you want money?"

"Very naturally. I had invested my capital famously-the best
speculations--partly in house rents, partly in company shares; and
houses pay no rents, and nobody will buy company shares. I had 1,000
napoleons on hand, it is true, when Duplessis left Paris--much more, I
thought, than I could possibly need, for I never believed in the siege.
But during the first few weeks I played at whist with bad luck, and
since then so many old friends have borrowed of me that I doubt if I
have 200 francs left. I have despatched four letters to Duplessis by
pigeon and balloon, entreating him to send me 25,000 francs by some
trusty fellow who will pierce the Prussian lines. I have had two
answers: 1st, that he will find a man; 2nd, that the man is found and
on his way. Trust to that man, my dear friend, and meanwhile lend me 200
francs."

"Mon cher, desole to refuse; but I was about to ask you to share your
200 francs with me who live chiefly by my pen; and that resource is cut
off. Still, il faut vivre--one must dine."

"That is a fact, and we will dine together to-day at my expense; limited
liability, though--eight francs a head."

"Generous Monsieur, I accept. Meanwhile let us take a turn towards the
Madeleine."

The two Parisians quit the cafe, and proceed up the Boulevard. On their
way they encounter Savarin. "Why," said De Breze, "I thought you had
left Paris with Madame."

"So I did, and deposited her safely with the Morleys at Boulogne. These
kind Americans were going to England, and they took her with them. But
I quit Paris! No: I am old; I am growing obese. I have always been
short-sighted. I can neither wield a sword nor handle a musket. But
Paris needs defenders; and every moment I was away from her I sighed to
myself, 'il faut etre la!' I returned before the Vandals had possessed
themselves of our railways, the convoi overcrowded with men like myself,
who had removed wives and families; and when we asked each other why we
went back, every answer was the same, 'il faut etre la.' No, poor child,
no--I have nothing to give you."

These last words were addressed to a woman young and handsome, with
a dress that a few weeks ago might have been admired for taste and
elegance by the lady leaders of the ton, but was now darned, and dirty,
and draggled.

"Monsieur, I did not stop you to ask for alms. You do not seem to
remember me, M. Savarin."

"But I do," said Lemercier, "surely I address Mademoiselle Julie
Caumartin."

"Ah, excuse me, le petit Frederic," said Julie with a sickly attempt at
coquettish sprightliness; "I had no eyes except for M. Savarin."

"And why only for me, my poor child?" asked the kindhearted author.

"Hush!" She drew him aside. "Because you can give me news of that
monster Gustave. It is not true, it cannot be true, that he is going to
be married?"

"Nay, surely, Mademoiselle, all connection between you and young Rameau
has ceased for months--ceased from the date of that illness in July
which nearly carried him off."

"I resigned him to the care of his mother," said the girl; "but when he
no longer needs a mother, he belongs to me. Oh, consider, M. Savarin,
for his sake I refused the most splendid offers! When he sought me, I
had my coupe, my opera-box, my cachemires, my jewels. The Russians--the
English--vied for my smiles. But I loved the man. I never loved before:
I shall never love again; and after the sacrifices I have made for him,
nothing shall induce me to give him up. Tell me, I entreat, my dear M.
Savarin, where he is hiding. He has left the parental roof, and they
refused there to give me his address."

"My poor girl, don't be mechante. It is quite true that Gustave Rameau
is engaged to be married; and any attempt of yours to create scandal--"

"Monsieur," interrupted Julie, vehemently, "don't talk to me about
scandal! The man is mine, and no one else shall have him. His address?"

"Mademoiselle," cried Savarin, angrily, "find it out for yourself."
Then--repentant of rudeness to one so young and so desolate--he
added, in mild expostulatory accents: "Come, come, ma belle enfant, be
reasonable: Gustave is no loss. He is reduced to poverty."

"So much the better. When he was well off I never cost him more than a
supper at the Maison Doree; and if he is poor he shall marry me, and I
will support him!"

"You!--and how?"

"By my profession when peace comes; and meanwhile I have offers from a
cafe to recite warlike songs. Ah! you shake your head incredulously. The
ballet-dancer recite verses? Yes! he taught me to recite his own Soyez
bon pour moi. M. Savarin! do say where I can find mon homme."

"No."

"That is your last word?"

"It is."

The girl drew her thin shawl round her and hurried off. Savarin rejoined
his friends. "Is that the way you console yourself for the absence of
Madame?" asked De Breze, drily.

"Fie!" cried Savarin, indignantly; "such bad jokes are ill-timed. What
strange mixtures of good and bad, of noble and base, every stratum of
Paris life contains! There is that poor girl, in one way contemptible,
no doubt, and yet in another way she has an element of grandeur. On the
whole, at Paris, the women, with all their faults, are of finer mould
than the men."

"French gallantry has always admitted that truth," said Lemercier. "Fox,
Fox, Fox." Uttering this cry, he darted forward after the dog, who had
strayed a few yards to salute another dog led by a string, and caught
the animal in his arms. "Pardon me," he exclaimed, returning to his
friends, "but there are so many snares for dogs at present. They are
just coming into fashion for roasts, and Fox is so plump."

"I thought," said Savarin, "that it was resolved at all the sporting
clubs that, be the pinch of famine ever so keen, the friend of man
should not be eaten."

"That was while the beef lasted; but since we have come to cats, who
shall predict immunity to dogs? Quid intactum nefasti linquimus? Nothing
is sacred from the hand of rapine."

The church of the Madeleine now stood before them. Moblots were playing
pitch-and-toss on its steps.

"I don't wish you to accompany me, Messieurs," said Lemercier,
apologetically, "but I am going to enter the church."

"To pray?" asked De Breze, in profound astonishment. "Not exactly; but
I want to speak to my friend Rochebriant, and I know I shall find him
there."

"Praying?" again asked De Breze.

"Yes."

"That is curious--a young Parisian exquisite at prayer--that is worth
seeing. Let us enter, too, Savarin."

They enter the church. It is filled, and even the sceptical De Breze
is impressed and awed by the sight. An intense fervour pervades the
congregation. The majority, it is true, are women, many of them in
deep mourning, and many of their faces mourning deeper than the dress.
Everywhere may be seen gushing tears, and everywhere faintly heard the
sound of stifled sighs. Besides the women are men of all ages--young,
middle-aged, old, with heads bowed and hands clasped, pale, grave,
and earnest. Most of them were evidently of the superior grade of
life--nobles, and the higher bourgeoisie: few of the ouvrier class, very
few, and these were of an earlier generation. I except soldiers, of whom
there were many, from the provincial Mobiles, chiefly Bretons; you know
the Breton soldiers by the little cross worn on their kepis.

Among them Lemercier at once distinguished the noble countenance of
Alain de Rochebriant. De Breze and Savarin looked at each other with
solemn eyes. I know not when either had last been within a church;
perhaps both were startled to find that religion still existed in
Paris--and largely exist it does, though little seen on the surface
of society, little to be estimated by the articles of journals and the
reports of foreigners. Unhappily, those among whom it exists are not the
ruling class--are of the classes that are dominated over and obscured in
every country the moment the populace becomes master. And at that moment
the journals chiefly read were warring more against the Deity than
the Prussians--were denouncing soldiers who attended mass. "The Gospel
certainly makes a bad soldier," writes the patriot Pyat.

Lemercier knelt down quietly. The other two men crept noiselessly out,
and stood waiting for him on the steps, watching the Moblots (Parisian
Moblots) at play.

"I should not wait for the roturier if he had not promised me a roti,"
said the Vicomte de Breze, with a pitiful attempt at the patrician wit
of the ancien regime.

Savarin shrugged his shoulders. "I am not included in the invitation,"
said he, "and therefore free to depart. I must go and look up a former
confrere who was an enthusiastic Red Republican, and I fear does not get
so much to eat since he has no longer an Emperor to abuse."

So Savarin went away. A few minutes afterwards Lemercier emerged from
the church with Alain.




CHAPTER XIV.

"I knew I should find you in the Madeleine," said Lemercier, "and I
wished much to know when you had news from Duplessis. He and your fair
fiancee are with your aunt still staying at Rochebriant?"

"Certainly. A pigeon arrived this morning with a few lines. All well
there."

"And Duplessis thinks, despite the war, that he shall be able, when the
time comes, to pay Louvier the mortgage-sum?"

"He never doubts that. His credit in London is so good. But of course
all works of improvement are stopped."

"Pray did he mention me?--anything about the messenger who was to pierce
the Prussian lines?"

"What! has the man not arrived? It is two weeks since he left."

"The Uhlans have no doubt shot him--the assassins, and drunk up my
25,000 francs--the thieves."

"I hope not. But in case of delay, Duplessis tells me I am to remit to
you 2,000 francs for your present wants. I will send them to you this
evening."

"How the deuce do you possess such a sum?"

"I came from Brittany with a purse well filled. Of course I could have
no scruples in accepting money from my destined father-in-law."

"And you can spare this sum?"

"Certainly--the State now provides for me; I am in command of a Breton
company."

"True. Come and dine with me and De Breze."

"Alas! I cannot. I have to see both the Vandemars before I return to
the camp for the night. And now-hush--come this way (drawing Frederic
further from De Breze), I have famous news for you. A sortie on a grand
scale is imminent; in a few days we may hope for it."

"I have heard that so often that I am incredulous."

"Take it as a fact now."

"What! Trochu has at last matured his plan?"

"He has changed its original design, which was to cut through the
Prussian lines to Rouen, occupying there the richest country for
supplies, guarding the left bank of the Seine and a watercourse to
convoy them to Paris. The incidents of war prevented that: he has a
better plan now. The victory of the army of the Loire at Orleans opens
a new enterprise. We shall cut our way through the Prussians, join that
army, and with united forces fall on the enemy at the rear. Keep this a
secret as yet, but rejoice with me that we shall prove to the invaders
what men who fight for their native soil can do under the protection of
Heaven."

"Fox, Fox, mon cheri," said Lemercier, as he walked towards the cafe
Riche with De Breze; "thou shalt have a festin de Balthazar under the
protection of Heaven."




CHAPTER XV.

On leaving Lemercier and De Breze, Savarin regained the Boulevard,
and pausing every now and then to exchange a few words with
acquaintances--the acquaintances of the genial author were
numerous--turned into the quartier Chaussee d'Antin, and gaining a
small neat house, with a richly-ornamented facade, mounted very
clean, well-kept stairs to a third story. On one of the doors on the
landing-place was nailed a card, inscribed, "Gustave Rameau, homme de
lettres." Certainly it is not usual in Paris thus to afficher one's self
as a "man of letters"? But Genius scorns what is usual. Had not Victor
Hugo left in the hotel-books on the Rhine his designation "homme de
lettres"? Did not the heir to one of the loftiest houses in the peerage
of England, and who was also a first-rate amateur in painting, inscribe
on his studio when in Italy, "--artiste"? Such examples, no doubt, were
familiar to Gustave Rameau, and "homme de lettres" was on the scrap of
pasteboard nailed to his door.

Savarin rang; the door opened, and Gustave appeared. The poet was, of
course, picturesquely attired. In his day of fashion he had worn within
doors a very pretty fanciful costume, designed after portraits of the
young Raffaelle; that costume he had preserved--he wore it now. It
looked very threadbare, and the pourpoint very soiled. But the beauty of
the poet's face had survived the lustre of the garments. True, thanks
to absinthe, the cheeks had become somewhat puffy and bloated. Grey was
distinctly visible in the long ebon tresses. But still the beauty of
the face was of that rare type which a Thorwaldsen or a Gibson seeking a
model for a Narcissus would have longed to fix into marble.

Gustave received his former chief with a certain air of reserved
dignity; led him into his chamber, only divided by a curtain from his
accommodation for washing and slumber, and placed him in an arm-chair
beside a drowsy fire--fuel had already become very dear.

"Gustave," said Savarin, "are you in a mood favourable to a little
serious talk?"

"Serious talk from M. Savarin is a novelty too great not to command my
profoundest interest."

"Thank you,--and to begin: I who know the world and mankind advise you,
who do not, never to meet a man who wishes to do you a kindness with
an ungracious sarcasm. Irony is a weapon I ought to be skilled in, but
weapons are used against enemies, and it is only a tyro who flourishes
his rapier in the face of his friends."

"I was not aware that M. Savarin still permitted me to regard him as a
friend."

"Because I discharged the duties of friend--remonstrated, advised, and
warned. However, let bygones be bygones. I entreated you not to quit the
safe shelter of the paternal roof. You insisted on doing so. I entreated
you not to send to one of the most ferocious of the Red, or rather,
the Communistic, journals, articles, very eloquent, no doubt, but which
would most seriously injure you in the eyes of quiet, orderly people,
and compromise your future literary career for the sake of a temporary
flash in the pan during a very evanescent period of revolutionary
excitement. You scorned my adjurations, but at all events you had the
grace not to append your true name to those truculent effusions. In
literature, if literature revive in France, we two are henceforth
separated. But I do not forego the friendly interest I took in you in
the days when you were so continually in my house. My wife, who liked
you so cordially, implored me to look after you during her absence from
Paris, and, enfin, mon pauvre garcon, it would grieve me very much if,
when she comes back, I had to say to her, 'Gustave Rameau has thrown
away the chance of redemption and of happiness which you deemed was
secure to him.' A l'oeil malade, la lumiere nuit."

So saying, he held out his hand kindly.

Gustave, who was far from deficient in affectionate or tender impulses,
took the hand respectfully, and pressed it warmly.

"Forgive me if I have been ungracious, M. Savarin, and vouchsafe to hear
my explanation."

"Willingly, mon garcon."

"When I became convalescent, well enough to leave my father's house,
there were circumstances which compelled me to do so. A young man
accustomed to the life of a garcon can't be always tied to his mother's
apron-strings."

"Especially if the apron-pocket does not contain a bottle of absinthe,"
said Savarin, drily. "You may well colour and try to look angry; but I
know that the doctor strictly forbade the use of that deadly liqueur,
and enjoined your mother to keep strict watch on your liability to its
temptations. And hence one cause of your ennui under the paternal roof.
But if there you could not imbibe absinthe, you were privileged to
enjoy a much diviner intoxication. There you could have the foretaste of
domestic bliss,--the society of the girl you loved, and who was pledged
to become your wife. Speak frankly. Did not that society itself begin to
be wearisome?"

"No," cried Gustave, eagerly, "it was not wearisome--"

"Yes, but--"

"But it could not be all-sufficing to a soul of fire like mine."

"Hem," murmured Savarin--"a soul of fire! This is very interesting; pray
go on."

"The calm, cold, sister-like affection of a childish undeveloped
nature, which knew no passion except for art, and was really so little
emancipated from the nursery as to take for serious truth all the old
myths of religion--such companionship may be very soothing and pleasant
when one is lying on one's sofa, and must live by rule, but when one
regains the vigour of youth and health--"

"Do not pause," said Savarin, gazing with more compassion than envy on
that melancholy impersonation of youth and health. "When one regains
that vigour of which I myself have no recollection, what happens?"

"The thirst for excitement, the goads of ambition, the irresistible
claims which the world urges upon genius, return."

"And that genius, finding itself at the North Pole amid Cimmerian
darkness in the atmosphere of a childish intellect--in other words,
the society of a pure-minded virgin, who, though a good romance-writer,
writes nothing but what a virgin may read, and, though a bel esprit,
says her prayers and goes to church--then genius--well, pardon my
ignorance, what does genius do?"

"Oh, M. Savarin, M. Savarin! don't let us talk any more. There is no
sympathy between us. I cannot bear that bloodless, mocking, cynical mode
of dealing with grand emotions, which belongs to the generation of the
Doctrinaires. I am not a Thiers or a Guizot."

"Good heavens! who ever accused you of being either? I did not mean
to be cynical. Mademoiselle Cicogna has often said I am, but I did
not think you would. Pardon me. I quite agree with the philosopher who
asserted that the wisdom of the past was an imposture, that the meanest
intellect now living is wiser than the greatest intellect which is
buried in Pere la Chaise; because the dwarf who follows the giant, when
perched on the shoulders of the giant, sees farther than the giant ever
could. Allez. I go in for your generation. I abandon Guizot and Thiers.
Do condescend and explain to my dull understanding, as the inferior
mortal of a former age, what are the grand emotions which impel a
soul of fire in your wiser generation. The thirst of excitement--what
excitement? The goads of ambition--what ambition?"

"A new social system is struggling from the dissolving elements of the
old one, as, in the fables of priestcraft, the soul frees itself from
the body which has become ripe for the grave. Of that new system I
aspire to be a champion--a leader. Behold the excitement that allures
me, the ambition that goads."

"Thank you," said Savarin, meekly; "I am answered. I recognise the dwarf
perched on the back of the giant. Quitting these lofty themes, I venture
to address to you now one simple matter-of-fact question: How about
Mademoiselle Cicogna? Do you think you can induce her to transplant
herself to the new social system, which I presume will abolish, among
other obsolete myths, the institution of marriage?"

"M. Savarin, your question offends me. Theoretically I am opposed to the
existing superstitions that encumber the very simple principle by
which may be united two persons so long as they desire the union, and
separated so soon as the union becomes distasteful to either. But I
am perfectly aware that such theories would revolt a young lady like
Mademoiselle Cicogna. I have never even named them to her, and our
engagement holds good."

"Engagement of marriage? No period for the ceremony fixed?"

"That is not my fault. I urged it on Isaura with all earnestness before
I left my father's house."

"That was long after the siege had begun. Listen to me, Gustave. No
persuasion of mine or my wife's, nor Mrs. Morley's, could induce Isaura
to quit Paris while it was yet time. She said very simply that, having
pledged her truth and hand to you, it would be treason to honour and
duty if she should allow any considerations for herself to be even
discussed so long as you needed her presence. You were then still
suffering, and, though convalescent, not without danger of a relapse.
And your mother said to her--I heard the words: ''Tis not for his bodily
health I could dare to ask you to stay, when every man who can afford
it is sending away his wife, sisters, daughters. As for that, I should
suffice to tend him; but if you go, I resign all hope for the health of
his mind and his soul.' I think at Paris there may be female poets and
artists whom that sort of argument would not have much influenced. But
it so happens that Isaura is not a Parisienne. She believes in those old
myths which you think fatal to sympathies with yourself; and those old
myths also lead her to believe that where a woman has promised she will
devote her life to a man, she cannot forsake him when told by his mother
that she is necessary to the health of his mind and his soul. Stay.
Before you interrupt me, let me finish what I have to say. It appears
that, so soon as your bodily health was improved, you felt that your
mind and your soul could take care of themselves; and certainly it seems
to me that Isaura Cicogna is no longer of the smallest use to either."

Rameau was evidently much disconcerted by this speech. He saw what
Savarin was driving at--the renunciation of all bond between Isaura and
himself. He was not prepared for such renunciation. He still felt for
the Italian as much of love as he could feel for any woman who did not
kneel at his feet, as at those of Apollo condescending to the homage of
Arcadian maids. But on the one hand, he felt that many circumstances had
occurred since the disaster at Sedan to render Isaura a very much less
desirable partie than she had been when he had first wrung from her
the pledge of betrothal. In the palmy times of a Government in which
literature and art commanded station and insured fortune, Isaura,
whether as authoress or singer, was a brilliant marriage for Gustave
Rameau. She had also then an assured and competent, if modest, income.
But when times change, people change with them. As the income for
the moment (and Heaven only can say how long that moment might last),
Isaura's income had disappeared. It will be recollected that Louvier
had invested her whole fortune in the houses to be built in the street
called after his name. No houses, even when built, paid any rent now.
Louvier had quitted Paris; and Isaura could only be subsisting upon such
small sum as she might have had in hand before the siege commenced. All
career in such literature and art as Isaura adorned was at a dead stop.
Now, to do Rameau justice, he was by no means an avaricious or mercenary
man. But he yearned for modes of life to which money was essential. He
liked his "comforts;" and his comforts included the luxuries of elegance
and show-comforts not to be attained by marriage with Isaura under
existing circumstances.

Nevertheless it is quite true that he had urged her to marry him at
once, before he had quitted his father's house; and her modest shrinking
from such proposal, however excellent the reasons for delay in the
national calamities of the time, as well as the poverty which the
calamity threatened, had greatly wounded his amour propre. He had
always felt that her affection for him was not love; and though he could
reconcile himself to that conviction when many solid advantages were
attached to the prize of her love, and when he was ill, and penitent,
and maudlin, and the calm affection of a saint seemed to him infinitely
preferable to the vehement passion of a sinner,--yet when Isaura
was only Isaura by herself--Isaura minus all the et cetera which had
previously been taken into account--the want of adoration for himself
very much lessened her value.

Still, though he acquiesced in the delayed fulfilment of the engagement
with Isaura, he had no thought of withdrawing from the engagement
itself, and after a slight pause he replied: "You do me great injustice
if you suppose that the occupations to which I devote myself render me
less sensible to the merits of Mademoiselle Cicogna, or less eager
for our union. On the contrary, I will confide to you--as a man of the
world--one main reason why I quitted my father's house, and why I desire
to keep my present address a secret. Mademoiselle Caumartin conceived
for me a passion--a caprice--which was very flattering for a time, but
which latterly became very troublesome. Figure to yourself--she
daily came to our house while I was lying ill, and with the greatest
difficulty my mother got her out of it. That was not all. She pestered
me with letters containing all sorts of threats--nay, actually kept
watch at the house; and one day when I entered the carriage with my
mother and Signora Venosta for a drive in the Bois (meaning to call for
Isaura by the way), she darted to the carriage-door, caught my hand, and
would have made a scene if the coachman had given her leave to do so.
Luckily he had the tact to whip on his horses, and we escaped. I had
some little difficulty in convincing the Signora Venosta that the girl
was crazed. But I felt the danger I incurred of her coming upon me some
moment when in company with Isaura, and so I left my father's house; and
naturally wishing to steer clear of this vehement little demon till I
am safely married, I keep my address a secret from all who are likely to
tell her of it."

"You do wisely if you are really afraid of her, and cannot trust your
nerves to say to her plainly, 'I am engaged to be married; all is at an
end between us. Do not force me to employ the police to protect myself
from unwelcome importunities.'"

"Honestly speaking, I doubt if I have the nerve to do that, and I doubt
still more if it would be of any avail. It is very ennuayant to be so
passionately loved; but, que voulez vous? It is my fate."

"Poor martyr! I condole with you: and, to say truth, it was chiefly
to warn you of Mademoiselle Caumartin's pertinacity that I call this
evening."

Here Savarin related the particulars of his rencontre with Julie, and
concluded by saying: "I suppose I may take your word of honour that you
will firmly resist all temptation to renew a connection which would be
so incompatible with the respect due to your fiancee? Fatherless and
protectorless as Isaura is, I feel bound to act as a virtual guardian
to one in whom my wife takes so deep an interest, and to whom, as she
thinks, she had some hand in bringing about your engagement: she is
committed to no small responsibilities. Do not allow poor Julie, whom
I sincerely pity, to force on me the unpleasant duty of warning your
fiancee of the dangers to which she might be subjected by marriage with
an Adonis whose fate it is to be so profoundly beloved by the sex in
general, and ballet nymphs in particular."

"There is no chance of so disagreeable a duty being incumbent on you,
M. Savarin. Of course, what I myself have told you in confidence is
sacred."

"Certainly. There are things in the life of a garcon before marriage
which would be an affront to the modesty of his fiancee to communicate
and discuss. But then those things must belong exclusively to the past
and cast no shadow over the future. I will not interrupt you further. No
doubt you have work for the night before you. Do the Red journalists for
whom you write pay enough to support you in these terribly dear times?"

"Scarcely. But I look forward to wealth and fame in the future. And
you?"

"I just escape starvation. If the siege last much longer, it is not of
the gout I shall die. Good-night to you."




CHAPTER XVI.

Isaura had, as we have seen, been hitherto saved by the siege and its
consequences from the fulfilment of her engagement to Gustave Rameau;
and since he had quitted his father's house she had not only seen less
of him, but a certain chill crept into his converse in the visits
he paid to her. The compassionate feeling his illness had excited,
confirmed by the unwonted gentleness of his mood, and the short-lived
remorse with which he spoke of his past faults and follies, necessarily
faded away in proportion as he regained that kind of febrile strength
which was his normal state of health, and with it the arrogant
self-assertion which was ingrained in his character. But it was now
more than ever that she became aware of the antagonism between all that
constituted his inner life and her own. It was not that he volunteered
in her presence the express utterance of those opinions, social or
religious, which he addressed to the public in the truculent journal to
which, under a nom de plume, he was the most inflammatory contributor.
Whether it was that he shrank from insulting the ears of the pure virgin
whom he had wooed as wife with avowals of his disdain of marriage bonds,
or perhaps from shocking yet more her womanly humanity and her religious
faith by cries for the blood of anti-republican traitors and the
downfall of Christian altars; or whether he yet clung, though with
relapsing affection, to the hold which her promise had imposed on him,
and felt that that hold would be for ever gone, and that she would
recoil from his side in terror and dismay, if she once learned that the
man who had implored her to be his saving angel from the comparatively
mild errors of youth, had so belied his assurance, so mocked her
credulity, as deliberately to enter into active warfare against all that
he knew her sentiments regarded as noble and her conscience received
as divine: despite the suppression of avowed doctrine on his part, the
total want of sympathy between these antagonistic natures made itself
felt by both--more promptly felt by Isaura. If Gustave did not frankly
announce to her in that terrible time (when all that a little later
broke out on the side of the Communists was more or less forcing ominous
way to the lips of those who talked with confidence to each other,
whether to approve or to condemn) the associates with whom he was
leagued, the path to which he had committed his career--still for her
instincts for genuine Art--which for its development needs the
serenity of peace, which for its ideal needs dreams that soar into the
Infinite--Gustave had only the scornful sneer of the man who identifies
with his ambition the violent upset of all that civilisation has
established in this world, and the blank negation of all that patient
hope and heroic aspiration which humanity carries on into the next.

