France, and more especially Brittany, still has some few towns that stand entirely outside the social movement which gives a character to the nineteenth century. For lack of rapid and constant communications with Paris, connected only by an ill-made road with the prefecture or chief town to which they belong, these places hear and see modern civilization pass by like a spectacle; they are amazed, but they do not applaud; and whether they fear it or make light of it, they remain faithful to the antiquated manners of which they preserve the stamp. Anyone who should travel as a moral archaeologist, and study men instead of stones, might find a picture of the age of Louis XV in some village of Provence, that of the time of Louis XIV in the depths of Poitou, that of yet remoter ages in the heart of Brittany.

Most of these places have fallen from some splendor of which history has kept no record, busied as it is with facts and dates rather than manners, but of which the memory still survives in tradition; as in Brittany, where the character of the people allows no forgetfulness of anything that concerns the home country. Many of these towns have been the capital of some little feudal territory⁠—a county or a duchy conquered by the Crown, or broken up by inheritors in default of a direct male line. Then, deprived of their activity, these heads became arms; the arms, bereft of nutrition, have dried up and merely vegetate; and within these thirty years these images of remote times are beginning to die out and grow very rare.

Modern industry, toiling for the masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, for its outcome was as personal to the purchaser as to the maker. We have products nowadays; we no longer have works. Buildings play a large part in the phenomena of retrospection; but to industry, buildings are stone-quarries or saltpetre mines, or storehouses for cotton. A few years more and these primitive towns will be transformed, known no more excepting in this literary iconography.

One of the towns where the physiognomy of the feudal ages is still most plainly visible is Guérande. The name alone will revive a thousand memories in the mind of painters, artists, and thinkers who may have been to the coast and have seen this noble gem of feudality proudly perched where it commands the sand-hills and the strand at low tide, the top corner, as it were, of a triangle at whose other points stand two not less curious relicts⁠—le Croisic and le Bourg de Batz. Besides Guérande there are but two places⁠—Vitré, in the very centre of Brittany, and Avignon in the south⁠—which preserve their medieval aspect and features intact in the midst of our century.

Guérande is to this day enclosed by mighty walls, its wide moats are full of water, its battlements are unbroken, its loopholes are not filled up with shrubs, the ivy has thrown no mantle over its round and square towers. It has three gates, where the rings may still be seen for suspending the portcullis; it is entered over drawbridges of timber shod with iron, which could be raised, though they are raised no longer. The municipality was blamed in 1820 for planting poplars by the side of the moat to shade the walk; it replied that on the land side, by the sand-hills, for above a hundred years, the fine, long esplanade by the walls, which look as if they had been built yesterday, had been made into a mall overshadowed by elms, where the inhabitants took their pleasure.

The houses have known no changes; they are neither more nor less in number. Not one of them has felt on its face the hammer of the builder, or the brush of the whitewasher, or trembled under the weight of an added story. They all retain their primitive character. Some are raised on wooden columns forming “rows,” under which there is a footway, floored with planks that yield but do not break. The shop-dwellings are small and low, and faced with slate shingles. Woodwork, now decayed, has been largely used for carved window-frames; and the beams, prolonged beyond the pillars, project in grotesque heads, or at the angles, in the form of fantastic creatures, vivified by the great idea of Art, which at that time lent life to dead matter. These ancient things, defying the touch of time, offer to painters the brown tones and obliterated lines that they delight in.

The streets are what they were a hundred years ago. Only, as the population is thinner now, as the social stir is less active, a traveler curious to wander through this town, as fine as a perfect suit of antique armor, may find his way, not untouched by melancholy, down an almost deserted street, where the stone window-frames are choked with concrete to avoid the tax. This street ends at a postern-gate built up with a stone wall, and crowned by a clump of saplings planted there by the hand of Breton Nature⁠—France can hardly show a more luxuriant and all-pervading vegetation. If he is a poet or a painter, our wanderer will sit down, absorbed in the enjoyment of the perfect silence that reigns under the still sharp-cut vaulting of this side gate, whither no sound comes from the peaceful town, whence the rich country may be seen in all its beauty through loopholes, once held by archers and cross-bowmen, which seem placed like the little windows arranged to frame a view from a summerhouse.

It is impossible to go through the town without being reminded at every step of the manners and customs of long past times; every stone speaks of them; traditions of the Middle Ages survive there as superstitions. If by chance a gendarme passes in his laced hat, his presence is an anachronism against which the mind protests; but nothing is rarer than to meet a being or a thing of the present. There is little to be seen even of the dress of the day; so much of it as the natives have accepted has become to some extent appropriate to their unchanging habits and hereditary physiognomy. The marketplace is filled with Breton costumes, which artists come here to study, and which are amazingly varied. The whiteness of the linen clothes worn by the paludiers, the salt-workers who collect salt from the pans in the marshes, contrasts effectively with the blues and browns worn by the inland peasants, and the primitive jewelry piously preserved by the women. These two classes and the jacketed seamen, with their round varnished leather hats, are as distinct as the castes in India, and they still recognize the distinctions that separate the townsfolk, the clergy, and the nobility. Here every landmark still exists; the revolutionary plane found the divisions too rugged and too hard to work over; it would have been notched if not broken. Here the immutability which Nature has given to zoological species is to be seen in men. In short, even since the revolution of 1830, Guérande is still a place unique, essentially Breton, fervently catholic, silent, meditative, where new ideas can scarcely penetrate.

Its geographical position accounts for this singularity. This pretty town overlooks the salt marshes; its salt is indeed known throughout Brittany as Sel de Guérande, and to its merits many of the natives ascribe the excellence of their butter and sardines. It has no communication with the rest of France but by two roads, one leading to Savenay, the chief town of the immediate district, and thence to Saint-Nazaire; and the other by Vannes on to Morbihan. The district road connects it with Nantes by land; that by Saint-Nazaire and then by boat also leads to Nantes. The inland road is used only by the Government, the shorter and more frequented way is by Saint-Nazaire. Between that town and Guérande lies a distance of at least six leagues, which the mails do not serve, and for a very good reason⁠—there are not three travelers by coach a year. Saint-Nazaire is divided from Paimboeuf by the estuary of the Loire, there four leagues in width. The bar of the river makes the navigation by steamboat somewhat uncertain; and to add to the difficulties, there was, in 1829, no landing quay at the cape of Saint-Nazaire; the point ended in slimy shoals and granite reefs, the natural fortifications of its picturesque church, compelling arriving voyagers to fling themselves and their baggage into boats when the sea was high, or, in fine weather, to walk across the rocks as far as the jetty then in course of construction. These obstacles, ill suited to invite the amateur, may perhaps still exist there. In the first place, the authorities move but slowly; and then the natives of this corner of land, which you may see projecting like a tooth on the map of France between Saint-Nazaire, le Bourg de Batz, and le Croisic, are very well content with the hindrances that protect their territory from the incursions of strangers.

Thus flung down on the edge of a continent, Guérande leads no whither, and no one ever comes there. Happy in being unknown, the town cares only for itself. The centre of the immense produce of the salt marshes, paying not less than a million francs in taxes, is at le Croisic, a peninsular town communicating with Guérande across a tract of shifting sands, where the road traced each day is washed out each night, and by boats indispensable for crossing the inlet which forms the port of le Croisic, and which encroaches on the sand. Thus this charming little town is a Herculaneum of feudalism, minus the winding sheet of lava. It stands, but is not alive; its only reason for surviving is that it has not been pulled down.

If you arrive at Guérande from le Croisic, after crossing the tract of salt marshes, you are startled and excited at the sight of this immense fortification, apparently quite new. Coming on it from Saint-Nazaire, its picturesque position and the rural charm of the neighborhood are no less fascinating. The country round it is charming, the hedges full of flowers⁠—honeysuckles, roses, and beautiful shrubs; you might fancy it was an English wild garden planned by a great artist. This rich landscape, so homelike, so little visited, with all the charm of a clump of violets or lily-of-the-valley found in the midst of a forest, is set in an African desert shut in by the ocean⁠—a desert without a tree, without a blade of grass, without a bird, where, on a sunny day, the marshmen, dressed all in white, and scattered at wide intervals over the dismal flats where the salt is collected, look just like Arabs wrapped in their burnouse. Indeed, Guérande, with its pretty scenery inland, and its desert bounded on the right by le Croisic and on the left by Batz, is quite unlike anything else to be seen by the traveler in France. The two types of nature so strongly contrasted and linked by this last monument of feudal life, are quite indescribably striking. The town itself has the effect on the mind that a soporific has on the body; it is as soundless as Venice.

There is no public conveyance but that of a carrier who transports travelers, parcels, and possibly letters, in a wretched vehicle, from Saint-Nazaire to Guérande or back again. Bernus, the driver of this conveyance, was, in 1829, the factotum of the whole community. He goes as he likes, the whole country knows him, he does everybody’s commissions. The arrival of a carriage is an immense event⁠—some lady who is passing through Guérande by the land road to le Croisic, or a few old invalids on their way to take sea-baths, which among the rocks of this peninsula have virtues superior to those of Boulogne, Dieppe, or les Sables. The peasants come on horseback, and for the most part bring in their produce in sacks. They come hither chiefly, as do the salt makers, for the business of purchasing the jewelry peculiar to their caste, which must always be given to Breton maidens on betrothal, and the white linen or the cloth for their clothes. For ten leagues round, Guérande is still that illustrious Guérande where a treaty was signed famous in French history; the key of the coast, displaying no less than le Bourg de Batz, a magnificence now lost in the darkness of ages. The jewelry, the cloth, the linen, the ribbons, and hats are manufactured elsewhere, but to the purchasers they are the specialty of Guérande.

Every artist, nay, and everyone who is not an artist, who passes through Guérande, feels a desire⁠—soon forgotten⁠—to end his days in its peace and stillness, walking out in fine weather on the mall that runs round the town from one gate to the other on the seaward side. Now and again a vision of this town comes to knock at the gates of memory; it comes in crowned with towers, belted with walls; it displays its robe strewn with lovely flowers, shakes its mantle of sand-hills, wafts the intoxicating perfumes of its pretty thorn-hedged lanes, decked with posies lightly flung together; it fills your mind, and invites you like some divine woman whom you have once seen in a foreign land, and who has made herself a home in your heart.

Close to the church of Guérande a house may be seen which is to the town what the town is to the country, an exact image of the past, the symbol of a great thing now gone, a poem. This house belongs to the noblest family in the land⁠—that of du Guaisnic, who, in the time of the du Guesclin, were as superior to them in fortune and antiquity as the Trojans were to the Romans. The Guaisqlain (also formerly spelt du Glaicquin)⁠—which has become Guesclin⁠—are descended from the Guaisnics. The Guaisnics, as old as the granite of Brittany, are neither Franks nor Gauls; they are Bretons, or, to be exact, Celts. Of old they must have been Druids, have cut the mistletoe in sacred groves, and have sacrificed men on dolmens. Today this race, the equals of the Rohans, but never choosing to be made Princes, powerful in the land before Hugues Capet’s ancestors had been heard of, this family, pure from every alloy, is possessed of about two thousand francs a year, this house at Guérande, and the little castle of le Guaisnic. All the estates belonging to the Barony of le Guaisnic, the oldest in Brittany, are in the hands of farmers, and bring in about sixty thousand francs a year in spite of defective culture. The du Guaisnics are indeed still the owners of the land; but as they cannot pay up the capital deposited with them two hundred years ago by those who then held them, they cannot take the income. They are in the position of the French Crown towards its tenants in 1789. When and where could the Barons find the million francs handed over to them by their farmers? Until 1789 the tenure of the fiefs held of the Castle of le Guaisnic, which stands on a hill, was still worth fifty thousand francs; but by a single vote the National Assembly suppressed the fines on leases and sales paid to the feudal lords. In such circumstances, this family, no longer of any consequence in France, would be a subject of ridicule in Paris; at Guérande it is an epitome of Brittany. At Guérande the Baron du Guaisnic is one of the great barons of France, one of the men above whom there is but one⁠—the King of France, chosen of old to be their chief. In these days the name of du Guaisnic⁠—full of local meanings, of which the etymology has been explained in Les Chouans, or Brittany in 1799⁠—has undergone the same change as disfigures that of du Guaisqlain. The tax-collector, like everyone else, writes it Guénic.

At the end of a silent, damp, and gloomy alley, formed by the gabled fronts of the neighboring houses, the arch of a door in the wall may be seen, high and wide enough to admit a horseman, which is in itself sufficient evidence of the house having been finished at a time when carriages as yet were not. This arch, raised on jambs, is all of granite. The door, made of oak, has cracked like the bark of the trees that furnished the timber, and is set with enormous nails in a geometrical pattern. The arch is coved, and displays the coat-of-arms of the du Guaisnics, as sharp and clean-cut as though the carver had but just finished it. This shield would delight an amateur of heraldry by its simplicity, testifying to the pride and the antiquity of the family. It is still the same as on the day when the crusaders of the Christian world invented these symbols to know each other by; the Guaisnics have never quartered their bearings with any others. It is always true to itself, like the arms of France, which heralds may recognize borne in chief or quarterly in the coats of the oldest families. This is the blazon, as you still may see it at Guérande: Gules, a hand proper manched ermine holding a sword argent in pale, with this tremendous motto, Fac. Is not that a fine and great thing? The wreath of the baronial coronet surmounts this simple shield, on which the vertical lines used, instead of color, to represent gules, are still clear and sharp.

The sculptor has given an indescribable look of pride and chivalry to the hand. With what vigor does it hold the sword which has done the family service only yesterday! Indeed, if you should go to Guérande after reading this story, you will not look at that coat-of-arms without a thrill. The most determined Republican cannot fail to be touched by the fidelity, the nobleness, and the dignity buried at the bottom of that narrow street. The du Guaisnics did well yesterday; they are ready to do well tomorrow. “To do” is the great word of chivalry. “You did well in the fight,” was always the praise bestowed by the High Constable par excellence, the great du Guesclin, who for a while drove the English out of France. The depth of the carving, protected from the weather by the projecting curved margin of the arch, seems in harmony with the deeply graven moral of the motto in the spirit of this family. To those who know the Guaisnics this peculiarity is very pathetic.

The open door reveals a fairly large courtyard with stables to the right and kitchen offices to the left. The house is built of squared stone from cellar to garret. The front to the courtyard has a double flight of outside steps; the decorated landing at the top is covered with vestiges of sculpture much injured by time; but the eye of the antiquarian can still distinguish in the centrepiece of the principal ornament the hand holding the sword. Below this elegant balcony, graced with mouldings now broken in many places, and polished here and there by long use, is a little lodge, once occupied by a watchdog. The stone balustrade is disjointed, and weeds, tiny flowers, and mosses sprout in the seams and on the steps, which ages have dislodged without destroying their solidity. The door into the house must have been pretty in its day. So far as the remains allow us to judge, it must have been wrought by an artist trained in the great Venetian school of the thirteenth century; it shows a singular combination of the Mauresque and Byzantine styles, and is crowned by a semicircular bracket, which is overgrown with plants, a posy of rose, yellow, brown, or blue, according to the season. The door, of nail-studded oak, opens into a vast hall, beyond which is a similar door leading to such another balcony, and steps down into the garden.

This hall is in wonderful preservation. The wainscot, up to the height of a man’s elbow, is in chestnut wood; the walls above are covered with splendid Spanish leather stamped in relief, its gilding rubbed and rusty. The ceiling is coffered, artistically moulded, painted, and gilt, but the gold is scarcely visible; it is in the same condition as that on the Cordova leather; a few red flowers and green leaves can still be seen. It seems probable that cleaning would revive the paintings, and show them to be like those which decorate the woodwork of the House at Tours, called “la Maison de Tristan,” which would prove that they had been restored or repaired in the time of Louis XI. The fireplace is enormous, of carved stone, with huge wrought-iron dogs of the finest workmanship. They would carry a cartload of logs. All the seats in this hall are of oak, and have the family shield carved on their backs. Hanging to nails on the wall are three English muskets, fit alike for war or for sport, three cavalry swords, two gamebags, and various tackle for hunting and fishing.

On one side is the dining-room, communicating with the kitchen by a door in a corner turret. This turret corresponds with another in the general design of the front, containing a winding-stair up to the two stories above. The dining-room is hung with tapestries dating from the fourteenth century; the style and spelling of the legends on ribbons below each figure prove their antiquity; but as they are couched in the frank language of the Fabliaux, they cannot be transcribed here. These pieces, which are well preserved in the corners where the light has not faded them, are set in frames of carved oak now as black as ebony. The ceiling is supported on beams carved with foliage, and all different; the flats between are of painted wood, wreaths of flowers on a blue ground. Two old dressers with cupboards face each other; and on the shelves, rubbed with Breton perseverance by Mariotte the cook, may be seen now⁠—as at the time when kings were quite as poor in 1200 as the du Guaisnics in 1830⁠—four old goblets, an ancient soup-tureen, and two saltcellars in silver, a quantity of metal plates, a number of blue and gray stoneware jugs with arabesque designs and the du Guaisnic arms, and crowned with hinged metal lids.

The fireplace has been modernized; its state shows that since the last century this has been the family sitting-room. It is of carved stone in the Louis XV style, surmounted by a mirror framed in a beaded and gilt moulding. This anachronism, to which the family is indifferent, would grieve a poet. On the shelf, covered with red velvet, there stands in the middle a clock of tortoiseshell, inlaid with brass, flanked by a pair of silver candelabra of strange design. A large table on heavy twisted legs stands in the middle of the room; the chairs are of turned wood, covered with tapestry. A round table with a centre leg and claw carved to represent a vine-stock stands in front of the window to the garden, and on it stands a quaint lamp. This lamp is formed of a globe of common glass, rather smaller than an ostrich’s egg, held in a candlestick by a glass knob at the bottom. From an opening at the top comes a flat wick in a sort of brass nozzle; the plait of cotton, curled up like a worm in a phial, is fed with nut oil from the glass vessel. The window looking out on the garden, like that on the courtyard⁠—for they are alike⁠—has stone mullions and hexagon panes set in lead; they are hung with curtains and valances, decorated with heavy tassels of an old-fashioned stuff⁠—red silk shot with yellow, formerly known as brocatelle or damask.

Each floor of the house⁠—there are but two below the attics⁠—consists of only two rooms. The first floor was of old inhabited by the head of the family; the second was given up to the children; guests were lodged in the attic rooms. The servants were housed over the kitchens and stables. The sloping roof, leaded at every angle, has to the front and back alike a noble dormer window with a pointed arch, almost as high as the ridge of the roof, supported on graceful brackets; but the carving of the stone is worn and eaten by the salt vapor of the atmosphere. Above the windows, divided into four by mullions of carved stone, the aristocratic weathercock still creaks as it veers.

A detail, precious by its originality, and not devoid of merit in the eyes of the archaeologist, must not be overlooked. The turret containing the winding stairs finishes the angle of a broad gabled wall in which there is no window. The stairs go down to a small arched door, opening on a sandy plot dividing the house from the outer wall which forms the back of the stables. The turret is repeated at the corner of the garden front; but instead of being circular, this turret has five angles and a hemispherical dome; also, it is crowned by a little belfry instead of carrying a conical cap like its sister. This is how those elegant architects lent variety to symmetry. On the level of the first floor these turrets are connected by a stone balcony, supported by brackets like prows with human heads. This outside gallery has a balustrade wrought with marvelous elegance and finish. Then from the top of the gable, below which there is a single small loophole, falls an ornamental stone canopy, like those which are seen over the heads of saints in a cathedral porch. Each turret has a pretty little doorway under a pointed arch, opening on to this balcony. Thus did the architects of the thirteenth century turn to account the bare, cold wall which is presented to us in modern times by the end section of a house.

Cannot you see a lady walking on this balcony in the morning, and looking out over Guérande to where the sun sheds a golden light on the sands, and is mirrored in the face of the ocean? Do you not admire this wall with its finial and gable, furnished at its corners with these reed-like turrets⁠—one suddenly rounded off like a swallow’s nest, the other displaying its little door and gothic arch decorated with the hand and sword?

The other end of the Hôtel du Guaisnic joins on to the next house.

The harmony of effect so carefully aimed at by the builders of that period is preserved in the front to the courtyard by the turret corresponding to that containing the winding stair or vyse, an old word derived from the French vis. It serves as a passage from the dining-room to the kitchen, but it ends at the first floor, and is capped by a little cupola on pillars covering a blackened statue of Saint Calixtus.

The garden is sumptuous within its ancient enclosure; it is more than half an acre in extent, and the walls are covered with fruit-trees; the square beds for vegetables are marked out by standards, and kept by a manservant named Gasselin, who also takes charge of the horses. At the bottom of the garden is an arbor with a bench under it. In the midst stands a sundial. The paths are graveled.

The garden front has no second turret to correspond with that at the corner of the gable; to make up for this there is a column with a spiral twist from bottom to top, which of old must have borne the standard of the family, for it ends in a large rusty iron socket in which lank weeds are growing. This ornament, harmonizing with the remains of stonework, shows that the building was designed by a Venetian architect; this elegant standard is like a sign manual left by Venice, and revealing the chivalry and refinement of the thirteenth century. If there could still be any doubt, the character of the details would remove them. The trefoils of the Guaisnic house have four leaves. This variant betrays the Venetian school debased by its trade with the East, since the semi-Mauresque architects, indifferent to Catholic symbolism, gave the trefoil a fourth leaf, while Christian architects remained faithful to the emblem of the Trinity. From this point of view Venetian inventiveness was heretical.

If this house moves you to admiration, you will wonder, perhaps, why the present age never repeats these miracles of art. In our day such fine houses are sold and pulled down, and make way for streets. Nobody knows whether the next generation will keep up the ancestral home, where each one abides as in an inn; whereas formerly men labored, or at least believed that they labored, for an eternal posterity. Hence the beauty of their houses. Faith in themselves worked wonders, as much as faith in God.

With regard to the arrangement and furniture of the upper stories, they can only be imagined from this description of the ground floor, and from the appearance and habits of the family. For the last fifty years the du Guaisnics have never admitted a visitor into any room but these two, which, like the courtyard and the external features of the house, are redolent of the grace, the spirit, and the originality of the noble province of old Brittany.

Without this topography and description of the town, without this detailed picture of their home, the singular figures of the family dwelling there might have been less well understood. The frame was necessarily placed before the portraits. Everyone must feel that mere things have an effect on people. There are buildings whose influence is visible on the persons who live near them. It is difficult to be irreligious under the shadow of a cathedral like that of Bourges. The soul that is constantly reminded of its destiny by imagery finds it less easy to fall short of it. So thought our ancestors, but the opinion is no longer held by a generation which has neither symbols nor distinctions, while its manners change every ten years. Do you not expect to find the Baron du Guaisnic, sword in hand⁠—or all this picture will be false?

In 1836, when this drama opens, in the early days of August, the family consisted still of Monsieur and Madame du Guénic, of Mademoiselle du Guénic, the Baron’s elder sister, and of a son aged one-and-twenty, named Gaudebert-Calyste-Louis, in obedience to an old custom in the family. His father’s name was Gaudebert-Calyste-Charles. Only the last name was ever changed; Saint-Gaudebert and Saint-Calixtus were always the patrons of the Guénics.

The Baron du Guénic had gone forth from Guérande as soon as la Vendée and Brittany had taken up arms, and he had fought with Charette, with Catelineau, La Rochejaquelein, d’Elbée, Bonchamps, and the Prince de Loudon. Before going, he had sold all his possessions to his elder sister, Mademoiselle Zéphirine du Guénic, a stroke of prudence unique in Revolutionary annals. After the death of all the heroes of the West, the Baron, preserved by some miracle from ending as they did, would not yield to Napoleon. He fought on till 1802, when, having narrowly escaped capture, he came back to Guérande, and from Guérande went to le Croisic, whence he sailed to Ireland⁠—faithful to the traditional hatred of the Bretons for England.

The good people of Guérande pretended not to know that the Baron was alive; during twenty years not a word betrayed him. Mademoiselle du Guénic collected the rents, and sent the money to her brother through the hands of fishermen.

In 1813, Monsieur du Guénic came back to Guérande with as little fuss as if he had been spending the summer at Nantes. During his sojourn in Dublin, in spite of his fifty years, the Breton noble had fallen in love with a charming Irish girl, the daughter of one of the oldest and poorest houses of that unhappy country. Miss Fanny O’Brien was at that time one-and-twenty. The Baron du Guénic came to fetch the papers needed for his marriage, went back to be married, and returned ten months later, at the beginning of 1814, with his wife, who gave birth to a son on the very day when Louis XVIII landed at Calais⁠—which accounts for the name of Louis.

The loyal old man was now seventy-three years old, but the guerilla warfare against the Republic, his sufferings during five sea voyages in open boats, and his life at Dublin, had all told on him; he looked more than a hundred. Hence, never had there been a Guénic whose appearance was in more perfect harmony with the antiquity of the house built at a time when a Court was held at Guérande.

