In the year 1800, towards the end of October, a stranger, having with him a woman and a little girl, made his appearance in front of the Tuileries Palace, and stood for some little time close to the ruins of a house, then recently pulled down, on the spot where the wing is still unfinished which was intended to join Catherine de’ Medici’s Palace to the Louvre built by the Valois. There he stood, his arms folded, his head bent, raising it now and again to look at the Consul’s Palace, or at his wife, who sat on a stone by his side.

Though the stranger seemed to think only of the little girl of nine or ten, whose black hair was a plaything in his fingers, the woman lost none of the glances shot at her by her companion. A common feeling, other than love, united these two beings, and a common thought animated their thoughts and their actions. Misery is perhaps the strongest of all bonds.

The man had one of those broad, solemn-looking heads, with a mass of hair, of which so many examples have been perpetuated by the Carracci. Among the thick black locks were many white hairs. His features, though fine and proud, had a set hardness which spoiled them. In spite of his powerful and upright frame, he seemed to be more than sixty years of age. His clothes, which were dilapidated, betrayed his foreign origin.

The woman’s face, formerly handsome, but now faded, bore a stamp of deep melancholy, though, when her husband looked at her, she forced herself to smile, and affected a calm expression. The little girl was standing, in spite of the fatigue that was written on her small sunburned face. She had Italian features, large black eyes under well-arched eyebrows, a native dignity and genuine grace. More than one passerby was touched by the mere sight of this group, for the persons composing it made no effort to disguise a despair evidently as deep as the expression of it was simple; but the spring of the transient kindliness which distinguishes the Parisian is quickly dried up. As soon as the stranger perceived that he was the object of some idler’s attention, he stared at him so fiercely that the most intrepid lounger hastened his step, as though he had trodden on a viper.

After remaining there a long time undecided, the tall man suddenly passed his hand across his brow, driving away, so to speak, the thoughts that had furrowed it with wrinkles, and made up his mind no doubt to some desperate determination. Casting a piercing look at his wife and daughter, he drew out of his jerkin a long dagger, held it out to the woman, and said in Italian, “I am going to see whether the Bonapartes remember us.”

He walked on, with a slow, confident step, towards the entrance to the palace, where, of course, he was checked by a soldier on guard, with whom there could be no long discussion. Seeing that the stranger was obstinate, the sentry pointed his bayonet at him by way of ultimatum. As chance would have it at this moment, a squad came round to relieve guard, and the corporal very civilly informed the stranger where he might find the captain of the guard.

“Let Bonaparte know that Bartolomeo di Piombo wants to see him,” said the Italian to the officer.

In vain did the Captain explain to Bartolomeo that it was not possible to see the First Consul without having written to him beforehand to request an audience. The stranger insisted that the officer should go to inform Bonaparte. The Captain urged the rules of his duty, and formally refused to yield to the demands of this strange petitioner. Bartolomeo knit his brows, looked at the Captain with a terrible scowl, and seemed to make him responsible for all the disasters his refusal might occasion; then he remained silent, his arms tightly crossed on his breast, and took his stand under the archway which connects the garden and the courtyard of the Tuileries.

People who are thoroughly bent on anything are almost always well served by chance. At the moment when Bartolomeo sat down on one of the curbstones near the entrance to the palace, a carriage drove up, and out of it stepped Lucien Bonaparte, at that time Minister of the Interior.

“Ah! Loucien, good luck for me to have met you!” cried the stranger.

These words, spoken in the Corsican dialect, made Lucien stop at the instant when he was rushing into the vestibule; he looked at his fellow-countryman, and recognized him. At the first word that Bartolomeo said in his ear, he took him with him. Murat, Lannes, and Rapp were in the First Consuls Cabinet. On seeing Lucien come in with so strange a figure as was Piombo, the conversation ceased. Lucien took his brother’s hand and led him into a window recess. After exchanging a few words, the First Consul raised his hand with a gesture, which Murat and Lannes obeyed by retiring. Rapp affected not to have seen it, and remained. Then, Bonaparte having sharply called him to order, the aide-de-camp went out with a sour face. The First Consul, who heard the sound of Rapp’s steps in the neighboring room, hastily followed him, and saw him close to the wall between the cabinet and the anteroom.

“You refuse to understand me?” said the First Consul. “I wish to be alone with my countryman.”

“A Corsican!” retorted the aide-de-camp. “I distrust those creatures too much not to⁠—”

The First Consul could not help smiling, and lightly pushed his faithful officer by the shoulders.

“Well, what are you doing here, my poor Bartolomeo?” said the First Consul to Piombo.

“I have come to ask for shelter and protection, if you are a true Corsican,” replied Bartolomeo in a rough tone.

“What misfortune has driven you from your native land? You were the richest, the most⁠—”

“I have killed all the Porta,” replied the Corsican, in a hollow voice, with a frown.

The First Consul drew back a step or two, like a man astonished.

“Are you going to betray me?” cried Bartolomeo, with a gloomy look at Bonaparte. “Do you forget that there are still four of the Piombo in Corsica?”

Lucien took his fellow-countryman by the arm and shook him.

“Do you come here to threaten the saviour of France?” he said vehemently.

Bonaparte made a sign to Lucien, who was silent. Then he looked at Piombo, and said, “And why did you kill all the Porta?”

“We had made friends,” he replied; “the Barbanti had reconciled us. The day after we had drunk together to drown our quarrel I left, because I had business at Bastia. They stayed at my place, and set fire to my vineyard at Longone. They killed my son Gregorio; my daughter Ginevra and my wife escaped; they had taken the Communion that morning; the Virgin protected them. When I got home I could no longer see my house; I searched for it with my feet in the ashes. Suddenly I came across Gregorio’s body; I recognized it in the moonlight. ‘Oh! the Porta have played this trick!’ said I to myself, I went off at once into the scrub; I got together a few men to whom I had done some service⁠—do you hear, Bonaparte?⁠—and we marched down on the Porta’s vineyard. We arrived at five in the morning, and by seven they were all in the presence of God. Giacomo declares that Elisa Vanni saved a child, little Luigi; but I tied him into bed with my own hands before setting the house on fire. Then I quitted the island with my wife and daughter without being able to make sure whether Luigi Porta were still alive.”

Bonaparte looked at Bartolomeo with curiosity, but no astonishment.

“How many were they?” asked Lucien.

“Seven,” replied Piombo. “They persecuted you in their day,” he added. The words aroused no sign of hatred in the two brothers. “Ah! you are no longer Corsicans!” cried Bartolomeo, with a sort of despair. “Goodbye. Formerly I protected you,” he went on reproachfully. “But for me your mother would never have reached Marseilles,” he said, turning to Bonaparte, who stood thoughtful, his elbow resting on the chimneypiece.

“I cannot in conscience take you under my wing, Piombo,” replied Napoleon. “I am the head of a great nation; I govern the Republic; I must see that the laws are carried out.”

“Ah, ha!” said Bartolomeo.

“But I can shut my eyes,” Bonaparte went on. “The tradition of the Vendetta will hinder the reign of law in Corsica for a long time yet,” he added, talking to himself. “But it must be stamped out at any cost.”

He was silent for a minute, and Lucien signed to Piombo to say nothing. The Corsican shook his head from side to side with a disapproving look.

“Remain here,” the First Consul said, addressing Bartolomeo. “We know nothing. I will see that your estates are purchased so as to give you at once the means of living. Then later, some time hence, we will remember you. But no more Vendetta. There is no Marquis scrub here. If you play tricks with your dagger, there is no hope for you. Here the law protects everybody, and we do not do justice on our own account.”

“He has put himself at the head of a strange people,” replied Bartolomeo, taking Lucien’s hand and pressing it. “But you recognize me in misfortune; it is a bond between us for life and death; and you may command everyone named Piombo.” As he spoke, his brow cleared, and he looked about him approvingly.

“You are not badly off here,” he said, with a smile, as if he would like to lodge there. “And you are dressed all in red like a Cardinal.”

“It rests with you to rise and have a palace in Paris,” said Bonaparte, looking at him from head to foot. “It will often happen that I may look about me for a devoted friend to whom I can trust myself.”

A sigh of gladness broke from Piombo’s deep chest; he held out his hand to the First Consul, saying, “There is something of the Corsican in you still!”

Bonaparte smiled. He gazed in silence at this man, who had brought him as it were a breath of air from his native land, from the island where he had formerly been so miraculously saved from the hatred of the “English party,” and which he was fated never to see again. He made a sign to his brother, who led away Bartolomeo di Piombo.

Lucien inquired with interest as to the pecuniary position of the man who had once protected his family. Piombo led the Minister of the Interior to a window and showed him his wife and Ginevra, both seated on a heap of stones.

“We have come from Fontainebleau on foot,” said he, “and we have not a sou.”

Lucien gave his fellow-countryman his purse, and desired him to come again next morning to consult as to the means of providing for his family. The income from all Piombo’s possessions in Corsica could hardly suffice to maintain him respectably in Paris.

Fifteen years elapsed between the arrival of the Piombo family in Paris and the following incidents, which, without the story of this event, would have been less intelligible.

Servin, one of our most distinguished artists, was the first to conceive the idea of opening a studio for young ladies who may wish to take lessons in painting. He was a man of over forty, of blameless habits, and wholly given up to his art, and he had married for love the daughter of a general without any fortune. At first mothers brought their daughters themselves to the professor’s studio; but when they understood his high principles and appreciated the care by which he strove to deserve such confidence, they ended by sending the girls alone. It was part of the painter’s scheme to take as pupils only young ladies of rich or highly respectable family, that no difficulties might arise as to the society in his studio; he had even refused to take young girls who intended to become artists, and who must necessarily have had certain kinds of training without which no mastery is possible. By degrees his prudence, the superior method by which he initiated his pupils into the secrets of his art, as well as the security their mothers felt in knowing that their daughters were in the company of well-bred girls, and in the artist’s character, manners, and marriage, won him a high reputation in the world of fashion. As soon as a young girl showed any desire to learn drawing or painting, and her mother asked advice, “Send her to Servin,” was always the answer.

Thus Servin had a specialty for teaching ladies art, as Herbault had for bonnets, Leroy for dresses, and Chevet for dainties. It was acknowledged that a young woman who had taken lessons of Servin could pronounce definitively on the pictures in the Louvre, paint a portrait in a superior manner, copy an old picture, and produce her own painting of genre. Thus this artist sufficed for all the requirements of the aristocracy.

Notwithstanding his connection with all the best houses in Paris, he was independent and patriotic, preserving with all alike the light and witty tone, sometimes ironical, and the freedom of opinion which characterize painters.

He had carried his scrupulous precautions into the arrangement of the place where his scholars worked. The outer entrance to the loft above his dwelling-rooms had been walled up; to get into this retreat, as sacred as a harem, the way was up a staircase in the centre of the house. This studio, which occupied the whole of the top story, was on the vast scale which always surprises inquisitive visitors when, having climbed to sixty feet above the ground, they expect to find an artist lodged in the gutter. It was a kind of gallery, abundantly lighted by immense skylights screened with the large green blinds which artists use to distribute the light. A quantity of caricatures, heads sketched in outline with a brush or the point of a palette knife, all over the dark gray walls, proved that, allowing for a difference in the expression, fine young ladies have as much whimsicality in their brain as men can have. A small stove, with a huge pipe that made amazing zigzags before reaching the upper region of the roof, was the inevitable decoration of this studio. There was a shelf all round the room, supporting plaster casts which lay there in confusion, most of them under a coating of whitish dust.

Above this shelf here and there a head of Niobe hanging to a nail showed its pathetic bend, a Venus smiled, a hand was unexpectedly thrust out before your eyes, like a beggar’s asking alms; then there were anatomical écorchés, yellow with smoke, and looking like limbs snatched from coffins; and pictures, drawings, lay-figures, frames without canvas, and canvases without frames, completed the effect, giving the room the characteristic aspect of a studio, a singular mixture of ornamentation and bareness, of poverty and splendor, of care and neglect.

This huge sort of hold, in which everything, even man, looks small, has a behind-the-scenes flavor; here are to be seen old linen, gilt armor, odds and ends of stuffs, and some machinery. But there is something about it as grand as thought; genius and death are there; Diana and Apollo side by side with a skull or a skeleton; beauty and disorder, poetry and reality, gorgeous coloring in shadow, and often a whole drama, but motionless and silent. How symbolical of the artist brain!

At the moment when my story begins the bright sun of July lighted up the studio, and two beams of sunshine shot across its depths, broad bands of diaphanous gold in which the dust-motes glistened. A dozen easels raised their pointed spars, looking like the masts of vessels in a harbor. Several young girls gave life to the scene by the variety of their countenances and attitudes, and the difference in their dress. The strong shadows cast by the green baize blinds, arranged to suit the position of each easel, produced a multitude of contrasts and fascinating effects of chiaroscuro. This group of girls formed the most attractive picture in the gallery. A fair-haired girl, simply dressed, stood at some distance from her companions, working perseveringly and seeming to foresee misfortune; no one looked at her nor spoke to her; she was the prettiest, the most modest, and the least rich. Two principal groups, divided by a little space, represented two classes of society, two spirits even, in this studio, where rank and fortune ought to have been forgotten.

These young things, sitting or standing, surrounded by their paintboxes, playing with their brushes or getting them ready, handling their bright-tinted palettes, painting, chattering, laughing, singing, given up to their natural impulses and revealing their true characters, made up a drama unknown to men; this one proud, haughty, capricious, with black hair and beautiful hands, flashed the fire of her eyes at random; that one, lighthearted and heedless, a smile on her lips, her hair chestnut, with delicate white hands, virginal and French, a light nature without a thought of evil, living from hour to hour; another, dreamy, melancholy, pale, her head drooping like a falling blossom; her neighbor, on the contrary, tall, indolent, with Oriental manners, and long, black, melting eyes, speaking little, but lost in thought, and stealing a look at the head of Antinoüs.

In the midst, like the Jocoso of a Spanish comedy, a girl, full of wit and sparkling sallies, stood watching them all with a single glance, and making them laugh; raising a face so full of life that it could not but be pretty. She was the leader of the first group of pupils, consisting of the daughters of bankers, lawyers, and merchants⁠—all rich, but exposed to all the minute but stinging disdains freely poured out upon them by the other young girls who belonged to the aristocracy. These were governed by the daughter of a gentleman usher to the King’s private chamber, a vain little thing, as silly as she was vain, and proud of her father’s having an office at Court. She aimed at seeming to understand the master’s remarks at the first word, and appearing to work by inspired grace; she used an eyeglass, came very much dressed, very late, and begged her companions not to talk loud. Among this second group might be observed some exquisite shapes and distinguished-looking faces; but their looks expressed but little simplicity. Though their attitudes were elegant and their movements graceful, their faces were lacking in candor, and it was easy to perceive that they belonged to a world where politeness forms the character at an early age, and the abuse of social pleasures kills the feelings and develops selfishness. When the whole party of girl students was complete there were to be seen among them childlike heads, virgin heads of enchanting purity, faces where the parted lips showed virgin teeth, and where a virgin smile came and went. Then the studio suggested not a seraglio, but a group of angels sitting on a cloud in heaven.