On his side, Gustave Rameau, who was not without certain fine and
delicate attributes in a complicated nature over which the personal
vanity and the mobile temperament of the Parisian reigned supreme,
chafed at the restraints imposed on him. No matter what a man's
doctrines may be--however abominable you and I may deem them--man
desires to find, in the dearest fellowship he can establish, that
sympathy in the woman his choice singles out from her sex-deference
to his opinions, sympathy with his objects, as man. So, too, Gustave's
sense of honour and according to his own Parisian code that sense was
keen--became exquisitely stung by the thought that he was compelled to
play the part of a mean dissimulator to the girl for whose opinions he
had the profoundest contempt. How could these two, betrothed to each
other, not feel, though without coming to open dissension, that between
them had flowed the inlet of water by which they had been riven asunder?
What man, if he can imagine himself a Gustave Rameau, can blame the
revolutionist absorbed in ambitious projects for turning the pyramid of
society topsy-turvy, if he shrank more and more from the companionship
of a betrothed with whom he could not venture to exchange three words
without caution and reserve? And what woman can blame an Isaura if she
felt a sensation of relief at the very neglect of the affianced whom she
had compassionated and could never love?

Possibly the reader may best judge of the state of Isaura's mind at this
time by a few brief extracts from an imperfect fragmentary journal, in
which, amid saddened and lonely hours, she held converse with herself.

"One day at Enghien I listened silently to a conversation between M.
Savarin and the Englishman, who sought to explain the conception of duty
in which the German poet has given such noble utterance to the thoughts
of the German philosopher--viz., that moral aspiration has the same goal
as the artistic,--the attainment to the calm delight wherein the pain
of effort disappears in the content of achievement. Thus in life, as in
art, it is through discipline that we arrive at freedom, and duty only
completes itself when all motives, all actions, are attuned into one
harmonious whole, and it is not striven for as duty, but enjoyed as
happiness. M. Savarin treated this theory with the mockery with which
the French wit is ever apt to treat what it terms German mysticism.
According to him, duty must always be a hard and difficult struggle; and
he said laughingly, 'Whenever a man says, "I have done my duty," it is
with a long face and a mournful sigh.'

"Ah, how devoutly I listened to the Englishman! how harshly the
Frenchman's irony jarred upon my ears! And yet now, in the duty that
life imposes on me, to fulfil which I strain every power vouchsafed to
my nature, and seek to crush down every impulse that rebels, where is
the promised calm, where any approach to the content of achievement?
Contemplating the way before me, the Beautiful even of Art has vanished.
I see but cloud and desert. Can this which I assume to be duty really be
so? Ah, is it not sin even to ask my heart that question?

"Madame Rameau is very angry with her son for his neglect both of his
parents and of me. I have had to take his part against her. I would not
have him lose their love. Poor Gustave! But when Madame Rameau suddenly
said to-day: 'I erred in seeking the union between thee and Gustave.
Retract thy promise; in doing so thou wilt be justified,'--oh, the
strange joy that flashed upon me as she spoke. Am I justified? Am I? Oh,
if that Englishman had never crossed my path! Oh, if I had never
loved! or if in the last time we met he had not asked for my love,
and confessed his own! Then, I think, I could honestly reconcile my
conscience with my longings, and say to Gustave, 'We do not suit each
other; be we both released!' But now-is it that Gustave is really
changed from what he was, when in despondence at my own lot, and in
pitying belief that I might brighten and exalt his, I plighted my troth
to him? or is it not rather that the choice I thus voluntarily made
became so intolerable a thought the moment I knew I was beloved and
sought by another; and from that moment I lost the strength I had
before,--strength to silence the voice at my own heart? What! is it
the image of that other one which is persuading me to be false?--to
exaggerate the failings, to be blind to the merits of him who has a
right to say, 'I am what I was when thou didst pledge thyself to take me
for better or for worse'?

"Gustave has been here after an absence of several days. He was not
alone. The good Abbe Vertpre and Madame de Vandemar, with her son,
M. Raoul, were present. They had come on matters connected with our
ambulance. They do not know of my engagement to Gustave; and seeing him
in the uniform of a National Guard, the Abbe courteously addressed
to him some questions as to the possibility of checking the terrible
increase of the vice of intoxication, so alien till of late to the
habits of the Parisians, and becoming fatal to discipline and bodily
endurance,--could the number of the cantines on the ramparts be more
limited? Gustave answered with rudeness and bitter sarcasm, 'Before
priests could be critics in military matters they must undertake
military service themselves.'

"The Abbe replied with unalterable good-humour, 'But, in order to
criticise the effects of drunkenness, must one get drunk one's self?'
Gustave was put out, and retired into a corner of the room, keeping
sullen silence till my other visitors left.

"Then before I could myself express the pain his words and manner
had given me, he said abruptly, 'I wonder how you can tolerate the
tartuferie which may amuse on the comic stage, but in the tragedy
of these times is revolting.' This speech roused my anger, and the
conversation that ensued was the gravest that had ever passed between
us.

"If Gustave were of stronger nature and more concentrated will, I
believe that the only feelings I should have for him would be antipathy
and dread. But it is his very weaknesses and inconsistencies that secure
to him a certain tenderness of interest. I think he could never be
judged without great indulgence by women; there is in him so much of
the child,--wayward, irritating one moment, and the next penitent,
affectionate. One feels as if persistence in evil were impossible to
one so delicate both in mind and form. That peculiar order of genius
to which he belongs seems as if it ought to be so estranged from all
directions, violent or coarse. When in poetry he seeks to utter some
audacious and defying sentiment, the substance melts away in daintiness
of expression, in soft, lute-like strains of slender music. And when
he has stung, angered, revolted my heart the most, suddenly he subsides
into such pathetic gentleness, such tearful remorse, that I feel as if
resentment to one so helpless, desertion of one who must fall without
the support of a friendly hand, were a selfish cruelty. It seems to me
as if I were dragged towards a precipice by a sickly child clinging to
my robe.

"But in this last conversation with him, his language in regard to
subjects I hold most sacred drew forth from me words which startled
him, and which may avail to save him from that worst insanity of human
minds,--the mimicry of the Titans who would have dethroned a God to
restore a Chaos. I told him frankly that I had only promised to
share his fate on my faith in his assurance of my power to guide
it heavenward; and that if the opinions he announced were seriously
entertained, and put forth in defiance of heaven itself, we were
separated for ever. I told him how earnestly, in the calamities of the
time, my own soul had sought to take refuge in thoughts and hopes beyond
the earth; and how deeply many a sentiment that in former days passed
by me with a smile in the light talk of the salons, now shocked me as
an outrage on the reverence which the mortal child owes to the Divine
Father. I owned to him how much of comfort, of sustainment, of thought
and aspiration, elevated beyond the sphere of Art in which I had
hitherto sought the purest air, the loftiest goal, I owed to intercourse
with minds like those of the Abbe de Vertpre; and how painfully I felt
as if I were guilty of ingratitude when he compelled me to listen to
insults on those whom I recognised as benefactors.

"I wished to speak sternly; but it is my great misfortune, my prevalent
weakness, that I cannot be stern when I ought to be. It is with me in
life as in art. I never could on the stage have taken the part of a
Norma or a Medea. If I attempt in fiction a character which deserves
condemnation, I am untrue to poetic justice. I cannot condemn and
execute; I can but compassionate and pardon the creature I myself have
created. I was never in the real world stern but to one; and then, alas!
it was because I loved where I could no longer love with honour; and I,
knowing my weakness, had terror lest I should yield.

"So Gustave did not comprehend from my voice, my manner, how gravely I
was in earnest. But, himself softened, affected to tears, he confessed
his own faults--ceased to argue in order to praise; and--and--uttering
protestations seemingly the most sincere, he left me bound to him
still--bound to him still--woe is me!"

It is true that Isaura had come more directly under the influence of
religion than she had been in the earlier dates of this narrative. There
is a time in the lives of most of us, and especially in the lives of
women, when, despondent of all joy in an earthly future, and tortured by
conflicts between inclination and duty, we transfer all the passion and
fervour of our troubled souls to enthusiastic yearnings for the Divine
Love; seeking to rebaptise ourselves in the fountain of its mercy,
taking thence the only hopes that can cheer, the only strength that can
sustain us. Such a time had come to Isaura. Formerly she had escaped
from the griefs of the work-a-day world into the garden-land of Art.
Now, Art had grown unwelcome to her, almost hateful. Gone was the spell
from the garden-land; its flowers were faded, its paths were stony, its
sunshine had vanished in mist and rain. There are two voices of Nature
in the soul of the genuine artist,--that is, of him who, because he can
create, comprehends the necessity of the great Creator. Those voices
are never both silent. When one is hushed, the other becomes distinctly
audible. The one speaks to him of Art, the other of Religion.

At that period several societies for the relief and tendance of the
wounded had been formed by the women of Paris,--the earliest, if I
mistake not, by ladies of the highest rank--amongst whom were the
Comtesse de Vandemar and the Contessa di Rimini--though it necessarily
included others of stations less elevated. To this society, at the
request of Alain de Rochebriant and of Enguerrand, Isaura had eagerly
attached herself. It occupied much of her time; and in connection with
it she was brought much into sympathetic acquaintance with Raoul de
Vandemar--the most zealous and active member of that Society of
St. Francois de Sales, to which belonged other young nobles of the
Legitimist creed. The passion of Raoul's life was the relief of human
suffering. In him was personified the ideal of Christian charity.
I think all, or most of us, have known what it is to pass under the
influence of a nature that is so far akin to ours that it desires
to become something better and higher than it is--that desire being
paramount in ourselves--but seeks to be that something in ways not akin
to, but remote from, the ways in which we seek it. When this contact
happens, either one nature, by the mere force of will, subjugates and
absorbs the other, or both, while preserving their own individuality,
apart and independent, enrich themselves by mutual interchange, and
the asperities which differences of taste and sentiment in detail might
otherwise provoke melt in the sympathy which unites spirits striving
with equal earnestness to rise nearer to the unseen and unattainable
Source, which they equally recognise as Divine.

Perhaps, had these two persons met a year ago in the ordinary
intercourse of the world, neither would have detected the sympathy of
which I speak. Raoul was not without the prejudice against artists and
writers of romance, that is shared by many who cherish the persuasion
that all is vanity which does not concentrate imagination and intellect
in the destinies of the soul hereafter; and Isaura might have excited
his compassion, certainly not his reverence. While to her, his views
on all that seeks to render the actual life attractive and embellished,
through the accomplishments of Muse and Grace, would have seemed
the narrow-minded asceticism of a bigot. But now, amid the direful
calamities of the time, the beauty of both natures became visible
to each. To the eyes of Isaura tenderness became predominant in the
monastic self-denial of Raoul. To the eyes of Raoul, devotion became
predominant in the gentle thoughtfulness of Isaura. Their intercourse
was in ambulance and hospital-in care for the wounded, in prayer for the
dying. Ah! it is easy to declaim against the frivolities and vices of
Parisian society as they appear on the surface; and, in revolutionary
times, it is the very worst of Paris that ascends in scum to the top.
But descend below the surface, even in that demoralising suspense of
order, and nowhere on earth might the angel have beheld the image of
humanity more amply vindicating its claim to the heritage of heaven.




CHAPTER XVII.

The warning announcement of some great effort on the part of the
besieged, which Alain had given to Lemercier, was soon to be fulfilled.

For some days the principal thoroughfares were ominously lined with
military convois. The loungers on the Boulevards stopped to gaze on
the long defiles of troops and cannons, commissariat conveyances, and,
saddening accompaniments! the vehicles of various ambulances for the
removal of the wounded. With what glee the loungers said to each other
"Enfin!" Among all the troops that Paris sent forth, none were so
popular as those which Paris had not nurtured--the sailors. From the
moment they arrived, the sailors had been the pets of the capital. They
soon proved themselves the most notable contrast to that force which
Paris herself had produced--the National Guard. Their frames were hardy,
their habits active, their discipline perfect, their manners mild
and polite. "Oh, if all our troops were like these!" was the common
exclamation of the Parisians.

At last burst forth upon Paris the proclamations of General Trochu and
General Ducrot; the first brief, calm, and Breton-like, ending with
"Putting our trust in God. March on for our country:" the second more
detailed, more candidly stating obstacles and difficulties, but fiery
with eloquent enthusiasm, not unsupported by military statistics, in
the 400 cannon, two-thirds of which were of the largest calibre, that
no material object could resist; more than 150,000 soldiers, all well
armed, well equipped, abundantly provided with munitions, and all (j'en
a l'espoir) animated by an irresistible ardour. "For me," concludes the
General, "I am resolved. I swear before you, before the whole nation,
that I will not re-enter Paris except as dead or victorious."

At these proclamations, who then at Paris does not recall the burst of
enthusiasm that stirred the surface? Trochu became once more popular;
even the Communistic or atheistic journals refrained from complaining
that he attended mass, and invited his countrymen to trust in God.
Ducrot was more than popular--he was adored.

The several companies in which De Mauleon and Enguerrand served departed
towards their post early on the same morning, that of the 28th. All the
previous night, while Enguerrand was buried in profound slumber, Raoul
remained in his brother's room; sometimes on his knees before the
ivory crucifix which had been their mother's last birthday gift to her
youngest son--sometimes seated beside the bed in profound and devout
meditation. At daybreak, Madame de Vandemar stole into the chamber.
Unconscious of his brother's watch, he had asked her to wake him in good
time, for the young man was a sound sleeper. Shading the candle she bore
with one hand, with the other she drew aside the curtain, and looked at
Enguerrand's calm fair face, its lips parted in the happy smile which
seemed to carry joy with it wherever its sunshine played. Her tears fell
noiselessly on her darling's cheek; she then knelt down and prayed for
strength. As she rose she felt Raoul's arm around her; they looked at
each other in silence; then she bowed her head and wakened Enguerrand
with her lips. "Pas de querelle, mes amis," he murmured, opening his
sweet blue eyes drowsily. "Ah, it was a dream! I thought Jules and Emile
[two young friends of his] were worrying each other; and you know, dear
Raoul, that I am the most officious of peacemakers. Time to rise, is it?
No peacemaking to-day. Kiss me again, mother, and say 'Bless thee.'"

"Bless thee, bless thee, my child," cried the mother, wrapping her arms
passionately round him, and in tones choked with sobs.

"Now leave me, maman," said Enguerrand, resorting to the infantine
ordinary name, which he had not used for years. "Raoul, stay and help
me to dress. I must be tres beau to-day. I shall join thee at breakfast,
maman. Early for such repast, but l'appetit vient en mangeant. Mind the
coffee is hot."

Enguerrand, always careful of each detail of dress, was especially so
that morning, and especially gay, humming the old air, "Partant pour la
Syrie." But his gaiety was checked when Raoul, taking from his breast a
holy talisman, which he habitually wore there, suspended it with loving
hands round his brother's neck. It was a small crystal set in Byzantine
filigree; imbedded in it was a small splinter of wood, said by pious
tradition to be a relic of the Divine Cross. It had been for centuries
in the family of the Contessa di Rimini, and was given by her to Raoul,
the only gift she had ever made him, as an emblem of the sinless
purity of the affection that united those two souls in the bonds of the
beautiful belief.

"She bade me transfer it to thee to-day, my brother," said Raoul,
simply; "and now without a pang I can gird on thee thy soldier's sword."

Enguerrand clasped his brother in his arms, and kissed him with
passionate fervour. "Oh, Raoul, how I love thee! how good thou hast ever
been to me! how many sins thou hast saved me from! how indulgent thou
hast been to those from which thou couldst not save! Think on that, my
brother, in case we do not meet again on earth."

"Hush, hush, Enguerrand! No gloomy forebodings now! Come, come hither,
my half of life, my sunny half of life!" and uttering these words,
he led Enguerrand towards the crucifix, and there, in deeper and more
solemn voice, said, "Let us pray." So the brothers knelt side by side,
and Raoul prayed aloud as only such souls can pray.

When they descended into the salon where breakfast was set out, they
found assembled several of their relations, and some of Enguerrand's
young friends not engaged in the sortie. One or two of the latter,
indeed, were disabled from fighting by wounds in former fields; they
left their sick-beds to bid him good-bye. Unspeakable was the affection
this genial nature inspired in all who came into the circle of its
winning magic; and when, tearing himself from them, he descended the
stair, and passed with light step through the Porte cochere, there was
a crowd around the house--so widely had his popularity spread among even
the lower classes, from which the Mobiles in his regiment were chiefly
composed. He departed to the place of rendezvous amid a chorus of
exhilarating cheers.

Not thus lovingly tended on, not thus cordially greeted, was that equal
idol of a former generation, Victor de Mauleon. No pious friend prayed
beside his couch, no loving kiss waked him from his slumbers. At the
grey of the November dawn he rose from a sleep which had no smiling
dreams, with that mysterious instinct of punctual will which cannot even
go to sleep without fixing beforehand the exact moment in which sleep
shall end. He, too, like Enguerrand, dressed himself with care--unlike
Enguerrand, with care strictly soldier-like. Then, seeing he had some
little time yet before him, he rapidly revisited the pigeonholes and
drawers in which might be found by prying eyes anything he would deny
to them curiosity. All that he found of this sort were some letters in
female handwriting, tied together with faded ribbon, relics of earlier
days, and treasured throughout later vicissitudes; letters from the
English girl to whom he had briefly referred in his confession to
Louvier,--the only girl he had ever wooed as his wife. She was the only
daughter of highborn Roman Catholics, residing at the time of his youth
in Paris. Reluctantly they had assented to his proposals; joyfully they
had retracted their assent when his affairs had become so involved;
yet possibly the motive that led him to his most ruinous excesses--the
gambling of the turf--had been caused by the wild hope of a nature, then
fatally sanguine, to retrieve the fortune that might suffice to
satisfy the parents. But during his permitted courtship the lovers
had corresponded. Her letters were full of warm, if innocent,
tenderness--till came the last cold farewell. The family had long ago
returned to England; he concluded, of course, that she had married
another.

Near to these letters lay the papers which had served to vindicate his
honour in that old affair, in which the unsought love of another had
brought on him shame and affliction. As his eye fell on the last, he
muttered to him self, "I kept these, to clear my repute. Can I keep
those, when, if found, they might compromise the repute of her who
might have been my wife had I been worthy of her? She is doubtless now
another's; or, if dead,--honour never dies." He pressed his lips to the
letters with a passionate, lingering, mournful kiss; then, raking up the
ashes of yesterday's fire, and rekindling them, he placed thereon those
leaves of a melancholy romance in his past, and watched them slowly,
reluctantly smoulder away into tinder. Then he opened a drawer in which
lay the only paper of a political character which he had preserved. All
that related to plots or conspiracies in which his agency had committed
others, it was his habit to destroy as soon as received. For the sole
document thus treasured he alone was responsible; it was an outline
of his ideal for the future constitution of France, accompanied with
elaborate arguments, the heads of which his conversation with the
Incognito made known to the reader. Of the soundness of this political
programme, whatever its merits or faults (a question on which I presume
no judgment), he had an intense conviction. He glanced rapidly over its
contents, did not alter a word, sealed it up in an envelope, inscribed,
"My Legacy to my Countrymen." The papers refuting a calumny relating
solely to himself he carried into the battle-field, placed next to his
heart,--significant of a Frenchman's love of honour in this world--as
the relic placed round the neck of Enguerrand by his pious brother was
emblematic of the Christian hope of mercy in the next.




CHAPTER XVIII.

The streets swarmed with the populace troops as they passed to their
destination. Among those of the Mobiles who especially caught the eye
were two companies in which Enguerrand de Vandemar and Victor de Mauleon
commanded. In the first were many young men of good family, or in the
higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, known to numerous lookers-on; there was
something inspiriting in their gay aspects, and in the easy carelessness
of their march. Mixed with this company, however, and forming of course
the bulk of it, were those who belonged to the lower classes of the
population; and though they too might seem gay to an ordinary observer,
the gaiety was forced. Many of them were evidently not quite sober; and
there was a disorderly want of soldiership in their mien and armament
which inspired distrust among such vieux moustaches as, too old for
other service than that of the ramparts, mixed here and there among the
crowd.

But when De Mauleon's company passed, the vieux moustaches impulsively
touched each other. They recognised the march of well-drilled men; the
countenances grave and severe, the eyes not looking on this side and
that for admiration, the step regularly timed; and conspicuous among
these men the tall stature and calm front of the leader.

"These fellows will fight well," growled a vieux moustache, "where did
they fish out their leader?"

"Don't you know?" said a bourgeois. "Victor de Mauleon. He won the cross
in Algeria for bravery. I recollect him when I was very young; the very
devil for women and fighting."

"I wish there were more such devils for fighting and fewer for women,"
growled again le vieux moustache.

One incessant roar of cannon all the night of the 29th. The populace
had learned the names of the French cannons, and fancied they
could distinguish the several sounds of their thunder. "There
spits 'Josephine'!" shouts an invalid sailor. "There howls our own
'Populace'!" cries a Red Republican from Belleville.

   [The "Populace" had been contributed to the artillery,
   sou a sou, by the working class.]

"There sings 'Le Chatiment'!" laughed Gustave Rameau, who was now become
an enthusiastic admirer of the Victor Hugo he had before affected to
despise. And all the while, mingled with the roar of the cannon,
came, far and near from the streets, from the ramparts, the gusts of
song--song sometimes heroic, sometimes obscene, more often carelessly
joyous. The news of General Vinoy's success during the early part of the
day had been damped by the evening report of Ducrot's delay in crossing
the swollen Marne. But the spirits of the Parisians rallied from a
momentary depression on the excitement at night of that concert of
martial music.

During that night, close under the guns of the double redoubt of
Gravelle and La Faisanderie, eight pontoon-bridges were thrown over
the Marne; and at daybreak the first column of the third army under
Blanchard and Renoult crossed with all their artillery, and, covered
by the fire of the double redoubts, of the forts of Vincennes, Nogent,
Rossuey, and the batteries of Mont Avron, had an hour before noon
carried the village of Champingy, and the first echelon of the
important plateau of Villiers, and were already commencing the work
of intrenchment, when, rallying from the amaze of a defeat, the German
forces burst upon them, sustained by fresh batteries. The Prussian
pieces of artillery established at Chennevieres and at Neuilly opened
fire with deadly execution; while a numerous infantry, descending from
the intrenchments of Villiers, charged upon the troops under Renoult.
Among the French in that strife were Enguerrand and the Mobiles of which
he was in command. Dismayed by the unexpected fire, these Mobiles gave
way, as indeed did many of the line. Enguerrand rushed forward to the
front: "On, mes enfans, on! What will our mothers and wives say of us
if we fly? Vive la France!--On!" Among those of the better class in that
company there rose a shout of applause, but it found no sympathy among
the rest. They wavered, they turned. "Will you suffer me to go on
alone, countrymen?" cried Enguerrand; and alone he rushed on towards
the Prussian line--rushed, and fell, mortally wounded, by a musket-ball.
"Revenge, revenge!" shouted some of the foremost; "Revenge!" shouted
those in the rear; and, so shouting, turned on their heels and fled.
But ere they could disperse they encountered the march, steadfast though
rapid, of the troop led by Victor de Mauleon. "Poltroons!" he thundered,
with the sonorous depth of his strong voice, "halt and turn, or my men
shall fire on you as deserters."

"Va, citoyen," said one fugitive, an officer-popularly elected, because
he was the loudest brawler in the club of the Salle Favre,--we have seen
him before--Charles, the brother of Armand Monnier;--"men can't fight
when they despise their generals. It is our generals who are poltroons
and fools both."

"Carry my answer to the ghosts of cowards," cried De Mauldon, and shot
the man dead.

His followers, startled and cowed by the deed, and the voice and the
look of the death-giver, halted. The officers, who had at first yielded
to the panic of their men, took fresh courage, and finally led the bulk
of the troop back to their post "enlevis a la baionette," to use the
phrase of a candid historian of that day.

Day, on the whole, not inglorious to France. It was the first, if it
was the last, really important success of the besieged. They remained
masters of the ground, the Prussians leaving to them the wounded and the
dead.

That night what crowds thronged from Paris to the top of the Montmartre
heights, from the observatory on which the celebrated inventor Bazin
had lighted up, with some magical electric machine, all the plain of
Gennevilliers from Mont Valerien to the Fort de la Briche! The splendour
of the blaze wrapped the great city;--distinctly above the roofs of
the houses soared the Dome des Invalides, the spires of Notre Dame, the
giant turrets of the Tuileries;--and died away on resting on the infames
scapulos Acroceraunia, the "thunder crags" of the heights occupied by
the invading army.

Lemercier, De Breze, and the elder Rameau--who, despite his peaceful
habits and grey hairs, insisted on joining in the aid of la patrie--were
among the National Guards attached to the Fort de la Briche and the
neighbouring eminence, and they met in conversation.

"What a victory we have had!" said the old Rameau.

"Rather mortifying to your son, M. Rameau," said LeMercier.

"Mortifying to my son, sir!--the victory of his countrymen. What do you
mean?"

"I had the honour to hear M. Gustave the other night at the club de la
Vengeance."