Monsieur du Guénic was a tall old man, upright, shriveled, strongly knit, and lean. His oval face was puckered by a thousand wrinkles, forming arched fringes above the cheekbones and eyebrows, giving his face some resemblance to those of the old men painted with such a loving brush by Van Ostade, Rembrandt, Mieris, and Gerard Dow⁠—heads that need a magnifying glass to show their finish. His countenance was buried, as it were, under these numerous furrows produced by an open-air life, by the habit of scanning the horizon in the sunshine, at sunrise, and at the fall of day. But the sympathetic observer could still discern the imperishable forms of the human face, which always speak to the soul even when the eye sees no more than a death’s head. The firm modeling of the features, the high brow, the sternness of outline, the severe nose, the form of the bones which wounds alone can alter, expressed disinterested courage, boundless faith, implicit obedience, incorruptible fidelity, unchanging affection. In him the granite of Brittany was made man.

The Baron had no teeth. His lips, once red, but now blue, were supported only by the hardened gums with which he ate the bread his wife took care first to soften by wrapping it in a damp cloth, and they were sunk in his face while preserving a proud and threatening smile. His chin aimed at touching his nose; but the character of that nose⁠—high in the middle⁠—showed his Breton vigor and power of resistance. His complexion, marbled with red that showed through the wrinkles, was that of a full-blooded, high-tempered man, able to endure the fatigues which had often, no doubt, saved him from apoplexy. The head was crowned with hair as white as silver, falling in curls on his shoulders. This face, that seemed partly extinct, still lived by the brightness of a pair of black eyes, sparkling in their dark, sunken sockets, and flashing with the last fires of a generous and loyal soul. The eyebrows and eyelashes were gone. The skin had set, and would not yield; the difficulty of shaving compelled the old man to grow a fan-shaped beard.

What a painter would most have admired in this old lion of Brittany, with his broad shoulders and sinewy breast, was the hands, splendid soldier’s hands⁠—hands such as du Guesclin’s must have been, broad, firm, and hairy; the hands that had seized the sword never to relinquish it⁠—any more than Joan of Arc’s⁠—till the day when the royal standard floated in the Cathedral at Reims; hands that had often streamed with blood from the thorns of the Bocage⁠—the thickets of la Vendée⁠—that had pulled the oar in the Marais to steal upon the “blues,” or on the open sea to help Georges to land; the hands of a partisan and of a gunner, of a private and of a captain; hands that were now white, though the Bourbons of the elder branch were in exile; but if you looked at them, you could see certain recent marks revealing that the Baron, not so long ago, had joined Madame in la Vendée, since the truth may now be told. These hands were a living commentary on the noble motto to which no Guénic had ever been false, “Fac!”

The forehead attracted attention by the golden tone on the temples, in contrast with the tan of that narrow, hard, set brow to which baldness had given height enough to add majesty to the noble ruin. The whole countenance, somewhat unintellectual it must be owned⁠—and how should it be otherwise?⁠—had, like the other Breton faces grouped about it, a touch of savagery, a stolid calm, like the impassibility of Huron Indians, an indescribable stupidity, due perhaps to the complete reaction that follows on excessive fatigue when the animal alone is left evident. Thought was rare there; it was visibly an effort; its seat was in the heart rather than the head; and its outcome was action rather than an idea. But on studying this fine old man with sustained attention, the mystery could be detected of this practical antagonism to the spirit of the age. His feelings and beliefs were, so to speak, intuitive, and saved him all thought. He had learnt his duties by dint of living. Religion and Institutions thought for him. Hence he and his kindred reserved their powers of mind for action, without frittering them on any of the things they thought useless, though others considered them important. He brought his thought out of his mind as he drew his sword from the scabbard, dazzling with rectitude like the hand in its ermine sleeve on his coat-of-arms. As soon as this secret was understood everything was clear. It explained the depth of the resolutions due to clear, definite, loyal ideas, as immaculate as ermine. It accounted for the sale to his sister before the war, though to him it had meant everything⁠—death, confiscation, exile. The beauty of these two old persons’ characters⁠—for the sister lived only in and for her brother⁠—cannot be fully appreciated by the selfish habits which lie at the root of the uncertainty and changefulness of our day. An archangel sent down to read their hearts would not have found in them a single thought bearing the stamp of self. In 1814, when the priest of Guérande hinted to Baron du Guénic that he should go to Paris to claim his reward, the old sister, though avaricious for the family, exclaimed:

“Shame! Need my brother go begging like a vagrant?”

“It would be supposed that I had served the King from interested motives,” said the old man. “Besides, it is his business to remember. And, after all, the poor King has enough to do with all who are harassing him. If he were to give France away piecemeal, he would still be asked for more.”

This devoted servant, who cared so loyally for Louis XVIII, received a colonelcy, the Cross of Saint-Louis, and a pension of two thousand francs.

“The King has remembered!” he exclaimed, on receiving his letters patent.

No one undeceived him. The business had been carried through by the Duc de Feltre from the lists of the Army of la Vendée, in which he found the name of du Guénic with a few other Breton names ending in ic.

And so, in gratitude to the King, the Baron stood a siege at Guérande in 1815 against the forces of General Travot; he would not surrender the stronghold; and when he was compelled to evacuate, he made his escape into the woods with a party of Chouans, who remained under arms till the second return of the Bourbons. Guérande still preserves the memory of this last siege. If the old Breton trainbands had but joined, the war begun by this heroic resistance would have fired the whole of la Vendée.

It must be confessed that the Baron du Guénic was wholly illiterate⁠—as illiterate as a peasant; he could read, write, and knew a little of arithmetic; he understood the art of war and heraldry; but he had not read three books in his life besides his prayerbook.

His dress, a not unimportant detail, was always the same; it consisted of heavy shoes, thick woolen stockings, velvet breeches of a greenish hue, a cloth waistcoat, and a coat with a high collar, on which hung the Cross of Saint-Louis.

Beautiful peace rested on his countenance, which, for a year past, frequent slumber, the precursor of death, seemed to be preparing for eternal rest. This constant sleepiness, increasing day by day, did not distress his wife, nor his now blind sister, nor his friends, whose medical knowledge was not great. To them these solemn pauses of a blameless but weary soul were naturally accounted for⁠—the Baron had done his duty. This told all.

In this house the predominant interest centred in the fate of the deposed elder branch. The future of the exiled Bourbons and the Catholic religion, and the influence of the new politics on Brittany, exclusively absorbed the Baron’s family. No other interest mingled with these but the affection they all felt for the son of the house, Calyste, the heir and only hope of the great name of du Guénic. The old Vendéen, the old Chouan, had known a sort of renewal of his youth a few years since, to give his son the habit of those athletic exercises that befit a gentleman who may be called upon to fight at any moment. As soon as Calyste reached the age of sixteen, his father had gone out with him in the woods and marshes, teaching him by the pleasures of sport the rudiments of war, preaching by example, resisting fatigue, steadfast in the saddle, sure of his aim, whatever the game might be, ground game or birds, reckless in overcoming obstacles, inciting his son to face danger as though he had ten children to spare.

Then, when the Duchesse de Berry came to France to conquer the kingdom, the father carried off his son to make him act on the family motto. The Baron set out in the night without warning his wife, who might perhaps have displayed her emotion, leading his only child under fire as if it were to a festival, and followed by Gasselin, his only vassal, who rode forth gleefully. The three men of the house were away for six months, without sending any news to the Baroness⁠—who never read the Quotidienne without quaking over every line⁠—nor to her old sister-in-law, heroically upright, whose brow never flinched as she listened to the paper. So the three muskets hanging in the hall had seen service recently. The Baron, in whose opinion this call to arms was unavailing, had left the field before the fight at la Penissière, otherwise the race of Guénic might have become extinct.

When, one night of dreadful weather, the father, son, and serving-man had reached home after taking leave of Madame, surprising their friends, the Baroness, and old Mademoiselle du Guénic⁠—though she, by a gift bestowed on all blind people, had recognized the steps of three men in the little street⁠—the Baron looked round on the circle of his anxious friends gathered round the little table lighted up by the antique lamp, and merely said, in a quavering voice, while Gasselin hung up the muskets and swords in their place, these words of feudal simplicity:

“Not all the Barons did their duty.”

Then he kissed his wife and sister, sat down in his old armchair, and ordered supper for his son, himself, and Gasselin. Gasselin, having screened Calyste with his body, had received a sabre cut on his shoulder; such a small matter, that he was scarcely thanked for it.

Neither the Baron nor his guests uttered a curse or a word of abuse of the conquerors. This taciturnity is a characteristically Breton trait. In forty years no one had ever heard a contemptuous speech from the Baron as to his adversaries. They could but do their business, as he did his duty. Such stern silence is an indication of immutable determination.

This last struggle, the flicker of exhausted powers, had resulted in the weakness under which the Baron was now ailing. The second exile of the Bourbons, as miraculously ousted as they had been miraculously restored, plunged him in bitter melancholy.

At about six in the evening, on the day when the scene opens, the Baron, who, according to old custom, had done his dinner by four o’clock, had gone to sleep while listening to the reading of the Quotidienne. His head rested against the back of his armchair by the fireside, at the garden end.

The Baroness, sitting on one of the old chairs in front of the fire, by the side of this gnarled trunk of an ancient tree, was of the type of those adorable women which exist nowhere but in England, Scotland, or Ireland. There only do we find girls kneaded with milk, golden-haired, with curls twined by angels’ fingers, for the light of heaven seems to ripple over their tendrils with every air that fans them. Fanny O’Brien was one of those sylphs, strong in tenderness, invincible in misfortune, as sweet as the music of her voice, as pure as the blue of her eyes, elegantly lovely and refined, with the prettiness and the exquisite flesh⁠—satin to the touch and a joy to the eye⁠—that neither pencil nor pen can do justice to. Beautiful still at forty-two, many a man would have been happy to marry her as he looked at the charms of this glorious, richly-toned autumn, full of flower and fruit, and renewed by dews from heaven. The Baroness held the newspaper in a hand soft with dimples, and turned-up fingertips with squarely-cut nails like those of an antique statue. She leaned back in her chair, without awkwardness or affectation, her feet thrust forward to get warm; and she wore a black velvet dress, for the wind had turned cold these last few days. The bodice, fitting tight to the throat, covered shoulders of noble outline and a bosom which had suffered no disfigurement from having nursed an only child. Her hair fell in ringlets on each side of her face, close to her cheeks, in the English fashion; a simple twist on the top of her head was held by a tortoiseshell comb; and the mass, instead of being of a doubtful hue, glittered in the light like threads of brownish gold. She had made a plait of the loose, short hairs that grow low down and are a mark of fine breeding. This tiny tress, lost in the rest of her hair that was combed high on her head, allowed the eye to note with pleasure the flowing line from her neck to her beautiful shoulders. This little detail shows the care she always gave to her toilet. She persisted in charming the old man’s eye. What a delightful and touching attention!

When you see a woman lavishing in her home life the care for appearance which other women find for one feeling only, you may be sure that she is a noble mother, as she is a noble wife, the joy and flower of the household; she understands her duties as a woman, the elegance of her appearance dwells in her soul and her affections, she does good in secret, she knows how to love truly without ulterior motives, she loves her neighbor as she loves God for Himself. And it really seemed as though the Virgin in Paradise, under whose protection she lived, had rewarded her chaste girlhood and saintly womanhood by the side of the noble old man by throwing over her a sort of glory that preserved her from the ravages of time.

Plato would perhaps have honored the fading of her beauty as so much added grace. Her skin, once so white, had acquired those warm and pearly tones that painters delight in. Her forehead, broad and finely moulded, seemed to love the light that played on it with sheeny touches. Her eyes of turquoise-blue gleamed with wonderful softness under light, velvety lashes. The drooping lids and pathetic temples suggested some unspeakable, silent melancholy; below the eyes her cheeks were dead white, faintly veined with blue to the bridge of the nose. The nose, aquiline and thin, had a touch of royal dignity, a reminder of her noble birth. Her lips, pure and delicately cut, were graced by a smile, the natural outcome of inexhaustible good humor. Her teeth were small and white. She had grown a little stout, but her shapely hips and slender waist were not disfigured by it; the autumn of her beauty displayed still some bright flowers forgotten by spring and the warmer glories of summer. Her finely moulded arms, her smooth, lustrous skin had gained a finer texture; the forms had filled out. And her open, serene countenance, with its faint color, the purity of her blue eyes, to which too rude a gaze would have been an offence, expressed unchanging gentleness, the infinite tenderness of the angels.

At the other side of the fireplace, in another armchair, sat the old sister of eighty, in every particular but dress the exact image of her brother; she listened to the paper while knitting stockings, for which sight is not needed. Her eyes were darkened by cataract, and she obstinately refused to be operated on, in spite of her sister-in-law’s entreaties. She alone knew the secret motive of her determination; she ascribed it to lack of courage, but in fact she did not choose that twenty-five louis should be spent on her; there would have been so much less in the house. Nevertheless, she would have liked to see her brother again. These two old people were an admirable foil to the Baroness’ beauty. What woman would not have seemed young and handsome between Monsieur du Guénic and his sister?

Mademoiselle Zéphirine, deprived of sight, knew nothing of the changes that her eighty years had wrought in her looks. Her pallid, hollow face, to which the fixity of her white and sightless eyes gave a look of death, while three or four projecting teeth added an almost threatening expression; in which the deep eye-sockets were circled with red lines, and a few manly hairs, long since white, were visible on the chin and lips⁠—this cold, calm face was framed in a little brown cotton hood quilted like a counterpane, edged with a cambric frill, and tied under her chin with ribbons that were never fresh. She wore a short upper skirt of stout cloth over a quilted petticoat, a perfect mattress, within which lurked double louis d’or; and she had pockets sewn to a waistband, which she took off at night and put on in the morning as a garment. Her figure was wrapped in the usual jacket bodice of Breton women, made of cloth like the skirt, and finished with a close pleated frill, of which the washing formed the only subject of difference between her and the Baroness; she insisted on changing it but once a week. Out of the wadded sleeves of this jacket came a pair of withered but sinewy arms, and two ever-busy hands, somewhat red, which made her arms look as white as poplar wood. These fingers, claw-like from the contraction induced by the habit of knitting, were like a stocking-machine in constant motion; the wonder would have been to see them at rest. Now and then Mademoiselle du Guénic would take one of the long knitting needles darned into the bosom of her dress, and push it in under her hood among her white hairs. A stranger would have laughed to see how calmly she stuck it in again, without any fear of pricking herself. She was as upright as a steeple; her columnar rigidity might be regarded as one of those old women’s vanities which prove that pride is a passion indispensable to vitality. She had a bright smile; she too had done her duty.

As soon as Fanny saw that the Baron was asleep, she ceased reading. A sunbeam shot across from window to window, cutting the atmosphere of the old room in two by a band of gold, and casting a glory on the almost blackened furniture. The light caught the carvings of the cornice, fluttered over the cabinets, spread a shining face over the oak table, and gave cheerfulness to this softly sombre room, just as Fanny’s voice brought to the old woman’s spirit a harmony as luminous and gay as the sunbeam. Ere long the rays of the sun assumed a reddish glow, which by insensible degrees sank to the melancholy hues of dusk. The Baroness fell into serious thought, one of those spells of perfect silence which her old sister-in-law had noticed during a fortnight past, trying to account for them without questioning the Baroness in any way; but she was studying the causes of this absence of mind as only blind people can, who read, as it were, a black book with white letters, while every sound rings through their soul as though it were an oracular echo. The old blind woman, to whom the falling darkness now meant nothing, went on knitting, and the silence was so complete that the tick of her steel knitting needles could be heard.

“You have dropped the paper⁠—but you are not asleep, sister,” said the old woman sagaciously.

It was now dark; Mariotte came in to light the lamp, and placed it on a square table in front of the fire; then she fetched her distaff, her hank of flax, and a little stool, and sat down to spin in the window recess on the side towards the courtyard, as she did every evening. Gasselin was still busy in the outbuildings, attending to the Baron’s horse and that of Calyste, seeing that all was right in the stables, and giving the two fine hounds their evening meal. The glad barking of these two creatures was the last sound that roused the echoes lurking in the dark walls of the house.

These two horses and two dogs were the last remains of the splendor of chivalry. An imaginative man, sitting on the outer steps, and abandoning himself to the poetry of the images still living in this dwelling, might have been startled at hearing the dogs and the tramping hoofs of the neighing steeds.

Gasselin was one of the short, sturdy, square-built Breton race, with black hair and tanned faces, silent, slow, as stubborn as mules, but always going on the road marked out for them. He was now two-and-forty, and had lived in the house twenty-five years. Mademoiselle had engaged Gasselin as servant when he was fifteen, on hearing of the Baron’s marriage and probable return. This henchman considered himself a member of the family. He had played with Calyste, he loved the horses and dogs, and talked to them and petted them as though they were his own. He wore a short jacket of blue linen with little pockets that flapped over his hips, and a waistcoat and trousers of the same material, in all seasons alike, blue stockings and hobnailed shoes. When the weather was very cold or wet, he added the goatskin with the hair on, worn in his province.

Mariotte, who was also past forty, was as a woman exactly what Gasselin was as a man. Never did a better pair run in harness; the same color, the same figure, the same small, sharp black eyes. It was hard to imagine why Mariotte and Gasselin had never married; but it might have been criminal; they almost seemed like brother and sister. Mariotte had thirty crowns a year in wages, and Gasselin a hundred livres; but not for a thousand francs a year would they have quitted the house of the Guénics. They were both under the jurisdiction of old Mademoiselle, who had been in the habit of managing the house from the time of the war in la Vendée till her brother’s return. Hence she had been greatly upset on hearing that her brother was bringing home a mistress of the house, supposing that she would have to lay down the domestic sceptre in favor of the Baronne du Guénic, whose first subject she would then be.

Mademoiselle Zéphirine had been very agreeably surprised on finding that Miss Fanny O’Brien was born to a lofty position, a girl who detested the minute cares of housekeeping, and who, like all noble souls, would have preferred dry bread from the bakers to any food she had to prepare herself; capable of fulfilling all the duties of motherhood, strong to endure every necessary privation, but without energy for commonplace industry. When the Baron, in the name of his shrinking wife, begged his sister to rule the house, the old maid embraced the Baroness as her sister; she made a laughter of her, she adored her, happy in being allowed to continue her care of governing the house, and keeping it with incredible rigor and most economical habits, which she relaxed only on great occasions, such as her sister-in-law’s confinement and feeding, and everything that could affect Calyste, the worshiped son of the house.

Though the two servants were accustomed to this strict rule, and needed no telling; though they took more care of heir master’s interests than of their own, still Mademoiselle Zéphirine had an eye on everything. Her attention having nothing to divert it, she was the woman to know without going to look, how large the pile of walnuts should be in the loft, and how much corn was left in the stable-bin without plunging her sinewy arm into its depths. She wore a boatswain’s whistle attached by a string to her waistband, and called Mariotte by whistling once, and Gasselin by whistling twice. Gasselin’s chief happiness consisted in cultivating the garden and raising fine fruit and good vegetables. He had so little to do that but for his gardening he would have been bored to death. When he had groomed the horses in the morning he polished the floors, and cleaned the two ground-floor rooms; he had little to do for his masters. So in the garden you could not have found a weed or a noxious insect. Sometimes Gasselin might be seen standing motionless and bareheaded in the sunshine, watching for a field-rat or the dreadful larvae of the cockchafer; then he would rush in with a child’s glee to show the master the creature he had spent a week in catching. On fast days it was his delight to go to le Croisic to buy fish, cheaper there than at Guérande.

Never was there a family more united, on better terms, or more inseparable, than this pious and noble household. Masters and servants seemed to have been made for each other. In five-and-twenty years there had never been a trouble or a discord. The only sorrows they had known were the child’s little ailments, and the only anxieties had come of the events of 1814, and again of 1830. If the same things were invariably done at the same hours, if the food varied only with the changes of the seasons, this monotony, like that of nature, with its alternation of cloud, rain, and sunshine, was made endurable by the affection that filled every heart, and was all the more helpful and beneficent because it was the outcome of natural laws.

When twilight was ended, Gasselin came into the room and respectfully inquired whether he were wanted.

“After prayers you can go out, or go to bed,” said the Baron, rousing himself, “unless Madame or my sister⁠—”

The two ladies nodded agreement. Gasselin, seeing them all rise to kneel on their chairs, fell on his knees. Mariotte knelt on her stool. Old Mademoiselle du Guénic said prayers aloud.

As she finished, a knock was heard at the outer gate. Gasselin went to open it.

“It is Monsieur le Curé, no doubt; he is almost always the first,” remarked Mariotte.

And, in fact, they all recognized the footstep of the parish priest on the resonant steps to the balcony entrance. The Curé bowed respectfully to the three, addressing the Baron and the two ladies with the unctuous civility that a priest has at his command. In reply to an absentminded “Good evening” from the mistress of the house, he gave her a look of priestly scrutiny.

“Are you uneasy, madame, or unwell?” he asked.

“Thank you, no!” said she.

Monsieur Grimont, a man of about fifty, of middle height, wrapped in his gown, beneath which a pair of thick shoes with silver buckles were visible, showed above his bands a fat face, on the whole fair, but sallow. His hands were plump. His abbot-like countenance had something of the Dutch burgomaster in its calm complexion and the tones of the flesh, and something, too, of the Breton peasant in its straight black hair and sparkling black eyes, which nevertheless were under the control of priestly decorum. His cheerfulness, like that of all people whose conscience is calm and pure, consented to jest. There was nothing anxious or forbidding in his look, as in that of those unhappy priests whose maintenance or power is disputed by their parishioners, and who instead of being, as Napoleon so grandly said, the moral leaders of the people and natural justices of the peace, are regarded as enemies. The most unbelieving of strangers who should see Monsieur Grimont walking through Guérande would have recognized him as the sovereign of the Catholic town; but this sovereign abdicated his spiritual rule before the feudal supremacy of the du Guénic family. In this drawing-room he was as a chaplain in the hall of his liege. In church, as he gave the blessing, his hand always turned first towards the chapel of the House, where their hand and sword and their motto were carved on the keystone of the vaulting.

“I thought that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was here,” said the Curé, seating himself, as he kissed the Baroness’ hand. “She is losing her good habits. Is the fashion for dissipation spreading? For I observe that Monsieur le Chevalier is at les Touches again this evening.”

“Say nothing of his visits there before Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël,” exclaimed the old lady in an undertone.

“Ah! mademoiselle,” Mariotte put in, “how can you keep the whole town from talking?”

“And what do they say?” asked the Baroness.

“All the girls and the old gossips⁠—everybody, in short⁠—is saying that he is in love with Mademoiselle des Touches.”

“A young fellow so handsome as Calyste is only following his calling by making himself loved,” said the Baron.

“Here is Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël,” said Mariotte.

The gravel in the courtyard was, in fact, heard to crunch under this lady’s deliberate steps, heralded by a lad bearing a lantern. On seeing this retainer, Mariotte transferred her stool and distaff to the large hall, where she could chat with him by the light of the rosin candle that burned at the cost of the rich and stingy old maid, thus saving her master’s.

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël was a slight, thin woman, as yellow as the parchment of an archive, and wrinkled like a lake swept by the wind, with gray eyes, large, prominent teeth, and hands like a man’s; she was short, certainly crooked, and perhaps even humpbacked; but no one had ever been curious to study her perfections or imperfections. Dressed in the same style as Mademoiselle du Guénic, she made quite a commotion in a huge mass of petticoats and frills when she tried to find one of the two openings in her gown by which she got at her pockets; the strangest clinking of keys and money was then heard from beneath these skirts. All the iron paraphernalia of a good housewife was to be found on one side, and on the other her silver snuffbox, her thimble, her knitting, and other jangling objects.

Instead of the quilted hood worn by Mademoiselle du Guénic, she had a green bonnet, which she no doubt wore when she went to look at her melons; like them, it had faded from green to yellow, and as for its shape, fashion has lately revived it in Paris under the name of Bibi. This bonnet was made under her own eye by her nieces, of green sarcenet purchased at Guérande, on a shape she bought new every five years at Nantes⁠—for she allowed it the life of an administration. Her nieces also made her gowns, cut by an immemorial pattern. The old maid still used the crutch-handled cane which ladies carried at the beginning of the reign of Marie-Antoinette. She was of the first nobility of Brittany. On her shield figured the ermines of the ancient duchy; the illustrious Breton house of Pen-Hoël ended in her and her sister.

This younger sister had married a Kergarouët, who, in spite of the disapprobation of the neighbors, had added the name of Pen-Hoël to his own, and called himself the Vicomte de Kergarouët-Pen-Hoël.

“Heaven has punished him,” the old maid would say. “He has only daughters, and the name of Kergarouët-Pen-Hoël will become extinct.”

Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël enjoyed an income of about seven thousand francs from land. For thirty-six years, since she had come of age, she herself had managed her estates; she rode out to inspect them, and on every point displayed the firmness of will characteristic of deformed persons. Her avarice was the amazement of all for ten leagues round, but viewed with no disapprobation. She kept one woman servant and this lad; all her expenditure, not inclusive of taxes, did not come to more than a thousand francs a year. Hence she was the object of the most flattering attentions from the Kergarouët-Pen-Hoëls, who spent the winter at Nantes, and the summer at their country-house on the banks of the Loire just below Indret. It was known that she intended to leave her fortune and her savings to that one of her nieces whom she might prefer. Every three months one of the four Demoiselles de Kergarouët came to spend a few days with her.

