The Masterpieces of George Sand, Amandine Lucille Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME COMPLETELY TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH SHE AND HE, AND LAVINIA BY G. BURNHAM IVES; WITH MEMOIR BY J. ALFRED BURGAN (continued 6)

Thérèse's character had grown weaker in this twofold love, which, in fact, had been simply two acts of the same drama; except for that outraged, shattered passion, Palmer would never have thought of marrying her, and the effort that she had made to pledge herself to him was, perhaps, nothing more than the reaction of despair. Laurent had never disappeared from her life, since Palmer's constant argument, in seeking to convince her, had been to refer to the deplorable results of that liaison which he wished to make her forget and which he seemed fatally impelled to recall to her mind over and over again.

And then the renewal of friendship after the rupture had been, so far as Laurent was concerned, a genuine renewal of passion; whereas, to Thérèse, it had been a new phase of devotion, more refined and more touching than love itself. She had suffered from Palmer's desertion, but not in a cowardly way. She still had strength to meet injustice; indeed, we may say that was her whole strength. She was not one of those women who are everlastingly suffering and complaining, overflowing with useless regrets and insatiable longings. A violent reaction was taking place in her, and her intelligence, which was abundantly developed, naturally helped it on. She conceived an exalted idea of moral liberty, and when another's love and faith failed her, she had the righteous pride not to dispute the tattered compact, shred by shred. She even took pleasure in the idea of restoring freedom and repose, generously and without reproach, to whoever reclaimed them.

But she had become much weaker than in her earlier womanhood, in the sense that she had recovered the craving to love and to have faith, which had been long benumbed by a disaster of exceptional severity. She had fancied for a long time that she could live thus, and that art would be her only passion. She had made a mistake, and she could no longer indulge in any illusions concerning the future. It was necessary for her to love, and her greatest misfortune was that it was necessary for her to love gently and self-sacrificingly, and to satisfy at any price the maternal impulse which was, as it were, a fatal element of her nature and her life. She had become accustomed to suffering for some one, she longed to suffer still, and if that longing, strange, it is true, but well characterized in certain women, and in certain men as well, had made her less merciful to Palmer than to Laurent, it was because Palmer had seemed to her too strong himself to need her devotion. So that Palmer had erred in offering her support and consolation. Thérèse had missed the feeling that she was necessary to that man, who wished her to think of no one but herself.

Laurent, who was more ingenuous, had that peculiar charm of which she was fatally enamored—weakness! He made no secret of it, he proclaimed that touching infirmity of his genius with transports of sincerity and inexhaustible emotion. Alas! he, too, erred. He was not really weak, any more than Palmer was really strong. He had his hours, he always talked like a child of heaven, and as soon as his weakness had won the day, he recovered his strength to make others suffer, as is the wont of all the children whom we adore.

Laurent was in the clutches of an inexorable fatality. He said so himself in his lucid moments. It seemed as if, born of the intercourse of two angels, he had nursed at the breast of a Fury, and had retained in his blood a leaven of frenzy and despair. He was one of those persons, more plentiful than is generally supposed in the human race, in both sexes, who, although endowed with all sublimity of thought and all the noble impulses of the heart, never attain the full extent of their faculties without falling at once into a sort of intellectual epilepsy.

And then, too, he was, like Palmer, inclined to undertake the impossible, which is to try to graft happiness upon despair, and to taste the divine joys of conjugal faith and of sacred friendship upon the ruins of a newly devastated past. Those two hearts, bleeding from the wounds they had received, were sadly in need of repose: Thérèse implored it with the sorrow born of a ghastly presentiment; but Laurent fancied that he had lived ten centuries during the ten months of their separation, and he became ill with the exuberance of a desire of the heart, which should have terrified Thérèse more than a desire of the senses.

Unfortunately, she allowed herself to be reassured by the nature of that desire. Laurent seemed to be so far regenerated as to have restored moral love to the place it should occupy in the front rank, and he was once more alone with Thérèse, but did not worry her as before by his outbreaks of frenzy. He was able to talk with her for hours at a time with the most sublime affection—he who had long believed that he was dumb, he said, and who at last felt his genius spreading its wings and taking its flight to a loftier realm! He made himself a part of Thérèse's future by constantly pointing out to her that she had a sacred duty to perform toward him, the duty of sheltering him from the mad impulses of youth, from the unworthy ambitions of middle life, and the depraved selfishness of old age. He talked to her of himself, always of himself. Why not? He talked so well! Through her means, he would be a great artist, a great heart, a great man; she owed him that, because she had saved his life! And Thérèse, with the fatal simplicity of loving hearts, came at last to look upon this reasoning as irrefutable, and to regard as a duty what she had at first been implored to grant as a proof of forgiveness.

So Thérèse at last consented to weld anew that fatal chain; but she was happily inspired to postpone the marriage, desiring to test Laurent's resolution on that point, and fearing an irrevocable engagement for his sake. If her own happiness alone had been involved, the imprudent creature would have bound herself forever.

Thérèse's first happiness did not last a whole week, as a merry ballad sadly says; the second did not last twenty-four hours. Laurent's reactions were sudden and violent, in proportion to the intensity of his enjoyment. We say his reactions, Thérèse said his retractations, and that was the more accurate word. He obeyed that inexorable longing which some young men feel to kill or destroy anything that arouses their passions. These cruel instincts have been observed in men of widely varying natures, and history has stigmatized them as perverse instincts; it would be more just to describe them as instincts perverted either by a disease of the brain contracted amid the surroundings in which the men in question were born, or by the impunity, fatal to the reason, which certain conditions assured them from their first steps in life. We have heard of young kings murdering fawns to which they seemed to be much attached, solely for the pleasure of seeing their entrails quiver. Men of genius, too, are kings in the environment in which they mature; indeed, they are absolute kings, who are intoxicated by their power. There are some who are tormented by the thirst for domination, and whose joy, when their domination is assured, excites them to frenzy.

Such was Laurent, in whom two entirely distinct natures struggled for mastery. One would have said that two souls, having fought for the privilege of vivifying his body, were engaged in a desperate conflict to drive each other out. Between those contrary impulsions the poor wretch lost his free will, and fell exhausted every day after the victory of the angel or the demon who fought over his body.

And when he analyzed himself, it seemed to him sometimes that he was reading in a book of magic, and could discern with marvellous and appalling lucidity the key to the mysterious spells of which he was the victim.

"Yes," he said to Thérèse, "I am undergoing the phenomenon which the thaumaturgists called possession. Two spirits have acquired mastery over me. Is one of them really a good and one an evil spirit? No, I do not think so: the one who terrifies you, the sceptical, violent, frantic one, does ill only because he is not able to do good as he understands it. He would like to be calm, philosophical, playful, tolerant; the other does not choose that he shall be so. He wishes to play his part of good angel; he seeks to be fervent, enthusiastic, single-hearted, devoted; and as his adversary mocks at him, denies him, and insults him, he becomes morose and cruel in his turn, so that the two angels together bring forth a demon."

And Laurent said and wrote to Thérèse on this strange subject sentences no less beautiful than appalling, which seemed to be true and to add further privileges to the impunity he had apparently arrogated to himself with respect to her.

All that Thérèse had feared that she would suffer on Laurent's account if she became Palmer's wife, she suffered on Palmer's account when she became for the second time Laurent's companion. Ghastly retrospective jealousy, the worst of all forms of jealousy, because it takes offence at everything and can be sure of nothing, gnawed the unhappy artist's heart and sowed madness in his brain. The memory of Palmer became a spectre, a vampire to him. He obstinately insisted that Thérèse should tell him all the details of her life at Genoa and Porto Venere, and, as she refused, he accused her of having tried to deceive him! Forgetting that at that time Thérèse had written to him: I love Palmer, and that a little later she had written to him: I am going to marry him, he reproached her with having always held in a firm and treacherous hand the chain of hope and desire which bound him to her. Thérèse placed all their correspondence before him, and he admitted that she had said to him all that loyalty called upon her to say to cut him loose from her. He became calmer, and agreed that she had handled his half-extinct passion with excessive delicacy, telling him the whole truth little by little, as he showed a disposition to receive it without pain, and also as she gained confidence in the future toward which Palmer was leading her. He admitted that she had never told him anything resembling a falsehood, even when she had refused to explain herself, and that immediately after his illness, when he was still deluding himself with the idea of a possible reconciliation, she had said to him: "All is at an end between us. What I have determined upon and accepted for myself is my secret, and you have no right to question me."

"Yes, yes; you are right!" cried Laurent. "I was unjust, and my fatal curiosity is a torment which it is a veritable crime for me to seek to make you share. Yes, dear Thérèse, I subject you to humiliating questions, you who owed me nothing more than oblivion, and who generously granted me a full pardon! I have changed rôles; I draw an indictment against you, forgetting that I am the culprit and the condemned! I try to tear away with an impious hand the veils of modesty in which your heart is entitled, and doubtless in duty bound, to envelop itself touching all that concerns your relations with Palmer. I thank you for your proud silence. I esteem you all the more for it. It proves to me that you never allowed Palmer to question you touching the mysteries of our sorrows and our joys. And now I understand that not only does a woman not owe these private confidences to her lover, but it is her duty to refuse them. The man who asks for them degrades the woman he loves. He calls upon her to do a dastardly thing, at the same time that he debases her in his mind, by associating her image with those of all the phantoms that beset him. Yes, Thérèse, you are right; one must work on his own account to maintain the purity of his ideal; and I am forever straining every nerve to profane it and cast it forth from the temple I had built for it!"