It was near noon; Servin had not yet made his appearance. For some days past he had spent most of his time at a studio he had elsewhere, finishing a picture he had there for the exhibition. Suddenly Mademoiselle Amélie Thirion, the head of the aristocrats in this little assembly, spoke at some length to her neighbor; there was profound silence among the patrician group; the banker faction were equally silent from astonishment, and tried to guess the subject of such a conference. But the secret of the young ultras was soon known. Amélie rose, took an easel that stood near her, and moved it to some distance from the “nobility,” close to a clumsy partition which divided the studio from a dark closet where broken casts were kept, paintings that the professor had condemned, and, in winter, the firewood. Amélie’s proceedings gave rise to a murmur of surprise which did not hinder her from completing the removal by wheeling up to the easel a stool and paintbox, in fact, everything, even a picture by Prudhon, of which a pupil, who had not yet come, was making a copy. After this coup d’etat the party of the Eight painted on in silence; but the Left talked it over at great length.

“What will Mademoiselle Piombo say?” asked one of the girls of Mademoiselle Mathilde Roguin, the oracle of mischief of her group.

“She is not a girl to say much,” was the reply. “But fifty years hence she will remember this insult as if she had experienced it the day before, and will find some cruel means of revenge. She is a person I should not like to be at war with.”

“The proscription to which those ladies have condemned her is all the more unjust,” said another young girl, “because Mademoiselle Ginevra was very sad the day before yesterday; her father, they say, has just given up his appointment. This will add to her troubles, while she was very good to those young ladies during the Hundred Days. Did she ever say a word that could hurt them? On the contrary, she avoided talking politics. But our ultras seem to be prompted by jealousy rather than by party-spirit.”

“I have a great mind to fetch Mademoiselle Piombo’s easel and place it by mine,” said Mathilde Roguin. She rose, but on second thoughts she sat down again. “With a spirit like Mademoiselle Ginevra’s,” said she, “it is impossible to know how she would take our civility. Let us wait and see.”

“Eccola!” said the black-eyed girl languidly. In fact, the sound of footsteps coming upstairs was heard in the studio. The words, “Here she comes!” passed from mouth to mouth, and then perfect silence fell.

To understand the full importance of the ostracism carried into effect by Amélie Thirion, it must be told that this scene took place towards the end of the month of July 1815. The second restoration of the Bourbons broke up many friendships which had weathered the turmoil of the first. At this time families, almost always divided among themselves, renewed many of the most deplorable scenes which tarnish the history of all countries at periods of civil or religious struggles. Children, young girls, old men, had caught the monarchical fever from which the Government was suffering. Discord flew in under the domestic roof, and suspicion dyed in gloomy hues the most intimate conversations and actions.

Ginevra di Piombo idolized Napoleon; indeed, how could she have hated him? The Emperor was her fellow-countryman, and her father’s benefactor. Baron di Piombo was one of Napoleon’s followers who had most efficiently worked to bring him back from Elba. Incapable of renouncing his political faith, nay, eager to proclaim it, Piombo had remained in Paris in the midst of enemies. Hence Ginevra di Piombo was ranked with the “suspicious characters,” all the more so because she made no secret of the regret her family felt at the second restoration. The only tears she had perhaps ever shed in her life were wrung from her by the twofold tidings of Bonaparte’s surrender on board the Bellerophon, and the arrest of Labédoyère.

The young ladies forming the aristocratic party in the studio belonged to the most enthusiastically Royalist families of Paris. It would be difficult to give any idea of the exaggerated feelings of the time, and of the horror felt towards Bonapartists. However mean and trivial Amélie Thirion’s conduct may seem today, it was then a very natural demonstration of hatred. Ginevra di Piombo, one of Servin’s earliest pupils, had occupied the place of which they wished to deprive her ever since the first day she had come to the studio. The aristocratic group had gradually settled round her; and to turn her out of a place, which in a certain sense belonged to her, was not merely to insult her, but to cause her some pain, for all artists have a predilection for the spot where they work.

However, political hostility had perhaps not much to do with the conduct of this little studio party of the Eight. Ginevra di Piombo, the most accomplished of Servin’s pupils, was an object of the deepest jealousy. The master professed an equal admiration for the talents and the character of this favorite pupil, who served as the standard of all his comparisons; and indeed, while it was impossible to explain the ascendency this young girl exercised over all who were about her, she enjoyed in this small world an influence resembling that of Bonaparte over his soldiers. The aristocratic clique had, some days since, resolved on the overthrow of this queen; but as no one had been bold enough to repulse the Bonapartist, Mademoiselle Thirion had just struck the decisive blow so as to make her companions the accomplices of her hatred. Though Ginevra was really beloved by some of the Royalist party, who at home were abundantly lectured on politics, with the tact peculiar to women, they judged it best not to interfere in the quarrel.

On entering, Ginevra was received in perfect silence. Of all the girls who had yet appeared at Servin’s studio, she was the handsomest, the tallest, and the most finely made. Her gait had a stamp of dignity and grace which commanded respect. Her face, full of intelligence, seemed radiant, it was so transfused with the animation peculiar to Corsicans, which does not exclude calmness. Her abundant hair, her eyes, and their black lashes told of passion. Though the corners of her mouth were softly drawn and her lips a little too thick, they had the kindly expression which strong people derive from the consciousness of strength. By a singular freak of nature the charm of her features was in some sort belied by a marble forehead stamped with an almost savage pride, and the traditional habits of Corsica. That was the only bond between her and her native land; in every other detail of her person the simplicity and freedom of Lombard beauties were so bewitching, that only in her absence could anyone bear to cause her the smallest pain. She was, indeed, so attractive, that her old father, out of prudence, never allowed her to walk alone to the studio.

The only fault of this really poetic creature came of the very power of such fully developed beauty. She had refused to marry, out of affection for her father and mother, feeling herself necessary to them in their old age. Her taste for painting had taken the place of the passions which commonly agitate women.

“You are all very silent today,” she said, after coming forward a step or two. “Good morning, my little Laure,” she added in a gentle, caressing tone, as she went up to the young girl who was painting apart from the rest. “That head is very good. The flesh is a little too pink, but it is all capitally drawn.”

Laure raised her head, looked at Ginevra much touched, and their faces brightened with an expression of mutual affection. A faint smile gave life to the Italian’s lips, but she seemed pensive, and went slowly to her place, carelessly glancing at the drawings and pictures, and saying good morning to each of the girls of the first group, without observing the unusual curiosity excited by her presence. She might have been a queen amid her Court. She did not observe the deep silence that reigned among the aristocrats, and passed their camp without saying a word. Her absence of mind was so complete that she went to her easel, opened her paintbox, took out her brushes, slipped on her brown linen cuffs, tied her apron, examined her palette, all without thinking, as it seemed, of what she was doing. All the heads of the humbler group were turned to look at her. And if the young ladies of the Thirion faction were less frankly impatient than their companions, their side glances were nevertheless directed to Ginevra.

“She notices nothing,” said Mademoiselle Roguin.

At this moment Ginevra, roused from the meditative attitude in which she had gazed at her canvas, turned her head towards the aristocratic party. With one glance she measured the distance that lay between them, and held her peace.

“It has not occurred to her that they meant to insult her,” said Mathilde. “She has neither colored nor turned pale. How provoked those young ladies will be if she likes her new place better than the old one!”⁠—“You are quite apart there, mademoiselle,” she added louder, and addressing Ginevra.

The Italian girl affected not to hear, or perhaps she did not hear; she hastily rose, walked rather slowly along the partition which divided the dark closet from the studio, seeming to examine the skylight from which the light fell; and to this she ascribed so much importance that she got upon a chair to fasten the green baize which interfered with the light, a good deal higher. At this elevation she was on a level with a small crack in the boarding, the real object of her efforts, for the look she cast through it can only be compared with that of a miser discovering Aladdin’s treasure. She quickly descended, came back to her place, arranged her picture, affected still to be dissatisfied with the light, pushed a table close to the partition, and placed a chair on it; then she nimbly mounted this scaffolding, and again peeped through the crack. She gave but one look into the closet, which was lighted by a window at the top of the partition, but what she saw impressed her so vividly that she started.

“You will fall, Mademoiselle Ginevra!” cried Laure.

All the girls turned to look at their imprudent companion, who was tottering. The fear of seeing them gather round her gave her courage; she recovered her strength and her balance, and dancing on the chair, she turned to Laure, and said with some agitation:

“Bah! It is at any rate safer than a throne!”

She quickly arranged the baize, came down, pushed the table and the chair far from the partition, returned to her easel, and made a few more attempts, seeming to try for an effect of light that suited her. Her picture did not really trouble her at all; her aim was to get close to the dark closet by which she placed herself, as she wished, at the end near the door. Then she prepared to set her palette, still in perfect silence. Where she now was she soon heard more distinctly a slight noise which, on the day before, had greatly stirred her curiosity, and sent her young imagination wandering over a wide field of conjecture. She easily recognized it as the deep, regular breathing of the sleeping man whom she had just now seen. Her curiosity was satisfied, but she found herself burdened with an immense responsibility. Through the crack she had caught sight of the Imperial eagle, and on a camp bed, in the dim light, had seen the figure of an officer of the guard. She guessed it all. Servin was sheltering a refugee.

She now trembled lest one of her companions should come to examine her picture, and should hear the unfortunate man breathe, or heave too deep a sigh, such as had fallen on her ear during yesterday’s lesson. She resolved to remain near the door, and trust to her wits to cheat the tricks of fate.

“I had better remain here,” thought she, “to prevent some disaster, than leave the poor prisoner at the mercy of some giddy prank.”

This was the secret of Ginevra’s apparent indifference when she found her easel transplanted; she was secretly delighted, since she had been able to satisfy her curiosity in a natural manner; and besides, she was too much absorbed at this moment to inquire into the reason of her exclusion. Nothing is more mortifying to young girls, or indeed to anyone, than to see a practical joke, an insult, or a witticism fail of its effect in consequence of the victim’s contempt. It would seem that our hatred of an enemy is increased by the height to which he can rise above us.

Ginevra’s conduct remained a riddle to all her companions. Her friends and her foes were alike surprised, for she was allowed to have every good quality excepting forgiveness of injuries. Though the opportunities for showing this vice of temper had rarely been offered to Ginevra by the incidents of studio life, the instances she had happened to give of her vindictive spirit and determination had none the less made a deep impression on her companions’ minds. After many guesses, Mademoiselle Roguin finally regarded the Italian’s silence as evidence of a magnanimity above all praise; and her party, inspired by her, conceived a plan to humiliate the aristocrats of the studio. They achieved their purpose by a fire of sarcasms directed at the pride and airs of the party of the Eight.

Madame Servin’s arrival put an end to this contest of self-assertiveness. Amélie, with the shrewdness which is always coupled with malice, had remarked, watched, and wondered at the excessive absence of mind which hindered Ginevra from hearing the keenly polite dispute of which she was the subject. The revenge which Mademoiselle Roguin and her followers were wreaking on Mademoiselle Thirion and her party had thus the fatal effect of setting the young Ultras to discover the cause of Ginevra’s absorbed silence. The beautiful Italian became the centre of observation, and was watched by her friends as much as by her enemies. It is very difficult to hide the slightest excitement, the most trifling feeling, from fifteen idle and inquisitive girls whose mischief and wits crave only for secrets to guess, and intrigues to plot or to baffle, and who can ascribe to a gesture, to a glance, to a word, so many meanings, that they can hardly fail to discover the true one. Thus Ginevra di Piombo’s secret was in great peril of being found out.

At this moment Madame Servin’s presence produced a diversion in the drama that was being obscurely played at the bottom of these young hearts; while its sentiments, its ideas, its development, were expressed by almost allegorical words, by significant looks, by gestures, and even by silence, often more emphatic than speech.

The moment Madame Servin came into the studio her eyes turned to the door by which Ginevra was standing. Under the present circumstances this look was not lost. If at first none of the maidens observed it, Mademoiselle Thirion remembered it afterwards, and accounted for the suspiciousness, the alarm, and mystery which gave a hunted expression to Madame Servin’s eyes.

“Mesdemoiselles,” she said, “Monsieur Servin cannot come today.” Then she paid some little compliment to each pupil, all of them welcoming her in the girlish, caressing way which lies as much in the voice and eyes as in actions. She immediately went to Ginevra under an impulse of uneasiness, which she vainly tried to conceal. The Italian and the painter’s wife exchanged friendly nods, and then stood in silence, one painting, the other watching her paint. The officer’s breathing was easily audible, but Madame Servin could take no notice of it; and her dissimulation was so complete that Ginevra was tempted to accuse her of wilful deafness. At this moment the stranger turned on the bed. The Italian girl looked Madame Servin steadily in the face, and, without betraying the smallest agitation, the lady said, “Your copy is as fine as the original. If I had to choose, I should really be puzzled.”

“Monsieur Servin has not let his wife into the secret of this mystery,” thought Ginevra, who, after answering the young wife with a gentle smile of incredulity, sang a snatch of some national canzonetta to cover any sounds the prisoner might make.

It was so unusual to hear the studious Italian sing, that all the girls looked at her in surprise. Later this incident served as evidence to the charitable suppositions of hatred, Madame Servin soon went away, and the hours of study ended without further event. Ginevra let all her companions leave, affecting to work on; but she unconsciously betrayed her wish to be alone, for as the pupils made ready to go she looked at them with ill-disguised impatience. Mademoiselle Thirion, who within these few hours had become a cruel foe to the young girl, who was her superior in everything, guessed by the instinct of hatred that her rival’s affected industry covered a mystery. She had been struck more than once by the attention with which Ginevra seemed to be listening to a sound no one else could hear. The expression she now read in the Italian’s eyes was as a flash of illumination. She was the last to leave, and went in on her way down to see Madame Servin, with whom she stayed a few minutes. Then, pretending that she had forgotten her bag, she very softly went upstairs again to the studio, and discovered Ginevra at the top of a hastily constructed scaffolding, so lost in contemplation of the unknown soldier that she did not hear the light sound of her companion’s footsteps. It is true that Amélie walked on eggs⁠—to use a phrase of Walter Scott’s; she retired to the door and coughed. Ginevra started, turned her head, saw her enemy, and colored; then she quickly untied the blind, to mislead her as to her purpose, and came down. After putting away her paintbox, she left the studio, carrying stamped upon her heart the image of a man’s head as charming as the Endymion, Girodet’s masterpiece, which she had copied a few days previously.