"Bon Dieu! do you frequent those tragic reunions?" asked De Breze.

"They are not at all tragic: they are the only comedies left us, as one
must amuse one's self somewhere, and the club de la Vengeance is the
prettiest thing of the sort going. I quite understand why it should
fascinate a poet like your son, M. Rameau. It is held in a salle de
cafe chantant--style Louis Quinze--decorated with a pastoral scene from
Watteau. I and my dog Fox drop in. We hear your son haranguing. In what
poetical sentences he despaired of the Republic! The Government (he
called them les charlatans de l'Hotel de Ville) were imbeciles. They
pretended to inaugurate a revolution, and did not employ the most
obvious of revolutionary means. There Fox and I pricked up our ears:
what were those means? Your son proceeded to explain: 'All mankind were
to be appealed to against individual interests. The commerce of luxury
was to be abolished. Clearly luxury was not at the command of all
mankind. Cafes and theatres were to be closed for ever--all mankind
could not go to cafes and theatres. It was idle to expect the masses to
combine for anything in which the masses had not an interest in common.
The masses had no interest in any property that did not belong to
the masses. Programmes of the society to be founded, called the Ligue
Cosmopolite Democratique, should be sent at once into all the States of
the civilised world--how? by balloons. Money corrupts the world as now
composed: but the money at the command of the masses could buy all the
monarchs and courtiers and priests of the universe.' At that sentiment,
vehemently delivered, the applauses were frantic, and Fox in his
excitement began to bark. At the sound of his bark one man cried out,
'That's a Prussian!' another, 'Down with the spy!' another, 'There's an
aristo present--he keeps alive a dog which would be a week's meal for
a family!' I snatch up Fox at the last cry, and clasp him to a bosom
protected by the uniform of the National Guard.

"When the hubbub had subsided, your son, M. Rameau, proceeded, quitting
mankind in general, and arriving at the question in particular most
interesting to his audience--the mobilisation of the National Guard;
that is, the call upon men who like talking and hate fighting to talk
less and fight more. 'It was the sheerest tyranny to select a certain
number of free citizens to be butchered. If the fight was for the mass,
there ought to be la levee en masse. If one did not compel everybody
to fight, why should anybody fight?' Here the applause again became
vehement, and Fox again became indiscreet. I subdued Fox's bark into a
squeak by pulling his ears. 'What!' cries your poet-son, 'la levee en
masse gives us fifteen millions of soldiers, with which we could crush,
not Prussia alone, but the whole of Europe. (Immense sensation.) Let us,
then, resolve that the charlatans of the Hotel de Ville are incapable of
delivering us from the Prussians; that they are deposed; that the Ligue
of the Democratie Cosmopolite is installed; that meanwhile the Commune
shall be voted the Provisional Government, and shall order the Prussians
to retire within three days from the soil of Paris.'

"Pardon me this long description, my dear M. Rameau, but I trust I
have satisfactorily explained why victory obtained in the teeth of
his eloquent opinions, if gratifying to him as a Frenchman, must be
mortifying to him as a politician."

The old Rameau sighed, hung his head, and crept away. While, amid this
holiday illumination, the Parisians enjoyed the panorama before them,
the Freres Chretiens and the attendants of the various ambulances were
moving along the battle-plains; the first in their large-brimmed hats
and sable garbs, the last in strange motley costume, many of them in
glittering uniform--all alike in their serene indifference to danger;
often pausing to pick up among the dead their own brethren who had
been slaughtered in the midst of their task. Now and then they came
on sinister forms apparently engaged in the same duty of tending the
wounded and dead, but in truth murderous plunderers, to whom the dead
and the dying were equal harvests. Did the wounded man attempt to resist
the foul hands searching for their spoil, they added another wound more
immediately mortal, grinning as they completed on the dead the robbery
they had commenced on the dying.

Raoul de Vandemar had been all the earlier part of the day with the
assistants of the ambulance over which he presided, attached to the
battalions of the National Guard in a quarter remote from that in which
his brother had fought and fallen. When those troops, later in the day,
were driven from the Montmedy plateau, which they had at first carried,
Raoul repassed towards the plateau at Villiers, on which the dead lay
thickest. On the way he heard a vague report of the panic which
had dispersed the Mobiles of whom Enguerrand was in command, and of
Enguerrand's vain attempt to inspirit them. But his fate was not known.
There, at midnight, Raoul is still searching among the ghastly heaps and
pools of blood, lighted from afar by the blaze from the observatory of
Montmartre, and more near at hand by the bivouac fires extended along
the banks to the left of the Marne, while everywhere about the field
flitted the lanterns of the Frere Chretiens. Suddenly, in the dimness of
a spot cast into shadow by an incompleted earthwork, he observed a small
sinister figure perched on the breast of some wounded soldier, evidently
not to succour. He sprang forward and seized a hideous-looking urchin,
scarcely twelve years old, who held in one hand a small crystal locket,
set in filigree gold, torn from the soldier's breast, and lifted high in
the other a long case-knife. At a glance Raoul recognised the holy relic
he had given to Enguerrand, and, flinging the precocious murderer to be
seized by his assistants, he cast himself beside his brother. Enguerrand
still breathed, and his languid eyes brightened as he knew the dear
familiar face. He tried to speak, but his voice failed, and he shook his
head sadly, but still with a faint smile on his lips. They lifted him
tenderly, and placed him on a litter. The movement, gentle as it was,
brought back pain, and with the pain strength to mutter, "My mother---I
would see her once more."

As at daybreak the loungers on Montmartre and the ramparts descended
into the streets--most windows in which were open, as they had been
all night, with anxious female faces peering palely down-they saw the
conveyances of the ambulances coming dismally along, and many an
eye turned wistfully towards the litter on which lay the idol of the
pleasure-loving Paris, with the dark, bareheaded figure walking beside
it,--onwards, onwards, till it reached the Hotel de Vandemar, and a
woman's cry was heard at the entrance--the mother's cry, "My son! my
son!"





BOOK XII.




CHAPTER I.

The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the
30th of November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no less
honourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December. There was the
sanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would break
through the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army
of Aurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise the
investment;--belief rudely shaken by Ducrot's proclamation of the 4th,
to explain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the
positions conquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke's
letter to Trochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the
Loire and the recapture of Orleans. Even then the Parisians did not
lose hope of succour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie
against Le Bourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat
and predictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on
the city.

Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.

It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the most
hideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at
the worst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest
characteristics--unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days
of the capital--became conspicuously prominent. The higher classes,
including the remnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege,
exhibited qualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by
the enemies of aristocracy. Their sons had been foremost among those
soldiers who never calumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their
women had been among the most zealous and the most tender nurses of the
ambulances they had founded and served; their houses had been freely
opened, whether to the families exiled from the suburbs, or in
supplement to the hospitals. The amount of relief they afforded
unostentatiously, out of means that shared the general failure of
accustomed resource, when the famine commenced, would be scarcely
credible if stated. Admirable, too, were the fortitude and resignation
of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,--the thrifty tradesfolk and small
rentiers,--that class in which, to judge of its timidity when opposed
to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous virtue. Courage became so
now--courage to bear hourly increasing privation, and to suppress every
murmur of suffering that would discredit their patriotism, and invoke
"peace at any price." It was on this class that the calamities of the
siege now pressed the most heavily. The stagnation of trade, and the
stoppage of the rents, in which they had invested their savings, reduced
many of them to actual want. Those only of their number who obtained the
pay of one-and-a-half franc a day as National Guards, could be sure to
escape from starvation. But this pay had already begun to demoralise the
receivers. Scanty for supply of food, it was ample for supply of drink.
And drunkenness, hitherto rare in that rank of the Parisians, became
a prevalent vice, aggravated in the case of a National Guard, when
it wholly unfitted him for the duties he undertook, especially such
National Guards as were raised from the most turbulent democracy of the
working class.

But of all that population; there were two sections in which the
most beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly
manifest--the women and the priesthood, including in the latter
denomination all the various brotherhoods and societies which religion
formed and inspired.

It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing
wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated
that "the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days,"
had commenced the bombardment. Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had
escaped the Prussian's guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest
known for twenty years. He was one of the many frozen at their
posts--brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying
to keep him warm. He had only lately been sent forth as
convalescent,--ambulances were too crowded to retain a patient longer
than absolutely needful,--and had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched
ever since. The luxurious Frederic had still, somewhere or other, a
capital yielding above three thousand a year, and of which he could not
now realise a franc, the title-deeds to various investments being in the
hands of Duplessis, the most trustworthy of friends, the most upright of
men, but who was in Bretagne, and could not be got at. And the time had
come at Paris when you could not get trust for a pound of horse-flesh,
or a daily supply of fuel. And Frederic Lemercier, who had long since
spent the 2000 francs borrowed from Alain (not ignobly, but somewhat
ostentatiously, in feasting any acquaintance who wanted a feast), and
who had sold to any one who could afford to speculate on such dainty
luxuries,--clocks, bronzes, amber-mounted pipes,--all that had made the
envied garniture of his bachelor's apartment--Frederic Lemercier was,
so far as the task of keeping body and soul together, worse off than
any English pauper who can apply to the Union. Of course he might have
claimed his half-pay of thirty sous as a National Guard. But he little
knows the true Parisian who imagines a seigneur of the Chaussee d'Antin,
the oracle of those with whom he lived, and one who knew life so well
that he had preached prudence to a seigneur of the Faubourg like Alain
de Rochebriant, stooping to apply for the wages of thirty sons. Rations
were only obtained by the wonderful patience of women, who had children
to whom they were both saints and martyrs. The hours, the weary hours,
one had to wait before one could get one's place on the line for the
distribution of that atrocious black bread, defeated men,--defeated most
wives if only for husbands, were defied only by mothers and daughters.
Literally speaking, Lemercier was starving. Alain had been badly wounded
in the sortie of the 21st, and was laid up in an ambulance. Even if
he could have been got at, he had probably nothing left to bestow upon
Lemercier.

Lemercier gazed on the announcement of the bombardment, and the
Parisian gaiety, which some French historian of the siege calls douce
philosophie, lingering on him still, he said, audibly, turning round
to any stranger who heard: "Happiest of mortals that we are! Under the
present Government we are never warned of anything disagreeable that can
happen; we are only told of it when it has happened, and then as rather
pleasant than otherwise. I get up. I meet a civil gendarme. 'What is
that firing? which of our provincial armies is taking Prussia in the
rear? 'Monsieur,' says the gendarme, 'it is the Prussian Krupp guns.' I
look at the proclamation, and my fears varnish,--my heart is relieved. I
read that the bombardment is a sure sign that the enemy is worn out."

Some of the men grouped round Frederic ducked their heads in terror;
others, who knew that the thunderbolt launched from the plateau of Avron
would not fall on the pavements of Paris, laughed and joked. But in
front, with no sign of terror, no sound of laughter, stretched, moving
inch by inch, the female procession towards the bakery in which the
morsel of bread for their infants was doled out.

"Hist, mon ami," said a deep voice beside Lemercier. "Look at those
women, and do not wound their ears by a jest."

Lemercier, offended by that rebuke, though too susceptible to good
emotions not to recognise its justice, tried with feeble fingers to turn
up his moustache, and to turn a defiant crest upon the rebuker. He
was rather startled to see the tall martial form at his side, and to
recognise Victor de Mauleon. "Don't you think, M. Lemercier," resumed
the Vicomte, half sadly, "that these women are worthy of better husbands
and sons than are commonly found among the soldiers whose uniform we
wear?"

"The National Guard! You ought not to sneer at them, Vicomte,--you
whose troop covered itself with glory on the great days of Villiers
and Champigny,--you in whose praise even the grumblers of Paris became
eloquent, and in whom a future Marshal of France is foretold."

"But, alas! more than half of my poor troop was left on the
battle-field, or is now wrestling for mangled remains of life in the
ambulances. And the new recruits with which I took the field on the
21st are not likely to cover themselves with glory, or to insure their
commander the baton of a marshal."

"Ay, I heard when I was in the hospital that you had publicly shamed
some of these recruits, and declared that you would rather resign than
lead them again to battle."

"True; and at this moment, for so doing, I am the man most hated by the
rabble who supplied those recruits." The men, while thus conversing,
had moved slowly on, and were now in front of a large cafe, from the
interior of which came the sound of loud bravos and clappings of hands.
Lemercier's curiosity was excited. "For what can be that applause?" he
said; "let us look in and see." The room was thronged. In the distance,
on a small raised platform, stood a girl dressed in faded theatrical
finery, making her obeisance to the crowd.

"Heavens!" exclaimed Frederic--"can I trust my eyes? Surely that is the
once superb Julie: has she been dancing here?"

One of the loungers, evidently belonging to the same world as Lemercier,
overheard the question and answered politely: "No, Monsieur: she has
been reciting verses, and really declaims very well, considering it
is not her vocation. She has given us extracts from Victor Hugo and De
Musset: and crowned all with a patriotic hymn by Gustave Rameau,--her
old lover, if gossip be true." Meanwhile De Mauleon, who at first had
glanced over the scene with his usual air of calm and cold indifference,
became suddenly struck by the girl's beautiful face, and gazed on it
with a look of startled surprise.

"Who and what did you say that poor fair creature is, M. Lemercier?"

"She is a Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin, and was a very popular coryphee.
She has hereditary right to be a good dancer, as the daughter of a once
more famous ornament of the ballet, la belle Leonie--whom you must have
seen in your young days."

"Of course. Leonie--she married a M. Surville, a silly bourgeois
gentilhomme, who earned the hatred of Paris by taking her off the stage.
So that is her daughter I see no likeness to her mother--much handsomer.
Why does she call herself Caumartin?"

"Oh," said Frederic, "a melancholy but trite story."

"Leonie was left a widow, and died in want. What could the poor young
daughter do? She found a rich protector, who had influence to get her
an appointment in the ballet: and there she did as most girls so
circumstanced do--appeared under an assumed name, which she has since
kept."

"I understand," said Victor, compassionately. "Poor thing! she has
quitted the platform, and is coming this way, evidently to speak to you.
I saw her eyes brighten as she caught sight of your face."

Lemercier attempted a languid air of modest self-complacency as the girl
now approached him. "Bonjour, M. Frederic! Ah, mon Dieu! how thin you
have grown! You have been ill?"

"The hardships of a military life, Mademoiselle. Ah, for the beaux
fours and the peace we insisted on destroying under the Empire which we
destroyed for listening to us! But you thrive well, I trust. I have seen
you better dressed, but never in greater beauty."

The girl blushed as she replied, "Do you really think as you speak?"

"I could not speak more sincerely if I lived in the legendary House of
Glass."

The girl clutched his arm, and said in suppressed tones, "Where is
Gustave?"

"Gustave Rameau? I have no idea. Do you never see him now?"

"Never,--perhaps I never shall see him again; but when you do meet
him, say that Julie owes to him her livelihood. An honest livelihood,
Monsieur. He taught her to love verses--told her how to recite them. I
am engaged at this cafe--you will find me here the same hour every day,
in case--in case--You are good and kind, and will come and tell me that
Gustave is well and happy even if he forgets me. Au revoir! Stop, you do
look, my poor Frederic, as if--as if--pardon me, Monsieur Lemercier, is
there anything I can do? Will you condescend to borrow from me? I am in
funds."

Lemercier at that offer was nearly moved to tears. Famished though he
was, he could not, however, have touched that girl's earnings.

"You are an angel of goodness, Mademoiselle! Ah, how I envy Gustave
Rameau! No, I don't want aid. I am always a--rentier."

"Bien! and if you see Gustave, you will not forget."

"Rely on me. Come away," he said to De Mauleon; "I don't want to hear
that girl repeat the sort of bombast the poets indite nowadays. It is
fustian; and that girl may have a brain of feather, but she has a heart
of gold."

"True," said Victor, as they regained the street. "I overheard what
she said to you. What an incomprehensible thing is a woman! how more
incomprehensible still is a woman's love! Ah, pardon me; I must leave
you. I see in the procession a poor woman known to me in better days."

De Mauleon walked towards the woman he spoke of--one of the long
procession to the bakery--a child clinging to her robe. A pale
grief-worn woman, still young, but with the weariness of age on her
face, and the shadow of death on her child's.

"I think I see Madame Monnier," said De Mauleon, softly.

She turned and looked at him drearily. A year ago, she would have
blushed if addressed by a stranger in a name not lawfully hers.

"Well," she said, in hollow accents broken by cough; "I don't know you,
Monsieur."

"Poor woman!" he resumed, walking beside her as she moved slowly on,
while the eyes of other women in the procession stared at him hungrily.
"And your child looks ill too. It is your youngest?"

"My only one! The others are in Pere la Chaise. There are but few
children alive in my street now. God has been very merciful, and taken
them to Himself."

De Mauleon recalled the scene of a neat comfortable apartment, and the
healthful happy children at play on the floor. The mortality among the
little ones, especially in the quartier occupied by the working classes,
had of late been terrible. The want of food, of fuel, the intense
severity of the weather, had swept them off as by a pestilence.

"And Monnier--what of him? No doubt he is a National Guard, and has his
pay?"

The woman made no answer, but hung down her head. She was stifling a
sob. Till then her eyes seemed to have exhausted the last source of
tears.

"He lives still?" continued Victor, pityingly: "he is not wounded?"

"No: he is well--in health; thank you kindly, Monsieur."

"But his pay is not enough to help you, and of course he can get no
work. Excuse me if I stopped you. It is because I owed Armand Monnier a
little debt for work, and I am ashamed to say that it quite escaped my
memory in these terrible events. Allow me, Madame, to pay it to you,"
and he thrust his purse into her hand. "I think this contains about the
sum I owed; if more or less, we will settle the difference later. Take
care of yourself."

He was turning away when the woman caught hold of him.

"Stay, Monsieur. May Heaven bless you!--but--but tell me what name I am
to give to Armand. I can't think of any one who owed him money. It must
have been before that dreadful strike, the beginning of all our woes.
Ah, if it were allowed to curse any one, I fear my last breath would not
be a prayer."

"You would curse the strike, or the master who did not forgive Armand's
share in it?"

"No, no,--the cruel man who talked him into it--into all that has
changed the best workman, the kindest heart--the--the--" again her voice
died in sobs.

"And who was that man?" asked De Mauleon, falteringly.

"His name was Lebeau. If you were a poor man, I should say 'Shun him.'"

"I have heard of the name you mention; but if we mean the same person,
Monnier cannot have met him lately. He has not been in Paris since the
siege."

"I suppose not, the coward! He ruined us--us who were so happy before;
and then, as Armand says, cast us away as instruments he had done with.
But--but if you do know him, and do see him again, tell him--tell him
not to complete his wrong--not to bring murder on Armand's soul. For
Armand isn't what he was--and has become, oh, so violent! I dare not
take this money without saying who gave it. He would not take money as
alms from an aristocrat. Hush! he beat me for taking money from the good
Monsieur Raoul de Vandemar--my poor Armand beat me!"

De Mauleon shuddered. "Say that it is from a customer whose rooms
he decorated in his spare hours on his own account before the
strike,--Monsieur --------;" here he uttered indistinctly some
unpronounceable name and hurried off, soon lost as the streets grew
darker. Amid groups of a higher order of men-military men, nobles,
ci-devant deputies--among such ones his name stood very high. Not only
his bravery in the recent sorties had been signal, but a strong belief
in his military talents had become prevalent; and conjoined with
the name he had before established as a political writer, and the
remembrance of the vigour and sagacity with which he had opposed the
war, he seemed certain, when peace and order became established, of
a brilliant position and career in a future administration: not less
because he had steadfastly kept aloof from the existing Government,
which it was rumoured, rightly or erroneously, that he had been
solicited to join; and from every combination of the various democratic
or discontented factions.

Quitting these more distinguished associates, he took his way alone
towards the ramparts. The day was closing; the thunders of the cannon
were dying down.

He passed by a wine-shop round which were gathered many of the worse
specimens of the Moblots and National Guards, mostly drunk, and loudly
talking in vehement abuse of generals and officers and commissariat. By
one of the men, as he came under the glare of a petroleum lamp (there
was gas no longer in the dismal city), he was recognised as the
commander who had dared to insist on discipline, and disgrace honest
patriots who claimed to themselves the sole option between fight and
flight. The man was one of those patriots--one of the new recruits whom
Victor had shamed and dismissed for mutiny and cowardice. He made a
drunken plunge at his former chief, shouting, "A bas Pai-isto! Comrades,
this is the coquin De Mauleon who is paid by the Prussians for getting
us killed: a la lanterne!" "A la lanterne!" stammered and hiccupped
others of the group; but they did not stir to execute their threat.
Dimly seen as the stern face and sinewy form of the threatened man was
by their drowsied eyes, the name of De Mauleon, the man without fear
of a foe, and without ruth for a mutineer, sufficed to protect him from
outrage; and with a slight movement of his arm that sent his denouncer
reeling against the lamp-post, De Mauleon passed on:--when another man,
in the uniform of a National Guard, bounded from the door of the tavern,
crying with a loud voice, "Who said De Mauleon?--let me look on him:"
and Victor, who had strode on with slow lion-like steps, cleaving the
crowd, turned, and saw before him in the gleaming light a face, in which
the bold frank, intelligent aspect of former days was lost in a wild,
reckless, savage expression--the face of Armand Monnier.

"Ha! are you really Victor de Mauleon?" asked Monnier, not fiercely, but
under his breath,--in that sort of stage whisper which is the natural
utterance of excited men under the mingled influence of potent drink and
hoarded rage.

"Certainly; I am Victor de Mauleon."

"And you were in command of the--company of the National Guard on the
30th of November at Champigny and Villiers?"

"I was."

"And you shot with your own hand an officer belonging to another company
who refused to join yours?"

"I shot a cowardly soldier who ran away from the enemy, and seemed a
ringleader of other runaways; and in so doing, I saved from dishonour
the best part of his comrades."

"The man was no coward. He was an enlightened Frenchman, and worth fifty
of such aristos as you; and he knew better than his officers that he was
to be led to an idle slaughter. Idle--I say idle. What was France the
better, how was Paris the safer, for the senseless butchery of that day?
You mutinied against a wiser general than Saint Trochu when you murdered
that mutineer."

"Armand Monnier, you are not quite sober to-night, or I would argue with
you that question. But you no doubt are brave: how and why do you take
the part of a runaway?"

"How and why? He was my brother, and you own you murdered him: my
brother--the sagest head in Paris. If I had listened to him, I should
not be,--bah!--no matter now what I am."

"I could not know he was your brother; but if he had been mine I would
have done the same."

Here Victor's lip quivered, for Monnier griped him by the arm, and
looked him in the face with wild stony eyes. "I recollect that voice!
Yet--yet--you say you are a noble, a Vicomte--Victor de Mauleon, and you
shot my brother!"

Here he passed his left hand rapidly over his forehead. The fumes of
wine still clouded his mind, but rays of intelligence broke through the
cloud. Suddenly he said in a loud, and calm, and natural voice:

"Mons. le Vicomte, you accost me as Armand Monnier--pray how do you know
my name?"

"How should I not know it? I have looked into the meetings of the 'Clubs
rouges.' I have heard you speak, and naturally asked your name. Bon soir
M. Monnier! When you reflect in cooler moments, you will see that if
patriots excuse Brutus for first dishonouring and then executing his own
son, an officer charged to defend his country may be surely pardoned for
slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he saved
the man's name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you insist on
telling the world why he was slain."

"I know your voice--I know it. Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.
And if--"

But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on. Monnier looked
round, saw him gone, but did not pursue. He was just intoxicated enough
to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the
wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine. Could you have seen him then
as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known
the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.
You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on
a great royalty fallen. For the grandest of all royalties is that which
takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth. And Nature
made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn
of meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of
heart which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and
home, to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal
natures would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.

How had the royalty of the man's nature fallen thus? Royalty rarely
falls from its own constitutional faults. It falls when, ceasing to be
royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers. And what bad advisers,
always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser,
had discrowned this mechanic?

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says the old-fashioned poet.

"Not so," says the modern philosopher; "a little knowledge; is safer
than no knowledge." Possibly, as all individuals and all communities
must go through the stage of a little knowledge before they can arrive
at that of much knowledge, the philosopher's assertion may be right
in the long-run, and applied to humankind in general. But there is
a period, as there is a class, in which a little knowledge tends to
terrible demoralisation. And Armand Monnier lived in that period and
was one of that class. The little knowledge that his mind, impulsive
and ardent, had picked up out of books that warred with the great
foundations of existing society, had originated in ill advices. A man
stored with much knowledge would never have let Madame de Grantmesnil's
denunciations of marriage rites, or Louis Blane's vindication of
Robespierre as the representative of the working against the middle
class, influence his practical life. He would have assessed such
opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth might seem to
him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct of his
life. Opinion is not fateful: conduct is. A little knowledge crazes
an earnest, warm-blooded, powerful creature like Armand Monnier into a
fanatic. He takes an opinion which pleases him as a revelation from the
gods; that opinion shapes his conduct; that conduct is his fate. Woe to
the philosopher who serenely flings before the little knowledge of
the artisan dogmas as harmless as the Atlantis of Plato if only to be
discussed by philosophers, and deadly as the torches of Ate if seized as
articles of a creed by fanatics! But thrice woe to the artisan who makes
himself the zealot of the Dogma!