It would seem that after such protestations, and when Laurent declared his readiness to sign them with his blood and his tears, tranquillity should have been restored and happiness have begun. But such was not the case. Laurent, consumed by secret rage, returned the next day to his questions, his insults, his sarcasms. Whole nights were passed in deplorable disputes, in which it seemed that he had an absolute craving to work upon his own genius with the lash, to wound it and torture it, in order to make it fruitful in abusive language of truly appalling eloquence, and to drive both Thérèse and himself to the uttermost limits of despair. After these hurricanes, there seemed to be nothing left for them to do but to kill themselves together. Thérèse constantly expected it and was always ready, for life was horrible to her; but Laurent had not as yet had that thought. Exhausted by fatigue he would fall asleep, and his good angel seemed to return to watch over his slumber and bring to his face the divine smile of celestial visions.

It was an incredible, but fixed and invariable, rule of that strange character, that sleep changed all his resolutions. If he fell asleep with his heart overflowing with affection, he was sure to wake with his mind eager for battle and murder; and on the other hand, if he had gone away cursing the night before, he would return in the morning to bless.

Three times Thérèse left him and fled from Paris; three times he went after her and forced her to forgive his despair; for as soon as he had lost her he adored her, and began anew to implore her with all the tears of exalted repentance.

Thérèse was at once miserable and sublime in that hell into which she had plunged the second time, closing her eyes and sacrificing her life. She carried devotion to the point of acts of self-immolation which made her friends shudder, and which sometimes brought upon her the blame, almost the scorn, of certain proud and virtuous people who did not know what it is to love.

Moreover, this love of Thérèse for Laurent was incomprehensible to herself. She was not drawn on by her passions, for Laurent, besmirched by the debauchery into which he plunged anew to kill a love which he could not destroy by his will, had become a more disgusting object than a dead body to her. She no longer had any caresses for him, and he no longer dared ask her for them. She was no longer vanquished and swayed by the charm of his eloquence and the child-like grace of his penitence. She could no longer believe in the morrow; and the superb outbursts of emotion, which had reconciled them so many times, were no longer anything more in her eyes than alarming symptoms of storm and shipwreck.

What attached her to him was that all-embracing compassion which one inevitably acquires as a habit toward those to whom one has forgiven much. Pardon seems to engender pardon even to satiety, to foolish weakness. When a mother has said to herself that her child is incorrigible, and that he must either die or kill some one, there is nothing left for her to do except to abandon him or to accept him as he is. Thérèse had been mistaken every time that she had thought to cure Laurent by abandoning him. It is very true that he seemed to improve at such times, but only because he hoped to obtain his pardon. When he ceased to hope, he plunged recklessly into dissipation and idleness. Then she returned to rescue him, and succeeded in making him work for a few days. But how dearly she had to pay for the little good she succeeded in doing him! When he became disgusted once more with a regular life, he could not find enough invectives with which to reproach her for trying to make of him "what her patron saint Thérèse Levasseur had made of Jean-Jacques," that is to say, according to him, "an idiot and a maniac."

And yet there was in this pity, which he implored so fervently only to insult it as soon as she had given it back to him, an enthusiastic, perhaps a slightly fanatical respect for his genius as an artist. That woman, whom he accused of being commonplace and lacking in intelligence, when he saw her working for his well-being with simple-hearted perseverance, was superbly artistic, in her love at least, since she accepted Laurent's tyranny as a matter of divine right, and sacrificed to him her own pride, her own labor, and what another less self-sacrificing than she might have called her own glory.

And he, poor wretch, saw and understood that devotion, and when he realized his ingratitude he was consumed by remorse which crushed him. He should have had a heedless, robust mistress, who would have laughed at his anger and his repentance alike, who would not have suffered because of anything he did, so long as she controlled him. Thérèse was not such a woman. She was dying of weariness and disappointment, and Laurent, seeing her fade away, sought momentary forgetfulness of his own tears in the suicide of his intelligence, in the poison of drunkenness.

XIII

One evening, he abused her so long and so incoherently that she ceased to listen to him, and dozed in her chair. After a few moments, a slight rustling made her open her eyes. Laurent convulsively threw on the floor something that gleamed: it was a dagger. Thérèse smiled, and closed her eyes again. She understood feebly, and as if through the haze of a dream, that he had thought of killing her. At that moment, Thérèse was utterly indifferent to everything. To rest from living and thinking, let that rest be sleep or death—she left the choice to destiny.

Death was what she despised. Laurent thought that it was he, and, as he despised himself, he left her at last.

Three days later, Thérèse, having decided to borrow a sum which would enable her to take a long journey, to leave Paris in earnest,—for such a succession of agitations and hurricanes was spoiling her work and her life,—went to the Quai aux Fleurs and bought a white rose-bush, which she sent to Laurent without giving her name to the messenger. It was her farewell. On returning home, she found there a white rose-bush, sent without a name: that was Laurent's farewell. They both intended to go away—they both remained. The incident of the white rose-bushes moved Laurent to tears. He hurried to Thérèse and found her finishing her packing. Her place was taken in the mail-coach for six o'clock that evening. Laurent's place also was taken in the same coach. Both had thought of visiting Italy again alone. "Well, let us go together!" he cried.

"No, I am not going," said she.

"Thérèse, it's of no use for us to plan! this horrible bond that connects us will never be broken. It is madness to think of it. My love has withstood everything that can crush a sentiment, everything that can break a heart. You must love me as I am, or else we must die together. Are you willing to love me?"

"It would be of no use for me to be willing to do it; I cannot," said Thérèse. "I feel that my heart is exhausted; I think that it is dead."

"Very well; are you willing to die?"

"It is a matter of indifference to me how soon I die, as you know; but I do not wish you to live or die with me."

"Ah! yes, you believe in the eternity of the ego! You don't want to meet me again in the other life! Poor martyr! I can understand that."

"We shall not meet again, Laurent, I am sure. Each soul goes toward its centre of attraction. Repose summons me, while you will always and everywhere be attracted by the tempest."

"That is to say that you have not earned hell!"

"Nor have you earned it. You will be in another heaven, that is all!"

"What is there left for me in this world, if you leave me?"

"Glory, when you no longer seek love."

Laurent became pensive. Several times he repeated mechanically: "Glory!"—then he knelt in front of the hearth, poking the fire as he was accustomed to do when he wished to be alone with himself. Thérèse went out to countermand the orders for her journey. She was well aware that Laurent would have followed her.

When she returned, she found him very calm and cheerful.

"This world is only a dull comedy," he said; "but why seek to rise above it, since we do not know what there may be higher up, or even if there is anything at all? Glory, at which you laugh in your sleeve, I know very well——"

"I do not laugh at other people's glory."

"What other people?"

"Those who believe in it and love it."

"God knows whether I believe in it, Thérèse, or whether I snap my fingers at it as a mere farce! But one can love a thing of which he knows the trifling value. You love a balky horse that breaks your neck, the tobacco that poisons you, a wretched play that makes you laugh, and glory, which is only a masquerade! Glory! what is glory to a living artist? Newspaper articles that tear you to pieces and make people talk about you, and laudatory articles that no one reads, for the public is amused only by bitter criticisms, and when its idol is praised to the skies it ceases to care for him at all. And then the groups that gather about a painted canvas, and the monumental orders which fill you with delight and ambition, and leave you half-dead with fatigue, with your ideal unrealized. And then—the Institute—a collection of men who detest you, and who themselves——"

Here Laurent indulged in the most intensely bitter sarcasms, and concluded his dithyramb by saying:

"No matter! such is the glory of this world! We spit upon it, but we cannot do without it, since there is nothing better!"

Their conversation was prolonged until evening, satirical, philosophical, and becoming gradually altogether impersonal. To look at them and listen to them, one would have said that they were two friends, naturally peaceable, who had never quarrelled. This strange situation had occurred several times in the midst of their fiercest storms: when their hearts were silent, their minds still understood each other and agreed.

Laurent was hungry, and asked Thérèse to give him some dinner.

"What about the coach?" she said. "It is almost time for it to start."

"But you are not going?"

"I shall go if you stay."

"Very well; then I will go, Thérèse. Adieu!"

He left the house abruptly, and returned an hour later.

"I missed the mail," he said; "I will go to-morrow. Haven't you dined yet?"

In her preoccupation Thérèse had forgotten her dinner, which was on the table.