Jacqueline de Pen-Hoël, a great friend of Zéphirine du Guénic’s, and brought up in the faith and fear of the Breton dignity of the Guénics, had conceived a plan, since Calyste’s birth, of securing her wealth to this youth by getting him to marry one of these nieces, to be bestowed on him by the Vicomtesse de Kergarouët-Pen-Hoël. She proposed to repurchase some of the best land for the Guénics by paying off the farmers’ loans. When avarice has an end in view, it ceases to be a vice; it is the instrument of virtue; its stern privations become a constant sacrifice; in short, it has greatness of purpose concealed beneath its meanness. Zéphirine was perhaps in Jacqueline’s secret. Perhaps, too, the Baroness, whose whole intelligence was absorbed in love for her son and tender care for his father, may have guessed something when she saw with what pertinacious perseverance Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël would bring with her, day after day, Charlotte de Kergarouët, her favorite niece, now fifteen. The priest, Monsieur Grimont, was undoubtedly in her confidence; he helped the old lady to invest her money well. But if Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had had three hundred thousand francs in gold⁠—the sum at which her savings were commonly estimated; if she had had ten times more land than she owned, the du Guénics would never have allowed themselves to pay her such attention as might lead the old maid to fancy that they were thinking of her fortune. With an admirable instinct of truly Breton pride, Jacqueline de Pen-Hoël, gladly accepting the supremacy assumed by her old friends Zéphirine and the du Guénics, always expressed herself honored by a visit when the descendant of Irish Kings and Zéphirine condescended to call on her. She went so far as to conceal with care the little extravagance which she winked at every evening by permitting her boy to burn an oribus at the du Guénics⁠—the gingerbread colored candle which is commonly used in various districts in the West. This rich old maid was indeed aristocracy, pride, and dignity personified.

At the moment when the reader is studying her portrait, an indiscretion on the part of the Curé had betrayed the fact that, on the evening when the old Baron, the young Chevalier, and Gasselin stole away armed with swords and fowling-pieces to join Madame in la Vendée⁠—to Fanny’s extreme terror, and to the great joy of the Bretons⁠—Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had placed in the Baron’s hands a sum of ten thousand francs in gold, an immense sacrifice, supplemented by ten thousand francs more, the fruits of a tithe collected by the Curé, which the old partisan was requested to lay at the feet of Henry V’s mother, in the name of the Pen-Hoëls and of the parish of Guérande.

Meanwhile, she treated Calyste with the airs of a woman who believes she is in her rights; her schemes justified her in keeping an eye on him; not that she was straitlaced in her ideas as to questions of gallantry⁠—she had all the indulgence of a woman of the old regime; but she had a horror of Revolutionary manners. Calyste, who might have risen in her esteem by intrigues with Breton women, would have fallen immensely if she had taken up what she called the newfangled ways. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, who would have unearthed a sum of money to pay off a girl he had seduced, would have regarded Calyste as a reckless spendthrift if she had seen him driving a tilbury, or heard him talk of setting out for Paris. And if she had found him reading some impious review or newspaper, it is impossible to imagine what she might have done. To her, new notions meant the rotation of crops, sheer ruin under the guise of improvements and method, lands ultimately mortgaged as a result of experiments. To her, thrift was the real way to make a fortune; good management consisted in filling her outhouses with buckwheat, rye, and hemp, in waiting for prices to rise at the risk of being known to force the market, and in resolutely hoarding her corn-sacks. As it happened, strangely enough, she had often met with good bargains that confirmed her in her principles. She was thought cunning, but she was not really clever; she had only the methodical habits of a Dutch woman, the caution of a cat, the pertinacity of a priest; and this, in a land of routine, was as good as the deepest perspicacity.

“Shall we see Monsieur du Halga this evening?” asked Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, taking off her knitted worsted mittens after exchanging the usual civilities.

“Yes, mademoiselle, I saw him airing his dog in the Mall,” replied the Curé.

“Then our mouche will be lively this evening,” said she. “We were but four last night.”

On hearing the word mouche, the priest rose, and brought out of a drawer of one of the cabinets a small, round basket of fine willow, some ivory counters as yellow as Turkish tobacco, from twenty years’ service, and a pack of cards as greasy as those of the customhouse officers of Saint-Nazaire, who only have a new pack once a fortnight. The Abbé himself sorted out the proper number of counters for each player, and put the basket by the lamp in the middle of the table, with childish eagerness and the manner of a man accustomed to fulfil this little task. A loud rap in military style presently echoed through the silent depths of the old house. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s little servant went solemnly to open the gate. Before long, the tall, lean figure of the Chevalier du Halga, formerly flag-captain under Admiral de Kergarouët, was seen, carefully dressed to suit the season, a black object in the dusk that still prevailed outside.

“Come in, Chevalier,” cried Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“The altar is prepared!” said the priest.

Du Halga, whose health was poor, wore flannel for the rheumatism, a black silk cap to protect his head against the fog, and a spencer to guard his precious chest from the sudden blasts of wind that refresh the atmosphere of Guérande. He always went about armed with a rattan to drive off dogs when they tried to make inopportune love to his own, which was a lady. This man, as minutely particular as any fine lady, put out by the smallest obstacles, speaking low to spare the voice remaining to him, had been in his day one of the bravest and most capable officers of the King’s navy. He had been honored with the confidence of the Bailli de Suffren, and the Comte de Portenduère’s friendship. His valor, as captain of Admiral de Kergarouët’s flagship, was scored in legible characters on his face, seamed with scars. No one, on looking at him, could have recognized the voice that had roared down the storm, the eye that had swept the horizon, the indomitable courage of a Breton seaman. He did not smoke, he never swore; he was as gentle and quiet as a girl, and devoted himself to his dog Thisbe and her various little whims with the absorption of an old woman. He gave everyone a high idea of his departed gallantry. He never spoke of the startling acts which had amazed the Comte d’Estaing.

Though he stooped like a pensioner, and walked as though he feared to tread on eggs at every step, though he complained of a cool breeze, of a scorching sun, of a damp fog, he displayed fine white teeth set in red gums, which were reassuring as to his health; and, indeed, his complaint must have been an expensive one, for it consisted in eating four meals a day of monastic abundance. His frame, like the Baron’s, was large-boned and indestructibly strong, covered with parchment stretched tightly over the bones, like the coat of an Arab horse that shines in the sun over its sinews. His complexion had preserved the tanned hue it had acquired in his voyages to India, but he had brought back no ideas and no reminiscences. He had emigrated; he had lost all his fortune; then he had recovered the Cross of Saint-Louis and a pension of two thousand francs, legitimately earned by his services, and paid out of the fund for naval pensions. The harmless hypochondria that led him to invent a thousand imaginary ailments was easily accounted for by his sufferings during the emigration. He had served in the Russian navy till the day when the Emperor Alexander wanted him to serve against France; he then retired and went to live at Odessa, near the Duc de Richelieu, with whom he came home, and who procured the payment of the pension due to this noble wreck of the old Breton navy.

At the death of Louis XVIII he came home to Guérande, and was chosen mayor of the town. The Curé, the Chevalier, and Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had been for fifteen years in the habit of spending their evenings at the Hôtel du Guénic, whither also came a few persons of good family from the town and immediate neighborhood. It is easy to see that the Guénic family were the leaders of this little Faubourg Saint-Germain of the district, into which no official was admitted who had been appointed to his post by the new Government. For six years past the Curé invariably coughed at the critical words of Domine, salvum fac regem. Politics always stuck at that point in Guérande.

Mouche (a sort of loo) is a game played with five cards in each hand and a turn-up. The turned-up card decides the trumps. At every fresh deal each player is at liberty to play or to retire. If he throws away his hand, he loses only his deposit; for as long as no fines have been paid into the pool, each player must contribute to it. Those who play must make a trick, paid for in proportion to the contents of the pool; if there are five sous in the trick, he pays one sou. The player who fails to pay is “looed”; he then owes as much as the pool contains, which increases it for the following deal. The fines due are written down; they are added to the pools one after another in diminishing order, the heaviest before the lesser sums. Those who decline to play show their cards during the play, but they count for nothing. The players may discard and draw from the pack, as at écarté, in order of seniority. Each player may change as many cards as he likes, so the eldest and the second hands may use up the pack between them. The turned-up card belongs to the dealer, who is the youngest hand; he has a right to exchange it for any card in his own hand. One terrible card takes all others, and is known as “mistigris”; mistigris is the knave of clubs. This game, though so excessively simple, is not devoid of interest. The covetousness natural to man finds scope in it, as well as some diplomatic finessing and play of expression.

At the Hôtel du Guénic each player purchased twenty counters for five sous, by which the stake amounted to five liards each deal, an important sum in the eyes of these gamblers. With very great luck a player might win fifty sous, more than anyone in Guérande spent in a day. And Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël came to this game⁠—of which the simplicity is unsurpassed in the nomenclature of the Academy, unless by that of Beggar my Neighbor⁠—with an eagerness as great as that of a sportsman at a great hunting party. Mademoiselle Zéphirine, who was the Baroness’ partner, attached no less importance to the game of mouche. To risk a liard for the chance of winning five, deal after deal, constituted a serious financial speculation to the thrifty old woman, and she threw herself into it with as much moral energy as the greediest speculator puts into gambling on the Bourse for the rise and fall of shares.

By a diplomatic convention, dating from September, 1825, after a certain evening when Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had lost thirty-seven sous, the game was ended as soon as anyone expressed a wish to that effect after losing ten sous. Politeness would not allow of a player being put to the little discomfort of looking on at the game without taking part in it. But every passion has its Jesuitical side. The Chevalier du Halga and the Baron, two old politicians, had found a way of evading the act. When all the players were equally eager to prolong an exciting game, the brave Chevalier, one of those bachelors who are prodigal and rich by the expenses they save, always offered to lend Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël or Mademoiselle Zéphirine ten counters when either of them had lost her five sous, on the understanding that she should repay them if she should win. An old bachelor might allow himself such an act of gallantry to the unmarried ladies. The Baron also would offer the old maids ten counters, under pretence of not stopping the game. The avaricious old women always accepted, not without some pressing, after the usage and custom of old maids. But to allow themselves such a piece of extravagance, the Baron and the Chevalier must first have won, otherwise the offer bore the character of an affront.

This game was in its glory when a young Mademoiselle de Kergarouët was on a visit to her aunt⁠—Kergarouët only, for the family had never succeeded in getting itself called Kergarouët-Pen-Hoël by anybody here, not even by the servants, who had indeed peremptory orders on this point. The aunt spoke of the mouche parties at the du Guénics’ as a great treat. The girl was enjoined to make herself agreeable⁠—an easy matter enough when she saw the handsome Calyste, on whom the four young ladies all doted. These damsels, brought up in the midst of modern civilization, thought little of five sous, and paid fine after fine. Then fines would be scored up to a total sometimes of five francs, on a scale ranging from two sous and a half up to ten sous. These were evenings of intense excitement to the old blind woman. The tricks were called “mains” (or hands) at Guérande. The Baroness would press her foot on her sister-in-law’s as many times as she had, as she believed, tricks in her hand. The question of play or no play on occasions when the pool was full led to secret struggles in which covetousness contended with alarms. The players would ask each other, “Are you coming in?” with feelings of envy of those who had good enough cards to tempt fate, and spasms of despair when they were forced to retire.

If Charlotte de Kergarouët, who was commonly thought foolhardy, was lucky in her daring when her aunt had won nothing, she was treated with coldness when they got home, and had a little lecture: “She was too decided and forward; a young girl ought not to challenge persons older than herself; she had an overbold manner of seizing the pool, or declaring to play; a young person should show more reserve and modesty in her manners; it was not seemly to laugh at the misfortunes of others,” and so forth.

Then perennial jests, repeated a thousand times a year, but always fresh, turned on the carriage of the basket when the pool overfilled it. They must get oxen to draw it, elephants, horses, asses, dogs. And at the end of twenty years no one noticed the staleness of the joke; it always provoked the same smile. It was the same thing with the remarks caused by the annoyance of seeing a pool taken from those who had helped to fill it and got nothing out. The cards were dealt with automatic slowness. They talked in chest-tones. And these respectable and highborn personages were so delightfully mean as to suspect each other’s play. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël almost always accused the Curé of cheating when he won a pool.

“But what is so odd,” the Curé would say, “is that I never cheat when I am fined.”

No one laid down a card without profound meditation, without keen scrutiny, and more or less astute hints, ingenious and searching remarks. The deals were interrupted, you may be sure, by gossip as to what was going on in the town, or discussions on politics. Frequently the players would pause for a quarter of an hour, their cards held in a fan against their chest, absorbed in talk. Then, if after such an interruption a counter was short in the pool, everybody was certain that his or her counter was not missing; and generally it was the Chevalier who made up the loss, under general accusations of thinking of nothing but the singing in his ears, his headache, or his fads, and of forgetting to put in. As soon as he had paid up a counter, old Zéphirine or the cunning hunchback was seized with remorse; they then fancied that perhaps the fault was theirs; they thought, they doubted; but, after all, the Chevalier could afford the little loss! The Baron often quite forgot what he was about when the misfortunes of the Royal family came under discussion.

Sometimes the game resulted in a way that was invariably a surprise to the players, who each counted on being the winner. After a certain number of rounds each had won back his counters, and went away, the hour being late, without loss or profit, but not without excitement. On these depressing evenings the mouche was abused; it had not been interesting; the players accused the game, as Negroes beat the reflection of the moon in water when the weather is bad. The evening had been dull; they had toiled so hard for so little.

When, on their first visit, the Vicomte de Kergarouët and his wife spoke of whist and boston as games more interesting than mouche, and were encouraged to teach them by the Baroness, who was bored to death by mouche, the company bent themselves to the innovation, not without strong protest; but it was impossible to make these games understood; and as soon as the Kergarouëts had left, they were spoken of as overwhelmingly abstruse, as algebraical puzzles, and incredibly difficult. They all preferred their beloved mouche, their unpretentious little mouche. And mouche triumphed over the modern games, as old things constantly triumph over new in Brittany.

While the Curé dealt the cards, the Baroness was asking the Chevalier du Halga the same question as she had asked the day before as to his health. The Chevalier made it a point of honor to have some new complaint. Though the questions were always the same, the Captain had a great advantage in his replies. Today his false ribs had been troubling him. The remarkable thing was that the worthy man never complained of his wounds. Everything serious he was prepared for, he understood it; but fantastic ailments⁠—pains in his head, dogs devouring his inside, bells ringing in his ears, and a thousand other crotchets worried him greatly; he set up as an incurable, with all the more reason that physicians know no remedy for maladies that are nonexistent.

“Yesterday, I fancy you had pains in your legs?” said the Curé very seriously.

“They move about,” replied du Halga.

“Legs in your false ribs?” asked Mademoiselle Zéphirine.

“And made no halt on the way?” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël with a smile.

The Chevalier bowed gravely, with a negative shake of the head, not without fun in it, which would have proved to an observer that in his youth the seaman must have been witty, loved, and loving. His fossilized life at Guérande covered perhaps many memories. As he stood planted on his heron legs in the sun, stupidly watching the sea, or his dog sporting on the Mall, perhaps he was alive again in the Earthly Paradise of a past rich in remembrance.

“So the old Duc de Lenoncourt is dead!” said the Baron, recalling the passage in the Quotidienne at which his wife had stopped. “Well, well, the first gentleman-in-waiting had not long to wait before following his master. I shall soon go too.”

“My dear! my dear!” said his wife, gently patting his lean and bony hand.

“Let him talk, sister,” said Zéphirine. “So long as I am above ground, he will not go under ground. He is younger than I am.”

A cheerful smile brightened the old woman’s face when the Baron dropped a reflection of this kind, the players and callers would look at each other anxiously, grieved to find the King of Guérande out of spirits. Those who had come to see him would say as they went away, “Monsieur du Guénic is much depressed; have you noticed how much he sleeps?” And next day all Guérande would be talking of it: “The Baron du Guénic is failing.” The words began the conversation in every house in the place.

“And is Thisbe well?” asked Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël as soon as the deal was over.

“The poor little beast is like me,” said the Chevalier. “Her nerves are out of order; she is always holding up one of her legs as she runs.⁠—Like this.”

And in showing how Thisbe ran, by bending his arm as he raised it, the Chevalier allowed his neighbor, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, to see his cards; she wanted to know whether he had trumps or mistigris. This was a first finesse to which he fell a prey.

“Oh!” exclaimed the Baroness, “the tip of Monsieur le Curé’s nose has turned pale, he must have mistigris!”

The joy of having mistigris was so great to the Curé, as to all the players, that the poor priest could not disguise it. There is in each human face some spot where every secret motion of the heart betrays itself; and these good people, accustomed to watch each other, had, after the lapse of years, discovered the weak place in the Curé⁠—when he had mistigris the tip of his nose turned white. Then they all took care not to play.

“You have had visitors today?” said the Chevalier to Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“Yes; one of my brother-in-law’s cousins. He surprised me by telling me of the intended marriage of Madame la Comtesse de Kergarouët, a demoiselle de Fontaine⁠—”

“A daughter of Grand-Jacques!” exclaimed du Halga, who during his stay in Paris had never left his Admiral’s side.

“The Countess inherits everything; she has married a man who was ambassador.⁠—He told me the most extraordinary things about our neighbor, Mademoiselle des Touches; so extraordinary, that I will not believe them. Calyste could never be so attentive to her; he has surely enough good sense to perceive such monstrosities.”

“Monstrosities!” said the Baron, roused by the word.

The Baroness and the priest looked meaningly at each other. The cards were dealt. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël had mistigris; she did not want to continue the conversation, but was glad to cover her delight under the general amazement caused by this word.

“It is your turn to lead, Monsieur le Baron,” said she, bridling.

“My nephew is not one of those young men who like monstrosities,” said Zéphirine, poking her knitting-pin through her hair.

“Mistigris!” cried Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, without answering her friend.

The Curé, who appeared fully informed as to all that concerned Calyste and Mademoiselle des Touches, did not enter the lists.

“What does she do that is so extraordinary, this Mademoiselle des Touches?” asked the Baron.

“She smokes,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël.

“It is very wholesome,” said the Chevalier.

“Her bacon?” asked the Baron.

“Her bacon! She does not save it,” retorted the old maid.

“Everyone played, and everyone is looed; I have the king, queen, and knave of trumps, mistigris, and a king,” said the Baroness. “The pool is ours, sister.”

This stroke, won without play, overwhelmed Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, who thought no more of Calyste and Mademoiselle des Touches. At nine o’clock no one remained in the room but the Baroness and the Curé. The four old people had gone away and to bed.

The Chevalier, as usual, escorted Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël to her own house in the Market Place, making remarks on the skill of the last player, on their good or ill luck, or on the ever-new glee with which Mademoiselle Zéphirine’s pocket engulfed her winnings, for the old blind woman made no attempt now to disguise the expression of her sentiments in her face. Madame du Guénic’s absence of mind was their subject tonight. The Chevalier had observed the charming Irishwoman’s inattention to the game. On the doorstep, when her boy had gone upstairs, the old lady replied in confidence to the Chevalier’s guesses as to the Baroness’ strange manner by these words, big with importance:

“I know the reason; Calyste is done for if he is not soon married. He is in love with Mademoiselle des Touches⁠—an actress!”

“In that case, send for Charlotte.”

“My sister shall hear from me tomorrow,” said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, bidding him good night.

From this study of a normal evening, the commotion may be imagined that was produced in the home circles of Guérande by the arrival, the stay, the departure, or even the passing through of a stranger.

When not a sound was audible in the Baron’s room or in his sister’s, Madame du Guénic turned to the priest, who was pensively playing with the counters.

“I see that you at last share my uneasiness about Calyste,” she said.

“Did you notice Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s prim air this evening?” asked he.

“Yes,” replied the Baroness.

“She has, I know, the very best intentions towards our dear Calyste; she loves him as if he were her son; and his conduct in la Vendée at his father’s side, with Madame’s praise of his devoted behavior, has added to the affection Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël feels for him. She will endow either of her nieces whom Calyste may marry with all her fortune by deed of gift.

“You have, I know, in Ireland, a far richer match for your beloved boy; but it is well to have two strings to one’s bow. In the event of your family not choosing to undertake to settle anything on Calyste, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls fortune is not to be despised. You could, no doubt, find your son a wife with seven thousand francs a year, but not the savings of forty years, nor lands managed, tilled, and kept up as Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls are. That wicked woman, Mademoiselle des Touches, has come to spoil everything. We have at last found out something about her.”

“Well?” asked the mother.

“Oh, she is a slut, a baggage,” exclaimed the Curé. “A woman of doubtful habits, always hanging about the theatres in the company of actors and actresses, squandering her fortune with journalists, painters, musicians⁠—the devil’s own, in short! When she writes, she uses a different name in her books, and is better known by that, it is said, than by that of des Touches. A perfect imp, who has never been inside a church since her first communion, excepting to stare at statues or pictures. She has spent her fortune in decorating les Touches in the most improper manner to make it a sort of Muhammad’s Paradise, where the houris are not women. There is more good wine drunk there while she is in the place than in all Guérande besides in a year. Last year the Demoiselles Bougniol had for lodgers some men with goats’ beards, suspected of being ‘blues,’ who used to go to her house, and who sang songs that made those virtuous girls blush and weep. That is the woman your son at present adores.

“If that creature were to ask this evening for one of the atrocious books in which atheists nowadays laugh everything to scorn, the young Chevalier would come and saddle his horse with his own hands, to ride off at a gallop to fetch it for her from Nantes. I do not know that Calyste would do so much for the Church. And then, Bretonne as she is, she is not a Royalist. If it were necessary to march out, gun in hand, for the good cause, should Mademoiselle des Touches⁠—or Camille Maupin, for that, I remember, is her name⁠—want to keep Calyste with her, your son would let his old father set out alone.”

“No,” said the Baroness.

“I should not like to put him to the test, you might feel it too painfully,” replied the Curé. “All Guérande is in a commotion over the Chevalier’s passion for this amphibious creature that is neither man nor woman, who smokes like a trooper, writes like a journalist, and, at this moment, has under her roof the most malignant writer of them all, according to the postmaster⁠—a trimmer who reads all the papers. It is talked of at Nantes. This morning the Kergarouët cousin, who wants to see Charlotte married to a man who has sixty thousand francs a year, came to call on Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, and turned her head with roundabout tales about Mademoiselle des Touches which lasted seven hours.⁠—There is a quarter to ten striking by the church clock, and Calyste is not come in; he is at les Touches⁠—perhaps he will not come back till morning.”

The Baroness listened to the Curé, who had unconsciously substituted monologue for dialogue; he was looking at this lamb of his flock, reading her uneasy thoughts in her face. The Baroness was blushing and trembling. When the Abbé Grimont saw tears in the distressed mother’s beautiful eyes, he was deeply touched.

“I will see Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël tomorrow, be comforted,” said he, in an encouraging tone. “The mischief is, perhaps, not so great as rumor says; I will find out the truth. Besides, Mademoiselle Jacqueline has confidence in me. Again, we have brought up Calyste, and he will not allow himself to be bewitched by the demon; he will do nothing to disturb the peace of his family, or the plans we are making for his future life. Do not weep; all is not lost, madame; one fault is not vice.”

“You only tell me the details,” said the Baroness. “Was not I the first to perceive the change in Calyste? A mother feels keenly the pain of being second in her son’s affections, the grief of not being alone in his heart. That phase of a man’s life is one of the woes of motherhood; but though I knew it must come, I did not expect it so soon. And, then, I could have wished that he should have taken into his heart some beautiful and noble creature, not a mere actress, a posture-maker, a woman who frequents theatres, an authoress accustomed to feign feeling, a bad woman who will deceive him and make him wretched. She has had ‘affairs?’ ”

“With many men,” said the Abbé Grimont. “And yet this miscreant was born in Brittany. She is a disgrace to her native soil. On Sunday I will preach a sermon about her.”

“By no means!” exclaimed the Baroness. “The marshmen and peasants are capable of attacking les Touches. Calyste is worthy of his name; he is a true Breton; and some evil might come of it if he were there, for he would fight for her as if she were the Blessed Virgin.”

“It is striking ten; I will bid you good night,” said the Abbé, lighting the oribus of his lantern, of which the clear glass panes and glittering metalwork showed his housekeeper’s minute care for all the concerns of the house. “Who could have told me, madame,” he went on, “that a young man nursed at your breast, brought up by me in Christian ideas, a fervent Catholic, a boy who lived like a lamb without spot, would plunge into such a foul bog?”

“But is that quite certain?” said the mother. “And, after all, how could any woman help loving Calyste?”

“No proof is needed beyond that witch’s prolonged stay at les Touches. During twenty-four years, since she came of age, this is the longest visit she has paid here. Happily for us, her apparitions have hitherto been brief.”

“A woman past forty!” said the Baroness. “I have heard it said in Ireland that such a woman is the most dangerous mistress a young man can have.”

“On that point I am ignorant,” replied the Curé. “Nay, and I shall die in my ignorance.”

“Alas! and so shall I,” said the Baroness. “I wish now that I had ever been in love, to be able to study, advise, and comfort Calyste.”

The priest did not cross the clean little courtyard alone; Madame du Guénic went with him as far as the gate, in the hope of hearing Calyste’s step in Guérande; but she heard only the heavy sound of the Abbé’s deliberate tread, which grew fainter in the distance, and ceased when the shutting of the priest’s door echoed through the silent town.