Poor Armand acts on the opinions he adopts; proves his contempt for the
marriage state by living with the wife of another; resents, as natures
so inherently manly must do, the Society that visits on her his defiance
of its laws; throws himself, head foremost, against that society
altogether; necessarily joins all who have other reasons for
hostility to Society; he himself having every inducement not to join
indiscriminate strikes--high wages, a liberal employer, ample savings,
the certainty of soon becoming employer himself. No; that is not enough
to the fanatic: he persists on being dupe and victim. He, this great
king of labour, crowned by Nature, and cursed with that degree of little
knowledge which does not comprehend how much more is required before
a schoolboy would admit it to be knowledge at all,--he rushes into the
maddest of all speculations--that of the artisan with little knowledge
and enormous faith--that which intrusts the safety and repose and
dignity of life to some ambitious adventurer, who uses his warm heart
for the adventurer's frigid purpose, much as the lawyer-government of
September used the Communists,--much as, in every revolution of France,
a Bertrand has used a Raton--much as, till the sound of the last
trumpet, men very much worse than Victor de Mauleon will use men very
much better than Armand Monnier, if the Armand Monniers disdain the
modesty of an Isaac Newton on hearing that a theorem to which he had
given all the strength of his patient intellect was disputed: "It may be
so;" meaning, I suppose, that it requires a large amount of experience
ascertained before a man of much knowledge becomes that which a man of
little knowledge is at a jump-the fanatic of an experiment untried.




CHAPTER II.

Scarcely had De Mauleon quitted Lemercier before the latter was joined
by two loungers scarcely less famished than himself--Savarin and De
Breze. Like himself, too, both had been sufferers from illness, though
not of a nature to be consigned to an hospital. All manner of diseases
then had combined to form the pestilence which filled the streets with
unregarded hearses--bronchitis, pneumonia, smallpox, a strange sort of
spurious dysentery much more speedily fatal than the genuine. The three
men, a year before so sleek, looked like ghosts under the withering sky;
yet all three retained embers of the native Parisian humour, which their
very breath on meeting sufficed to kindle up into jubilant sparks or
rapid flashes.

"There are two consolations," said Savarin, as the friends strolled or
rather crawled towards the Boulevards--"two consolations for the gourmet
and for the proprietor in these days of trial for the gourmand, because
the price of truffles is come down."

"Truffles!" gasped De Breze, with watering mouth; "impossible! They are
gone with the age of gold."

"Not so. I speak on the best authority--my laundress; for she attends
the succursale in the Rue de Chateaudun; and if the poor woman, being,
luckily for me, a childless widow, gets a morsel she can spare, she
sells it to me."

"Sells it!" feebly exclaimed Lemercier. "Croesus! you have money then,
and can buy?"

"Sells it--on credit! I am to pension her for life if I live to have
money again. Don't interrupt me. This honest woman goes this morning to
the succursale. I promise myself a delicious bifteck of horse. She gains
the succursale, and the employee informs her that there is nothing left
in his store except--truffles. A glut of those in the market allows him
to offer her a bargain-seven francs la boite. Send me seven francs, De
Breze, and you shall share the banquet."

De Breze shook his head expressively.

"But," resumed Savarin, "though credit exists no more except with my
laundress, upon terms of which the usury is necessarily proportioned to
the risk, yet, as I had the honour before to observe, there is comfort
for the proprietor. The instinct of property is imperishable."

"Not in the house where I lodge," said Lemercier. "Two soldiers were
billeted there; and during my stay in the ambulance they enter my rooms,
and cart away all of the little furniture left there, except a bed and a
table. Brought before a court-martial, they defend themselves by saying,
'The rooms were abandoned.' The excuse was held valid. They were let off
with a reprimand and a promise to restore what was not already disposed
of. They have restored me another table and four chairs."

"Nevertheless, they had the instinct of property, though erroneously
developed, otherwise they would not have deemed any excuse for their
act necessary. Now for my instance of the inherent tenacity of that
instinct. A worthy citizen in want of fuel sees a door in a garden wall,
and naturally carries off the door. He is apprehended by a gendarme who
sees the act. 'Voleur,' he cries to the gendarme, 'do you want to rob me
of my property?' 'That door your property? I saw you take it away.' 'You
confess,' cries the citizen, triumphantly--'you confess that it is my
property; for you saw me appropriate it.' Thus you see how imperishable
is the instinct of property. No sooner does it disappear as yours than
it reappears as mine."

"I would laugh if I could," said Lemercier, "but such a convulsion would
be fatal. Dieu des dieux, how empty I am!" He reeled as he spoke, and
clung to De Breze for support. De Breze had the reputation of being the
most selfish of men. But at that moment, when a generous man might be
excused for being selfish enough to desire to keep the little that he
had for his own reprieve from starvation, this egotist became superb.
"Friends," he cried, with enthusiasm, "I have something yet in my
pocket; we will dine, all three of us."

"Dine!" faltered Lemercier. "Dine! I have not dined since I left the
hospital. I breakfasted yesterday--on two mice upon toast. Dainty, but
not nutritious. And I shared them with Fox."

"Fox! Fox lives still, then?" cried De Breze, startled.

"In a sort of way he does. But one mouse since yesterday morning is not
much; and he can't expect that every day."

"Why don't you take him out?" asked Savarin. "Give him a chance of
picking up a bone somewhere."

"I dare not; he would be picked up himself. Dogs are getting very
valuable: they sell for 50 francs apiece. Come, De Breze, where are we
to dine?"

"I and Savarin can dine at the London Tavern upon rat pate or jugged
cat. But it would be impertinence to invite a satrap like yourself who
has a whole dog in his larder--a dish of 50 francs--a dish for a king.
Adieu, my dear Frederic. Allons, Savarin."

"I feasted you on better meats than dog when I could afford it," said
Frederic, plaintively; "and the first time you invite me you retract the
invitation. Be it so. Bon appetit."

"Bah!" said De Breze, catching Frederic's arm as he turned to depart.
"Of course I was but jesting. Only another day, when my pockets will be
empty, do think what an excellent thing a roasted dog is, and make up
your mind while Fox has still some little flesh on his bones."

"Flesh!" said Savarin, detaining them. "Look! See how right Voltaire was
in saying, 'Amusement is the first necessity of civilised man.' Paris
can do without bread Paris still retains Polichinello."

He pointed to the puppet-show, round which a crowd, not of children
alone, but of men-middle-aged and old-were collected; while sous were
dropped into the tin handed round by a squalid boy.

"And, mon ami," whispered De Breze to Lemercier, with the voice of a
tempting fiend, "observe how Punch is without his dog."

It was true. The dog was gone,--its place supplied by a melancholy
emaciated cat.

Frederic crawled towards the squalid boy. "What has become of Punch's
dog?"

"We ate him last Sunday. Next Sunday we shall have the cat in a pie,"
said the urchin, with a sensual smack of the lips.

"O Fox! Fox!" murmured Frederic, as the three men went slowly down
through the darkening streets--the roar of the Prussian guns heard afar,
while distinct and near rang the laugh of the idlers round the Punch
without a dog.




CHAPTER III.

While De Breze and his friends were feasting at the cafe Anglais, and
faring better than the host had promised--for the bill of fare comprised
such luxuries as ass, mule, peas, fried potatoes, and champagne
(champagne in some mysterious way was inexhaustible during the time of
famine)--a very different group had assembled in the rooms of
Isaura Cicogna. She and the Venosta had hitherto escaped the extreme
destitution to which many richer persons had been reduced. It is true
that Isaura's fortune placed in the hands of the absent Louvier, and
invested in the new street that was to have been, brought no return. It
was true that in that street the Venosta, dreaming of cent. per cent.,
had invested all her savings. But the Venosta, at the first announcement
of war, had insisted on retaining in hand a small sum from the amount
Isaura had received from her "roman," that might suffice for current
expenses, and with yet more acute foresight had laid in stores of
provisions and fuel immediately after the probability of a siege became
apparent. But even the provident mind of the Venosta had never foreseen
that the siege would endure so long, or that the prices of all articles
of necessity would rise so high. And meanwhile all resources--money,
fuel, provisions--had been largely drawn upon by the charity and
benevolence of Isaura, without much remonstrance on the part of the
Venosta, whose nature was very accessible to pity. Unfortunately, too,
of late money and provisions had failed to Monsieur and Madame Rameau,
their income consisting partly of rents no longer paid, and the profits
of a sleeping partnership in the old shop, from which custom had
departed; so that they came to share the fireside and meals at the rooms
of their son's fiancee with little scruple, because utterly unaware that
the money retained and the provisions stored by the Venosta were now
nearly exhausted.

The patriotic ardour which had first induced the elder Rameau to
volunteer his services as a National Guard had been ere this cooled
if not suppressed, first by the hardships of the duty, and then by the
disorderly conduct of his associates, and their ribald talk and obscene
songs. He was much beyond the age at which he could be registered. His
son was, however, compelled to become his substitute, though from
his sickly health and delicate frame attached to that portion of
the National Guard which took no part in actual engagements, and was
supposed to do work on the ramparts and maintain order in the city.

In that duty, so opposed to his tastes and habits, Gustave signalised
himself as one of the loudest declaimers against the imbecility of the
Government, and in the demand for immediate and energetic action, no
matter at what loss of life, on the part of all--except the heroic force
to which he himself was attached. Still, despite his military
labours, Gustave found leisure to contribute to Red journals, and his
contributions paid him tolerably well. To do him justice, his parents
concealed from him the extent of their destitution; they, on their part,
not aware that he was so able to assist them, rather fearing that he
himself had nothing else for support but his scanty pay as a National
Guard. In fact, of late the parents and son had seen little of each
other. M. Rameau, though a Liberal politician, was Liberal as a
tradesman, not as a Red Republican or a Socialist. And, though little
heeding his son's theories while the Empire secured him from the
practical effect of them, he was now as sincerely frightened at the
chance of the Communists becoming rampant as most of the Parisian
tradesmen were. Madame Rameau, on her side, though she had the dislike
to aristocrats which was prevalent with her class, was a stanch Roman
Catholic; and seeing in the disasters that had befallen her country the
punishment justly incurred by its sins, could not but be shocked by the
opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author
of certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were
proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in
his conversation. She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with
passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment
Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride
and depreciating his wisdom.

Partly to avoid meeting his parents, partly because he recoiled
almost as much from the ennui of meeting the other visitors at her
apartments--the Paris ladies associated with her in the ambulance, Raoul
de Vandeniar, whom he especially hated, and the Abbe Vertpre, who had
recently come into intimate friendship with both the Italian ladies--his
visits to Isaura had become exceedingly rare. He made his incessant
military duties the pretext for absenting himself; and now, on this
evening, there were gathered round Isaura's hearth--on which burned
almost the last of the hoarded fuel--the Venosta, the two Rameaus, the
Abbe Vertpre, who was attached as confessor to the society of which
Isaura was so zealous a member. The old priest and the young poetess had
become dear friends. There is in the nature of a woman (and especially
of a woman at once so gifted and so childlike as Isaura, combining
an innate tendency towards faith with a restless inquisitiveness of
intellect, which is always suggesting query or doubt) a craving for
something afar from the sphere of her sorrow, which can only be obtained
through that "bridal of the earth and sky" which we call religion. And
hence, to natures like Isaura's, that link between the woman and the
priest, which the philosophy of France has never been able to dissever.

"It is growing late," said Madame Rameau; "I am beginning to feel
uneasy. Our dear Isaura is not yet returned."

"You need be under no apprehension," said the Abby. "The ladies attached
to the ambulance of which she is so tender and zealous a sister incur no
risk. There are always brave men related to the sick and wounded who
see to the safe return of the women. My poor Raoul visits that ambulance
daily. His kinsman, M. de Rochebriant, is there among the wounded."

"Not seriously hurt, I hope," said the Venosta; "not disfigured? He
was so handsome; it is only the ugly warrior whom a scar on the face
improves."

"Don't be alarmed, Signora; the Prussian guns spared his face. His
wounds in themselves were not dangerous, but he lost a good deal of
blood. Raoul and the Christian brothers found him insensible among a
heap of the slain."

"M. de Vandemar seems to have very soon recovered the shock of his poor
brother's death," said Madame Rameau. "There is very little heart in an
aristocrat."

The Abbe's mild brow contracted. "Have more charity, my daughter. It is
because Raoul's sorrow for his lost brother is so deep and so holy that
he devotes himself more than ever to the service of the Father which
is in heaven. He said, a day or two after the burial, when plans for
a monument to Enguerrand were submitted to him: 'May my prayer be
vouchsafed, and my life be a memorial of him more acceptable to his
gentle spirit than monuments of bronze or marble. May I be divinely
guided and sustained in my desire to do such good acts as he would have
done had he been spared longer to earth. And whenever tempted to weary,
may my conscience whisper, Betray not the trust left to thee by thy
brother, lest thou be not reunited to him at last."'

"Pardon me, pardon!" murmured Madame Rameau humbly, while the Venosta
burst into tears.

The Abbe, though a most sincere and earnest ecclesiastic, was a cheery
and genial man of the world; and, in order to relieve Madame Rameau
from the painful self-reproach he had before excited, he turned the
conversation. "I must beware, however," he said, with his pleasant
laugh, "as to the company in which I interfere in family questions;
and especially in which I defend my poor Raoul from any charge brought
against him. For some good friend this day sent me a terrible organ
of communistic philosophy, in which we humble priests are very roughly
handled, and I myself am especially singled out by name as a pestilent
intermeddler in the affairs of private households. I am said to set
the women against the brave men who are friends of the people, and
am cautioned by very truculent threats to cease from such villainous
practices." And here, with a dry humour that turned into ridicule
what would otherwise have excited disgust and indignation among his
listeners, he read aloud passages replete with the sort of false
eloquence which was then the vogue among the Red journals. In these
passages, not only the Abbe was pointed out for popular execration, but
Raoul de Vandemar, though not expressly named, was clearly indicated as
a pupil of the Abbe's, the type of a lay Jesuit.

The Venosta alone did not share in the contemptuous laughter with which
the inflated style of these diatribes inspired the Rameaus. Her simple
Italian mind was horror-stricken by language which the Abbe treated with
ridicule.

"Ah!" said M. Rameau, "I guess the author--that firebrand Felix Pyat."

"No," answered the Abbe; "the writer signs himself by the name of a
more learned atheist--Diderot le jeune." Here the door opened, and Raoul
entered, accompanying Isaura. A change had come over the face of the
young Vandemar since his brother's death. The lines about the mouth had
deepened, the cheeks had lost their rounded contour and grown somewhat
hollow. But the expression was as serene as ever, perhaps even less
pensively melancholy. His whole aspect was that of a man who
has sorrowed, but been supported in sorrow; perhaps it was more
sweet-certainly it was more lofty.

And, as if there were in the atmosphere of his presence something that
communicated the likeness of his own soul to others, since Isaura had
been brought into his companionship, her own lovely face had caught
the expression that prevailed in his--that, too, had become more
sweet--that, too, had become more lofty.

The friendship that had grown up between these two young mourners was of
a very rare nature. It had in it no sentiment that could ever warm into
the passion of human love. Indeed, had Isaura's heart been free to give
away, love for Raoul de Vandemar would have seemed to her a profanation.
He was never more priestly than when he was most tender. And the
tenderness of Raoul towards her was that of some saint-like nature
towards the acolyte whom it attracted upwards. He had once, just before
Enguerrand's death, spoken to Isaura with a touching candour as to his
own predilection for a monastic life. "The worldly avocations that open
useful and honourable careers for others have no charm for me. I care
not for riches nor power, nor honours nor fame. The austerities of the
conventual life have no terror for me; on the contrary, they have
a charm, for with them are abstraction from earth and meditation on
heaven. In earlier years I might, like other men, have cherished
dreams of human love, and felicity in married life, but for the sort
of veneration with which I regarded one to whom I owe--humanly
speaking--whatever of good there may be in me. Just when first taking
my place among the society of young men who banish from their life all
thought of another, I came under the influence of a woman who taught me
to see that holiness was beauty. She gradually associated me with her
acts of benevolence, and from her I learned to love God too well not to
be indulgent to his creatures. I know not whether the attachment I
felt to her could have been inspired in one who had not from childhood
conceived a romance, not perhaps justified by history, for the ideal
images of chivalry. My feeling for her at first was that of the pure
and poetic homage which a young knight was permitted, sans reproche, to
render to some fair queen or chatelaine, whose colours he wore in the
lists, whose spotless repute he would have perilled his life to defend.
But soon even that sentiment, pure as it was, became chastened from all
breath of earthly love, in proportion as the admiration refined itself
into reverence. She has often urged me to marry, but I have no bride on
this earth. I do but want to see Enguerrand happily married, and then I
quit the world for the cloister."

But after Enguerrand's death, Raoul resigned all idea of the convent.
That evening, as he attended to their homes Isaura and the other ladies
at to the ambulance, he said, in answer to inquiries about his mother,
"She is resigned and calm. I have promised her I will not, while she
lives, bury her other son: I renounce my dreams of the monastery."

Raoul did not remain many minutes at Isaura's. The Abbe accompanied him
on his way home. "I have a request to make to you," said the former;
"you know, of course, your distant cousin the Vicomte de Mauleon?"

"Yes. Not so well as I ought, for Enguerrand liked him."

"Well enough, at all events, to call on him with a request which I am
commissioned to make, but it might come better from you as a kinsman.
I am a stranger to him, and I know not whether a man of that sort would
not regard as an officious intermeddling any communication made to him
by a priest. The matter, however, is a very simple one. At the convent
of ------- there is a poor nun who is, I fear, dying. She has an intense
desire to see M. de Mauleon, whom she declares to be her uncle, and her
only surviving relative. The laws of the convent are not too austere to
prevent the interview she seeks in such a case. I should add that I am
not acquainted with her previous history. I am not the confessor of the
sisterhood; he, poor man, was badly wounded by a chance ball a few
days ago when attached to an ambulance on the ramparts. As soon as the
surgeon would allow him to see any one, he sent for me, and bade me go
to the nun I speak of--Sister Ursula. It seems that he had informed
her that M. de Mauleon was at Paris, and had promised to ascertain his
address. His wound had prevented his doing so, but he trusted to me to
procure the information. I am well acquainted with the Superieure of
the convent, and I flatter myself that she holds me in esteem. I had
therefore no difficulty to obtain her permission to see this poor nun,
which I did this evening. She implored me for the peace of her soul to
lose no time in finding out M. de Mauleon's address, and entreating him
to visit her. Lest he should demur, I was to give him the name by which
he had known her in the world--Louise Duval. Of course I obeyed. The
address of a man who has so distinguished himself in this unhappy
siege I very easily obtained, and repaired at once to M. de Mauleon's
apartment. I there learned that he was from home, and it was uncertain
whether he would not spend the night on the ramparts."

"I will not fail to see him early in the morning," said Raoul, "and
execute your commission."




CHAPTER IV.

M. Mauleon was somewhat surprised by Raoul's visit the next morning. He
had no great liking for a kinsman whose politely distant reserve towards
him, in contrast to poor Euguerrand's genial heartiness, had much
wounded his sensitive self-respect; nor could he comprehend the
religious scruples which forbade Raoul to take a soldier's share in the
battle-field, though in seeking there to save the lives of others so
fearlessly hazarding his own life.

"Pardon," said Raoul, with his sweet mournful smile, "the unseasonable
hour at which I disturb you. But your duties on the ramparts and mine
in the hospital begin early, and I have promised the Abbe Vertpre to
communicate a message of a nature which perhaps you may deem pressing."
He proceeded at once to repeat what the Abbe had communicated to him the
night before relative to the illness and the request of the nun.

"Louise Duval!" exclaimed the Vicomte, "discovered at last, and a
religieuse! Ah! I now understand why she never sought me out when I
reappeared at Paris. Tidings of that sort do not penetrate the walls of
a convent. I am greatly obliged to you, M. de Vandemar, for the trouble
you have so kindly taken. This poor nun is related to me, and I will at
once obey the summons. But this convent des ------- I am ashamed to say
I know not where it is. A long way off, I suppose?"

"Allow me to be your guide," said Raoul; "I should take it as a favour
to be allowed to see a little more of a man whom my lost brother held in
such esteem."

Victor was touched by this conciliatory speech, and in a few minutes
more the two men were on their way to the convent on the other side of
the Seine.

Victor commenced the conversation by a warm and heartfelt tribute to
Euguerrand's character and memory. "I never," he said, "knew a nature
more rich in the most endearing qualities of youth; so gentle, so
high-spirited, rendering every virtue more attractive, and redeeming
such few faults or foibles as youth so situated and so tempted cannot
wholly escape, with an urbanity not conventional, not artificial, but
reflected from the frankness of a genial temper and the tenderness of a
generous heart. Be comforted for his loss, my kinsman. A brave death was
the proper crown of that beautiful life."

Raoul made no answer, but pressed gratefully the arm now linked within
his own. The companions walked on in silence; Victor's mind settling on
the visit he was about to make to the niece so long mysteriously lost,
and now so unexpectedly found. Louise had inspired him with a certain
interest from her beauty and force of character, but never with any warm
affection. He felt relieved to find that her life had found its close in
the sanctuary of the convent. He had never divested himself of a certain
fear, inspired by Louvier's statement that she might live to bring
scandal and disgrace on the name he had with so much difficulty, and
after so lengthened an anguish, partially cleared in his own person.

Raoul left De Mauleon at the gate of the convent, and took his way
towards the hospitals where he visited, and the poor whom he relieved.

Victor was conducted silently into the convent parloir; and, after
waiting there several minutes, the door opened, and the Superieure
entered. As she advanced towards him, with stately step and solemn
visage, De Mauleon recoiled, and uttered a half-suppressed exclamation
that partook both of amaze and awe. Could it be possible? Was this
majestic woman, with the grave impassible aspect, once the ardent girl
whose tender letters he had cherished through stormy years, and only
burned on the night before the most perilous of his battle-fields? This
the one, the sole one, whom in his younger dreams he had seen as his
destined wife? It was so--it was. Doubt vanished when he heard her
voice; and yet how different every tone, every accent, from those of the
low, soft, thrilling music that had breathed in the voice of old!

"M. de Mauleon," said the Superieure, calmly, "I grieve to sadden you by
very mournful intelligence. Yesterday evening, when the Abbe undertook
to convey to you the request of our Sister Ursula, although she was
beyond mortal hope of recovery--as otherwise you will conceive that I
could not have relaxed the rules of this house so as to sanction your
visit--there was no apprehension of immediate danger. It was believed
that her sufferings would be prolonged for some days. I saw her late
last night before retiring to my cell, and she seemed even stronger than
she had been for the last week. A sister remained at watch in her cell.
Towards morning she fell into apparently quiet sleep, and in that sleep
she passed away." The Superieure here crossed herself, and murmured
pious words in Latin. "Dead! my poor niece!" said Victor, feelingly,
roused from his stun at the first sight of the Superieure by her
measured tones, and the melancholy information she so composedly
conveyed to him. "I cannot, then, even learn why she so wished to see me
once more,--or what she might have requested at my hands!"

"Pardon, M. le Vicomte. Such sorrowful consolation I have resolved to
afford you, not without scruples of conscience, but not without sanction
of the excellent Abbe Vertpre, whom I summoned early this morning to
decide my duties in the sacred office I hold. As soon as Sister Ursula
heard of your return to Paris, she obtained my permission to address to
you a letter, subjected, when finished, to my perusal and sanction. She
felt that she had much on her mind which her feeble state might forbid
her to make known to you in conversation with 'sufficient fulness; and
as she could only have seen you in presence of one of the sisters
she imagined that there would also be less restraint in a written
communication. In fine, her request was that, when you called, I might
first place this letter in your hands, and allow you time to read it,
before being admitted to her presence; when a few words conveying your
promise to attend to the wishes with which you would then be acquainted,
would suffice for an interview in her exhausted condition. Do I make
myself understood?"

"Certainly, Madame,--and the letter?"

"She had concluded last evening; and when I took leave of her later in
the night, she placed it in my hands for approval. M. le Vicomte, it
pains me to say that there is much in the tone of that letter which I
grieve for and condemn. And it was my intention to point this out to our
sister at morning, and tell her that passages must be altered before
I could give to you the letter. Her sudden decease deprived me of this
opportunity. I could not, of course, alter or erase a line--a word.
My only option was to suppress the letter altogether, or give it you
intact. The Abbe thinks that, on the whole, my duty does not forbid the
dictate of my own impulse--my own feelings; and I now place this letter
in your hands."

De Mauleon took a packet, unsealed, from the thin white fingers of
the Superieure; and as he bent to receive it, lifted towards her eyes
eloquent with sorrowful, humble pathos, in which it was impossible for
the heart of a woman who had loved not to see a reference to the past
which the lips did not dare to utter.

A faint, scarce-perceptible blush stole over the marble cheek of the
nun. But, with an exquisite delicacy, in which survived the woman while
reigned the nun, she replied to the appeal.

"M. Victor de Mauleon, before, having thus met, we part for ever, permit
a poor religieuse to say with what joy--a joy rendered happier because
it was tearful--I have learned through the Abbe Vertpre that the honour
which, as between man and man, no one who had once known you could ever
doubt, you have lived to vindicate from calumny."

"Ah; you have heard that--at last, at last!"

"I repeat--of the honour thus deferred, I never doubted." The Superieure
hurried on. "Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same
venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your
country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your
God. Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon."

She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in
which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally
nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,
"That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me
omitted."

She spoke, and vanished.