"My dear Thérèse," he said, "grant me one last favor; come to dine somewhere with me, and let us go to some play this evening. I want to be your friend once more, just your friend. That will cure me and be the salvation of both of us. Try me. I will not be jealous, nor exacting, nor even amorous any more. Let me tell you—I have another mistress, a pretty little woman in society, as slender as a linnet, and as white and dainty as a sprig of lily of the valley. She is a married woman. I am a friend of her lover, whom I am playing false. I have two rivals, two deadly perils to defy every time that I obtain a tête-à-tête. That is very exciting, and therein lies the whole secret of my love. Thus my passions and my imagination are satisfied there; my heart alone and a free exchange of ideas are what I offer you."

"I refuse them," said Thérèse.

"What! you are vain enough to be jealous of a man whom you no longer love?"

"Surely not! I no longer have my life to give, and I cannot understand such a friendship as you ask of me, without exclusive devotion. Come to see me as my other friends do, I am perfectly willing; but do not ask me for any further private intimacy, even apparent."

"I understand, Thérèse; you have another lover!"

Thérèse shrugged her shoulders and made no reply. He was dying to have her boast to him of some caprice, as he had just boasted to her. His shattered strength was reviving and longed for a fight. He awaited anxiously her response to his challenge, ready to overwhelm her with reproaches and disdain, and perhaps to inform her that he had invented that mistress of his to induce her to betray herself. He could not understand Thérèse's inertness. He preferred to think that she hated him and deceived him, rather than that he was simply annoying or indifferent to her.

She tired him out by her silence.

"Good-night," he said at last. "I am going to dine, and then to the Opera, if I am not too drunk."

Thérèse, left alone, explored for the thousandth time the fathomless depths of this mysterious destiny. What did it lack of being one of the most beautiful of human destinies? Reason.

"But what is reason?" Thérèse asked herself, "and how can genius exist without it? Is it because it is such a mighty force that it can kill reason and still survive it? Or is reason simply an isolated faculty, whose union with the other faculties is not always necessary?"

She fell into a sort of metaphysical reverie. It had always seemed to her that reason was an assemblage of ideas, and not a single detail; that all the faculties of a perfectly constituted being borrowed something from it and supplied something to it in turn; that it was at once the means and the end; that no masterpiece could evade its law, and that no man could have any real value after he had resolutely trampled reason under foot.

She reviewed in her mind her memories of the great artists of all time, and also of contemporary artists. Everywhere she saw the rigid rules of the true associated with the dream of the beautiful, and yet everywhere there were exceptions, terrifying anomalies, radiant yet blighted faces like Laurent's. Aspiration to the sublime was a disease of Thérèse's epoch and environment. It was a touch of fever which took possession of youth and caused it to despise the normal conditions of happiness as well as the ordinary duties of life. By the force of events, Thérèse was hurled, without desiring or anticipating it, into that awful circle of the human hell. She had become the companion, the intellectual half, of one of those sublime madmen, one of those unreasoning geniuses; she was a witness of the endless agony of Prometheus, of the recurrent frenzies of Orestes; she felt the recoil of those indescribable sufferings, with no comprehension of their cause, and with no power to find a remedy for them.

And yet God still dwelt in those rebellious, tormented souls, for Laurent became enthusiastic and kindly once more at certain hours, and the pure well-spring of sacred inspiration was not dried up; his talent was not exhausted, perhaps he still had a glorious future before him. Should such a man be abandoned to the assaults of delirium or to the stupor of fatigue?

Thérèse, we say, had skirted that abyss too often not to have been made giddy by it more than once. Her own talent as well as her own character had well-nigh become involved, without her knowledge, in that desperate path. She had known that exaltation of suffering which shows one the miseries of life on a large scale, and which hovers on the boundaries between the real and the imaginary; but, by virtue of a natural reaction, her mind aspired henceforth to the true, which is neither one nor the other, neither prosaic fact nor the uncurbed ideal. She felt that there the beautiful was to be found, and that, in order to resume the logical life of the soul, she must seek to live a simple and dignified material life. She reproached herself sternly for having been false to herself so long; and a moment later she reproached herself as sternly for thinking too much of her own lot, in face of the extreme peril by which Laurent was still threatened.

With all its voices, with the voice of friendship as well as that of public opinion, society called to her to rise and resume possession of herself. That was her duty, according to the world, a term which in such case is equivalent to general order, the interest of society: "Follow the straight road; let those perish who wander from it."—And religion added: "The virtuous and the good for everlasting salvation, the blind and the rebellious for hell!"—Does it matter little to the wise man, pray, that the fool perishes?

Thérèse was shocked at that conclusion.

"On the day that I deem myself the most perfect, the most useful and the best creature on earth," she said to herself, "I will consent to a sentence of death against all others; but if that day does not come, shall I not be more mad than all the other madmen? Back, madness of vanity, the mother of selfishness! Let us continue to suffer for others than ourselves!"

It was almost midnight when she rose from the chair upon which she had sunk, crushed and spiritless, four hours before. Someone rang. A messenger brought a box and a note. The box contained a domino and a black satin mask. The note contained these words in Laurent's handwriting: Senza veder, senza parlar.

Without seeing or speaking to each other!—What was the key to that enigma? Did it mean that she should go to the masked ball to amuse him by a commonplace intrigue? Did he mean to try to fall in love with her without knowing her? Was it the fancy of a poet, or the insult of a libertine?

Thérèse sent away the box, and fell back in her chair; but a feeling of uneasiness made it impossible for her to reflect. Ought she not to try every expedient to rescue that victim from his infernal aberrations?

"I will go," she said, "I will follow him step by step. I will see, I will listen to his life away from me, I will learn how much truth there is in the villainous stories he tells me, whether he loves evil innocently or with affectation, whether he really has depraved tastes or is only seeking to distract his thoughts. Knowing all that I have hitherto tried not to know of him and his vile associates, all that I have striven with disgust to keep from his memory and my imagination, perhaps I shall discover some weak spot, some pretext for curing him of this vertigo."

She remembered the domino Laurent had sent her, although she had barely glanced at it. It was of satin. She sent for one of Naples silk, donned a mask, carefully covered her hair, supplied herself plentifully with bows of ribbon, in order to change her appearance more completely in case Laurent should suspect her identity, and, sending for a carriage, she set out, alone and resolutely, for the Opera ball.

She had never attended one of those functions. The mask was stifling, intolerable to her. She had never tried to disguise her voice, yet she did not wish that her identity should be divined by any one. She glided silently through the corridors, seeking the deserted corners when she was tired of walking, but going on if any one was coming toward her, always pretending to have a definite goal, and succeeding better than she had hoped in remaining alone and unmolested in that hustling crowd.

It was the time when there was no dancing at the Opera ball, and when the only disguise admitted was the black domino. There was therefore a multitude, sombre and solemn in appearance, but probably intent for the most part upon intrigues as immoral as the bacchanalian revels of other functions of the sort, but of a most imposing aspect when seen as a whole from above. And at intervals a blaring orchestra would suddenly begin to play a frantic quadrille, as if the management, at odds with the police, wished to induce the public to disregard the prohibition; but no one seemed to think of such a thing. The black swarm continued to move slowly and whisper amid the uproar, which ended with a pistol-shot, a strange, fantastic finale, which seemed powerless to dispel the vision of that dismal festival.

For some moments Thérèse was so impressed by the spectacle that she forgot where she was, and fancied herself in the world of depressing dreams. She looked for Laurent, and did not find him.

She ventured into the foyer, where the best-known men in Paris were gathered, without masks or other disguises, and, having made the circuit of the room, she was about to retire, when she heard her name mentioned in a corner. She turned and saw the man she had loved so well, seated between two masked damsels, whose voices and accent had that indefinable combination of limpness and sharpness which betrays exhaustion of the senses and bitterness of spirit.

"Well," said one of them, "so you have abandoned your famous Thérèse at last? It seems that she deceived you in Italy, and that you would not believe it."

"He began to suspect it," rejoined the other, "on the day that he succeeded in driving out his fortunate rival."

Thérèse was mortally wounded to see the painful romance of her life laid open to such interpretations, and even more to see Laurent smile, tell those creatures that they did not know what they were saying, and change the subject, with no trace of indignation and apparently without noticing or being disturbed by what he heard. Thérèse would never have believed that he was not even her friend. Now she was sure of it! She remained, and continued to listen; her mask was glued to her face by a cold perspiration.

And yet Laurent said nothing to those girls that all the world might not have overheard. He chattered away, amused by their prattle, and answered them like a well-bred man. They were empty-headed creatures, and more than once he yawned, making a slight effort to conceal it. Nevertheless, he remained there, caring little whether he was seen of all men in such company, letting them pay court to him, yawning with fatigue and not with real ennui, absent-minded but affable, and talking to those chance companions as if they were women of the best society, almost dear and genuine friends, associated with pleasant memories of joys which one can avow.

This lasted fully a quarter of an hour. Thérèse still held her place. Laurent's back was turned to her. The bench on which he was sitting stood in the recess of a closed glass door. When the groups wandering along the outer corridors stopped against that door, the black coats and dominos made an opaque background and the glass became a sort of black mirror, in which Thérèse's face was reflected unknown to her. Laurent glanced at her several times without thinking of her; but eventually the immobility of that masked face made him uneasy, and he said to his companions, pointing her out to them in the black mirror:

"Don't you call that mask ghastly?"