“So young a man, and proscribed! Who can he be?⁠—for it is not Marshal Ney.”

These two sentences are the simplest expression of all the ideas which Ginevra turned over in her mind during two days. The next day but one, notwithstanding her hurry to be first at the painting gallery, she found that Mademoiselle Thirion had already come in a carriage. Ginevra and her enemy watched each other for some time, but each kept her countenance impenetrable by the other. Amélie had seen the stranger’s handsome face; but happily, and at the same time unhappily, the eagles and the uniform were not within the range of her eye through the crack. She lost herself in conjecture. Suddenly Servin came in, much earlier than usual.

“Mademoiselle Ginevra,” said he, after casting an eye round the gallery, “why have you placed yourself there? The light is bad. Come nearer to these young ladies, and lower your blind a little.”

Then he sat down by Laure, whose work deserved his most lenient criticism.

“Well done!” he exclaimed, “this head is capitally done. You will be a second Ginevra.”

The master went from easel to easel, blaming, flattering, and jesting; and making himself, as usual, more feared for his jests than for his reproofs.

The Italian had not obeyed his wishes; she remained at her post with the firm intention of staying there. She took out a sheet of paper and began to sketch in sepia the head of the unhappy refugee. A work conceived of with passion always bears a particular stamp. The faculty of giving truth to a rendering of nature or of a thought constitutes genius, and passion can often take its place. Thus in the circumstances in which Ginevra found herself, either the intuition she owed to her memory, which had been deeply struck, or perhaps necessity, the mother of greatness, lent her a supernatural flash of talent. The officer’s head was thrown off on the paper with an inward trembling that she ascribed to fear, and which a physiologist would have recognized as the fever of inspiration. From time to time she stole a furtive glance at her companions, so as to be able to hide the sketch in case of any indiscretion on their part. But in spite of her sharp lookout, there was a moment when she failed to perceive that her relentless enemy, under the shelter of a huge portfolio, had turned her eyeglass on the mysterious drawing. Mademoiselle Thirion, recognizing the refugee’s features, raised her head suddenly, and Ginevra slipped away the sheet of paper.

“Why do you stay there, in spite of my opinion, mademoiselle?” the professor gravely asked Ginevra.

The girl hastily turned her easel so that no one could see her sketch, and said, in an agitated voice, as she showed it to her master:

“Don’t you think with me that this is a better light? May I not stay where I am?”

Servin turned pale. As nothing can escape the keen eyes of hatred. Mademoiselle Thirion threw herself, so to speak, into the excited feelings that agitated the professor and his pupil.

“You are right,” said Servin. “But you will soon know more than I do,” he added, with a forced laugh. There was a silence, during which the master looked at the head of the officer. “This is a masterpiece, worthy of Salvator Rosa!” he exclaimed, with an artist’s vehemence.

At this exclamation all the young people rose, and Mademoiselle Thirion came forward with the swiftness of a tiger springing on its prey. At this instant the prisoner, roused by the turmoil, woke up. Ginevra overset her stool, spoke a few incoherent sentences, and began to laugh; but she had folded the portrait in half and thrown it into a portfolio before her terrible enemy could see it. The girls crowded round the easel; Servin enlarged in a loud voice on the beauties of the copy on which his favorite pupil was just now engaged; and all the party were cheated by this stratagem, excepting Amélie, who placed herself behind her companions and tried to open the portfolio into which she had seen the sketch put. Ginevra seized it and set it in front of her without a word, and the two girls gazed at each other in silence.

“Come, young ladies, to your places!” said Servin. “If you want to know as much as Mademoiselle di Piombo, you must not be always talking of fashions and balls, and trifling so much.”

When the girls had all returned to their easels, the master sat down by Ginevra.

“Was it not better that this mystery should be discovered by me than by anyone else?” said the Italian girl in a low tone.

“Yes,” answered the painter. “You are patriotic; but even if you had not been, you are still the person to whom I should entrust it.”

The master and pupil understood each other, and Ginevra was not now afraid to ask, “Who is he?”

“An intimate friend of Labédoyère’s; the man who, next to the unfortunate Colonel, did most to effect a junction between the 7th and the Grenadiers of Elba. He was a Major in the Guards, and has just come back from Waterloo.”

“Why have you not burned his uniform and shako, and put him into civilian dress?” asked Ginevra vehemently.

“Some clothes are to be brought for him this evening.”

“You should have shut up the studio for a few days.”

“He is going away.”

“Does he wish to die?” said the girl. “Let him stay with you during these first days of the storm. Paris is the only place in France where a man may be safely hidden. Is he a friend of yours?” she added.

“No. He has no claim to my regard but his misfortunes. This is how he fell into my hands: my father-in-law, who had rejoined his regiment during this campaign, met the poor young man, and saved him very cleverly from those who have arrested Labédoyère. He wanted to defend him. Like a madman!

“And do you call him so!” cried Ginevra, with a glance of surprise at the painter, who did not speak for a moment.

“My father-in-law is too closely watched to be able to keep anyone in his house,” he went on. “He brought him here by night last week. I hoped to hide him from every eye by keeping him in this corner, the only place in the house where he can be safe.”

“If I can be of any use, command me,” said Ginevra. “I know Marshal Feltre.”

“Well, we shall see,” replied the painter.

This conversation had lasted too long not to be remarked by all the other pupils. Servin left Ginevra, came back to each easel, and gave such long lessons that he was still upstairs when the clock struck the hour at which his pupils usually left.

“You have forgotten your bag, mademoiselle,” cried the professor, running after the young lady who condescended to act the spy to gratify her hatred.

The inquisitive pupil came back for the bag, expressing some surprise at her own carelessness; but Servin’s attention was to her additional proof of the existence of a mystery which was undoubtedly a serious one. She had already planned what should follow, and could say, like the Abbé Vertot, “I have laid my siege.” She ran downstairs noisily, and violently slammed the door leading to Servin’s rooms, that it might be supposed she had gone out; but she softly went upstairs again, and hid behind the door of the studio.

When the painter and Ginevra supposed themselves alone, he tapped in a particular manner at the door of the attic, which at once opened on its rusty, creaking hinges. The Italian girl saw a tall and well-built youth, whose Imperial uniform set her heart beating. The officer carried his arm in a sling, and his pale face told of acute suffering. He started at seeing her, a stranger. Amélie, who could see nothing, was afraid to stay any longer; but she had heard the creaking of the door, and that was enough. She silently stole away. “Fear nothing,” said the painter. “Mademoiselle is the daughter of the Emperor’s most faithful friend, the Baron di Piombo.”

The young officer felt no doubt of Ginevra’s loyalty when once he had looked at her.

“You are wounded?” she said.

“Oh, it is nothing, mademoiselle; the cut is healing.”

At this moment the shrill and piercing tones of men in the street came up to the studio, crying out, “This is the sentence which condemns to death⁠—” all three shuddered. The soldier was the first to hear a name at which he turned pale.

“Labédoyère!” he exclaimed, dropping on to a stool.

They looked at each other in silence. Drops of sweat gathered on the young man’s livid brow; with a gesture of despair he clutched the black curls of his hair, resting his elbow on Ginevra’s easel.

“After all,” said he, starting to his feet, “Labédoyère and I knew what we were doing. We knew the fate that awaited us if we triumphed or if we failed. He is dying for the cause, while I am in hiding⁠—”

He hurried towards the studio door; but Ginevra, more nimble than he, rushed forward and stopped the way.

“Can you restore the Emperor?” she said. “Do you think you can raise the giant again, when he could not keep his feet?”

“What then is to become of me?” said the refugee, addressing the two friends whom chance had sent him. “I have not a relation in the world; Labédoyère was my friend and protector, I am now alone; tomorrow I shall be exiled or condemned; I have never had any fortune but my pay; I spent my last crown-piece to come and snatch Labédoyère from death and get him away. Death is an obvious necessity to me. When a man is determined to die, he must know how to sell his head to the executioner. I was thinking just now that an honest man’s life is well worth that of two traitors, and that a dagger-thrust, judiciously placed, may give one immortality.” This passion of despair frightened the painter, and even Ginevra, who fully understood the young man. The Italian admired the beautiful head and the delightful voice, of which the accents of rage scarcely disguised the sweetness; then she suddenly dropped balm on all the hapless man’s wounds.

“Monsieur!” said she, “as to your pecuniary difficulties, allow me to offer you the money I myself have saved. My father is rich; I am his only child; he loves me, and I am quite sure he will not blame me. Have no scruples in accepting it; our wealth comes from the Emperor, we have nothing which is not the bounty of his munificence. Is it not gratitude to help one of his faithful soldiers? So take this money with as little ceremony as I make about offering it. It is only money,” she added in a scornful tone. “Then, as to friends⁠—you will find friends!” And she proudly raised her head, while her eyes shone with unwonted brilliancy. “The head which must fall tomorrow⁠—the mark of a dozen guns⁠—saves yours,” she went on. “Wait till this storm is over, and you can take service in a foreign land if you are not forgotten, or in the French army if you are.”

In the comfort offered by a woman there is a delicacy of feeling which always has a touch of something motherly, something farseeing and complete; but when such words of peace and hope are seconded by grace of gesture, and the eloquence which comes from the heart, above all, when the comforter is beautiful, it is hard for a young man to resist. The young Colonel inhaled love by every sense. A faint flush tinged his white cheeks, and his eyes lost a little of the melancholy that dimmed them as he said, in a strange tone of voice, “You are an angel of goodness!⁠—But, Labédoyère!” he added, “Labédoyère!”

At this cry they all three looked at each other, speechless, and understood each other. They were friends, not of twenty minutes, but of twenty years.

“My dear fellow,” said Servin, “can you save him?”

“I can avenge him.”

Ginevra was thrilled. Though the stranger was handsome, his appearance had not moved her. The gentle pity that women find in their heart for suffering which is not ignoble had, in Ginevra, stifled every other emotion; but to hear a cry of revenge, to find in this fugitive an Italian soul and Corsican magnanimity! This was too much for her; she gazed at the officer with respectful emotion, which powerfully stirred her heart. It was the first time a man had ever made her feel so strongly. Like all women, it pleased her to imagine that the soul of this stranger must be in harmony with the remarkable beauty of his features and the fine proportions of his figure, which she admired as an artist. Led by chance curiosity to pity, from pity to eager interest, she now from interest had reached sensations so strong and deep that she thought it rash to remain there any longer.

“Till tomorrow,” she said, leaving her sweetest smile with the officer, to console him.

As he saw that smile, which threw a new light, as it were, on Ginevra’s face, the stranger for a moment forgot all else.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated sadly. “Tomorrow, Labédoyère⁠—”

Ginevra turned to him and laid a finger on her lips, looking at him as though she would say, “Be calm, be prudent.”

Then the young man exclaimed: “O Dio! Chi non vorrei vivere dopo averla veduta!” “O God! who would not live after having seen her!” The peculiar accent with which he spoke the words startled Ginevra.

“You are a Corsican!” she exclaimed, coming back to him, her heart beating with gladness.

“I was born in Corsica,” he replied; “But I was taken to Genoa when very young; and, as soon as I was of an age to enter the army, I enlisted.”

The stranger’s handsome person, the transcendent charm he derived from his attachment to the Emperor, his wound, his misfortunes, even his danger, all vanished before Ginevra’s eyes, or rather all were fused in one new and exquisite sentiment. This refugee was a son of Corsica, and spoke its beloved tongue. In a minute the girl stood motionless, spellbound by a magical sensation. She saw before her eyes a living picture to which a combination of human feeling and chance lent dazzling hues. At Servin’s invitation the officer had taken his seat on an ottoman, the painter had untied the string which supported his guest’s arm, and was now undoing the bandages in order to dress the wound. Ginevra shuddered as she saw the long wide gash, made by a sabre-cut, on the young man’s forearm, and gave a little groan. The stranger looked up at her and began to smile. There was something very touching that went to the soul in Servin’s attentive care as he removed the lint and touched the tender flesh, while the wounded man’s face, though pale and sickly, expressed pleasure rather than suffering as he looked at the young girl.

An artist could not help admiring the antithesis of sentiments, and the contrast of color between the whiteness of the linen and the bare arm and the officer’s blue and red coat. Soft dusk had now fallen on the studio, but a last sunbeam shone in on the spot where the refugee was sitting, in such a way that his pale, noble face, his black hair, his uniform were all flooded with light. This simple effect the superstitious Italian took for an omen of good luck. The stranger seemed to her a celestial messenger who had spoken to her in the language of her native land, and put her under the spell of childish memories; while in her heart a feeling had birth as fresh and pure as her first age of innocence. In a very short instant she stood pensive, lost in infinite thought; then she blushed to have betrayed her absence of mind, exchanged a swift, sweet look with the officer, and made her escape, seeing him still.

The next day there was no painting lesson; Ginevra could come to the studio, and the prisoner could be with his fellow-countrywoman. Servin, who had a sketch to finish, allowed the officer to sit there while he played guardian to the two young people who frequently spoke in Corsican. The poor soldier told of his sufferings during the retreat from Moscow; for, at the age of nineteen, he had found himself at the passage of the Beresina, alone of all his regiment, having lost in his comrades the only men who could care for him, an orphan. He described, in words of fire, the great disaster of Waterloo.

His voice was music to the Italian girl. Brought up in Corsican ways, Ginevra was, to some extent, a child of nature; falsehood was unknown to her, and she gave herself up without disguise to her impressions, owning them, or rather letting them be seen without the trickery, the mean and calculating vanity of the Parisian girl. During this day she remained more than once, her palette in one hand, a brush in the other, while the brush was undipped in the colors on the palette; her eyes fixed on the officer’s face, her lips slightly parted, she sat listening, ready to lay on the touch which was not given. She was not surprised to find such sweetness in the young man’s eyes, for she felt her own soften in spite of her determination to keep them severe and cold. Thus, for hours, she painted with resolute attention, not raising her head because he was there watching her work. The first time he sat down to gaze at her in silence, she said to him in an agitated voice, after a long pause, “Does it amuse you, then, to look on a painting?”

That day she learned that his name was Luigi. Before they parted it was agreed that if any important political events should occur on the days when the studio was open, Ginevra was to inform him by singing in an undertone certain Italian airs.

On the following day Mademoiselle Thirion informed all her companions, as a great secret, that Ginevra di Piombo had a lover⁠—a young man who came during the hours devoted to lessons⁠—to hide in the dark closet of the studio.

“You, who take her part,” said she to Mademoiselle Roguin, “watch her well, and you will see how she spends her time.”

So Ginevra was watched with diabolical vigilance. Her songs were listened to, her glances spied. At moments when she believed that no one saw her, a dozen eyes were incessantly centered on her. And being forewarned, the girls interpreted in their true sense the agitations which passed across the Italian’s radiant face, and her snatches of song, and the attention with which she listened to the muffled sounds which she alone could hear through the partition.

By the end of the week, only Laure, of the fifteen students, had resisted the temptation to scrutinize Louis through the crack in the panel, or, by an instinct of weakness, still defended the beautiful Corsican girl. Mademoiselle Roguin wanted to make her wait on the stairs at the hour when they all left, to prove to her the intimacy between Ginevra and the handsome young man, by finding them together; but she refused to condescend to an espionage which curiosity could not justify, and thus became an object of general reprobation.

Ere long the daughter of the Gentleman-usher thought it unbecoming in her to work in the studio of a painter whose opinions were tainted with patriotism or Bonapartism⁠—which at that time were regarded as one and the same thing; so she came no more to Servin’s. Though Amélie forgot Ginevra, the evil she had sown bore fruit. Insensibly, by chance, for gossip, or out of prudery, the other damsels informed their mothers of the strange adventure in progress at the studio. One day Mathilde Roguin did not come; the next time another was absent; at last the three or four pupils, who had still remained, came no more. Ginevra and her little friend. Mademoiselle Laure, were for two or three days the sole occupants of the deserted studio.

The Italian did not observe the isolation in which she was left, and did not even wonder at the cause of her companions’ absence. Having devised the means of communicating with Louis, she lived in the studio as in a delightful retreat, secluded in the midst of the world, thinking only of the officer, and of the dangers which threatened him. This young creature, though sincerely admiring those noble characters who would not be false to their political faith, urged Louis to submit at once to royal authority, in order to keep him in France, while Louis refused to submit, that he might not have to leave his hiding-place.

If, indeed, passions only have their birth and grow up under the influence of romantic causes, never had so many circumstances concurred to link two beings by one feeling. Ginevra’s regard for Louis, and his for her, thus made greater progress in a month than a fashionable friendship can make in ten years in a drawing-room. Is not adversity the touchstone of character? Hence Ginevra could really appreciate Louis, and know him, and they soon felt a reciprocal esteem. Ginevra, who was older than Louis, found it sweet to be courted by a young man already so great, so tried by fortune, who united the experience of a man with the graces of youth. Louis, on his part, felt unspeakable delight in allowing himself to be apparently protected by a girl of five-and-twenty. Was it not a proof of love? The union in Ginevra of pride and sweetness, of strength and weakness, had an irresistible charm; Louis was indeed completely her slave. In short, they were already so deeply in love that they felt no need either to deny it to themselves, or to tell it.

One day, towards evening, Ginevra heard the signal agreed on⁠—Louis tapped on the woodwork with a pin, so gently as to make no more noise than a spider attaching its thread⁠—thus asking if he might come out. She glanced round the studio, did not see little Laure, and answered the summons; but as the door was opened, Louis caught sight of the girl, and hastily retreated. Ginevra, much surprised, looked about her, saw Laure, and going up to her easel, said, “You are staying very late, dear. And that head seems to me finished; there is only a reflected light to put in on that lock of hair.”

“It would be very kind of you,” said Laure, in a tremulous voice, “if you would correct this copy for me; I should have something of your doing to keep.”

“Of course I will,” said Ginevra, sure of thus dismissing her. “I thought,” she added, as she put in a few light touches, “that you had a long way to go home from the studio.”

“Oh! Ginevra, I am going away for good,” cried the girl, sadly.

“You are leaving Monsieur Servin?” asked the Italian, not seeming affected by her words, as she would have been a month since.

“Have you not noticed, Ginevra, that for some time there has been nobody here but you and me?”

“It is true,” replied Ginevra, suddenly struck as by a reminiscence. “Are they ill, or going to be married, or are all their fathers employed now at the palace?”

“They have all left Monsieur Servin,” said Laure.

“And why?”

“On your account, Ginevra.”

“Mine!” repeated the Corsican, rising, with a threatening brow, and a proud sparkle in her eyes.

“Oh, do not be angry, dear Ginevra,” Laure piteously exclaimed. “But my mother wishes that I should leave too. All the young ladies said that you had an intrigue; that Monsieur Servin had lent himself to allowing a young man who loves you to stay in the dark closet; but I never believed these calumnies, and did not tell my mother. Last evening Madame Roguin met my mother at a ball, and asked her whether she still sent me here. When mamma said Yes, she repeated all those girls’ tales. Mamma scolded me well; she declared I must have known it all, and that I had failed in the confidence of a daughter in her mother by not telling her. Oh, my dear Ginevra, I, who always took you for my model, how grieved I am not to be allowed to stay on with you⁠—”

“We shall meet again in the world; young women get married,” said Ginevra.

“When they are rich,” replied Laure.

“Come to see me, my father has wealth⁠—”

“Ginevra,” Laure went on, much moved, “Madame Roguin and my mother are coming tomorrow to see Monsieur Servin, and complain of his conduct. At least let him be prepared.”

A thunderbolt falling at her feet would have astonished Ginevra less than this announcement. “What could it matter to them?” she innocently asked.

“Everyone thinks it very wrong. Mamma says it is quite improper.”

“And you, Laure, what do you think about it?”

The girl looked at Ginevra, and their hearts met. Laure could no longer restrain her tears; she threw herself on her friend’s neck and kissed her. At this moment Servin came in.

“Mademoiselle Ginevra,” he said, enthusiastically, “I have finished my picture, it is being varnished. — But what is the matter? All the young ladies are making holiday, it would seem, or are gone into the country.”

Laure wiped away her tears, took leave of Servin, and went away.

“The studio had been deserted for some days,” said Ginevra, “and those young ladies will return no more.”

“Pooh!”

“Nay, do not laugh,” said Ginevra, “listen to me. I am the involuntary cause of your loss of repute.”

The artist smiled, and said, interrupting his pupil, “My repute? But in a few days my picture will be exhibited.”

“It is not your talent that is in question,” said the Italian girl; “but your morality. The young ladies have spread a report that Louis is shut up here, and that you⁠—lent yourself to our lovemaking.”

“There is some truth in that, mademoiselle,” replied the professor. “The girls’ mothers are airified prudes,” he went on. “If they had but come to me, everything would have been explained. But what do I care for such things? Life is too short!”

And the painter snapped his fingers in the air.

Louis, who had heard part of the conversation, came out of his cupboard.

“You are losing all your pupils,” he cried, “and I shall have been your ruin!”

The artist took his hand and Ginevra’s, and joined them. “Will you marry each other, my children” he asked, with touching bluntness. They both looked down, and their silence was their first mutual confession of love. “Well,” said Servin, “and you will be happy, will you not? Can anything purchase such happiness as that of two beings like you?”

“I am rich,” said Ginevra, “if you will allow me to indemnify you⁠—”

“Indemnify!” Servin broke in. “Why, as soon as it is known that I have been the victim of a few little fools, and that I have sheltered a fugitive, all the Liberals in Paris will send me their daughters! Perhaps I shall be in your debt then.”

Louis grasped his protector’s hand, unable to speak a word; but at last he said, in a broken voice, “To you I shall owe all my happiness.”

“Be happy; I unite you,” said the painter with comic unction, laying his hands on the heads of the lovers.

This pleasantry put an end to their emotional mood. They looked at each other, and all three laughed. The Italian girl wrung Louis’ hand with a passionate grasp, and with a simple impulse worthy of her Corsican traditions.

“Ah, but, my dear children,” said Servin, “you fancy that now everything will go on swimmingly? Well, you are mistaken.” They looked at him in amazement.

“Do not be alarmed; I am the only person inconvenienced by your giddy behavior. But Madame Servin is the pink of propriety, and I really do not know how we shall settle matters with her.”

“Heavens! I had forgotten. Tomorrow Madame Roguin and Laure’s mother are coming to you⁠—”

“I understand!” said the painter, interrupting her.

“But you can justify yourself,” said the girl, with a toss of her head of emphatic pride. “Monsieur Louis,” and she turned to him with an arch look, “has surely no longer an antipathy for the King’s Government?”⁠—“Well, then,” she went on, after seeing him smile, “tomorrow morning I shall address a petition to one of the most influential persons at the Ministry of War, a man who can refuse the Baron di Piombo’s daughter nothing. We will obtain a tacit pardon for Captain Louis⁠—for they will not recognize your grade as Colonel. And you,” she added, speaking to Servin, “may annihilate the mammas of my charitable young companions by simply telling them the truth.”

“You are an angel!” said Servin.

While this scene was going on at the studio, Ginevra’s father and mother were impatiently expecting her return.

“It is six o’clock, and Ginevra is not yet home,” said Bartolomeo.

“She was never so late before,” replied his wife.

The old people looked at each other with all the signs of very unusual anxiety. Bartolomeo, too much excited to sit still, rose and paced the room twice, briskly enough for a man of seventy-seven. Thanks to a strong constitution, he had changed but little since the day of his arrival at Paris, and tall as he was, he was still upright. His hair, thin and white now, had left his head bald, a broad and bossy skull which gave token of great strength and firmness. His face, deeply furrowed, had grown full and wide, with the pale complexion that inspires veneration. The fire of a passionate nature still lurked in the unearthly glow of his eyes, and the brows, which were not quite white, preserved their terrible mobility. The aspect of the man was severe, but it could be seen that Bartolomeo had the right to be so. His kindness and gentleness were known only to his wife and daughter. In his official position, or before strangers, he never set aside the majesty which time had lent to his appearance; and his habit of knitting those thick brows, of setting every line in his face, and assuming a Napoleonic fixity of gaze, made him seem as cold as marble.

In the course of his political life he had been so generally feared that he was thought unsociable; but it is not difficult to find the causes of such a reputation. Piombo’s life, habits, and fidelity were a censure on most of the courtiers. Notwithstanding the secret missions entrusted to his discretion, which to any other man would have proved lucrative, he had not more than thirty thousand francs a year in Government securities. And when we consider the low price of stock under the Empire, and Napoleon’s liberality to those of his faithful adherents who knew how to ask, it is easy to perceive that the Baron di Piombo was a man of stern honesty; he owed his Baron’s plumage only to the necessity of bearing a title when sent by Napoleon to a foreign Court.

Bartolomeo had always professed implacable hatred of the traitors whom Napoleon had gathered about him, believing he could win them over by his victories. It was he⁠—so it was said⁠—who took three steps towards the door of the Emperor’s room, after advising him to get rid of three men then in France, on the day before he set out on his famous and brilliant campaign of 1814. Since the second return of the Bourbons, Bartolomeo had ceased to wear the ribbon of the Legion of Honor. No man ever offered a finer image of the old Republicans, the incorruptible supporters of the Empire, who survived as the living derelicts of the two most vigorous Governments the world has perhaps ever seen. If Baron di Piombo had displeased some courtiers, Daru, Drouot, Carnot were his friends. And, indeed, since Waterloo, he cared no more about other political figures than for the puffs of smoke he blew from his cigar.

With the moderate sum which Madame, Napoleon’s mother, had paid him for his estates in Corsica, Bartolomeo di Piombo had acquired the old Hôtel de Portenduère, in which he made no alterations. Living almost always in official residences at the cost of the Government, he had resided in this mansion only since the catastrophe of Fontainebleau. Like all simple folks of lofty character, the Baron and his wife cared nothing for external splendor; they still used the old furniture they had found in the house. The reception rooms of this dwelling, lofty, gloomy, and bare, the huge mirrors set in old gilt frames almost black with age, the furniture from the time of Louis XIV, were in keeping with Bartolomeo and his wife⁠—figures worthy of antiquity, Under the Empire, and during the Hundred Days, while holding offices that brought handsome salaries, the old Corsican had kept house in grand style, but rather to do honor to his position than with a view to display.

His life, and that of his wife and daughter, was so frugal, so quiet, that their modest fortune sufficed for their needs. To them their child Ginevra outweighed all the riches on earth. And when, in May 1814, Baron di Piombo resigned his place, dismissed his household, and locked his stable-doors, Ginevra, as simple and unpretentious as her parents, had not a regret. Like all great souls, she found luxury in strength of feeling, as she sought happiness in solitude and work.

And these three loved each other too much for the externals of life to have any value in their eyes. Often⁠—and especially since Napoleon’s second and fearful fall⁠—Bartolomeo and his wife spent evenings of pure delight in listening to Ginevra as she played the piano or sang. To them there was an immense mystery of pleasure in their daughter’s presence, in her lightest word; they followed her with their eyes with tender solicitude; they heard her step in the courtyard, however lightly she trod. Like lovers, they would all three sit silent for hours, hearing, better than in words, the eloquence of each other’s soul. This deep feeling, the very life of the two old people, filled all their thoughts. Not three lives were here, but one, which, like the flame on a hearth, burned up in three tongues of fire.

Though now and then memories of Napoleon’s bounty and misfortunes, or the politics of the day, took the place of their constant preoccupation, they could talk of them without breaking their community of thought. For did not Ginevra share their political passions? What could be more natural than the eagerness with which they withdrew into the heart of their only child? Until now the business of public life had absorbed Baron di Piombo’s energies; but in resigning office the Corsican felt the need of throwing his energy into the last feeling that was left to him; and, besides the tie that bound a father and mother to their daughter, there was perhaps, unknown to these three despotic spirits, a powerful reason in the fanaticism of their reciprocal devotion; their love was undivided; Ginevra’s whole heart was given to her father, as Piombo’s was to her; and certainly, if it is true that we are more closely attached to one another by our faults than by our good qualities, Ginevra responded wonderfully to all her father’s passions. Herein lay the single defect of this threefold existence. Ginevra was wholly given over to her vindictive impulses, carried away by them, as Bartolomeo had been in his youth. The Corsican delighted in encouraging these savage emotions in his daughter’s heart, exactly as a lion teaches his whelps to spring on their prey. But as this apprenticeship to revenge could only be carried out under the parental roof, Ginevra never forgave her father anything; he always had to succumb. Piombo regarded these factitious quarrels as mere childishness, but the child thus acquired a habit of domineering over her parents. In the midst of these tempests which Bartolomeo loved to raise, a tender word, a look, was enough to soothe their angry spirits, and they were never so near kissing as when threatening wrath.