The poor mother went indoors in despair at learning that the whole town was informed of what she had believed herself alone in knowing. She sat down, revived the lamp by cutting the wick with a pair of old scissors, and took up the worsted work she was accustomed to do while waiting for Calyste. She flattered herself that she thus induced her son to come home earlier, to spend less time with Mademoiselle des Touches. But this stratagem of maternal jealousy was in vain. Calyste’s visits to les Touches became more and more frequent, and every evening he came in a little later; at last, the previous night, he had not returned till midnight.

The Baroness, sunk in meditation, set her stitches with the energy of women who can think while following some manual occupation. Anyone who should have seen her bent to catch the light of the lamp, in the midst of the paneling of this room, four centuries old, must have admired the noble picture. Fanny’s flesh had a transparency that seemed to show her thoughts legible on her brow. Stung, now, by the curiosity that comes to pure-minded women, she wondered by what diabolical secrets these daughters of Baal so bewitched a man as to make him forget his mother and his family, his country, his self-interest. Then she went so far as to wish she could see the woman, so as to judge her sanely. She calculated the extent of the mischief that the innovating spirit of the age⁠—which the Curé described as so dangerous to youthful souls⁠—might do to her only child, till now as guileless and pure as an innocent girl, whose beauty could not be fresher than his.

Calyste, a noble offshoot of the oldest Breton and the noblest Irish blood, had been carefully brought up by his mother. Till the moment when the Baroness handed him over to the Curé of Guérande, she was sure that not an indecent word, nor an evil idea, had ever soiled her son’s ear or his understanding. The mother, after rearing him on her own milk, and thus giving him a double infusion of her blood, could present him in virginal innocence to the priest who, out of reverence for the family, undertook to give him a complete and Christian education. Calyste was educated on the plan of the Seminary where the Abbé Grimont had been brought up. His mother taught him English. A mathematical master was discovered, not without difficulty, among the clerks at Saint-Nazaire. Calyste, of course, knew nothing of modern literature, or of the latest advance and progress of science. His education was limited to the geography and emasculated history taught in girls’ schools, to the Latin and Greek of the Seminary, to the literature of dead languages, and a limited selection of French writers. When, at sixteen, he began what the Abbé called his course of philosophy, he was still as innocent as at the moment when Fanny had handed him over to the Curé. The Church was no less maternal than the mother; without being bigoted or ridiculous, this well-beloved youth was a fervent Catholic.

The Baroness longed to plan a happy and obscure life for her handsome and immaculate son. She expected some little fortune from an old aunt, about two or three thousand pounds sterling; this sum, added to the present fortune of the Guénics, might enable her to find a wife for Calyste who would bring him twelve or fifteen thousand francs a year. Charlotte de Kergarouët, with her aunt’s money, some rich Irish girl, or any other heiress⁠—it was a matter of indifference to the Baroness. She knew nothing of love; like all the people among whom she lived, she regarded marriage as a stepping-stone to fortune. Passion was a thing unknown to these Catholics, old people wholly occupied in saving their souls, in thinking of God, the king, and their own wealth.

No one, therefore, can be surprised at the gravity of the reflections that mingled with the wounded feelings in this mother’s heart, living, as she did, as much for her boy’s interests as by his affection. If the young couple would but listen to reason, by living parsimoniously and economizing, as Country folk know how, by the second generation the du Guénics might repurchase their estates and reconquer the splendor of wealth. The Baroness hoped to live to be old that she might see the dawn of that life of ease. Mademoiselle du Guénic had understood and adopted this scheme, and now it was threatened by Mademoiselle des Touches.

Madame du Guénic heard midnight strike with horror, and she endured an hour more of fearful alarms, for the stroke of one rang out, and still Calyste had not come home.

“Will he stay there?” she wondered. “It would be the first time⁠—poor child!”

At this moment Calyste’s step was heard in the street. The poor mother, in whose heart joy took the place of anxiety, flew from the room to the gate and opened it for her son.

“My dearest mother,” cried Calyste, with a look of vexation, “why sit up for me? I have the latchkey and a tinderbox.”

“You know, my child, that I can never sleep while you are out,” said she, kissing him.

When the Baroness had returned to the room, she looked into her son’s face to read in its expression what had happened during the evening; but this look produced in her, as it always did, a certain emotion which custom does not weaken⁠—which all loving mothers feel as they gaze at their human masterpiece, and which for a moment dims their sight.

Calyste had black eyes, full of vigor and sunshine, inherited from his father, with the fine, fair hair, the aquiline nose and lovely mouth, the turned-up fingertips, the soft complexion, finish, and fairness of his mother. Though he looked not unlike a girl dressed as a man, he was wonderfully strong. His sinews had the elasticity and tension of steel springs, and the singular effect of his black eyes had a charm of its own. As yet he had no hair on his face; this late development, it is said, is a promise of long life. The young Chevalier, who wore a short jacket of black velvet, like his mother’s gown, with silver buttons, had a blue neckerchief, neat gaiters, and trousers of gray drill. His snowy-white forehead bore the traces, as it seemed, of great fatigue, but, in fact, they were those of a burden of sad thoughts. His mother, having no suspicion of the sorrows that were eating the lad’s heart out, ascribed this transient change to happiness. Calyste was, nevertheless, as beautiful as a Greek god, handsome without conceit; for, in the first place, he was accustomed to see his mother, and he also cared but little for beauty, which he knew to be useless.

“And those lovely smooth cheeks,” thought she, “where the rich young blood flows in a thousand tiny veins, belong to another woman, who is mistress, too, of that girl-like brow? Passion will stamp them with its agitations, and dim those fine eyes, as liquid now as a child’s!”

The bitter thought fell heavy on Madame du Guénic’s heart, and spoilt her pleasure.

It must seem strange that, in a family where six persons were obliged to live on three thousand francs a year, the son should have a velvet coat, and the mother a velvet dress; but Fanny O’Brien had rich relations and aunts in London, who reminded the Breton Baroness of their existence by sending her presents. Some of her sisters, having married well, took an interest in Calyste so far as to think of finding him a rich wife, knowing that he was as handsome and as wellborn as their exiled favorite Fanny.

“You stayed later at les Touches than you did yesterday, my darling?” she said at last, in a broken voice.

“Yes, mother dear,” replied he, without adding any explanation.

The brevity of the answer brought a cloud to his mother’s brow; she postponed any explanation till the morrow. When mothers are disturbed by such alarms as the Baroness felt at this moment, they almost tremble before their sons; they instinctively feel the effects of the great emancipation of love; they understand all that this new feeling will rob them of; but, at the same time, they are, in a sense, glad of their son’s happiness; there is a fierce struggle in their heart. Though the result is that the son is grown up, and on a higher level, true mothers do not like their tacit abdication; they would rather keep their child little and wanting care. That, perhaps, is the secret of mothers’ favoritism for weakly, deformed, and helpless children.

“You are very tired, dear child,” said she, swallowing down her tears. “Go to bed.”

A mother who does not know everything her son is doing thinks of him as lost when she loves and is as well loved as Fanny. And perhaps any other mother would have quaked in her place as much as Madame du Guénic. The patience of twenty years might be made useless. Calyste⁠—a human masterpiece of noble, prudent, and religious training⁠—might be ruined; the happiness so carefully prepared for him might be destroyed forever by a woman.

Next day Calyste slept till noon, for his mother would not allow him to be roused; Mariotte gave the spoilt boy his breakfast in bed. The immutable and almost conventual rule that governed the hours of meals yielded to the young gentleman’s caprices. Indeed, when at any time it was necessary to obtain Mademoiselle du Guénic’s bunch of keys to get out something between meals which would necessitate interminable explanations, the only way of doing it was to plead some whim of Calyste’s.

At about one o’clock, the Baron, his wife, and Mademoiselle were sitting in the dining-room; they dined at three. The Baroness had taken up the Quotidienne, and was finishing it to her husband, who was always rather more wakeful before his meals. Just as she had done, Madame du Guénic heard her son’s step on the floor above, and laid down the paper, saying:

“Calyste, I suppose, is dining at les Touches again today; he has just finished dressing.”

“He takes his pleasure⁠—that boy!” said the old lady, pulling a silver whistle out of her pocket, and whistling once.

Mariotte came through the turret, making her appearance at the door, which was hidden by a silk damask curtain, like those at the windows.

“Yes,” said she, “did you please to want anything?”

“The Chevalier is dining at les Touches; we shall not want the fish.”

“Well, we do not know yet,” said the Baroness.

“You seem vexed about it, sister; I know by the tone of your voice,” said the blind woman.

“Monsieur Grimont has learnt some serious facts about Mademoiselle des Touches, who, during the last year, has done so much to change our dear Calyste.”

“In what way?” asked the Baron.

“Well, he reads all sorts of books.”

“Ah, ha!” said the Baron; “then that is why he neglects hunting and riding.”

“She leads a very reprehensible life, and calls herself by a man’s name,” Madame du Guénic went on.

“A nickname among comrades,” said the old man. “I used to be called ‘l’Intimé,’ the Comte de Fontaine was ‘Grand-Jacques,’ the Marquis de Montauran was ‘le Gars.’ I was a great friend of ‘Ferdinand’s’; he did not submit, any more than I did. Those were good times! There was plenty of fighting, and we had some fun here and there, all the same.”

These reminiscences of the war, thus taking the place of paternal anxiety, distressed Fanny for a moment. The Curé’s revelations, and her son’s want of confidence, had hindered her sleeping.

“And if Monsieur le Chevalier should be in love with Mademoiselle des Touches, where is the harm?” exclaimed Mariotte. “She is a fine woman, and has thirty thousand crowns a year.”

“What are you talking about, Mariotte,” cried the old man. “A du Guénic to marry a des Touches! The des Touches were not even our squires at a time when the du Guesclins regarded an alliance with us as a distinguished honor.”

“A woman who calls herself by a man’s name⁠—Camille Maupin!” added the Baroness.

“The Maupins are an old family,” said the old man. “They are Norman, and bear gules, three⁠—” he stopped short. “But she cannot be a man and a woman at the same time.”

“She calls herself Maupin at the theatre.”

“A des Touches cannot be an actress,” said the old man. “If I did not know you, Fauny, I should think you were mad.”

“She writes pieces and books,” the Baroness went on.

“Writes books!” said the Baron, looking at his wife with as much astonishment as if he had heard of a miracle. “I have heard that Mademoiselle de Scudéri and Madame de Sévigné wrote books, and that was not the best of what they did. But only Louis XIV and his court could produce such prodigies.”

“You will be dining at les Touches, won’t you, monsieur?” said Mariotte to Calyste, who came in.

“Probably,” said the young man.

Mariotte was not inquisitive, and she was one of the family; she left the room without waiting to hear the question Madame du Guénic was about to put to Calyste.

“You are going to les Touches again, my Calyste?” said she, with an emphasis on my Calyste. “And les Touches is not a decent and reputable house. The mistress of it leads a wild life; she will corrupt our boy. Camille Maupin makes him read a great many books⁠—she has had a great many adventures! And you knew it, bad child, and never said anything about it to your old folks.”

“The Chevalier is discreet,” said his father, “an old world virtue!”

“Too discreet!” said the jealous mother, as she saw the color mount to her son’s brow.

“My dear mother,” said Calyste, kneeling down before her, “I did not think it necessary to proclaim my defeat. Mademoiselle des Touches, or, if you prefer it, Camille Maupin, rejected my love eighteen months since, when she was here last. She gently made fun of me; she might be my mother, she said; a woman of forty who loved a minor committed a sort of incest, and she was incapable of such depravity. In short, she laughed at me in a hundred ways, and quite overpowered me, for she has the wit of an angel. Then, when she saw me crying bitter tears, she comforted me by offering me her friendship in the noblest way. She has even more heart than brains; she is as generous as you are. I am like a child to her now.⁠—Then, when she came here again, I heard that she loved another man, and I resigned myself.⁠—Do not repeat all the calumnies you hear about her; Camille is an artist; she has genius, and leads one of those exceptional lives which cannot be judged by ordinary standards.”

“My child!” said the pious Fanny, “nothing can excuse a woman for not living according to the ordinances of the Church. She fails in her duties towards God and towards society by failing in the gentle religion of her sex. A woman commits a sin even by going to a theatre; but when she writes impieties to be repeated by actors, and flies about the world, sometimes with an enemy of the Pope’s, sometimes with a musician⁠—Oh! Calyste! you will find it hard to convince me that such things are acts of faith, hope, or charity. Her fortune was given her by God to do good. What use does she make of it?”

Calyste suddenly stood up; he looked at his mother and said:

“Mother, Camille is my friend. I cannot hear her spoken of in this way, for I would give my life for her.”

“Your life?” said the Baroness, gazing at her son in terror. “Your life is our life⁠—the life of us all!”

“My handsome nephew has made use of many words that I do not understand,” said the old blind woman, turning to Calyste.

“Where has he learnt them?” added his mother. “At les Touches.”

“Why, my dear mother, she found me as ignorant as a carp.”

“You knew all that was essential in knowing the duties enjoined on us by religion,” replied the Baroness. “Ah! that woman will undermine your noble and holy beliefs.”

The old aunt rose and solemnly extended her hand towards her brother, who was sleeping.

“Calyste,” said she, in a voice that came from her heart, “your father never opened a book, he speaks Breton, he fought in the midst of perils for the King and for God. Educated men had done the mischief, and gentlemen of learning had deserted their country.⁠—Learn if you will.”

She sat down again, and began knitting with the vehemence that came of her mental agitation. Calyste was struck by this Phocion-like utterance.

“In short, my dearest, I have a presentiment of some evil hanging over you in that house,” said his mother, in a broken voice as her tears fell.

“Who is making Fanny cry?” exclaimed the old man, suddenly wakened by the sound of his wife’s voice. He looked round at her, his son, and his sister.

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing, my dear,” replied the Baroness.

“Mamma,” said Calyste in his mother’s ear, “it is impossible that I should explain matters now; but we will talk it over this evening. When you know all, you will bless Mademoiselle des Touches.”

“Mothers have no love of cursing,” replied the Baroness, “and I should never curse any woman who truly loved my Calyste.”

The young man said goodbye to his father, and left the house. The Baron and his wife rose to watch him as he crossed the courtyard, opened the gate, and disappeared. The Baroness did not take up the paper again; she was agitated. In a life so peaceful, so monotonous, this little discussion was as serious as a quarrel in any other family; and the mother’s anxiety, though soothed, was not dispelled. Whither would this friendship, which might demand and imperil her boy’s life, ultimately lead him? How could she, the Baroness, have reason to bless Mademoiselle des Touches? These two questions were as all-important to her simple soul as the maddest revolution can be to a diplomatist. Camille Maupin was a revolution in the quiet and simple home.

“I am very much afraid that this woman will spoil him for us,” said she, taking up the newspaper again.

“My dear Fanny,” said the old Baron, with knowing sprightliness, “you are too completely an angel to understand such things. Mademoiselle des Touches is, they say, as black as a crow, as strong as a Turk, and she is forty⁠—our dear boy was sure to be attracted by her. He will tell a few very honorable fibs to conceal his happiness. Let him enjoy the illusions of his first love.”

“If it were any other woman⁠—”

“But, dearest Fanny, if the woman was a saint, she would not make your son welcome.”

The Baroness went back to the paper.

“I will go to see her,” said the old man, “and tell you what I think of her.”

The speech has no point but in retrospect. After hearing the history of Camille Maupin, you may imagine the Baron face to face with this famous woman.

The town of Guérande, which for two months past had seen Calyste⁠—its flower and its pride⁠—going every day, morning or evening⁠—sometimes both morning and evening⁠—to les Touches, supposed that Mademoiselle des Touches was passionately in love with the handsome lad, and did her utmost to bewitch him. More than one girl and one young woman wondered what was the witchcraft of an old woman that she had such absolute empire over the angelic youth. And so, as Calyste crossed the High Street to go out by the gate to le Croisic, more than one eye looked anxiously after him.

It now becomes necessary to account for the reports that were current concerning the personage whom Calyste was going to see. These rumors, swelled by Breton gossip, and envenomed by the ignorance of the public, had reached even the Curé. The Tax-Receiver, the Justice of the Peace, the head clerk of the customs at Saint-Nazaire, and other literate persons in the district, had not reassured the Abbé by telling him of the eccentric life led by the woman and artist hidden under the name of Camille Maupin.

She had not yet come to eating little children, to killing her slaves, like Cleopatra, to throwing men into the river, as the heroine of the Tour de Nesle is falsely accused of doing; still, to the Abbé Grimont, this monstrous creature, at once a siren and an atheist, was a most immoral combination of woman and philosopher, and fell short of every social law laid down to control or utilize the weaknesses of the fair sex. Just as Clara Gazul is the feminine pseudonym of a clever man, and George Sand that of a woman of genius, so Camille Maupin was the mask behind which a charming girl long hid herself⁠—a Bretonne named Félicité des Touches, she who was now giving the Baronne du Guénic and the worthy Curé of Guérande so much cause for anxiety. This family has no connection with that of the des Touches of Touraine, to which the Regent’s ambassador belongs, a man more famous now for his literary talents than for his diplomacy.

Camille Maupin, one of the few famous women of the nineteenth century, was long supposed to be really a man, so manly was her first appearance as an author. Everybody is now familiar with the two volumes of dramas, impossible to put on the stage, written in the manner of Shakespeare or of Lopez de Vega, and brought out in 1822, which caused a sort of literary revolution when the great question of Romanticism versus Classicism was a burning one in the papers, at clubs, and at the Académie. Since then Camille Maupin has written several plays and a novel which have not belied the success of her first efforts, now rather too completely forgotten.

An explanation of the chain of circumstances by which a girl assumed a masculine incarnation⁠—by which Félicité des Touches made herself a man and a writer⁠—of how, more fortunate than Madame de Staël, she remained free, and so was more readily excused for her celebrity⁠—will, no doubt, satisfy much curiosity, and justify the existence of one of those monstrosities which stand up among mankind like monuments, their fame being favored by their rarity⁠—for in twenty centuries scarcely twenty great women are to be counted. Hence, though she here plays but a secondary part, as she had great influence over Calyste, and is a figure in the literary history of the time, no one will be sorry if we pause to study her for a rather longer time than modern fiction usually allows.

In 1793, Mademoiselle Félicité des Touches found herself an orphan. Thus her estates escaped the confiscation which no doubt would have fallen on her father or brother. Her father died on the 10th of August, killed on the palace steps among the defenders of the King, on whom he was in waiting as major of the bodyguard. Her brother, a young member of the corps, was massacred at les Carmes. Mademoiselle des Touches was but two years old when her mother died of grief a few days after this second blow. On her deathbed Madame des Touches placed her little girl in the care of her sister, a nun at Chelles. This nun, Madame de Faucombe, very prudently took the child to Faucombe, an estate of some extent near Nantes, belonging to Madame des Touches, where she settled with three Sisters from the convent. During the last days of the Terror, the mob of Nantes demolished the château and seized the Sisters and Mademoiselle des Touches, who were thrown into prison under a false charge of having harbored emissaries from Pitt and from Coburg. The ninth Thermidor saved them. Félicité’s aunt died of the fright; two of the Sisters fled from France, the third handed the little girl over to her nearest relation, Monsieur de Faucombe, her mother’s uncle, who lived at Nantes, and then joined her companions in exile.

Monsieur de Faucombe, a man of sixty, had married a young wife, to whom he left the management of his affairs. He busied himself only with archaeology, a passion, or, to be accurate, a mania, which helps old men to think themselves alive. His ward’s education was left entirely to chance. Félicité, little cared-for by a young woman who threw herself into all the pleasures of the Emperor’s reign, brought herself up like a boy. She sat with Monsieur de Faucombe in his library, and read whatever he might happen to be reading. Thus she knew life well in theory, and preserved no innocence of mind though virginal at heart. Her intelligence wandered through all the impurities of science while her heart remained pure. Her knowledge was something amazing, fed by her passion for reading, and well served by an excellent memory. Thus, at eighteen, she was as learned as the authors of today ought to be before trying to write. This prodigious amount of study controlled her passions far better than a convent life, which only inflames a young girl’s imagination; this brain, crammed with undigested and unclassified information, governed the heart of a child. Such a depravity of mind, absolutely devoid of any influence on her chastity of person, would have amazed a philosopher or an observer, if anyone at Nantes could have suspected the fine qualities of Mademoiselle des Touches.

The result was in inverse proportion to the cause: Félicité had no predisposition towards evil; she conceived of everything by her intelligence, but held aloof from the facts. She delighted old Faucombe, and helped him in his works, writing three books for the worthy gentleman, who believed them to be his own, for his spiritual paternity also was blind. Such severe work, out of harmony with the development of her girlhood, had its natural effect; Félicité fell ill, there was a fever in her blood, her lungs were threatened with inflammation. The doctors ordered her horse-exercise and social amusements. Mademoiselle des Touches became a splendid horsewoman, and had recovered in a few months.

At eighteen she made her appearance in the world, where she produced such a sensation, that at Nantes she was never called anything but the beautiful Mademoiselle des Touches. But the adoration of which she was the object left her insensible, and she had come to this by the influence of one of the sentiments which are imperishable in a woman, however superior she may be. Snubbed by her aunt and cousins, who laughed at her studies and made fun of her distant manners, assuming that she was incapable of being attractive, Félicité aimed at being light and coquettish, in short, a woman. She had expected to find some interchange of ideas, some fascination on a level with her own lofty intelligence; she was disgusted by the commonplaces of ordinary conversation and the nonsense of flirtation; above all, she was provoked by the aristocratic airs of the military, to whom at that time everything gave way.

She had, as a matter of course, neglected the drawing-room arts. When she found herself less considered than the dolls who could play the piano, and make themselves agreeable by singing ballads, she aspired to become a musician. She retired into deep solitude, and set to work to study unremittingly under the guidance of the best master in the town. She was rich, she sent for Steibelt to give her finishing lessons, to the great astonishment of her neighbors. This princely outlay is still remembered at Nantes. The master’s stay there cost her twelve thousand francs. She became at last a consummate musician. Later, in Paris, she took lessons in harmony and counterpoint, and composed two operas, which were immensely successful, though the public never knew her secret. These operas were ostensibly the work of Conti, one of the most eminent artists of our day; but this circumstance was connected with the history of her heart, and will be explained presently. The mediocrity of provincial society wearied her so excessively, her imagination was full of such grand ideas, that she withdrew from all the drawing-rooms after reappearing for a time to eclipse all other women by the splendor of her beauty, to enjoy her triumph over the musical performers, and win the devotion of all clever people; still, after proving her power to her two cousins, and driving two lovers to desperation, she came back to her books, to her piano, to the works of Beethoven, and to old Faucombe.

In 1812 she was one-and-twenty; the archaeologist accounted to her for his management of her property; and from that time forth she herself controlled her fortune, consisting of fifteen thousand francs a year from les Touches, her father’s estate; twelve thousand francs, the income at that time from the lands of Faucombe, which increased by a third when the leases were renewed; besides a capital sum of three hundred thousand francs saved by her guardian. Félicité derived nothing from her country training but an apprehension of money matters and that instinct for wise administration which perhaps restores, in the provinces, the balance against the constant tendency of capital to centre in Paris. She withdrew her three hundred thousand francs from the bank where the archaeologist had deposited them, and invested in consols just at the time of the disastrous retreat from Moscow. Thus she had thirty thousand francs a year more. When all her expenses were paid, she had a surplus of fifty thousand francs a year to be invested.

A girl of one-and-twenty, with such a power of will, was a match for a man of thirty. Her intellect had gained immense breadth and habits of criticism, which enabled her to judge sanely of men and things, art and politics. Thenceforward she purposed leaving Nantes; but old Monsieur Faucombe fell ill of the malady that carried him off. She was like a wife to the old man; she nursed him for eighteen months with the devotion of a guardian angel, and closed his eyes at the very time when Napoleon was fighting with Europe over the dead body of France. She therefore postponed her departure for Paris till the end of the war.

As a Royalist she flew to hail the return of the Bourbons to Paris. She was welcomed there by the Grandlieus, with whom she was distantly connected; but then befell the catastrophe of the 20th of March, and everything remained in suspense. She had the opportunity of seeing on the spot this last resurrection of the Empire, of admiring the Grande Armée which came out on the Champ de Mars, as in an arena, to salute its Cassar before dying at Waterloo. Félicité’s great and lofty soul was captivated by the magical spectacle. Political agitations and the fairy transformations of the theatrical drama, lasting for three months, and known as the hundred days, absorbed her wholly, and preserved her from any passion, in the midst of an upheaval that broke up the Royalist circle in which she had first come out. The Grandlieus followed the Bourbons to Ghent, leaving their house at Mademoiselle des Touches’ service.

Félicité, who could not accept a dependent position, bought for the sum of a hundred and thirty thousand francs one of the handsomest mansions in the Rue du Mont-Blanc, where she settled on the return of the Bourbons in 1815; the garden alone is worth two million francs now. Being accustomed to act on her own responsibility, Félicité soon took the habit of independent action, which seems the privilege of men only. In 1816 she was five-and-twenty. She knew nothing of marriage; she conceived of it only in her brain, judged of it by its causes instead of observing its effect, and saw only its disadvantages. Her superior mind rebelled against the abdication which begins the life of a married woman; she keenly felt the preciousness of independence, and had nothing but disgust for the cares of motherhood. These details are necessary to justify the anomalies that characterize Camille Maupin. She never knew father or mother, she was her own mistress from her childhood, her guardian was an old antiquary, chance placed her in the domain of science and imagination, in the literary world, instead of keeping her within the circle drawn by the futile education given to women⁠—a mother’s lectures on dress, on the hypocritical proprieties, and man-hunting graces of her sex. And so, long before she became famous, it could be seen at a glance that she had never played the doll.