"Do we frighten you, pray?"

"No, not you; I know what sort of a nose you have under that bit of satin; but to have a face that you can't divine, that you don't know, glaring at you like that! I am going away, I have had enough of it."

"That is to say," they retorted, "that you have had enough of us."

"No," he said, "I have had enough of the ball. It's stifling here. Don't you want to come to see the snow fall? I am going to the Bois de Boulogne."

"Why, that's enough to kill you!"

"Ah! yes. Is there such a thing as death? Are you coming?"

"Faith, no!"

"Who wants to go to the Bois de Boulogne in a domino with me?" he asked, raising his voice.

A group of black figures swooped down upon him like a flock of bats.

"How much is it worth?" said one.

"Will you paint my portrait?" said another.

"Are we to go on foot or on horseback?" queried a third.

"A hundred francs a head," he replied, "just to walk about in the snow by moonlight. I will follow you at a distance. I want to see the effect. How many of you are there?" he added, after a moment. "Ten! that's hardly enough. But no matter, off we go!"

Three remained behind, saying:

"He hasn't a sou. We shall get inflammation of the lungs, and that will be all."

"You stay behind?" he said. "Seven left! Bravo! a cabalistic number, the seven deadly sins! Vive Dieu! I was afraid I should be bored, but there's an idea that saves me."

"Bah!" said Thérèse, "a mere artist's whim! He remembers that he is a painter. Nothing is lost."

She followed the strange party as far as the peristyle, to make sure that the fantastic idea was carried out; but the cold made the most determined draw back, and Laurent allowed himself to be persuaded to abandon the plan. He was asked to substitute a supper for the party.

"Faith," he said, "you are nothing but timid, selfish creatures, just exactly like virtuous women. I am going back into respectable society. So much the worse for you."

But they led him back to the foyer, and there ensued between him and other young men who were friends of his, and a party of shameless hussies, such a lively conversation, coupled with such fine projects, that Thérèse, overcome by disgust, withdrew, saying to herself that it was too late. Laurent loved vice; she could do nothing more for him.

Did Laurent really love vice? No: the slave does not love the yoke and the lash; but, when he is a slave through his own fault, when he has allowed his liberty to be stolen from him for lack of a day of courage or prudence, he becomes accustomed to slavery and all its sorrows: he justifies that profound saying of the ancients, that, when Jupiter reduces a man to that condition, he takes away half of his soul.

When bodily slavery was the awful fruit of victory, Heaven so ordained it in pity for the vanquished; but, when it is the mind that is subjected to the lamentable embrace of debauchery, the punishment is inflicted in its entirety. Laurent thoroughly deserved that punishment. He might have redeemed himself. Thérèse, too, had risked half of her soul: he had not profited by it.

As she entered the carriage to return home, a frantic man rushed after her. It was Laurent. He had recognized her, as she left the foyer, by an involuntary gesture of horror of which she was unconscious.

"Thérèse, let us go back to the ball," he said. "I want to say to all those men: 'You are brutes!' to all those women: 'You are vile creatures!' I want to shout your name, your sacred name, to that idiotic crowd, to grovel at your feet and bite the dust, calling down upon myself all the scorn, all the insults, all the shame! I want to make my confession aloud in the midst of that vast masquerade, as the early Christians did in the heathen temples, which were suddenly purified by the tears of repentance, and washed clean by the blood of the martyrs."

This outbreak lasted until Thérèse had taken him to his door. She could not at all understand why and how that man, who was so little intoxicated, so self-controlled, so agreeably loquacious among the damsels of the masked ball, could become passionate to the point of frenzy as soon as she appeared.

"It is I who drive you mad," she said. "A moment ago, those women were talking about me as about any vile creature, and it did not even rouse you. I have become, so far as you are concerned, a sort of avenging spectre. That was not what I wanted. Let us part, therefore, since I can no longer do anything but harm."

XIV

They met again the next day, however. He begged her to give him one last day of fraternal conversation, and to take one last friendly, quiet, bourgeois walk with him. They went to the Jardin des Plantes, sat down under the great cedar, and visited the labyrinth. It was a mild day; there were no traces of the snow. The sun shone pale through the light-purple clouds. The buds were already bursting with sap. Laurent was a poet, a contemplative poet and artist, nothing else, that day: a profound, incredible tranquillity; no remorse, no desires, and no hopes; at intervals, flashes of ingenuous gaiety.

Thérèse, who watched him with amazement, could hardly believe that everything was at an end between them.

The next day, there was another terrible tempest, without cause or pretext, precisely as a storm gathers in the summer sky for no other reason than that it was fair the day before.

Then, from day to day, everything became darker and darker, and it was like the end of the world, like continual flashes of lightning in the darkness.

One night, he came to her house very late, in a completely dazed condition, and, having no idea where he was, without a word to her, threw himself on the sofa in the salon, and fell asleep.

Thérèse went into her studio, and prayed to God fervently and despairingly to deliver her from that torture. She was discouraged; her cup was full. She wept and prayed all night.

Day was just breaking when she heard the bell ring at her gate. Catherine was asleep, and Thérèse supposed that some belated passer-by had made a mistake in the house. The ring was repeated, once, twice. Thérèse looked out through the round window in the hall over the front door. She saw a child of ten or twelve years, whose clothes indicated that his family was well-to-do, and whose upturned face seemed like an angel's.

"What is it, my little friend?" she said; "have you lost your way?"

"No," he replied, "I was brought here; I am looking for a lady whose name is Mademoiselle Jacques."

Thérèse ran down, opened the door, and gazed at the child with extraordinary emotion. It seemed to her that she had seen him before, or that he resembled some one whom she knew and whose name she could not remember. The child also seemed confused and undecided.

She led him into the garden to question him; but, instead of answering her questions, he asked: "Are you Mademoiselle Thérèse?" while trembling from head to foot.

"I am, my child; what do you want with me? what can I do for you?"

"You must take me and keep me with you, if you will have me!"

"Who are you? Pray tell me!"

"I am the son of the Comte de ——"

Thérèse restrained a cry, and her first impulse was to spurn the child; but suddenly she was struck by his resemblance to a face she had recently painted, looking at it in a mirror, in order to send it to her mother; and that face was her own.

"Wait!" she cried, taking the boy in her arms with a convulsive movement. "What is your name?"

"Manuel."

"Oh! Mon Dieu! who is your mother?"

"She is—I was told not to tell you right away! My mother used to be the Comtesse de ——, at Havana; she didn't love me, and she used often to say to me: 'You are not my son, I am not obliged to love you.'—But my papa loved me, and he often said to me: 'You are all mine, you haven't any mother.'—Then he died a year and a half ago, and the countess said: 'You belong to me and you are going to stay with me.'—That was because my father left her some money on condition that I should always be known as their son. But she didn't love me any better, and I was very unhappy with her, when a gentleman from the United States, whose name is Monsieur Richard Palmer, came all of a sudden and asked for me. The countess said: 'No, I am not willing.'—Then Monsieur Palmer said to me: 'Do you want me to take you to your real mother, who thinks you are dead, and who will be very happy to see you again?'—I said: 'Yes, indeed I do!' Then Monsieur Palmer came at night in a boat, because we lived on the sea-shore, and I got up very softly, very softly, and we sailed together to a big ship, and then we crossed the great ocean, and here we are."

"Here you are!" said Thérèse, who held the child close to her heart, and, trembling with frantic joy, enveloped him in a single, fervent kiss while he was speaking; "where is Palmer?"

"I don't know," said the child. "He brought me to the door, and told me to ring; then I didn't see him again."

"Let us look for him," said Thérèse, rising; "he cannot be far away!"

She ran out with the child, and they found Palmer, who was waiting at a little distance, to make sure that the boy was recognized by his mother.

"Richard! Richard!" cried Thérèse, throwing herself at his feet in the middle of the still deserted street, as she would have done if it had been full of people. "To me you are God!"

She could say no more; suffocated by tears of joy, she well-nigh went mad.

Palmer led her beneath the trees on the Champs-Elysées, and made her sit down. It was at least an hour before she became calm and recovered her wits, and could manage to caress her son without danger of smothering him.

"Now," said Palmer, "I have paid my debt. You gave me days of happiness and hope, and I did not choose to remain under obligations to you. I give you a whole life-time of affection and consolation, for this child is an angel, and it costs me dear to part from him. I have deprived him of one inheritance, and I owe him one in exchange. You have no right to object; my measures are taken, and all his interests are properly cared for. He has a purse in his pocket which assures his present and his future. Adieu, Thérèse! Be sure that I am your friend in life and in death."

Palmer went away happy; he had done a good deed. Thérèse did not choose to return to the house where Laurent was sleeping. She took a cab, after sending a messenger to Catherine with her instructions, which she wrote at a small café where she and her son breakfasted. They passed the day driving about Paris, equipping themselves for a long journey. In the evening, Catherine joined them with the boxes she had packed during the day, and Thérèse left Paris to conceal her child, her happiness, her repose, her toil, her joy, her life, in the depths of Germany. She was selfishly happy; she thought no more of what would become of Laurent without her. She was a mother, and the mother had killed the mistress beyond recall.

Laurent slept all day, and awoke in solitude. He rose, cursing Thérèse for going out to walk without thinking of ordering supper for him. He was surprised not to find Catherine; consigned the house to all the devils, and went away.

Not until some days later did he understand what had happened to him. When he saw that Thérèse's house was sublet, the furniture stored or sold, and when he waited weeks and months without receiving a word from her, he abandoned hope, and thought of nothing but wooing oblivion.

Not until a year had elapsed did he find a way to send a letter to Thérèse. He charged himself with all his misfortunes, and implored a return of the former friendship; then reverted to the vein of passion, and concluded thus:

"I know that I do not deserve even this from you, for I cursed you, and in my despair at losing you I made the efforts of a desperate man to cure myself. Yes, I strove to make your character and your conduct unnatural in my own eyes; I said evil of you with people who hate you, and I took delight in hearing evil said of you by people who did not know you. I treated you absent as I treated you when you were here. And why are you not here? It is your fault if I go mad; you should not have abandoned me. Oh! wretch that I am, I feel that I hate you at the same time that I adore you. I feel that my whole life will be passed in loving you and cursing you. And I see that you detest me! And I would like to kill you! And if you were here I should fall at your feet! Thérèse, Thérèse, have you become a monster, that you no longer know pity? Oh! what a horrible punishment is this incurable love, combined with this unsatisfied anger! What have I done, O my God! to be reduced to lose everything, even liberty to love or hate?"

Thérèse replied:

"Adieu forever! But be sure that you have done nothing to me which I have not forgiven, and that you can never do anything which I cannot forgive. God condemns certain men of genius to wander about in the tempest and to create while in pain. I have studied you enough in your lights and shadows, in your grandeur and your weakness, to know that you are the victim of destiny, and that you should not be weighed in the same scales with most other men. Your suffering and your doubt, which you call your punishment, may be the conditions upon which your glory depends. Learn, therefore, to submit to them. You aspired with all your might to ideal happiness, and you grasped it only in your dreams. But your dreams, my child, are your reality, they are your talent, they are your life; are you not an artist?

"Have no fear, God will forgive you for not being able to love! He doomed you to that insatiable aspiration, so that your youth should not be engrossed by one woman. The women of the future, they who will gaze at your work from century to century,—they are your sisters and your sweethearts."

LAVINIA

AN OLD TALE

NOTE

"Since you are to be married, Lionel, would it not be well for us to return our respective letters and pictures? It can easily be done, since chance has brought us within a short distance of each other, and, after ten years passed in different countries, we are but a few leagues apart to-day. You come sometimes to Saint-Sauveur, so I am told; I am passing only a week here. I trust, therefore, that you will be here during the week with the package which I desire. I am living in the Maison Estabanette, at the foot of the water-fall. You can send your messenger there; he will bring back to you a similar package, which I have all ready for delivery in exchange for the other."

REPLY

"MADAME:

"The package which you command me to send you is with me, sealed, and bearing your name. I ought, doubtless, to be gratified to find that you relied confidently upon my having it at hand whenever and wherever it should please you to demand it.

"But is it necessary, madame, that I should go myself to Saint-Sauveur, there to place it in the hands of a third person to be handed to you? Since you do not deem it advisable to accord me the pleasure of seeing you, will it not be simpler for me not to go to the place where you are living and expose myself to the emotion of being so near you? Would it not be better for me to entrust the package to a messenger of whom I am sure, to be taken from Bagnères to Saint-Sauveur? I await your orders in this regard; whatever they may be, madame, I will submit to them blindly."

NOTE

"I knew, Lionel, that my letters happened to be among your luggage at this moment, because my cousin Henry told me that he saw you at Bagnères, and learned that fact from you. I am very glad that Henry, who is a little inclined to prevaricate, like all gossips, did not deceive me. I asked you to bring the package to Saint-Sauveur yourself, because such documents should not be carelessly exposed to danger in mountains infested with smugglers who steal everything that falls into their hands. As I know that you are the sort of man to defend a trust valiantly, I cannot but feel perfectly safe in making you the guardian of the treasure in which I am interested. I did not suggest an interview, because I feared to make even more disagreeable the vexatious step which I have in a measure forced upon you. But since you seem to refer with regret to the possibility of an interview, I owe you that feeble compensation, and grant it with all my heart. But, as I do not wish to make you sacrifice valuable time in waiting for me, I will appoint a day, so that you may be sure to find me. Be at Saint-Sauveur, then, on the 15th, at nine in the evening. Go to my house, and send word to me by my negress. I will return at once. The package will be ready. Farewell."

Sir Lionel was disagreeably surprised by the receipt of the second note. It found him in the midst of preparing for a trip to Luchon, during which the fair Miss Ellis, his future bride, expected to be favored with his escort. It was certain to be a charming trip. At watering-places, pleasure-parties are almost always successful, because they succeed one another so rapidly that one has no time to prepare for them; because life moves swiftly, sharply, and in unexpected ways; because the constant arrival of new companions gives a flavor of improvisation to the most trivial details of a fête.

Sir Lionel was amusing himself, therefore, at the watering-places in the Pyrenees as much as it is seemly for a true Englishman to amuse himself. He was, moreover, in love to a reasonable degree with Miss Ellis's plump figure and comfortable dowry; and his desertion on the eve of so important a riding excursion—Mademoiselle Ellis had sent to Tarbes for a very handsome dapple-gray Bearnese steed, whose fine points she proposed to exhibit at the head of the cavalcade—might have a disastrous effect on his projected marriage. But Sir Lionel's position was embarrassing; he was a man of honor, and of the most scrupulous type. He went to his friend Sir Henry to lay before him this case of conscience.

But, in order to compel that jovial individual to give him his serious attention, he began by picking a quarrel with him.

"Rattle-pated gossip that you are!" he cried, as he entered the room; "it was well worth while to go to tell your cousin that her letters were travelling about with me! You never yet were able to keep a dangerous word inside your lips. You are like a brook that flows the faster the more water it receives; one of those vases, open at the ends, which embellish the statues of naiads and river-gods; the water that rushes through them doesn't stop for a moment."

"Good, Lionel, good!" cried the young man; "I like to see you in a fit of temper; it makes you poetic. At such times, you are yourself a stream, a river of metaphors, a torrent of eloquence, a reservoir of allegories."

"Oh! it's all very well to laugh!" exclaimed Lionel angrily; "we are not going to Luchon."

"We are not going! Who says so?"

"You and I are not going; I say so."

"Speak for yourself, if you please; so far as I am concerned, I am your humble servant."

"But I am not going, therefore you are not going, either. You have made a blunder, Henry, and you must repair it. You have caused me a terrible disappointment; your conscience bids you to help me to bear it. You will dine with me at Saint-Sauveur."

"May the devil fly away with me if I do!" cried Henry; "I have been madly in love since last night with the little girl from Bordeaux, at whom I laughed so heartily yesterday morning. I intend to go to Luchon, for she is going; she is going to ride my Yorkshire, and she will make your tall chestnut Margaret Ellis burst with jealousy."

"Look you, Henry," said Lionel gravely, "you are a friend of mine?"

"Of course; you know that. It's of no use to go into hysterics over our friendship just at this time. I understand that this solemn beginning is intended to impress me."

"Listen to me, Henry, I tell you; you are my friend, you rejoice in the fortunate occurrences of my life, and you would not readily forgive yourself, I am sure, for having caused me an injury, a genuine misfortune?"

"No, on my honor! But what are you talking about?"

"Well, Henry! it may be that you have caused my marriage to fall through."

"Nonsense! what folly! just because I told my cousin that you had her letters, and she asks you to return them! What influence can Lady Lavinia still have over your life, after ten years of mutual oblivion? Are you conceited enough to believe that she has never been consoled for your infidelity? Nonsense, Lionel! that is carrying remorse too far! there's no great harm done! it can be remedied, believe me——"

As he spoke, Henry nonchalantly put his hand to his cravat and glanced at the mirror; two acts which, in the venerable language of pantomime, are easy to interpret.

This lesson in modesty, from the lips of a much more conceited man than he, irritated Sir Lionel.

"I shall indulge in no reflections on Lady Lavinia's conduct," he replied, trying to express all the bitterness he felt. "No feeling of wounded vanity will ever lead me to try to blacken a woman's reputation, even though I had never loved her."

"That is precisely my case," replied Sir Henry carelessly; "I never loved her, and I never was jealous of those whom she may have treated better than me; nor have I anything to say of the virtue of my gloriously beautiful cousin Lavinia; I have never tried seriously to move her."

"You have done her that favor, Henry? She should be exceedingly grateful to you!"

"Come, come, Lionel! what are we talking about, and what did you come to say to me? You seemed yesterday to have very little regard for the memories of your early loves; you were absolutely prostrate before the radiant Ellis. To-day where are you, please? You seem unwilling to listen to reason on the subject of the past, and then you talk about going to Saint-Sauveur instead of to Luchon! Tell me, with whom are you in love? whom are you going to marry?"

"I am going to marry Miss Margaret, if it please God and you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you can save me. In the first place, read the last note your cousin has written me. Have you done it? Very good. Now, you see, I must decide between Luchon and Saint-Sauveur, between a woman to be won and a woman to be consoled."

"Stop there, impertinent!" cried Henry; "I have told you a hundred times that my cousin is as fresh as the flowers, lovely as the angels, lively as a bird, light-hearted, rosy, stylish, and coquettish; if that woman is in despair, I am content to groan all my life under the burden of a like sorrow."

"Don't expect to pique me, Henry; I am overjoyed to hear what you tell me. But in that case can you explain to me the strange caprice that leads Lady Lavinia to force a meeting upon me?"

"O you stupid fellow!" cried Henry; "don't you see that it's your own fault? Lavinia had not the slightest wish for this meeting; I am very sure of it; for when I spoke to her about you, when I asked her if her heart didn't beat fast sometimes, on the road from Bagnères to Saint-Sauveur, when a riding-party drew near, of which you might be one, she replied indifferently: 'Oh! perhaps my heart would beat faster if I should meet him!'—And the last words were deliciously emphasized by a yawn. Oh! don't bite your lip, Lionel; one of those pretty little feminine yawns, so cool and harmonious that they seem courteous and caressing, so long drawn out that they express the most absolute apathy and the most hearty indifference. But you, instead of taking advantage of this excellent disposition on her part, cannot resist the temptation to construct phrases. True to the everlasting pathos of discarded lovers, although enchanted to be one, you affect the piteous elegiac tone; you seem to bewail the impossibility of seeing her instead of telling her frankly that you are grateful beyond words."

"A man cannot say such impertinent things. How could I have foreseen that she would take seriously a few meaningless words prompted by the proprieties of the situation?"

"Oh! I know Lavinia; it's a characteristic piece of mischief."

"It's the never-failing mischief of womankind! But no; Lavinia was the sweetest and least satirical of women; I am sure that she is no more desirous of this interview than I am. Come, my dear Henry, save us both from this torture; take the package and go to Saint-Sauveur; take it upon yourself to arrange everything; make her understand that I cannot——"

"Leave Miss Ellis on the eve of your marriage, eh? That's an excellent reason to give to a rival! Impossible! you made the blunder, my dear fellow, and you must drink the cup. When a man is foolish enough to keep a woman's picture and letters for ten years, when he is giddy enough to boast of it to a chatterbox like me, when he is mad enough to be witty and sentimental in cold blood in a letter of rupture, he must submit to all the consequences. You have no right to refuse Lady Lavinia anything so long as her letters are in your hands; and whatever method of communication she may impose on you, you must submit to it so long as you have not carried out that solemn obligation. Come, Lionel! order your pony saddled and let us be off; for I will go with you. I have been a little to blame in all this, and you see that I cease to jest when it comes to repairing my mistakes. Let us go!"

Lionel had hoped that Henry would suggest some other way of helping him out of the scrape. He sat motionless, dismayed, chained to his place by a secret, involuntary impulse to resist the decrees of necessity. But he rose at last, sad, resigned, and with his arms folded across his chest. In the matter of love, Sir Lionel was an accomplished hero. If his heart had been false to more than one passion, his external conduct had never departed from the code of the proprieties; no woman had ever had reason to reproach him for any act at variance with that refined and generous condescension which is the most convincing sign of indifference that a well-bred man can give to an irritated woman. With the consciousness of having been scrupulously observant of these rules, the handsome Sir Lionel forgave himself for the sorrows attached to his triumphs.

"Here is a pretext!" cried Sir Henry, rising in his turn. "The coterie of our fair compatriots decides everything here. Miss Ellis and her sister Anna are the most influential powers in the council of Amazons. We must induce Margaret to postpone this excursion, which is fixed for to-morrow, for one more day. A day here is a good deal, I know; but we must obtain it, allege some serious reason for our inability to go, and start to-night for Saint-Sauveur. We shall arrive there in the afternoon; we will rest until evening; at nine o'clock, while you are together, I will have the horses saddled, and at ten o'clock—I fancy that you won't need more than an hour to exchange two packages of letters—we will mount and ride all night, reach here at sunrise, and find the fair Margaret caracoling on her noble steed, my pretty little Madame Bernos curvetting on my Yorkshire; we will change boots and horses; and, covered with dust, dead with fatigue, consumed with love, pale and interesting, we will attend our Dulcineas over mountains and valleys. If so much zeal is not rewarded, all women must be hanged as an example. Come, are you ready?"

Lionel, overflowing with gratitude, threw himself into Henry's arms. An hour later the latter returned.

"Let us be off," he said, "everything is arranged; the Luchon excursion is postponed till the 16th; but it was hard work. Miss Ellis had some suspicions. She knows that my cousin is at Saint-Sauveur, and she has a terrible aversion for my cousin, because she knows what a fool you made of yourself for her. But I adroitly turned aside her suspicions; I said that you were horribly ill, and that I had just forced you to go to bed——"

"Great Heaven! a new freak to help to ruin my chances!"

"No, no, not at all! Dick will put a night-cap on your bolster, place it in your bed, and order three pints of herb-tea from the maid-servant. Then he will put the key of the room in his pocket, and take up his position in front of the door, with a long face and mournful eyes; and he has orders not to let any one in and to murder whoever attempts to force a passage, though it were Miss Margaret herself. Ah! here he is already making up your bed. Good! he has an excellent face; he wants to look sad and he looks idiotic. Let us go out by the gate leading into the ravine. Jack will bring our horses to the end of the valley, as if he were exercising them, and we will join him at Lonnio Bridge. Come, forward, and may the god of love protect us!"

They rode rapidly over the space that separates the two mountain chains, and did not slacken their speed until they entered the dark and narrow gorge which extends from Pierrefitte to Luz. That gorge is unquestionably one of the most characteristic and forbidding spots in the Pyrenees. Everything has a formidable look there. The mountains draw together; the banks of the Gave contract, and the river flows with a dull roar under the arches of rock and wild vines; the black sides of the cliff are covered with climbing plants, whose brilliant green fades to bluish tints in the distance, and to grayish tones near the mountain-tops. Their reflections in the rushing streams are sometimes of a limpid green, sometimes of a dull, slaty-blue, such as we see in the waters of the ocean.

Great marble bridges of a single span stretch from mountain to mountain over deep chasms. Nothing can be more imposing than the construction and the situation of those bridges, cast into space as it were, and swimming in the white, moist atmosphere which seems to fall regretfully into the ravine. The road passes from one side of the gorge to the other seven times in the space of four leagues. When our travellers crossed the seventh bridge, they saw at the bottom of the gorge, which widened almost imperceptibly before them, the charming valley of Luz, bathed in the flames of the rising sun. The mountains on both sides of the road were so high that not a single beam reached them. The water-ouzel uttered his plaintive little cry among the grasses by the stream. The cold, foaming water raised with an effort the veil of mist that lay upon it. On the higher ground a few lines of light gilded the jutting rocks, and the hanging locks of the clematis. But in the background of that rugged landscape, behind those huge black masses, as frowning and sullen as Salvator's favorite subjects, the lovely valley, bathed in sparkling dew, floated in the light and formed a sheet of gold in a frame of black marble.

"How lovely it is!" cried Henry, "and how I pity you for being in love, Lionel! You are insensible to all these sublime things; you consider that the loveliest sunbeam is not worth one of Miss Margaret Ellis's smiles."

"Confess, Henry, that Margaret is the loveliest creature in the three kingdoms."

"Yes, theoretically she is a flawless beauty. But that is just the fault I have to find with her. I would like her to be less perfect, less majestic, less classic. I should love my cousin a thousand times better if God should give me my choice between them."

"Nonsense, Henry, you don't mean what you say," said Lionel, smiling; "family pride blinds you. By the unanimous agreement of all who have eyes in their heads, Lady Lavinia's beauty is more than problematical; and I, who knew her in all the freshness of her prime, can assure you that there never was any possible comparison between them."

"Agreed; but Lavinia is so graceful and charming! her eyes are so bright, her hair so lovely, her feet so small!"

Lionel amused himself for some time combating Henry's admiration for his cousin. But, while he enjoyed extolling the beauty that he loved, a secret sentiment of self-esteem made him also enjoy listening to the praise of her whom he had formerly loved. It was a momentary impulse of vanity, nothing more; for poor Lavinia had never really reigned in his heart, which easy triumphs had spoiled very early. It is a great misfortune for a man to be thrust into a prominent position too soon. The blind admiration of the women, the foolish jealousy of vulgar rivals, are quite enough to give a false direction to an untried judgment and to corrupt an inexperienced mind.

Lionel, from having known too much of the joy of being loved, had exhausted the powers of his heart; from having exercised his passions too early in life, he had made himself forever incapable of feeling a serious passion. Beneath a handsome, manly face, beneath a youthful and vigorous expression, he concealed a heart as cold and worn out as an old man's.