In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found
himself without the walls of the convent. Mechanically, as a man
does when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first
Minister of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed
to appear at their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a
horse-collar, though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some
household or secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way
towards the ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw
recruits. Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended,
for the cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly
judgment, no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save
that he might be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the
other. This routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted
because a more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on
the frozen sward alone. The cannon thundered around him. He heard
unconsciously: from time to time an obus hissed and splintered close at
his feet;--he saw with abstracted eye. His soul was with the past; and,
brooding over all that in the past lay buried there, came over him a
conviction of the vanity of the human earth-bounded objects for which
we burn or freeze, far more absolute than had grown out of the worldly
cynicism connected with his worldly ambition. The sight of that face,
associated with the one pure romance of his reckless youth, the face
of one so estranged, so serenely aloft from all memories of youth, of
romance, of passion, smote him in the midst of the new hopes of the new
career, as the look on the skull of the woman he had so loved and so
mourned, when disburied from her grave, smote the brilliant noble
who became the stern reformer of La Trappe. And while thus gloomily
meditating, the letter of the poor Louise Duval was forgotten. She whose
existence had so troubled, and crossed, and partly marred the lives of
others,--she, scarcely dead, and already forgotten by her nearest kin.
Well--had she not forgotten, put wholly out of her mind, all that was
due to those much nearer to her than is an uncle to a niece?

The short, bitter, sunless day was advancing towards its decline before
Victor roused himself with a quick impatient start from his reverie, and
took forth the letter from the dead nun.

It began with expressions of gratitude, of joy at the thought that she
should see him again before she died, thank him for his past kindness,
and receive, she trusted, his assurance that he would attend to her
last remorseful injunctions. I pass over much that followed in the
explanation of events in her life sufficiently known to the reader. She
stated, as the strongest reason why she had refused the hand of Louvier,
her knowledge that she should in due time become a mother--a fact
concealed from Victor, secure that he would then urge her not to annul
her informal marriage, but rather insist on the ceremonies that would
render it valid. She touched briefly on her confidential intimacy with
Madame Marigny, the exchange of name and papers, her confinement in
the neighbourhood of Aix, the child left to the care of the nurse,
the journey to Munich to find the false Louise Duval was no more. The
documents obtained through the agency of her easy-tempered kinsman, the
late Marquis de Rochebriant, and her subsequent domestication in the
house of the von Rudesheims,--all this it is needless to do more here
than briefly recapitulate. The letter then went on: "While thus kindly
treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the
terms of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble
birth. He was the only man I ever cared for. I loved him with frail
human passion. I could not tell him, my true history. I could not tell
him that I had a child; such intelligence would have made him renounce
me at once. He had a daughter, still but an infant, by a former
marriage, then brought up in France. He wished to take her to his house,
and his second wife to supply the place of her mother. What was I to
do with the child I had left near Aix? While doubtful and distracted, I
read an advertisement in the journals to the effect that a French lady,
then staying in Coblentz, wished to adopt a female child not exceeding
the age of six: the child to be wholly resigned to her by the parents,
she undertaking to rear and provide for it as her own. I resolved to go
to Coblentz at once. I did so. I saw this lady. She seemed in affluent
circumstances, yet young, but a confirmed invalid, confined the greater
part of the day to her sofa by some malady of the spine. She told me
very frankly her story. She had been a professional dancer on the stage,
had married respectably, quitted the stage, become a widow, and shortly
afterwards been seized with the complaint that would probably for life
keep her a secluded prisoner in her room. Thus afflicted, and without
tie, interest, or object in the world, she conceived the idea of
adopting a child that she might bring up to tend and cherish her as a
daughter. In this, the imperative condition was that the child should
never be sought by the parents. She was pleased by my manner and
appearance: she did not wish her adopted daughter to be the child of
peasants. She asked me for no references,--made no inquiries. She
said cordially that she wished for no knowledge that, through any
indiscretion of her own, communicated to the child might lead her to
seek the discovery of her real parents. In fine, I left Coblentz on the
understanding that I was to bring the infant, and if it pleased Madame
Surville, the agreement was concluded.

"I then repaired to Aix. I saw the child. Alas! unnatural mother that I
was, the sight only more vividly brought before me the sense of my own
perilous position. Yet the child was lovely! a likeness of myself, but
lovelier far, for it was a pure, innocent, gentle loveliness. And they
told her to call me 'Maman.' Oh, did I not relent when I heard that
name? No; it jarred on my ear as a word of reproach and shame. In
walking with the infant towards the railway station, imagine my dismay
when suddenly I met the man who had been taught to believe me dead. I
soon discovered that his dismay was equal to my own,--that I had nothing
to fear from his desire to claim me. It did occur to me for a moment
to resign his child to him. But when he shrank reluctantly from a half
suggestion to that effect, my pride was wounded, my conscience absolved.
And, after all, it might be unsafe to my future to leave with him any
motive for tracing me. I left him hastily. I have never seen nor heard
of him more. I took the child to Coblentz. Madame Surville was charmed
with its prettiness and prattle,--charmed still more when I rebuked the
poor infant for calling me 'Maman,' and said, 'Thy real mother is here.'
Freed from my trouble, I returned to the kind German roof I had quitted,
and shortly after became the wife of Ludovico Cicogna.

"My punishment soon began. His was a light, fickle, pleasure-hunting
nature. He soon grew weary of me. My very love made me unamiable to him.
I became irritable, jealous, exacting. His daughter, who now came to
live with us, was another subject of discord. I knew that he loved her
better than me. I became a harsh step-mother; and Ludovico's reproaches,
vehemently made, nursed all my angriest passions. But a son of this new
marriage was born to myself. My pretty Luigi! how my heart became wrapt
up in him! Nursing him, I forgot resentment against his father. Well,
poor Cicogna fell ill and died. I mourned him sincerely; but my boy was
left. Poverty then fell on me,--poverty extreme. Cicogna's sole income
was derived from a post in the Austrian dominion in Italy, and ceased
with it. He received a small pension in compensation; that died with
him.

"At this time, an Englishman, with whom Ludovico had made acquaintance
in Venice, and who visited often at our house in Verona, offered me his
hand. He had taken an extraordinary liking to Isaura, Cicogna's daughter
by his first marriage. But I think his proposal was dictated partly by
compassion for me, and more by affection for her. For the sake of my boy
Luigi I married him. He was a good man, of retired learned habits with
which I had no sympathy. His companionship overwhelmed me with ennui.
But I bore it patiently for Luigi's sake. God saw that my heart was as
much as ever estranged from Him, and He took away my all on earth--my
boy. Then in my desolation I turned to our Holy Church for comfort. I
found a friend in the priest, my confessor. I was startled to learn
from him how guilty I had been--was still. Pushing to an extreme the
doctrines of the Church, he would not allow that my first marriage,
though null by law, was void in the eyes of Heaven. Was not the death of
the child I so cherished a penalty due to my sin towards the child I had
abandoned?

"These thoughts pressed on me night and day. With the consent and
approval of the good priest, I determined to quit the roof of M. Selby,
and to devote myself to the discovery of my forsaken Julie.

"I had a painful interview with M. Selby. I announced my intention to
separate from him. I alleged as a reason my conscientious repugnance
to live with a professed heretic--an enemy to our Holy Church. When M.
Selby found that he could not shake my resolution, he lent himself to
it with the forbearance and generosity which he had always exhibited. On
our marriage he had settled on me five thousand pounds, to be absolutely
mine in the event of his death. He now proposed to concede to me the
interest on that capital during his life, and he undertook the charge
of my step-daughter Isaura, and secured to her all the rest he had to
leave; such landed property as he possessed in England passing to a
distant relative.

"So we parted, not with hostility--tears were shed on both sides. I
set out for Coblentz. Madame Surville had long since quitted that town,
devoting some years to the round of various mineral spas in vain hope of
cure. Not without some difficulty I traced her to her last residence
in the neighbourhood of Paris, but she was then no more--her death
accelerated by the shock occasioned by the loss of her whole fortune,
which she had been induced to place in one of the numerous fraudulent
companies by which so many have been ruined. Julie, who was with her at
the time of her death, had disappeared shortly after it--none could tell
me whither; but from such hints as I could gather, the poor child, thus
left destitute, had been betrayed into sinful courses.

"Probably I might yet by searching inquiry have found her out; you will
say it was my duty at least to institute such inquiry. No doubt; I
now remorsefully feel that it was. I did not think so at the time. The
Italian priest had given me a few letters of introduction to French
ladies with whom, when they had sojourned at Florence, he had made
acquaintance. These ladies were very strict devotees, formal observers
of those decorums by which devotion proclaims itself to the world. They
had received me not only with kindness but with marked respect. They
chose to exalt into the noblest self-sacrifice the act of my leaving
M. Selby's house. Exaggerating the simple cause assigned to it in the
priest's letter, they represented me as quitting a luxurious home and
an idolising husband rather than continue intimate intercourse with the
enemy of my religion. This new sort of flattery intoxicated me with its
fumes. I recoiled from the thought of shattering the pedestal to which I
had found myself elevated. What if I should discover my daughter in one
from the touch of whose robe these holy women would recoil as from
the rags of a leper! No; it would be impossible for me to own
her--impossible for me to give her the shelter of my roof. Nay, if
discovered to hold any commune with such an outcast, no explanation, no
excuse short of the actual truth, would avail with these austere judges
of human error. And the actual truth would be yet deeper disgrace. I
reasoned away my conscience. If I looked for example in the circles
in which I had obtained reverential place, I could find no instance
in which a girl who had fallen from virtue was not repudiated by her
nearest relatives. Nay, when I thought of my own mother, had not her
father refused to see her, to acknowledge her child, from no other
offence than that of a misalliance which wounded the family pride? That
pride, alas! was in my blood--my sole inheritance from the family I
sprang from.

"Thus it went on, till I had grave symptoms of a disease which rendered
the duration of my life uncertain. My conscience awoke and tortured me.
I resolved to take the veil. Vanity and pride again! My resolution was
applauded by those whose opinion had so swayed my mind and my conduct.
Before I retired into the convent from which I write, I made legal
provision as to the bulk of the fortune which, by the death of M. Selby,
has become absolutely at my disposal. One thousand pounds amply sufficed
for dotation to the convent: the other four thousand pounds are given in
trust to the eminent notary, M. Nadaud, Rue -------. On applying to him,
you will find that the sum, with the accumulated interest, is bequeathed
to you,--a tribute of gratitude for the assistance you afforded me in
the time of your own need, and the kindness with which you acknowledged
our relationship and commiserated my misfortunes.

"But oh, my uncle, find out--a man can do so with a facility not
accorded to a woman--what has become of this poor Julie, and devote
what you may deem right and just of the sum thus bequeathed to place her
above want and temptation. In doing so, I know you will respect my name:
I would not have it dishonour you, indeed.

"I have been employed in writing this long letter since the day I heard
you were in Paris. It has exhausted the feeble remnants of my strength.
It will be given to you before the interview I at once dread and long
for, and in that interview you will not rebuke me. Will you, my kind
uncle? No, you will only soothe and pity!

"Would that I were worthy to pray for others, that I might add, 'May
the Saints have you in their keeping and lead you to faith in the Holy
Church, which has power to absolve from sins those who repent as I do.'"

The letter dropped from Victor's hand. He took it up, smoothed it
mechanically, and with a dim, abstracted, be wildered, pitiful wonder.
Well might the Superieure have hesitated to allow confessions, betraying
a mind so little regulated by genuine religious faith, to pass into
other hands. Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from want
or from sin the writer's forsaken child, that had overborne all other
considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she consulted.

Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding! what
a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so
obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the
conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of
being thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger
than the moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose
errors, if she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was
alone responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love
for a name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained;
and that concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which
there was so qualified a reparation!

More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points
of similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,
between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted. By one of those
singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary
rules presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not
unjustly impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for
this child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left
to the discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of
the consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction
of respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in
condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of
individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human
opinion. For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,
inasmuch as the secrecy he sought was for the sake, not of his own
memory, but that of her whom the world knew only as his honoured wife.
The conduct of Louise admits no such excuse; she dies as she had lived;
an Egotist. But, whatever the motives of the parents, what is the fate
of the deserted child? What revenge does the worldly opinion, which the
parents would escape for themselves, inflict on the innocent infant
to whom the bulk of their worldly possessions is to be clandestinely
conveyed? Would all the gold of Ophir be compensation enough for her?

Slowly De Mauleon roused himself, and turned from the solitary place
where he had been seated to a more crowded part of the ramparts. He
passed a group of young Moblots, with flowers wreathed round their
gun-barrels. "If," said one of them gaily, "Paris wants bread, it never
wants flowers." His companions laughed merrily, and burst out into a
scurrile song in ridicule of St. Trochu. Just then an obus fell a few
yards before the group. The sound only for a moment drowned the song,
but the splinters struck a man in a coarse, ragged dress, who had
stopped to listen to the singers. At his sharp cry, two men hastened
to his side: one was Victor de Mauleon; the other was a surgeon, who
quitted another group of idlers--National Guards--attracted by the
shriek that summoned his professional aid. The poor man was terribly
wounded. The surgeon, glancing at De Mauleon, shrugged his shoulders,
and muttered, "Past help!" The sufferer turned his haggard eyes on the
Vicomte, and gasped out, "M. de Mauleon?"

"That is my name," answered Victor, surprised, and not immediately
recognising the sufferer.

"Hist, Jean Lebeau!--look at me: you recollect me now,--Mart le Roux,
concierge to the Secret Council. Ay, I found out who you were long
ago--followed you home from the last meeting you broke up. But I did not
betray you, or you would have been murdered long since. Beware of
the old set--beware of--of--" Here his voice broke off into shrill
exclamations of pain. Curbing his last agonies with a powerful effort,
he faltered forth, "You owe me a service--see to the little one at
home--she is starving." The death-rale came on; in a few moments he was
no more.

Victor gave orders for the removal of the corpse, and hurried away. The
surgeon, who had changed countenance when he overheard the name in
which the dying man had addressed De Mauleon, gazed silently after De
Mauleon's retreating form, and then, also quitting the dead, rejoined
the group he had quitted. Some of those who composed it acquired evil
renown later in the war of the Communists, and came to disastrous ends:
among that number the Pole Loubinsky and other members of the Secret
Council. The Italian Raselli was there too, but, subtler than his
French confreres, he divined the fate of the Communists, and glided
from it--safe now in his native land, destined there, no doubt, to the
funereal honours and lasting renown which Italy bestows on the dust
of her sons who have advocated assassination out of love for the human
race.

Amid this group, too, was a National Guard, strayed from his proper
post, and stretched on the frozen ground; and, early though the hour, in
the profound sleep of intoxication.

"So," said Loubinsky, "you have found your errand in vain, Citizen le
Noy; another victim to the imbecility of our generals."

"And partly one of us," replied the Medecin des Pauvres. "You remember
poor le Roux, who kept the old baraque where the Council of Ten used to
meet? Yonder he lies."

"Don't talk of the Council of Ten. What fools and dupes we were made by
that vieux gredin, Jean Lebeau! How I wish I could meet him again!"

Gaspard le Noy smiled sarcastically. "So much the worse for you, if you
did. A muscular and a ruthless fellow is that Jean Lebeau!" Therewith he
turned to the drunken sleeper and woke him up with a shake and a kick.
"Armand--Armand Monnier, I say, rise, rub your eyes. What if you are
called to your post? What if you are shamed as a deserter and a coward?"

Armand turned, rose with an effort from the recumbent to the sitting
posture, and stared dizzily in the face of the Medecin des Pauvres.

"I was dreaming that I had caught by the throat," said Armand, wildly,
"the aristo who shot my brother; and lo, there were two men, Victor de
Mauleon and Jean Lebeau."

"Ah! there is something in dreams," said the surgeon. "Once in a
thousand times a dream comes true."




CHAPTER V.

The time now came when all provision of food or of fuel failed the
modest household of Isaura; and there was not only herself and the
Venosta to feed and warm--there were the servants whom they had brought
from Italy, and had not the heart now to dismiss to the 'certainty of
famine. True, one of the three, the man, had returned to his native land
before the commencement of the siege; but the two women had remained.
They supported themselves now as they could on the meagre rations
accorded by the Government. Still Isaura attended the ambulance to which
she was attached. From the ladies associated with her she could readily
have obtained ample supplies: but they had no conception of her real
state of destitution; and there was a false pride generally prevalent
among the respectable classes, which Isaura shared, that concealed
distress lest alms should be proffered.

The destitution of the household had been carefully concealed from the
parents of Gustave Rameau, until, one day, Madame Rameau, entering at
the hour at which she generally, and her husband sometimes, came for
a place by the fireside and a seat at the board, found on the one only
ashes, on the other a ration of the black nauseous compound which had
become the substitute for bread.

Isaura was absent on her duties at the ambulance hospital,--purposely
absent, for she shrank from the bitter task of making clear to the
friends of her betrothed the impossibility of continuing the aid to
their support which their son had neglected to contribute; and still
more from the comment which she knew they would make on his conduct, in
absenting himself so wholly of late, and in the time of such trial and
pressure, both from them and from herself. Truly, she rejoiced at
that absence so far as it affected herself. Every hour of the day she
silently asked her conscience whether she were not now absolved from
a promise won from her only by an assurance that she had power to
influence for good the life that now voluntarily separated itself from
her own. As she had never loved Gustave, so she felt no resentment at
the indifference his conduct manifested. On the contrary, she hailed it
as a sign that the annulment of their betrothal would be as welcome
to him as to herself. And if so, she could restore to him the sort of
compassionate friendship she had learned to cherish in the hour of his
illness and repentance. She had resolved to seize the first opportunity
he afforded to her of speaking to him with frank and truthful plainness.
But, meanwhile, her gentle nature recoiled from the confession of
her resolve to appeal to Gustave himself for the rupture of their
engagement.

Thus the Venosta alone received Madame Rameau; and while that lady was
still gazing round her with an emotion too deep for immediate utterance,
her husband entered with an expression of face new to him--the look of
a man who has been stung to anger, and who has braced his mind to some
stern determination. This altered countenance of the good-tempered
bourgeois was not, however, noticed by the two women. The Venosta
did not even raise her eyes to it, as with humbled accents she said,
"Pardon, dear Monsieur, pardon, Madame, our want of hospitality; it
is not our hearts that fail. We kept our state from you as long as we
could. Now it speaks for itself; 'la fame e una bretta festin.'"

"Oh, Madame! and oh, my poor Isaura!" cried Madame Rameau, bursting into
tears. "So we have been all this time a burden on you,--aided to bring
such want on you! How can we ever be forgiven? And my son--to leave us
thus,--not even to tell us where to find him!"

"Do not degrade us, my wife," said M. Rameau, with unexpected dignity,
"by a word to imply that we would stoop to sue for support to our
ungrateful child. No, we will not starve! I am strong enough still to
find food for you. I will apply for restoration to the National Guard.
They have augmented the pay to married men; it is now nearly two francs
and a half a-day to a pere de famille, and on that pay we all can at
least live. Courage, my wife! I will go at once for employment. Many
men older than I am are at watch on the ramparts, and will march to the
battle on the next sortie."

"It shall not be so," exclaimed Madame Rameau, vehemently, and winding
her arm round her husband's neck. "I loved my son better than thee
once--more shame to me. Now, I would rather lose twenty such sons than
peril thy life, my Jacques! Madame," she continued, turning to the
Venosta, "thou wert wiser than I. Thou wert ever opposed to the union
between thy young friend and my son. I felt sore with thee for it--a
mother is so selfish when she puts herself in the place of her child. I
thought that only through marriage with one so pure, so noble, so
holy, Gustave could be saved from sin and evil. I am deceived. A man so
heartless to his parents, so neglectful of his affianced, is not to be
redeemed. I brought about this betrothal: tell Isaura that I release her
from it. I have watched her closely since she was entrapped into it.
I know how miserable the thought of it has made her, though, in her
sublime devotion to her plighted word, she sought to conceal from me the
real state of her heart. If the betrothal bring such sorrow, what would
the union do! Tell her this from me. Come, Jacques, come away!"

"Stay, Madame!" exclaimed the Venosta, her excitable nature much
affected by this honest outburst of feeling. "It is true that I did
oppose, so far as I could, my poor Piccola's engagement with M. Gustave.
But I dare not do your bidding. Isaura would not listen to me. And let
us be just! M. Gustave may be able satisfactorily to explain his seeming
indifference and neglect. His health is always very delicate; perhaps
he may be again dangerously ill. He serves in the National Guard;
perhaps--" she paused, but the mother conjectured the word left unsaid,
and, clasping her hands, cried out in anguish, "Perhaps dead!--and
we have wronged him! Oh, Jacques, Jacques! how shall we find out-how
discover our boy? Who can tell us where to search? at the hospital--or
in the cemeteries?" At the last word she dropped into a seat, and her
whole frame shook with her sobs.

Jacques approached her tenderly, and kneeling by her side, said:

"No, m'amie, comfort thyself, if it be indeed comfort to learn that thy
son is alive and well. For my part, I know not if I would not rather he
had died in his innocent childhood. I have seen him--spoken to him. I
know where he is to be found."

"You do, and concealed it from me? Oh, Jacques!"

"Listen to me, wife, and you, too, Madame; for what I have to say should
be made known to Mademoiselle Cicogna. Some time since, on the night
of the famous sortie, when at my post on the ramparts, I was told that
Gustave had joined himself to the most violent of the Red Republicans,
and had uttered at the Club de la Vengeance sentiments, of which I will
only say that I, his father and a Frenchman, hung my head with shame
when they were repeated to me. I resolved to go to the club myself.
I did. I heard him speak--heard him denounce Christianity as the
instrument of tyrants."

"Ah!" cried the two women, with a simultaneous shudder.

"When the assembly broke up, I waylaid him at the door. I spoke to him
seriously. I told him what anguish such announcement of blasphemous
opinions would inflict on his pious mother. I told him I should deem it
my duty to inform Mademoiselle Cicogna, and warn her against the union
on which he had told us his heart was bent. He appeared sincerely moved
by what I said; implored me to keep silence towards his mother and his
betrothed; and promised, on that condition, to relinquish at once
what he called 'his career as an orator,' and appear no more at such
execrable clubs. On this understanding I held my tongue. Why, with such
other causes of grief and suffering, should I tell thee, poor wife, of a
sin that I hoped thy son had repented and would not repeat? And Gustave
kept his word. He has never, so far as I know, attended, at least
spoken, at the Red clubs since that evening."

"Thank heaven so far," murmured Madame Rameau.

"So far, yes; but hear more. A little time after I thus met him he
changed his lodging, and did not confide to us his new address, giving
as a reason to us that he wished to avoid a clue to his discovery by
that pertinacious Mademoiselle Julie."

Rameau had here sunk his voice into a whisper, intended only for his
wife, but the ear of the Venosta was fine enough to catch the sound, and
she repeated, "Mademoiselle Julie! Santa Maria! who is she?"

"Oh!" said M. Rameau, with a shrug of his shoulders, and with true
Parisian sangfroid as to such matters of morality, "a trifle not worth
considering. Of course, a good-looking garcon like Gustave must have
his little affairs of the heart before he settles for life. Unluckily,
amongst those of Gustave was one with a violent-tempered girl who
persecuted him when he left her, and he naturally wished to avoid all
chance of a silly scandal, if only out of respect to the dignity of his
fiancee. But I found that was not the true motive, or at least the only
one, for concealment. Prepare yourself, my poor wife. Thou hast heard of
these terrible journals which the decheance has let loose upon us. Our
unhappy boy is the principal writer of one of the worst of them, under
the name of 'Diderot le Jeune."'

"What!" cried the Venosta. "That monster! The good Abbe Vertpre was
telling us of the writings with that name attached to them. The Abbe
himself is denounced by name as one of those meddling priests who are to
be constrained to serve as soldiers or pointed out to the vengeance of
the canaille. Isaura's fiancee a blasphemer!"

"Hush, hush!" said Madame Rameau, rising, very pale but self-collected.
"How do you know this, Jacques?"

"From the lips of Gustave himself. I heard first of it yesterday from
one of the young reprobates with whom he used to be familiar, and who
even complimented me on the rising fame of my son, and praised the
eloquence of his article that day. But I would not believe him. I bought
the journal--here it is; saw the name and address of the printer--went
this morning to the office--was there told that 'Diderot le Jeune' was
within revising the press--stationed myself by the street door, and when
Gustave came out I seized his arm, and asked him to say Yes or No if he
was the author of this infamous article,--this, which I now hold in my
hand. He owned the authorship with pride; talked wildly of the great
man he was--of the great things he was to do; said that, in hitherto
concealing his true name, he had done all he could to defer to the
bigoted prejudices of his parents and his fiancee; and that if genius,
like fire, would find its way out, he could not help it; that a time was
rapidly coming when his opinions would be uppermost; that since October
the Communists were gaining ascendancy, and only waited the end of the
siege to put down the present Government, and with it all hypocrisies
and shams, religious or social. My wife, he was rude to me, insulting!
but he had been drinking--that made him incautious: and he continued to
walk by my side towards his own lodging, on reaching which he ironically
invited me to enter, saying, 'I should meet there men who would soon
argue me out of my obsolete notions.' You may go to him, wife, now, if
you please. I will not, nor will I take from him a crust of bread. I
came hither, determined to tell the young lady all this, if I found her
at home. I should be a dishonoured man if I suffered her to be cheated
into misery.

"There, Madame Venosta, there! Take that journal, show it to
Mademoiselle; and report to her all I have said."