Towards the end of the year 1817, Félicité des Touches perceived that her face showed symptoms not indeed of fading, but of the beginning of fatigue. She understood that her beauty would suffer from the fact of her persistent celibacy; she was bent on remaining beautiful, for at that time she prized her beauty. Knowledge warned her of the doom set by Nature on her creations, which deteriorate as much by misapplication as by ignorance of her laws. The vision of her aunt’s emaciated face rose before her and made her shudder. Thus placed between marriage and passion, she determained to remain free; but she no longer scorned the homage that she met with on all hands.

At the date when this story begins, she was almost the same as she had been in 1817. Eighteen years had passed over her and left her untouched; at the age of forty she might have called herself twenty-five. Thus a picture of her in 1836 will represent her as she was in 1817. Women who know under what conditions of temperament and beauty a woman must live to resist the attacks of time, will understand how and why Félicité des Touches enjoyed such high privileges, as they study a portrait for which the most glowing colors of the palette must be brought into play.

Brittany offers a singular problem in the predominance of brown hair, brown eyes, and a dark complexion, in a country so close to England, where the atmospheric conditions are so nearly similar. Does the question turn on the wider one of race, or on unobserved physical influences? Scientific men will some day perhaps inquire into the cause of this peculiarity, which does not exist in the neighboring province of Normandy. Pending its solution, the strange fact lies before us that fair women are rare among the women of Brittany, who almost always have the brilliant eyes of Southerners; but instead of showing the tall figures and serpentine grace of Italy or Spain, they are usually small, short, with neat, set figures, excepting some women of the upper classes which have been crossed by aristocratic alliances.

Mademoiselle des Touches, a thoroughbred Bretonne, is of medium height, about five feet, though she looks taller. This illusion is produced by the character of her countenance, which gives her dignity. She has the complexion which is characteristic of Italian beauty, pale olive by day, and white under artificial light; you might think it was animated ivory. Light glides over such a skin as over a polished surface, it glistens on it; only strong emotion can bring a faint flush to the middle of each cheek, and it disappears at once. This peculiarity gives her face the placidity of a savage. The face, long rather than oval, resembles that of some beautiful Isis in the bas-reliefs of Egina; it has the purity of a Sphinx’s head, polished by desert fires, lovingly touched by the flame of the Egyptian sun. Her hair, black and thick, falls in plaited loops over her neck, like the headdress with rigid double locks of the statues at Memphis, accentuating very finely the general severity of her features. She has a full, broad forehead, bossy at the temples, bright with its smooth surface on which the light lingers, and moulded like that of a hunting Diana; a powerful, wilful brow, calm and still. The eyebrows, strongly arched, bend over eyes in which the fire sparkles now and again like that of fixed stars. The white of the eye is not bluish, nor veined with red, nor is it pure white; its texture looks horny, still it is warm in tone; the black centre has an orange ring round the edge; it is bronze set in gold⁠—but living gold, animated bronze. The pupil is deep. It is not, as in some eyes, lined, as it were, like a mirror, reflecting the light, and making them look like the eyes of tigers and cats; it has not that terrible fixity of gaze that makes sensitive persons shiver; but this depth has infinitude, just as the brightness of mirror-eyes has finality. The gaze of the observer can sink and lose itself in that soul, which can shrink and retire as rapidly as it can flash forth from those velvet eyes. In a moment of passion, Camille Maupin’s eye is superb; the gold of her glance lights up the yellowish white and the whole flashes fire; but when at rest it is dull, the torpor of deep thought often gives it a look of stupidity; and when the light of the soul is absent, the lines of the face also look sad. The lashes are short, but as black and thickset as the hair of an ermine’s tail. The lids are tawny, and netted with fine red veins, giving them at once strength and elegance, two qualities hard to combine in women. All round the eyes there is not the faintest wrinkle or stain. Here again you will think of Egyptian granite mellowed by time. Only the cheekbones, though softly rounded, are more prominent than in most women, and confirm the impression of strength stamped on the face.

Her nose, narrow and straight, has high-cut nostrils, with enough of passionate dilation to show the rosy gleam of their delicate lining; this nose is well set on to the brow, to which it is joined by an exquisite curve, and it is perfectly white to the very tip⁠—a tip endowed with a sort of proper motion that works wonders whenever Camille is angry, indignant, or rebellious. There especially⁠—as Talma noted⁠—the rage or irony of lofty souls finds expression. Rigid nostrils betray a certain shallowness. The nose of a miser never quivers, it is tightly set like his lips; everything in his face is as close shut as himself.

Camille’s mouth, arched at the corners, is brightly red; the lips, full of blood, supply that living, impulsive carmine that gives them such infinite charm, and may reassure the lover who might be alarmed by the grave majesty of the face. The upper lip is thin, the furrow beneath the nose dents it low down, like a brow, which gives peculiar emphasis to her scorn. Camille has no difficulty in expressing anger. This pretty lip meets the broader red edge of a lower lip that is exquisitely kind, full of love, and carved, it might be, by Phidias, as the edge of an opened pomegranate, which it resembles in color. The chin is round and firm, a little heavy, but expressing determination, and finishing well this royal, if not goddess-like, profile. It is necessary to add that below the nose, the lip is faintly shaded by a down that is wholly charming; nature would have blundered if she had not there placed that tender, smoky tinge.

The ear is most delicately formed, a sign of other concealed daintinesses. The bust broad, the bosom small but not flat, the hips slender but graceful. The slope of the back is magnificent, more suggestive of the Bacchus than of the Venus Callipyge. Herein we see a detail that distinguishes almost all famous women from the rest of their sex; they have in this a vague resemblance to men; they have neither the pliancy nor the freedom of line that we see in women destined by nature to be mothers; their gait is unbroken by a gentle sway. This observation is, indeed, two-edged; it has its counterpart in men whose hips have a resemblance to those of women⁠—men who are cunning, sly, false, and cowardly.

Camille’s head, instead of having a hollow at the nape of the neck, is set on her shoulders with a swelling outline without an inward curve, an unmistakable sign of power; and this neck, in some attitudes, has folds of athletic firmness. The muscles attaching the upper arm, splendidly moulded, are those of a colossal woman. The arm is powerfully modeled, ending in wrists of English slenderness, and pretty delicate hands, plump and full of dimples, finished off with pink nails cut to an almond shape, and well set in the flesh. Her hands are of a whiteness which proclaims that all the body, full, firm, and solid, is of a quite different tone from her face. The cold, steadfast carriage of her head is contradicted by the ready mobility of the lips, their varying expression, and the sensitive nostrils of an artist.

Still, in spite of this exciting promise, not wholly visible to the profane, there is something provoking in the calmness of this countenance. The face is melancholy and serious rather than gracious, stamped with the sadness of constant meditation. Mademoiselle des Touches listens more than she speaks. She is alarming by her silence and that look of deep scrutiny. Nobody among really well-informed persons can ever have seen her without thinking of the real Cleopatra, the little brown woman who so nearly changed the face of the earth; but in Camille the animal is so perfect, so homogeneous, so truly leonine, that a man with anything of the Turk in him regrets the embodiment of so great a mind in such a frame, and wishes it were altogether woman. Everyone fears lest he may find there the strange corruption of a diabolical soul. Do not cold analysis and positive ideas throw their light upon the passions in this unwedded soul? In her, does not judgment take the place of feeling? Or, a still more terrible phenomenon, does she not feel and judge both together? Her brain being omnipotent, can she stop where other women stop? Has the intellectual power left the affections weak? Can she be gracious? Can she condescend to the pathetic trifles by which a woman busies, amuses, and interests the man she loves? Does she not crush a sentiment at once if it does not answer to the infinite that she apprehends and contemplates? Who can fill up the gulfs in her eyes?

We fear lest we should find in her some mysterious element of unsubdued virginity. The strength of a woman ought to be merely symbolical; we are frightened at finding it real. Camille Maupin is in some degree the living image of Schiller’s Isis, hidden in the depths of the temple, at whose feet the priests found the dying gladiators who had dared to consult her. Her various “affairs,” believed in by the world, and not denied by Camille herself, confirm the doubts suggested by her appearance. But perhaps she enjoys this calumny. The character of her beauty has not been without effect on her reputation; it has helped her, just as her fortune and position have upheld her in the midst of society. If a sculptor should wish to make an admirable statue of Brittany, he might copy Mademoiselle des Touches. Such a sanguine, bilious temperament alone can withstand the action of time. The perennially nourished texture of such a skin, as it were, varnished, is the only weapon given to woman by nature to ward off wrinkles, which in Camille are hindered also by the passivity of her features.

In 1817 this enchanting woman threw open her house to artists, famous authors, learned men, and journalists, the men to whom she was instinctively attracted. She had a drawing-room like that of Baron Gerard, where the aristocracy mingled with distinguished talents and the cream of Parisian womanhood. Mademoiselle des Touches’ family connections and her fine fortune, now augmented by that of her aunt the nun, protected her in her undertaking⁠—a difficult one in Paris⁠—of forming a circle. Her independence was one cause of her success. Many ambitious mothers dreamed of getting her to marry a son whose wealth was disproportioned to the splendor of his armorial bearings. Certain peers of Prance, attracted by her eighty thousand francs a year and tempted by her splendid house and establishment, brought the strictest and most fastidious ladies of their family. The diplomatic world, on the lookout for wit and amusement, came and found pleasure there.

Thus Mademoiselle des Touches, the centre of so many interests, could study the different comedies which all men, even the most distinguished, are led to play by passion, avarice, or ambition. She soon saw the world as it really is, and was so fortunate as not to fall at once into such an absorbing love as engrosses a woman’s intellect and faculties, and prevents her wholesome judgment. Generally a woman feels, enjoys, and judges, each in turn; hence three ages, the last coinciding with the sad period of old age. To Félicité the order was reversed. Her youth was shrouded in the snows of science, the chill of thoughtfulness. This transposition also explains the oddity of her life and the character of her talents. She was studying men at the age when most women see but one; she despised what they admire; she detected falsehood in the flatteries they accept as truth; she laughed at what makes them serious.

This contradictory state lasted a long time; it had a disastrous termination; it was her fate to find her first love, newborn and tender in her heart, at an age when women are required by nature to renounce love. Her first liaison was kept so secret that no one ever knew of it. Félicité, like all women who believe in the commonsense of their feelings, was led to count on finding a beautiful soul in a beautiful body; she fell in love with a face, and discovered all the foolishness of a lady’s man, who thought of her merely as a woman. It took her some time to get over her disgust and this mad connection. Another man guessed her trouble, and consoled her without looking for any return, or at any rate he concealed his purpose. Félicité thought she had found the magnanimity of heart and mind that the dandy had lacked. This man had one of the most original intellects of the day. He himself wrote under a pseudonym, and his first works revealed him as an admirer of Italy. Félicité must needs travel or perpetuate the only form of ignorance in which she remained. This man, a sceptic and a scoffer, took Félicité to study the land of Art. This famous “Anonymous” may be regarded as Camille Maupin’s teacher and creator. He reduced her vast information to order, he added to it a knowledge of the masterpieces of which Italy is full, and gave her that subtle and ingenious one, epigrammatic and yet deep, which is characteristic of his talent⁠—always a little eccentric in its expression⁠—but modified in Camille Maupin by the delicate feeling and the ingenious turn natural to women; he inoculated her with a taste for the works of English and German literature, and made her learn the two languages while traveling.

At Rome, in 1820, Mademoiselle des Touches found herself deserted for an Italian. But for this disaster she might never have become famous. Napoleon said that Misfortune was midwife to Genius. This event gave Mademoiselle des Touches at once and forever the scorn of mankind which is her great strength. Félicité was dead and Camille was born.

She returned to Paris in the company of Conti, the great musician, for whom she wrote the libretti of two operas; but she had no illusions left, and became, though the world did not know it, a sort of female Don Juan⁠—without either debts or conquests. Encouraged by success, she published the two volumes of dramas which immediately placed Camille Maupin among the anonymous celebrities. She told the story of her betrayed love in an admirable little romance, one of the masterpieces of the time. This book, a dangerous example, was compared, and on the level, with Adolphe, a horrible lament, of which the counterpart was found in Camille’s tale. The delicate nature of her literary disguise is not yet fully understood; some refined intelligences still see nothing in it but the magnanimity that subjects a man to criticism and screens a woman from fame by allowing her to remain unknown.

In spite of herself, her reputation grew every day, as much by the influence of her salon as for her repartees, the soundness of her judgment, and the solidity of her acquirements. She was regarded as an authority, her witticisms were repeated, she could not abdicate the functions with which Parisian society invested her. She became a recognized exception. The fashionable world bowed to the talent and the wealth of this strange girl; it acknowledged and sanctioned her independence; women admired her gifts, and men her beauty. Indeed, her conduct was always ruled by social proprieties. Her friendships seemed to be entirely Platonic. There was nothing of the authoress⁠—the female author⁠—about her; as a woman of the world Mademoiselle des Touches is delightful⁠—weak at appropriate moments, indolent, coquettish, devoted to dress, charmed with the trivialities that appeal to women and poets.

She perfectly understood that after Madame de Staël there was no place in this century for a Sappho, and that no Ninon could exist in Paris where there were no grand Seigneurs, no voluptuous Court. She is the Ninon of intellect; she adores art and artists; she goes from the poet to the musician, from the sculptor to the prose-writer. She is full of a noble generosity that verges on credulity, so ready is she to pity misfortune and to disdain the fortunate. Since 1830 she has lived in a chosen circle of proved friends, who truly love and esteem each other. She dwells far removed from such turmoil as Madame de Staëls, and not less far from political conflict; and she makes great fun of Camille Maupin as the younger brother of George Sand, of whom she speaks as “Brother Cain,” for this new glory has killed her own. Mademoiselle des Touches admires her happier rival with angelic readiness, without any feeling of jealousy or covert envy.

Until the time when this story opens she had led the happiest life conceivable for a woman who is strong enough to take care of herself. She had come to les Touches five or six times between 1817 and 1834. Her first visit had been made just after her first disenchantment, in 1818. Her house at les Touches was uninhabitable; she sent her steward to Guérande, and took his little house at les Touches. As yet she had no suspicion of her coming fame; she was sad, she would see no one; she wanted to contemplate herself, as it were, after this great catastrophe. She wrote to a lady in Paris, a friend, explaining her intentions and giving instructions for furniture to be sent for les Touches. The things came by ship to Nantes, were transhipped to a smaller boat for le Croisic, and thence were carried, not without difficulty, across the sands to les Touches. She sent for workmen from Paris, and settled herself at les Touches, which she particularly liked. She meant to meditate there on the events of life, as in a little private Chartreuse.

At the beginning of winter she returned to Paris. Then the little town of Guérande was torn by diabolical curiosity; nothing was talked of but the Asiatic luxury of Mademoiselle des Touches. The notary, her agent, gave tickets to admit visitors to les Touches, and people came from Batz, from le Croisic, and from Savenay. This curiosity produced in two years the enormous sum for the gatekeeper and gardener of seventeen francs.

Mademoiselle did not come there again till two years later, on her return from Italy, and arrived by le Croisic. For some time no one knew that she was at Guérande, and with her Conti the composer. Her appearance at intervals did not greatly excite the curiosity of the little town of Guérande. Her steward and the notary at most had been in the secret of Camille Maupin’s fame. By this time, however, new ideas had made some little progress at Guérande, and several persons knew of Mademoiselle des Touches’ double existence. The postmaster got letters addressed to “Camille Maupin, aux Touches.”

At last the veil was rent. In a district so essentially Catholic, old-world, and full of prejudices, the strange life led by this illustrious and unmarried woman could not fail to start the rumors which had frightened the Abbé Grimont; it could never be understood; she seemed an anomaly.

Félicité was not alone at les Touches; she had a guest. This visitor was Claude Vignon, the haughty and contemptuous writer who, though he has never published anything but criticism, has impressed the public and literary circles with an idea of his superiority. Félicité, who for the last seven years had made this writer welcome, as she had a hundred others⁠—authors, journalists, artists, and people of fashion⁠—who knew his inelastic temperament, his idleness, his utter poverty, his carelessness, and his disgust at things in general, seemed by her behavior to him to wish to marry him. She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, by her ambition and the horror she felt of growing old; she wanted to place the rest of her life in the hands of a superior man for whom her fortune might be a stepping-stone, and who would uphold her importance in the literary world. So she had carried off Claude Vignon from Paris to les Touches, as an eagle takes a kid in his talons, to study him and take some vehement step; but she was deceiving both Calyste and Claude⁠—she was not thinking of marriage. She was in the most violent throes that can convulse a soul so firm as hers, for she found herself the dupe of her own intellect, and saw her life illuminated too late by the sunshine of love, glowing as it glows in the heart of a girl of twenty.

Now for a picture of Camille’s “Chartreuse.”

At a few hundred paces from Guérande the terra firma of Brittany ends, and the salt marshes and sand-hills begin. A rugged road, to which vehicles are unknown, leads down a ravine to the desert of sands left by the sea as neutral ground between the waters and the land. This desert consists of barren hills, of “pans” of various sizes edged with a ridge of clay, in which the salt is collected, of the creek which divides the mainland from the island of le Croisic. Though in geography le Croisic is a peninsula, as it is attached to Brittany only by the strand between it and the Bourg de Batz, a shifting bottom which it is very difficult to cross, it may be regarded as an island. At an angle where the road from le Croisic to Guérande joins the road on the mainland, stands a country house, enclosed in a large garden remarkable for its wrung and distorted pine-trees⁠—some spreading parasol-like at the top, others stripped of their boughs, and all showing red, scarred trunks where the bark has been torn away. These trees, martyrs to the storm, growing literally in spite of wind and tide, prepare the mind for the melancholy and strange spectacle of the salt marshes, and the sand-hills looking like solidified waves.

The house, well built of schistose stone and cement held together by courses of granite, has no pretensions to architecture; the eye sees only a bare wall, regularly pierced by the windows; those on the first floor have large panes, on the ground floor small quarries. Above the first floor there are lofts, under an enormously high-pointed roof, with a gable at each end, and two large dormers on each side. Under the angle of each gable a window looks out, like a Cyclops’ eye, to the west over the sea, to the east at Guérande. One side of the house faces the Guérande road; the other the waste over which le Croisic is seen, and beyond that the open sea. A little stream escapes through an opening in the garden wall on the side by the road to le Croisic, which it crosses, and is soon lost in the sand, or in the little pool of salt water enclosed by the sand-hills and marshland, being left there by the arm of the sea.

A few fathoms of roadway, constructed in this break in the soil, leads to the house. It is entered through a gate; the courtyard is surrounded by unpretentious rural outhouses⁠—a stable, a coach-house, a gardener’s cottage with a poultry yard and sheds adjoining, of more use to the gatekeeper than to his mistress. The gray tones of this building harmonize delightfully with the scenery it stands in. The grounds are an oasis in this desert, on the edge of which the traveler has passed a mud-hovel, where customhouse officers keep guard. This house, with no lands, or rather of which the lands lie in the district of Guérande, derives an income of ten thousand francs from the marshes, and from farms scattered about the mainland. This was the fief of les Touches, deprived of its feudal revenues by the Revolution. Les Touches is still a property; the marshmen still speak of the Château and they would talk of the Lord if the owner were not a woman. When Félicité restored les Touches, she was too much of an artist to think of altering the desolate-looking exterior which gives this lonely building the appearance of a prison. Only the gate was improved by the addition of two brick piers with an architrave, under which a carriage can drive in. The courtyard was planted.

The arrangement of the ground floor is common to most country houses built a hundred years ago. The dwelling was evidently constructed on the ruins of a little castel perched there as a link connecting le Croisic and Batz with Guérande, and lording it over the marshes. A hall had been contrived at the foot of the stairs. The first room is a large wainscoted anteroom where Félicité has a billiard-table; next comes an immense drawing-room with six windows, two of which, at the gable-end, form doors leading to the garden, down ten steps, corresponding in the arrangement of the room with the door into the billiard-room, and that into the dining-room. The kitchen, at the other end, communicates with the dining-room through the pantry. The staircase is between the billiard-room and the kitchen, which formerly had a door into the hall; this Mademoiselle des Touches closed, and opened one to the courtyard.

The loftiness and spaciousness of the rooms enables Camille to treat this ground with noble simplicity. She was careful not to introduce any elaboration of detail. The drawing-room, painted gray, has old mahogany furniture with green silk cushions, white cotton window curtains bordered with green, two consoles, and a round table; in the middle is a carpet with a large pattern in squares; over the huge chimney-place are an immense mirror and a clock representing Apollo’s car, between candelabra of the style of the Empire. The billiard-room has gray cotton curtains, bordered with green, and two divans. The dining-room furniture consists of four large mahogany sideboards, a table, twelve mahogany chairs with horsehair seats, and some magnificent engravings by Audran in mahogany frames. From the middle of the ceiling hangs an elegant lamp such as were usual on the staircases of fine houses, with two lights. All the ceilings and the beams supporting them are painted to imitate wood. The old staircase, of wood with a heavy balustrade, is carpeted with green from top to bottom.

On the first floor were two sets of rooms divided by the staircase. Camille chose for her own those which look over the marshes, the sand-hills, and the sea, arranging them as a little sitting-room, a bedroom, a dressing-room, and a study. On the other side of the house she contrived two bedrooms, each with a dressing-closet and anteroom. The servants’ rooms are above. The two spare rooms had at first only the most necessary furniture. The artistic luxuries for which she had sent to Paris she reserved for her own rooms. In this gloomy and melancholy dwelling, looking out on that gloomy and melancholy landscape, she wanted to have the most fantastic creations of art. Her sitting-room is hung with fine Gobelin tapestry, set in wonderfully carved frames. The windows are draped with heavy antique stuffs, a splendid brocade with a doubly shot ground, gold and red, yellow and green, falling in many bold folds, edged with royal fringes and tassels worthy of the most splendid baldachins of the Church. The room contains a cabinet which her agent found for her, worth seven or eight thousand francs now, a table of carved ebony, a writing bureau brought from Venice, with a hundred drawers, inlaid with arabesques of ivory, and some beautiful Gothic furniture. There are pictures and statuettes, the best that an artist friend could select in the old curiosity shops, where the dealers never suspected in 1818 the price their treasures would afterwards fetch. On her tables stand fine Chinese vases of grotesque designs. The carpet is Persian, smuggled in across the sand-hills.

Her bedroom is in the Louis XV style and a perfectly exact imitation. Here we have the carved wooden bedstead, painted white, with the arched head and side, and figures of Loves throwing flowers, the lower part stuffed and upholstered in brocaded silk, the crown above decorated with four bunches of feathers; the walls are hung with Indian chintz draped with silk cords and knots. The fireplace is finished with rustic work, the clock of ormolu, between two large vases of the choicest blue Sèvres mounted in gilt copper; the mirror is framed to match. The Pompadour toilet-table has its lace hangings and its glass; and then there is all the fanciful small furniture, the “duchesses,” the couch, the little formal settee, the easy-chair with a quilted back, the lacquer screen, the curtains of silk to match the chairs, lined with pink satin and draped with thick ropes; the carpet woven at la Savonnerie⁠—in short, all the elegant, rich, sumptuous, and fragile things among which the ladies of the eighteenth century made love.

The study, absolutely modern, in contrast with the gallant suggestiveness of the days of Louis XV, has pretty mahogany furniture. The bookshelves are full; it looks like a boudoir; there is a divan in it. It is crowded with the dainty trifles that women love; books that lock up, boxes for handkerchiefs and gloves; pictured lampshades, statuettes, Chinese grotesques, writing-cases, two or three albums, paperweights, in short, every fashionable toy. The curious visitor notes with uneasy surprise a pair of pistols, a narghile, a riding whip, a hammock, a pipe, a fowling-piece, a blouse, some tobacco, and a soldier’s knapsack⁠—a motley collection characteristic of Félicité.

Every lofty soul on looking round must be struck by the peculiar beauty of the landscape that spreads its breadth beyond the grounds, the last vegetation of the Continent. Those dismal squares of brackish water, divided by little white dykes on which the marshman walks, all in white, to rake out and collect the salt and heap it up; that tract over which salt vapors rise, forbidding birds to fly across, while they at the same time choke every attempt at plant-life; those sands where the eye can find no comfort but in the stiff evergreen leaves of a small plant with rose-colored flowers and in the Carthusian pink; that pool of seawater, the sand of the dunes, and the view of le Croisic⁠—a miniature town dropped like Venice into the sea; and beyond, the immensity of ocean, tossing a fringe of foam over the granite reefs to emphasize their wild forms⁠—this scene elevates while it saddens the spirit, the effect always produced in the end by anything sublime which makes us yearn regretfully for unknown things that the soul apprehends at unattainable heights. Indeed, these wild harmonies have no charm for any but lofty natures and great sorrows. This desert, not unbroken, where the sunbeams are sometimes reflected from the water and the sand, whiten the houses of Batz, and ripple over the roofs of le Croisic with a pitiless dazzling glare, would absorb Camille for days at a time. She rarely turned to the delightful green views, the thickets, and flowery hedges that garland Guérande like a bride, with flowers and posies and veils and festoons. She was suffering dreadful and unknown misery.

As Calyste saw the weathercocks of the two gables peeping above the furze-bushes of the highroad and the gnarled heads of the fir-trees, the air seemed to him lighter; to him Guérande was a prison, his life was at les Touches. Who cannot understand the attractions it held for a simple-minded lad? His love, like that of Cherubino, which had brought him to the feet of a personage who had been a great idea to him before being a woman, naturally survived her inexplicable rejections. This feeling, which is rather the desire for love than love itself, had no doubt failed to elude the inexorable analysis of Camille Maupin, and hence perhaps her repulses, a nobleness of mind misunderstood by Calyste. And, then, the marvels of modern civilization seemed all the more dazzling here by contrast with Guérande, where the poverty of the Guénics was considered splendor. Here, spread before the ravished eyes of this ignorant youth, who had never seen anything but the yellow broom of Brittany and the heaths of la Vendée, lay the Parisian glories of a new world; just as here he heard an unknown and sonorous language. Calyste here listened to the poetical tones of the finest music, the amazing music of the nineteenth century, in which melody and harmony vie with each other as equal powers, and singing and orchestration have achieved incredible perfection. He here saw the works of the most prodigal painting⁠—that of the French school of today, the inheritor of Italy, Spain, and Flanders, in which talent has become so common that our eyes and hearts, weary of so much talent, cry out loudly for a genius. He here read those works of imagination, those astounding creations of modern literature, which produce their fullest effect on a fresh young heart. In short, our grand nineteenth century rose before him in all its magnificence as a whole⁠—its criticism, its struggles for every kind of renovation, its vast experiments, almost all measured by the standard of the giant who nursed its infancy in his flag, and sang it hymns to an accompaniment of the terrible bass of cannon.

Initiated by Félicité into all this grandeur, which perhaps escapes the ken of those who put it on the stage and are its makers, Calyste satisfied at les Touches the love of the marvelous that is so strong at his age, and that guileless admiration, the first love of a growing man, which is so wroth with criticism. It is so natural that flame should fly upwards! He heard the light Parisian banter, the graceful irony which revealed to him what French wit should be, and awoke in him a thousand ideas that had been kept asleep by the mild torpor of home life. To him, Mademoiselle des Touches was the mother of his intelligence, a mother with whom he might be in love without committing a crime. She was so kind to him: a woman is always adorably kind to a man in whom she has inspired a passion, even though she should not seem to share it. At this moment Félicité was giving him music lessons. To him the spacious rooms on the ground floor, looking all the larger by reason of the skilful arrangement of the lawns and shrubs in the little park; the staircase, lined with masterpieces of Italian patience⁠—carved wood, Venetian and Florentine mosaics, bas-reliefs in ivory and marble, curious toys made to the order of the fairies of the Middle Ages; the upper rooms, so cozy, so dainty, so voluptuously artistic, were all infused and living with a light, a spirit, an atmosphere, that were supernatural, indefinable, and strange. The modern world with its poetry was in strong contrast to the solemn, patriarchal world of Guérande, and the two systems here were face to face. On one hand, the myriad effects of art; on the other, the simplicity of wild Brittany. No one, then, need ask why the poor boy, as weary as his mother was of the subtleties of mouche, always felt a qualm as he entered this house, as he rang the bell, as he crossed the yard. It is to be observed that these presentiments cease to agitate men of riper growth, inured to the mishaps of life, whom nothing can surprise, and who are prepared for everything.

As he went in, Calyste heard the sound of the piano; he thought that Camille Maupin was in the drawing-room; but on entering the billiard-room he could no longer hear it. Camille was playing, no doubt, on the little upright piano, brought for her from England by Conti, which stood in the little drawing-room above. As he mounted the stairs, where the thick carpet completely deadened the sound of footsteps, Calyste went more and more slowly. He perceived that this music was something extraordinary. Félicité was playing to herself alone; she was talking to herself. Instead of going in, the young man sat down on a Gothic settle with a green velvet cushion on the landing, beneath the window, which was artistically framed in carved wood stained with walnut juice and varnished.

Nothing could be more mysteriously melancholy than Camille’s improvisation; it might have been the cry of a soul wailing a De profundis to God from the depths of the grave. The young lover knew it for the prayer of love in despair, the tenderness of resigned grief, the sighing of controlled anguish. Camille was amplifying, varying, and changing the introduction to the cavatina, “Grâce pour toi, grâce pour moi” from the fourth act of Robert le Diable. Suddenly she began to sing the scena in heartrending tones, and broke off. Calyste went in and saw the reason of this abrupt ending. Poor Camille Maupin, beautiful Félicité, turned to him without affectation, her face bathed in tears, took out her handkerchief to wipe them away, and said simply:

“Good morning.”

She was charming in her morning dress; on her head was one of the red chenille nets at that time in fashion, from which the shining curls of her black hair fell on her neck. A very short pelisse formed a modern Greek tunic, showing below it cambric trousers, with embroidered frills, and the prettiest scarlet and gold Turkish slippers.

“What is the matter?” asked Calyste.

“He has not come back,” she replied, standing up at the window, and looking out over the sands, the creek, and the marshes.

This reply accounted for her costume. Camille, it would seem, was expecting Claude Vignon, and she was fretted as a woman who had wasted her pains. A man of thirty would have seen this. Calyste only saw that she was unhappy.

“You are anxious?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, with a melancholy that this boy could not fathom. Calyste was hastily leaving the room.

“Well, where are you going?”

“To find him.”

“Dear child!” said she, taking his hand, and drawing him to her with one of those tearful looks which to a young soul is the highest reward. “Are you mad? Where do you think you can find him on this shore?”

“I will find him.”

“Your mother will suffer mortal anguish. Besides⁠—stay. Come, I insist upon it,” and she made him sit down on the divan. “Do not break your heart about me. These tears that you see are the tears we take pleasure in. There is a faculty in women which men have not: that of abandoning ourselves to our nerves by indulging our feelings to excess. By imagining certain situations, and giving way to the idea, we work ourselves up to tears, sometimes into a serious condition and real illness. A woman’s fancies are not the sport of the mind merely, but of the heart.⁠—You have come at the right moment; solitude is bad for me. I am not deluded by the wish he felt to go without me to study le Croisic and its rocks, the Bourg de Batz, and its sands and salt-marshes. I knew he would spend several days over it instead of one. He wished to leave us two alone; he is jealous, or rather he is acting jealousy. You are young; you are handsome.”

“Why did you not tell me sooner? Must I come no more?” asked Calyste, failing to restrain a tear that rolled down his cheek, and touched Félicité deeply.

“You are an angel!” she exclaimed.

Then she lightly sang Mathilde’s strain “Restez” out of William Tell, to efface all gravity from this grand reply of a princess to her subject.

“He thus hopes,” she added, “to make me believe in a greater love for me than he feels. He knows all the regard I feel for him,” she went on, looking narrowly at Calyste, “but he is perhaps humiliated to find himself my inferior in this. Possibly, too, he has formed some suspicions of you, and thinks he will take us by surprise.⁠—But, even if he is guilty of nothing worse than of wishing to enjoy the delights of this expedition in the wilds without me, of refusing to let me share his excursions, and the ideas the scenes may arouse in him, of leaving me in mortal alarms⁠—is not that enough? His great brain has no more love for me than had the musician, the wit, the soldier. Sterne is right: names have a meaning, and mine is the bitterest mockery. I shall die without ever finding in a man such love as I have in my heart, such poetry as I have in my soul.”

She sat with her arms hanging limp, her head thrown back on the cushion, her eyes dull with concentrated thought, and fixed on a flower in the carpet. The sufferings of superior minds are mysteriously grand and imposing; they reveal immense expanses of the soul, to which the spectator’s fancy adds yet greater breadth. Such souls share in the privilege of royalty, whose affections cling to a nation, and then strike a whole world.

“Why did you⁠—?” began Calyste, who could not finish the sentence. Camille Maupin’s beautiful, burning hand was laid on his, and eloquently stopped him.

“Nature has forsworn her laws by granting me five or six years of added youth. I have repelled you out of selfishness. Sooner or later age would have divided us.⁠—I am thirteeen years older than he is, and that is quite enough!”

“You will still be beautiful when you are sixty!” cried Calyste, heroically.

“God grant it!” she replied, with a smile. “But, my dear child, I intend to love him. In spite of his insensibility, his lack of imagination, his cowardly indifference, and the envy that consumes him, I believe that there is greatness under those husks; I hope to galvanize his heart, to save him from himself, to attach him to me.⁠ ⁠… Alas! I have the brain to see clearly while my heart is blind.”

She was appallingly clear to herself. She could suffer and analyze her suffering, as Cuvier and Dupuytren could explain to their friends the fatal progress of their diseases and the steady advance of death. Camille Maupin knew passion as these two learned men knew anatomy.

“I came here on purpose to form an opinion about him; he is already bored. He misses Paris, as I told him; he is homesick for something to criticise. Here there is no author to be plucked, no system to be undermined, no poet to be driven to despair; he dares not here rush into some excess in which he could unburden himself of the weight of thought. Alas! my love, perhaps, is not true enough to refresh his brain. In short, I cannot intoxicate him!⁠—Tonight you and he must get drunk together; I shall say I am ailing, and stay in my room; I shall know if I am mistaken.”

Calyste turned as red as a cherry, red from his chin to his hair, and his ears tingled with the glow.

“Good God!” she exclaimed, “and here am I depraving your maiden innocence without thinking of what I was doing! Forgive me, Calyste. When you love you will know that you would try to set the Seine on fire to give the least pleasure to ‘the object of your affections,’ as the fortunetellers say.”

She paused.

“There are some proud and logical spirits,” she went on, “who at a certain age can exclaim, ‘If I could live my life again, I would do everything the same.’ Now I⁠—and I do not think myself weak⁠—I say, ‘I would be such a woman as your mother.’

“To have a Calyste of my own! What happiness! If I had had the greatest fool on earth for a husband, I should have been a humble and submissive wife. And yet I have not sinned against society; I have only hurt myself. Alas! dear child, a woman can no longer go into society unprotected excepting in what is called a primitive state. The affections that are not in harmony with social or natural laws, the affections which are not binding, in short, evade us. If I am to suffer for suffering’s sake, I might as well be useful. What do I care for the children of my Faucombe cousins, who are no longer Faucombes, whom I have not seen for twenty years, and who married merchants only! You are a son who has cost me none of the cares of motherhood; I shall leave you my fortune, and you will be happy, at any rate, so far as that is concerned, by my act, dear jewel of beauty and sweetness, which nothing should ever change or fade!”

As she spoke these words in a deep voice, her eyelids fell, that he should not read her eyes.

“You have never chosen to accept anything from me,” said Calyste. “I shall restore your fortune to your heirs.”

“Child!” said Camille, in her rich tones, while the tears fell down her cheeks, “can nothing save me from myself?”

“You have a story to tell me, and a letter to⁠—” the generous boy began, to divert her from her distress. But she interrupted him before he could finish his sentence.

“You are right. I must, above all things, keep my word. It was too late yesterday; but we shall have time enough today, it would seem,” she said, in a half-playful, half-bitter tone. “To fulfil my promise, I will sit where I can look down the road to the cliffs.”

Calyste placed a deep Gothic armchair where she could look out in that direction, and opened the window. Camille Maupin, who shared the Oriental tastes of the more illustrious writer of her own sex, took out a magnificent Persian narghileh that an ambassador had given her; she filled it with patchouli leaves, cleaned the mouthpiece, scented the quill before she inserted it⁠—it would serve her but once⁠—put a match to the dried leaves, placed the handsome instrument of pleasure, with its long-necked bowl of blue-and-gold enamel, at no great distance, and then rang for tea.

“If you would like a cigarette?⁠—Ah! I always forget that you do not smoke. Such immaculateness as yours is rare! I feel as though only the fingers of an Eve fresh from the hand of God ought to caress the downy satin of your cheeks.”

Calyste reddened and sat down on a stool; he did not observe the deep emotion that made Camille blush.

“The person from whom I yesterday received this letter, and who will perhaps be here tomorrow, is the Marquise de Rochefide,” said Félicité. “After getting his eldest daughter married to a Portuguese grandee who has settled in France, old Rochefide, whose family is not as old as yours, wanted to connect his son with the highest nobility, so as to procure for him a peerage he had failed to obtain for himself. The Comtesse de Montcornet told him that in the department of the Orne there was a certain Mademoiselle Béatrix Maximilienne, Rose de Casteran, the youngest daughter of the Marquis de Casteran, who wanted to get his two daughters off his hands without any money, so as to leave his whole fortune to his son, the Comte de Casteran. The Casterans, it would seem, are descended direct from Adam.

“Béatrix, born and brought up in the château of Casteran, at the time of her marriage in 1828, was twenty years of age. She was remarkable for what you provincials call eccentricity, which is simply a superior mind, enthusiasm, a sense of the beautiful, and a fervid feeling for the works of art. Take the word of a poor woman who has trusted herself on these slopes, there is nothing more perilous for a woman; if she tries them, she arrives where you see me, and where the Marquise is⁠—in an abyss. Men only have the staff that can be a support on the edge of those precipices, a strength which we lack, or which makes us monsters if we have it.

“Her old grandmother, the dowager Marquise de Casteran, was delighted to see her marry a man whose superior she would certainly be in birth and mind. The Rochefides did everything extremely well, Béatrix could but be satisfied; and in the same way Rochefide had every reason to be pleased with the Casterans, who, as connected with the Verneuils, the d’Esgrignons, and the Troisvilles, obtained the peerage for their son-in-law as one of the last batch made by Charles X, though it was annulled by a decree of the Revolution of July.

“Rochefide is a fool, however; he began by having a son; and as he gave his wife no respite, and almost killed her with his company, she soon had enough of him. The early days of married life are a rock of danger for small minds as for great passions. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife’s ignorance for coldness; he regarded Béatrix as a lymphatic creature⁠—she is very fair⁠—and thereupon lulled himself in perfect security, and led a bachelor life, trusting to the Marquise’s supposed coldness, her pride, her haughtiness, and the splendor of a style of living which surrounds a woman in Paris with a thousand barriers. When you go there you will understand what I mean. Those who hoped to take advantage of his easy indifference would say to him, ‘You are a lucky fellow. You have a heartless wife, whose passions will be in her brain; she is content with shining; her fancies are purely artistic; her jealousy and wishes will be amply satisfied if she can form a salon where all the wits and talents meet; she will have debauches of music, orgies of literature.’⁠—And the husband took in all this nonsense with which simpletons are stuffed in Paris.

“At the same time, Rochefide is not a common idiot; he has as much vanity and pride as a clever man, with this difference, that clever men assume some modesty and become cats; they coax to be coaxed in return; whereas, Rochefide has a fine flourishing conceit, rosy and plump, that admires itself in public, and is always smiling. His vanity rolls in the stable, and feeds noisily from the manger, tugging out the hay. He has faults such as are known only to those who are in a position to judge him intimately, which are noticeable only in the shade and mystery of private life, while in society and to society the man seems charming. Rochefide must have been intolerable the moment he fancied that his hearth and home were threatened; for his is that cunning and squalid jealousy that is brutal when it is roused, cowardly for six months, and murderous the seventh. He thought he deceived his wife, and he feared her⁠—two reasons for tyranny if the day should come when he discerned that his wife was so merciful as to affect indifference to his infidelities.

“I have analyzed his character to explain Béatrix’s conduct. The Marquise used to admire me greatly; but there is but one step from admiration to jealousy. I have one of the most remarkable salons of Paris; she wished to have one, and tried to win away my circle. I have not the art of keeping those who wish to leave me. She has won such superficial persons as are everybody’s friends from vacuity, and whose object is always to go out of a room as soon as they have come in; but she has not had time to make a circle. At that time I supposed that she was consumed with the desire of any kind of celebrity. Nevertheless, she had some greatness of soul, a royal pride, ideas, and a wonderful gift of apprehending and understanding everything. She will talk of metaphysics and of music, of theology and of painting. You will see her as a woman what we saw her as a bride; but she is not without a little conceit; she gives herself too much the air of knowing difficult things⁠—Chinese or Hebrew, of having ideas about hieroglyphics, and of being able to explain the papyrus that wraps a mummy.

“Béatrix is one of those fair women by whom fair Eve would look like a Negress. She is as tall and straight as a taper, and as white as the holy wafer; she has a long, pointed face, and a very variable complexion, today as colorless as cambric, tomorrow dull and mottled under the skin with a myriad tiny specks, as though the blood had left dust there in the course of the night. Her forehead is grand, but a little too bold; her eyes, pale aquamarine-tinted, floating in the white cornea under colorless eyebrows and indolent lids. There is often a dark circle round her eyes. Her nose, curved to a quarter of a circle, is pinched at the nostrils and full of refinement, but it is impertinent. She has the Austrian mouth, the upper lip thicker than the lower, which has a scornful droop. Her pale cheeks only flush under some very strong emotion. Her chin is rather fat; mine is not thin; and perhaps I ought not to tell you that women with a fat chin are exacting in love affairs. She has one of the most beautiful figures I ever saw; a back of dazzling whiteness, which used to be very flat, but which now, I am told, has filled out and grown dimpled; but the bust is not so fine as the shoulders, her arms are still thin. However, she has a mien and a freedom of manner which redeem all her defects and throw her beauties into relief. Nature has bestowed on her that air, as of a princess, which can never be acquired, which becomes her, and at once reveals the woman of birth; it is in harmony with the slender hips of exquisite form, with the prettiest foot in the world, and the abundant angel-like hair, resembling waves of light, such as Girodet’s brush has so often painted.

“Without being faultlessly beautiful or pretty, when she chooses, she can make an indelible impression. She has only to dress in cherry-colored velvet, with lace frillings, and red roses in her hair, to be divine. If on any pretext Béatrix could dress in the costume of a time when women wore pointed stomachers laced with ribbon, rising, slender and fragile-looking, from the padded fullness of brocade skirts set in thick, deep pleats; when their heads were framed in starched ruffs, and their arms hidden under slashed sleeves with lace ruffles, out of which the hand appeared like the pistil from the cup of a flower; when their hair was tossed back in a thousand little curls over a knot held up by a network of jewels, Béatrix would appear as a successful rival to any of the ideal beauties you may see in that array.”

Félicité showed Calyste a good copy of Mieris’ picture, in which a lady in white satin stands singing with a gentleman of Brabant, while a Negro pours old Spanish wine into a glass with a foot, and a housekeeper is arranging some biscuits.

“Fair women,” she went on, “have the advantage over us dark women of the most delightful variety; you may be fair in a hundred ways, but there is only one way of being dark. Fair women are more womanly than we are; we dark Frenchwomen are too like men. Well,” she added, “do not be falling in love with Béatrix on the strength of the portrait I have given you, exactly like some prince in the Arabian Nights. Too late in the day, my dear boy! But be comforted. With her the bones are for the first comer.”

She spoke with meaning; the admiration expressed in the youth’s face was evidently more for the picture than for the painter whose touch had missed its purpose.

“In spite of her being a blonde,” she resumed, “Béatrix has not the delicacy of her coloring; the lines are severe, she is elegant and hard; she has the look of a strictly accurate drawing, and you might fancy she had southern fires in her soul. She is a flaming angel, slowly drying up. Her eyes look thirsty. Her front face is the best; in profile her face looks as if it had been flattened between two doors. You will see if I am wrong.

“This is what led to our being such intimate friends: For three years, from 1828 to 1831, Béatrix, while enjoying the last gaieties of the Restoration, wandering through drawing-rooms, going to court, gracing the fancy-dress balls at the Élysée Bourbon, was judging men, things, and events from the heights of her intellect. Her mind was fully occupied. This first bewilderment at seeing the world kept her heart dormant, and it remained torpid under the first startling experiences of marriage⁠—a baby⁠—a confinement, and all the business of motherhood, which I cannot bear; I am not a woman so far as that is concerned. To me children are unendurable; they bring a thousand sorrows and incessant anxieties. I must say that I regard it as one of the blessings of modern society of which that hypocrite, Jean-Jacques, deprived us, that we were free to be or not to be mothers. Though I am not the only woman that thinks this, I am the only one to say it.

“During the storm of 1830 and 1831, Béatrix went to her husband’s country house, where she was as much bored as a saint in his stall in Paradise. On her return to Paris, the Marquise thought, and perhaps rightly, that the Revolution, which in the eyes of most people was purely political, would be a moral revolution, too. The world to which she belonged had failed to reconstitute itself during the unlooked-for fifteen years of triumph under the Restoration, so it must crumble away under the steady battering ram of the middle class. She had understood Monsieur Lainé’s great words, ‘Kings are departing.’ This opinion, I suspect, was not without its influence on her conduct.

“She sympathized intellectually with the new doctrines which, for three years after that July, swarmed into life like flies in the sunshine, and which turned many women’s heads; but, like all the nobility, though she thought the new ideas magnificent, she wished to save the nobility. Finding no opening now for personal superiority, seeing the uppermost class again setting up the speechless opposition it had already shown to Napoleon⁠—which, during the dominion of actions and facts, was the only attitude it could take, whereas, in a time of moral transition, it was equivalent to retiring from the contest⁠—she preferred a happy life to this mute antagonism.

“When we began to breathe a little, the Marquise met at my house the man with whom I had thought to end my days⁠—Gennaro Conti, the great composer, of Neapolitan parentage, but born at Marseilles. Conti is a very clever fellow, and has gifts as a composer, though he can never rise to the highest rank. If we had not Meyerbeer and Rossini, he might perhaps have passed for a genius. He has this advantage over them, that he is as a singer what Paganini is on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni as a dancer⁠—in short, what the famous Garat was, of whom he reminds those who ever heard that singer. It is not a voice, my dear boy, it is a soul. When that singing answers to certain ideas, certain indescribable moods in which a woman sometimes finds herself, if she hears Gennaro, she is lost.⁠—The Marquise fell madly in love with him and won him from me. It was excessively provincial, but fair warfare. She gained my esteem and friendship by her conduct towards me. She fancied I was the woman to fight for my possession; she could not tell that in my eyes the most ridiculous thing in the world under such circumstances is the subject of the contest. She came to see me. The woman, proud as she is, was so much in love that she betrayed her secret and left me mistress of her fate. She was quite charming; in my eyes she remained a woman and a marquise.

“I may tell you, my friend, that women are sometimes bad; but they have a secret greatness which men will never be able to appreciate. And so, as I may wind up my affairs as a woman on the brink of old age, which is awaiting me, I will tell you that I had been faithful to Conti, that I should have continued faithful till death, and that, nevertheless, I knew him thoroughly. He has apparently a delightful nature; at bottom he is detestable. In matters of feeling he is a charlatan.

“There are men, like Nathan, of whom I have spoken to you, who are charlatans on the surface, but honest. Such men lie to themselves. Perched on stilts, they fancy that they are on their feet, and play their tricks with a sort of innocence; their vanity is in their blood; they are born actors, swaggerers, grotesquely funny, like a Chinese jar; they might even laugh at themselves. Their personal impulses are generous, and, like the gaudiness of Murat’s royal costume, they attract danger.

“But Conti’s rascality will never be known to anyone but his mistress. He has as an artist that famous Italian jealousy which led Carlone to assassinate Piola, and cost Paesiello a stiletto thrust. This terrible envy is hidden beneath the most charming good-fellowship. Conti has not the courage of his vice; he smiles at Meyerbeer and pays him compliments, while he longs to rend him. He feels himself weak, and gives himself the airs of force; and his vanity is such that he affects the sentiments furthest from his heart. He assumes to be an artist inspired direct from Heaven. To him Art is something sacred and holy. He is a fanatic; he is sublime in his fooling of fashionable folk; his eloquence seems to flow from the deepest convictions. He is a seer, a demon, a god, an angel. In short, though I have warned you, Calyste, you will be his dupe. This southerner, this seething artist, is as cold as a well-rope.

“You listen to him; the artist is a missionary, Art is a religion that has its priesthood and must have its martyrs. Once started, Gennaro mounts to the most disheveled pathos that ever a German philosopher spouted out on his audience. You admire his convictions⁠—he believes in nothing. He carries you up to Heaven by a song that seems to be some mysterious fluid, flowing with love; he gives you a glance of ecstasy; but he keeps an eye on your admiration; he is asking himself, ‘Am I really a god to these people?’ And in the same instant he is perhaps saying to himself, ‘I have eaten too much macaroni.’ You fancy he loves you⁠—he hates you; and you do not know why. But I always knew. He had seen some woman the day before, loved her for a whim, insulted me with false love, with hypocritical kisses, making me pay dearly for his feigned fidelity. In short, he is insatiable for applause; he shams everything, and trifles with everything; he can act joy as well as grief, and he succeeds to perfection. He can please, he is loved, he can get admiration whenever he chooses.

“I left him hating his voice; he owed it more success than he could get from his talent as a composer; and he would rather be a man of genius like Rossini than a performer as fine as Rubini. I had been so foolish as to attach myself to him, and I would have decked the idol till the last. Conti, like many artists, is very dainty, and likes his ease and his little enjoyments; he is dandified, elegant, well dressed; well, I humored all his manias; I loved that weak but astute character. I was envied, and I sometimes smiled with disdain. I respected his courage; he is brave, and bravery, it is said, is the only virtue which no hypocrisy can simulate. On one occasion, when traveling, I saw him put to the test; he was ready to risk his life⁠—and he loves it; but, strange to say, in Paris I have known him guilty of what I call mental cowardice.