However, from the age of about five, Ginevra, growing wiser than her father, constantly avoided these scenes. Her faithful nature, her devotion, the affection which governed all her thoughts, and her admirable good sense, had got the better of her rages; still a great evil had resulted: Ginevra lived with her father and mother on a footing of equality which is always disastrous.

To complete the picture of all the changes that had happened to these three persons since their arrival in Paris, Piombo and his wife, people of no education, had allowed Ginevra to study as she would. Following her girlish fancy, she had tried and given up everything, returning to each idea, and abandoning each in turn, until painting had become her ruling passion; she would have been perfect if her mother had been capable of directing her studies, of enlightening and harmonizing her natural gifts. Her faults were the outcome of the pernicious training that the old Corsican had delighted to give her.

After making the floor creak for some minutes under his feet, the old man rang the bell. A servant appeared.

“Go to meet Mademoiselle Ginevra,” said the master.

“I have always been sorry that we have no longer a carriage for her,” said the Baroness.

“She would not have one,” replied Piombo, looking at his wife; and she, accustomed for twenty years to obedience as her part, cast down her eyes.

Tall, thin, pale, and wrinkled, and now past seventy, the Baroness was exactly like the old woman whom Schnetz introduces into the Italian scenes of his genre-pictures; she commonly sat so silent that she might have been taken for a second Mrs. Shandy; but a word, a look, a gesture would betray that her feelings had all the vigor and freshness of youth. Her dress, devoid of smartness, was often devoid of taste. She usually remained passive, sunk in an armchair, like a Sultana valideh, waiting for, or admiring Ginevra⁠—her pride and life. Her daughter’s beauty, dress, and grace seemed to have become her own. All was well with her if Ginevra were content. Her hair had turned white, and a few locks were visible above her furrowed brow, and at the side of her withered cheeks.

“For about a fortnight now,” said she, “Ginevra has been coming in late.”

“Jean will not go fast enough,” cried the impatient old man, crossing over the breast of his blue coat; he snatched up his hat, crammed it on to his head, and was off.

“You will not get far,” his wife called after him.

In fact, the outer gate opened and shut, and the old mother heard Ginevra’s steps in the courtyard. Bartolomeo suddenly reappeared, carrying his daughter in triumph, while she struggled in his arms.

“Here she is! La Ginevra, la Ginevrettina, la Ginevrina, la Ginevrola, la Ginevretta, la Ginevra bella!”

“Father! you are hurting me!”

Ginevra was immediately set down with a sort of respect. She nodded her head with a graceful gesture to reassure her mother, who was alarmed, and to convey that it had been only an excuse. Then the Baroness’ pale, dull face regained a little color, and even a kind of cheerfulness. Piombo rubbed his hands together extremely hard⁠—the most certain symptom of gladness; he had acquired the habit at Court when seeing Napoleon in a rage with any of his generals or ministers who served him ill, or who had committed some blunder. When once the muscles of his face were relaxed, the smallest line in his forehead expressed benevolence. These two old folks at this moment were exactly like drooping plants, which are restored to life by a little water after a long drought.

“Dinner, dinner!” cried the Baron, holding out his hand to Ginevra, whom he addressed as Signora Piombellina, another token of good spirits, to which his daughter replied with a smile.

“By the way,” said Piombo, as they rose from table, “do you know that your mother has remarked that for a month past you have stayed at the studio much later than usual? Painting before parents, it would seem.”

“Oh, dear father⁠—”

“Ginevra is preparing some surprise for us, no doubt,” said the mother.

“You are going to bring me a picture of your painting?” cried the Corsican, clapping his hands.

“Yes, I am very busy at the studio,” she replied.

“What ails you, Ginevra? you are so pale,” asked her mother.

“No!” exclaimed the girl, with a resolute gesture. “No! it shall never be said that Ginevra Piombo ever told a lie in her life.”

On hearing this strange exclamation, Piombo and his wife looked at their daughter with surprise.

“I love a young man,” she added, in a broken voice. Then, not daring to look at her parents, her heavy eyelids drooped as if to veil the fire in her eyes.

“Is he a prince?” asked her father ironically; but his tone of voice made both the mother and daughter tremble.

“No, father,” she modestly replied, “he is a young man of no fortune⁠—”

“Then is he so handsome?”

“He is unfortunate.”

“What is he?”

“As a comrade of Labédoyère’s he was outlawed, homeless; Servin hid him, and⁠—”

“Servin is a good fellow, and did well,” cried Piombo. “But you, daughter, have done ill to love any man but your father⁠—”

“Love is not within my control,” said Ginevra gently.

“I had flattered myself,” said her father, “that my Ginevra would be faithful to me till my death; that my care and her mother’s would be all she would have known; that our tenderness would never meet with a rival affection in her heart; that⁠—”

“Did I ever reproach you for your fanatical devotion to Napoleon?” said Ginevra. “Have you never loved anyone but me? Have you not been away on Embassies for months at a time? Have I not borne your absence bravely? Life has necessities to which we must yield.”

“Ginevra!”

“No, you do not love me for my own sake, and your reproaches show intolerable selfishness.”

“And you accuse your father’s love!” cried Piombo with flaming looks.

“Father, I will never accuse you,” replied Ginevra, more gently than her trembling mother expected. “You have right on the side of your egoism, as I have right on the side of my love. Heaven is my witness that no daughter ever better fulfilled her duty to her parents. I have never known anything but love and happiness in what many daughters regard as obligations. Now, for fifteen years, I have never been anywhere but under your protecting wing, and it has been a very sweet delight to me to charm your lives. But am I then ungrateful in giving myself up to the joy of loving, and in wishing for a husband to protect me after you?”

“So you balance accounts with your father, Ginevra!” said the old man in ominous tones.

There was a frightful pause; no one dared to speak. Finally, Bartolomeo broke the silence by exclaiming in a heartrending voice: “Oh, stay with us; stay with your old father! I could not bare to see you love a man. Ginevra, you will not have long to wait for your liberty⁠—”

“But, my dear father, consider; we shall not leave you, we shall be two to love you; you will know the man to whose care you will bequeath me. You will be doubly loved by me and by him⁠—by him, being part of me, and by me who am wholly he.”

“Oh, Ginevra, Ginevra!” cried the Corsican, clenching his fists, “why were you not married when Napoleon had accustomed me to the idea, and introduced dukes and counts as your suitors.”

“They only loved me to order,” said the young girl. “Besides, I did not wish to leave you; and they would have taken me away with them.”

“You do not wish to leave us alone,” said Piombo, “but if you marry you isolate us. I know you, my child, you will love us no more. Elisa,” he added, turning to his wife, who sat motionless and, as it were, stupefied; “we no longer have a daughter; she wants to be married.”

The old man sat down, after raising his hands in the air as though to invoke God; then he remained bent, crushed by his grief. Ginevra saw her father’s agitation, and the moderation of his wrath pierced her to the heart; she had expected a scene and furies; she had not steeled her soul against his gentleness.

“My dear father,” she said in an appealing voice, “no, you shall never be abandoned by your Ginevra. But love me too a little for myself. If only you knew how he loves me! Ah, he could never bear to cause me pain!”

“What, comparisons already!” cried Piombo in a terrible voice. “No,” he went on, “I cannot endure the idea. If he were to love you as you deserve, he would kill me; and if he were not to love you, I should stab him!”

Piombo’s hands were trembling, his lips trembled, his whole frame trembled, and his eyes flashed lightnings; Ginevra alone could meet his gaze; for then her eyes too flashed fire, and the daughter was worthy of the father.

“To love you! What man is worthy of such a life?” he went on. “To love you as a father even⁠—is it not to live in Paradise? Who then could be worthy to be your husband?”

“He,” said Ginevra. “He of whom I feel myself unworthy.”

“He,” echoed Piombo mechanically. “Who? He?”

“The man I love.”

“Can he know you well enough already to adore you?”

“But, father,” said Ginevra, feeling a surge of impatience, “even if he did not love me, so long as I love him⁠—”

“You do love him then?” cried Piombo. Ginevra gently bowed her head. “You love him more than you love me?”

“The two feelings cannot be compared” she replied.

“One is stronger than the other?” said Piombo.

“Yes, I think so,” said Ginevra.

“You shall not marry him!” cried the Corsican in a voice that made the windows rattle.

“I will marry him!” replied Ginevra calmly.

“Good God!” cried the mother, “how will this quarrel end? Santa Virginia, come between them!”

The Baron, who was striding up and down the room, came and seated himself. An icy sternness darkened his face; he looked steadfastly at his daughter, and said in a gentle and affectionate voice, “Nay, Ginevra⁠—you will not marry him. Oh, do not say you will, this evening. Let me believe that you will not. Do you wish to see your father on his knees before you, and his white hairs humbled? I will beseech you⁠—”

“Ginevra Piombo is not accustomed to promise and not to keep her word,” said she; “I am your child.”

“She is right,” said the Baroness, “we come into the world to marry.”

“And so you encourage her in disobedience,” said the Baron to his wife, who, stricken by the reproof, froze into a statue.

“It is not disobedience to refuse to yield to an unjust command,” replied Ginevra.

“It cannot be unjust when it emanates from your father’s lips, my child. Why do you rise in judgment on me? Is not the repugnance I feel a counsel from on High? I am perhaps saving you from some misfortune.”

“The misfortune would be that he should not love me.”

“Always he!”

“Yes, always,” she said. “He is my life, my joy, my thought. Even if I obeyed you, he would be always in my heart. If you forbid me to marry him, will it not make me hate you?”

“You love us no longer!” cried Piombo.

“Oh!” said Ginevra, shaking her head.

“Well, then, forget him. Be faithful to us. After us⁠ ⁠… you understand⁠ ⁠…”

“Father, would you make me wish that you were dead?” cried Ginevra.

“I shall outlive you; children who do not honor their parents die early,” cried her father at the utmost pitch of exasperation,

“All the more reason for marrying soon and being happy,” said she.

This coolness, this force of argument, brought Piombo’s agitation to a crisis; the blood rushed violently to his head, his face turned purple. Ginevra shuddered; she flew like a bird on to her father’s knees, threw her arms round his neck, stroked his hair, and exclaimed, quite overcome:

“Oh, yes, let me die first! I could not survive you, my dear, kind father.”

“Oh, my Ginevra, my foolish Ginevretta!” answered Piombo, whose rage melted under this caress as an icicle melts in the sunshine.

“It was time you should put an end to the matter,” said the Baroness in a broken voice.

“Poor mother!”

“Ah, Ginevretta, mia Ginevra bella!”

And the father played with his daughter as if she were a child of six; he amused himself with undoing the waving tresses of her hair and dancing her on his knee; there was dotage in his demonstrations of tenderness. Presently his daughter scolded him as she kissed him, and tried, half in jest, to get leave to bring Louis to the house; but, jesting too, her father refused. She sulked, and recovered herself, and sulked again; then, at the end of the evening, she was only too glad to have impressed on her father the ideas of her love for Louis and of a marriage ere long.

Next day she said no more about it; she went later to the studio and returned early; she was more affectionate to her father than she had ever been, and showed herself grateful, as if to thank him for the consent to her marriage he seemed to give by silence. In the evening she played and sang for a long time, and exclaimed now and then, “This nocturne requires a man’s voice!” She was an Italian, and that says everything.

A week later her mother beckoned her; Ginevra went, and then in her ear she whispered, “I have persuaded your father to receive him.”

“Oh, mother! you make me very happy.”

So that afternoon, Ginevra had the joy of coming home to her father’s house leaning on Louis’ arm. The poor officer came out of his hiding-place for the second time. Ginevra’s active intervention addressed to the Due de Feltre, then Minister of War, had been crowned with perfect success. Louis had just been reinstated as an officer on the reserve list. This was a very long step towards a prosperous future.

Informed by Ginevra of all the difficulties he would meet with in the Baron, the young officer dared not confess his dread of failing to please him. This man, so brave in adversity, so bold on the field of battle, quaked as he thought of entering the Piombos’ drawing-room. Ginevra felt him tremble, and this emotion, of which their happiness was the first cause, was to her a fresh proof of his love.

“How pale you are!” said she, as they reached the gate of the hotel.

“Oh, Ginevra! If my life alone were at stake⁠—”

Though Bartolomeo had been informed by his wife of this official introduction of his daughter’s lover, he did not rise to meet him, but remained in the armchair he usually occupied, and the severity of his countenance was icy.

“Father,” said Ginevra, “I have brought you a gentleman whom you will no doubt be pleased to see. Monsieur Louis, a soldier who fought quite close to the Emperor at Mont-Saint-Jean⁠—”

The Baron rose, cast a furtive glance at Louis, and said in a sardonic tone:

“Monsieur wears no orders?”

“I no longer wear the Legion of Honor,” replied Louis bashfully, and he humbly remained standing.

Ginevra, hurt by her father’s rudeness, brought forward a chair. The officer’s reply satisfied the old Republican. Madame Piombo, seeing that her husband’s brows were recovering their natural shape, said, to revive the conversation, “Monsieur is wonderfully like Nina Porta. Do not you think that he has quite the face of a Porta?”

“Nothing can be more natural,” replied the young man, on whom Piombo’s flaming eyes were fixed. “Nina was my sister.”

“You are Luigi Porta?” asked the old man.

“Yes.”

Bartolomeo di Piombo rose, tottered, was obliged to lean on a chair, and looked at his wife. Elisa Piombo came up to him; then the two old folks silently left the room, arm in arm, with a look of horror at their daughter. Luigi Porta, quite bewildered, gazed at Ginevra, who turned as white as a marble statue, and remained with her eyes fixed on the door where her father and mother had disappeared. There was something so solemn in her silence and their retreat, that, for the first time in his life perhaps, a feeling of fear came over him. She clasped her hands tightly together, and said in a voice so choked that it would have been inaudible to anyone but a lover, “How much woe in one word!”

“In the name of our love, what have I said?” asked Luigi Porta.

“My father has never told me our deplorable history,” she replied. “And when we left Corsica I was too young to know anything about it.”

“Is it a Vendetta?” asked Luigi, trembling.

“Yes. By questioning my mother I learned that the Porta had killed my brothers and burned down our house. My father then massacred all your family. How did you survive, you whom he thought he had tied to the posts of a bed before setting fire to the house?”

“I do not know,” replied Luigi. “When I was six I was taken to Genoa, to an old man named Colonna. No account of my family was ever given to me; I only knew that I was an orphan, and penniless. Colonna was like a father to me; I bore his name till I entered the army; then, as I needed papers to prove my identity, old Colonna told me that, helpless as I was, and hardly more than a child, I had enemies. He made me promise to take the name of Luigi only, to evade them.”

“Fly, fly, Luigi,” cried Ginevra. “Yet, stay; I must go with you. So long as you are in my father’s house you are safe. As soon as you quit it, take care of yourself. You will go from one danger to another. My father has two Corsicans in his service, and if he does not threaten your life they will.”

“Ginevra,” he said, “and must this hatred exist between us?”

She smiled sadly and bowed her head. But she soon raised it again with a sort of pride, and said, “Oh, Luigi, our feelings must be very pure and true that I should have the strength to walk in the path I am entering on. But it is for the sake of happiness which will last as long as life, is it not?”

Luigi answered only with a smile, and pressed her hand. The girl understood that only a great love could at such a moment scorn mere protestations. This calm and conscientious expression of Luigi’s feelings seemed to speak for their strength and permanence. The fate of the couple was thus sealed. Ginevra foresaw many painful contests to be fought out, but the idea of deserting Louis⁠—an idea which had perhaps floated before her mind⁠—at once vanished. His, henceforth and forever, she suddenly dragged him away and out of the house with a sort of violence, and did not quit him till they reached the house where Servin had taken a humble lodging for him.

When she returned to her father’s house she had assumed the serenity which comes of a strong resolve. No change of manner revealed any uneasiness. She found her parents ready to sit down to dinner, and she looked at them with eyes devoid of defiance, and full of sweetness. She saw that her old mother had been weeping; at the sight of her red eyelids for a moment her heart failed her, but she hid her emotion. Piombo seemed to be a prey to anguish too keen, too concentrated to be shown by ordinary means of expression. The servants waited on a meal which no one ate. A horror of food is one of the symptoms indicative of a great crisis of the soul. All three rose without any one of them having spoken a word. When Ginevra was seated in the great, solemn drawing-room, between her father and mother, Piombo tried to speak, but he found no voice; he tried to walk about, but found no strength; he sat down again and rang the bell.

“Pietro,” said he to the servant at last, “light the fire, I am cold.”

Ginevra was shocked, and looked anxiously at her father. The struggle he was going through must be frightful; his face looked quite changed. Ginevra knew the extent of the danger that threatened her, but she did not tremble; while the glances that Bartolomeo cast at his daughter seemed to proclaim that he was at this moment in fear of the character whose violence was his own work. Between these two everything must be in excess. And the certainty of the possible change of feeling between the father and daughter filled the Baroness’ face with an expression of terror.

“Ginevra, you love the enemy of your family,” said Piombo at last, not daring to look at his daughter.

“That is true,” she replied.

“You must choose between him and us. Our Vendetta is part of ourselves. If you do not espouse my cause, you are not of my family.”

“My choice is made,” said Ginevra, in a steady voice.

His daughter’s calmness misled Bartolomeo.

“Oh, my dear daughter!” cried the old man, whose eyelids were moist with tears, the first, the only tears he ever shed in his life.

“I shall be his wife,” she said abruptly.

Bartolomeo could not see for a moment; but he recovered himself and replied, “This marriage shall never be so long as I live. I will never consent.” Ginevra kept silence. “But, do you understand,” the Baron went on, “that Luigi is the son of the man who killed your brothers?”

“He was six years old when the crime was committed; he must be innocent of it,” she answered.

“A Porta!” cried Bartolomeo.

“But how could I share this hatred?” said the girl eagerly. “Did you bring me up in the belief that a Porta was a monster? Could I imagine that even one was left of those you had killed? Is it not in nature that you should make your Vendetta give way to my feelings?”

“A Porta!” repeated Piombo. “If his father had found you then in your bed, you would not be alive now. He would have dealt you a hundred deaths.”

“Possibly,” she said. “But his son has given me more than life. To see Luigi is a happiness without which I cannot live. Luigi has revealed to me the world of feeling. I have, perhaps, seen even handsomer faces than his, but none ever charmed me so much. I have, perhaps, heard voices⁠—no, no, never one so musical! Luigi loves me. He shall be my husband.”

“Never!” said Piombo. “Ginevra, I would sooner see you in your coffin!”

The old man rose, and paced the room with hurried strides, uttering fierce words, with pauses between that betrayed all his indignation.

“You think, perhaps, that you can bend my will? Undeceive yourself. I will not have a Porta for my son-in-law. That is my decision. Never speak of the matter again. I am Bartolomeo di Piombo, do you hear, Ginevra?”

“Do you attach any mysterious meaning to the words?” she coldly asked.

“They mean that I have a dagger, and that I do not fear the justice of men. We Corsicans settle such matters with God.”

“Well,” said the girl, “I am Ginevra di Piombo, and I declare that in six months I will be Luigi Porta’s wife. — You are a tyrant, father,” she added, after an ominous pause.

Bartolomeo clenched his fists, and struck the marble chimney shelf.

“Ah! we are in Paris!” he muttered.

He said no more, but folded his arms and bowed his head on his breast; nor did he say another word the whole evening. Having asserted her will, the girl affected the most complete indifference; she sat down to the piano, sang, played the most charming music, with a grace and feeling that proclaimed her perfect freedom of mind, triumphing over her father, whose brow showed no relenting. The old man deeply felt this tacit insult, and at that moment gathered the bitter fruits of the education he had given his daughter. Respect is a barrier which protects the parents and the children alike, sparing those much sorrow, and these remorse.

The next day, as Ginevra was going out at the hour when she usually went to the studio, she found the door of the house closed upon her; but she soon devised means for informing Luigi Porta of her father’s severity. A waiting woman, who could not read, carried to the young officer a letter written by Ginevra. For five days the lovers contrived to correspond, thanks to the plots that young people of twenty can always contrive.

The father and daughter rarely spoke to each other. Both had in the bottom of their hearts an element of hatred; they suffered, but in pride and silence. Knowing well how strong were the bonds of love that tied them to each other, they tried to wrench them asunder, but without success. No sweet emotion ever came, as it had been wont, to give light to Bartolomeo’s severe features when he gazed at his Ginevra, and there was something savage in her expression when she looked at her father. Reproach sat on her innocent brow; she gave herself up, indeed, to thoughts of happiness, but remorse sometimes dimmed her eyes. It was not, indeed, difficult to divine that she would never enjoy in peace a felicity which made her parents unhappy. In Bartolomeo, as in his daughter, all the irresolution arising from their native goodness of heart was doomed to shipwreck on their fierce pride and the revengeful spirit peculiar to Corsicans. They encouraged each other in their wrath, and shut their eyes to the future. Perhaps, too, each fancied that the other would yield.

On Ginevra’s birthday, her mother, heartbroken at this disunion, which was assuming a serious aspect, planned to reconcile the father and daughter by an appeal to the memories of this anniversary. They were all three sitting in Bartolomeo’s room. Ginevra guessed her mother’s purpose from the hesitation written in her face, and she smiled sadly. At this instant a servant announced two lawyers, accompanied by several witnesses, who all came into the room. Bartolomeo stared at the men, whose cold, set faces were in themselves an insult to souls so fevered as those of the three principal actors in this scene. The old man turned uneasily to his daughter, and saw on her face a smile of triumph which led him to suspect some catastrophe; but he affected, as savages do, to preserve a deceitful rigidity, while he looked at the two lawyers with a sort of apathetic curiosity. At a gesture of invitation from the old man the visitors took seats.

“Monsieur is no doubt Baron di Piombo?” said the elder of the two lawyers.

Bartolomeo bowed. The lawyer gave his head a little jerk, looked at Ginevra with the sly expression of a bailiff nabbing a debtor; then he took out his snuffbox, opened it, and, taking a pinch of snuff, absorbed it in little sniffs while considering the opening words of his discourse; and while pronouncing them he made constant pauses, an oratorical effect which a dash in printing represents very imperfectly.

“Monsieur,” said he, “I am Monsieur Roguin, notary to mademoiselle, your daughter, and we are here⁠—my colleague and I⁠—to carry out the requirements of the law, and⁠—to put an end to the divisions which⁠—as it would seem⁠—have arisen⁠—between you and mademoiselle, your daughter⁠—on the question⁠—of⁠—her⁠—marriage with Monsieur Luigi Porta.” This speech, made in a pedantic style, seemed, no doubt, to Monsieur Roguin much too fine to be understood all in a moment, and he stopped, while looking at Bartolomeo with an expression peculiar to men of business, and which is halfway between servility and familiarity. Lawyers are so much used to feign interest in the persons to whom they speak that their features at last assume a grimace which they can put on and off with their official pallium. This caricature of friendliness, so mechanical as to be easily detected, irritated Bartolomeo to such a pitch that it took all his self-control not to throw Monsieur Roguin out of the window; a look of fury emphasized his wrinkles, and on seeing this the notary said to himself: “I am making an effect.”

“But,” he went on in a honeyed voice, “Monsieur le Baron, on such occasions as these, our intervention must always, at first, be essentially conciliatory. — Have the kindness to listen to me. — It is in evidence that Mademoiselle Ginevra Piombo⁠—has today⁠—attained the age at which, after a ‘respectful summons,’ she may proceed to the solemnization of her marriage⁠—notwithstanding that her parents refuse their consent. Now⁠—it is customary in families⁠—which enjoy a certain consideration⁠—which move in society⁠—and preserve their dignity⁠—people, in short, to whom it is important not to let the public into the secret of their differences⁠—and who also do not wish to do themselves an injury by blighting the future lives of a young husband and wife⁠—for that is doing themselves an injury. It is the custom, I was saying⁠—in such highly respectable families⁠—not to allow the serving of such a summons⁠—which must be⁠—which always is a record of a dispute⁠—which at last ceases to exist. For as soon, monsieur, as a young lady has recourse to a ‘respectful summons’ she proclaims a determination so obstinate⁠—that her father⁠—and her mother⁠—” he added, turning to the Baroness, “can have no further hope of seeing her follow their advice. — Hence the parental prohibition being nullified⁠—in the first place by this fact⁠—and also by the decision of the law⁠—it is always the case that a wise father, after finally remonstrating with his child, allows her the liberty⁠—”

Monsieur Roguin paused, perceiving that he might talk on for two hours without extracting an answer; and he also felt a peculiar agitation as he looked at the man he was trying to convince. An extraordinary change had come over Bartolomeo’s countenance. All its lines were set, giving him an expression of indescribable cruelty, and he glared at the lawyer like a tiger. The Baroness sat mute and passive. Ginevra, calm and resolute, was waiting; she knew that the notary’s voice was stronger than hers, and she seemed to have made up her mind to keep silence. At the moment when Roguin ceased speaking, the scene was so terrible that the witnesses, as strangers, trembled; never, perhaps, had such a silence weighed on them. The lawyers looked at each other as if in consultation, then they rose and went to the window.

“Did you ever come across clients made to this pattern?” asked Roguin of his colleague.

“There is nothing to be got out of him,” said the younger man. “In your place I should read the summons and nothing more. The old man is no joke; he is choleric, and you will gain nothing by trying to discuss matters with him.”

Monsieur Roguin therefore read aloud from a sheet of stamped paper a summons ready drawn up, and coldly asked Bartolomeo what his reply was.

“Are there laws in France then that upset a father’s authority?” asked the Corsican.

“Monsieur⁠—” said Roguin, smoothly.

“That snatch a child from her father?”

“Monsieur⁠—”

“That rob an old man of his last consolation?”

“Monsieur, your daughter belongs to you only so long⁠—”

“That kill her?”

“Monsieur, allow me.”

There is nothing more hideous than the cold-blooded and close reasoning of a lawyer in the midst of such scenes of passion as they are usually mixed up with. The faces which Piombo saw seemed to him to have escaped from Hell; his cold and concentrated rage knew no bounds at the moment when his little opponent’s calm and almost piping voice uttered that fatal, “Allow me.” He sprang at a long dagger which hung from a nail over the chimneypiece, and rushed at his daughter. The younger of the two lawyers and one of the witnesses threw themselves between him and Ginevra; but Bartolomeo brutally knocked them over, showing them a face of fire and glowing eyes which seemed more terrible than the flash of the dagger. When Ginevra found herself face to face with her father, she looked at him steadily with a glance of triumph, went slowly towards him, and knelt down.

“No, no! I cannot!” he exclaimed, flinging away the weapon with such force that it stuck fast in the wainscot.

“Mercy, then, mercy!” said she. “You hesitate to kill me, but you refuse me life. Oh, father, I never loved you so well⁠—but give me Luigi. I ask your consent on my knees; a daughter may humble herself to her father. My Luigi, or I must die!”

The violent excitement that choked her prevented her saying more; she found no voice; her convulsive efforts plainly showed that she was between life and death. Bartolomeo roughly pushed her away.

“Go,” he said, “the wife of Luigi Porta cannot be a Piombo. I no longer have a daughter! I cannot bring myself to curse you, but I give you up. You have now no father. My Ginevra Piombo is buried then!” he exclaimed in a deep tone, as he clutched at his heart. — “Go, I say, wretched girl,” he went on after a moment’s silence. “Go, and never let me see you again.”

He took Ginevra by the arm, and in silence led her out of the house.

“Luigi!” cried Ginevra, as she went into the humble room where the officer was lodged, “my Luigi, we have no fortune but our love.”

“We are richer than all the kings of the earth,” he replied.

“My father and mother have cast me out,” said she with deep melancholy.

“I will love you for them.”

“Shall we be very happy?” she cried, with a gaiety that had something terrible in it.

“And forever!” he answered, clasping her to his heart.

On the day following that on which Ginevra had quitted her father’s house, she went to beg Madame Servin to grant her protection and shelter till the time, fixed by law, when she could be married to Luigi. There began her apprenticeship to the troubles which the world strews in the way of those who do not obey its rules. Madame Servin, who was greatly distressed at the injury that Ginevra’s adventure had done the painter, received the fugitive coldly, and explained to her with circumspect politeness that she was not to count on her support. Too proud to insist, but amazed at such selfishness, to which she was unaccustomed, the young Corsican went to lodge in a furnished house as near as possible to Luigi’s. The son of the Portas spent all his days at the feet of his beloved; his youthful love, and the purity of his mind, dispersed the clouds which her father’s reprobation had settled on the banished daughter’s brow; and he painted the future as so fair that she ended by smiling, though she could not forget her parents’ severity.

One morning the maid of the house brought up to her several trunks containing dress-stuffs, linen, and a quantity of things needful for a young woman settling for the first time. In this she recognized the foreseeing kindness of a mother; for as she examined these gifts, she found a purse into which the Baroness had put some money belonging to Ginevra, adding all her own savings. With the money was a letter, in which she implored her daughter to give up her fatal purpose of marrying, if there were yet time. She had been obliged, she said, to take unheard-of precautions to get this small assistance conveyed to Ginevra; she begged her not to accuse her of hardness if henceforth she left her neglected; she feared she could do no more for her; she blessed her, hoped she might find happiness in this fatal marriage if she persisted, and assured her that her one thought was of her beloved daughter. At this point tears had blotted out many words of the letter.

“Oh, mother!” cried Ginevra, quite overcome.

She felt a longing to throw herself at her mother’s feet, to see her, to breathe the blessed air of home; she was on the point of rushing off when Luigi came in. She looked at him, and filial affection vanished, her tears were dried, she could not find it in her to leave the unhappy and loving youth. To be the sole hope of a noble soul, to love and to desert it⁠—such a sacrifice is treason of which no young heart is capable. Ginevra had the generosity to bury her grief at the bottom of her soul.

At last the day of their wedding came. Ginevra found no one near her. Luigi took advantage of the moment when she was dressing to go in search of the necessary witnesses to their marriage act. These were very good people. One of them, an old quartermaster of hussars, had, when in the army, found himself under such obligations to Luigi as an honest man never forgets; he had became a job-master, and had several hackney carriages. The other, a builder, was the proprietor of the house where the young couple were to lodge. Each of these brought a friend, and all four came with Luigi to fetch the bride. Unaccustomed as they were to social grimacing, seeing nothing extraordinary in the service they were doing to Luigi, these men were decently but quite plainly dressed, and there was nothing to proclaim the gay escort of a wedding. Ginevra herself was very simply clad, to be in keeping with her fortune; but, nevertheless, there was something so noble and impressive in her beauty that at the sight of her the words died on the lips of the good folks who had been prepared to pay her some compliment; they bowed respectfully, and she bowed in return; they looked at her in silence, and could only admire her. Joy can only express itself among equals. So, as fate would have it, all was gloomy and serious around the lovers; there was nothing to reflect their happiness.

The church and the mairie were not far away. The two Corsicans, followed by the four witnesses required by law, decided to go on foot, with a simplicity which robbed this great event of social life of all parade. In the courtyard of the mairie they found a crowd of carriages, which announced a numerous party within. They went upstairs and entered a large room, where the couples who were to be made happy on this particular day were awaiting the Maire of that quarter of Paris with considerable impatience. Ginevra sat down by Luigi on the end of a long bench, and their witnesses remained standing for lack of seats. Two brides, pompously arrayed in white, loaded with ribbons and lace and pearls, and crowned with bunches of orange-blossom of which the sheeny buds quivered under their veils, were surrounded by their families and accompanied by their mothers, to whom they turned with looks at once timid and satisfied; every eye reflected their happiness, and every face seemed to exhale benedictions. Fathers, witnesses, brothers, and sisters were coming and going like a swarm of insects playing in a sunbeam which soon must vanish. Everyone seemed to understand the preciousness of this brief hour in life when the heart stands poised between two hopes⁠—the wishes of the past, the promise of the future.

At this sight Ginevra felt her heart swell, and she pressed Luigi’s arm. He gave her a look, and a tear rose to the young man’s eye; he never saw more clearly than at that moment all that his Ginevra had sacrificed for him. That rare tear made the young girl forget the forlorn position in which she stood. Love poured treasures of light between the lovers, who from that moment saw nothing but each other in the midst of the confusion.

Their witnesses, indifferent to the ceremonial, were quietly discussing business matters.

“Oats are very dear,” said the quartermaster to the mason.

“They have not yet gone up so high as plaster in proportion,” said the builder. And they walked round the large room.

“What a lot of time we are losing here!” exclaimed the mason, putting a huge silver watch back into his pocket.

Luigi and Ginevra, clinging to each other, seemed to be but one person. A poet would certainly have admired these two heads, full of the same feeling, alike in coloring, melancholy and silent in the presence of the two buzzing wedding-parties, of four excited families sparkling with diamonds and flowers, and full of gaiety which seemed a mere effervescence. All the joys of which these loud and gorgeous groups made a display, Luigi and Ginevra kept buried at the bottom of their hearts. On one side was the coarse clamor of pleasure; on the other the delicate silence of happy souls: earth and heaven.

But Ginevra trembled, and could not altogether shake off her woman’s weakness. Superstitious, as Italians are, she regarded this contrast as an omen, and in the depths of her heart she harbored a feeling of dread, as unconquerable as her love itself. Suddenly an official in livery threw open the double doors; silence fell, and his voice sounded like a yelp as he called out the names of Monsieur Luigi Porta and Mademoiselle Ginevra Piombo. This incident caused the pair some embarrassment. The celebrity of the name of Piombo attracted attention; the spectators looked about them for a wedding-party which must surely be a splendid one. Ginevra rose; her eyes, thunderous with pride, subdued the crowd, she took Luigi’s arm, and went forward with a firm step, followed by the witnesses. A murmur of astonishment which rapidly grew louder, and whispering on all sides, reminded Ginevra that the world was calling her to account for her parents’ absence. Her father’s curse seemed to be pursuing her.

“Wait for the families of the bride and bridegroom,” said the Maire to the clerk, who at once began to read the contracts.

“The father and mother enter a protest,” said the clerk indifferently.

“On both sides?” asked the Maire.

“The man is an orphan.”

“Where are the witnesses?”

“They are here,” said the clerk, pointing to the four motionless and silent men who stood like statues, with their arms crossed.

“But if the parents protest?” said the Maire.

“The ‘respectful summons’ has been presented in due form,” replied the man, rising to place the various documents in the functionary’s hands.

This discussion in an office seemed to brand them, and in a few words told a whole history. The hatred of the Porta and the Piombo, all these terrible passions, were thus recorded on a page of a register, as the annals of a nation may be inscribed on a tombstone in a few lines, nay, even in a single name: Robespierre or Napoleon. Ginevra was trembling. Like the dove crossing the waters, which had no rest for her foot but in the ark, her eyes could take refuge only in Luigi’s, for all else was cold and sad. The Maire had a stem, disapproving look, and his clerk stared at the couple with ill-natured curiosity. Nothing ever had less the appearance of a festivity. Like all the other events of human life when they are stripped of their accessories, it was a simple thing in itself, immense in its idea.

After some questions, to which they replied, the Maire muttered a few words, and then, having signed their names in the register, Luigi and Ginevra were man and wife. The young Corsicans, whose union had all the poetry which genius has consecrated in Romeo and Juliet, went away between two lines of jubilant relations to whom they did not belong, and who were out of patience at the delay caused by a marriage apparently so forlorn. When the girl found herself in the courtyard and under the open sky, a deep sigh broke from her very heart.

“Oh, will a whole life of love and devotion suffice to repay my Ginevra for her courage and tenderness?” said Luigi.

At these words, spoken with tears of joy, the bride forgot all her suffering, for she had suffered in showing herself to the world claiming a happiness which her parents refused to sanction.

“Why do men try to come between us?” she said, with a simplicity of feeling that enchanted Luigi.

Gladness made them more lighthearted. They saw neither the sky, nor the earth, nor the houses, and flew on wings to the church. At last they found themselves in a small, dark chapel, and in front of a humble altar where an old priest married them. There, as at the mairie, they were pursued by the two weddings that persecuted them with their splendor. The church, filled with friends and relations, rang with the noise made by carriages, beadles, porters, and priests. Altars glittered with ecclesiastical magnificence; the crowns of orange-blossom that decked the statues of the Virgin seemed quite new. Nothing was to be seen but flowers, with perfumes, gleaming tapers, and velvet cushions embroidered with gold. God seemed to have a share in this rapture of a day. When the symbol of eternal union was to be held above the heads of Luigi and Ginevra⁠—the yoke of white satin which for some is so soft, so bright, so light, and for the greater number is made of lead⁠—the priest looked round in vain for two young boys to fill the happy office; two of the witnesses took their place. The priest gave the couple a hasty discourse on the dangers of life, and on the duties they must one day inculcate in their children, and he here took occasion to insinuate a reflection on the absence of Ginevra’s parents; then having united them in the presence of God, as the Maire had united them in the presence of the Law, he ended the mass, and left them.

“God bless them,” said Vergniaud to the mason at the church door. “Never were two creatures better made for each other. That girl’s parents are wretches. I know no braver soldier than Colonel Luigi! If all the world had behaved as he did, L’autre2 would still be with us.”

The soldier’s blessing, the only one breathed for them this day, fell like balm on Ginevra’s heart.

They all parted with shaking of hands, and Luigi cordially thanked his landlord.

“Goodbye, old fellow,” said Luigi to the quartermaster. “And thank you.”

“At your service, Colonel, soul and body, horses and chaises⁠—all that is mine is yours.”

“How well he loves you!” said Ginevra.

Luigi eagerly led his wife home to the house they were to live in; they soon reached the modest apartment, and there, when the door was closed, Luigi took her in his arms, exclaiming, “Oh, my Ginevra⁠—for you are mine now⁠—here is our real festival! Here,” he went on, “all will smile on us.”

Together they went through the three rooms which composed their dwelling. The entrance hall served as drawing-room and dining-room. To the right was a bedroom, to the left a sort of large closet which Luigi had arranged for his beloved wife, where she found easels, her paintbox, some casts, models, lay figures, pictures, portfolios, in short, all the apparatus of an artist.

“Here I shall work,” said she, with childlike glee.

She looked for a long time at the paper and the furniture, constantly turning to Luigi to thank him, for there was a kind of magnificence in this humble retreat; a bookcase contained Ginevra’s favorite books, and there was a piano. She sat down on an ottoman, drew Luigi to her side, and clasping his hand, “You have such good taste,” said she, in a caressing tone.

“Your words make me very happy,” he replied.

“But, come, let us see everything,” said Ginevra, from whom Luigi had kept the secret of this little home.

They went into a bridal chamber that was as fresh and white as a maiden.

“Oh! come away,” said Luigi, laughing.

“But I must see everything,” and Ginevra imperiously went on, examining all the furniture with the curiosity of an antiquary studying a medal. She touched the silk stuff and scrutinized everything with the childlike delight of a bride turning over the treasures of the corbeille brought her by her husband.

“We have begun by ruining ourselves,” she said in a half-glad, half-regretful tone.

“It is true; all my arrears of pay are there,” replied Luigi. “I sold it to a good fellow named Gigonnet.

“Why?” she asked, in a reproachful voice, which betrayed, however, a secret satisfaction. “Do you think I should be less happy under a bare roof? Still,” she went on, “it is all very pretty, and it is ours!”

Luigi looked at her with such enthusiasm that she cast down her eyes, and said, “Let us see the rest.”

Above these three rooms, in the attics, were a workroom for Luigi, a kitchen, and a servant’s room. Ginevra was content with her little domain, though the view was limited by the high wall of a neighboring house, and the courtyard on which the rooms looked was gloomy. But the lovers were so glad of heart, hope so beautified the future, that they would see nothing but enchantment in their mysterious dwelling. They were buried in this huge house, lost in the immensity of Paris, like two pearls in their shell, in the bosom of the deep sea. For anyone else it would have been a prison; to them it was Paradise.

The first days of their married life were given to love; it was too difficult for them to devote themselves at once to work, and they could not resist the fascination of their mutual passion. Luigi would recline for hours at his wife’s feet, admiring the color of her hair, the shape of her forehead, the exquisite setting of her eyes, the purity and whiteness of the arched brow beneath which they slowly rose or fell, expressing the happiness of satisfied love. Ginevra stroked her Luigi’s locks, never tiring of gazing at what she called, in one of her own phrases, the beltà folgorante of the young man, and his delicately cut features; always fascinated by the dignity of his manners, while always charming him by the grace of her own. They played like children with the merest trifles, these trifles always brought them back to their passion, and they ceased playing only to lapse into the day dreams of far niente. An air sung by Ginevra would reproduce for them the exquisite hues of their love.

Or, matching their steps as they had matched their souls, they wandered about the country, finding their love in everything, in the flowers, in the sky, in the heart of the fiery glow of the setting sun; they read it even in the changing clouds that were tossed on the winds. No day was ever like the last, their love continued to grow because it was true. In a very few days they had proved each other, and had instinctively perceived that their souls were of such a temper that their inexhaustible riches seemed to promise ever new joys for the future. This was love in all its fresh candor, with its endless prattle, its unfinished sentences, its long silences, its Oriental restfulness and ardor. Luigi and Ginevra had wholly understood love. Is not love like the sea, which, seen superficially or in haste, is accused of monotony by vulgar minds, while certain privileged beings can spend all their life admiring it and finding in it changeful phenomena which delight them?

One day, however, prudence dragged the young couple from their Garden of Eden; they must work for their living. Ginevra, who had a remarkable talent for copying pictures, set to work to produce copies, and formed a connection among dealers. Luigi, too, eagerly sought some occupation; but it was difficult for a young officer, whose talents were limited to a thorough knowledge of tactics, to find any employment in Paris. At last, one day when, weary of his vain efforts, he felt despair in his soul at seeing that the whole burden of providing for their existence rested on Ginevra, it occurred to him that he might earn something by his handwriting, which was beautiful. With a perseverance, of which his wife had set the example, he went to ask work of the attorneys, the notaries, and the pleaders of Paris. The frankness of his manners and his painful situation greatly interested people in his favor, and he got enough copying to be obliged to employ youths under him. Presently he took work on a larger scale. The income derived from this office-work and the price of Ginevra’s paintings put the young household on a footing of comfort, which they were proud of as the fruit of their own industry.

This was the sunniest period of their life. The days glided swiftly by between work and the happiness of love. In the evening after working hard they found themselves happy in Ginevra’s cell. Music then consoled them for their fatigues. No shade of melancholy ever clouded the young wife’s features, and she never allowed herself to utter a lament. She could always appear to her Luigi with a smile on her lips and a light in her eyes. Each cherished a ruling thought which would have made them take pleasure in the hardest toil: Ginevra told herself she was working for Luigi, and Luigi for Ginevra. Sometimes, in her husband’s absence, the young wife would think of the perfect joy it would have been if this life of love might have been spent in the sight of her father and mother; then she would sink into deep melancholy, and feel all the pangs of remorse; dark pictures would pass like shadows before her fancy; she would see her old father alone, or her mother weeping in the evenings, and hiding her tears from the inexorable Piombo. Those two grave, white heads would suddenly rise up before her, and she fancied she would never see them again but in the fantastical light of memory. This idea haunted her like a presentiment.

She kept the anniversary of their wedding by giving her husband a portrait he had often wished for⁠—that of his Ginevra. The young artist had never executed so remarkable a work. Apart from the likeness, which was perfect, the brilliancy of her beauty, the purity of her feelings, the happiness of love, were rendered with a kind of magic. The masterpiece was hung up with due ceremony.

They spent another year in the midst of comfort. The history of their life can be told in these words: “They were happy.” No event occurred deserving to be related.

At the beginning of the winter of 1819 the picture-dealers advised Ginevra to bring them something else than copies, as, in consequence of the great competition, they could no longer sell them to advantage. Madame Porta acknowledged the mistake she had made in not busying herself with genre pictures which would have won her a name; she undertook to paint portraits; but she had to contend against a crowd of artists even poorer than herself. However, as Luigi and Ginevra had saved some money, they did not despair of the future. At the end of this same winter Luigi was working without ceasing. He, too, had to compete with rivals; the price of copying had fallen so low that he could no longer employ assistants, and was compelled to give up more time to his labor to earn the same amount. His wife had painted several pictures which were not devoid of merit, but dealers were scarcely buying even those of artists of repute. Ginevra offered them for almost nothing, and could not sell them.

The situation of the household was something terrible; the souls of the husband and wife floated in happiness, love loaded them with its treasures; poverty rose up like a skeleton in the midst of this harvest of joys, and they hid their alarms from each other. When Ginevra felt herself on the verge of tears as she saw Luigi suffering, she heaped caresses on him; Luigi, in the same way, hid the blackest care in his heart, while expressing the fondest devotion to Ginevra. They sought some compensation for their woes in the enthusiasm of their feelings, and their words, their joys, their playfulness, were marked by a kind of frenzy. They were alarmed at the future. What sentiment is there to compare in strength with a passion which must end tomorrow⁠—killed by death or necessity? When they spoke of their poverty, they felt the need of deluding each other, and snatched at the smallest hope with equal eagerness.

One night Ginevra sought in vain for Luigi at her side, and got up quite frightened. A pale gleam reflected from the dingy wall of the little courtyard led her to guess that her husband sat up to work at night. Luigi waited till his wife was asleep to go up to his workroom. The clock struck four. Ginevra went back to bed and feigned sleep; Luigi came back, overwhelmed by fatigue and want of sleep, and Ginevra gazed sadly at the handsome face on which labor and anxiety had already traced some lines.

“And it is for me that he spends the night in writing,” she thought, and she wept.

An idea came to dry her tears: she would imitate Luigi. That same day she went to a rich print-seller, and by the help of a letter of recommendation to him that she had obtained from Elie Magus, a picture-dealer, she got some work in coloring prints. All day she painted and attended to her household cares, then at night she colored prints. These two beings, so tenderly in love, got into bed only to get out of it again. Each pretended to sleep, and out of devotion to the other stole away as soon as one had deceived the other. One night Luigi, knocked over by a sort of fever caused by work, of which the burden was beginning to crush him, threw open the window of his workroom to inhale the fresh morning air, and shake off his pain, when, happening to look down, he saw the light thrown on the wall by Ginevra’s lamp; the unhappy man guessed the truth; he went downstairs, walking softly, and discovered his wife in her studio coloring prints.

“Oh, Ginevra,” he exclaimed.

She started convulsively in her chair, and turned scarlet.

“Could I sleep while you were wearing yourself out with work?” said she.

“But I alone have a right to work so hard.”

“And can I sit idle?” replied the young wife, whose eyes filled with tears, “when I know that every morsel of bread almost costs us a drop of your blood? I should die if I did not add my efforts to yours. Ought we not to have everything in common, pleasures and pains?”

“She is cold!” cried Luigi, in despair, “Wrap your shawl closer over your chest, my Ginevra, the night is damp and chilly.”

They went to the window, the young wife leaning her head on her beloved husband’s shoulder, he with his arm round her, sunk in deep silence, and watching the sky which dawn was slowly lighting up.

Gray clouds swept across in quick succession, and the east grew brighter by degrees.

“See,” said Ginevra, “it is a promise⁠—we shall be happy.”

“Yes, in Heaven!” replied Luigi, with a bitter smile. “Oh, Ginevra! you who deserved all the riches of earth⁠ ⁠…”

“I have your heart!” said she in a glad tone.

“Ah, and I do not complain,” he went on, clasping her closely to him. And he covered the delicate face with kisses; it was already beginning to lose the freshness of youth, but the expression was so tender and sweet that he could never look at it without feeling comforted.

“How still!” said Ginevra. “I enjoy sitting late, my dearest. The majesty of night is really contagious; it is impressive, inspiring; there is something strangely solemn in the thought: all sleeps, but I am awake.”

“Oh, my Ginevra, I feel, not for the first time, the refined grace of your soul⁠—but, see, this is daybreak, come and sleep.”

“Yes,” said she, “if I am not the only one to sleep. I was miserable indeed the night when I discovered that my Luigi was awake and at work without me.”

The valor with which the young people defied misfortune for some time found a reward. But the event which usually crowns the joys of a household was destined to be fatal to them. Ginevra gave birth to a boy who, to use a common phrase, was as beautiful as the day. The feeling of motherhood doubled the young creature’s strength. Luigi borrowed money to defray the expenses of her confinement. Thus, just at first, she did not feel all the painfulness of their situation, and the young parents gave themselves up to the joy of rearing a child. This was their last gleam of happiness. Like two swimmers who unite their forces to stem a current, the Corsicans at first struggled bravely; but sometimes they gave themselves up to an apathy resembling the torpor that precedes death, and they soon were obliged to sell their little treasures.

Poverty suddenly stood before them, not hideous, but humbly attired, almost pleasant to endure; there was nothing appalling in her voice; she did not bring despair with her, nor spectres, nor squalor, but she made them forget the traditions and the habit of comfort; she broke the mainsprings of pride. Then came misery in all its horror, reckless of her rags, and trampling every human feeling under foot. Seven or eight months after the birth of little Bartolomeo it would have been difficult to recognize the original of the beautiful portrait, the sole adornment of their bare room, in the mother who was suckling a sickly baby. Without any fire in bitter winter weather, Ginevra saw the soft outlines of her face gradually disappear, her cheeks became as white as porcelain, her eyes colorless, as though the springs of life were drying up in her. And watching her starved and pallid infant, she suffered only in his young misery, while Luigi had not the heart even to smile at his boy.

“I have scoured Paris,” he said in a hollow voice. “I know no one, and how can I dare beg of strangers? Vergniaud, the horse-breeder, my old comrade in Egypt, is implicated in some conspiracy, and has been sent to prison; besides, he had lent me all he had to lend. As to the landlord, he has not asked me for any rent for more than a year.”

“But we do not want for anything,” Ginevra gently answered, with an affectation of calmness.

“Each day brings some fresh difficulty,” replied Luigi, with horror.

Luigi took all Ginevra’s paintings, the portrait, some furniture which they yet could dispense with, and sold them all for a mere trifle; the money thus obtained prolonged their sufferings for a little while. During these dreadful days Ginevra showed the sublime heights of her character, and the extent of her resignation. She bore the inroads of suffering with stoical firmness. Her vigorous soul upheld her under all ills; with a weak hand she worked on by her dying child, fulfilled her household duties with miraculous activity, and was equal to everything. She was even happy when she saw on Luigi’s lips a smile of surprise at the look of neatness she contrived to give to the one room to which they had been reduced.

“I have kept you a piece of bread, dear,” she said one evening when he came in tired.

“And you?”

“I have dined, dear Luigi; I want nothing.” And the sweet expression of her face, even more than her words, urged him to accept the food of which she had deprived herself. Luigi embraced her with one of the despairing kisses which friends gave each other in 1793 as they mounted the scaffold together. In such moments as these two human creatures see each other heart to heart. Thus the unhappy Luigi, understanding at once that his wife was fasting, felt the fever that was undermining her; he shivered, and went out on the pretext of pressing business, for he would rather have taken the most insidious poison than escape death by eating the last morsel of bread in the house.

He wandered about Paris among the smart carriages, in the midst of the insulting luxury that is everywhere flaunted; he hurried past the shops of the money-changers where gold glitters in the window; finally, he determined to sell himself, to offer himself as a substitute for the conscription, hoping by this sacrifice to save Ginevra, and that during his absence she might be taken into favor again by Bartolomeo. So he went in search of one of the men who deal in these white slaves, and felt a gleam of happiness at recognizing in him an old officer of the Imperial Guard.

“For two days I have eaten nothing,” he said, in a slow, weak voice. “My wife is dying of hunger, and never utters a complaint; she will die, I believe, with a smile on her lips. For pity’s sake, old comrade,” he added, with a forlorn smile, “pay for me in advance; I am strong, I have left the service, and I⁠—”

The officer gave Luigi something on account of the sum he promised to get for him. The unhappy man laughed convulsively when he grasped a handful of gold pieces, and ran home as fast as he could go, panting, and exclaiming as he went, “Oh, my Ginevra⁠—Ginevra!”

It was growing dark by the time he reached home. He went in softly, fearing to over-excite his wife, whom he had left so weak; the last pale rays of sunshine, coming in at the dormer-window, fell on Ginevra’s face. She was asleep in her chair with her baby at her breast.

“Wake up, my darling,” said he, without noticing the attitude of the child, which seemed at this moment to have a supernatural glory.

On hearing his voice, the poor mother opened her eyes, met Luigi’s look, and smiled; but Luigi gave a cry of terror. He hardly recognized his half-crazed wife, to whom he showed the gold, with a gesture of savage vehemence. Ginevra began to laugh mechanically, but suddenly she cried in a terrible voice, “Louis, the child is cold!”

She looked at the infant and fainted. Little Bartolomeo was dead.

Luigi took his wife in his arms, without depriving her of the child, which she clutched to her with incomprehensible strength, and after laying her on the bed he went out to call for help.

“Great Heaven!” he exclaimed to his landlord, whom he met on the stairs, “I have money, and my child is dead of hunger, and my wife is dying. Help us.”

In despair he went back to his wife, leaving the worthy builder and various neighbors to procure whatever might relieve the misery of which till now they had known nothing, so carefully had the Corsicans concealed it out of a feeling of pride. Luigi had tossed the gold pieces on the floor, and was kneeling by the bed where his wife lay.

“Father, take charge of my son, who bears your name!” cried Ginevra in her delirium.

“Oh, my angel, be calm,” said Luigi, kissing her, “better days await us!” His voice and embrace restored her to some composure.

“Oh, my Louis,” she went on, looking at him with extraordinary fixity, “listen to me. I feel that I am dying. My death is quite natural. I have been suffering too much; and then happiness so great as mine had to be paid for. Yes, my Luigi, be comforted. I have been so happy that if I had to begin life again, I would again accept our lot. I am a bad mother; I weep for you even more than for my child. — My child!” she repeated in a full, deep voice. Two tears dropped from her dying eyes, and she suddenly clasped yet closer the little body she could not warm. “Give my hair to my father in memory of his Ginevra,” she added. “Tell him that I never, never accused him⁠—”

Her head fell back on her husband’s arm.

“No, no, you cannot die!” cried Luigi. “A doctor is coming. We have food. Your father will receive you into favor. Prosperity is dawning on us. Stay with us, angel of beauty!”

But that faithful and loving heart was growing cold. Ginevra instinctively turned her eyes on the man she adored, though she was no longer conscious of anything; confused images rose before her mind, fast losing all memories of earth. She knew that Luigi was there, for she clung more and more tightly to his ice-cold hand, as if to hold herself up above a gulf into which she feared to fall.

“You are cold, dear,” she said presently; “I will warm you.”

She tried to lay her husband’s hand over her heart, but she was dead. Two doctors, a priest, and some neighbors came in at this moment, bringing everything that was needful to save the lives of the young couple and to soothe their despair. At first these intruders made a good deal of noise, but when they were all in the room an appalling silence fell.

While this scene was taking place Bartolomeo and his wife were sitting in their old armchairs, each at one corner of the immense fireplace that warmed the great drawing-room of their mansion. The clock marked midnight. It was long since the old couple had slept well. At this moment they were silent, like two old folks in their second childhood, who look at everything and see nothing. The deserted room, to them full of memories, was feebly lighted by a single lamp fast dying out. But for the dancing flames on the hearth they would have been in total darkness. One of their friends had just left them, and the chair on which he had sat during his visit stood between the old people. Piombo had already cast more than one glance at this chair, and these glances, fraught with thoughts, followed each other like pangs of remorse, for the empty chair was Ginevra’s. Elisa Piombo watched the expressions that passed across her husband’s pale face. Though she was accustomed to guess the Corsican’s feelings from the violent changes in his features, they were tonight by turns so threatening and so sad that she failed to read this inscrutable soul.

Was Bartolomeo yielding to the overwhelming memories aroused by that chair? Was he pained at perceiving that it had been used by a stranger for the first time since his daughter’s departure? Had the hour of mercy, the hour so long and vainly hoped for, struck at last?

These reflections agitated the heart of Elisa Piombo. For a moment her husband’s face was so terrible that she quaked at having ventured on so innocent a device to give her an opportunity of speaking of Ginevra. At this instant the northerly blast flung the snowflakes against the shutters with such violence that the old people could hear their soft pelting. Ginevra’s mother bent her head to hide her tears from her husband. Suddenly a sigh broke from the old man’s heart; his wife looked at him; he was downcast. For the second time in three years she ventured to speak to him of his daughter.

“Supposing Ginevra were cold!” she exclaimed in an undertone. “Or perhaps she is hungry,” she went on. The Corsican shed a tear. “She has a child, and cannot suckle it⁠—her milk is dried up⁠—” the mother added vehemently, with an accent of despair.

“Let her come, oh, let her come!” cried Piombo. “Oh, my darling child, you have conquered me.”

The mother rose, as if to go to fetch her daughter. At this instant the door was flung open, and a man, whose face had lost all semblance to humanity, suddenly stood before them.

“Dead!⁠—Our families were doomed to exterminate each other; for this is all that remains of her,” he said, laying on the table Ginevra’s long, black hair.

The two old people started, as though they had been struck by a thunderbolt; they could not see Luigi.

“He has spared us a pistol shot, for he is dead,” said Bartolomeo, deliberately, as he looked on the ground.