M. Rameau, habitually the mildest of men, had, in talking, worked
himself up into positive fury.

His wife, calmer but more deeply affected, made a piteous sign to the
Venosta not to say more; and without other salutation or adieu took her
husband's arm, and led him from the house.




CHAPTER VI.

Obtaining from her husband Gustave's address, Madame Rameau hastened
to her son's apartment alone through the darkling streets. The house in
which he lodged was in a different quarter from that in which Isaura had
visited him. Then, the street selected was still in the centre of the
beau monde--now, it was within the precincts of that section of the
many-faced capital in which the beau monde was held in detestation or
scorn; still the house had certain pretensions, boasting a courtyard and
a porter's lodge. Madame Rameau, instructed to mount au second, found
the door ajar, and, entering, perceived on the table of the little salon
the remains of a feast which, however untempting it might have been
in happier times, contrasted strongly with the meagre fare of which
Gustave's parents had deemed themselves fortunate to partake at the
board of his betrothed; remnants of those viands which offered to
the inquisitive epicure an experiment in food much too costly for the
popular stomach--dainty morsels of elephant, hippopotamus, and wolf,
interspersed with half-emptied bottles of varied and high-priced
wines. Passing these evidences of unseasonable extravagance with a mute
sentiment of anger and disgust, Madame Rameau penetrated into a small
cabinet, the door of which was also ajar, and saw her son stretched
on his bed half dressed, breathing heavily in the sleep which follows
intoxication. She did not attempt to disturb him. She placed herself
quietly by his side, gazing mournfully on the face which she had once so
proudly contemplated, now haggard and faded,--still strangely beautiful,
though it was the beauty of ruin.

From time to time he stirred uneasily, and muttered broken words, in
which fragments of his own delicately-worded verse were incoherently
mixed up with ribald slang, addressed to imaginary companions. In
his dreams he was evidently living over again his late revel, with
episodical diversions into the poet-world, of which he was rather a
vagrant nomad than a settled cultivator. Then she would silently
bathe his feverish temples with the perfumed water she found on his
dressing-table. And so she watched till, in the middle of the night,
he woke up, and recovered the possession of his reason with a quickness
that surprised Madame Rameau. He was, indeed, one of those men in whom
excess of drink, when slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the
effect of nervous exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to
his mother, seemed a propitious lucidity of the moral sense.

Certainly on seeing her he threw himself on her breast, and began to
shed tears. Madame Rameau had not the heart to reproach him sternly. But
by gentle degrees she made him comprehend the pain he had given to his
father, and the destitution in which he had deserted his parents and
his affianced. In his present mood Gustave was deeply affected by these
representations. He excused himself feebly by dwelling on the excitement
of the times, the preoccupation of his mind, the example of his
companions; but with his excuses he mingled passionate expressions of
remorse, and before daybreak mother and son were completely reconciled.
Then he fell into a tranquil sleep; and Madame Rameau, quite worn out,
slept also in the chair beside him, her arm around his neck. He awoke
before she did at a late hour in the morning; and stealing from her arm,
went to his escritoire, and took forth what money he found there, half
of which he poured into her lap, kissing her till she awoke.

"Mother," he said, "henceforth I will work for thee and my father. Take
this trifle now; the rest I reserve for Isaura."

"Joy! I have found my boy again. But Isaura, I fear that she will not
take thy money, and all thought of her must also be abandoned."

Gustave had already turned to his looking-glass, and was arranging with
care his dark ringlets: his personal vanity--his remorse appeased by
this pecuniary oblation--had revived.

"No," he said gaily, "I don't think I shall abandon her; and it is not
likely, when she sees and hears me, that she can wish to abandon me! Now
let us breakfast, and then I will go at once to her."

In the mean while, Isaura, on her return to her apartment at the wintry
nightfall, found a cart stationed at the door, and the Venosta on
the threshold, superintending the removal of various articles of
furniture--indeed, all such articles as were not absolutely required.

"Oh, Piccola!" she said, with an attempt at cheerfulness, "I did not
expect thee back so soon. Hush! I have made a famous bargain. I have
found a broker to buy these things which we don't want just at present,
and can replace by new and prettier things when the siege is over and we
get our money. The broker pays down on the nail and thou wilt not go
to bed without supper. There are no ills which are not more supportable
after food."

Isaura smiled faintly, kissed the Venosta's cheek, and ascended with
weary steps to the sitting-room. There she seated herself quietly,
looking with abstracted eyes round the bare dismantled space by the
light of the single candle.

When the Venosta re-entered, she was followed by the servants, bringing
in a daintier meal than they had known for days--a genuine rabbit,
potatoes, marrons glaces, a bottle of wine, and a pannier of wood. The
fire was soon lighted, the Venosta plying the bellows. It was not till
this banquet, of which Isaura, faint as she was, scarcely partook, had
been remitted to the two Italian women-servants, and another log been
thrown on the hearth, that the Venosta opened the subject which was
pressing on her heart. She did this with a joyous smile, taking both
Isaura's hands in her own, and stroking them fondly.

"My child, I have such good news for thee! Thou hast escaped--thou art
free!" and then she related all that M. Rameau had said, and finished by
producing the copy of Gustave's unhallowed journal.

When she had read the latter, which she did with compressed lips and
varying colour, the girl fell on her knees--not to thank Heaven that she
would now escape a union from which her soul so recoiled--not that she
was indeed free, but to pray, with tears rolling down her cheeks, that
God would yet save to Himself, and to good ends, the soul that she had
failed to bring to Him. All previous irritation against Gustave was
gone: all had melted into an ineffable compassion.




CHAPTER VII.

When, a little before noon, Gustave was admitted by the servant into
Isaura's salon, its desolate condition, stripped of all its pretty
feminine elegancies, struck him with a sense of discomfort to himself
which superseded any more remorseful sentiment. The day was intensely
cold: the single log on the hearth did not burn; there were only two
or three chairs in the room; even the carpet, which had been of gaily
coloured Aubusson, was gone. His teeth chattered; and he only replied
by a dreary nod to the servant who informed him that Madame Venosta was
gone out, and Mademoiselle had not yet quitted her own room.

If there be a thing which a true Parisian of Rameau's stamp associates
with love of woman, it is a certain sort of elegant surroundings, a
pretty boudoir, a cheery hearth, an easy fauteuil. In the absence of
such attributes, "fuyit retro Venus." If the Englishman invented the
word comfort, it is the Parisian who most thoroughly comprehends the
thing. And he resents the loss of it in any house where he has been
accustomed to look for it, as a personal wrong to his feelings.

Left for some minutes alone, Gustave occupied himself with kindling the
log, and muttering, "Par tous les diables, quel chien de rhume je vais
attraper?" He turned as he heard the rustle of a robe and a light slow
step. Isaura stood before him. Her aspect startled him. He had come
prepared to expect grave displeasure and a frigid reception. But the
expression of Isaura's face was more kindly, more gentle, more tender,
than he had seen it since the day she had accepted his suit.

Knowing from his mother what his father had said to his prejudice, he
thought within himself, "After all, the poor girl loves me better than I
thought. She is sensible and enlightened; she cannot pretend to dictate
an opinion to a man like me."

He approached with a complacent self-assured mien, and took her
hand, which she yielded to him quietly, leading her to one of the few
remaining chairs, and seating himself beside her.

"Dear Isaura," he said, talking rapidly all the while he performed this
ceremony, "I need not assure you of my utter ignorance of the state to
which the imbecility of our Government, and the cowardice, or rather
the treachery, of our generals, has reduced you. I only heard of it late
last night from my mother. I hasten to claim my right to share with you
the humble resources which I have saved by the intellectual labours that
have absorbed all such moments as my military drudgeries left to the
talents which, even at such a moment, paralysing minds less energetic,
have sustained me:"--and therewith he poured several pieces of gold and
silver on the table beside her chair.

"Gustave," then said Isaura, "I am well pleased that you thus prove
that I was not mistaken when I thought and said that, despite all
appearances, all errors, your heart was good. Oh, do but follow its true
impulses, and--"

"Its impulses lead me ever to thy feet," interrupted Gustave, with a
fervour which sounded somewhat theatrical and hollow.

The girl smiled, not bitterly, not mockingly; but Gustave did not like
the smile.

"Poor Gustave," she said, with a melancholy pathos in her soft voice,
"do you not understand that the time has come when such commonplace
compliments ill suit our altered positions to each other? Nay, listen
to me patiently; and let not my words in this last interview pain you
to recall. If either of us be to blame in the engagement hastily
contracted, it is I. Gustave, when you, exaggerating in your imagination
the nature of your sentiments for me, said with such earnestness that
on my consent to our union depended your health, your life, your career;
that if I withheld that consent you were lost, and in despair would seek
distraction from thought in all from which your friends, your mother,
the duties imposed upon Genius for the good of Man to the ends of God,
should withhold and save you--when you said all this, and I believed it,
I felt as if Heaven commanded me not to desert the soul which appealed
to me in the crisis of its struggle and peril. Gustave, I repent; I was
to blame."

"How to blame?"

"I overrated my power over your heart: I overrated still more, perhaps,
my power over my own."

"Ah, your own! I understand now. You did not love me?"

"I never said that I loved you in the sense in which you use the word.
I told you that the love which you have described in your verse, and
which," she added, falteringly, with heightened colour and with hands
tightly clasped, "I have conceived possible in my dreams, it was not
mine to give. You declared you were satisfied with such affection as
I could bestow. Hush! let me go on. You said that affection would
increase, would become love, in proportion as I knew you more. It has
not done so. Nay, it passed away; even before this time of trial and of
grief, I became aware how different from the love you professed was the
neglect which needs no excuse, for it did not pain me."

"You are cruel indeed, Mademoiselle."

"No, indeed, I am kind. I wish you to feel no pang at our parting. Truly
I had resolved, when the siege terminated, and the time to speak frankly
of our engagement came, to tell you that I shrank from the thought of
a union between us; and that it was for the happiness of both that our
promises should be mutually cancelled. The moment has come sooner than
I thought. Even had I loved you, Gustave, as deeply as--as well as
the beings of Romance love, I would not dare to wed one who calls upon
mortals to deny God, demolish His altars, treat His worship as a crime.
No; I would sooner die of a broken heart, that I might the sooner be one
of those souls privileged to pray the Divine Intercessor for merciful
light on those beloved and left dark on earth."

"Isaura!" exclaimed Gustave, his mobile temperament impressed, not by
the words of Isaura, but by the passionate earnestness with which they
were uttered, and by the exquisite spiritual beauty which her face
took from the combined sweetness and fervour of its devout
expression,--"Isaura, I merit your censure, your sentence of
condemnation; but do not ask me to give back your plighted troth. I have
not the strength to do so. More than ever, more than when first pledged
to me, I need the aid, the companionship, of my guardian angel. You
were that to me once; abandon me not now. In these terrible times of
revolution, excitable natures catch madness from each other. A writer in
the heat of his passion says much that he does not mean to be literally
taken, which in cooler moments he repents and retracts. Consider, too,
the pressure of want, of hunger. It is the opinions that you so condemn
which alone at this moment supply bread to the writer. But say you will
yet pardon me,--yet give me trial if I offend no more--if I withdraw
my aid to any attacks on your views, your religion--if I say, 'Thy God
shall be my God, and thy people shall be my people.'"

"Alas!" said Isaura, softly, "ask thyself if those be words which I can
believe again. Hush!" she continued, checking his answer with a more
kindling countenance and more impassioned voice. "Are they, after all,
the words that man should address to woman? Is it on the strength of
Woman that Man should rely? Is it to her that he should say, 'Dictate
my opinions on all that belongs to the Mind of man; change the doctrines
that I have thoughtfully formed and honestly advocate; teach me how
to act on earth, clear all my doubts as to my hopes of heaven'? No,
Gustave; in this task man never should repose on woman. Thou are honest
at this moment, my poor friend; but could I believe thee to-day, thou
wouldst laugh tomorrow at what woman can be made to believe."

Stung to the quick by the truth of Isaura's accusation, Gustave
exclaimed with vehemence: "All that thou sayest is false, and thou
knowest it. The influence of woman on man for good or for evil defies
reasoning. It does mould his deeds on earth; it does either make or mar
all that future which lies between his life and his gravestone, and
of whatsoever may lie beyond the grave. Give me up now, and thou art
responsible for me, for all I do, it may be against all that thou
deemest holy. Keep thy troth yet awhile, and test me. If I come to
thee showing how I could have injured, and how for thy dear sake I have
spared, nay, aided, all that thou dost believe and reverence, then wilt
thou dare to say, 'Go thy ways alone--I forsake thee!'"

Isaura turned aside her face, but she held out her hand--it was as cold
as death. He knew that she had so far yielded, and his vanity exulted:
he smiled in secret triumph as he pressed his kiss on that icy hand and
was gone.

"This is duty--it must be duty," said Isaura to herself. "But where is
the buoyant delight that belongs to a duty achieved?--where? oh where?"
And then she stole with drooping head and heavy step into her own room,
fell on her knees, and prayed.




CHAPTER VIII.

In vain persons, be they male or female, there is a complacent
self-satisfaction in any momentary personal success, however little that
success may conduce to--nay, however much it may militate against--the
objects to which their vanity itself devotes its more permanent desires.
A vain woman may be very anxious to win A------, the magnificent, as a
partner for life; and yet feel a certain triumph when a glance of her
eye has made an evening's conquest of the pitiful B-------, although
by that achievement she incurs the imminent hazard of losing A------
altogether. So, when Gustave Rameau quitted Isaura, his first feeling
was that of triumph. His eloquence had subdued her will; she had not
finally discarded him. But as he wandered abstractedly in the biting
air, his self-complacency was succeeded by mortification and discontent.
He felt that he had committed himself to promises which he was by no
means prepared to keep. True, the promises were vague in words; but in
substance they were perfectly clear--"to spare, nay, to aid all that
Isaura esteemed and reverenced." How was this possible to him? How could
he suddenly change the whole character of his writings?--how become the
defender of marriage and property, of church and religion?--how proclaim
himself so utter an apostate? If he did, how become a leader of
the fresh revolution? how escape being its victim? Cease to write
altogether?

But then how live? His pen was his sole subsistence, save 30 sous a-day
as a National Guard--30 sous a day to him, who, in order to be Sybarite
in tastes, was Spartan in doctrine. Nothing better just at that moment
than Spartan doctrine, "Live on black broth and fight the enemy." And
the journalists in vogue so thrived upon that patriotic sentiment, that
they were the last persons compelled to drink the black broth or to
fight the enemy.

"Those women are such idiots when they meddle in politics," grumbled
between his teeth the enthusiastic advocate of Woman's Rights on all
matters of love. "And," he continued, soliloquising, "it is not as if
the girl had any large or decent dot; it is not as if she said, 'In
return for the sacrifice of your popularity, your prospects, your
opinions, I give you not only a devoted heart, but an excellent table
and a capital fire and plenty of pocket-money.' Sacre bleu! when I think
of that frozen salon, and possibly the leg of a mouse for dinner, and a
virtuous homily by way of grace, the prospect is not alluring; and the
girl herself is not so pretty as she was--grown very thin. Sur mon ame,
I think she asks too much--far more than she is worth. No, No; I had
better have accepted her dismissal. Elle n'est pas digne de moi."

Just as he arrived at that conclusion, Gustave Rameau felt the touch of
a light, a soft, a warm, yet a firm hand, on his aria. He turned, and
beheld the face of the woman whom, through so many dreary weeks, he had
sought to shun--the face of Julie Caumartin. Julie was not, as Savarin
had seen her, looking pinched and wan, with faded robes, nor, as when
met in the cafe by Lemercier, in the faded robes of a theatre. Julie
never looked more beautiful, more radiant, than she did now; and there
was a wonderful heartfelt fondness in her voice when she cried, "Mon
homme! mon homme! seul homme au monde a mon coeur, Gustave, cheri adore!
I have found thee-at last--at last!" Gustave gazed upon her, stupefied.
Involuntarily his eye glanced from the freshness of bloom in her face
which the intense cold of the atmosphere only seemed to heighten into
purer health, to her dress, which was new and handsome--black--he did
not know that it was mourning--the cloak trimmed with costly sables.
Certainly it was no mendicant for alms who thus reminded the shivering
Adonis of the claims of a pristine Venus. He stammered out her naive,
"Julie!"--and then he stopped.

"Oui, ta Julie! Petit ingrat! how I have sought for thee! how I have
hungered for the sight of thee! That monster Savarin! he would not give
me any news of thee. That is ages ago. But at least Frederic Lemercier,
whom I saw since, promised to remind thee that I lived still. He did not
do so, or I should have seen thee--n'est ce, pas?"

"Certainly, certainly--only--chere amie--you know that--that--as I
before announced to thee, I--I--was engaged in marriage--and--and--"

"But are you married?"

"No, no. Hark! Take care--is not that the hiss of an obus?"

"What then? Let it come! Would it might slay us both while my hand is in
thine!"

"Ah!" muttered Gustave, inwardly, "what a difference! This is love! No
preaching here! Elle est plus digne de moi que d'autre."

"No," he said, aloud, "I am not married. Marriage is at best a pitiful
ceremony. But if you wished for news of me, surely you must have heard
of my effect as an orator not despised in the Salle Favre. Since, I have
withdrawn from that arena. But as a journalist I flatter myself that I
have had a beau succes."

"Doubtless, doubtless, my Gustave, my Poet! Wherever thou art, thou must
be first among men. But, alas it is my fault--my misfortune. I have not
been in the midst of a world that perhaps rings of thy name."

"Not my name. Prudence compelled me to conceal that. Still, Genius
pierces under any name. You might have discovered me under my nom de
plume."

"Pardon me--I was always bete. But, oh! for so many weeks I was so
poor--so destitute. I could go nowhere, except--don't be ashamed of
me--except--"

"Yes? Go on."

"Except where I could get some money. At first to dance--you remember
my bolero. Then I got a better engagement. Do you not remember that you
taught me to recite verses? Had it been for myself alone, I might have
been contented to starve. Without thee, what was life? But thou wilt
recollect Madeleine, the old bonne who lived with me. Well, she had
attended and cherished me since I was so high-lived with my mother.
Mother! no; it seems that Madame Surville was not my mother after all.
But, of course, I could not let my old Madeleine starve; and therefore,
with a heart as heavy as lead, I danced and declaimed. My heart was not
so heavy when I recited thy songs."

"My songs! Pauvre ange!" exclaimed the Poet.

"And then, too, I thought, 'Ah, this dreadful siege! He, too, may
be poor--he may know want and hunger;' and so all I could save from
Madeleine I put into a box for thee, in case thou shouldst come back to
me some day. Mon homme, how could I go to the Salle Favre? How could
I read journals, Gustave? But thou art not married, Gustave? Parole
d'honneur?"

"Parole d'honneur! What does that matter?"

"Everything! Ah! I am not so mechante, so mauvaise tete as I was some
months ago. If thou went married, I should say, 'Blessed and sacred be
thy wife! Forget me.' But as it is, one word more. Dost thou love the
young lady, whoever she be? or does she love thee so well that it would
be sin in thee to talk trifles to Julie? Speak as honestly as if thou
wert not a poet."

"Honestly, she never said she loved me. I never thought she did. But,
you see, I was very ill, and my parents and friends and my physician
said that it was right for me to arrange my life, and marry, and so
forth. And the girl had money, and was a good match. In short, the thing
was settled. But oh, Julie, she never learned my songs by heart! She did
not love as thou mayst, and still dost. And--ah! well--now that we meet
again--now that I look in thy face--now that I hear thy voice--No, I do
not love her as I loved, and might yet love thee. But--but--"

"Well, but? oh, I guess. Thou seest me well dressed, no longer dancing
and declaiming at cafes: and thou thinkest that Julie has disgraced
herself? she is unfaithful?"

Gustave had not anticipated that frankness, nor was the idea which it
expressed uppermost in his mind when he said, "but, but--" There were
many buts all very confused, struggling through his mind as he spoke.
However, he answered as a Parisian sceptic, not ill-bred, naturally
would answer:

"My dear friend, my dear child" (the Parisian is very fond of the word
child or enfant in addressing a woman), "I have never seen thee so
beautiful as thou art now; and when thou tellest me that thou are no
longer poor, and the proof of what thou sayest is visible in the furs,
which, alas'. I cannot give thee, what am I to think?"

"Oh, mon homme, mon homme! thou art very spirituel, and that is why I
loved thee. I am very bete, and that is excuse enough for thee if thou
couldst not love me. But canst thou look me in the face and not know
that my eyes could not meet thine as they do, if I had been faithless to
thee even in a thought, when I so boldly touched thine arm? Viens chez
moi, come and let me explain all. Only--only let me repeat, if another
has rights over thee which forbid thee to come, say so kindly, and I
will never trouble thee again."

Gustave had been hitherto walking slowly by the side of Julie, amidst
the distant boom of the besiegers' cannon, while the short day began to
close; and along the dreary boulevards sauntered idlers turning to look
at the young, beautiful, well-dressed woman who seemed in such contrast
to the capital whose former luxuries the "Ondine" of imperial Paris
represented. He now offered his arm to Julie; and, quickening his pace,
said, "There is no reason why I should refuse to attend thee home,
and listen to the explanations thou dost generously condescend to
volunteer."




CHAPTER IX.

"Ah, indeed! what a difference! what a difference!" said Gustave to
himself when he entered Julie's apartment. In her palmier days, when
he had first made her acquaintance, the apartment no doubt had been
infinitely more splendid, more abundant in silks and fringes and flowers
and nicknacks; but never had it seemed so cheery and comfortable and
home-like as now. What a contrast to Isaura's dismantled chilly salon!
She drew him towards the hearth, on which, blazing though it was, she
piled fresh billets, seated him in the easiest of easy-chairs, knelt
beside him, and chafed his numbed hands in hers; and as her bright eyes
fixed tenderly on his, she looked so young and so innocent! You would
not then have called her the "Ondine of Paris."

But when, a little while after, revived by the genial warmth and moved
by the charm of her beauty, Gustave passed his arm round her neck and
sought to draw her on his lap, she slid from his embrace, shaking
her head gently, and seated herself, with a pretty air of ceremonious
decorum, at a little distance.

Gustave looked at her amazed.

"Causons," said she, gravely, "thou wouldst know why I am so well
dressed, so comfortably lodged, and I am longing to explain to thee all.
Some days ago I had just finished my performance at the cafe--, and was
putting on my shawl, when a tall Monsieur, fort bel homme, with the
air of a grand seigneur, entered the cafe, and approaching me politely,
said, 'I think I have the honour to address Mademoiselle Julie
Caumartin?' 'That is my name,' I said, surprised; and, looking at him
more intently, I recognised his face. He had come into the cafe a few
days before with thine old acquaintance Frederic Lemercier, and stood
by when I asked Frederic to give me news of thee. 'Mademoiselle,' he
continued, with a serious melancholy smile, 'I shall startle you when I
say that I am appointed to act as your guardian by the last request of
your mother.' 'Of Madame Surville?' 'Madame Surville adopted you, but
was not your mother. We cannot talk at ease here. Allow me to request
that you will accompany me to Monsieur -----, the avoue. It is not
very far from this--and by the way--I will tell you some news that may
sadden, and some news that may rejoice.'

"There was an earnestness in the voice and look of this Monsieur that
impressed me. He did not offer me his arm; but I walked by his side in
the direction he chose. As we walked he told me in very few words that
my mother had been separated from her husband, and for certain family
reasons had found it so difficult to rear and provide for me herself,
that she had accepted the offer of Madame Surville to adopt me as her
own child. While he spoke, there came dimly back to me the remembrance
of a lady who had taken me from my first home, when I had been, as
I understood, at nurse, and left me with poor dear Madame Surville,
saying, 'This is henceforth your mamma.'

"I never again saw that lady. It seems that many years afterwards my
true mother desired to regain me. Madame Surville was then dead. She
failed to trace me out, owing, alas! to my own faults and change of
name. She then entered a nunnery, but, before doing so, assigned a sum
of 100,000 francs to this gentleman, who was distantly connected with
her, with full power to him to take it to himself, or give it to my use
should he discover me, at his discretion. 'I ask you,' continued the
Monsieur, 'to go with me to Mons. N------'s, because the sum is still in
his hands. He will confirm my statement. All that I have now to say is
this, If you accept my guardianship, if you obey implicitly my advice,
I shall consider the interest of this sum which has accumulated since
deposited with M. ----- due to you; and the capital will be your dot on
marriage, if the marriage be with my consent.'"

Gustave had listened very attentively, and without interruption, until
now; when he looked up, and said with his customary sneer, "Did your
Monsieur, fort bel homme, you say, inform you of the value of the
advice, rather of the commands, you were implicitly to obey?"

"Yes," answered Julie, "not then, but later. Let me go on. We arrived at
M. N-----'s, an elderly grave man. He said that all he knew was that he
held the money in trust for the Monsieur with me, to be given to him,
with the accumulations of interest, on the death of the lady who had
deposited it. If that Monsieur had instructions how to dispose of the
money, they were not known to him. All he had to do was to transfer it
absolutely to him on the proper certificate of the lady's death. So you
see, Gustave, that the Monsieur could have kept all from me if he had
liked."

"Your Monsieur is very generous. Perhaps you will now tell me his name."

"No; he forbids me to do it yet."

"And he took this apartment for you, and gave you money to buy that
smart dress and these furs. Bah! mon enfant, why try to deceive me? Do I
not know my Paris? A fort bel homme does not make himself guardian to
a fort belle fine so young and fair as Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin
without certain considerations which shall be nameless, like himself."