“My dear boy, I knew all this. I said to the poor Marquise, ‘You do not know what a gulf you are setting foot in; you are the Perseus of a hapless Andromeda; you are rescuing me from the rock. If he loves you, so much the better; but I doubt it; he loves no one but himself.’

“Gennaro was in the seventh heaven of pride. I was no marquise; I was not born a Casteran; I was forgotten in a day. I allowed myself the fierce pleasure of studying this character to its depths. Certain of what the end would be, I meant to watch Conti’s contortions. My poor boy, in one week I saw horrors of sentimentality, hideous manoeuvring! I will tell you no more; you will see the man here. Only, as he knows that I know him, he hates me now. If he could safely stab me, I should not be alive for two seconds.

“I have never said a word of this to Béatrix. Gennaro’s last and constant insult is that he believes me capable of communicating my painful knowledge to the Marquise. He has become restless and absentminded, for he cannot believe in good feeling in anyone. He still performs for my benefit the part of a man grieved to have deserted me. You will find him full of the most penetrating cordiality; he will wheedle, he will be chivalrous. To him every woman is a Madonna! You have to live with him for some time before you detect the secret of that false frankness, or know the stiletto prick of his humbug. His air of conviction would take in God. And so you will be enmeshed by his feline blandishments, and will never conceive of the deep and rapid arithmetic of his inmost mind.⁠—Let him be.

“I carried indifference to the point of receiving them together at my house. The consequence of this was that the most suspicious world on earth, the world of Paris, knew nothing of the intrigue. Though Gennaro was drunk with pride, he wanted, no doubt, to pose before Béatrix; his dissimulation was consummate. He surprised me; I had expected to find that he insisted on a stage-effect. It was she who compromised herself, after a year of happiness, under all the vicissitudes and risks of Parisian existence.

“She had not seen Gennaro for some days, and I had invited him to dine with me, as she was coming in the evening. Rochefide had no suspicions; but Béatrix knew her husband so well, that, as she often told me, she would have preferred the worst poverty to the wretched life that awaited her in the event of that man ever having a right to scorn or to torment her. I had chosen the evening when our friend, the Comtesse de Montcornet, was at home. After seeing her husband served with his coffee, Béatrix left the drawing-room to dress, though she was not in the habit of getting ready so early.

“ ‘Your hairdresser is not here yet,’ said Rochefide, when he heard why she was going.

“ ‘Thérèse can do my hair,’ she replied.

“ ‘Why, where are you going? You cannot go to Madame de Montcornet’s at eight o’clock.’

“ ‘No,’ said she, ‘but I shall hear the first act at the Italian Opera.’

“The catechizing bailiff in Voltaire’s Huron is a silent man by comparison with an idle husband. Béatrix fled, to be no further questioned, and did not hear her husband say, ‘Very well; we will go together.’

“He did not do it on purpose; he had no reason to suspect his wife; she was allowed so much liberty! He tried never to fetter her in any way; he prided himself on it. And, indeed, her conduct did not offer the smallest hold for the strictest critic. The Marquis was going who knows where⁠—to see his mistress, perhaps. He had dressed before dinner; he had only to take up his hat and gloves when he heard his wife’s carriage draw up under the awning of the steps in the courtyard. He went to her room and found her ready, but amazed at seeing him.

“ ‘Where are you going?’ said she.

“ ‘Did I not tell you I would go with you to the Opera?’

“The Marquise controlled the outward expression of intense annoyance; but her cheeks turned as scarlet as though she had used rouge.

“ ‘Well, come then,’ she replied.

“Rochefide followed her, without heeding the agitation betrayed by her voice; she was burning with the most violent suppressed rage.

“ ‘To the Opera,’ said her husband.

“ ‘No,’ cried Béatrix, ‘to Mademoiselle des Touches’. I have a word to say to her,’ she added, when the door was shut.

“The carriage started.

“ ‘But if you like,’ Béatrix added, ‘I can take you first to the Opera and go to her afterwards.’

“ ‘No,’ said the Marquis; ‘if you have only a few words to say to her, I will wait in the carriage; it is only half-past seven.’

“If Béatrix had said to her husband, ‘Go to the Opera and leave me alone,’ he would have obeyed her quite calmly. Like every clever woman, knowing herself guilty, she was afraid of rousing his suspicions, and resigned herself. Thus, when she gave up the Opera to come to my house, her husband accompanied her. She came in scarlet with rage and impatience. She walked straight up to me, and said in a low voice, with the calmest manner in the world:

“ ‘My dear Félicité, I shall start for Italy tomorrow evening with Conti; beg him to make his arrangements, and wait for me here with a carriage and passport.’

“Then she left with her husband.⁠—Violent passions insist on liberty at any cost. Béatrix had for a year been suffering from want of freedom and the rarity of their meetings, for she considered herself one with Gennaro. So nothing could surprise me. In her place, with my temper, I should have acted as she did. Conti’s happiness broke my heart; only his vanity was engaged in this matter.

“ ‘That is, indeed, being loved!’ he exclaimed, in the midst of his transports. ‘How few women would thus forego their whole life, their fortune, their reputation!’

“ ‘Oh, yes, she loves you,’ said I; ‘but you do not love her!’

“He flew into a fury and made a scene; he harangued, he scolded, he described his passion, saying he had never thought it possible that he could love so much. I was immovably cool, and lent him the money he might want for the journey that had taken him by surprise.

“Béatrix wrote a letter to her husband, and set out for Italy the next evening. She stayed there two years; she wrote to me several times. Her letters are bewitchingly friendly; the poor child clings to me as the only woman that understands her. She tells me she adores me. Want of money compelled Gennaro to write an opera; he did not find in Italy the pecuniary resources open to a composer in Paris.⁠—Here is her last letter; you can understand it now if, at your age, you can analyze the emotions of the heart,” she added, handing him the letter.

At this moment Claude Vignon came in. At the unexpected sight, Calyste and Félicité sat silent for a minute, she from surprise, he from vague dissatisfaction. Claude’s vast, high, and wide forehead, bald at seven-and-thirty, was dark with clouds. His firm, judicious lips expressed cold irony. Claude Vignon is an imposing person, in spite of the changes in a face that was splendid and is now grown livid. From the age of eighteen to five-and-twenty he had a strong likeness to the divine young Raphael; but his nose, the human feature which most readily alters, has grown sharp; his countenance has, as it were, sunk under mysterious hollows, the outlines have grown puffy, and with a bad color; leaden grays predominate in the worn complexion, though no one knows what the fatigues can be of a young man, aged, perhaps, by crushing loneliness, and an abuse of keen discernment. He is always examining other men’s minds, without object or system; the pickaxe of his criticism is always destroying, and never constructing anything. His weariness is that of the laborer, not of the architect.

His eyes, light blue and once bright, are dimmed with unconfessed suffering, or clouded by sullen sadness. Dissipation has darkened the eyelids beneath the brows; the temples have lost their smoothness. The chin, most nobly moulded, has grown double without dignity. His voice, never very sonorous, has grown thin; it is not hoarse, not husky, but something between the two. The inscrutability of this fine face, the fixity of that gaze, cover an irresolution and weakness that are betrayed in the shrewd and ironical smile. This weakness affects his actions, but not his mind; the stamp of encyclopaedic intellect is on that brow and in the habit of that face, at once childlike and lofty.

One detail may help to explain the eccentricities of this character. The man is tall and already somewhat bent, like all who bear a world of ideas. These tall, long frames have never been remarkable for tenacious energy, for creative activity. Charlemagne, Narses, Belisarius, and Constantine have been, in this particular, very noteworthy exceptions. Claude Vignon, no doubt, suggests mysteries to be solved. In the first place, he is at once very simple and very deep. Though he rushes into excess with the readiness of a courtesan, his mind remains unclouded. The intellect which can criticise art, science, literature, and politics is inadequate to control his outer life. Claude contemplates himself in the wide extent of his intellectual realm, and gives up the form of things with Diogenes-like indifference. Content with seeing into everything, understanding everything, he scorns material details; but, being beset with hesitancy as soon as creation is needed, he sees obstacles without being carried away by beauties, and by dint of discussing means, he sits, his hands hanging idle, producing no results. Intellectually he is a Turk in whom meditation induces sleep. Criticism is his opium, and his harem of books has disgusted him with any work he might do.

He is equally indifferent to the smallest and to the greatest things, and is compelled by the mere weight of his brain to throw himself into debauchery to abdicate for a little while the irresistible power of his omnipotent analysis. He is too much absorbed by the seamy side of genius, and you may now conceive that Camille Maupin should try to show him the right side.

The task was a fascinating one. Claude Vignon believed himself no less great as a politician than he was as a writer; but this Machiavelli of private life laughs in his sleeve at ambitious persons, he knows all he can ever know, he instinctively measures his future life by his faculties, he sees himself great, he looks obstacles in the face, perceives the folly of parvenus, takes fright, or is disgusted, and lets the time slip by without doing anything. Like Étienne Lousteau, the feuilleton writer; like Nathan, the famous dramatic author; like Blondet, another journalist, he was born in the middle class to which we owe most of our great writers.

“Which way did you come?” said Mademoiselle des Touches, coloring with pleasure or surprise.

“In at the door,” replied Claude Vignon, drily.

“Well,” she replied, with a shrug, “I know you are not a man to come in at the window.”

“Scaling a balcony is a sort of cross of honor for the beloved fair.”

“Enough!” said Félicité.

“I am in the way?” said Claude Vignon.

“Monsieur,” said the guileless Calyste, “this letter⁠—”

“Keep it; I ask no questions. At our age such things need no words,” said he, in a satirical tone, interrupting Calyste.

“But, indeed, monsieur⁠—” Calyste began, indignantly.

“Be calm, young man; my indulgence for feelings is boundless.”

“My dear Calyste,” said Camille, anxious to speak.

“Dear?” said Vignon, interrupting her.

“Claude is jesting,” Camille went on, addressing Calyste, “and he is wrong⁠—with you who know nothing of Paris and its ‘chaff.’ ”

“I had no idea that I was funny,” said Vignon, very gravely.

“By what road did you come? For two hours I have never ceased looking out towards le Croisic.”

“You were not incessantly looking,” replied Vignon.

“You are intolerable with your banter.”

“Banter! I?”

Calyste rose.

“You are not so badly off here that you need leave,” said Vignon.

“On the contrary,” said the indignant youth, to whom Camille gave her hand, which he kissed instead of merely taking it, and left on it a scalding tear.

“I wish I were that little young man,” said the critic, seating himself, and taking the end of the hookah. “How he will love!”

“Too much, for then he will not be loved,” said Mademoiselle des Touches. “Madame de Rochefide is coming here.”

“Good!” said Claude; “and with Conti?”

“She will stay here alone, but he is bringing her.”

“Have they quarreled?”

“No.”

“Play me a sonata by Beethoven; I know nothing of the music he has written for the piano.”

Claude filled the bowl of the hookah with tobacco, watching Camille more closely than she knew; a hideous idea possessed him; he fancied that a straightforward woman believed she had duped him. The situation was a new one.

Calyste, as he went away, was thinking neither of Béatrix de Rochefide nor her letter; he was furious with Claude Vignon, full of wrath at what he thought want of delicacy, and of pity for poor Félicité. How could a man be loved by that perfect woman and not worship her on his knees, not trust her on the faith of a look or a smile? After being the privileged spectator of the suffering Félicité had endured while waiting, he felt an impulse to rend that pale, cold spectre. He knew nothing himself, as Félicité had told him, of the sort of deceptive witticisms in which the satirists of the press excel. To him love was a human form of religion.

On seeing him cross the courtyard, his mother could not restrain a joyful exclamation, and old Mademoiselle du Guénic whistled for Mariotte.

“Mariotte, here is the child; give us the lubine.”

“I saw him, mademoiselle,” replied the cook.

His mother, a little distressed by the melancholy that sat on Calyste’s brow, never suspecting that it was caused by what he thought Vignon’s bad treatment of Félicité, took up her worsted work. The old aunt pulled out her knitting. The Baron gave up his easy-chair to his son, and walked up and down the room as if to unstiffen his legs before taking a turn in the garden. No Flemish or Dutch picture represents an interior of richer tone, or furnished with more happily suitable figures. The handsome youth, dressed in black velvet, the mother, still so handsome, and the two old folks, in the setting of ancient paneling, were the expression of the most domestic harmony.

Fanny longed to question Calyste, but he had taken Béatrix’s letter out of his pocket⁠—the letter which was, perhaps, to destroy all the happiness this noble family enjoyed. As he unfolded it, Calyste’s lively imagination called up the Marquise dressed as Camille Maupin had fantastically described her.

“From Béatrix to Félicité.

“Genoa, July 2nd.

“I have not written to you, my dear friend, since our stay at Florence, but Venice and Rome took up all my time; and happiness, as you know, fills a large place in life. We are neither of us likely to take strict account of a letter more or less. I am a little tired; I insisted on seeing everything, and to a mind not easily satiated the repetition of pleasures brings fatigue. Our friend had great triumphs at the Scala, at the Fenice, and these last three days at the San Carlo. Three Italian operas in two years! You cannot say that love has made him idle.

“We have been warmly welcomed everywhere, but I should have preferred silence and solitude. Is not that the only mode of life that suits a woman in direct antagonism with the world? This was what I had expected. Love, my dear, is a more exacting master than marriage; but it is sweet to serve him. After having played at love all my life, I did not know that I must see the world again, even in glimpses, and the attentions paid me on all hands were so many wounds. I was no longer on an equal footing with women of the highest type. The more kindly I was treated, the more was my inferiority marked. Gennaro did not understand these subtleties, but he was so happy that I should have been graceless if I had not sacrificed such petty vanities to a thing so splendid as an artist’s life.

“We live only by love, while men live by love and action⁠—otherwise they would not be men. There are, however, immense disadvantages to a woman in the position in which I have placed myself; and you have avoided them. You have remained great in the face of the world which had no rights over you; you have perfect liberty, and I have lost mine. I am speaking only with reference to concerns of the heart, and not to social matters, which I have wholly sacrificed. You might be vain and wilful, you might have all the graces of a woman in love, who can give or refuse anything as she chooses; you had preserved the privilege of being capricious, even in the interest of your affection and of the man you might like. In short, you, even now, have still your own sanction; I have not the freedom of feeling, which, as I think, it is always delightful to assert in love, even when the passion is an eternal one. I have not the right to quarrel in jest, which we women so highly and so rightly prize; is it not the line by which we sound the heart? I dare not threaten, I must rely for attractiveness an infinite docility and sweetness, I must be impressive through the immenseness of my love; I would rather die than give up Gennaro, for the holiness of my passion is its only plea for pardon.

“I did not hesitate between my social dignity and my own little dignity⁠—a secret between me and my conscience. Though I have fits of melancholy, like the clouds which float across the clearest sky, to which we women like to give way, I silence them at once; they would look like regret. Dear me! I so fully understood the extent of my debt to him, that I have equipped myself with unlimited indulgence; but hitherto Gennaro has not roused my sensitive jealousy. Indeed, I cannot see how my dear great genius can do wrong. I am, my dear, rather like the devotees who argue with their God, for is it not to you that I owe my happiness? And you cannot doubt that I have often thought of you.

“At last I have seen Italy! As you saw it, as it ought to be seen, illuminated to the soul by love, as it is by its glorious sun and its masterpieces of art. I pity those who are incessantly fired by the admiration it calls for at every step when they have not a hand to clasp, a heart into which they may pour the overflow of emotions which then subside as they grow deeper. These two years are to me all my life, and my memory will have reaped a rich harvest. Did you not, as I did, dream of settling at Chiavari, of buying a palace at Venice, a villa at Sorrento, a house at Florence? Do not all women who love shun the world? And I, forever an outcast, could I help longing to bury myself in a lovely landscape, in a heap of flowers, looking out on the pretty sea, or a valley as good as the sea, like the valley you look on from Fiesole?

“But, alas, we are poor artists, and want of money is dragging the wanderers back to Paris again. Gennaro cannot bear me to feel that I have left all my luxury, and he is bringing a new work, a grand opera, to be rehearsed in Paris. Even at the cost of my love, I cannot bear to meet one of those looks from a woman or a man which would make me feel murderous. Yes! for I could hack anyone to pieces who should condescend to pity me, should offer me the protection of patronage⁠—like that enchanting Château-neuf, who, in the time of Henri III, I think, spurred her horse to trample down the Provost of Paris for some such offence.

“So I am writing to tell you that without delay I shall arrive to join you at les Touches, and wait for our Gennaro in that quiet spot. You see how bold I am with my benefactress and sister. Still, the magnitude of the obligation will not betray my heart, like some others, into ingratitude.

“You have told me so much about the difficulties of the journey that I shall try to reach le Croisic by sea. This idea occurred to me on hearing that there was here a little Danish vessel, loaded with marble, which will put in at le Croisic to take up salt on its way back to the Baltic. By this voyage I shall avoid the fatigue and expense of traveling by post. I know you are not alone, and I am glad of it; I had some remorse in the midst of my happiness. You are the only person with whom I could bear to be alone without Conti. Will it not be a pleasure to you, too, to have a woman with you who will understand your happiness and not be jealous of it?

“Well, till our meeting! The wind is fair, and I am off, sending you a kiss.”

“Well, well, she, too, knows how to love!” said Calyste to himself, folding up the letter with a sad expression.

This sadness flashed on his mother’s heart like a gleam lighting up an abyss. The Baron had just left the room. Fanny bolted the door to the turret, and returned to lean over the back of the chair in which her boy was sitting, as Dido’s sister bends over her in Guérin’s picture. She kissed his forehead and said:

“What is the matter, my child? what makes you unhappy? You promised to account to me for your constant visits to les Touches; I ought to bless its mistress, you say?”

“Yes, indeed,” he replied. “She, my dear mother, has shown me all the defects of my education in these times, when men of noble birth must acquire personal merit if they are to restore their names to life again. I was as remote from my day as Guérande is from Paris. She has been, in a way, the mother of my intelligence.”

“Not for that can I bless her!” said the Baroness, her eyes filling with tears.

“Mother,” cried Calyste, on whose forehead the hot tears fell, drops of heartbroken motherhood, “mother, do not cry. Just now, when, to do her a pleasure, I proposed scouring the coast from the customhouse hut to the Bourg de Batz, she said to me, ‘How anxious your mother would be!’ ”

“She said so! Then I can forgive her much,” said Fanny.

“Félicité wishes me well,” replied Calyste, “and she often checks herself from saying some of those hasty and doubtful things which artists let fall, so as not to shake my faith⁠—knowing that it is not immovable. She has told me of the life led in Paris by youths of the highest rank, going from their country homes, as I might from mine, leaving their family without any fortune, and making great wealth by the force of their will and their intelligence. I can do what the Baron de Rastignac has done, and he is in the Ministry.⁠—She gives me lessons on the piano, she teaches me Italian, she has let me into a thousand social secrets of which no one has an inkling at Guérande. She could not give me the treasures of her love; she gives me those of her vast intellect, her wit, her genius. She does not choose to be a mere pleasure, but a light to me; she offends none of my creeds; she believes in the nobility, she loves Brittany⁠—”

“She has changed our Calyste,” said the old blind woman, interrupting him, “for I understand nothing of this talk. You have a fine old house over your head, nephew, old relations who worship you, good, old servants; you can marry a good little Bretonne, a pious and well-bred girl who will make you happy, and you can reserve your ambitions for your eldest son, who will be three times as rich as you are if you are wise enough to live quietly and economically, in the shade and in the peace of the Lord, so as to redeem the family estates. That is as simple as a Breton heart. You will get rich less quickly, but far more surely.”

“Your aunt is right, my darling; she cares as much for your happiness as I do. If I should not succeed in arranging your marriage with Miss Margaret, your uncle, Lord Fitz-William’s daughter, it is almost certain that Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël will leave her money to either of her nieces you may prefer.”

“And there will be a few crown pieces here!” said the old aunt in a low, mysterious voice.

“I! Marry at my age?” said he, with one of those looks which weaken a mother’s reason. “Am I to have no sweet and crazy lovemaking? Am I never to tremble, thrill, flutter, fear, lie down under a pitiless gaze and presently melt it? May I never know the beauty that is free, the fancy of the soul, the clouds that fleet over the serene blue of happiness and that the breath of enjoyment blows away? May I never stand under a gutter spout without discovering that it is raining, like the lovers seen by Diderot? Shall I never hold a burning coal in the palm of my hand like the Duc de Lorraine? Shall I never climb a silken rope-ladder, nor cling to a rotten, old trellis without feeling it yield? Am I never to hide in a closet or under a bed? Can I know nothing of woman but wifely surrender, or of love but its equable lamplight? Is all my curiosity to be satiated before it is excited? Am I to live without ever feeling that fury of the heart which adds to a man’s power? Am I to be a married monk?⁠—No! I have set my teeth in the Paris apple of civilization. Do you not perceive that by your chaste, your ignorant family habits you have laid the fire that is consuming me, and that I shall be burnt up before I can adore the divinity I see wherever I turn⁠—in the green foliage and in the sand glowing in the sunshine, and in all the beautiful, lordly, and elegant women who are described in the books and poems I have devoured at Camille’s? Alas! There is but one such woman in all Guérande, and that is you, mother! The lovely Blue Birds of my dreams come from Paris; they live in the pages of Lord Byron and Scott; they are Parisina, Effie, Minna! Or, again, that Royal Duchess I saw in the moors among the heath and broom, whose beauty sent my blood with a rush to the heart!”

These thoughts were clearer, more brilliant, more living, to the Baroness’ eye, than art can make them to the reader; she saw them in a flash shot from the boy’s glance like the arrows from a quiver that is upset. Though she had never read Beaumarchais, she thought, as any woman would, that it would be a crime to make this Cherubino marry.

“Oh, my dear boy!” said she, taking him in her arms, pressing him to her, and kissing his beautiful hair⁠—still her own⁠—“marry when you please, only be happy. It is not my part to tease you.”

Mariotte came to lay the table. Gasselin had gone out to exercise Calyste’s horse, for he had not ridden it these two months. The three women, the mother, the aunt, and Mariotte, were of one mind, with the natural cunning of women, to make much of Calyste when he dined at home. Breton penuriousness, fortified by the memories and habits of childhood, tried to contend with the civilization of Paris so faithfully represented at les Touches, so close to Guérande. Mariotte tried to disgust her young master with the elaborate dishes prepared in Camille Maupin’s kitchen, as his mother and aunt vied with each other in attentions to enmesh their child in the nets of their tenderness, and to make comparisons impossible.

“Ah, ha! You have a lubine,1 Monsieur Calyste, and snipe, and pancakes such as you will never get anywhere but here,” said Mariotte, with a knowing and triumphant air, as she looked down on the white cloth, a perfect sheet of snow.

After dinner, when his old aunt had settled down to her knitting again, when the curé of Guérande and the Chevalier du Halga came in, attracted by their game of mouche, Calyste went out to go back to les Touches, saying he must return Béatrix’s letter.

Claude Vignon and Mademoiselle des Touches were still at table. The great critic had a tendency to greediness, and this vice was humored by Félicité, who knew how a woman makes herself indispensable by such attentions.

The dining-room, lately finished by considerable additions, showed how readily and how quickly a woman can marry the nature, adopt the profession, the passions, and the tastes of the man she loves, or means to love. The table had the rich and dazzling appearance which modern luxury, seconded by the improvements in manufactures, stamps on every detail. The noble but impoverished house of du Guénic knew not the antagonist with whom it had to do battle, nor how large a sum was needed to contend with the brand-new plate brought from Paris by Mademoiselle des Touches, with her china⁠—thought good enough for the country⁠—her fine linen, her silver gilt, all the trifles on her table, and all the skill of her man cook.

Calyste declined to take any of the liqueurs contained in one of the beautiful inlaid cases of precious woods, that might be shrines.

“Here is your letter,” he said, with childish ostentation, looking at Claude, who was sipping a glass of West Indian liqueur.

“Well, what do you think of it?” asked Mademoiselle des Touches, tossing the letter across the table to Vignon, who read it, alternately lifting and setting down his glass.

“Why⁠—that the women of Paris are very happy; they all have men of genius, who love them, to worship.”

“Dear me, you are still but a rustic!” said Félicité, with a laugh. “What! You did not discover that she already loves him less, that⁠—”

“It is self-evident!” said Claude Vignon, who had as yet read no more than the first page. “When a woman is really in love, does she trouble her head in the least about her position? Is she as finely observant as the Marquise? Can she calculate? Can she distinguish? Our dear Béatrix is tied to Conti by her pride; she is condemned to love him, come what may.”

“Poor woman!” said Camille.

Calyste sat staring at the table, but he saw nothing. The beautiful creature in her fantastic costume, as sketched by Félicité that morning, rose before him, radiant with light; she smiled on him, she played with her fan, and her other hand, emerging from a frill of lace and cherry-colored velvet, lay white and still on the full folds of her magnificent petticoat.

“This is the very thing for you,” said Claude Vignon, with a sardonic smile at Calyste.

Calyste was offended at the words the very thing.

“Do not suggest the idea of such an intrigue to the dear child; you do not know how dangerous such a jest may be. I know Béatrix; she has too much magnanimity of temper to change; besides, Conti will be with her.”