"Come, Lionel, tell me why you did not marry Lavinia Buenafè, who is to-day Lady Blake through your fault? for, although I am no rigid moralist, and although I am disposed to respect in our sex the God-given privilege of doing as we please, I am unable to approve your conduct, when I reflect upon it. After courting her for two years, after compromising her as much as it is possible to compromise a young lady,—which is not a very easy thing to do in blessed Albion,—after causing her to reject some most eligible offers, you dropped her to run after an Italian singer, who certainly did not deserve the honor of inspiring such perfidy. Tell me, was not Lavinia clever and pretty? was she not the daughter of a Portuguese banker, a Jew to be sure, but very rich? was she not a good match? didn't she love you to distraction?"

"Why, my dear fellow, that is just why I complain: she loved me too much for me ever to have made her my wife. In the opinion of every man of sense, a lawful wife should be a gentle and placid helpmeet, an Englishwoman to the very depths of her being, not very susceptible to love, incapable of jealousy, fond of sleep, and sufficiently addicted to the excessive use of black tea to keep her faculties in a conjugal state. With that Portuguese girl, ardent of heart, active, accustomed from childhood to constant change of abode, to unrestrained manners, liberal ideas, and all the dangerous opinions that a woman picks up while travelling all over the world, I should have been the most miserable, if not the most ridiculous of husbands. For fifteen months I was blind to the inevitable misery that that love was brewing for me. I was so young then! I was only twenty-two; remember that, Henry, and do not condemn me. I opened my eyes at last, just when I was about to commit the signal folly of marrying a woman who was madly in love with me. I halted on the brink of the precipice, and I fled in order not to succumb to my weakness."

"Hypocrite!" said Henry, "Lavinia told me the story very differently: it seems that, long before the heartless resolution that sent you off to Italy with Rosmonda, you had already tired of the poor Jewess, and that you cruelly made her sensible of the ennui that overpowered you when you were with her. Oh! when Lavinia tells about that, she displays no self-conceit, I assure you; she avows her unhappiness and your cruelty with an artless modesty which I have never noticed in other women. She has a way of her own of saying: 'In a word, I bored him.'—I tell you, Lionel, if you had heard her say those words, with the accent of ingenuous melancholy that she puts into them, I'll wager that you would have felt the stings of remorse."

"Ah! have I never felt them!" cried Lionel. "That is what disgusts a man still more with a woman—all that he has to suffer on her account after he leaves her, the thousand and one annoyances caused by the haunting memory of her, the voice of bourgeois society crying for revenge and shrieking curses, the disturbed and frightened conscience, and the exceedingly gentle but exceedingly cruel reproaches which the poor abandoned creature heaps upon him through the hundred voices of rumor. I tell you, Henry, I know nothing more wearisome or more depressing than the trade of a lady-killer."

"To whom are you talking?" retorted Henry grandiloquently, with that ironical, conceited gesture which became him so well. But his companion did not deign to smile, and continued to ride on slowly, letting his reins lie on his horse's neck, and resting his wearied eyes on the charming panorama which the valley unrolled at his feet.

Luz is a small town about a mile from Saint-Sauveur. Our dandies halted there; Lionel could not be persuaded to go on to the place where Lady Lavinia was living; he took up his quarters in an inn, and threw himself on the bed, awaiting the hour fixed for the meeting.

Although the climate is very much cooler in the valley of Luz than in that of Bigorre, it was a scorching, oppressive day. Sir Lionel, stretched upon a wretched tavern bed, felt some feverish symptoms, and fell into a troubled sleep amid the buzzing of the insects that circled about his head in the burning air. His companion, being more active and less disturbed in mind, crossed the valley, paid visits all over the neighborhood, watched the riding-parties on the Gavarni road, saluted the fair dames whom he spied at their windows or on the roads, cast burning glances at the young Frenchwomen, for whom he had a decided preference, and joined Lionel again about night-fall.

"Come, up, up!" he cried, pulling aside the woollen curtains; "it is the time fixed for the meeting."

"Already?" said Lionel, who was just beginning to sleep comfortably, thanks to the cool evening air; "what time is it, Henry?"

Henry replied, with emphasis:

"Oh! for God's sake, spare me your quotations, Henry! I can see for myself that it is growing dark, that silence is stealing over the landscape, that the voice of the torrent is louder and clearer; but Lady Lavinia doesn't expect me until nine o'clock, so I can sleep a little longer."

"No, not another minute, Lionel. We must walk to Saint-Sauveur; for I had our horses taken there this morning, and the poor creatures are tired enough now, to say nothing of what they still have to do. Come, dress yourself. Good! At ten o'clock, I will be at Lady Lavinia's door on horseback, holding your palfrey and ready to hand you your rein, exactly as our big William used to do at the theatre, when he was reduced to playing the jockey, the great man! Come, Lionel, here's your portmanteau, a white cravat, and some wax for your moustache. Patience! Oh! such negligence! such apathy! Can you think of such a thing, my dear fellow, as appearing carelessly dressed before a woman you no longer love? that would be a terrible blunder! Pray understand that you must, on the contrary, appear to the very best advantage, in order to make her realize the value of what she has lost. Come, come, brush your hair back even more carefully than if you were preparing to open the ball with Miss Margaret. Good! Let me brush your coat a bit. What! can it be that you forgot to bring a phial of essence of tuberose with which to saturate your silk handkerchief? That would be inexcusable. No, God be praised! here it is. On my word, Lionel, you are deliciously fragrant, you are magnificent; off you go. Remember that your honor is involved in causing a few tears to flow when you appear to-night, for the last time, on Lady Lavinia's horizon."

When they passed through the hamlet of Saint-Sauveur, which consists of fifty houses at the most, they were surprised to see no people of fashion in the street or at the windows. But they understood that strange circumstance when they passed the ground-floor windows of a house from which came the shrill notes of a violin, flageolet, and tympanon, an indigenous instrument half-way between the French tambourine and the Spanish guitar. The noise and the dust apprised our travellers that the ball had begun, and that the most fashionable members of the aristocracy of France, Spain, and England, assembled in a modest apartment, with whitewashed walls embellished with wreaths of boxwood and wild thyme, were dancing to the strains of the most infernal cacophony that ever rent mortal ears and marked time falsely.

Several groups of bathers, those whom a less well-filled purse or genuine ill-health deprived of the pleasure of taking an active part in the function, were crowded about the windows, casting an envious or satirical glance into the ball-room over each other's shoulders, and exchanging enthusiastic or ill-natured remarks, pending the time when the village clock should strike the hour when every convalescent must go to bed, under pain of losing the benefit of the mineral waters.

As our two friends passed these groups, there was a sort of oscillating movement toward the windows; and Henry, mingling with the lookers-on, overheard these words:

"That's the beautiful Jewess, Lavinia Blake, just standing up to dance. They say that she's the best dancer in Europe."

"Come, Lionel," cried the young baronet; "come, see how beautifully dressed and charming my cousin is!"

But Lionel pulled him by the arm and dragged him away from the window, angrily and impatiently, not deigning to glance in that direction.

"Come, come!" he said; "we didn't come here to watch people dance."

But he could not move on so quickly that he did not hear another remark made somewhere in his neighborhood:

"Ah! the handsome Comte de Morangy is her partner."

"Do me the favor to tell me who else is likely to be?" rejoined another voice.

"They say he has lost his head over her," observed a third by-stander. "He has already used up three horses for her, and I don't know how many jockeys."

Self-esteem is so strange a counsellor, that, thanks to it, we all find ourselves in flat contradiction with ourselves a hundred times a day. In reality, Sir Lionel was delighted to know that Lady Lavinia was placed, by a new attachment, in a situation which assured their mutual independence. And yet, the publicity of the triumph which might help that discarded woman to forget the past was a species of affront which Lionel found it difficult to swallow.

Henry, who knew the neighborhood, guided him to the end of the village, to the house in which his cousin lived. There he left him.

This house stood a little apart from the other dwellings; the mountain rose behind it, and the front windows overlooked the ravine. A few feet away, a stream fell noisily into a cleft of the rock; and the house, bathed, so to speak, in that cool, wild noise, seemed to be shaken by the falling water and on the point of plunging with it into the abyss. It was one of the most picturesque locations imaginable, and Lionel recognized in the choice the romantic and slightly eccentric nature of Lady Lavinia.

An old negress opened the door of a small salon on the ground-floor. No sooner did the light fall on her glistening, weather-beaten face, than Lionel uttered an exclamation of surprise. It was Pepa, Lavinia's old nurse, whom Lionel had seen for two years in attendance upon his beloved. As he was not on his guard against any sort of emotion, the unexpected appearance of that old woman, arousing the memory of the past, upset all his ideas for a moment. He was very near leaping on her neck, calling her nurse, as in his youthful, merry days, and embracing her as an old friend and faithful servant; but Pepa stepped back, observing Lionel's eagerness with an air of stupefaction. She did not recognize him.

"Alas! am I so changed?" he thought.

"I am the person whom Lady Lavinia sent for," he said in a faltering voice. "Did she not tell you?"

"Yes, yes, my lord," replied the negress; "my lady is at the ball; she told me to bring her her fan as soon as a gentleman knocked at the door. Stay here; I will go to tell her."

The old woman looked about for the fan. It was on a marble table, at Sir Lionel's hand. He took it up and gave it to the negress, and his fingers retained the perfume after she had gone out.

That perfume worked upon him like a charm; his nerves received a shock which extended to his heart and made it quiver. It was Lavinia's favorite perfume: a species of aromatic herb which grows in India, and with which her clothes and her furniture used always to be impregnated. That odor of patchouly was in itself a whole world of memories, a whole life-time of love; it was an emanation from the first woman Lionel had ever loved. A film passed over his eyes, his pulses throbbed violently; it seemed to him as if a cloud were floating in front of him, and in that cloud, a girl of sixteen, dark skinned, slender, at once lively and gentle: Lavinia the Jewess, his first love. He saw her pass, swift as a doe, skimming over the heather, riding through the game-laden preserves of her park, urging her black hackney through the swamps; merry, ardent, and capricious as Diana Vernon, or as the jovial fairies of the Emerald Isle.

He soon felt ashamed of his weakness, when he thought of the ennui that had blighted that love and all the rest. He cast a sadly philosophical glance upon the ten years of positive existence which separated him from those days of pastorals and poetry; then he evoked the future, parliamentary renown, and the splendor of a political career, in the guise of Miss Margaret Ellis, whom he next evoked herself in the guise of her dowry; and finally he began to inspect the room in which he stood, glancing about with the sceptical expression of a disillusioned lover, and of a man of thirty at odds with social life.

Visitors to the watering-places in the Pyrenees live in simple lodgings; but thanks to the avalanches and torrents which wreck many houses every winter, decorations and furniture have to be replaced or restored every spring. The cottage Lavinia had hired was built of rough marble, and sheathed with resinous woods inside. The wood was painted white, and was as bright and cool as stucco. A rush mat of several colors, woven in Spain, served as a carpet. Snow-white dimity curtains reflected the moving shadows of the firs which shook their black tops in the night-wind, beneath the watery glance of the moon. Small jars of varnished olive-wood were filled with the loveliest mountain flowers. Lavinia had plucked with her own hand, in the loveliest valleys and on the loftiest peaks, the nightshade with its ruddy breast; the monk's-hood with its pale-blue petals and poisonous calyx; the pink and white sweet-william, with its delicately notched petals; the pallid soap-wort; the transparent bell-flowers, wrinkled like muslin; the purple valerian and all the wild daughters of solitude, so fresh and fragrant that the chamois fears that he may blight them by brushing against them as he runs, and the water of springs unknown to the hunter barely bends them with its careless, silent stream.

That white and perfume-laden apartment had, as if unwittingly, an air of assignation; but it seemed also the sanctuary of a pure and maidenly love. The candles shed a timid light; the flowers seemed modestly to shield their bosoms from the glare; no woman's garment, no symbol of coquetry, had been left lying on the furniture; only a bunch of withered pansies and a torn white glove lay side by side on the mantel. Lionel, obeying an uncontrollable impulse, picked up the glove and crumpled it in his hand. It was like the cold, convulsive grasp of a last farewell. He took up the odorless bouquet, gazed at it for a moment, made a bitter remark about the flowers of which it was composed, and threw it down. Had Lavinia placed it there with the purpose that it should be noticed by her former lover?

Lionel walked to the window and put aside the curtains, to divert, by looking upon the spectacle offered by nature, the emotion that was gradually stealing over him. It was a magical spectacle. The house, built on the solid rock, formed a sort of bastion to a gigantic wall of perpendicular cliffs of which the Gave bathed the base. At the right, the cataract plunged into the ravine with a loud roar; at the left, a clump of firs leaned far over the abyss; in the distance lay the valley, vaguely outlined in the white moonlight. A tall wild laurel, growing in a cleft of the rock, brushed the window-sill with its long, shiny leaves, and the breeze, rubbing them together, seemed to be whispering mysterious words.

Lavinia entered while Lionel was engrossed by this spectacle; the noise of the water-fall and the wind prevented him from hearing her. She stood behind him a few moments, occupied, doubtless, in collecting her thoughts, and perhaps asking herself if this were really the man she had loved so dearly; for, at that moment of inevitable emotion, although the situation had been planned beforehand, Lavinia fancied that she was dreaming. She could remember a time when it would have seemed impossible to her that she could see Lionel again without falling dead with grief and wrath. And now she stood there, mild and calm, perhaps indifferent.

Lionel turned instinctively and saw her. He was not expecting her, and he uttered an exclamation; then, ashamed of such a breach of the proprieties, and bewildered by the emotion that he felt, he made a violent effort to bestow upon Lady Lavinia a faultless and irreproachable salutation.

But, despite his utmost endeavors, an unforeseen embarrassment, an unconquerable agitation, paralyzed his shrewd yet frivolous wit, that tractable, obliging wit, which stood ever ready to be thrown into circulation, according to the laws of affability, and to be passed, like coin, from hand to hand, for the use of the first comer. On this occasion his rebellious wit held its peace and gazed open-mouthed at Lady Lavinia.

You see, he did not expect to find her so beautiful. He had left her quite ill and sadly changed. In those days, tears had withered her cheeks, sorrow had reduced her flesh; her eyes were dull, her hands hot and dry, and she neglected her dress. She imprudently made herself ugly then, poor Lavinia! not thinking that sorrow embellishes a woman's heart only, and that most men are quite ready to deny the existence of mind in woman, as was done at a certain council of Italian prelates.

Now, Lavinia was in all the splendor of that second beauty which comes to women who have not received incurable wounds in the heart in their first youth. She was still a pale, thin Portuguese, with a slightly bronzed skin and a somewhat sharp profile; but her expression and her manners had acquired all the grace, all the caressing charm, of a Frenchwoman's. Her dark skin was as soft as velvet, as the result of restored and unfailing health; her slender form had recovered the lithe and flexible activity of youth; her hair, which she had cut off in the old days as a sacrifice to love, now shone in all its splendor, in heavy masses over her smooth brow; her costume consisted of a gown of India muslin, and a bunch of white heather, picked in the ravine and thrust in her hair. There is no more graceful plant than the white heather; as you watched its delicate clusters waving over Lavinia's black hair, you would have said that they were clusters of living pearls. That head-dress and that simple gown were in the most exquisite taste, and the ingenious coquetry of the sex revealed itself therein by dint of concealing itself.

Never had Lionel seen Lavinia so fascinating. For an instant, he was on the point of falling at her feet and asking pardon; but the placid smile that he saw on her face restored to him the modicum of bitterness necessary to enable him to carry through the interview with every appearance of dignity.

In default of suitable words, he took from his breast a carefully sealed package, and said, in a firm voice, as he placed it on the table:

"You see, madame, that I have obeyed like a slave; may I believe that my liberty will be restored to me from to-day?"

"It seems to me," rejoined Lavinia, with a somewhat melancholy playfulness, "that your liberty has not been very tightly chained, Sir Lionel! As a matter of fact, have you remained all this time in my fetters? I confess that I had not flattered myself that such was the fact."

"Oh! madame, in heaven's name, let us not jest! Is not this a melancholy moment?"

"It is an old tradition," she replied, "a conventional dénouement, an inevitable climax in all love-stories. And if, when two people were writing to each other, they were thoroughly impressed with the fact that in the future they would have to wrest their letters from each other with suspicion—— But no one ever thinks of it. At twenty years, we write with a sense of the utmost security, because we have exchanged eternal oaths; we smile with pity when we think of the commonplace results of all the passions that we see dying out; we are proud to believe that we shall prove an exception to this great law of human fickleness! Noble error, blessed conceit, wherein are born the grandeur and the illusions of youth! isn't that so, Lionel?"

Lionel remained dumb with stupefaction. This sadly philosophical language, although natural enough in Lavinia's mouth, seemed to him a ghastly contradiction, for he had never seen her so: he had seen her, a weak child, abandon herself blindly to all the errors of life, yield herself trustfully to all the tempests of passion; and, when he had left her crushed with grief, he had heard her continue to protest eternal fidelity to the author of her despair.

But to hear her thus pronounce sentence of death on all the illusions of the past, was a painful and ghastly thing. That woman who survived herself, so to speak, and who was not afraid to deliver a funeral oration on her own life, was a profoundly depressing spectacle, which Lionel could not witness without a pang. He could think of nothing to say in reply. He knew better than any one all that might be said in such cases, but he had not the courage to help Lavinia to commit suicide.

As he twisted and turned the package of letters in his hand in his embarrassment, she continued:

"You know me well enough, or, better still, you remember enough about me, to be sure that I reclaim these pledges of a former attachment for none of those prudential reasons which occur to women when they cease to love. If you had any suspicion of such a thing, I need do no more to justify myself than remind you that these pledges have remained in your hands for ten years, and that I have not once thought of asking you for them. I should never have made up my mind to do it, had it not been that another woman's happiness was jeopardized by the existence of those papers."

Lionel gazed steadfastly at Lavinia, watching for the faintest indication of bitterness or chagrin produced by the thought of Margaret Ellis; but he could not detect the slightest change in her expression or her voice. Lavinia seemed to be invulnerable.

"Has this woman changed to diamond or to ice?" he asked himself.