Julie's eyes flashed. "Ah, Gustave! ah, Monsieur!" she said, half
angrily, half plaintively, "I see that my guardian knew you better than
I did. Never mind; I will not reproach. Thou halt the right to despise
me."

"Pardon! I did not mean to offend thee," said Gustave, somewhat
disconcerted. "But own that thy story is strange; and this guardian, who
knows me better than thou--does he know me at all? Didst thou speak to
him of me?"

"How could I help it? He says that this terrible war, in which he takes
an active part, makes his life uncertain from day to day. He wished to
complete the trust bequeathed to him by seeing me safe in the love of
some worthy man who"--she paused for a moment with an expression of
compressed anguish, and then hurried on--"who would recognise what was
good in me,--would never reproach me for--for--the past. I then said
that my heart was thine: I could never marry any one but thee."

"Marry me," faltered Gustave--"marry!"

"And," continued the girl, not heeding his interruption, "he said thou
wert not the husband he would choose for me: that thou wert not--no, I
cannot wound thee by repeating what he said unkindly, unjustly. He bade
me think of thee no more. I said again, that is impossible."

"But," resumed Rameau, with an affected laugh, "why think of anything
so formidable as marriage? Thou lovest me, and--" He approached again,
seeking to embrace her. She recoiled. "No, Gustave, no. I have sworn
solemnly by the memory of my lost mother--O--that I will never sin
again. I will never be to thee other than thy friend--or thy wife."

Before Gustave could reply to these words, which took him wholly by
surprise, there was a ring at the outer door, and the old bonne
ushered in Victor de Mauleon. He halted at the threshold, and his brow
contracted.

"So you have already broken faith with me, Mademoiselle?"

"No, Monsieur, I have not broken faith," cried Julie; passionately. "I
told you that I would not seek to find out Monsieur Rameau. I did
not seek, but I met him unexpectedly. I owed to him an explanation. I
invited him here to give that explanation. Without it, what would he
have thought of me? Now he may go, and I will never admit him again
without your sanction."

The Vicomte turned his stern look upon Gustave, who though, as we know,
not wanting in personal courage, felt cowed by his false position; and
his eye fell, quailed before De Mauleon's gaze.

"Leave us for a few minutes alone, Mademoiselle," said the Vicomte.
"Nay, Julie," he added, in softened tones, "fear nothing. I, too, owe
explanation--friendly explanation--to M. Rameau."

With his habitual courtesy towards women, he extended his hand to Julie,
and led her from the room. Then, closing the door, he seated himself,
and made a sign to Gustave to do the same.

"Monsieur," said De Mauleon, "excuse me if I detain you. A very few
words will suffice for our present interview. I take it for granted that
Mademoiselle has told you that she is no child of Madame Surville's:
that her own mother bequeathed her to my protection and guardianship
with a modest fortune which is at my disposal to give or withhold. The
little I have seen already of Mademoiselle impresses me with sincere
interest in her fate. I look with compassion on what she may have been
in the past; I anticipate with hope what she may be in the future. I do
not ask you to see her in either with my eyes. I say frankly that it is
my intention, and I may add, my resolve, that the ward thus left to my
charge shall be henceforth safe from the temptations that have seduced
her poverty, her inexperience, her vanity, if you will, but have not yet
corrupted her heart. Bref, I must request you to give me your word of
honour that you will hold no further communication with her. I can allow
no sinister influence to stand between her fate and honour."

"You speak well and nobly, M. le Vicomte," said Rameau, "and I give the
promise you exact." He added, feelingly: "It is true her heart has never
been corrupted that is good, affectionate, unselfish as a child's. J'ai
l'honneur de vous saluer, M. le Vicomte."

He bowed with a dignity unusual to him, and tears were in his eyes as he
passed by De Mauleon and gained the anteroom. There a side-door suddenly
opened, and Julie's face, anxious, eager, looked forth.

Gustave paused: "Adieu, Mademoiselle! Adieu, though we may never meet
again,--though our fates divide us,--believe me that I shall ever
cherish your memory--and--"

The girl interrupted him, impulsively seizing his arm, and looking him
in the face with a wild fixed stare. "Hush! dost thou mean to say that
we are parted,--parted forever?"

"Alas!" said Gustave, "what option is before us? Your guardian rightly
forbids my visits; and even were I free to offer you my hand, you
yourself say that I am not a suitor he would approve."

Julie turned her eyes towards De Mauleon, who, following Gustave into
the ante-room, stood silent and impassive, leaning against the wall.

He now understood and replied to the pathetic appeal in the girl's eyes.

"My young ward," he said, "M. Rameau expresses himself with propriety
and truth. Suffer him to depart. He belongs to the former life;
reconcile yourself to the new."

He advanced to take her hand, making a sign to Gustave to depart. But
as he approached Julie, she uttered a weak piteous wail, and fell at his
feet senseless. De Mauleon raised and carried her into her room, where
he left her to the care of the old bonne. On re-entering the anteroom,
he found Gustave still lingering by the outer door. "You will pardon
me, Monsieur," he said to the Vicomte, "but in fact I feel so uneasy, so
unhappy. Has she--? You see, you see that there is danger to her health,
perhaps to her reason, in so abrupt a separation, so cruel a rupture
between us. Let me call again, or I may not have strength to keep my
promise."

De Mauleon remained a few minutes musing. Then he said in a whisper,
"Come back into the salon. Let us talk frankly."




CHAPTER X.

"M. Rameau," said De Mauleon, when the two men had reseated themselves
in the salon, "I will honestly say that my desire is to rid myself as
soon as I can of the trust of guardian to this young lady. Playing as I
do with fortune, my only stake against her favours is my life. I feel
as if it were my duty to see that Mademoiselle is not left alone and
friendless in the world at my decease. I have in my mind for her a
husband that I think in every way suitable: a handsome and brave
young fellow in my battalion, of respectable birth, without any living
relations to consult as to his choice. I have reason to believe that if
Julie married him, she need never fear as a reproach to her antecedents.
Her dot would suffice to enable him to realise his own wish of a country
town in Normandy. And in that station, Paris and its temptations would
soon pass from the poor child's thoughts, as an evil dream. But I
cannot dispose of her hand without her own consent; and if she is to be
reasoned out of her fancy for you, I have no time to devote to the task.
I come to the point, You are not the man I would choose for her husband.
But, evidently, you are the man she would choose. Are you disposed to
marry her? You hesitate, very naturally; I have no right to demand an
immediate answer to a question so serious. Perhaps you will think over
it, and let me know in a day or two? I take it for granted that if you
were, as I heard, engaged before the siege to marry the Signora Cicogna,
that engagement is annulled?"

"Why take it for granted?" asked Gustave, perplexed. "Simply because I
find you here. Nay, spare explanations and excuses. I quite understand
that you were invited to come. But a man solemnly betrothed to a
mademoiselle like the Signora Cicogna, in a time of such dire calamity
and peril, could scarcely allow himself to be tempted to accept the
invitation of one so beautiful, and so warmly attached to him, as is
Mademoiselle Julie; and on witnessing the passionate strength of that
attachment, say that he cannot keep a promise not to repeat his visits.
But if I mistake, and you are still betrothed to the Signorina, of
course all discussion is at an end."

Gustave hung his head in some shame, and in much bewildered doubt.

The practised observer of men's characters, and of shifting phases of
mind, glanced at the poor poet's perturbed countenance with a half-smile
of disdain.

"It is for you to judge how far the very love to you so ingenuously
evinced by my ward--how far the reasons against marriage with one
whose antecedents expose her to reproach--should influence one of your
advanced opinions upon social ties. Such reasons do not appear to have
with artists the same weight they have with the bourgeoisie. I have but
to add that the husband of Julie will receive with her hand a dot of
nearly 120,000 francs; and I have reason to believe that that fortune
will be increased--how much, I cannot guess-when the cessation of the
siege will allow communication with England. One word more. I should
wish to rank the husband of my ward in the number of my friends. If
he did not oppose the political opinions with which I identify my own
career, I should be pleased to make any rise in the world achieved by me
assist to the raising of himself. But my opinions, as during the time we
were brought together you were made aware, are those of a practical man
of the world, and have nothing in common with Communists, Socialists,
Internationalists, or whatever sect would place the aged societies
of Europe in Medea's caldron of youth. At a moment like the present,
fanatics and dreamers so abound that the number of such sinners will
necessitate a general amnesty when order is restored. What a poet so
young as you may have written or said at such a time will be readily
forgotten and forgiven a year or two hence, provided he does not put his
notions into violent action. But if you choose to persevere in the
views you now advocate, so be it. They will not make poor Julie less a
believer in your wisdom and genius. Only they will separate you from me,
and a day may come when I should have the painful duty of ordering you
to be shot--Die meliora. Think over all I have thus frankly said.
Give me your answer within forty-eight hours; and meanwhile hold no
communication with my ward. I have the honour to wish you good-day."




CHAPTER XI.

The short grim day was closing when Gustave, quitting Julie's apartment,
again found himself in the streets. His thoughts were troubled and
confused. He was the more affected by Julie's impassioned love for
him, by the contrast with Isaura's words and manner in their recent
interview. His own ancient fancy for the "Ondine of Paris" became
revived by the difficulties between their ancient intercourse which her
unexpected scruples and De Mauleon's guardianship interposed. A
witty writer thus defines une passion, "une caprice inflamme par des
obstacles." In the ordinary times of peace, Gustave, handsome, aspiring
to reputable position in the beau monde, would not have admitted any
considerations to compromise his station by marriage with a fagurante.
But now the wild political doctrines he had embraced separated his
ambition from that beau monde, and combined it with ascendancy over the
revolutionists of the populace--a direction which he must abandon if
he continued his suit to Isaura. Then, too, the immediate possession of
Julie's dot was not without temptation to a man who was so fond of his
personal comforts, and who did not see where to turn for a dinner, if,
obedient to Isaura's "prejudices," he abandoned his profits as a writer
in the revolutionary press. The inducements for withdrawal from the
cause he had espoused, held out to him with so haughty a coldness by
De Mauleon, were not wholly without force, though they irritated his
self-esteem. He was dimly aware of the Vicomte's masculine talents
for public life; and the high reputation he had already acquired
among military authorities, and even among experienced and thoughtful
civilians, had weight upon Gustave's impressionable temperament. But
though De Mauleon's implied advice here coincided in much with the
tacit compact he had made with Isaura, it alienated him more from Isaura
herself, for Isaura did not bring to him the fortune which would enable
him to suspend his lucubrations, watch the turn of events, and live at
ease in the meanwhile; and the dot to be received with De Mauleon's ward
had those advantages.

While thus meditating Gustave turned into one of the cantines still
open, to brighten his intellect with a petit verre, and there he found
the two colleagues in the extinct Council of Ten, Paul Grimm and Edgar
Ferrier. With the last of these revolutionists Gustave had become
intimately lie. They wrote in the same journal, and he willingly
accepted a distraction from his self-conflict which Edgar offered him in
a dinner at the cafe Riche, which still offered its hospitalities at no
exorbitant price. At this repast, as the drink circulated, Gustave waxed
confidential. He longed, poor youth, for an adviser. Could he marry a
girl who had been a ballet-dancer, and who had come into an unexpected
heritage? "Es-tu fou d'en douter?" cried Edgar. "What a sublime occasion
to manifest thy scorn of the miserable banalities of the bourgeoisie! It
will but increase thy moral power over the people. And then think of the
money. What an aid to the cause! What a capital for the launch!--journal
all thine own! Besides, when our principles triumph--as triumph they
must--what would be marriage but a brief and futile ceremony, to be
broken the moment thou hast cause to complain of thy wife or chafe at
the bond? Only get the dot into thine own hands. L'amour passe--reste la
cassette."

Though there was enough of good in the son of Madame Rameau to revolt at
the precise words in which the counsel was given, still, as the fumes of
the punch yet more addled his brains, the counsel itself was acceptable;
and in that sort of maddened fury which intoxication produces in some
excitable temperaments, as Gustave reeled home that night leaning on
the arm of stouter Edgar Ferrier, he insisted on going out of his way
to pass the house in which Isaura lived, and, pausing under her window,
gasped out some verses of a wild song, then much in vogue among the
votaries of Felix Pyat, in which everything that existent society deems
sacred was reviled in the grossest ribaldry. Happily Isaura's ear heard
it not. The girl was kneeling by her bedside absorbed in prayer.




CHAPTER XII.

Three days after the evening thus spent by Gustave Rameau, Isaura was
startled by a visit from M. de Mauleon. She had not seen him since the
commencement of the siege, and she did not recognise him at first glance
in his military uniform.

"I trust you will pardon my intrusion, Mademoiselle," he said, in the
low sweet voice habitual to him in his gentler moods, "but I thought
it became me to announce to you the decease of one who, I fear, did not
discharge with much kindness the duties her connection with you imposed.
Your father's second wife, afterwards Madame Selby, is no more. She died
some days since in a convent to which she had retired."

Isaura had no cause to mourn the dead, but she felt a shock in the
suddenness of this information; and in that sweet spirit of womanly
compassion which entered so largely into her character, and made a part
of her genius itself, she murmured tearfully, "The poor Signora! Why
could I not have been with her in illness? She might then have learned
to love me. And she died in a convent, you say? Ah, her religion was
then sincere! Her end was peaceful?"

"Let us not doubt that, Mademoiselle. Certainly she lived to regret any
former errors, and her last thought was directed towards such atonement
as might be in her power. And it is that desire of atonement which now
strangely mixes me up, Mademoiselle, in your destinies. In that desire
for atonement, she left to my charge, as a kinsman distant indeed, but
still, perhaps, the nearest with whom she was personally acquainted--a
young ward. In accepting that trust, I find myself strangely compelled
to hazard the risk of offending you."

"Offending me? How? Pray speak openly."

"In so doing, I must utter the name of Gustave Rameau."

Isaura turned pale and recoiled, but she did not speak. "Did he inform
me rightly that, in the last interview with him three days ago, you
expressed a strong desire that the engagement between him and yourself
should cease; and that you only, and with reluctance, suspended your
rejection of the suit he had pressed on you, in consequence of his
entreaties, and of certain assurances as to the changed direction of the
talents of which we will assume that he is possessed?"

"Well, well, Monsieur," exclaimed Isaura, her whole face brightening;
"and you come on the part of Gustave Rameau to say that on reflection he
does not hold me to our engagement--that in honour and in conscience I
am free?"

"I see," answered De Mauleon, smiling, "that I am pardoned already.
It would not pain you if such were my instructions in the embassy I
undertake?"

"Pain me? No. But--"

"But what?"

"Must he persist in a course which will break his mother's heart, and
make his father deplore the hour that he was born? Have you influence
over him, M. de Mauleon? If so, will you not exert it for his good?"

"You interest yourself still in his fate, Mademoiselle?"

"How can I do otherwise? Did I not consent to share it when my heart
shrank from the thought of our union? And now when, if I understand you
rightly, I am free, I cannot but think of what was best in him."

"Alas! Mademoiselle, he is but one of many--a spoilt child of that
Circe, imperial Paris. Everywhere I look around, I see but corruption.
It was hidden by the halo which corruption itself engenders. The halo
is gone, the corruption is visible. Where is the old French manhood?
Banished from the heart, it comes out only at the tongue. Were our
deeds like our words, Prussia would beg on her knee to be a province of
France. Gustave is the fit poet for this generation. Vanity--desire to
be known for something, no matter what, no matter by whom--that is the
Parisian's leading motive power;--orator, soldier, poet, all alike.
Utterers of fine phrases; despising knowledge, and toil, and discipline;
railing against the Germans as barbarians, against their generals as
traitors; against God for not taking their part. What can be done to
weld this mass of hollow bubbles into the solid form of a nation--the
nation it affects to be? What generation can be born out of the unmanly
race, inebriate with brag and absinthe? Forgive me this tirade; I have
been reviewing the battalion I command. As for Gustave Rameau,--if
we survive the siege, and see once more a Government that can enforce
order, and a public that will refuse renown for balderdash,--I should
not be surprised if Gustave Rameau were among the prettiest imitators
of Lamartine's early Meditations. Had he been born under Louis XIV. how
loyal he would have been! What sacred tragedies in the style of Athalie
he would have written, in the hope of an audience at Versailles! But I
detain you from the letter I was charged to deliver you. I have done so
purposely, that I might convince myself that you welcome that release
which your too delicate sense of honour shrank too long from demanding."

Here he took forth and placed a letter in Isaura's hand; and, as if to
allow her to read it unobserved, retired to the window recess.

Isaura glanced over the letter. It ran thus:

"I feel that it was only to your compassion that I owed your consent to
my suit. Could I have doubted that before, your words when we last met
sufficed to convince me. In my selfish pain at the moment, I committed
a great wrong. I would have held you bound to a promise from which you
desired to be free. Grant me pardon for that; and for all the faults
by which I have offended you. In cancelling our engagement, let me hope
that I may rejoice in your friendship, your remembrance of me, some
gentle and kindly thought. My life may henceforth pass out of contact
with yours; but you will ever dwell in my heart, an image pure and
holy as the saints in whom you may well believe-they are of your own
kindred."

"May I convey to Gustave Rameau any verbal reply to his letter?" asked
De Mauleon, turning as she replaced the letter on the table.

"Only my wishes for his welfare. It might wound him if I added, my
gratitude for the generous manner in which he has interpreted my heart,
and acceded to its desires."

"Mademoiselle, accept my congratulations. My condolences are for the
poor girl left to my guardianship. Unhappily she loves this man; and
there are reasons why I cannot withhold my consent to her union with
him, should he demand it, now that, in the letter remitted to you, he
has accepted your dismissal. If I can keep him out of all the follies
and all the evils into which he suffers his vanity to mislead his
reason, I will do so;--would I might say, only in compliance with your
compassionate injunctions. But henceforth the infatuation of my ward
compels me to take some interest in his career. Adieu, Mademoiselle! I
have no fear for your happiness now."

Left alone, Isaura stood as one transfigured. All the bloom of her
youth seemed suddenly restored. Round her red lips the dimples opened,
countless mirrors of one happy smile. "I am free, I am free," she
murmured--"joy, joy!" and she passed from the room to seek the Venosta,
singing clear, singing loud, as a bird that escapes from the cage and
warbles to the heaven it regains the blissful tale of its release.




CHAPTER XIII.

In proportion to the nearer roar of the besiegers' cannon, and the
sharper gripe of famine within the walls, the Parisians seemed to
increase their scorn for the skill of the enemy, and their faith in
the sanctity of the capital. All false news was believed as truth; all
truthful news abhorred as falsehood. Listen to the groups round the
cafes. "The Prussian funds have fallen three per cent. at Berlin," says
a threadbare ghost of the Bourse (he had been a clerk of Louvier's).
"Ay," cries a National Guard, "read extracts from La Liberte. The
barbarians are in despair. Nancy is threatened, Belfort is freed.
Bourbaki is invading Baden. Our fleets are pointing their cannon upon
Hamburg. Their country endangered, their retreat cut off, the sole hope
of Bismarck and his trembling legions is to find a refuge in Paris. The
increasing fury of the bombardment is a proof of their despair."

"In that case," whispered Savarin to De Breze, "suppose we send a flag
of truce to Versailles with a message from Trochu that, on disgorging
their conquests, ceding the left bank of the Rhine, and paying the
expenses of the war, Paris, ever magnanimous to the vanquished; will
allow the Prussians to retire."

"The Prussians! Retire!" cried Edgar Ferrier, catching the last word and
glancing fiercely at Savarin. "What Prussian spy have we among us? Not
one of the barbarians shall escape. We have but to dismiss the traitors
who have usurped the government, proclaim the Commune and the rights
of labour, and we give birth to a Hercules that even in its cradle can
strangle the vipers."

Edgar Ferrier was the sole member of his political party among the group
which he thus addressed; but such was the terror which the Communists
already began to inspire among the bourgeoisie that no one volunteered a
reply.

Savarin linked his arm in De Breze's, and prudently drew him off.

"I suspect," said the former, "that we shall soon have worse calamities
to endure than the Prussian obus and the black loaf. The Communists will
have their day."

"I shall be in my grave before then," said De Breze, in hollow accents.
"It is twenty-four hours since I spent my last fifty sous on the
purchase of a rat, and I burnt the legs of my bedstead for the fuel by
which that quadruped was roasted."

"Entre nous, my poor friend, I am much in the same condition," said
Savarin, with a ghastly attempt at his old pleasant laugh. "See how I
am shrunken! My wife would be unfaithful to the Savarin of her dreams
if she accepted a kiss from the slender gallant you behold in me. But I
thought you were in the National Guard, and therefore had not to vanish
into air."

"I was a National Guard, but I could not stand the hardships, and being
above the age, I obtained my exemption. As to pay, I was then too proud
to claim my wage of 1 franc 25 centimes. I should not be too proud now.
Ah, blessed be Heaven! here comes Lemercier; he owes me a dinner--he
shall pay it."

"Bon jour, my dear Frederic! How handsome you look in your kepi! Your
uniform is brilliantly fresh from the soil of powder. What a contrast to
the tatterdemalions of the Line!"

"I fear," said Lemercier, ruefully, "that my costume will not look so
well a day or two hence. I have just had news that will no doubt seem
very glorious--in the news papers. But then newspapers are not subjected
to cannonballs."

"What do you mean?" answered De Breze.

"I met, as I emerged from my apartment a few minutes ago, that
fire-eater, Victor de Mauleon, who always contrives to know what passes
at headquarters. He told me that preparations are being made for a great
sortie. Most probably the announcement will appear in a proclamation
tomorrow, and our troops march forth to-morrow night. The National Guard
(fools and asses who have been yelling out for decisive action) are to
have their wish, and to be placed in the van of battle,--amongst the
foremost, the battalion in which I am enrolled. Should this be our last
meeting on earth, say that Frederic Lemercier has finished his part in
life with eclat."

"Gallant friend," said De Breze, feebly seizing him by the arm, "if it
be true that thy mortal career is menaced, die as thou hast lived. An
honest man leaves no debt unpaid. Thou owest me a dinner."

"Alas! ask of me what is possible. I will give thee three, however, if I
survive and regain my rentes. But today I have not even a mouse to share
with Fox."

"Fox lives then?" cried De Breze, with sparkling hungry eyes.

"Yes. At present he is making the experiment how long an animal can live
without food."

"Have mercy upon him, poor beast! Terminate his pangs by a noble death.
Let him save thy friends and thyself from starving. For myself alone I
do not plead; I am but an amateur in polite literature. But Savarin, the
illustrious Savarin,--in criticism the French Longinus--in poetry
the Parisian Horace--in social life the genius of gaiety in
pantaloons,--contemplate his attenuated frame! Shall he perish for want
of food while thou hast such superfluity in thy larder? I appeal to thy
heart, thy conscience, thy patriotism. What, in the eyes of France, are
a thousand Foxes compared to a single Savarin?"

"At this moment," sighed Savarin, "I could swallow anything, however
nauseous, even thy flattery, De Breze. But, my friend Frederic, thou
goest into battle--what will become of Fox if thou fall? Will he not be
devoured by strangers? Surely it were a sweeter thought to his faithful
heart to furnish a repast to thy friends?--his virtues acknowledged, his
memory blest!"

"Thou dost look very lean, my poor Savarin! And how hospitable thou wert
when yet plump!" said Frederic, pathetically. "And certainly, if I live,
Fox will starve; if I am slain, Fox will be eaten. Yet, poor Fox, dear
Fox, who lay on my breast when I was frostbitten. No; I have not the
heart to order him to the spit for you. Urge it not."

"I will save thee that pang," cried De Breze. "We are close by thy
rooms. Excuse me for a moment: I will run in and instruct thy bonne."

So saying, he sprang forward with an elasticity of step which no one
could have anticipated from his previous languor. Frederic would have
followed, but Savarin clung to him, whimpering: "Stay; I shall fall like
an empty sack, without the support of thine arm, young hero. Pooh! of
course De Breze is only joking--a pleasant joke. Hist! a secret: he
has moneys, and means to give us once more a dinner at his own cost,
pretending that we dine on thy dog. He was planning this when thou
camest up. Let him have his joke, and we shall have a festin de
Balthazar."

"Hein!" said Frederic, doubtfully; "thou art sure he has no designs upon
Fox?"

"Certainly not, except in regaling us. Donkey is not bad, but it is 14
francs a pound. A pullet is excellent, but it is 30 francs. Trust to
De Breze; we shall have donkey and pullet, and Fox shall feast upon the
remains."

Before Frederic could reply, the two men were jostled and swept on by a
sudden rush of a noisy crowd in their rear. They could but distinguish
the words--Glorious news--victory--Faidherbe--Chanzy. But these words
were sufficient to induce them to join willingly in the rush. They
forgot their hunger; they forget Fox. As they were hurried on, they
learned that there was a report of a complete defeat of the Prussians
by Faidherbe near Amiens, of a still more decided one on the Loire by
Chanzy. These generals, with armies flushed with triumph, were pressing
on towards Paris to accelerate the destruction of the hated Germans. How
the report arose no one exactly knew.

All believed it, and were making their way to the Hotel de Ville to hear
it formally confirmed.

Alas! before, they got there they were met by another crowd returning,
dejected but angry. No such news had reached the Government. Chanzy and
Faidherbe were no doubt fighting bravely,--with every probability of
success; but--

The Parisian imagination required no more. "We should always be
defeating the enemy," said Savarin, "if there were not always a but;"
and his audience, who, had he so expressed himself ten minutes before,
would have torn him to pieces, now applauded the epigram; and with
execrations on Trochu, mingled with many a peal of painful sarcastic
laughter, vociferated and dispersed.