“Ah!” said Claude Vignon, satirically, “a little twinge of jealousy, heh?”

“Can you suppose it?” said Camille, proudly.

“You are more clear-sighted than a mother could be,” replied Claude.

“But, I ask you, is it possible?” and she looked at Calyste.

“And yet,” Vignon went on, “they would be well matched. She is ten years older than he is; he would be the girl.”

“A girl, monsieur, who has twice been under fire in la Vendée. If there had but been twenty thousand of such girls⁠—”

“I was singing your praise,” said Vignon, “an easier matter than singeing your beard.”

“I have a sword to cut the beards of those who wear them too long,” retorted Calyste.

“And I have a tongue that cuts sharply, too,” replied Vignon, smiling. “We are Frenchmen⁠—the affair can be arranged.”

Mademoiselle des Touches gave Calyste a beseeching look, which calmed him at once.

“Why,” said Félicité, to end the discussion, “why is it that youths, like my Calyste there, always begin by loving women no longer young?”

“I know of no more guileless and generous impulse,” said Vignon. “It is the consequence of the delightful qualities of youth. And besides, to what end would old women come if it were not for such love? You are young and handsome, and will be for twenty years to come; before you we may speak plainly,” he went on, with a keen glance at Mademoiselle des Touches. “In the first place, the semi-dowagers to whom very young men attach themselves know how to love far better than young women. A youth is too like a woman for a young woman to attract him. Such a passion is too suggestive of the myth of Narcissus. Besides this, there is, I believe, a common want of experience which keeps them asunder. Hence the reason which makes it true that a young woman’s heart can only be understood by a man in whom long practice is veiled by his real or assumed passion, is the same as that which, allowing for differences of nature, makes a woman past her youth more seductive to a boy; he is intensely conscious that he shall succeed with her, and the woman’s vanity is intensely flattered by his pursuit of her.

“Then, again, it is natural that the young should seize on fruit, and autumn offers many fine and luscious kinds. Is it nothing to meet those looks, at once bold and reserved, languishing at the proper moments, soft with the last gleams of love, so warm, so soothing? And the elaborate elegance of speech, the splendid ripe shoulders so finely filled out, the ample roundness, the rich and undulating plumpness, the hands full of dimples, the pulpy, well-nourished skin, the brow full of overflowing sentiment, on which the light lingers, the hair, so carefully cherished and dressed, where fine partings of white skin are delicately traced, and the throat with those fine curves, the inviting nape, where every resource of art is applied to bring out the contrast between the hair and the tones of the flesh, to emphasize all the audacity of life and love? Dark women then get some of the tones of the fairest, the amber shade of maturity.

“Then, again, these women betray their knowledge of the world in their smiles, and display it in their conversation; they know how to talk; they will set the whole world before you to raise a smile; they have sublime touches of dignity and pride; they can shriek with despair in a way to break your heart, wail a farewell to love, knowing that it is futile, and only resuscitates passion; they grow young again by dint of varying the most desperately simple things. They constantly expected to be contradicted as to the falling off they so coquettishly proclaim, and the intoxication of their triumph is contagious. Their devotion is complete; they listen, in short, they love; they clutch at love as a man condemned to death clings to the smallest trifles of living; they are like those lawyers who can urge every plea in a case without fatiguing the Court; they exhaust every means in their power; indeed, perfect love can only be known in them.

“I doubt if they are ever forgotten, any more than we can forget anything vast and sublime.

“A young woman has a thousand other things to amuse her, these women have nothing; they have no conceit left, no vanity, no meanness; their love is the Loire at its mouth, immense, swelled by every disenchantment, every affluent of life, and that is why⁠—my daughter is dumb!” he ended, seeing Mademoiselle des Touches in an attitude of ecstasy, clutching Calyste’s hand tightly, perhaps to thank him for having been the cause of such a moment for her, of such a tribute of praise that she could detect no snare in it.

All through the evening Claude Vignon and Félicité were brilliantly witty, telling anecdotes and describing the life of Paris to Calyste, who quite fell in love with Claude, for wit exerts a peculiar charm on men of feeling.

“I should not be in the least surprised to see Madame de Rochefide land here tomorrow with Conti, who is accompanying her, no doubt,” said Claude at the end of the evening. “When I came up from le Croisic, the seamen had spied a small ship, Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian.”

This speech brought the color to Camille’s cheeks, calm as she was.

That night, again, Madame du Guénic sat up for her son till one o’clock, unable to imagine what he could be doing at les Touches if Félicité did not love him.

“He must be in the way,” thought this delightful mother.

“What have you had to talk about so long?” she asked, as she saw him come in.

“Oh, mother! I never spent a more delightful evening. Genius is a great, a most sublime thing! Why did you not bestow genius on me? With genius a man must be able to choose the woman he loves from all the world; she must inevitably be his!”

“But you are handsome, my Calyste.”

“Beauty has no place but in women. And besides, Claude Vignon is fine. Men of genius have a brow that beams, eyes where lightnings play⁠—and I, unhappy wretch, I only know how to love.”

“They say that is all-sufficient, my darling,” said she, kissing his forehead.

“Really, truly?”

“I have been told so. I have had no experience.”

It was Calyste’s turn to kiss his mother’s hand with reverence.

“I will love for all those who might have been your adorers,” said he.

“Dear child, it is in some degree your duty; you have inherited all my feelings. So do not be rash; try to love only high-souled women, if you must love.”

What young man, welling over with passion and suppressed vitality, but would have had the triumphant idea of going to le Croisic to see Madame de Rochefide land, so as to be able to study her, himself unknown? Calyste greatly amazed his father and mother, who knew nothing of the fair Marquise’s arrival, by setting out in the morning without waiting for breakfast. Heaven knows how briskly the boy stepped out. He felt as if some new strength had come to his aid, he was so light; he kept close under the walls of les Touches to avoid being seen. The delightful boy was ashamed of his ardor, and had perhaps a miserable fear of being laughed at; Félicité and Claude Vignon were so horribly keen-sighted! And, then, in such cases a youth believes that his forehead is transparent.

He followed the zigzag path across the maze of salt-marshes, reached the sands, and was across them with a skip and a hop, in spite of the scorching sun that twinkled on them.

This brought him to the edge of the strand, banked up with a breakwater, near which stands a house where travelers may find shelter from storms, sea-gales, rain, and the whirlwind. It is not always possible to cross the little strait, nor are there always boats, and it is convenient, while they are crossing from the port, to have shelter for the horses, asses, merchandise, or passengers’ luggage. From thence men can scan the open sea and the port of le Croisic; and from thence Calyste soon discerned two boats coming, loaded with baggage⁠—bundles, trunks, carpetbags, and cases, of which the shape and size proclaimed to the natives the arrival of extraordinary things, such as could only belong to a voyager of distinction.

In one of these boats sat a young woman with a straw hat and green veil, accompanied by a man. This boat was the first to come to land. Calyste felt a thrill; but their appearance showed them to be a maid and a manservant, and he dared not question them.

“Are you crossing to le Croisic, Monsieur Calyste?” asked one of the boatmen, who knew him; but he replied only by a negative shake of the head, ashamed of having his name mentioned.

Calyste was enchanted at the sight of a trunk covered with waterproof canvas, on which he read Madame la Marquise de Rochefide. The name glittered in his eyes like some talisman; it had to him a purport of mysterious doom; he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he should fall in love with this woman; the smallest things relating to her interested him already, spurred his fancy and his curiosity. Why?⁠—In the burning desert of its immeasurable and objectless desires does not youth put forth all its powers towards the first woman who comes within reach? Béatrix had fallen heir to the love that Camille had disdained.

Calyste watched the landing of the luggage, looking out from time to time at le Croisic, hoping to see a boat come out of the harbor, cross to this little headland, and reveal to him the Béatrix who had already become to him what another Béatrix was to Dante, an eternal statue of marble on whose hands he would hang his flowers and wreaths. He stood with his arms folded, lost in the dream of expectancy. A thing worthy of remark, but which nevertheless has never been remarked, is the way in which we frequently subordinate our feelings to our will, how we pledge ourself to ourself, as it were, and how we make our fate; chance has certainly far less share in it than we suppose.

“I see no horses,” said the maid, sitting on a trunk.

“And I see no carriage-road,” said the valet.

“Well, horses have certainly been here,” replied the woman, pointing to their traces. “Monsieur,” said she, addressing Calyste, “is that the road leading to Guérande?”

“Yes,” said he; “whom are you expecting?”

“We were told that we should be met, fetched to les Touches.⁠—If they are very late, I do not know how Madame can dress,” said she to the man. “You had better walk on to les Touches. What a land of savages!”

It dawned on Calyste that he was in a false position.

“Then your mistress is going to les Touches?” he asked.

“Mademoiselle came to meet her at seven this morning.” was the reply. “Ah! here come the horses.”

Calyste fled, running back to Guérande with the swiftness and lightness of a chamois, and doubling like a hare to avoid being seen by the servants from les Touches; still, he met two of them in the narrow way across the marsh which he had to cross.

“Shall I go in? Shall I not?” he asked himself as he saw the tops of the pine-trees of les Touches.

He was afraid; he returned to Guérande hangdog and repentant, and walked up and down the Mall, where he continued the discussion with himself.

He started as he caught sight of les Touches, and studied the weathercocks.

“She can have no idea of my excitement,” said he to himself.

His wandering thoughts became so many grapnels that caught in his heart and held the Marquise there. Calyste had felt none of these terrors, these anticipatory joys with regard to Camille; he had first met her on horseback, and his desire had sprung up, as at the sight of a beautiful flower he might have longed to pluck. These vacillations constitute a sort of poem in a timid soul. Fired by the first flames of imagination, these souls rise up in wrath, are appeased, and eager by turns, and in silence and solitude reach the utmost heights of love before they have even spoken to the object of so many struggles.

Calyste saw from afar, on the Mall, the Chevalier du Halga, walking with Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël; he hid himself. The Chevalier and the old lady, believing themselves alone on the Mall, were talking aloud.

“Since Charlotte de Kergarouët is coming to you,” said the Chevalier, “keep her three or four months. How can you expect her to flirt with Calyste? She never stays here long enough to attempt it; whereas, if they see each other every day, the two children will end by being desperately in love, and you will see them married this winter. If you say two words of your plans to Charlotte, she will at once say four to Calyste; and a girl of sixteen will certainly win the day against a woman of forty-something!”

The two old folks turned to retrace their steps. Calyste heard no more, but he had understood what Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël’s plan was. In his present frame of mind nothing could be more disastrous. Is it in the fever of a preconceived passion that a young man will accept as his wife a girl found for him by others? Calyste, who cared not a straw for Charlotte de Kergarouët, felt inclined to repulse her. Considerations of money could not touch him; he had been accustomed from childhood to the modest style of his father’s house; besides, seeing Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël live as poorly as the Guénics themselves, he had no notion of her wealth. And a youth brought up as Calyste had been would not, in any case, consider anything but feeling; and all his mind was set on the Marquise.

Compared with the portrait drawn by Camille, what was Charlotte? The companion of his childhood, whom he treated as his sister.

He did not get home till five o’clock. When he went into the room, his mother, with a melancholy smile, handed him a note from Mademoiselle des Touches, as follows:⁠—

“My dear Calyste⁠—The beautiful Marquise de Rochefide has arrived; we count on you to do honor to her advent. Claude, always satirical, declares that you will be Bice and she Dante. The honor of Brittany and of the Guénics is at stake when there is a Casteran to be welcomed. So let us meet soon.⁠—Yours,

Calyste showed his mother the note, and went at once.

“What are these Casterans?” said she to the Baron.

“An old Norman family, related to William the Conqueror,” he replied. “Their arms are In tierce per fess azure gules and or, a horse rearing argent hoofed or.⁠—The beautiful creature for whom le Gars was killed at Fougères in 1800 was the daughter of a Casteran who became a nun at Séez, and was made abbess after being thrown over by the Duc de Verneuil.”

“And the Rochefides?”

“I do not know the name; I should want to see their arms,” said he.

The Baroness was a little relieved at hearing that the Marquise Béatrix de Rochefide was of an old family; still, she felt some alarm at knowing that her son was exposed to fresh fascinations.

Calyste, as he walked, felt the most violent and yet delightful impulses; his throat was choked, his heart full, his brain confused; he was devoured by fever. He wanted to walk slower, but a superior power urged him on. All young men have known this perturbation of the senses caused by a vague hope: a subtle fire flames within and raises a halo, like the glory shown about the divine persons in a sacred picture, through which they see nature in a glow and woman radiant. Are they not then, like the saints themselves, full of faith, ardor, hope, and purity?

The young Breton found the whole party in Camille’s little private drawing-room. It was by this time nearly six o’clock; through the windows the sinking sun shed a ruddy light, broken by the trees; the air was still, the room was full of the soft gloom that women love so well.

“Here is the member for Brittany,” said Camille Maupin, smiling to her friend, as Calyste lifted the tapestry curtain over the door. “As punctual as a king!”

“You recognized his step?” said Claude Vignon to Mademoiselle des Touches.

Calyste bowed to the Marquise, who merely nodded to him; he had not looked at her. He shook hands with Claude Vignon, who offered him his hand.

“Here is the great man of whom you have heard so much, Gennaro Conti,” Camille went on, without answering Claude Vignon.

She introduced to Calyste a man of middle height, thin and slender, with chestnut hair, eyes that were almost orange color, with a white, freckled skin, in short, so exactly the well-known head of Lord Byron, that it would be superfluous to describe it⁠—but perhaps he held it better. Conti was not a little proud of this resemblance.

“I am delighted, being but one day at les Touches, to meet Monsieur,” said Gennaro.

“It is my part to say as much to you,” replied Calyste, with sufficient ease of manner.

“He is as handsome as an angel!” the Marquise said to Félicité. Calyste, standing between the divan and the two women, overheard the words, though spoken in a whisper. He moved to an armchair, and stole watchful looks at the Marquise. In the soft light of the setting sun he saw lounging on the divan, as though a sculptor had placed her in position, a white, sinuous figure which seemed to dazzle his sight. Félicité, without knowing it, had served her friend well by her description.

Béatrix was superior to the not too flattering portrait drawn by Camille. Was it not partly for the stranger’s benefit that Béatrix had placed in her splendid hair bunches of blue cornflowers, which showed off the pale gleam of her ringlets, arranged to frame her face and flicker over her cheeks? Her eyes were set in circles darkened by fatigue, but only to the tone of the purest and most opalescent mother-of-pearl; her cheeks were as bright as her eyes. Under her white skin, as delicate as the silky lining of an eggshell, life flushed in the purple blood. The finish of her features was exquisite; her brow seemed diaphanous. This fair and gentle head, finely set on a long neck of marvelous beauty, lent itself to the most varying expression.

Her waist, slight enough to span, had a bewitching grace; her bare shoulders gleamed in the twilight like a white camellia in black hair. The bosom, well supported, but covered with a clear handkerchief, showed two exquisitely enticing curves. The muslin dress⁠—white flowered with blue, the wide sleeves, the bodice, pointed, and without any sash, the shoes with sandals crossed over fine thread stockings⁠—all showed perfect knowledge of the arts of dress. Earrings of silver filagree, marvels of Genoese work which no doubt were coming into fashion, were admirably suited to the exquisite softness of the fair hair starred with cornflowers.

At a single eager glance Calyste took in all this beauty, which stamped itself on his soul. Béatrix, so fair, and Félicité, so dark, recalled the “Keepsake” contrasts, so much affected by English engravers and draughtsmen. They were woman’s weakness and woman’s strength in their utmost expression, a perfect antithesis. These two women could never be rivals; each had her empire. They were like a delicate pale periwinkle or lily by the side of a sumptuous and gorgeous red poppy, or a turquoise by a ruby. In an instant Calyste was possessed by a passion which crowned the secret working of his hopes, his fears, his doubts. Mademoiselle des Touches had roused his senses, Béatrix fired his mind and heart. The young Breton was conscious of the birth within himself of an all-conquering force that would respect nothing. And he shot at Conti a look of envy and hatred, gloomy, and full of alarms, a look he had never had for Claude Vignon.

Calyste called upon all his resolution to restrain himself, thinking, nevertheless, that the Turks were very right to keep their women shut up, and that such beautiful creatures should be forbidden to show themselves in their tempting witcheries to young men aflame with love. This hot hurricane was lulled as soon as Béatrix turned her eyes on him and her gentle voice made itself heard; the poor boy already feared her as he feared God.

The dinner-bell rang.

“Calyste, give your arm to the Marquise,” said Mademoiselle des Touches, taking Conti on her right and Claude on her left, as she stood aside to let the young couple pass. Thus to go down the old staircase of les Touches was to Calyste like a first battle; his heart failed him, he found nothing to say, a faint moisture stood on his brow and down his spine. His arm trembled so violently that at the bottom step the Marquise said to him:

“What is the matter?”

“Never,” said he in a choked voice, “never in my life have I seen a woman so beautiful as you are, excepting my mother; and I cannot control my agitation.”

“Why, have you not Camille Maupin here?”

“But what a difference!” said Calyste artlessly.

“Ha! Calyste,” Félicité whispered in his ear; “did I not tell you that you would forget me as though I had never existed? Sit there, next her on her right, and Vignon on her left.⁠—As for you, Gennaro, I keep you by me,” she added, laughing; “we will keep an eye on her flirtations.”

The accent in which Camille spoke struck Claude, who looked at her with the wily and apparently absent glance, which in him showed that he was observant. He never ceased watching Mademoiselle des Touches throughout dinner.

“Flirtations!” replied the Marquise, drawing off her gloves and showing her beautiful hands; “I have every excuse; on one side of me I have a poet,” and she turned to Claude; “on the other poetry.”

Gennaro bestowed on Calyste a gaze full of flattery.

By candlelight Béatrix looked even more beautiful than before. The pale gleam of the wax-lights cast a satin sheen on her forehead, set sparks in her gazelle-like eyes, and fell through her silky ringlets, making separate hairs shine like threads of gold. With a graceful movement she threw off her gauze scarf, uncovering her shoulders. Calyste could then see the delicate nape, as white as milk, with a deep hollow that parted into two, curving off towards each shoulder with a lovely and delusive symmetry. The changes of aspect in which pretty women indulge produce very little effect in the fashionable world, where every eye is blasé, but they commit fearful ravages in a soul as fresh as was Calyste’s. This bust, so unlike Camille’s, revealed a perfectly different character in Béatrix. There could be seen pride of race, a tenacity peculiar to the aristocracy, and a certain hardness in that double muscle of the shoulder, which is perhaps the last surviving vestige of the conqueror’s strength.

Calyste found it very difficult to seem to eat; he was full of nervous feelings, which took away his hunger. As in all young men, Nature was in the clutches of those throes which precede first love, and stamp it so deeply on the soul. At his age the ardor of the heart repressed by the ardor of the moral sense leads to an internal conflict, which accounts for the long, respectful hesitancy, the deep absorption of love, the absence of all self-interest⁠—all the peculiar attractions of youths whose heart and life are pure.

As he noted⁠—by stealth, so as not to rouse Gennaro’s jealous suspicions⁠—all the details which make the Marquise de Rochefide so supremely beautiful, Calyste was oppressed by the majesty of the lady beloved; he felt himself shrink before the haughtiness of some of her glances, the imposing aspect of her face, overflowing with aristocratic self-consciousness, a pride, which women can express by slight movements, by airs of the head and a magnificent slowness of gesture, which are all less affected and less studied than might be supposed. There is a sentiment behind all these modes of expression. The ambiguous position in which Béatrix found herself, compelled her to keep a watch over herself, to be imposing without being ridiculous; and women of the highest stamp can all achieve this, though it is the rock on which ordinary women are wrecked.

Béatrix could guess from Félicité’s looks all the secret adoration she inspired in her neighbor, and that it was unworthy of her to encourage it; so from time to time she bestowed on him a repellant glance that fell on him like an avalanche of snow. The unfortunate youth appealed to Mademoiselle des Touches by a gaze in which she felt the tears kept down in his heart by superhuman determination, and Félicité kindly asked him why he ate nothing. Calyste stuffed to order, and made a feint of joining in the conversation. The idea of being tiresome instead of agreeable was unendurable, and hammered at his brain. He was all the more bashful because he saw, behind the Marquise’s chair, the manservant he had met in the morning on the jetty, who would no doubt report his curiosity.

Whether he were contrite or happy, Madame de Rochefide paid no attention to him. Mademoiselle des Touches had led her to talk of her journey in Italy, and she gave a very witty account of the point-blank fire of passion with which a little Russian diplomat at Florence had honored her, laughing at these little young men who fling themselves at a woman as a locust rushes on grass. She made Claude Vignon and Gennaro laugh, and Félicité also; but these darts of sarcasm went straight to Calyste’s heart, who only heard words through the humming in his ears and brain. The poor boy made no vow, as some obstinate men have done, to win this woman at any cost; no, he was not angry, he was miserable. When he discerned in Béatrix an intention to sacrifice him at Gennaro’s feet, he only said to himself⁠—“If only I can serve her in any way!” and allowed himself to be trampled on with the meekness of a lamb.

“How is it,” said Claude Vignon to the Marquise, “that you, who so much admire poetry, give it so bad a reception? Such artless admiration, so sweet in its expression, with no second thought, no reservation, is not that the poetry of the heart? Confess now that it gives you a sense of satisfaction and well-being.”

“Certainly,” she replied, “but we should be very unhappy and, above all, very worthless if we yielded to every passion we inspire.”

“If you made no selection,” said Conti, “we should not be so proud of being loved.”

“When shall I be chosen and distinguished by a woman?” Calyste wondered to himself, restraining his agony of emotion with difficulty.

He reddened like a sufferer on whose wound a finger is laid. Mademoiselle des Touches was startled by the expression she saw in Calyste’s face, and tried to comfort him with a sympathizing look. Claude Vignon caught that look. From that moment the writer’s spirits rose, and he vented his gaiety in sarcasms; he maintained that love lived only in desire, that most women were mistaken in their love, that they often loved for reasons unknown to the men and to themselves, that they sometimes wished to deceive themselves; that the noblest of them were still insincere.

“Be content to criticise books, and do not criticise our feelings,” said Camille, with an imperious flash.

The dinner ceased to be lively. Claude Vignon’s satire had made both the women grave. Calyste was in acute torment in spite of the happiness of gazing at Béatrix. Conti tried to read Madame de Rochefide’s eyes and guess her thoughts. When the meal was ended, Mademoiselle des Touches took Calyste’s arm, left the other two men to the Marquise, and allowed them to lead the way, so as to say to the youth:

“My dear boy, if the Marquise falls in love with you, she will pitch Conti out of the window; but you are behaving in such a way as to tighten their bonds. Even if she were enchanted by your worship, could she take any notice of it? Command yourself.”

“She is so hard on me, she will never love me,” said Calyste; “and if she does not love me, I shall die.”

“Die! you! My dear Calyste, you are childish,” said Camille. “You would not have died for me, then?”

“You made yourself my friend,” he replied.

After the little chat that always accompanies the coffee, Vignon begged Conti to sing. Mademoiselle des Touches sat down to the piano. Camille and Gennaro sang “Dunque il mio bene tu mia sarai”, the final duet in Zingarelli’s Romeo e Giulietta, one of the most pathetic pages of modern music. The passage Di tanti palpiti expresses love in all its passion. Calyste, sitting in the armchair where he had sat when Félicité had told him the story of the Marquise, listened devoutly. Béatrix and Vignon stood on each side of the piano.

Conti’s exquisite voice blended perfectly with Félicité’s. They both had frequently sung the piece; they knew all its resources, and agreed wonderfully in bringing them out. It was in their hands what the musician had intended to create, a poem of divine melancholy, the swan-song of two lovers. When the duet was ended the hearers were all in a state of feeling that cannot find expression in vulgar applause.

“Oh, Music is the queen of the arts!” exclaimed the Marquise.

“Camille gives the first place to youth and beauty⁠—the queen of all poetry,” said Claude Vignon.

Mademoiselle des Touches looked at Claude, dissembling a vague uneasiness. Béatrix, not seeing Calyste, looked round to see what effect the music had had on him, less out of interest in him than for Conti’s satisfaction. In a recess she saw a pale face covered with tears. At the sight she hastily turned away, as if some acute pain had stung her, and looked at Gennaro.

It was not merely that Music had risen up before Calyste, had touched him with her divine hand, had launched him on creation and stripped it of its mysteries to his eyes⁠—he was overwhelmed by Conti’s genius. In spite of what Camille Maupin had told him of the man’s character, he believed at this moment that the singer must have a beautiful soul, a heart full of love. How was he to contend against such an artist? How could a woman ever cease to adore him? The song must pierce her soul like another soul.

The poor boy was as much overcome by poetic feeling as by despair: he saw himself as so small a thing! This ingenuous conviction of his own nothingness was to be read in his face, mingling with his admiration. He did not observe Béatrix, who, attracted to Calyste by the contagion of genuine feeling, pointed him out by a glance to Mademoiselle des Touches.

“Oh! such a delightful nature!” said Félicité. “Conti, you will never receive any applause to compare with the homage paid you by this boy. Let us sing a trio.⁠—Come, Béatrix, my dear.”

When the Marquise, Camille, and Conti had returned to the piano, Calyste rose unperceived, flung himself on a sofa in the adjoining bedroom, of which the door was open, and remained there sunk in despair.