As the two friends sauntered back towards the part of the Boulevards on
which De Breze had parted company with them, Savarin quitted Lemercier
suddenly, and crossed the street to accost a small party of two ladies
and two men who were on their way to the Madeleine. While he was
exchanging a few words with them, a young couple, arm in arm, passed
by Lemercier,--the man in the uniform of the National Guard-uniform as
unsullied as Frederic's, but with as little of a military air as can
well be conceived. His gait was slouching; his head bent downwards. He
did not seem to listen to his companion, who was talking with quickness
and vivacity, her fair face radiant with smiles. Lemercier looked at
them as they passed by. "Sur mon ame," muttered Frederic to himself,
"surely that is la belle Julie; and she has got back her truant poet at
last."

While Lemercier thus soliloquised, Gustave, still looking down, was
led across the street by his fair companion, and into the midst of
the little group with whom Savarin had paused to speak. Accidentally
brushing against Savarin himself, he raised his eyes with a start, about
to mutter some conventional apology, when Julie felt the arm on which
she leant tremble nervously. Before him stood Isaura, the Countess
de Vandemar by her side; her two other companions, Raoul and the Abbe
Vertpre, a step or two behind.

Gustave uncovered, bowed low, and stood mute and still for a moment,
paralysed by surprise and the chill of a painful shame.

Julie's watchful eyes, following his, fixed themselves on the same face.
On the instant she divined the truth. She beheld her to whom she had
owed months of jealous agony, and over whom, poor child, she thought she
had achieved a triumph. But the girl's heart was so instinctively good
that the sense of triumph was merged in a sense of compassion. Her rival
had lost Gustave. To Julie the loss of Gustave was the loss of all that
makes life worth having. On her part, Isaura was moved not only by
the beauty of Julie's countenance, but still more by the childlike
ingenuousness of its expression.

So, for the first time in their lives, met the child and the stepchild
of Louise Duval. Each so deserted, each so left alone and inexperienced
amid the perils of the world, with fates so different, typifying orders
of womanhood so opposed. Isaura was naturally the first to break the
silence that weighed like a sensible load on all present.

She advanced towards Rameau, with sincere kindness in her look and tone.

"Accept my congratulations," she said, with a grave smile. "Your mother
informed me last evening of your nuptials. Without doubt I see Madame
Gustave Rameau;"--and she extended her hand towards Julie. The poor
Ondine shrank back for a moment, blushing up to her temples. It was the
first hand which a woman of spotless character had extended to her since
she had lost the protection of Madame Surville. She touched it timidly,
humbly, then drew her bridegroom on; and with head more downcast than
Gustave, passed through the group without a word.

She did not speak to Gustave till they were out of sight and hearing of
those they had left. Then, pressing his arm passionately, she said: "And
that is the demoiselle thou halt resigned for me! Do not deny it. I
am so glad to have seen her; it has done me so much good. How it has
deepened, purified, my love for thee! I have but one return to make;
but that is my whole life. Thou shalt never have cause to blame
me--never--never!"

Savarin looked very grave and thoughtful when he rejoined Lemercier.

"Can I believe my eyes?" said Frederic. "Surely that was Julie
Caumartin leaning on Gustave Rameau's arm! And had he the assurance, so
accompanied, to salute Madame de Vandemar, and Mademoiselle Cicogna,
to whom I understood he was affianced? Nay, did I not see Mademoiselle
shake hands with the Ondine? or am I under one of the illusions which
famine is said to engender in the brain?"

"I have not strength now to answer all these interrogatives. I have a
story to tell; but I keep it for dinner. Let us hasten to thy apartment.
De Breze is doubtless there waiting us."




CHAPTER XIV.

Unprescient of the perils that awaited him, absorbed in the sense of
existing discomfort, cold, and hunger, Fox lifted his mournful visage
from his master's dressing-gown, in which he had encoiled his shivering
frame, on the entrance of De Breze and the concierge of the house in
which Lemercier had his apartment. Recognising the Vicomte as one of his
master's acquaintances, he checked the first impulse that prompted him
to essay a feeble bark, and permitted himself, with a petulant whine,
to be extracted from his covering, and held in the arms of the murderous
visitor.

"Dieu des dieux!" ejaculated De Breze, "how light the poor beast has
become!" Here he pinched the sides and thighs of the victim. "Still," he
said, "there is some flesh yet on these bones. You may grill the paws,
fricassee the shoulders, and roast the rest. The rognons and the head
accept for yourself as a perquisite." Here he transferred Fox to the
arms of the concierge, adding, "Vite au besogne, mon ami."

"Yes, Monsieur. I must be quick about it while my wife is absent.
She has a faiblesse for the brute. He must be on the spit before she
returns."

"Be it so; and on the table in an hour--five o'clock precisely--I am
famished."

The concierge disappeared with Fox. De Breze then amused himself by
searching into Frederic's cupboards and buffets, from which he produced
a cloth and utensils necessary for the repast. These he arranged with
great neatness, and awaited in patience the moment of participation in
the feast.

The hour of five had struck before Savarin and Frederio entered the
salon; and at their sight De Breze dashed to the staircase and called
out to the concierge to serve the dinner.

Frederic, though unconscious of the Thyestean nature of the banquet,
still looked round for the dog; and, not perceiving him, began to call
out, "Fox! Fox! where hast thou hidden thyself?"

"Tranquillise yourself," said De Breze. "Do not suppose that I have
not...."

NOTE BY THE AUTHOR'S SON.--[See also Prefatory Note]--The hand that
wrote thus far has left unwritten the last scene of the tragedy of poor
Fox. In the deep where Prospero has dropped his wand are now irrevocably
buried the humour and the pathos of this cynophagous banquet. One
detail of it, however, which the author imparted to his son, may here
be faintly indicated. Let the sympathising reader recognise all that is
dramatic in the conflict between hunger and affection; let him recall
to mind the lachrymose loving-kindness of his own post-prandial emotions
after blissfully breaking some fast, less mercilessly prolonged, we will
hope, than that of these besieged banqueters, and then, though unaided
by the fancy which conceived so quaint a situation, he may perhaps
imagine what tearful tenderness would fill the eyes of the kind-hearted
Frederic, as they contemplate the well-picked bones of his sacrificed
favourite on the plate before him; which he pushes away, sighing, "Ah,
poor Fox! how he would have enjoyed those bones!"

The chapter immediately following this one also remains unfinished. It
was not intended to close the narrative thus left uncompleted; but of
those many and so various works which have not unworthily associated
with almost every department of literature the name of a single English
writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST. Had the author lived to finish it, he
would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most
epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two
princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the
redoubtable Louvier. Amongst the few other pages of the book which
have been left unwritten, we must also reckon with regret some pages
descriptive of the reconciliation between Graham Vane and Isaura
Cicogna; but, fortunately for the satisfaction of every reader who
may have followed thus far the fortunes of Die Parisians, all that our
curiosity is chiefly interested to learn has been recorded in the Envoi,
which was written before the completion of the novel.

We know not, indeed, what has become of these two Parisian types of
a Beauty not of Holiness, the poor vain Poet of the Pave, and the
good-hearted Ondine of the Gutter. It is obvious, from the absence of
all allusion to them in Lemercier's letter to Vane, that they had passed
out of the narrative before that letter was written. We must suppose
the catastrophe of their fates to have been described, in some preceding
chapter, by the author himself; who would assuredly not have left
141. Gustave Rameau in permanent pos session of his ill-merited and
ill-ministered fortune. That French representative of the appropriately
popular poetry of modern ideas, which prefers "the roses and raptures
of vice" to "the lilies and languors of virtue," cannot have been
irredeemably reconciled by the sweet savours of the domestic pot-au jeu,
even when spiced with pungent whiffs of repudiated disreputability, to
any selfish betrayal of the cause of universal social emancipation from
the personal proprieties. If poor Julie Caumartin has perished in the
siege of Paris, with all the grace of a self-wrought redemption still
upon her, we shall doubtless deem her fate a happier one than any she
could have found in prolonged existence as Madame Rameau; and a certain
modicum of this world's good things will, in that case, have been
rescued for worthier employment by Graham Vane. To that assurance
nothing but Lemercier's description of the fate of Victor de Mauleon
(which will be found in the Envoi) need be added for the satisfaction of
our sense of poetic justice and if on the mimic stage, from which they
now disappear, all these puppets have rightly played their parts in the
drama of an empire's fall, each will have helped to "point a moral" as
well as to "adorn a tale." Valete et plaudite!




CHAPTER THE LAST.

Among the refugees which the convoi from Versailles disgorged on the
Paris station were two men, who, in pushing through the crowd, came
suddenly face to face with each other.

"Aha! Bon jour, M. Duplessis," said a burly voice. "Bon jour, M.
Louvier," replied Duplessis.

"How long have you left Bretagne?"

"On the day that the news of the armistice reached it, in order to be
able to enter Paris the first day its gates were open. And you--where
have you been?"

"In London."

"Ah! in London!" said Duplessis, paling. "I knew I had an enemy there."

"Enemy! I? Bah! my dear Monsieur. What makes you think me your enemy?"

"I remember your threats."

"A propos of Rochebriant. By the way, when would it be convenient to you
and the dear Marquis to let me into prompt possession of that property?
You can no longer pretend to buy it as a dot for Mademoiselle Valerie."

"I know not that yet. It is true that all the financial operations
attempted by my agent in London have failed. But I may recover myself
yet, now that I re-enter Paris. In the mean time, we have still six
months before us; for, as you will find--if you know it not already--the
interest due to you has been lodged with Messrs. ---- of ------, and you
cannot foreclose, even if the law did not take into consideration the
national calamities as between debtor and creditor."

"Quite true. But if you cannot buy the property it must pass into my
hands in a very short time. And you and the Marquis had better come to
an amicable arrangement with me. Apropos, I read in the Times newspaper
that Alain was among the wounded in the sortie of December."

"Yes; we learnt that through a pigeon-post. We were afraid...."




L'ENVOI.

The intelligent reader will perceive that the story I relate is
virtually closed with the preceding chapter; though I rejoice to think
that what may be called its plot does not find its denouement amidst the
crimes and the frenzy of the Guerre des Communeaux. Fit subjects these,
indeed, for the social annalist in times to come. When crimes that
outrage humanity have their motive or their excuse in principles that
demand the demolition of all upon which the civilisation of Europe has
its basis-worship, property, and marriage--in order to reconstruct a new
civilisation adapted to a new humanity, it is scarcely possible for
the serenest contemporary to keep his mind in that state of abstract
reasoning with which Philosophy deduces from some past evil some
existent good. For my part, I believe that throughout the whole known
history of mankind, even in epochs when reason is most misled and
conscience most perverted, there runs visible, though fine and
threadlike, the chain of destiny, which has its roots in the throne
of an All-wise and an All-good; that in the wildest illusions by which
muititudes are frenzied, there may be detected gleams of prophetic
truths; that in the fiercest crimes which, like the disease of an
epidemic, characterise a peculiar epoch under abnormal circumstances,
there might be found instincts or aspirations towards some social
virtues to be realised ages afterwards by happier generations, all
tending to save man from despair of the future, were the whole society
to unite for the joyless hour of his race in the abjuration of soul and
the denial of God, because all irresistibly establishing that yearning
towards an unseen future which is the leading attribute of soul,
evincing the government of a divine Thought which evolves out of the
discords of one age the harmonies of another, and, in the world within
us as in the world without, enforces upon every unclouded reason the
distinction between Providence and chance.

The account subjoined may suffice to say all that rests to be said of
those individuals in whose fate, apart from the events or personages
that belong to graver history, the reader of this work may have
conceived an interest. It is translated from the letter of Frederic
Lemercier to Graham Vane, dated June ----, a month after the defeat of
the Communists.

"Dear and distinguished Englishman, whose name I honour but fail to
pronounce, accept my cordial thanks for your interests in such remains
of Frederic Lemercier as yet survive the ravages of Famine, Equality,
Brotherhood, Petroleum, and the Rights of Labour. I did not desert my
Paris when M. Thiers, 'parmula non bene relicta,' led his sagacious
friends and his valiant troops to the groves of Versailles, and confided
to us unarmed citizens the preservation of order and property from the
insurgents whom he left in possession of our forts and cannon. I felt
spellbound by the interest of the sinistoe melodrame, with its quick
succession of scenic effects and the metropolis of the world for its
stage. Taught by experience, I did not aspire to be an actor; and even
as a spectator, I took care neither to hiss nor applaud. Imitating your
happy England, I observed a strict neutrality; and, safe myself from
danger, left my best friends to the care of the gods.

"As to political questions, I dare not commit myself to a conjecture.
At this rouge et noir table, all I can say is, that whichever card turns
up, it is either a red or a black one. One gamester gains for the moment
by the loss of the other; the table eventually ruins both.

"No one believes that the present form of government can last; every one
differs as to that which can. Raoul de Vandemar is immovably convinced
of the restoration of the Bourbons. Savarin is meditating a new journal
devoted to the cause of the Count of Paris. De Brew and the old Count
de Passy, having in turn espoused and opposed every previous form of
government, naturally go in for a perfectly novel experiment, and are
for constitutional dictatorship under the Duc d'Aumale, which he is to
hold at his own pleasure, and ultimately resign to his nephew the Count,
under the mild title of a constitutional king;--that is, if it ever
suits the pleasure of a dictator to depose himself. To me this seems
the wildest of notions. If the Duc's administration were successful, the
French would insist on keeping it; and if the uncle were unsuccessful,
the nephew would not have a chance. Duplessis retains his faith in the
Imperial dynasty; and that Imperialist party is much stronger than it
appears on the surface. So many of the bourgeoisie recall with a sigh
eighteen years of prosperous trade; so many of the military officers, so
many of the civil officials, identify their career with the Napoleonic
favour; and so many of the Priesthood, abhorring the Republic, always
liable to pass into the hands of those who assail religion,--unwilling
to admit the claim of the Orleanists, are at heart for the Empire.

"But I will tell you one secret. I and all the quiet folks like me (we
are more numerous than any one violent faction) are willing to accept
any form of government by which we have the best chance of keeping our
coats on our backs. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternity, are gone quite out
of fashion; and Mademoiselle--has abandoned her great chant of the
Marseillaise, and is drawing tears from enlightened audiences by her
pathetic delivery of 'O Richard! O mon roi!'"

"Now about the other friends of whom you ask for news.

"Wonders will never cease. Louvier and Duplessis are no longer deadly
rivals. They have become sworn friends, and are meditating a great
speculation in common, to commence as soon as the Prussian debt is paid
off. Victor de Mauleon brought about this reconciliation in a single
interview during the brief interregnum between the Peace and the Guerre
des Communeaux. You know how sternly Louvier was bent upon seizing
Alain de Rochebriant's estates. Can you conceive the true cause? Can you
imagine it possible that a hardened money-maker like Louvier should ever
allow himself to be actuated, one way or the other, by the romance of
a sentimental wrong? Yet so it was. It seems that many years ago he was
desperately in love with a girl who disappeared from his life, and whom
he believed to have been seduced by the late Marquis de Rochebriant.
It was in revenge for this supposed crime that he had made himself the
principal mortgagee of the late Marquis; and, visiting the sins of
the father on the son, had, under the infernal disguise of friendly
interest, made himself sole mortgagee to Alain, upon terms apparently
the most generous. The demon soon showed his griffe, and was about to
foreclose, when Duplessis came to Alain's relief; and Rochebriant was
to be Valerie's dot on her marriage with Alain. The Prussian war, of
course, suspended all such plans, pecuniary and matrimonial. Duplessis,
whose resources were terribly crippled by the war, attempted operations
in London with a view of raising the sum necessary to pay off the
mortgage;--found himself strangely frustrated and baffled. Louvier
was in London, and defeated his rival's agent in every speculation. It
became impossible for Duplessis to redeem the mortgage. The two men came
to Paris with the peace. Louvier determined both to seize the Breton
lands and to complete the ruin of Duplessis, when he learned from De
Mauleon that he had spent half his life in a baseless illusion; that
Alain's father was innocent of the crime for which his son was to
suffer;--and Victor, with that strange power over men's minds which was
so peculiar to him, talked Louvier into mercy if not into repentance. In
short, the mortgage is to be paid off by instalments at the convenience
of Duplessis. Alain's marriage with Valerie is to take place in a few
weeks. The fournisseurs are already gone to fit up the old chateau for
the bride, and Louvier is invited to the wedding.

"I have all this story from Alain, and from Duplessis himself. I tell
the tale as 'twas told to me, with all the gloss of sentiment upon its
woof. But between ourselves, I am too Parisian not to be sceptical as
to the unalloyed amiability of sudden conversions. And I suspect that
Louvier was no longer in a condition to indulge in the unprofitable whim
of turning rural seigneur. He had sunk large sums and incurred great
liabilities in the new street to be called after his name; and that
street has been twice ravaged, first by the Prussian siege, and next
by the Guerre des Communeaux; and I can detect many reasons why Louvier
should deem it prudent not only to withdraw from the Rochebriant
seizure, and make sure of peacefully recovering the capital lent on it,
but establishing joint interest and quasi partnership with a financier
so brilliant and successful as Armand Duplessis has hitherto been.

"Alain himself is not quite recovered from his wound, and is now at
Rochebriant, nursed by his aunt and Valerie. I have promised to visit
him next week. Raoul de Vandemar is still at Paris with his mother,
saying, there is no place where one Christian man can be of such
service. The old Count declines to come back, saying there is no place
where a philosopher can be in such danger.

"I reserve as my last communication, in reply to your questions, that
which is the gravest. You say that you saw in the public journals brief
notice of the assassination of Victor de Mauleon; and you ask for such
authentic particulars as I can give of that event, and of the motives of
the assassin.

"I need not, of course, tell you how bravely the poor Vicomte behaved
throughout the siege; but he made many enemies among the worst members
of the National Guard by the severity of his discipline; and had he been
caught by the mob the same day as Clement Thomas, who committed the same
offence, would have certainly shared the fate of that general. Though
elected a depute, he remained at Paris a few days after Thiers & Co.
left it, in the hope of persuading the party of Order, including then
no small portion of the National Guards, to take prompt and vigorous
measures to defend the city against the Communists. Indignant at
their pusillanimity, he then escaped to Versailles. There he more than
confirmed the high reputation he had acquired during the siege, and
impressed the ablest public men with the belief that he was destined
to take a very leading part in the strife of party. When the Versailles
troops entered Paris, he was, of course, among them in command of a
battalion.

"He escaped safe through that horrible war of barricades, though no man
more courted danger. He inspired his men with his own courage. It was
not till the revolt was quenched on the evening of the 28th May that he
met his death. The Versailles soldiers, naturally exasperated, were very
prompt in seizing and shooting at once every passenger who looked like a
foe. Some men under De Mauleon had seized upon one of these victims,
and were hurrying him into the next street for execution, when, catching
sight of the Vicomte, he screamed out, 'Lebeau, save me!'

"At that cry De Mauleon rushed forward, arrested his soldiers, cried,
'This man is innocent--a harmless physician. I answer for him.' As he
thus spoke, a wounded Communist, lying in the gutter amidst a heap of
the slain, dragged himself up, reeled towards De Mauleon, plunged a
knife between his shoulders, and dropped down dead.

"The Vicomte was carried into a neighbouring house, from all the windows
of which the tricolour was suspended; and the Medecin whom he had just
saved from summary execution examined and dressed his wound. The Vicomte
lingered for more than an hour, but expired in the effort to utter some
words, the sense of which those about him endeavoured in vain to seize.

"It was from the Medecin that the name of the assassin and the motive
for the crime were ascertained. The miscreant was a Red Republican and
Socialist named Armand Monnier. He had been a very skilful workman, and
earning, as such, high wages. But he thought fit to become an active
revolutionary politician, first led into schemes for upsetting the world
by the existing laws of marriage, which had inflicted on him one woman
who ran away from him, but being still legally his wife, forbade him
to marry another woman with whom he lived, and to whom he seems to have
been passionately attached.

"These schemes, however, he did not put into any positive practice till
he fell in with a certain Jean Lebeau, who exercised great influence
over him, and by whom he was admitted into one of the secret
revolutionary societies which had for their object the overthrow of the
Empire. After that time his head became turned. The fall of the Empire
put an end to the society he had joined: Lebeau dissolved it. During
the siege Monnier was a sort of leader among the ouvriers; but as it
advanced and famine commenced, he contracted the habit of intoxication.
His children died of cold and hunger. The woman he lived with followed
them to the grave. Then he seems to have become a ferocious madman,
and to have been implicated in the worst crimes of the Communists. He
cherished a wild desire of revenge against this Jean Lebeau, to whom
he attributed all his calamities, and by whom, he said, his brother had
been shot in the sortie of December.

"Here comes the strange part of the story. This Jean Lebeau is alleged
to have been one and the same person with Victor de Mauleon. The Medecin
I have named, and who is well known in Belleville and Montmartre as the
Medecin des Pauvres, confesses that he belonged to the secret society
organised by Lebeau; that the disguise the Vicomte assumed was so
complete, that he should not have recognised his identity with
the conspirator but for an accident. During the latter time of the
bombardment, he, the _Medecin des Pauvres_, was on the eastern ramparts,
and his attention was suddenly called to a man mortally wounded by
the splinter of a shell. While examining the nature of the wound; De
Mauleon, who was also on the ramparts, came to the spot. The dying man
said, 'M. le Vicomte, you owe me a service. My name is Marc le Roux.
I was on the police before the war. When M. de. Mauleon reassumed his
station, and was making himself obnoxious to the Emperor, I might have
denounced him as Jean Lebeau the conspirator. I did not. The siege
has reduced me to want. I have a child at home--a pet. Don't let her
starve.' 'I will see to her,' said the Vicomte. Before we could get the
man into the ambulance cart he expired.

"The Medecin who told this story I had the curiosity to see myself, and
cross-question. I own I believe his statement. Whether De Mauleon did
or did not conspire against a fallen dynasty, to which he owed no
allegiance, can little, if at all, injure the reputation he has left
behind of a very remarkable man--of great courage and great ability--who
might have had a splendid career if he had survived. But, as Savarin
says truly, the first bodies which the car of revolution crushes down
are those which first harness themselves to it.

"Among De Mauleon's papers is the programme of a constitution fitted for
France. How it got into Savarin's hands I know not. De Mauleon left no
will, and no relations came forward to claim his papers. I asked Savarin
to give me the heads of the plan, which he did. They are as follows:

"The American republic is the sole one worth studying, for it has
lasted. The causes of its duration are in the checks to democratic
fickleness and disorder. 1st. No law affecting the Constitution can
be altered without the consent of two-thirds of Congress. 2nd. To
counteract the impulses natural to a popular Assembly chosen by
universal suffrage, the greater legislative powers, especially in
foreign affairs, are vested in the Senate, which has even executive
as well as legislative functions. 3rd. The Chief of the State,
having elected his government, can maintain it independent of hostile
majorities in either Assembly.

"'These three principles of safety to form the basis of any new
constitution for France.

"'For France it is essential that the chief magistrate, under whatever
title he assume, should be as irresponsible as an English sovereign.
Therefore he should not preside at his councils; he should not lead his
armies. The day for personal government is gone, even in Prussia. The
safety for order in a State is that, when things go wrong, the Ministry
changes, the State remains the same. In Europe, Republican institutions
are safer where the chief magistrate is hereditary than where elective.'

"Savarin says these axioms are carried out at length, and argued with
great ability.

"I am very grateful for your proffered hospitalities in England. Some
day I shall accept them-viz., whenever I decide on domestic life, and
the calm of the conjugal foyer. I have a penchant for an English Mees,
and am not exacting as to the dot. Thirty thousand livres sterling would
satisfy me--a trifle, I believe, to you rich islanders.

"Meanwhile I am naturally compelled to make up for the miseries of that
horrible siege. Certain moralising journals tell us that, sobered by
misfortunes, the Parisians are going to turn over a new leaf, become
studious and reflective, despise pleasure and luxury, and live like
German professors. Don't believe a word of it. My conviction is that,
whatever may be said as to our frivolity, extravagance, &c., under the
Empire, we shall be just the same under any form of government--the
bravest, the most timid, the most ferocious, the kindest-hearted, the
most irrational, the most intelligent, the most contradictory, the most
consistent people whom Jove, taking counsel of Venus and the Graces,
Mars and the Furies, ever created for the delight and terror of
the world;--in a word, the Parisians.--Votre tout divoue, 'FREDERIC
LEMERCIER.'"

It is a lovely noon on the bay of Sorrento, towards the close of the
autumn of 1871. Upon the part of the craggy shore, to the left of the
town, on which her first perusal of the loveliest poem in which the
romance of Christian heroism has ever combined elevation of thought with
silvery delicacies of speech, had charmed her childhood, reclined
the young bride of Graham Vane. They were in the first month of their
marriage. Isaura had not yet recovered from the effects of all that had
preyed upon her life, from the hour in which she had deemed that in her
pursuit of fame she had lost the love that had coloured her genius and
inspired her dreams, to that in which....

The physicians consulted agreed in insisting on her passing the winter
in a southern climate; and after their wedding, which took place in
Florence, they thus came to Sorrento.

As Isaura is seated on the small smoothed rock, Graham reclines at her
feet, his face upturned to hers with an inexpressible wistful anxiety in
his impassioned tenderness. "You are sure you feel better and stronger
since we have been here?"


THE END.








End of Project Gutenberg's The Parisians, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton