Anatole France

Tales from a Mother-of-Pearl Casket

TALES FROM A MOTHER-OF-PEARL CASKET

BY

ANATOLE FRANCE

[1844–1924]

translated by

HENRI PÈNE DU BOIS

[1858–1906]

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. RICHMOND & CO.

1896

Copyright 1896, by

GEORGE H. RICHMOND & CO.

Press of J. J. Little & Co.

Astor Place, New York.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

THE PROCURATOR OF JUDEA

AMYCUS AND CELESTIN

LEGEND OF SAINTS OLIVERIE AND LIBERETTE

SAINT EUPHROSINE

SCOLASTICA

THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME

THE MASS OF THE SHADES

LESLIE WOOD

PAUL VERLAINE

A VILLAGE DOCTOR’S MANUSCRIPT

MEMOIRS OF A VOLUNTEER

THE DAWN

MADAME DE LUZY

DEATH ACCORDED

AN ANECDOTE OF FLOREAL

THE LITTLE LEAD SOLDIER

PREFACE

A novelist is compelled often to equip a triple-decked vessel in order to carry an ant across water, but a writer of tales has not to think of quantity, since quality only should preoccupy him. After Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre, his models, he writes stories that are neat, precise, tender, wherein his mind has not to drag the heavy framework of theses, and whereof the style, every word of which is chased like a jewel, is as far superior to the related thing as the work of a Florentine gold-smith is to the rich metals that he used.

There are sixteen tales in this book, and every one of them is an excellent example of the literary art which the tale is to express. The stories are amusing as stories, and may be read and reread with renewed pleasure; the style is charming, the personages are as alert and acute as the phrases, and Anatole France evidently did his work in the light of enough candles to make his pictures, like those of the primitive painters, magnificent in coloring and free of cruel shadows.

He is a book-lover, he is young, he is a philosopher, he is very learned, and he knows men. There were never qualities more difficult to reunite in one person; there was never an artist more skilful at using their combination than Anatole France is. In this book a cycle of human progress is enclosed. There are in it the end of paganism and the end of the monarchy in France. There are in it the naïve ways of the saints of the Golden Legend and those of the revolutionists at the end of the eighteenth century. There are in it tolerance, sympathy, intelligence, and faultless artifice.

HENRI PÈNE DU BOIS.

THE PROCURATOR OF JUDEA

L. Aelius Lamia, born in Italy of illustrious parents, had not yet quitted the gown when he went to study philosophy in the schools of Athens. He resided afterward at Rome, and led in his house, among young debauchees, a voluptuous life. But having been accused of entertaining criminal relations with Letida, wife of Sulpicius Quirinus, a consular personage, and having been convicted, he was exiled by Tiberius Caesar. He was then in his twenty-fourth year. For eighteen years that his exile lasted he travelled in Syria, Palestine, Cappadocia, and made long sojourns at Antioch, Caesarea, and Jerusalem. When, after the death of Tiberius, Caius was raised to the throne, Lamia obtained permission to come back to the city. He recovered even a part of his fortune. His misfortunes had made him wise. He made no attempt to obtain public offices, avoided honors, and lived in retirement in his house in the Esquilies. Putting into writing what he had seen in his travels, he made, he said, of his past sufferings the diversion of his present moments. It was in the midst of these peaceful labors and in the assiduous meditation of books of Epicure that, with some surprise and a little sorrow, he felt old age coming. In his sixty-second year, as he was tormented by a cold, he went to the waters of Baies. This shore, which was formerly dear to the Halcyons, was frequented at that time by the Romans who were rich and crazy for pleasure. Lamia had been living for a week alone and friendless in their brilliant crowd, when, one day after dinner, feeling well disposed, he thought of climbing the hills which, covered with vine leaves, like Bacchantes, contemplate the waves.

Having reached the summit, he sat by a path and let his eyes wander over the beautiful landscape. At his left were extended, livid and bare, the Phlegrean Fields to the ruins of Cumes. At his right Cape Misene imbedded its acute spur in the Tyrrhenian sea. Under his feet toward the west, the rich Baies, following the graceful curve of the shore, displayed its gardens, its villas peopled by statues, its porticoes, its marble terraces, by the side of the blue sea where the dolphins played. Before him, on the other side of the gulf, on the coast of Campania, gilded by the sun, shone the temples that the laurels of the Pausilippe crowned, and in the depths of the horizon the Vesuvius smiled.

Lamia took from a fold of his toga a roll containing the “Treatise on Nature,” lay on the grass, and began to read. But the cries of a slave warned him to rise in order to give passage to a litter which was ascending the narrow vine path. As the litter came near, Lamia saw, lying on the cushions, an old man of vast corpulence, who, with his hand on his forehead, looked around him with an eye that was sombre and proud. His aquiline nose fell on his lips, that a protruding chin and powerful jaws pressed.

At first Lamia was certain that he knew this face. He hesitated a moment before naming the man. Then suddenly, rushing to the litter in a movement of surprise and of joy, he exclaimed:

“Pontius Pilatus, the gods be praised! I have the favor to see you again.”

The old man, signalling to the slaves to stop, fixed an attentive look on the man who was saluting him.

“Pontius, my dear host,” Lamia said, “twenty years have whitened my hair and hollowed my cheeks so that you do not recognize Aelius Lamia.”

At this name, Pontius Pilatus came out of the litter as quickly as the fatigue of his age and the gravity of his demeanor permitted, and he embraced Aelius Lamia twice.

“Certainly it is fortunate to see you again,” he said. “Alas! you recall to me the ancient days when I was Procurator of Judea in the province of Syria. It is thirty years ago that I saw you for the first time. This was at Caesarea, where you came dragging the miseries of exile. I was happy enough to soften them a little, and in friendship, Lamia, you followed me to that sad Jerusalem, where the Jews filled my heart with bitterness and disgust. You remained my guest and my companion for more than ten years, and as we talked of the city we consoled ourselves, you for your misfortunes and I for my grandeur.”

Lamia embraced him again.

“You do not say everything, Pontius. You do not recall that you exercised your influence in my favor over Herod Antipas, and that you opened your purse to me liberally.”

“Do not talk of this,” replied Pontius, “since you sent to me by a messenger, as soon as you arrived in Rome, a sum of money which repaid me with usury.”

“Pontius, I do not think myself freed from debt to you because I have returned your money. But tell me: have the gods granted your desires? Do you enjoy all the happiness that you deserve? Speak to me of your family, of your fortune, of your health.”

“Retired in Sicily, where I own lands, I raise and sell wheat. My eldest daughter, my dear Pontia, who has become a widow, lives at my house and directs it. I have retained, the gods be praised, the vigor of my mind; my memory has not weakened. But old age does not come without a long cortège of pains and infirmities. I am cruelly tried by gout. And you see me at this moment seeking in the Phlegrean Fields a remedy for my ills. This burning earth, from which at night flames escape, exhales sulphur vapors which, people say, calm pain and give litheness to the joints of one’s limbs.”

“May you, Pontius, feel the good effects of them! But, in spite of the gout and of its burning power, you do not seem older than I, although you are my elder by ten years. You have preserved more vigor than I ever had, and I rejoice to find you so robust. Why have you renounced public office? Why have you lived in your domains of Sicily in voluntary exile? Tell me what you have done since the time when I ceased to be a witness of your achievements. You were preparing to repress a revolt of the Samaritans when I started for Cappadocia, where I expected to find profit in breeding horses and mules. I have not seen you since then. What was the result of your expedition? Tell me. Everything that concerns you interests me.”

Pontius shook his head sadly.

“A natural solicitude,” he said, “and a sentiment of duty impelled me to fulfil public functions not only with diligence but with love. However, hatred pursued me without truce. Intrigue and calumny have broken my life and dried the fruits which it should have ripened. You ask about the revolt of the Samaritans. Let us sit down here. I will reply to you in a few words. These events are as distinct to me as if they had occurred yesterday.

“A plebeian, powerful by his eloquence, one of many in Syria, persuaded the Samaritans to assemble in arms on Mount Gerizim, which is regarded in that country as a holy place, and promised to show to them the sacred vases which an Eponymous hero, or rather an indigenous god, named Moses, had hidden there in the ancient days of Evander and Aeneas, our father.

“On this assurance, the Samaritans revolt. But, warned in time to meet caused the mountain to be occupied by detachments of infantry, and guarded with cavaliers the roads that led to it.

“These prudential measures were urgent. Already the rebels besieged the burg of Tyrathaba, at the foot of Mount Gerizim. I dispersed them easily, and stifled the revolt when it was hardly formed. Then, to make a grand example with few victims, I subjected to torture the chiefs of the sedition. But you know, Lamia, in what strict dependency I was held by the Proconsul Vitellius, who, governing Syria, not for Rome, but against Rome, imagined that the provinces of the empire were to be given like farms to the Tetrarchs. The principal men among the Samaritans came and cried at his feet in hatred of me. According to them, nothing was further from their thoughts than disobedience to Caesar. I had provoked them, and it was to resist my violence that they had assembled around Tyrathaba. Vitellius listened to their complaints, and, entrusting the affairs of Judea to his friend Marcellus, he ordered me to go and justify myself before the Emperor. With a heart made heavy by sorrow and resentment, I took the sea. When I arrived near the coasts of Italy, Tiberius, worn out by age and sovereignty, died suddenly on the Cape Misene, whose horn may be seen from here extending itself in the mist of night. I demanded justice of Caius, his successor, whose mind was naturally active and who knew the affairs of Syria. But, admire with me, Lamia, the insults of fate determined to effect my perdition. Caius had near him then in the city the Jew Agrippa, his companion and the friend of his childhood, whom he cherished more than his eyes. Well, Agrippa favored Vitellius, because Vitellius was the enemy of Antipas, whom Agrippa pursued with his hatred. The Emperor acted in accordance with the sentiment of his dear Asiatic friend, and refused even to listen to me. I had to remain under the odium of an unmerited disgrace. Swallowing my tears and fed with gall, I retired to my lands in Sicily, where I should have died of sorrow if my sweet Pontia had not come to console her father. I have raised wheat and grown the fattest sheep in the province. To-day my life is done. The future will judge between Vitellius and me.”

“Pontius,” replied Lamia, “I am sure that you acted with the Samaritans in accordance with the righteousness of your mind and in the interests of Rome. But have you not yielded on this occasion to the impetuous courage which always carried you away? You know that in Judea, when, being younger than you, I should have been more ardent, it often happened that I advised softness and clemency to you.”

“Clemency toward the Jews!” exclaimed Pontius Pilatus. “Although you have lived among them, you do not know these enemies of the human race. At once proud and vile, uniting ignominious cowardice with invincible obstinacy, they wear out love and hate. My mind was formed, Lamia, on the maxims of the divine Augustus. Already, when f was appointed Procurator of Judea, the majesty of Roman peace enveloped the earth. One saw no longer, as in the time of our civil discords, proconsuls enriching themselves by pillaging of provinces. I knew my duty. I was attentive to make use of wisdom and moderation only. The gods are my witnesses. I was obstinate in softness only. Of what use to me were these benevolent thoughts? You saw me, Lamia, when, at the beginning of my government, the first revolt broke out. Is it necessary to recall to you its circumstances? The garrison-of Caesarea had gone to winter quarters at Jerusalem. The legionaries wore on their standards the images of Caesar. These offended the Hierosolymites, who did not acknowledge the divinity of the Emperor, as if, since one must obey, it is not more honorable to obey a god than a man. The priests of the nation came before my tribunal to pray, with haughty humility, that the standards might be taken out of the holy city. I refused, in respect for the divinity of Caesar and the majesty of the empire. Then the rabble, uniting with the priests, made threatening supplications. I ordered the soldiers to stack their pikes before the Antonia tower, and to go, armed with staves like lictors, and disperse this insolent crowd. But, insensible to blows, the Jews still adjured me, and the most obstinate let themselves die under the whip. You were then a witness of my humiliation, Lamia. On the order of Vitellius, I had to return the standards to Caesarea. Surely this shame was not due to me. In the face of the immortal gods, I swear that I have not offended once justice and the laws. But I am old. My enemies are dead. I will die unavenged. Who shall defend my memory?”

He sighed and hushed. Lamia replied:

“It is wise to put neither fear nor hope in the uncertain future. What does it matter what men will think of us? We have no other witnesses and no other judges than ourselves. Be confident, Pontius Pilatus, in the testimony which you render to your own virtue. Be content with your own esteem and that of your friends. Nations are not governed by softness alone. That charity which philosophy counsels has little share in the actions of public men.”

“Let us drop the subject,” said Pontius. “The sulphur vapors which the Phlegrean Fields exhale have more power when they come out of the earth still heated by the rays of the sun. I must hasten. Good-by. But since I have found a friend, I wish to profit by this good fortune. Aelius Lamia, do me the favor to come and take supper with me to-morrow. My house is on the seashore, at the end of the city, near Misene. You will know it easily by the portico, where is painted Orpheus among the tigers and the lions, which he is charming by the sound of his lyre.

“Until to-morrow, Lamia,” he said, returning to his litter. “To-morrow we shall talk of Judea.”

The next day Lamia went at the supper hour to the house of Pontius Pilatus. Two beds only were waiting for the guests. Served without ostentation, but honorably, the table bore silver dishes wherein were prepared oysters of Lucrena and lampreys of Sicily. Pontius and Lamia, while eating, questioned each other on their maladies, the symptoms of which they described at length, and told each other the remedies which had been recommended to them. Then, congratulating each other on being reunited at Baies, they praised the beauty of the shore and the softness of the air. Lamia celebrated the grace of the courtesans who walked on the beach, loaded with gold, and dragging veils embroidered by the barbarians. But the old Procurator deplored an ostentation which, for vain stones and cobwebs woven by hand, made the money of Rome pass into foreign nations and even among the enemies of the empire. Then they talked of the great works accomplished in the country, of the prodigious bridge built by Caius between Puteoles and Baies, and of the canals dug by Augustus in order that the waters of the sea should fall into the lakes of Averne and Lucrine.

“I, too,” said Pontius, sighing, “have tried to undertake great works of public utility. When I received for my misfortune the government of Judea, I drew ‘the plan of an aqueduct two hundred stades in length, which should bring abundant and pure water to Jerusalem. I had studied everything and resolved everything. I prepared regulations in order that no individual might make illicit seizures. Architects and laborers were ordered. I directed that the work should be begun. But, far from seeing with satisfaction the making of this viaduct, which, on powerful arches, was to bring health with water in their city, the Hierosolymites uttered lamentable howls. Assembled in tumult, crying sacrilege and impiety, they rushed at the workmen and dispersed the foundation stones. Do you conceive, Lamia, of barbarians more disgusting? Vitellius, however, said that they were right, and I received the order to stop the work.”

“It is a mooted question,” said Lamia, “whether one should make the happiness of men in spite of themselves.”

Pontius Pilatus continued without listening to him:

“What folly to decline an aqueduct! But all that comes from the Romans is odious to the Jews. We are impure beings in their view, and our presence is a profanation to them. You know that they did not dare enter the Praetorium for fear of defiling themselves, and that I had to exercise the public magistracy in an outdoor tribunal, on that marble pavement where your feet rested so often.

“They fear us and they disdain us. Nevertheless, is not Rome the mother and the tutor of nations, which all, like children, rest and smile on her venerable breast? Our eagles have carried unto the limits of the universe peace and liberty. Seeing only friends in the vanquished we leave, we assure unto the conquered nations their customs and their laws. It is only since Pompey subjected it that Syria, formerly torn by a multitude of kings, has begun to enjoy rest and prosperous hours. And when Rome could sell its benefactions for gold, did it carry away the treasures with which the barbarian temples are crowded? Did it despoil the goddess Mother at Pessinonte, Jupiter in Morimeme and in Cilicia, the god of the Jews at Jerusalem? Antioch, Palmyra, Apamea, peaceful in spite of their riches, and fearing no longer the Arabs of the desert, raise temples to the genius of Rome and to the divinity of Caesar. The Jews alone hate and brave us. Tribute has to be drawn from them by force, and they refuse obstinately to do military service.”

“The Jews,” Lamia replied, “are much attached to their antique customs. They suspected you, without reason, of wishing to abolish their laws and to change their, manners. Let me tell you, Pontius, that you did always not always act in a manner to dissipate their unfortunate error. You found pleasure, in spite of yourself, in exciting their anxiety, and I have seen you more than once betray in their presence your contempt for their beliefs and their religious ceremonies, You vexed them particularly when you made legionaries guard in the Antonia tower the cloaks and sacerdotal ornaments of the high priests. It must be acknowledged that without having raised themselves like us into the contemplation of divine things, the Jews celebrate mysteries which their antiquity makes venerable.”

Pontius Pilatus shrugged his shoulders.

“They have not,” he said, “an exact knowledge of the nature of the gods. They adore Jupiter, but without giving him a name or a figure. They do not venerate him even in the form of a stone, as do certain nations of Asia. They know nothing of Apollo, of Neptune, of Mars, of Pluto, nor of any goddess. However, I believe that they adored Venus in ancient times. For women to-day still present at the altar doves as victims, and you know, as I do, that merchants established under the porches of the temple sell pairs of these birds for the sacrifice. I was even told one day that a man in fury drove out with, their cages these dealers in offerings. The priests complained of .them, as a sacrilege. I think that this fashion of sacrificing doves was established in honor of Venus. Why do you laugh, Lamia?”

“I laugh,” said Lamia, “at an odd idea which has gone through my head. I was thinking that some day the Jupiter of the Jews might come to Rome and pursue you with his hatred. Why not? Asia and Africa have given to us already a great number of gods. Rome has raised temples in honor of Isis and of the barking Anubis. We meet in the suburbs the good goddess of the Syrians mounted on an ass. And do you not know that under the government of Tiberius a young knight made himself pass for the horned Jupiter of the Egyptians, and obtained under this disguise the favors of an illustrious lady who was too virtuous to refuse anything to the gods? Be fearful, Pontius, lest the invisible Jupiter of the Jews disembark some day at Ostia!”

At the thought that a god might come from Judea a quick smile illuminated the severe visage of the Procurator. Then he replied, gravely:

“How could the Jews impose their holy law on other nations when they are at war among themselves for the interpretation of that law? Divided into twenty rival sects, you have seen them, Lamia, in public places, with their rolls in their hands, injuring one another and pulling their beards. You have seen them on the stylobate of the temple tear, as a sign of desolation, their dirty gowns around some wretch who was a prey to prophetic delirium. They cannot conceive that one may dispute quietly, with a serene mind, on divine things which are, however, veiled and full of uncertainty. For the nature of the immortals remains hidden to us and we cannot know it. Still, I think that it is wise to believe in the providence of the gods. But the Jews have no philosophy, and they cannot endure diversity in opinions. On the contrary, they esteem worthy of the last torture those who profess on divinity sentiments contrary to their law. And as, since the genius of Rome is on them, the capital sentences pronounced by their tribunals may be executed only through the sanction of the Proconsul or of the Procurator, they are constantly pressing the Roman magistrate to subscribe to their terrible verdicts; they fill the Praetorium with their death cries. I have seen them a hundred times, in crowds, rich and poor, all reconciliated. around their priests, besiege like madmen my ivory chair, and pull my toga and the strings of my sandals in order to reclaim, to exact from me, the death of some wretch whose crime I could not discern, and whom I judged to be only as crazy as his accusers. A hundred times! Why, this happened every day, every hour. And yet had I to execute their laws like ours, since Rome made me not the destructor but the supporter of their customs, and since I was over them the whip and the axe. At first I tried to-make them listen to reason; I tried to take their victims from them. But this softness irritated them; they claimed their prey, beating their wings and their bills around me like vultures. Their priests wrote to Caesar that I violated their law, and their supplications, supported by Vitellius, drew blame on me. How often have I desired to send together, as the Greeks say, to the crows, the accused and the judges!

“Do not think, Lamia, that I am nurturing powerless rancor and senile anger against this nation, which vanquished in me Rome and peace. But I foresee the extremity where they will reduce us sooner or later. Unable to govern them, we shall have to destroy them. Have no doubt of it: always unsubjected, feeding revolt in their overheated mind, they will make explode against us some day a fury in comparison with which the anger of the Numides and the threats of the Parthians are only caprices of children. They are feeding in the shade insensate hopes, and foolishly meditating our ruin. Can it be otherwise as long as they wait on the faith of some oracle for the prince of their blood who is to reign over the world? It is impossible to do anything with that nation. It is necessary that it should be destroyed. Jerusalem must be laid into ruins. Perhaps, old as I am, the favor will be granted to me of seeing the day when its walls shall fall, when the flame shall devour its houses, when its inhabitants shall be killed, and when salt shall be sown on the place where the temple was. On that day I shall be justified at last.”

Lamia tried to soften the tone of the interview.

“Pontius,” he said, “I appreciate your old resentment and your sinister presentiment. Certainly, what you have known of the temper of the Jews is not to their advantage. But I, who lived in Jerusalem as a gadabout, and who went among the people, have discovered among these men obscure virtues which were hidden to you. I have known Jews full of sweetness, whose simple manners and faithful hearts reminded me of what our poets have said concerning the old man of Ebalia. And yourself, Pontius, have seen expire under the rod of the legionaries simple-minded men who, without telling their names, died for a cause which they believed was just. Such men do not deserve our contempt. I speak thus because it is well to preserve in all things measure and equity. But I confess that I have never felt much sympathy for the Jews. The Jewesses, on the contrary, pleased me much. I was young then, and the Syrian women impressed me a great deal. Their red lips, their humid eyes, and their long looks affected me profoundly. Made up and painted, smelling of myrrh and aromatic plants, their flesh had a rare and delicious savor.”

Pontius heard this praise with impatience.

“I was not the man to fall into the nets of the Jewesses,” he said, “and since you lead me to say it to you, Lamia, I have never approved your incontinence. If I have not told you that I condemned your guilt at Rome, the reason was that formerly you were suffering for your fault. Marriage is a sacred thing among patricians; it is an institution which supports Rome. As for slaves and foreign women, the relations which one may have with them would be of little consequence if they did not accustom one to shameful indolence. Lamia, I blame you for not having married in accordance with the law, and for not having given children to the republic, as every good citizen should do.”

But the exile of Tiberius listened no longer to the old magistrate. Having emptied his cup, he smiled at some invisible image.

After a moment of silence he said in a low voice, which rose little by little:

“They dance with so much languor, the women of Syria! I knew a Jewess of Jerusalem who, in a den, in the light of a small, smoky lamp, on an old carpet, danced while raising her arms to strike her cymbals. Her waist curved, her head thrown back, and as if carried away by the weight of her heavy red hair, her eyes bathed in voluptuousness, ardent and supple, she would have made Cleopatra grow pale with envy. I liked her barbarous dances, her song, which was harsh and a. yet soft, the half somnolence in which she seemed to live. I followed her everywhere. I went into the vile company of soldiers and publicans that surrounded her. She disappeared one day, and I never saw her again. I sought for her in all the suspicious alleys and taverns. It was more difficult to get out of the habit of seeing her than of drinking Greek wine. Some months after I had lost sight of her I learned by chance that she had joined a small band of men and women which was following a young Galilean seer. He was named Jesus; he came from Nazareth, and he was crucified for I know not what crime. Pontius, do you remember that man?”

Pontius Pilatus frowned and carried his hand to his forehead, as does one who is seeking for something in his memory. Then, after some moments of silence:

“Jesus?” he murmured, “Jesus, of Nazareth? I do not recall him.”

AMYCUS AND CELESTIN

Prone at the threshold of his wild grotto, Celestin, the hermit, passed in prayer the vigils of Easter, that angelic night during which the trembling demons are precipitated into the abyss. And while shadows covered the earth, at the hour when the Destroying Angel had soared over Egypt, Celestin shivered with anguish and anxiety. He heard in the forest the wails of the wildcats and the fluted voice of the toads; plunged into impure darkness, he doubted that the glorious mystery might be accomplished. But when he saw the beginning of day, joy with the dawn entered into his heart; he knew that Christ had risen, and he exclaimed:

“Jesus has come out of the tomb; love has vanquished death; alleluia! He rises radiant from the foot of the hill; alleluia! Creation is made over and repaired. Darkness and evil are dissipated; grace and light fall on the world. Alleluia!”

A lark awoke in the wheat, and replied to him, singing:

“He has risen! I dreamed of nests and of eggs, of white eggs dotted with brown. Alleluia! He has risen!”

And Celestin, the hermit, came out of his grotto to solemnize at the chapel the holy day of Easter.

As he traversed the forest he saw in a clearing a beautiful tree, the swollen buds of which already permitted small leaves of tender green to appear; ivy garlands and woollen ribands were hanging on the branches that touched the earth; votive tablets attached to the knotty trunk talked of youth and love, and here and there a clay Eros, with open wings and flying tunic, swung on twigs. At the spectacle Celestin, the hermit, made his white eyebrows frown.

“It is the tree of the fairies,” he said to himself, “and the girls of the land have loaded it with offerings, in accordance with antique custom. My life is spent in struggling against the fairies, and one cannot imagine the trouble that these little persons give me. They do not resist openly. Every year, at harvest time, I exorcise the tree, in accordance with the rites, and I sing to them the Gospel of Saint John.

“One could do nothing better; holy water and the Gospel of Saint John put them to flight, and one hears nothing more of these ladies all winter, but they come back in the spring, and I have to begin the work over every year.

“They are subtle; a bush is enough to give shelter to a swarm of them. And they throw charms on the young men and on the young girls.

“Since I have grown old my sight is weak and I hardly perceive them. They mock me, pass under my nose, and laugh at my beard. But when I was twenty years old I could see them in the clearings, dancing round dances in flowered hats under a ray of the moon. Lord God, who made the sky and the dew, be praised in your works. But why did you make pagan trees and fairy fountains? Why did you put under the hazel-tree the mandrake that moans? These natural things induce youth into sin, and cause fatigues without number to the anchorites who, like me, have undertaken to sanctify creatures. If, at least, the Gospel of Saint John sufficed to expel the demons! But it does not suffice, and I do not know what to do.”

And as the good hermit went away, sighing, the tree which was a fairy said to him in a fresh murmur:

“Celestin, Celestin, my buds are eggs, real Easter eggs! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Celestin went into the woods without turning his head. He was advancing painfully, through a narrow path, among the thorns that tore his gown, when, suddenly leaping out of a thicket, a young man blocked his way. The young man was half-clothed in the skin of some beast, and he was more a faun than a boy; his look was piercing, his nose flat, his face laughing. His hair, in curls, hid the two small horns on his stubborn forehead; his lips revealed teeth sharp and white; there were blond hairs in two points at his chin. A golden fuzz shone at his breast. He was agile and light; his forked feet hid themselves in the grass.

Celestin, who possessed all the learning that meditation gives, saw at once with whom he had to deal, and raised his arm to make the sign of the cross. But the faun caught his hand and prevented him from finishing this powerful gesture.

“Good hermit,” he said, “do not exorcise me. This day is for me, as for you, a day of festival. It would not be charitable of you to sadden me in the paschal time. If you wish, we shall walk together, and you will see that I am not wicked.”

Celestin was, happily, well versed in sacred things. He remembered that Saint Jerome had as companions in the desert satyrs and centaurs who confessed the truth.

He said to the faun:

“Faun, be a hymn of God. Say that He has risen.”

“He has risen,” replied the faun, “and I rejoice at it.”

The path becoming wider, they walked side by side. The hermit was pensive, and thought:

“He is not a demon, since he has confessed the truth. I did well not to make him sad. The great Saint Jerome’s example was not lost for me.”

And turning to his capripede companion, he asked:

“What is your name?”

“My name is Amycus,” replied the faun. “I live in these woods, where I was born. I came to you, father, because you have the air of a good man under your long white beard. It seems to me that hermits are fauns that the years have bent. When I shall be old I will be similar to you.”

“He is risen,” the hermit said.

“He is risen,” said Amycus.

And, thus talking to each other, they went up the hill, where rose a chapel consecrated to the true God. It was small and coarse in structure. Celestin had built it with the ruins of a temple of Venus. In the interior the Lord’s table appeared, formless and bare.

“Let us kneel,” said the hermit, “and sing alleluia, for He is risen. And you, obscure being, remain on your knees while I offer the sacrifice.”

But the faun came near the hermit, caressed his beard, and said:

“You are more learned than I am, and you see the invisible. But I know better than you the woods and fountains. I will bring leaves and flowers to the God. I divine by its light odor the wild apple blossom, I know where the lilac grapes are, and the fields where the yellow cuckoo blooms. Already a snow of flowers crowns the blackthorn bushes. Wait for me.”

In three leaps he had reached the woods, and, when he came back, he impressed Celestin like a walking bush. Amycus disappeared under his perfumed harvest. He decked with garlands the rustic altar; he covered it with violets, and said, gravely:

“These flowers to the God who makes them grow!”

And, while Celestin celebrated the sacrifice of the mass, the capripede struck the earth with his horned forehead, adored the sun, and said:

“The earth is an egg that you make fecund, oh Sun, sacred Sun!”

Since that day, Celestin and Amycus lived in company. The hermit did not succeed, despite all his efforts, to make the half-man understand the ineffable mysteries; but, as the chapel of the true God was always ornamented, by Amycus’s care, with garlands, and made more flowery than the tree of the fairies, the saintly priest said, “The faun is a hymn of God.”

That is why Celestin baptized Amycus.

On the hill where Celestin had built the narrow chapel which Amycus ornamented with flowers of the mountains, woods, and waters, rises to-day a church the nave of which dates from the Eleventh Century, and the porch of which was rebuilt in the time of Henri II., in the style of the Renaissance. It is a place of pilgrimage, and the faithful venerate there the happy memory of Saints Amic and Celestin.

LEGEND OF SAINTS OLIVERIE AND LIBERETTE

I.

The forest of the Ardennes extended at that time to the river Aisne, and covered the Porcin country where the city of Bethel stands to-day. Innumerable boars lived in it; tall deer, the race of which is lost, assembled in the impenetrable thickets, and wolves, the strength of which was prodigious, appeared in winter at the edge of the woods. The basilisk and the unicorn had their place of retreat in this forest, as had also a frightful dragon, who was destroyed later by the grace of God at the prayer of a holy hermit. Because mystic nature was then revealed to men, and invisible things became visible for the glory of the Creator, one met in the clearings nymphs, satyrs, and centaurs.

And it is not doubtful that these wicked beings have been seen exactly as they are described in the fables of the pagans. But one has to know that they are devils, as appears from their foot, which is cloven. Unfortunately, it is not so easy to recognize the fairies; they resemble ladies, and often this resemblance is so great that one must be as prudent as a hermit not to be deceived by them. The fairies also are demons, and there were many of them in the forest of the Ardennes. That is why this forest was full of mystery and of horror.

The Romans, in the time of Caesar, had consecrated the forest to Diana, and the inhabitants of the Porcin land adored, on the banks of the Aisne, an idol which had the form of a woman. They offered cake, milk, and honey to her, and they sang hymns to her. Well, Berthauld, son of Theodulus, King of Scotland, having received holy baptism, lived in the palace of his father, less like a prince than as a hermit. Retired in his room, he spent all the day reciting prayers and meditating on the Holy Scriptures, and he was burning with desire to imitate the labors of the apostles. Having learned, in some miraculous way, the abominations of the Porcin land, he detested them and resolved to make them cease.

He traversed the sea in a bark, without sail or rudder, led by a swan. Happily arrived in the Porcin land, he went to the villages, the burgs, and the castles, announcing the good news.

“The God whom I teach,” he said, “is the only real one. He is one in three persons, and his Son was born of a virgin.”

But these coarse men replied to him:

“Young stranger, it is very simple-minded on your part to believe that there is only one, god; for the gods are innumerable. They live in the woods, the mountains, and the rivers. There are also gods more friendly, who sit at the hearth of pious men; others, in fine, live in the stables, and the race of the gods fills the universe. But what you say of a divine virgin is not without truth. We know a virgin with a triple face, and we sing songs to her, and we say to her, ‘Salve, sweet; salve, terrible.’ Her name is Diana, and her silver foot hardly touches, under the pale clearness of the moon, the thyme on the mountains. She has not disdained to receive in her bed of flowered hyacinth shepherds and hunters like us, but she is a virgin.”

Thus spoke these ignorant men, and they expelled the apostle from the village, and they pursued him with words of mockery.

II.

One day that he was walking, tired and sorrowful, he met two young girls, who were coming out of their castle and going to the wood. Having advanced a few steps toward them, he kept at a distance for fear of frightening them, and he said:

“Maidens, listen to me. I am Berthauld, son of Theodulus, King of Scotland. But I have disdained perishable crowns in order to become worthy of receiving from the angels the eternal crown. And I have come in a bark, led by a swan, to carry the good news to you.”

“Sire Berthauld,” replied the elder, “my name is Oliverie, and my sister’s name is Liberette. Our father, Thierry, is the richest lord in the country. We would willingly listen to your good words. But you seem tired. We advise you to wait for us at our father’s. He will doubtless give you a place at his table when he will hear that you are a prince of Scotland. Good-by, Sire Berthauld, we are going, my sister and I, to pick flowers for Diana.”

But the apostle Berthauld replied: “I will not sit at the table of a pagan. That Diana, whom you imagine is a virgin of heaven, is in reality a demon of hell. The true God is one in three persons, and Jesus Christ, his Son, was made man and died on the cross for the salvation of men. And verily, I say unto you, Oliverie and Liberette, a drop of his blood was shed for each one of you.”

And he spoke to them with so much warmth of the holy mysteries that the hearts of the two sisters were moved. The elder said:

“Sire Berthauld, you reveal unheard-of mysteries. But it is not easy always to distinguish truth from error. It would be painful to us to quit loving Diana. However, make a sign of the truth appear to us and we shall believe in Jesus crucified.”

But the younger said to the apostle:

“My sister Oliverie asks for a sign because she is prudent and full of wisdom. But if your God is the true one, Sire Berthauld, may I know him and love him without being compelled by a sign!”

The man of God knew at these words that Liberette was born to become a great saint. That is why he replied:

“Sister Liberette and Sister Oliverie, I am determined to retire into this forest and to lead there the heremitic life, which is beautiful and single. I will live in a hut made of branches and will feed on roots. Unceasingly I shall ask of God to change the hearts of the men of this country, and I will bless the fountains in order that the fairies may not come to them for the damnation of sinners. My sister Oliverie will receive the sign for which she has asked, and a guide, sent by the Lord, will lead you to my hermitage, in order that I may instruct you in the faith of Jesus Christ.”

Having spoken thus, Saint Berthauld blessed the two sisters by touching them with his hands. Then he went into the forest, never to come out of it again.

III.

Well, one day that, alone in the kitchen, Oliverie was weaving wool under the mantelpiece, she saw coming to her a beast, all white, which had the body of a goat and the head of a horse, and which wore on its forehead a sparkling sword. Oliverie knew at once what animal it was, and, as she had retained her innocence, she was not frightened by it, knowing that the unicorn never does any harm to misses who are wise. The unicorn placed its head softly on Oliverie’s knees. Then, returning toward the door, it invited the young girl to follow.

Oliverie called her sister at once; but, when Liberette entered the room, the unicorn had disappeared, and thus Liberette, in accordance with her desire, knew the true God without having been constrained to this by a sign.

They went together to the forest, and the unicorn, become visible again, walked in front of them. They followed the path of the ferocious beast, and it happened that when they were far in the woods they saw the beast swim through a torrent. And when they reached its bank, they saw that the torrent was large and deep. They bent over it to see if there were not stones on which they could step, and found none. But while, leaning on a willow, they were contemplating the foamy water, the willow suddenly inclined itself and bore them to the other side.

Thus they reached the hermitage of Saint Berthauld, and he made them listen to words of life. At their return, the willow straightened itself and carried them to the other shore.

Every day they went near the holy man, and when they returned home found that invisible hands had woven all the flax of their loom. This is why, having received baptism, they believed in Jesus Christ.

They had received for more than a year the lessons of Saint Berthauld, when Thierry, their father, was attacked by a cruel malady. Knowing that the end of their father was near, his daughters instructed him in the Christian faith. He learned the truth. This is why his death was full of merit. He was buried near his mortal residence, in a place called the Giant’s Mountain, and his sepulchre was venerated in after years in the Porcin land.

Meanwhile the two sisters went every day to the holy hermit Berthauld, and gathered from his lips the words of life. But one day when the melting snow had overflowed the rivers, Oliverie, while going through the vines, took a ladder in order to cross more surely the torrent, whose waters rolled with fury.

Liberette, disdaining all human help, refused to follow her example. She went near the torrent with hands armed with nothing other than the sign of the cross. And the willow inclined itself as was its habit. Then it straightened itself, and when Oliverie tried to pass in her turn it remained straight. And the current broke the ladder like straw and carried it away. And Oliverie remained on the shore. As she was wise, she understood that she had been justly punished for having doubted celestial power and for not having continued on her path by the grace of God as her sister Liberette had done. She thought of nothing but deserving her forgiveness by labor, penitence, and asceticism. Determined to lead, after the example of Saint Berthauld, the heremitic life, which is beautiful and singular, she remained in the forest and built for herself a hut of branches in a place where a spring has since sprung out, and which has been named “Saint Olive’s Spring.”

IV.

Liberette having gone alone near the beatific Berthauld, found him dead, in the attitude of contemplation. His body, extenuated by fasting, exhaled a delicious odor. She buried it with her hands. From this day Liberette, the virgin, renouncing the world, led the heremitic life in a hut by the side of a spring which has since been called the Saint Liberette, or Liberia Fountain, and the miraculous waters of which cure fever as well as various maladies of animals.

The two sisters never saw each other again in this world. By the intercession of the beatific Berthauld, God sent from the land of the Lombards to the Ardennes the deacon Vulfai, or Valfroy, who overturned the idol of Diana and converted to Christian faith the inhabitants of the Porcin land. This is why Oliverie and Liberette were overwhelmed with joy.

A short time after this the Lord recalled to him his servant Liberette, and he sent the unicorn to dig a grave wherein the body of the saint might be buried. Oliverie learned by revelation the fortunate death of her sister Liberette, and a voice said to her:

“Because you asked for a sign in order to have faith, the hour of your fortunate death shall be retarded, and the day of your glorification shall be postponed.” And Oliverie replied to the voice:

“Let the Lord’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

She lived for ten years waiting for eternal felicity, which began for her October 9th, in the year of our Lord 364.

SAINT EUPHROSINE

Euphrosine was the only daughter of a rich Alexandrian citizen, named Romulus, who took care that she should be instructed in music, dancing, and arithmetic, so that when she went out of childhood she displayed a mind subtle and curiously ornamented. She had not yet achieved her eleventh year when the magistrates of Alexandria posted in the streets the announcement that a golden cup would be given as a premium to the one who found an exact answer to the three following questions:

“First Question: I am the black child of a luminous father; a bird without wings I rise to the clouds. I cause tears to come to the eyes that I meet, without sorrow. Although hardly born, I vanish in the air. Friend, say what my name is.

“Second Question: I give birth to my mother and she gives birth to me, and at times I am longer and at times shorter. Friend, say what my name is.

“Third Question: Antipater owns what Nicomede owns and a third of Themistius’s share. Nicomede owns what Themistius owns and a third of what Antipater owns. Themistius has ten mines and a third of Nicomede’s share. How much belongs to each one?”

On the day fixed for the competition several young men presented themselves before the judges in the hope of winning the golden cup, but none answered correctly. The president was about to close the session, when Euphrosine, coming near the tribunal, asked that she should be heard. Everybody admired the modesty of her demeanor and the amiable blush that colored her cheeks.

“Illustrious judges,” she said, lowering her eyes, “after rendering homage to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, principal and end of all knowledge, I will try to reply to the questions which Your Lights have propounded, and I will begin with the first. The black child is smoke, which is born of fire, rises in the air, and brings tears to one’s eyes. So much for the first question.

“I will answer the second question. The one who engenders his mother and is engendered by her is none other than the day, which is at times long and at times short, according to the seasons. So much for the second question.

“I will reply to the third question. Antipater has forty-five mines; Nicomede has thirty-seven and one-half; Themistius, twenty-two and one-half. So much for the third question.”

The judges, admiring the correctness of these answers, gave the premium to Euphrosine. In consequence, the oldest judge rose, presented the golden cup to her, and placed a crown of papyrus on her forehead in order to honor in her the subtleness of her mind, and the maiden was escorted to the house of her father with an accompaniment of flutes.

But, as she was a Christian of uncommon piety, far from priding herself on these honors, she realized the vanity of them, and promised to apply in the future the penetration of her intelligence to the solution of problems more worthy of interest, as, for example, to calculate the sum of the numbers represented by the letters of the name of Jesus and to consider the marvellous properties of these numbers.

Meanwhile she increased in wisdom and in beauty, and was sought in marriage by many young men. One of them was Count Longin, who possessed great riches. Romulus received this pretender with favor, hoping that an alliance with this man might aid him in re-establishing his own fortunes, which he had disarranged by the luxury of his palace, of his plate, and of his gardens. Romulus, who was one of the most magnificent among the inhabitants of Alexandria, had spent enormous sums in order to gather in his house, under a vast cupola, the most admirable machines, such as a sphere, which was as brilliant as a sapphire, with the constellations of the sky correctly represented in precious stones. He had also a Hero-fountain, which sent out perfumed water, and two mirrors made so artistically that they changed whoever looked at himself in them, one into a short person and the other into a tall person. But what was most marvellous in this house was a bush covered with birds that, through some ingenious mechanism, sang as if they were alive. Romulus had spent the rest of his fortune to acquire these machines, which he liked. That is why he received with favor Count Longin, who possessed great riches. Romulus pressed with all his might the conclusion of a marriage from which he expected the happiness of his daughter and the repose of his old age. But every time that he vaunted to Euphrosine the merits of Count Longin she turned away her eyes and made no reply. He said to her one day:

“Do you not concede, my daughter, that he is the handsomest, the richest, and the noblest of Alexandria’s citizens?”

The wise Euphrosine replied:

“I concede willingly, my father, and I believe, in fact, that Count Longin surpasses in nobility, in opulence, and in beauty all the citizens of Alexandria. That is why, if I refuse to take him for a husband, there is little probability that another may make me change my resolution, which is to consecrate my virginity to Jesus Christ.”

At this Romulus fell into great anger, and swore that he would compel Euphrosine to marry Count Longin. Without vain threats, he said that this marriage, being decided in his heart, should be accomplished without delay, and that, if paternal authority was not sufficient, he would add to it that of the Emperor, whose Divinity would not suffer that a daughter should disobey her father in a matter which, like the marriage of a patrician, interested the public and the state.

Euphrosine knew that her father had great credit with the Emperor, whose Divinity inhabited Constantinople. She realized that in her peril she could expect aid from none except Count Longin himself. This is why she sent for him, asking him to meet her in secret in the basilica.

Moved by hope and curiosity, Count Longin went to the basilica, all covered with gold and precious stones. The maiden did not make him wait. But when he saw her appear with hair undone and wearing a black veil, the augury seemed bad to him, and his heart was irritated.

Euphrosine was the first to talk.

“Carissima Longin,” she said, “if you love me as much as you say you do, you will fear to displease me, and it would be, in fact, mortal displeasure to me to be led into your house and to be made to yield to you my body, which I have given, with my soul, to our Lord Jesus Christ, principal and end of all love.”

But Count Longin replied to her:

“Carissima Euphrosine, love is stronger than will; this is why love must be obeyed like a master. I will do what he ordains, which is to take you for my wife.”

“Does it become a man, even if he be illustrious, to take the Lord’s betrothed?”

“I will learn this from the bishops, not from you.”

The young girl was vividly alarmed; she realized that she could expect no pity from this violent man, governed by his senses, and that the bishops could not recognize the secret vows which she had made before God alone, and, in the excess of her anxiety, she had recourse to an artifice so singular that it must be considered more admirable than exemplary.

Her resolution having been taken, she feigned to yield to the will of her father and to the assiduity of her lover. She even permitted that the day for the ceremony of betrothal should be appointed. Count Longin was already placing in the coffers the jewels destined for the bride; he had ordered twelve gowns, on which were embroidered the scenes of the Old and New Testament, the fables of the Greeks, the history of animals, as well as the Divinities of the Emperor and Empress, with their train of officers and ladies. And one of these coffers contained books of theology and arithmetic, written in letters of gold on leaves of parchment dyed with purple, protected by plaques of ivory and gold.

But Euphrosine kept herself in her room. And she gave as a reason for her retirement that she was preparing her wedding gowns.

“It would not be proper,” she said, “that certain gowns should be cut and sewn by other hands than mine.”

And, in fact, she used her needle from morning till night. But what she was thus preparing in secret was not the virginal veil nor the white gown of the betrothed. It was the coarse hood, the short tunic, and the trousers which the young artisans of cities wear at their work. And she accomplished this work, while invoking Jesus Christ, principal and end of all the undertakings of the just, on the eighth day before the one which had been appointed for the solemnity of her marriage. She prayed all that day; then, having gone to receive, as was her custom, the kiss of her father, she returned to her room, cut her hair, which fell at her feet like golden floss, put on the short tunic and the trousers, drew the hood over her eyes, and went noiselessly out of the house while master and servants were asleep. Alone the dog watched; but as he knew her he followed her for a time in silence and returned to his kennel.

She traversed with rapid steps the deserted city, where one heard at intervals only the cries of drunken sailors and the heavy step of soldiers running after thieves. Because God was with her she was not insulted by men. And, having passed through one of the gates of Alexandria, she went toward the desert, following the canals covered by papyrus and blue lotos. At dawn she passed through a poor village occupied by laborers. An old man was singing before his door while polishing a sycamore coffin. When she was near him he raised his face and exclaimed:

“By Jupiter! Here is the child Eros carrying a pot of unguent to his mother. How tender and beautiful he is! Those who say that the gods have gone have lied, for this young man is truly a little god.”

And the wise Euphrosine, realizing from these words that this old man was a pagan, took pity on his ignorance and prayed God for his salvation. This prayer was answered. The old man, who was a coffin-maker, named Porou, was converted later and took the name of Philotheus.

After a day of marching Euphrosine reached a monastery where six hundred monks observed, under the direction of Abbé Onuphre, the admirable rule of Saint Pacomius. She asked to be taken to Onuphre, and she said to him:

“Father, my name is Smaragde, and I am an orphan. I pray you to receive me in your holy house in order that I may enjoy in it the delights of fasting and penitence.”

Abbé Onuphre, who was then one hundred and six years old, replied:

“Smaragde, your feet are beautiful, since they have led you into this house; your hands are beautiful, since they have knocked at this door. You are hungry and thirsty for fasting and abstinence. Come, and you shall be satiated. Happy is the child who flies from the century in his gown of innocence! The souls of men are exposed to great peril in cities, and particularly in Alexandria, because of women, who are there in great number. Woman is such a danger for man that the thought of her gives to me at my age a shiver which makes my flesh tremble. If there were one saucy enough to enter this saintly house, my arm would suddenly regain its vigor to expel her with blows from my pastoral cross. We must adore God, my son, in all his works; but it is a great mystery of His providence that he should have created woman. Remain here, Smaragde, for it was God who directed you.”

Having been welcomed in this manner among the children of Onuphre, Euphrosine took the monastic habit.

In her cell she praised the Lord and rejoiced at her pious fraud, considering that her father and her betrothed would not fail to seek for her in all the monasteries of women in order to take her by the Emperor’s command, and that they would never discover her in this asylum, where Jesus Christ himself had lovingly hidden her.

For three years she led in her cell the most edifying life, and the virtues of the child perfumed the monastery. This is why the Abbé Onuphre intrusted her with the functions of doorkeeper, relying on the wisdom of the young monk to receive strangers, and especially to repulse women who might try to enter the monastery. For, the saintly man said, woman is impure, and the mere trace of her steps is defiling.

Smaragde had been doorkeeper for five years, when a stranger knocked at the door of the monastery. He was a young man, splendid in his clothes, and wearing an air of pride, but pale, extremely thin, and with eye inflamed by melancholy fury.

“Friar Doorkeeper,” said this man, “direct me to the Saint Abbé Onuphre, so that he may cure me, for I am the prey of a mortal ill.”

Smaragde haying asked the stranger to take a seat, told him that Onuphre, who had reached his one hundred and fourteenth year, had gone to visit, in view of his coming end, the grottos of the holy anchorites Amon and Orcise.

At this news the visitor let his head fall in his hands.

“I cannot then expect to be cured,” he murmured.

And, raising his head, he added:

“It is love for a woman which has reduced me to this wretched condition.”

Then only Euphrosine recognized Count Longin. She feared that he might recognize her, but she was soon reassured, and was full of pity at seeing him so sad.

After a long silence Count Longin exclaimed:

“I wish to become a monk in order to escape my despair.”

And he related his love and how his betrothed Euphrosine had suddenly disappeared, and that he was seeking for her for eight years and could not find her, and that he was burned and dried up by love and sorrow.

She replied with celestial sweetness:

“My lord, this Euphrosine whose loss you deplore so bitterly did not deserve your love. Her beauty is precious only through the idea that you have formed of it; her beauty is vile and contemptible in reality. Her beauty was perishable, and what remains of it is not worth a regret. You imagine that you could not live without Euphrosine, and if you should happen to meet her you could not even recognize her.”

Count .Longin made no reply, but these words, or perhaps the voice which uttered them, made a fortunate impression on his mind. He went out feeling better, and promised to return.

He returned, and, desirous of embracing the monastic life, he asked for a cell, and made a gift to the monastery of his riches, which were immense. Euphrosine felt greatly pleased. But, a short time after, her heart was overwhelmed by a joy still more great.

A beggar, bent under his bundle, with nothing to cover him but sordid rags, having come to ask of the monks for a piece of bread, Euphrosine recognized Romulus, her father; but, feigning not to know who he was, she made him take a seat, washed his feet, and gave food to him.

“Son of God,” the beggar said, “I was not always a poor vagabond. I have owned great riches and a daughter who was beautiful, wise, learned, and who guessed the enigmas which were given for public competition, and who received one day from the magistrates a papyrus crown. I have lost her; I have lost all my goods. I am devoured by regret for my daughter and my riches. I had a bush of singing birds the artifice of which was marvellous. And now I have not a cloak to cover me. Still, I should be consoled if I could see before my death my beloved daughter.”

As he finished these words Euphrosine threw herself at his feet and said to him:

“Father, I am Euphrosine, your daughter, who fled one night from your house. And the dog did not bark. Forgive me, father. For I did not do these things without the permission of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

And, after relating to the old man how she had gone disguised as an artisan until she had reached this house, where she had been living in peace and quiet, she showed to him a mole on her neck. Romulus recognized his daughter by that mole. He kissed her tenderly, admiring the mysterious designs of the Lord.

This is why he resolved to become a monk and to remain in the monastery of Saint Onuphre. He built a cell of reeds near that of Count Longin. They sang songs and tilled the soil. During the hours of rest they talked of the vanity of earthly love and of the riches of this world. But Romulus revealed nothing to anybody of his marvellous meeting with his daughter Euphrosine, judging that it was better that Count Longin and the Abbé Onuphre should learn of this adventure in paradise, when they should have full intelligence of the ways of God. Longin did not know that his betrothed was near him. All three lived for several years in the practice of all the virtues, and, by a special favor of Providence, they went to sleep in the Lord, all three, almost at the same time. Count Longin died first, Romulus died two months later, and Saint Euphrosine, after she had closed his eyes, was called to Heaven in the same week by Jesus Christ, who said to her, “Come, my dove!” Saint Onuphre followed them in the grave, where he descended, full of merit, in the one hundred and thirty-second year of his age, on the holy day of Easter, of the three hundred and ninety-fifth year since the incarnation of the Son of God. May the intercession of the Archangel Saint Michael aid us! Here end the acts of Saint Euphrosine. Amen.

Such is the relation that the Deacon George wrote in Mount Athos, at an epoch, which may have been from the seventh to the fourteenth century of the Christian era. I am greatly uncertain in this respect. This relation is entirely unpublished. I have the best reasons to say this. I wish I had reasons as good to think that it deserved to be known. I have translated it with a fidelity which has been, doubtless, only too evident, in communicating to my style the Byzantine stiffness, the inconvenience of which seems to me to be almost intolerable. The Deacon George had less grace than Herodotus, and even Plutarch, and one may see by his example that epochs of decadence have at times less charm and delicacy than people imagine ordinarily. This demonstration is perhaps the principal merit of my work. This work shall be criticized, and doubtless questions shall be put to me for which it shall be difficult for me to find answers. The text which I have followed is not in the hand of Deacon George. I do not know if it is complete. I foresee that interpolations shall be discovered in it. M. Schlumberger will regard as suspicious divers portions of the recital, and M. Alfred Rambaud will contest the episode about the old man Porou. I reply in advance that, having only one text, it was the one which I followed. It is in very bad state and not very legible, but it must be said that all the masterpieces of classic antiquity that delight us have come to us in that state. I have good reasons to think that, in reading the text of my deacon, I made enormous errors and that my translation is full of nonsense. It is perhaps only perpetual nonsense. If this does not appear as much as it might be feared, the reason is that the most unintelligible text has always some sense for the one who translates it. If it were not for this, erudition would have no reason for being. I have compared the relation of Deacon George with the passages in Rufin and Saint Jerome relative to Saint Euphrosine. I must say that it does not agree with them. This is doubtless why my publisher has inserted this learned work in a light collection of tales.

SCOLASTICA

In that epoch which was the fourth century of the Christian era young Injuriosus, only son of a senator of Auvergne, asked in marriage a young girl named Scolastica, only child, like him, of a senator. She was given to him. And the ceremony of marriage having been celebrated, he brought her to his house and made her share his couch. But she, sad and turning to the wall, cried bitterly. ‘

“What troubles you, tell me, I pray you?”

TOC \o "1-3" \h \z And, as she made no reply, he added: “I pray you to tell me clearly the subject of your complaint. I pray you in the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God.”

Then she turned toward him: “Even if I should cry every day in my life, I could not shed tears enough for the great sorrow that fills my heart. I had decided to keep pure the sweet flesh and to offer it to Jesus Christ. It is unfortunate that I may not accomplish what I desired. Oh, day that I should never have seen! Now, divorced from the celestial husband who promised to me paradise as a dowry, I have become the wife of a mortal man, and my head, which should have been crowned with immortal roses, is ornamented with these roses already despoiled. Why was not the first day of my life the last one? How happy I would have been if I could have gone through the door of death without drinking a drop of milk! When you extend your arms toward me I think of the hands which were pierced with nails for the salvation of the world.”

And as she said these words she cried bitterly.

The young man replied softly:

“Scolastica, your parents, who are noble and rich, had only one daughter, and mine had only one son. They have wished to unite us in order to perpetuate their family, for fear that after their death a stranger should inherit their goods.”

But Scolastica said to him:

“The world is nothing. Riches are nothing, and this life, even, is nothing. Is it living to wait for death? Those alone live who, in eternal beatitude, drink light and enjoy the angelic happiness of possessing God.”

At this moment, touched by grace, Injuriosus exclaimed:

“Oh, sweet and fair words! The light of eternal life shines before my eyes. Scolastica, if you wish to keep what you have promised, I will remain near you in chastity.”

Half reassured, and smiling in her tears, she said:

“Injuriosus, it is difficult for a man to grant such a thing to a woman. But if you do as you say, I will give you a part of the dowry which has been promised to me by my husband and Lord Jesus Christ.”

Then, armed with the sign of the cross, he said:

“I will do as you desire.”

And, joining their hands, they went to sleep.

After ten years of trial Scolastica died.

In accordance with the custom of the time, she was carried to the basilica in vestments of ceremony, with face uncovered, with singing of songs, and followed by the entire people.

Kneeling near her, Injuriosus uttered in loud voice these words:

“I render thanks unto you, Lord Jesus, for having given to me the strength to keep your treasure intact.”

At these words the dead woman rose from her funeral bed, smiled, and murmured softly:

“My friend, why do you say what nobody asks of you?”

Then she slept the eternal sleep. Injuriosus soon followed her in death. He was buried not far from her in the basilica of Saint Allire. On the first night that he rested there a miraculous rose-bush came out of the virgin bride’s coffin and entwined the two tombs with its flowery arms. And on the morrow the people saw that they were linked by chains of roses. Recognizing by this sign the sanctity of Injuriosus and of Scolastica, the priests of Auvergne designated these sepulchres to the veneration of the faithful. But there were still pagans in this province evangelized by Saints Allire and Nepotian. One of them, named Sylvanus, venerated the fountains of the nymphs, placed pictures on the branches of an old oak, and kept at his hearth small figures of clay representing the sun and the goddesses. Half hidden in the foliage, the god of gardens protected his orchard. Sylvanus occupied his old age with the writing of poems. He composed eclogues and elegies in a style somewhat harsh but ingenious in phrase, and wherein he introduced verses of the ancients whenever he found an opportunity. Having visited with the crowd the sepulchre of the Christian couple, the poet admired the rose-bush which ornamented the two tombs. And, as he was pious, in his way, he saw in this a celestial sign. But he attributed the prodigy to his gods, and did not doubt that the rose-bush had come into bloom by the will of Eros.

“The sad Scolastica,” he said to himself, “now that she is a vain shade, regrets the time of love and the lost pleasure. The roses which come of her and which speak for her say to us: ‘Love, you who live!’ This prodigy teaches us that we should enjoy the pleasures of life while there is time.”

Thus thought this simple pagan. He composed on this subject an elegy, which I have found by the greatest accident in the public library of Tarascon, on the fly-leaf of a Bible of the eleventh century. The precious leaf, which had until now escaped the attention of the savants, contains not less than eighty-four lines, in Merovingian calligraphy, which must date from the seventh century. The text begins with this verse:

Nanc piget; et quaeris, quod non aut ista voluntas

Tunc fait…

and finishes with this:

Stringamus moestu carminis obsequio.

I will not fail to publish the text in its entirety as soon as I will have finished the reading of it. And I have no doubt that M. Leopold Delisle will take charge of presenting this inestimable document to the Academy of Inscriptions.

THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME

I.

There lived in France, in the time of King Louis, a poor juggler, native of Compiègne, named Barnabas, who went through the cities making tricks of strength and skill. On market days he extended on the public square an old carpet, all worn out, and, after having attracted the children and idlers by pleasing phrases, which he had learned from an old juggler and of which he never changed anything, he assumed attitudes which were not natural, and he placed a pewter plate on his nose and balanced it there. The crowd looked at him at first with indifference.

But when, with hands and head on the ground, he threw in the air and caught with his feet six copper balls which shone in the sun, or when, throwing himself backward till his neck touched his heels, he gave to his body the form of a perfect wheel, and juggled, in that posture, with twelve knives, a murmur of admiration rose from the spectators, and pieces of money rained on the carpet.

Nevertheless, like most of those who live of their talents, Barnabas of Compiègne had a great deal of trouble to live.

Earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, he carried more than his share of the miseries attached to the sin of Adam, our father.

Moreover, he could not work as much as he wished. To display his fine learning, as for the trees to give flowers and fruits, he needed the warmth of the sun and the light of day. In winter he was only a tree despoiled of its leaves and almost dead. The congealed earth was hard for the juggler. And, like the cicada whereof Marie of France writes, he suffered of cold and of hunger in the bad season. But, as his heart was simple, he suffered his ills in patience.

He had never reflected on the origin of riches nor on the inequality of human conditions. He believed firmly that, if this world is bad, the other world cannot fail to be good, and this hope supported him. He did not imitate the miscreants who have sold their souls to the devil. He never took the name of God in vain; he lived honestly, and, although he had no wife, he did not covet his neighbor’s, for woman is the enemy of strong men, as appears by the history of Samson which is related in the Scriptures.

In truth, his mind was not inclined toward material desires, and it would have cost him more to renounce mugs than women. For, although he never failed in sobriety, he liked to drink when it was warm. He was a good man, fearing God and very devout to the Holy Virgin.

He never failed, when he went into a church, to kneel before the image of the Mother of God and to address to her this prayer:

“Madame, take care of my life until it may please God that I shall die, and when I die let me have the joys of paradise.”

II.

One night, after a day of rain, while he was walking, sad and bent, carrying under his arm his balls and his knives hidden in his old carpet, and seeking for a barn where he might go to bed, without supper, he saw on the road a monk who was going the same way, and bowed to him courteously. As they were walking together they exchanged ideas.

“Friend,” said the monk, “how is it that you are dressed in green? Is it to play the personage of a clown in some mystery-play?”

“No, father,” replied Barnabas, “such as I am, I am Barnabas, and my trade is that of a juggler. It would be the most beautiful trade in the world if one in it could eat every day.”

“Friend Barnabas,” said the monk,” be careful of what you are saying. There is no more beautiful trade than the monastic one. In it are celebrated the praise of God, of the Virgin, and the saints, and the life of the monk is a perpetual canticle to the Lord.”

Barnabas replied:

“Father, I confess that I have talked like an ignorant man. Your trade may not be compared with mine, and, although there is some merit in dancing while holding a coin balanced on a stick on one’s nose, this merit does not reach the height of yours. I would like to sing every day like you, father, the office of the Holy Virgin, to whom I have devoted a special piety. I would willingly abandon the art in which I am known from Soissons to Beauvais, in more than six hundred cities and villages, in order to embrace the monastic life.”

The monk was moved by the juggler’s simplicity, and, as the monk was not lacking in discernment, he recognized in Barnabas one of the men of good will whereof our Lord has said: “Let peace be with them on earth.” That is why he replied:

“Friend Barnabas, come with me, and I will make you enter the convent whereof I am the prior. The one who led Mary the Egyptian in the desert placed me on your path to lead you in the way of salvation.”

It is thus that Barnabas became a monk. In the convent where he was received the religions celebrated the cult of the Holy Virgin, and each one used in her service all the learning and all the skill that God had given to him.

The prior, for his part, composed books which treated, in accordance with the rules of scholasticism, of the virtues of the Mother of God.

Friar Maurice copied with a learned hand these treatises on leaves of vellum.

Friar Alexander painted fine miniatures. One could see in them the Queen of Heaven, seated on the throne of Solomon, at the foot of which four lions watch. Around her head, which has a halo, are seven doves, which are the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost: gifts of fear, of piety, of science, of force, of advice, of intelligence, and of wisdom. She had as companions six virgins with golden hair: Humility, Prudence, Retirement, Respect, Virginity, and Obedience.

At her feet two small nude and white figures stood in respectful attitude. They were souls that implored for their salvation, and, certainly, not in vain, her all-powerful intercession.

Friar Alexander represented on another page Eve with eyes toward Mary, so that one might see at the same time the sin and the redemption, the humiliated woman and the exalted Virgin. One could admire, moreover, in this book the Well of Living Waters, the Fountain, the Lily, the Moon, the Sun and the Garden sung in the canticle, the Door of Heaven and the City of God, and these were images of the Virgin.

Friar Marbode was, similarly, one of the most tender children of Mary.

He carved stone images incessantly, so that his beard, his eyebrows, and his hair were white with dust, and his eyes were perpetually swollen and tearful; but he was full of strength and of joy in his old age, and, visibly, the Queen of Paradise protected the declining years of her child. Marbode represented her seated in a pulpit, with a nimbus around her forehead, the orb of which was in pearls. And he was careful that the folds of her gown should cover the feet of the one whereof the prophet has said, “My beloved is like a closed garden.”

At times, also, he represented her with the features of a child full of grace, and she seemed to say, “Lord, you are my Lord!”

There were also in the convent poets, who composed Latin hymns in honor of the Virgin Mary, and there was even a Picardian who related the miracles of Notre Dame in ordinary terms and in rhyming verses.

III.

Seeing such a competition in praises and such a beautiful harvest of work, Barnabas lamented his ignorance and his simplicity.

“Alas!” he sighed, while he walked alone in the small garden of the convent, “I am very unfortunate not to be able, like my brothers, to praise worthily the Holy Mother of God, to whom I have devoted the tenderness of my heart. Alas! alas! I am a rough and artless man, and I have at my service, Madame the Virgin, neither edifying sermons nor treatises well divided according to the rules, nor fine paintings, nor statues correctly sculptured, nor verses walking in measure. I have nothing, alas!”

He moaned in this manner and yielded to sadness. One night that the monks were conversing, he heard one of them relate the history of a religious who knew how to recite only the Ave Maria. This monk was disdained for his ignorance; but when he died five roses came out of his mouth in honor of the five letters of the name of Maria, and thus his sanctity was manifested.

While he listened to this tale Barnabas admired once more the kindness of the Virgin; but he was not consoled by the example of that death, for his heart was full of zeal and he wished to serve the glory of his lady who is in heaven.

He sought for the means of doing this without being able to find them, and his affliction increased day by day; but one morning he awoke joyfully, ran to the chapel, and stayed there alone for more than an hour. He returned after dinner.

And from this moment he went every day to that chapel, at the hour when it was deserted, and passed there a great part of the time that the other monks consecrated to the liberal and mechanical arts. He was no longer sad and he no longer complained.

A behavior so singular excited the curiosity of the monks.

They asked themselves in the community why Friar Barnabas made retreats so frequently.

The prior, whose duty it is to ignore nothing of the behavior of the religious, decided to watch Barnabas in his solitude. One day that he was closeted in the chapel, Dom Prior came, accompanied by two elders of the convent, and observed through cracks in the door the things that were happening in the interior.

They saw Barnabas, who, before the altar of the Holy Virgin, head downward, his feet in the air, was juggling with six copper balls and twelve knives. He was doing, in honor of the Holy Mother of God, the feats of his trade which had provoked the most applause. Not comprehending that this simple man thus placed his talent and his learning at the service of the Holy Virgin, the two elders cried that it was a sacrilege.

The prior knew that Barnabas’s mind was innocent, but thought that he had fallen into insanity. They were preparing to drag him out of the chapel as quickly as they could, when they saw the Holy Virgin descend the stairs of the altar in order to wipe with a fold of her blue mantle the perspiration which fell from the juggler’s forehead.

Then the prior, kneeling with his face against the marble slabs, recited these words:

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

“Amen,” replied the elders, kissing the earth.

THE MASS OF THE SHADES

This is what the sacristan of the Church of Saint Eulalia, at Neuville-d’Aumont, related to me under the trellis of the White Horse Tavern, one beautiful winter evening, while drinking a bottle of wine to the health of a man whom he had carried to earth in the morning, with honor, under a cloth studded with beautiful silver tears.

“My poor father was a grave-digger. He had an agreeable mind, and this was doubtless an effect of his profession, for it has been observed that people who work in graveyards have a jovial temperament. Death does not frighten them; they never think of it. I, sir, go into a graveyard at night as calmly as under the trellis of the White Horse. And if, peradventure, I meet a ghost, this does not frighten me, because I consider that he has a right to attend to his affairs as I attend to my own. I know the habits of the dead and their characteristics. I know on this subject things that the priests themselves do not know. And if I told all that I have seen you would be astonished. But all truth is not good to tell, and my father, who liked to tell things, has not revealed a twentieth part of what he knew. To make things even, he repeated often the same tales, and he must have related a hundred times, at least, Catherine Fontaine’s adventure.

“Catherine Fontaine was an old maid, whom he remembered to have seen when he was a child. I should not be astonished if there were still in this country at least three old men who remember having heard speak of her, for she was well known and of good renown, although poor. She lived at the corner of the Rue aux Nonnes, in the tower which you may see now, and which is an addition to an old mansion half destroyed and overlooking the Ursulines’ garden. There are half-effaced figures and inscriptions on this tower. The deceased curé of Saint Eulalia, M. Lavasseur, assured me that these inscriptions said in Latin that love is stronger than death. This, he said, was understood to be divine love.

“Catherine Fontaine lived alone in that little tower. She was a lace-maker. You know that the laces of our country were formerly celebrated. She was not known .to have parents or friends. It was said that when she was eighteen she loved the young knight d’Aumont-Clery, to whom she was secretly betrothed. But good people would not believe it, and they said that it was a tale which had been imagined because Catherine Fontaine had the air of a lady rather than of a working girl, because she retained under her white hair the remains of a great beauty, because she had a sad air, and wore on her finger one of those rings which the goldsmith decks with two clasped hands, and because it was a custom in former times for engaged people to exchange such rings. You will know in a moment what truth there was in this story.

“Catherine Fontaine lived in piety. She went to the churches, and every morning, in any weather, heard the six-o’clock mass at Saint Eulalia.

“Well, one night in December, when she was in bed in her room, she was awakened by the sound of the bells; doubting not that they were ringing the first mass, the pious girl put on her clothes and went into the street, where the night was so dark that one could not see the houses and not one light showed itself in the black sky. And there was such silence in this darkness that not one dog barked in the distance, and that one felt in it separated from all living creatures. But Catherine Fontaine, who knew every stone on which she pressed her foot, and who could have gone to the church with closed eyes, reached without trouble the corner of the Rue aux Nonnes and of the Rue de la Paroisse, where stands the frame house wearing a tree of Jesse carved on a big pillar. At this place she saw that the doors of the church were open and that a great clearness of tapers came from it. She continued to walk, and, having passed through the porch, she found herself in a numerous assembly which filled the church. But she recognized none of the congregation, and she was surprised to see them dressed in velvet and brocade, with feathers in their hats, and wearing their swords in the fashion of former times. There were lords who held tall canes, and ladies wearing lace hats held by diadem combs. Chevaliers of Saint Louis extended their hands to these ladies, who hid under their fans faces which were painted, of which one could see only the powdered temples and patches near the eyes. And all went to their places without noise, and one heard, while they walked, neither the sound of their steps on the slabs nor the rustling of stuffs. The aisles were filled with a crowd of young artisans in brown waistcoats, short trousers, and blue stockings, who held by their waists young girls who were pretty, pink, and lowered their eyes. And near the fonts of holy water peasant girls in red skirts and laced bodices sat on the floor with the tranquillity of domestic animals, while young men standing behind them opened big eyes and rolled their hats in their fingers. And all these silent faces seemed to stand there for eternity in the same thought, soft and sad. Kneeling at her customary place, Catherine Fontaine saw the priest advance toward the altar, preceded by two altar boys. She recognized neither the priest nor the boys. The mass began. It was a silent mass, where one could not hear the sound of lips that moved nor the tintinnabulation of the bells. Catherine Fontaine felt that she was under the look and the influence of her mysterious neighbor, and, having looked at him without hardly turning her head, she recognized in him the young chevalier d’Aumont-Clery who had loved her and who had died forty-five years before. She recognized him by a mole under his left ear, and especially by the shadow which his long black eyelashes made on his cheeks. He wore the hunting habit, red with gold braid, which he wore the day when, having met her in the Saint Leonard wood, he asked her for a drink and took a kiss. He had retained his youth and his good looks. His smile revealed teeth of a young wolf. Catherine said to him in a low voice:

“‘My lord, who were my friend and to whom I gave what is dearest to a girl, may God keep you in His grace! May He inspire me with regret for the sin that I have committed; for it is true that, in spite of my white hair and the nearness of death, I do not yet repent for having loved you. But, my handsome lord, tell me who are these people dressed in the fashion of old times who are listening here to the silent mass?’

“The chevalier d’Aumont-Clery replied, with a voice feebler than a breath and yet clearer than crystal:

“‘Catherine, these men and women are souls of Purgatory who have offended God by sinning as we did, but who are not, for that reason, separated from God, for their sin was, like ours, without malice.

“‘While separated from those whom they loved on earth, they are purified in the fire of Purgatory. They suffer the ills of absence, and this is their most cruel suffering. They are so miserable that an angel in heaven takes pity on their love trouble. With the permission of God, he reunites every year, for an hour at night, the lovers in their parochial church, where they may listen, while holding their hands, to the mass of the shades. Such is the truth. If it is permitted to me to see you before your death, Catherine, this has not been accomplished without the permission of God.’

“And Catherine Fontaine replied: “‘I would like to die in order to become beautiful as in the days when I gave a drink to you in the forest.’

“While they talked thus in a low voice, an old canon presented a great copper dish to the faithful, who let fall in it ancient coins that are not current at present. When the copper dish was presented to him, the chevalier put in it a louis, which made no more sound than the other pieces of gold or silver.

“Then the old canon stopped in front of Catherine Fontaine, who fumbled in her pocket without finding a cent there. Then, not wishing to refuse her offering, she took from her finger the ring which the chevalier had given to her the day before his death, and threw it in the copper dish. The gold ring in falling resounded like the heavy clapper of a bell, and at the noise which it made the chevalier, the canon, the priest, the boys, the ladies, the knights, the entire congregation, vanished; the tapers went out, and Catherine Fontaine remained alone in the darkness.”

Having thus finished his narration, the sacristan took a great gulp of wine, thought for a moment, and continued as follows:

“I have related the story to you exactly as my father related it several times, and I believe that it is true, because it is in accord with all that I have observed of the manners and particular customs of the dead. I have frequented the dead a great deal since my childhood, and I know that it is customary for them to return to their loves.

“It is thus that the miserly dead wander at night near the treasures which they have hidden in their lifetime. They stand as guards around their gold; but the care which they take, far from serving them, turns to their disadvantage, and it is not a scarce thing to discover money buried in the earth by digging at a spot that a ghost haunts. In the same way deceased husbands come to torment at night their wives who have married again, and I could name many who, when they were dead, could guard their wives better than when they were living.

“These are to be blamed, for, in justice, those who are dead should not be jealous. But I report to you what I have observed. You have to be careful when you marry a widow. Anyway, the story which I have related to you is proved in the following manner:

“The morning after this extraordinary night, Catherine Fontaine was found dead in her room. And the sexton of Saint Eulalia found in the copper dish a gold ring with two clasped hands. Anyway, I am not the sort of man to invent tales. Let us ask for another bottle of wine.”

LESLIE WOOD

There was a concert, followed by a comedy, at Madame N——’s, Boulevard Malesherbes.

While around a parlor radiant with bare shoulders young men were stifling in the warm perfumes, we, old familiars of the house, were at ease in a small drawing-room where we could see nothing, and where Mademoiselle Réjane’s voice reached us only as the slightly strident noise of a locust’s flight. From time to time we heard laughter and applause explode in the parlor, and we were inclined to pity the pleasure which we did not share. We exchanged airy nothings, and one of us, an amiable deputy, said:

“You know that Wood is here?”

At this news everybody exclaimed:

“Wood? Leslie Wood? Impossible! He has not been in Paris for ten years. Nobody knows what has become of him,”

“It is said that he has founded a black republic near the Victoria Nyanza.”

“It’s an invention. You know that he is prodigiously rich, and that he likes to realize impossible things. He lives at Ceylon in a fairy palace among enchanted gardens where women dance night and day.”

“How can you believe such silly things? The truth is that Leslie Wood has gone, with a Bible and a carbine, to convert the Zulus.”

Somebody said in a low voice:

“He is here; look at him.”

And indicated with a movement of the head and eyes a man, leaning against a door, who seemed an attentive spectator.

That athletic stature, that red face with white whiskers, that clear eye and tranquil look, were Leslie Wood’s.

Recalling the admirable letters which he gave for ten years to a London journal, I said:

“This man is the greatest newspaper man of his time.”

“You are, perhaps, right,” replied B——. “Twenty years ago nobody knew Europe like Leslie Wood.”

Baron Moise, who was listening, shook his head.

“You do not know Wood. I do. He was a financier. He knew business better than anybody. Why are you laughing, Princess?”

Half-lying on the sofa, in great annoyance because she could not smoke a cigarette, Princess Zevorine smiled.

“None of you knows Wood. Wood was never anything other than a mystic and a man in love.”

“I do not believe that,” replied Baron Moise, “but I should like to know where that devil of a fellow went to spend the ten most beautiful years of his life.”

“What do you call the ten most beautiful years of his life?”

“From fifty to sixty years. One’s position in life is assured then and one may enjoy it.”

“Baron, you may question Wood himself; here he is.”

The applause announced that the performance was finished. While the procession went to the buffet, Leslie Wood came to us. He shook my hand with placid cordiality.

“A ghost! a ghost!” exclaimed Baron Moise.

“Oh,” said Wood, “I have not gone far; the earth is so small.”

“Do you know what the Princess said? She said that you were only a mystic; is it true?”

“It depends on what you mean by mystic.”

“The word explains itself. A mystic is one who studies the affairs of the other world. But you know the affairs of this world too well to care for those of the other.”

At these words Wood frowned.

“You are mistaken, Moise. The affairs of the other world are much more important, much more, Moise.”

“Dear Leslie Wood,” laughed the Baron. “He is witty.”

The Princess said, gravely:

“Wood, is it not true that you have no wit? I hold witty people in horror.”

She rose.

“Wood, escort me to the buffet.”

An hour later, while M. G—— charmed with his songs the men and the women, I found Leslie Wood and Princess Zevorine alone before the deserted buffet.

The Princess spoke, with an enthusiasm almost savage, of Count Tolstoi, whose friend she was. She represented this great man as having become a simple man, wearing the clothes and the mind of a moujik, and, with his hands that had written masterpieces, making shoes for the poor.

To my great surprise, Wood approved Tolstoi’s style of life, which is so contrary to common sense. With his voice half-halting and to which incipient asthma gave a singular sweetness he said:

“Yes, Tolstoi is right. All philosophy is in these words: ‘Let God’s will be done.’ Tolstoi understands that all the ills of humanity come of its having a will distinct from divine will. I fear only that he may spoil so beautiful a doctrine by fancy and extravagance.”

“Oh,” replied the Princess, in a low voice, “the Count’s doctrine is extravagant in only one point: it prolongs until the oldest age the rights and duties of married people, and it imposes upon saints of a new age the fecund old age of patriarchs.”

Wood replied with suppressed exaltation:

“This is excellent and saintly. Physical love is natural to all the creatures of God, and, if neither trouble nor anxiety be mingled with it, it entertains the divine simplicity, the holy animality, without which there is no salvation. Asceticism is only conceit and revolt. Let us have always present in our minds the example of Boaz, and let us recall that the Bible makes of love the bread of the old.”

And suddenly, illumined, transfigured, in ecstasy, appealing with his eyes, his arms, and his entire mind to something invisible, he exclaimed:

“Annie, Annie, my beloved, is it not true that the Lord wishes saints and virgins to love each other with the humility of animals in the fields?”

Then he fell in an arm-chair. A frightful respiration shook his large chest, and he seemed thus more robust than ever, like those machines which seem more powerful when they are out of gear. Princess Zevorine wiped his forehead with her handkerchief and made him drink a glass of water.

I was stupefied. I could not recognize in that illuminated personage the man who so many times, in his office encumbered with good books, had talked so lucidly of the affairs in the Orient, the treaty of Frankfort, and the crises of our financial markets. As I let the Princess see my anxiety, she said, shrugging her shoulders:

“How French you are! You regard as crazy all those who do not think exactly as you think. Do not be alarmed; our friend Wood is very reasonable.”

After accompanying the Princess to the drawing-room, I prepared to go out. In the hall I found Wood putting on his coat. He said:

“Dear friend, I believe that we are neighbors. In weather like this it is a pleasure to walk. If you wish, we will go home together and talk.”

I accepted heartily. On the stoop he offered a cigar to me and the flame of an electric lighter.

“It is very convenient,” he said. As he clearly explained the theory of it, I recognized the Wood of former times. We were talking of indifferent things, when suddenly my companion placed his hands softly on my shoulder.

“Dear friend, some of the things which I said to-night may have surprised you. Perhaps you would like me to explain them to you.”

“You interest me vividly, my dear Wood.”

“I will do it, then. I have some esteem for your mind. We do not look at life in the same way. But you are not afraid of ideas, and that is a courage rare enough in France.”

“I believe, however, my dear Wood, that for freedom of thought—”

“Oh, no, you are not, like England, a people of theologians. But let us drop this. I want to tell you in a few words the history of my ideas. When you knew me fifteen years ago I was correspondent of a London journal. Newspaper work is more lucrative among us than among you. My situation was good and I made the most of it. I know business. I had excellent opportunities, and I conquered in a few years two enviable things: influence and fortune. You know that I am a practical man.

“I always had an aim. And I was always preoccupied by the wish to attain the supreme end of life. Serious theological studies which I had undertaken in my youth indicated to me that this aim is situated beyond terrestrial existence. But there remained doubts in my mind as to the practical means of attaining it. I suffered cruelly from this. Uncertainty is unbearable for a man of my temperament.

“In this state of mind I gave serious attention to the psychic researches of William Crookes, one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Academy. I knew him personally, and regarded him with reason as a learned man and a gentleman. He was then making experiments on a young person gifted with psychic faculties which were quite singular, and he was favored by the presence of an authentic spectre.

“A charming woman who had formerly lived in our life and who lives in the life beyond the tomb now, lent herself to the experiments of the eminent spiritualist and submitted herself to everything that he exacted from her. I thought that such investigations, bearing on the point where terrestrial existence is near extra-terrestrial existence, would lead me, if I followed them step by step, to the discovery of what it is necessary to know; that is, the real aim of life. But my hopes were soon deceived. The researches of my respectable friend, although conducted with a precision which left nothing to be desired, did not end in a conclusion theologic and moral sufficiently clear.

“Moreover, William Crookes was deprived suddenly of the aid of the incomparable dead lady who had gracefully granted to him several spiritualistic séances.

“Discouraged by public incredulity and offended by the mockeries of his colleagues, he ceased to publish communications relative to psychical knowledge. I told my deception to Reverend Burthogge, with whom I was in communication since his return from East Africa, which he has evangelized with a religious and practical spirit truly worthy of old England.

“Reverend Burthogge is of all men the one whose influence on me has always been strongest and most decisive.”

“He is very intelligent?” I asked.

“He has great doctrinal intelligence,” replied Leslie Wood. “He has, above all, a grand character, and you are not ignorant, dear friend, of the fact that it is by character that one may influence men. My disillusions caused no surprise in him; he attributed them to my defect in method, and especially to the pitiful moral infirmity whereof I gave evidence in this circumstance.

“‘Scientific researches,’ he said, ‘can lead to nothing but discoveries of the same order. How is it that you did not understand this? You were strangely frivolous,

Leslie Wood. Mind seeks for mind, Saint Paul said. To discover spiritual truths you must enter into spiritual ways.’

“These words produced a profound impression upon me.

“‘How shall I enter into spiritual ways?’ I asked.

“‘Through poverty and simplicity,’ Burthogge replied. ‘Sell your goods and give the money to the poor. You are well known; conceal yourself. Pray; accomplish works of charity. Make your mind simple, your soul pure, and you will know the truth.’

“I decided to follow these precepts to the letter. I sent in my resignation as a newspaper correspondent. I converted into money my fortune, which was engaged in business, and, fearing to renew the crime of Ananias and Sapphira, I conducted this difficult operation in such a manner as not to lose a cent of this capital, which no longer belonged to me. Baron Moise, who saw me at work, acquired for my financial genius a religious admiration. By order of Reverend Burthogge, I gave to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel the sums that I had collected. And when I expressed to this eminent theologian the joy which I felt at being poor, he said:

“‘Take care that the pleasure which you find in your poverty may not be pleasure at triumph of your energy. What shall it profit a man if he despoils himself, apparently, and keeps in himself the golden idol? Be humble.’”

Leslie Wood had reached this part of his recital when we came to the Pont Royal. The Seine, where lights trembled, ran under the arches with a groan.

“I shall be brief,” continued the nocturnal narrator. “Each episode of my new life would devour an entire night. Burthogge, to whom I was as obedient as a child, sent me among the Bassoutos with the mission to put down the traffic in negroes. I lived there under a tent, alone with that generous companion whose name is Danger, and seeing God in fever and in thirst.

“Five years after, Reverend Burthogge recalled me to England. On the vessel I met a young girl. What a vision! What an apparition! a thousand times more radiant than the spectre which appeared to William Crookes!

“She was the daughter of a colonel in the Indian army, who was dead. She was not particularly beautiful. Her pale complexion and her thin face indicated suffering. But her eyes expressed all that one may imagine of heaven; her flesh seemed to be illuminated softly by an interior light. How I loved her! How I understood when I saw her the hidden meaning of all creation! How this simple young girl revealed to me the secret of the world’s harmony!

“Oh, simple, very simple, my initiator, my beloved, sweet Annie Fraser. I read in her mind the sympathy which she felt for me. One night, one limpid night, as we were alone on the deck, in presence of the seraphic assembly of stars which palpitated in chorus in the sky, I took her hand and said to her:

“‘Annie Fraser, I love you. I feel that it would be well if you were my wife, but I have forbidden myself from making my own destiny in order that God should make it himself. May He wish to unite us! I have placed my will in the hands of the Reverend Burthogge. When we reach England we will go and see him. Will you, Annie Fraser? If he consents, we will marry.’

“She consented. During the rest of the voyage we read the Bible together.

“As soon as we arrived in London I accompanied her to the Reverend, and I said to him what my love for this young girl meant to me and with what beautiful light it impressed me.

“Burthogge looked at her benevolently.

“‘You may marry,’ he said at last. ‘But let your union be similar to the Christians of the primitive church. Let it be a purely spiritual union. Remain humble and hidden, and let the world ignore your name.’

“I married Annie Fraser, and I need not tell you that we followed exactly the law which Reverend Burthogge had imposed upon us. For four years I delighted in this fraternal union.

“By the grace of the simple Annie Fraser I progressed in the knowledge of God. Nothing more could make us suffer.

“Annie was ill and her strength declined, and we said, joyfully, ‘Let God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven!’

“After four years of this union, one day, at Christmas, Reverend Burthogge called for me and said, ‘Leslie Wood, I have imposed a salutary trial upon you. But it would be to fall into the error of Papists to imagine that the union of beings in the flesh does not please God. He blessed twice, in the Garden of Eden and in Noah’s ark, the marriage of men and of animals. Go and live hereafter with Annie Fraser, your wife, as a husband lives with his wife.’

“When I returned home Annie, my beloved Annie, was dead.

“I confess my weakness. I uttered with my lips and not with my heart these words: ‘My God, let thy will be done,’ and, thinking of what Reverend Burthogge had accorded to my love, I felt that my heart was full of bitterness.

“And it was with a desolate mind that I knelt at the foot of the bed where my Annie rested under a cross of roses, dumb, white, and with the pale violets of death on her cheeks.

“I bade farewell to her, and I remained for a week in sterile sadness which resembled despair. How I should have rejoiced, on the contrary! On the night of the eighth day, while I was in tears, with my forehead on the cold and empty bed, I received the sudden certainty that the beloved one was with me in my room.

“I was not mistaken. Having raised my head, I saw Annie, smiling and luminous, extending her two arms to me. But how shall I express the rest, how tell the ineffable?

“Certainly, when the Reverend Burthogge had said to me, ‘Live with Annie as a husband lives with a wife,’ he knew that love is stronger than death.

“Learn, my friend, that since that hour of grace and of joy my Annie comes to me every night.”

He spoke with frightful enthusiasm. He stopped before a modest-looking house. He said:

“I live here. Do you see at the second-story window that bright light? She is waiting for me.” He quitted me abruptly. Eight days afterward I learned by the newspapers the sudden death of Leslie Wood.

PAUL VERLAINE

They say that there is living, nowadays, a wicked fellow, named Gestas, who writes the sweetest songs in the world. It was written on his face that he should be a carnal sinner, and, toward night, wicked joys shine in his green eyes. He is young no longer. The bumps on his cranium have the brilliancy of copper; on his neck falls long hair, grown green. However, he is ingenuous, and he has retained the naïve faith of his childhood. When he is not in the hospital, he lodges in some hotel room, somewhere between the Panthéon and the Jardin des Plantes. There, in the old poor district, all the stones know him, the dark alleys are indulgent to him, and one of these alleys is like his heart, for, lined with wine rooms and with dens, it wears at the angle of a house a Holy Virgin, burned by the sun in her blue niche. He goes at night from wine room to wine room, and makes his rounds of beer and alcohol in constant order. The great works of debauch demand method and regularity. The night is old when he has regained, without knowing how, his miserable home, and found, through a daily miracle, the bed whereon he falls without undressing. He sleeps there the sleep of vagabonds and children. But this sleep is short.

As soon as the dawn whitens the window and throws between the curtains its luminous arrows, Gestas opens his eyes, rises, shakes himself like a dog without a master whom a kick awakens, descends hastily the long spiral of the stairs, and sees again with delight the street, the good street, which is so indulgent for the vices of the humble and the poor. His eyelids beat under the fine points of day; his nostrils of a Silenus are swollen by the morning air. Robust and straight, his legs stiffened by his old rheumatism, he goes, leaning on a stick the ferrule of which twenty years of vagabondage have worn out. In his nocturnal adventures he has never lost either his pipe or his stick.

Then he has an air of being very good and very happy. He is. In this world his greatest joy, for which he pays the price of his sleep, is to go in wine houses and drink with workmen the morning white wine. A drunkard’s innocence. That clear wine, in the pale light, among the white blouses of the bricklayers, charms his mind, which in vice has remained naïve.

One morning, in the spring, Gestas having gone in this way from his furnished room to the Petit More Tavern, had the pleasure to see the door, which the head of a Saracen surmounts, open, and to go to the pewter counter with friends whom he did not know. They were a squad of workmen from the Creuse, who clinked their glasses while talking of their country, and vaunting themselves like the twelve peers of Charlemagne. When one of them had a good idea he laughed at it loudly, and, that his comrades might the better understand it, he struck them with heavy blows of his fists in their backs. When these men had gone to their work Gestas came out of the Petit More and went to the Bon Coing. He drank there in amiable company, and he even offered a glass to two policemen, who were distrustful and soft. He visited afterward a third tavern, the antique signboard of which represented two small men carrying an enormous bunch of grapes, and there he was served by the beautiful Madame Trabert, celebrated in the entire quarter for her wisdom, her strength, and her good nature. Then, advancing toward the fortifications, he drank again at the refiners’, where one sees in the shade brass faucets shine on barrels, after which he re-entered the populous districts and drank vermouth in different wine rooms. The hour of eight rang. He walked straight, rigidly and solemnly, surprised when women going to the market pushed him with their heavy baskets, or when he struck, without seeing her, a little girl holding in her arms an enormous loaf of bread. At times the milkman’s cart, where danced and sang the tin cans, stopped so near him that he felt on his cheek the warm breath of the horse. But he went on his way without haste, under the disdained oaths of the rustic milkman. Surely his attitude, supported by the stick, was proud and peaceful. But internally the old man was weakening. Nothing of his early morning joy remained in him. The lark, which had thrown its joyful trills in his being with the first drops of the white wine, had flown away, and now his mind was a misty rookery where birds crowed on black trees. He was mortally sad. He felt a great disgust in his heart. The voice of his repentance and of his shame shouted at him: “Hog! hog! you are a hog!” and he admired that irritated and pure voice, that beautiful voice of an angel, which was in him mysteriously, and which repeated: “Hog! hog! you are a hog! He felt an infinite desire for innocence and purity. Big tears fell on his beard. He cried over himself. Docile to the Master’s word, which says, “Weep, daughters of Jerusalem,” he spilled the bitter dew of his eyes over his flesh, given to the seven sins and to the dreams which drunkenness created in him. The faith of his childhood returned to him. From his lips fell naïve prayers. He said, in a low voice: “God, let me become similar to the little child that I was.” At the moment when he was making this simple orison, he found himself under the porch of a church.

It was an old church, formerly white and beautiful under its lace of stone that time and man had torn. Now it is as black as the Sulamite, and its beauty impresses only the hearts of poets; it is a church poor and old, like the mother of Francis Villon, who perhaps came to kneel there and saw on the walls, now covered with whitewash, that painted paradise, where she seemed to hear harps, and that inferno, where the damned were boiled, which made the good creature feel a great fright. Gestas went into the house of God. He saw nobody there, not even a poor woman like Francis Villon’s mother. Formed in good order in the nave, the assembly of chairs alone attested the fidelity of the parishioners, and seemed to continue the common prayer.

In the damp and fresh shadow which fell from the vaults, Gestas turned on his right toward an aisle where, near the porch, before the statue of the Virgin, was a table on which no votive taper had yet been placed. There, contemplating the white, blue, and pink image which smiled among small silver and golden hearts, he inclined his old stiffened leg, shed the tears of Saint Peter, and sighed sweet words which were without sequence. “Good Virgin, my Mother; Mary, Mary, your child, Mother!” But suddenly he rose, made a few quick steps, and stopped before a confessional. Built of oak that time had made brown and oily, this confessional had the honest, intimate, and domestic air of an old cupboard. On the panels religious emblems, carved in escutcheons of shells and rocks, made one think of the women of former times who made their tall bonnets bow there. Where they had placed their knees Gestas placed his knee, and, with lips against the wooden trellis, he called, in a low voice, “Father, father!” As nobody answered his call, he knocked softly with his finger at the window.

“Father, father!”

He rubbed his eyes in order to see better through the holes of the railing, and he thought he saw in the shadow the white surplice of a priest. He repeated:

“Father, father, listen to me! I must confess; I must wash my soul; it is black and dirty; it disgusts me. Quick, father, a bath of penitence, a bath of forgiveness, the bath of Jesus. At the thought of my wickedness my heart rises to my lips.”

Then he waited, now thinking he saw a hand making a sign to him from the depths of the confessional, then discovering that there was nothing in the box but an empty seat. He remained immovable, nailed by the knees on the wooden step, his look fixed on the trellis from which should come to him all forgiveness, peace, salvation, innocence, reconciliation with God and with himself, celestial joy, contentment in love, sovereign good. At intervals he murmured tender supplications.

“Monsieur le curé, father, monsieur le curé! I am thirsty; give me a drink. My good monsieur le curé, give me what you have—pure water, a white gown, and wings for my poor soul. Give me penitence and forgiveness.”

“Receiving no answer, he knocked louder at the window, and said aloud: “Confession, if you please!” Then his patience gave out; he rose and struck with his stick on the side of the confessional, howling:

“Hello, there, the curé! Hello, there, the vicar!”

And as he spoke he struck harder. The blows fell furiously on the confessional, from which mists of dust escaped. The servant who was sweeping the sacristy came, saw the man with the stick, stopped for a moment, and then approached with the prudent slowness of those who have become white in the practice of the most humble duties. He asked: “What do you want?”

“I want to confess.”

“You cannot confess at this hour.”

“I want to confess.”

“Get out.”

“I want to see the curé.”

“What for?”

“To confess myself.”

“The curé cannot be seen.”

“The first vicar, then.”

“He cannot be seen either. Get out.”

“The second vicar, the third vicar, the fourth vicar, the last vicar.”

“Get out.”

“Well, are you to let me die without confession? Then, you are worse than they were in 1793. A very small vicar! What harm can it do you if I confess to a very small vicar, not taller than my arm? Tell a priest to come and hear my confession. I promise to tell him rare sins, more extraordinary, more interesting, than all those which his ordinary penitents tell him. You may warn him that he is wanted for a fine confession.”

“Get out.”

“But can’t you hear, old Barabbas? I tell you that I want to be reconciled with God, in God’s name.”

Although he had not the majestic height of the servant in a rich parish, he was a robust servant. He took Gestas by the shoulders and threw him out of doors.

Gestas, in the street, had no other idea than to return to the church by a side door in order to surprise, if possible, the rear guard of the servant and to catch some small vicar who would consent to hear his confession.

Unfortunately for his design, the church was surrounded by old houses, and Gestas lost himself in an inextricable labyrinth of streets and alleys.

He found a wine merchant, where the poor penitent was consoled with absinthe.

But he soon felt a new repentance. And this reassures his friends in the hope that he will be saved. He has faith, simple, strong, and naïve faith. He is lacking in works. Yet one must not despair of him since he does not despair himself ever.

Without entering into the considerable difficulties of predestination, nor considering on this subject the opinions of Saint Augustine, of Gotesiale, of the Albigenses, of the Wickliffites, of the Hussites, of Luther, of Calvin, and of Jansenius, people say that Gestas is predestined to eternal beatitude.

A VILLAGE DOCTOR’S MANUSCRIPT

Dr. H——, who died recently at Servigny, where he had been practising medicine for forty years, has left a diary which was not intended to be published. I would not dare to publish the manuscript as it is written, nor even to give extensive fragments of it, although many persons have adopted Taine’s opinion that it is proper to publish especially the things which were not made to be published. To tell interesting things, it is not sufficient, whatever one may say, not to be a writer. The diary of my physician would annoy one by its monotonous rusticity. Yet the man who wrote it had, in his humble condition, a mind which was not ordinary. This village physician was the philosopher-physician. One may read without much displeasure the last pages of his diary. I take the liberty to transcribe them here:

“It is a philosophic truth that nothing in the world is absolutely bad, and nothing absolutely good. The sweetest, the most natural, the most useful of virtues, pity, is not always good for the soldier nor for the priest; pity must, in the one and in the other, be hushed in the face of the enemy. Officers do not recommend it before a battle, and I have read in an old book that M. Nicole was afraid of it as of the principle of concupiscence. I am not a priest. I am still less a soldier. I am a physician, and one of the least, a country physician. I have practised my art for a long time in obscurity, and I can affirm that, if pity alone may inspire worthily our vocation, pity must quit us forever in presence of the miseries which she has given us the desire to palliate. A physician whom pity accompanies at the bedside of patients, has not a look clear enough nor hands sure enough. We go where the charity of humanity sends us, but we go without it. Physicians acquire easily the harshness which is necessary to them. It is a grace which may not be long lacking in them. There are several reasons for this. Pity is quickly deadened by contact with suffering; one thinks less of miseries which one may relieve, and then malady presents to a physician an interesting succession of phenomena.

“When I began to practise medicine I liked it passionately. I saw in the ills which were revealed to me only an opportunity to practise my art. When the maladies were fully developed, according to their normal types, I found them beautiful. Morbid phenomena excited the curiosity of my mind. I liked malady. From the point of view where I placed myself, malady and health were nothing but pure entities. An enthusiastic admirer of the human machine, I admired it in its worst modifications. I should willingly have exclaimed with Pinel: ‘Here is a fine cancer!’ I was becoming a philosophical physician. I lacked the genius of my art in order to possess nosologic beauty. It is the gift of genius to discover the splendor of things. Where an ordinary man sees only a disgusting wound, the naturalist worthy of the name admires a battlefield whereon the mysterious forces of life dispute sovereignty in a mélée more terrible than the battle so furiously painted by Salvator Rosa. I have only half seen that spectacle whereof the Magendies were familiar witnesses; but, resigned to be only a humble practitioner, I have retained as a professional necessity the faculty to look coldly at pain. I have given to my patients my strength and my intelligence. I have not given to them my pity. I should not put any gift, however precious it may be, above the gift of pity. Pity is the widow’s mite; it is the incomparable offering of the poor, who, more generous than all the rich in this world, gives with his tears a shred of his heart. It is for this very reason that pity has nothing to do with the accomplishment of professional duty, however noble the profession may be.

“To enter into more particular considerations, I will say that the men among whom I live inspire in their misfortune a sentiment which is not pity. There is some truth in this idea that one inspires only what one feels. The peasants of our country are not tender-hearted. Harsh to others and to themselves, they live in morose gravity. This gravity is contagious, and one’s mind is sad in their company. What is beautiful in their moral physiognomy is that they keep in purity the grand lines of humanity. As they think rarely and little, their thoughts have, at certain moments, a solemn aspect. I have heard some of them pronounce on their death-beds short and strong sentences worthy of the old men in the Bible. They may be admirable; they are not touching. Everything is simple in them, even disease. Reflection does not increase their sufferings. They are not like those beings too reflective, who make of their ills an image more unfortunate than their ills themselves. The peasants die so naturally that one cannot worry much about them. In fine, I will add, that they all resemble one another, and that nothing special disappears with any one of them.

“The result of all that I have said is that I have practised quietly the profession of a village physician. I do not regret having selected it. I am in it, I believe, somewhat superior; and, if it is bad for a man to be above his position, the damage is far greater when he is below it. I am not rich and never will be, but need one have much money to live alone in a village? Jenny, my little gray mare, is only fifteen years old. She trots as in the time of her youth, especially when we are going to the stable. I have not, like my illustrious colleagues of Paris, a picture gallery to show to my visitors, but I have pear trees, which they have not. My orchard is celebrated for twenty leagues around, and people come from the palaces to get grafts from me. One Monday, a year ago, as I was busy in my garden, a farm-hand came to ask me to go to Alies.

“I asked him if Jean Blin, the farmer at Alies, had fallen the day before on his way home. For, in my country, sprained ankles happen on Sundays, and it is not rare to break two or three ribs in wine rooms on that day. Jean Blin is not a loafer, but he likes to drink in company, and he has often waited for the dawn of Monday in muddy ditches.

“The farm-hand said that Jean Blin was not ill, but that Eloi, Jean Blin’s son, had the fever.

“I went for my stick and my hat and started on foot for the Alies, which are situated at twenty minutes’ walk from my house. While walking I thought of Jean Blin’s son, who had the fever. His father is a peasant similar to all the peasants, with this particularity, that the thought which created him forgot to make brains for him. That devil of a Jean Blin has a head no bigger than one’s fist. Divine wisdom has placed in that cranium only what was strictly indispensable. His wife, the most beautiful woman in the country, is an active housekeeper, thickly virtuous. Well, together they have given a child who is the most delicate and the most witty little being that ever struck this earth. Heredity is full of such surprises. Heredity, says Mysten, is the biologic phenomenon which makes ascendants transmit to descendants, besides type of species, particularities of organization and aptitude. I understand. But what particularities are transmitted and what are not nobody knows. My neighbor, the notary, lent to me last year a book by Emile Zola, and I saw that this author flattered himself with having on this subject special information. Here, he says, substantially, is an ascendant affected with nervousness; his descendants shall be neuropathic, unless they be not; some of them shall be insane and others sane; one of them may have genius. He has even made a genealogical tree in order to make this idea more evident. The discovery is not new, and the one who made it would be wrong if he were proud of it, but it is true that it contains on heredity all that we know. And that is how it happens that Eloi, Jean Blin’s boy, is full of wit. He has a creative imagination. I have surprised him more than once when, being no higher than my stick, he played hookey with children of the village. While they were stealing birds’ nests, I saw that little fellow make windmills and siphons with straws. Ingenious and savage, he questioned nature. His schoolmaster despaired of ever making anything of him, and, in fact, Eloi did not know his letters when he was eight years of age. But at that age he learned how to read and write with surprising rapidity, and he became in six months the best scholar in the village.

“He was also the most affectionate boy in the village. I sometimes gave him lessons in mathematics, and I was surprised by the wealth of his mind. In fine, I will confess, without fear of mockery, for people may forgive some exaggeration in a rustic old man, I took pleasure in surprising in this little peasant the beginning of one of those luminous minds which appear at long intervals in our dark humanity, and which, impelled by the necessity to love as well as by the zeal to know, accomplish, wherever destiny places them, a beautiful and useful work.

“These thoughts and others of similar nature accompanied me to the Alies. When I entered the room I found Eloi lying in the grand cottonade bed where his parents had transported him, with regard, doubtless, for the gravity of his condition. He was dozing; but his head, which was small and fine, weighed heavily on the pillow. I went near him. His forehead was burning; his temperature was very high. The mother and grandmother were near him, anxious. Jean Blin, idle in his anxiety, knowing not what to do and not daring to go, with his hands in his pockets, looked at us one after another. The child turned toward me his thin face, seeking for me with a patient, appealing look. He replied to my questions that his forehead and eye were hurting a great deal, that he heard noises which did not exist, that he recognized me, and that I was his old friend.

“‘He has chills and then he feels warm,’ added his mother.

“Jean Blin reflected for a few moments and said:

“‘It is doubtless inside that he feels hurt.’

“Then he returned to silence.

“It had been only too easy for me to verify the symptoms in the boy of acute meningitis. I prescribed blisters for the feet and leeches behind the ears. I went near my young friend and tried to tell him words better, alas! than the reality.

But then an entirely new phenomenon occurred in me. Although I had retained all my coldness, I saw the patient through a veil and so far from me that he seemed to me to be small, very small. This trouble in the idea of space was soon followed by analogous trouble in the idea of time. Although my visit had not lasted more than five minutes, I imagined that I had been for a long time, for a very long time, in that room, before that bed of white cottonade, and that the months and years went by without my making a motion.

“By a mental effort which was very natural to me, I analyzed at once these impressions, and the cause of them appeared clear to me. Eloi was dear to me. Cruel moments appeared to us to be long moments. That is why I had the impression that the five or six minutes spent near Eloi were almost like centuries. As for the vision of the child receding from me, it came of the idea that I would lose him. This idea, fixed in my mind without my consent, took, from the first second, the character of an absolute certainty.

“The next day Eloi’s condition was less alarming. This improvement persisted for several days. I had sent to the city for some ice; this ice had a good effect. But on the fifth day he fell into a violent delirium. The patient talked a great deal; among the words without sequence which I heard him utter I distinguished the following:

“‘The balloon, the balloon! I am holding the rudder of the balloon. It goes up. The sky is black. Mother, mother, why do you not come near me? I am directing my balloon well. It will be so beautiful! Come, it is stifling here!’

“On that day Blin followed me on the road. He had the embarrassed air of a man who wants to say something and dares not. After walking in silence for about twenty steps, he stopped, and, placing his hand on my arm, said:

“You see, doctor, I have an idea that he is hurt inside.”

“I went on my way sadly, and for the first time the desire to see again my pear trees did not make me hasten my step. For the first time, after forty years of practice, my heart was troubled by one of my patients, and I lamented for the child whom I could not save.

“There came the addition of a cruel anguish to my pain. I feared that my treatment might be bad. I surprised myself forgetting one day the prescriptions of the day before, uncertain about my diagnosis, timid and troubled. I asked for one of my colleagues, a young and skilful physician, who practised in a neighboring town. When he came, the poor little patient, become blind, was in a profound coma.

“He died the next day.

“A year after this misfortune I was called in consultation at the county seat. The fact is singular. The causes which brought it are odd, but as they are of no interest I shall not report them here. After the consultation the prefecture’s physician did me the honor to invite me to breakfast with two of my colleagues. After the breakfast, where I was charmed by a conversation which was solid and varied, we drank the coffee in the physician’s office. When I went to the mantelpiece to place there my empty cup, I saw on the frame of the mirror a portrait which produced so vivid an emotion in me that I could hardly restrain a cry. It was a miniature, a portrait of a child. This child resembled so strikingly the one whom I could not save and of whom I thought every day, that I could not prevent myself from believing that it was the child himself. Yet this supposition was absurd. The wooden frame and the golden circle which surrounded the miniature attested the taste of the end of the eighteenth century, and the child was represented wearing a waistcoat in pink and white stripes like a little Louis XVII.; but the face was Eloi’s. The same forehead, obstinate and powerful, immense forehead under curls of a cherub; the same fire in the eyes, the same suffering gracefulness on the lips; on the same features, in fine, the same expression.

“I had been examining this portrait for a long time, when the doctor touched my shoulder.

“‘Dear colleague,’ he said, ‘you are looking at a family relic which I am proud to own. My maternal ancestor was the friend of the illustrious man whom you see represented here as a child, and this miniature comes to me from my ancestor!” I asked him if he would tell me the name of that illustrious friend of his ancestor. He unhooked the miniature, m gave it to me, and said:

“Read this date, “Lyons, 1787.” Does this recall anything to you? No? Well this twelve-year-old child is the great Ampère.’

“At this moment I had an exact notion and the certain measure of what death had destroyed a year before in the Alies farm.”

MEMOIRS OF A VOLUNTEER

I.

I was born in 1770, in a rustic suburb of a small city in Langres, where my father sold knives and took care of his orchard. There nuns, who educated only girls, taught me how to read because I was small and they were good friends of my mother. When I came out of their hands I received Latin lessons from a priest of the city, son of a shoemaker and an excellent humanist. In the summer we worked under old chestnut trees, and it was near them that Abbé Lamadou explained to me the Georgics of Virgil. I could not imagine happiness greater than mine, and I lived contented between my master and Mademoiselle Rose, the Marshal’s daughter. But there is no durable felicity in the world. One morning my mother kissed me and put a coin of six livres in the pocket of my waistcoat. My bundles were made. My father jumped on his horse and carried me to the college of Langres. I thought along the route of my little room which the odor of fruits, preserved in the garret, perfumed in the autumn; of the closed lot where, on Sundays, father led me to pick apples; of Hose, of my sisters, of my mother; of myself, who was a poor exile! My heart was heavy, and I had much difficulty in holding back the tears which swelled my eyelids. In fine, after five hours of travel, we reached the city and stopped before a big door on which I read this word, which made me shiver: “Collegium.” We were received in a large, whitewashed hall by the regent, Father Féval. He was young and tall, and his smile reassured me. My father displayed always a vivacity and a frankness which never failed to make friends. He said:

“My reverend, I am bringing to you my only son, named Pierre, after his godfather, and Aubier, the spotless name which I gave to him as I received it from my late father. Pierre is my only son, his mother having given to me a son and three daughters, that I am bringing up in the best way that I can. My daughters will have the fate that it may please God in the first place, and their husbands afterward, to make for them. People say that they are pretty, and I cannot but believe it. Beauty, however, is only a deceptive gift for which one should not care. My daughters will be beautiful enough if they are good enough. As for my son, Pierre”—in saying these words my father placed his hand on my shoulder so heavily as to make me bend—“provided he fears God and knows Latin, he shall be a priest. I pray you humbly to examine him at leisure in order to discern his natural temperament. If you discover some merit in him, keep him. I will pay willingly what it will cost. If, on the contrary, you find that you can do nothing with him, send him back to me; I will come back for him at once, and teach him how to manufacture knives, as his father does.”

Father Féval promised that he would do what was expected of him; and on this assurance, my father said good-by to the regent and to me. As father was much affected and had a great deal of trouble to refrain from sobbing, he assumed a rude and contracted expression and gave to me in place of a kiss a terrible punch in the back. When he was gone, Father Féval led me out of the parlor into a garden, and, while we were passing under the trees, said:

“O Sylvai dulces umbras frondsai!”

I was fortunate enough to recognize in these archaic forms and in this heavy prosody a verse of old Ennius, and I replied to Father Féval that Virgil was still more worthy than his antique precursor to celebrate the beauty of these cool shades. My regent seemed satisfied with my compliment. He questioned me kindly on some points of the rudiments. Then, having heard my replies, he said:

“It is well; if you work, if you work a great deal, you may go into the fourth class. Come, I will introduce you myself to your teacher and schoolmates.”

While our promenade lasted I felt as if I had been adopted from my abandonment and supported in my distress. But when I found myself among the collegians of my class, in presence of M. Joursanvault, my teacher, I fell back into profound despair. M. Joursanvault had not the regent’s beautiful simplicity. He seemed to me to be much more impressed by his own importance and to be also harsher. He was a small man with a big head, whose words came out of two white lips and four yellow teeth like hisses. I thought at once that such a mouth was not made to pronounce the name of Lavinia, that I loved still more than that of Rose, for, I must confess it, the idyllic and royal betrothed of the unfortunate Turnus was decked in my imagination with august graces. Her ideal image effaced the more vulgar beauty of the Marshal’s daughter. M. Joursanvault did not please me much. My classmates frightened me; they seemed to me to be terribly bold, and I feared, with reason, that my naïveté would seem ridiculous to them. I felt like crying.

Self-love, stronger than my sorrow, prevented my falling into tears.

At night I went out of the college to find in the city the lodging that my father had rented for me. I was to reside with five other scholars at a working-man’s house. His wife cooked for us. We paid him twenty-five cents per month each.

My classmates tried at first to make fun of me because of the cut of my clothes and my rustic mien, but they ceased to joke when they saw that it did not hurt me. Only one of them, the thin son of a teacher, continued to imitate insolently my awkward demeanor. I chastised him so that he never did this again. I was not in favor with M. Joursanvault, but, as I accomplished my duties with regularity, I gave him no opportunity to punish me. As he made an ostentatious display of an authority which was violent, uncertain, and fidgety, he invited revolt, and there were in his class several rebellions wherein I took no part. One day that I was walking in the garden with the regent, who expressed much kindness toward me, it unfortunately came into my head to flatter myself on my good behavior.

“I was not in the last revolt, father,” I said.

“It is nothing to brag of,” replied Father Féval, with an accent of contempt that touched my heart.

He hated meanness more than anything else in the world. I promised myself never to say or do anything vile, and if I have known since then how to guard myself from lying and cowardice, I owe this to that excellent man.

M. Féval was not a philosophical priest; he professed the virtues and not the faith of the Savoyard vicar. He believed all that a priest should believe. But he held mummery in horror and could not tolerate the idea of serving God with frivolities. This appeared finely one Christmas day, when M. Joursanvault came to denounce impious pupils who the day before had put ink in the font of holy water.

The scandalized Joursanvault meditated exorcisms and murmured:

“Surely these are black traits.”

“Because of the ink,” our regent replied peacefully.

This virtuous man regarded weakness as the principal of all ills. He said often: “Lucifer and the rebellious angels fell through pride. This is why they remain, even in hell, princes and kings, and exercise over the damned a terrible sovereignty. If they had perished in a cowardly way, they would be among the flames the laughing-stock of the sinners’ souls, and the hegemony of evil would have escaped their demeaned hands.”

When vacation came it was with great joy that I returned to our house. But I found it very small. When I entered, my mother, bent over the fireplace, was skimming the soup. I found her very small, also, my good mother, and I kissed her in sobs.

With the skimmer in her hand, she told me that father, made heavy by age and suffering, had ceased to take care of the orchard; that the elder of my sisters was promised in marriage to the son of the cooper, and that the sacristan of the parish had been found dead in his room, a bottle in one hand. His fingers held the neck of the bottle so tightly that one could hardly detach them. Still, it was not proper to bring the sacristan to church with his bottle. While listening to my mother I had, for the first time, the sensitive idea of the flight of time, and I fell in a sort of torture.

“How handsome you look, my son!” mother was saying. “You already look like a little curé.”

At this moment Mademoiselle Rose entered the hall, blushed at seeing me, and feigned great surprise. I saw that I inspired her with interest and secretly was flattered. But I affected in her presence the grave demeanor of an ecclesiastic. I spent the greater part of my vacations in walks with M. Lamadou.

It had been agreed between us that we should talk only Latin, and we went through the roads, among the humble labors of the fields, in ardent nature, side by side, straight ahead, grave, serious, pure, disdainful of vulgar pleasures, and very vain of our knowledge.

I returned to the college with the firm resolution to enter holy orders. I saw myself already like M. Lamadou, wearing a large, three-cornered hat, wearing the cassock, with black breeches, woollen stockings, and buckled shoes, meditating on the eloquence of Cicero and the doctrine of Saint Augustine, traversing crowds, and returning grave bows to ladies and poor people inclined before me. Alas! a woman’s spectre came to trouble this beautiful dream. Until then I knew only Lavinia and Miss Rose. I made Dido’s acquaintance, and I felt flames run through my veins. The image of the one who, torn by an immortal wound, wandered in the myrtle forest, was bent at night over my agitated bed.

I saw her in summer evenings glide, all white, behind the trees in the woods, like the moon among the clouds. Full of this brilliant image, I feared to go into holy orders. Still, I took the ecclesiastical habit, which fitted me well. When I returned home thus dressed, my mother made a bow to me, and Rose, hiding her face in her apron, fell into tears. Then, looking at me with her beautiful eyes, as limpid as her tears, she said:

“Monsieur Pierre, I do not know why I am crying.”

She was touching thus, but she did not resemble the moon in the clouds. I did not love her; it was Dido whom I loved. That year was one of mourning for me. I lost my father, who succumbed suddenly to dropsy. In his last moments he recommended that his children should live in honesty and religion, and blessed them. He died with a sweetness which was not in his temperament. He seemed to quit without regret, and even with joy, this life, to which all the links of an ardent nature strongly bound him. I learned from him that it is easier than one may think to go out of life when one is a good man.

To be, in my turn, the father of these elder sisters, already at a marriageable age, and of this mother in tears, who, from year to year, became smaller, weaker, and more touching, was my duty. It is thus that, in a moment, from a child I became a man. I finished my studies at the Oratorians’, under excellent masters, Fathers Lance, Porriquet, and Marion, who, lost in a distant and savage province, consecrated to the education of a few poor children brilliant faculties and a profound erudition which would have done honor to the Academy of Inscriptions. The regent surpassed them all by the elevation of his mind.

While I was finishing my course in philosophy under these eminent masters, a grand rumor reached our province and went through the thick walls of our college. There was talk of convoking the States General. There were demands for reforms, and great changes were expected. New books that our masters let us read announced that the golden age would soon come.

When the time came to quit college, I embraced Father Féval. He held me in his arms with profound emotion. Then he led me under the trees where, six years before, I had my first conversation with him. Then, taking my hand, he bent over me, looked into my eyes, and said:

“Remember, my child, that without character wit is nothing. You may live long enough to see the birth in this country of a new order of things. These great changes will not be accomplished without trouble. Remember then what I tell you to-day: in trouble, wit is a very feeble resource. Virtue only may save what there is to be saved.”

While he spoke thus, the sun, already low at the horizon, enveloped him with ardent light and illuminated his beautiful, pensive face. I had the good fortune to retain in my memory these words, which impressed me, although I did not understand them exactly. I was only a pupil then, and one of the simplest. Since then the truth of his maxima has been revealed to me by the terrible lesson of events.

II.

I had renounced the ecclesiastic state. I had to live. I had not learned Latin for the sake of making knives in the suburb of a small city. I had grand ideas. Our farm, our cows, our garden, did not satisfy my ambition. I thought that Mademoiselle Rose had a rustic air. My mother imagined that my merit could be developed only in a city like Paris. I had no trouble in agreeing with her. I ordered a coat from the best tailor in Langres.

This coat had a sword with silver hilt, which gave me so grand an air that I could not doubt the greatness of my future. Father Féval gave me a letter to the Duc de Puybonne, and, in the year of grace 1789, July 12th, I went into the stagecoach, loaded with Latin books, cakes, lard, and kisses. I entered Paris by the Faubourg Saint Antoine, which I thought more hideous than the most miserable provincial hamlets. I lamented with all my heart the unfortunates who lived there, and myself, who had quitted my father’s house and orchard to seek my fortune among so many unfortunates. A wine merchant, who had taken the coach with me, explained to me, however, that all this crowd was full of joy because an old prison called the Bastille had been destroyed. He assured me that M. Necker would bring back the golden age. But a barber, who had heard our conversation, affirmed in his turn that M. Necker would ruin the nation if the King did not send him away at once. He said:

“The revolution is very bad. People have ceased to dress their hair, and people who do not dress their hair are lower than brutes.”

These words displeased the wine merchant.

“Learn,” he said, “that a regenerated nation disdains vain decorations. I would chastise you for your impertinence if I had the time, but I am going to sell wine to M. Bailly, Mayor of Paris, who honors me with his friendship.”

They quitted each other in this way, and I went on foot, with my Latin books, my lard, and the memory of my mother’s kisses, to Monsieur le Duc de Puybonne’s. His house was at the other end of the city, in the Rue de Grenelle. All the passers-by could indicate it to me, for the Duc is famous for his benevolence.

He received me kindly. Nothing in his clothes or in his manners deviates from simplicity. He has the joyful air that men who labor a great deal without being forced to do it alone wear.

He read Father Féval’s letter, and said to me:

“This recommendation is good, but what do you know?”

I replied that I knew Latin, some Greek, ancient history, rhetoric, and prosody.

“This is beautiful knowledge,” he replied, smilingly, “but it would be preferable if you had some idea of agriculture, of the mechanical arts, of commerce, of banking and industry. You know the laws of Solon, I suppose?”

I nodded yes.

“This is well. But you do not know the Constitution of England. It does not matter; you are young, and at an age when one may learn. I will employ you. M. Mille, my secretary, will tell you what I shall expect of you. Good-by, sir.”

A lackey escorted me to Monsieur Mille, who was writing at a table in the middle of a large, white parlor. He motioned to me to wait. He was a little, round man, whose face was kind enough, but who rolled terrible eyes and scolded while writing.

I heard the words “tyrants, irons, hell, men, Rome, slavery, liberty,” come out of his mouth. I thought that he was crazy. But, having laid down his pen, he bowed to me smilingly.

“You are looking at the room,” he said. “It is as simple as the house of an old Roman. No more gilt on the walls, no more vases on the mantelpieces, nothing that may recall the hated days of the late King, nothing which may be unworthy of the gravity of a free man. ‘Libre, Tibre;’ I must note this rhyme. It is a good rhyme, is it not? Do you like verses, M. Pierre Aubier?”

I replied that I liked verses only too well, and that it would have been better for my court to Monseigneur if I preferred Burke rather than Virgil.

“Virgil is a great man,” replied M. Mille, “but what do you think of Chénier? For me there is nothing more beautiful than his ‘Charles IX.’ I shall not conceal from you that I am trying tragedy. And at the moment when you entered I was finishing a scene which I liked very much. You seem to me to be an honest man. I want to confide to you the subject of my tragedy, but you must say nothing about it. You know what will be the consequence of the least indiscretion. I am composing a ‘Lucretia.’”

Lifting a big book, he read its title-page, “Lucretia, tragedy in five acts, dedicated to Louis, the well-beloved restorer of liberty in France.”

He declaimed two hundred verses of it, and then stopped, saying for an excuse that the rest was still imperfect.

“The Duc’s correspondence,” he said, sighing, “takes from me the most beautiful hours of the day. We receive letters from all the enlightened men of England, Switzerland, and America. I will tell you, M. Aubier, that you are to be employed in copying and classifying letters. If you would like to know the affairs that occupy us presently, I will tell you. We are arranging at Puybonne a farm, with English colonists, who will introduce in France the reforms in agriculture realized by Great Britain. We import from Spain some of those sheep with silky fleece whose flocks have enriched Segovia with their wool, a negotiation so arduous that the efforts of the King had to be united with ours. In fine, we are buying Swiss cows in order to give them to our vassals. I do not mention correspondence on public affairs. This is kept secret. But you are not ignorant of the fact that the Duc de Puybonne’s efforts are tending to apply to France the Constitution of England. Permit me to leave you, M. Aubier. I am going to the theatre. They are playing ‘Alzire.’”

That night I slept in fine sheets and slept badly. I dreamed that my mother’s bees were flying over the ruins of the Bastille, around the Duc de Puybonne, who smiled kindly in an Elysian light. The next day, in the early morning, I went to meet M. Mille, and asked him if he had enjoyed the theatre. He replied that he flattered himself with having learned, during the performance of “Alzire,” some of the secrets by which M. de Voltaire excited the susceptibility of spectators. Then he made me copy letters relative to the purchase of those Swiss cows which the Duc gave to his vassals. As I was applying myself to this task, he said:

“The Duc is kind. I have celebrated his benevolence in verses with which I am not discontented. Do you know the land of Puybonne? No? It is an enchanted place. My verses will tell you the beauties of it.” He recited them. I was amazed. I had never heard at Langres anything as courteous, and I recognized that there was in the air of Paris something indescribable which cannot be found elsewhere.

After dinner I visited the principal monuments of the city. The genius of the arts has thrown for two centuries its treasures on the illustrious shores of the Seine. I knew then only castles and Gothic churches, the melancholy of which inspires in the mind only graceless thoughts. Paris, it is true, still possesses some of these barbarous edifices. Even the cathedral in the City attests, by the irregularity and confusion of its structure, the ignorance of the ages when it was built. The Parisians forgive its ugliness in favor of its antiquity. Father Féval had a habit of saying that all things antique are venerable.

But how different is the spectacle of the monuments of polished centuries! The regularity of the plan, the exact proportion of the parts, the order of the whole; in fine, the beauty of orders imitated from the antique—such are the qualities which are brilliant in the works of modern architects. They were all reunited to make of the colonnade of the Louvre a masterpiece worthy of France and its kings. What a city Paris is! M. Mille has shown to me the playhouse where the most beautiful actresses in the world lend their charms to the inspirations of Mozart and Glück. He has done much more. He has accompanied me to the garden of the Luxembourg, where I have seen, under antique shades, Raynal walking with Dussaulx. O my venerated regent, O my master, O my father, O M. Féval! why are you not a witness of the joy and emotion of your pupil, of our son? I led for six weeks the sweetest sort of life. Around me people announced the return of the golden age, and I already saw advancing the chariot of Saturn and of Rhea. In the morning I copied letters under the direction of M. Mille. A good companion was M. Mille, always smiling, always florid and light. After dinner I read a few pages of the encyclopedia to our good lord, and I was free until the next day. One evening I went to supper at the Porcherons with M. Mille. Women, wearing on their bonnets the colors of the nation, stood at the door with flowers in a basket. One of them came to me, took my arm, and said:

“My dear sir, here is a bunch of roses which I give to you.”

I blushed and did not know what to say. But M. Mille, who knew the manners of the city, said to me:

“You must give six cents for these roses and say something pleasant to the pretty girl.”

I did both, and then I asked M. Mille if he thought that this flower-girl was a good girl. He replied that she was not, but that one had to be polite with all women. I liked the excellent Duc de Puybonne more and more every day. He was the best and simplest of men. He thought that he had given nothing to the unfortunates when he had not given himself. He lived like an ordinary man because he held that the luxury of the rich was theft from the poor. His benevolence was ingenious. I heard him say one day:

“There is no pleasure sweeter than to work for the happiness of the unknown, either by planting some useful tree or by grafting on young buds in the woods branches the fruits of which may some day appease the thirst of a lost traveller.”

The good lord was not preoccupied by philanthropy only. He worked ardently at the Constitution of the kingdom. Deputy of the nobility at the National Assembly, he was seated in the ranks of those amateurs of English liberty who were called monarchical, by the side of Malouet and of Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre. And, although this party seemed condemned already, he saw coming, with all the fervor of hope, the most human of revolutions. We shared his joy.

Despite many causes of anxiety, this enthusiasm supported us the following year. I accompanied M. Mille in the Champ de Mars in the first days of July. There two hundred thousand persons, of all conditions, men, women, and children, raised with their hands the altar where they were to swear to live or to die free. Barbers in blue waistcoats, water-carriers, abbés, coal dealers, Capuchins, girls of the opera in flower gowns, wearing ribbons and feathers, tilled together the sacred soil of the fatherland. What an example of fraternity! We saw Sieyès and Beauharnais attached to the same cart; we saw Gérard, who, like an ancient Roman, passes from the senate to the plough, wield the shovel; we saw a whole family laboring at the same place: the father used the pick, the mother loaded the wheelbarrow, and the children wheeled it around, while the youngest, four years of age, carried in the arms of his grandfather, who was eighty-three, stuttered a patriotic song. We saw processions of gardeners carrying lettuce and daisies on their ploughs. Several corporations followed them behind brass bands. There were printers whose banner bore this inscription: “Printing, first standard of liberty”; then butchers, on whose standard was painted a big knife with these words: “Aristocrats, tremble. Here come the butchers.” And even this seemed to ns to be fraternity.

“Aubier, my friend, my brother,” exclaimed M. Mille, “I feel carried away by poetic enthusiasm. I will compose an ode which I will dedicate to you.” M. Mille recited his verses with great warmth. He was small, but he made big gestures. He had an amaranth coat. All these circumstances caused him to be remarked, and when he finished his stanza there was a circle of curious people around him. People applauded him. He had hardly finished saying, “Open your eyes, fix your mind on this solemn spectacle,” when a woman, wearing a vast black hat with feathers, threw herself in his arms and exclaimed:

“How beautiful this is, Monsieur Mille! Let me embrace you.”

A Capuchin who stood with his pick in the circle of the bystanders applauded at the spectacle of this great embracing. Then young patriots pushed him toward the lady, who embraced him too, among the acclamations of the multitude.

“How beautiful these verses are!” exclaimed the lady with the big hat. “Bravo, Mille!”

“You are too good,” replied M. Mille. “Permit me, Madame Berthemet, to introduce to you my friend Pierre Aubier. He has much merit and will become accustomed to Paris.”

“The dear child,” replied Madame Berthemet, pressing my hand. “Bring him to our house, M. Mille. We have music every Thursday. Does he like music? But what a question! Not to love music is to be a barbarian, a prey to all the furies. Come Thursday, M. Aubier, my daughter Amelia will sing a romance to you.”

While she talked Mme. Berthemet pointed to a young girl with hair dressed in the Greek style and wearing a white gown, whose blond hair and blue eyes seemed to me to be the most beautiful in the world. I blushed in bowing to her. But she did not seem to notice my embarrassment.

When I returned to the Puybonne house I did not conceal from Mille the impression which the beauty of so amiable a person had made upon me. So he added a stanza to his ode, which predicted our marriage.

Alas! M. Mille had not the gift of reading into the future which antiquity attributed to poets. Our happy days were numbered and our beautiful illusions were all to fall. On the morrow of the federation the nation awakened cruelly divided. The King, feeble and limited, fulfilled badly the hopes which the people had placed in him.

The criminal emigration of princes and nobles impoverished the country, irritated the people, and led to war. The clubs predominated over the Assembly. Popular hatreds became more and more threatening. If the nation was the prey of troubles, peace could not reign in my heart. I had seen Amelia again. I had become the assiduous guest of her family, and there was not a week that I did not go two or three times to the house where they lived in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Eustache. Their fortune, which formerly was brilliant, had suffered much from the revolution, and I may say that misfortune ripened our friendship. Amelia, become poor, seemed to me to be more touching, and I loved her. I loved her without hope. What was I, a poor little peasant, to please so graceful a city girl?

I admired her talents. It is while making musical compositions, painting, or translating some English novels, that she could divert herself nobly from the public misfortunes and from those of her family. She displayed in every circumstance a pride which would easily turn into raillery where I was concerned. It was visible that, although I did not touch her heart, I amused her mind. Her father was the most handsome grenadier of his section. Besides that, he was nothing at all. As for Madame Berthemet, she was, despite her petulance, the best of women. She was overflowing with enthusiasm. Parrots, political economists, and verses written by M. Mille made her fall into spasms. She liked me when she had the time, for the newspapers and the opera took much of her time. She was, after her daughter, the person in the world whom I liked best to see.

I had made much progress in the confidence of M. de Puybonne. He did not keep me busy copying letters any longer; he employed me for the most delicate negotiations, and he often made to me confidences wherein M. Mille had no part.

He had lost faith, if not courage. The humiliating flight of Louis XVI. had afflicted him more than I could say. After the return of Varennes, he was assiduous near the sovereign prisoner who had disdained his advice and suspected his sentiments. My dear lord remained desperately faithful to dying royalty. He was at the castle August 10th, and it was by a sort of miracle that he escaped the mob and was able to return to his house. In the night he sent for me. I found him wearing the clothes of one of his intendants.

“Good-by,” he said to me; “I quit a land doomed to all kinds of desolations and crimes. I shall reach England day after to-morrow. I am carrying three hundred louis with me. It is all that I could realize of my fortune. I leave here considerable property. I can trust none but you. Mille is an ass. Take charge of my interests. I know that there shall be peril in doing this, but I esteem you enough to entrust perilous affairs to you.”

I took his hands and kissed them, which was my only answer.

As he was escaping from Paris in disguise and with a false passport, I burned in the chimneys of the house papers which might have compromised entire families and destroyed the lives of hundreds of persons. In the following days I was fortunate enough to sell, at a very low price, the carriages, horses, and plate of M. de Puybonne, and I saved in this way from seventy to eighty thousand livres, which went over the Channel. It was not without the gravest peril that I conducted these delicate negotiations. My life was in danger. Terror reigned over the capital on the morrow of August 10th. In the streets, which the day before had been animated by varied costumes, where were heard the cries of merchants and the steps of horses, was now solitude. All the shops were closed; the citizens, hidden in their houses, trembled for their friends and for themselves.

The barriers were guarded, and none could get out of the frightful city. Patrols of men armed with pikes went through the streets. There was talk of nothing but domiciliary visits. I could hear in my room the steps of armed citizens, the noise of pikes and of guns against neighboring doors, the plaints and cries of inhabitants led to the sections. And, when the “sans-culottes” had terrorized peaceful souls all day in the district, they went to a green-grocer’s shop in the neighborhood, drank, danced, sang the “Ça Ira” till morning, and it was impossible for me to go to sleep. Anxiety made my insomnia more cruel. I feared that some valet had denounced me and that I might be arrested.

There was then a fever of denunciation. There was not a scullion who did not imagine himself a Brutus for having betrayed the masters who fed him.

I was constantly on my guard; a faithful servant was to warn me at the first knock at the door. I threw myself, all dressed, on my bed or in an armchair. I carried the key of the garden gate. But, during the execrable days of September, when I learned that hundreds of prisoners had been massacred in the midst of public indifference, under the approving look of magistrates, horror prevailed over fear and I blushed at taking so much care of my security and at defending so prudently an existence which the crimes of my country desolated.

I feared no longer to show myself in the street and meet the patrols. Yet I loved life. There was a powerful charm in my anguish and in my suffering. A delicious image effaced the sombre spectacle unrolled before me. I loved Amelia, and her young visage, multiplied in my imagination, enchained it entire. I loved her hopelessly. Still, it seemed to me that I was not unworthy of her, since I had behaved like a man with a heart. I flattered myself, at least, that my perils would make me interesting in her eyes.

It was in this humor that I called on her one morning. I found her alone. She talked to me with more sweetness than she had yet shown. A tear fell from her eyes. This threw me into inexpressible trouble,

I threw myself at her feet, took her hand, and bathed it with my tears.

“Oh, my brother,” she said, trying to make me rise.

I did not understand then the cruel sweetness of that word brother. I talked to her with all the susceptibility of my mind.

“Yes!’ I exclaimed, “these times are frightful. Men are wicked; let us fly from them. Happiness is in solitude. There are still distant islands where one may live innocent and hidden. Let us go to them. Let us seek for happiness on the tomb of Virginia.”

While I spoke she looked in vacancy. She seemed to be dreamy, but I could not guess if her dream was similar to mine.

III.

I spent the rest of the day in cruel uncertainty. I could not take any rest nor occupy myself with any care. Solitude was frightful to me and society was importunate. In this humor I wandered at random through the streets and the quays of the city, looking sadly at the mutilated coats of arms, at the front of hotels, and at the decapitated saints at the portals of churches. My reverie led me unwittingly into the garden of the Palais Royal, where a crowd of idlers came to read the gazettes while drinking their coffee. Thus the wooden galleries wore every day an air of festival.

Since the declaration of war and the progress of the united armies Parisians came here for news. The crowd was great when the weather was fine, and there was diversion even in the anxiety.

Many women, dressed in the Greek fashion with simplicity, wore at the waist or in their hair the colors of the nation. I felt more isolated in this crowd. All this noise, all this movement which surrounded me, served only to enclose my thoughts within me.

“Alas!” I said to myself, “have I talked enough, have I expressed all my sentiments, or have I said too much? Will she consent to see me again now that she knows of my love? But does she know, and does she want to know?”

Thus I moaned on the uncertainty of my fate, when my attention was suddenly attracted by a voice that I knew. I raised my head and saw M. Mille, who, standing in a café, was singing among patriots and citizenesses. Dressed in the costume of a national guardsman, he encircled with his left arm a young woman, whom I recognized as one of the flower-girls of Ramponneau. A murmur of approval followed his couplets. He smiled, bowed, and continued to sing. He took from his pocket a ribbon bow and gave it to Sophie. She pinned the ribbon on her bonnet and fixed on the spectators a look which was stupid and triumphant. They applauded. M. Mille bowed. He contemplated the crowd without distinguishing in it either me or anybody else, or rather he saw in that crowd nobody but himself.

“Ah, sir,” exclaimed my neighbor, who embraced me tenderly in his enthusiasm, “if the Prussians and the Austrians could see this they would tremble, sir. Paris, if they came here, would be their grave. The spirit of the people is martial. I have just come from the Tuileries, sir; I have heard singers before the statue of Liberty shout the war-chant of the Marseillais. An agitated crowd repeated in chorus the refrain, ‘To arms, citizens!’ Why were not the Prussians there? They would have all disappeared under the earth!”

My interlocutor was an ordinary man, neither handsome nor ugly, neither small nor tall. He looked like everybody, and there was nothing characteristic or distinctive in him. As he talked loud he was quickly surrounded. After coughing, with an important air, he continued:

“The enemy is nearing Challons. We must enclose him in a circle of fire. Citizens, let us watch ourselves over public salvation. But be distrustful of your generals, distrustful of the Major-General’s staff, distrustful of your ministers, although you have selected them; distrustful even of your deputies in the convention. Let us save ourselves.”

“Bravo!” exclaimed one of the assistants. “Let us fly to Challons.” A small man interrupted him quickly:

“Patriots must not quit Paris until after they have exterminated the traitors.”

These words came out of a mouth which I recognized at once. I could not be mistaken. That enormous head on narrow shoulders, that flat and livid face, that frail and monstrous body, was that of my former master, Father Joursanvault.

A tattered coat had replaced his cassock. His head was dressed with a red cap. His face expressed hatred and apostasy. I turned mine away from him, but I could not but hear the former Oratorian continuing his harangue in these words:

“There was not enough blood spilled in the glorious days of September. The people, always magnanimous, has spared too much the conspirators and traitors.”

At these terrible words I fled in fright. When a child I suspected M. Joursanvault of being neither just nor benevolent. I did not like him. But I was far from divining the blackness of his mind. In discovering that my former master was only a vile scoundrel I felt a bitter pain.

“Why am I not still a child?” I said to myself. “Of what good is life since it makes such meetings possible? Oh, good regent, Father Féval, let your memory soften the sadness of my soul! Where has the turmoil thrown you, oh, my only, my true, master? At least, wherever you are, I am sure that humanity, pity, and heroism reside with you. You have taught me, oh, venerable regent, straightforwardness and courage. Foreseeing the days of trial, you have fortified my heart. May your pupil, your child, not show himself too unworthy of you!”

I had no sooner finished this mental invocation than I felt new courage, and, my thought returning, by a natural inclination, to my dear Amelia, I understood at once what my duty was and resolved to accomplish it. I had revealed my sentiments to Amelia. Should I not make the same avowal to Mme. Berthemet?

I stood at a few steps from the door, and my dreams had led me naturally toward the house where breathed Amelia. I entered, I talked.

Madame Berthemet replied, smiling, that I was a very honest man. Then, in a graver tone, she said:

“I will make a confidence to you which is necessary to your repose. Disabuse yourself; abandon all hope. My daughter is loved by the Chevalier de Saint-Ange, and she is not insensible to this honor. I wish that she would lose the remembrance of it; for our fortune declines every day, and the Chevalier’s love is thus put to a test over which the most ardent sentiments are not always victorious.”

The Chevalier de Saint-Ange! At this name I trembled. I had for a rival the most tender poet, the most amiable narrator. Birth, family, talents, he had everything that was necessary to please. The day before I had seen, in the hands of a lady, on a tortoise-shell box, the portrait in miniature of the Chevalier de Saint-Ange in a dragoon’s costume.

I had envied, as all men did, his masculine elegance and his sovereign grace. Every morning I heard my neighbor, the milliner, sing on the threshold of her door his immortal romance, “The Wager.”

I had read recently with delight the philosophical romance which opened to the Chevalier de Saint-Ange the doors of the French Academy, the admirable novel, “Cynégire,” which leaves far behind it Florian’s “Numa Pompilius.”

“Your ‘Cynégire,’” said the venerable M. Sedaine to the Chevalier de Saint-Ange, in welcoming him in the illustrious company, “your ‘Cynégire’ has been dedicated by you to the memory of Fénelon, and the offering has not been unworthy of the altar.” Such was my rival: this sensitive author of “The Wager,” the emulator of Fénelon and of Voltaire!

I was confounded. Astonishment softened my sorrow.

“What, madame,” I exclaimed, “the Chevalier de Saint-Ange?”

“Yes,” replied Mme. Berthemet, shaking her head, “a man of fine talent. But do not imagine that he is like his heroic poems. Alas! his love declines as our fortune declines.”

She added, with kindness, her regret that the choice of her daughter had not been to my advantage.

“Talent,” she said, “does not make happiness. On the contrary, the men gifted with extraordinary faculties, the poets and orators, should live alone. What need have they of companions in this life where they cannot meet equals? Their genius itself condemns them to selfishness. One cannot be with impunity a superior man.”

But I listened to her no longer. I remained astonished. This revelation had killed my love. I had never expected anything. Without hope, love has little vivacity. Mine died of a word.

The Chevalier de Saint-Ange! Shall I confess it? While my heart bled, I felt a sort of satisfaction in the thought that any other would have been repulsed as I was for such a rival.

I kissed a hundred times the hands of Mme. Berthemet, and I went out of her house quiet, dumb, as if I were the shade of the generous lover who had come an hour before to take to Amelia’s mother his scruples and his avowals. I was without hope; I was not suffering; I felt only surprise, shame, and fear at feeling that I survived my love, which was the best of me.

As I crossed the Pont Neuf to return to my own deserted district, I saw at the foot of the pedestal where the statue of Henry IV. had stood a singer of the Académie de Musique, who was reciting the hymn of the Marseillais with a pathetic voice. The crowd, bareheaded, repeated the refrain in chorus, “To arms, citizens!” but when the singer began the last couplet, in a voice which was slow and profound, the entire people shivered in saintly intoxication. At the verse, “Liberty, liberty,” I fell on my knees on the pavement, and saw that everybody was prone on the ground as I was. Oh, fatherland, fatherland! what is there in thee to make thy children adore thee so? Above the mud and the blood, rises thy radiant image. Oh, fatherland, happy are those who die for thee!

The sun, which descended then in the horizon in sanguinolent clouds, shed liquid flames on the waters of the most illustrious of rivers.

Salve, last ray of my beautiful days!

Oh, in what sombre winter I entered that night! When I was closeted in my little room in the Puybonne house I felt as if I had placed upon me the slab of my coffin. “It is done,” I said to myself. “I love Amelia no longer. But why is it that I am forced to say it to myself incessantly? How is it that, loving her no longer, I can think only of her? Why have I cried with so much bitterness over my poor, unrooted love?”

A cruel anguish came to add itself to the sadness of my heart. The condition of public affairs made me despair. My distress was extreme, and, far from hoping to obtain work, I was reduced to the necessity of concealing myself in order not to be arrested as a suspect.

M. Mille had not reappeared at the house since August 10th. I do not know where he lived; but he never missed a meeting of the Commune, and he recited every day before the municipality a new hymn, which the “sans-culottes” applauded. He was the most patriotic of poets, and the citizen Dorat-Cubières himself seemed in comparison with him to be timid and suspicious to the demagogues. It was dangerous to know me, so M. Mille did not call on me, and delicacy made it an easy duty for me not to seek for him. However, as he was a good man, he sent me the printed collection of his songs. Oh, how little his second muse resembled his first! This one was powdered, made up, and perfumed. The other had the air of a fury with hair made of snakes. I recall still the song of the “sans-culottes,” which wanted to be bad. The suit against the King threw me into indescribable trouble. My days were spent in horror. One morning there was a knock at my door. I guessed that the hand that struck it was friendly, opened the door, and Madame Berthemet fell in my arms, saying:

“Save me, save us! My brother Eustance, my only brother, inscribed on a list of émigrés, has come to seek for asylum in my house. He has been denounced and arrested. He has been in prison for five days. Happily, the accusation which weighs on him is vague and ill founded. My brother has never emigrated. It is enough to release him that somebody should testify on his residence. I have asked this service from the Chevalier de Saint-Ange. He has refused it prudently. Well, my friend, my son, this service, which is perilous for him and still more perilous for you, I come to ask it of you.”

I thanked her for this request as if it were a favor. It was a favor, in fact, and the most precious with which an honest man may be honored.

“I knew very well that you would not refuse me,” exclaimed Mme. Berthemet, embracing me, “but this is not all. You must find a second witness. It is necessary that two witnesses should present themselves in order that my brother be released. My friend, in what awful times we are living! M. de Saint-Ange goes away from us, our misfortune annoys him, and M. Mille would fear to be seen in the company of suspects. Who would have said it, my friend; who would have said it? Do you remember the day of the Federation? We were all animated by fraternal sentiments, and I had a very beautiful gown.”

She left in tears. I went down the stairway after her to seek for a witness, and I was in truth greatly embarrassed to find one. When I placed my hand to my chin in my thought, I realized that I had not been shaved for a week, that this might make me suspicious, and I went at once to my barber.

This barber was a very good man named Larisse, as long as a poplar and as agitated as an aspen leaf. When I went in his shop he was shaving a wine merchant of the district, who was saying all sorts of gentle abominations. He was saying:

“Your head shall be cut and placed at the end of a pike in order to satisfy your aristocratic aspirations. All the enemies of the people must be beheaded, from the fat Capet to the thin Larisse.”

M. Larisse, paler than the moon, shaved with infinite precautions the chin of the insulting patriot. I observed that no hair-dresser ever felt more frightened; and I thought that this was a good augury for the success of the plan which I had suddenly formed. My intention was, in fact, to ask M. Larisse to testify with me before the committee.

“He is such a poltroon,” I said to myself, “that he will not dare refuse.”

The wine merchant went out grumbling and left me alone with the barber, who, still trembling, placed a towel at my neck.

“Ah, sir,” he said, with a voice weaker than a sigh, “hell is unchained against us. Have I studied the art of hair-dressing only to serve demons? The heads that did me honor are now at London or at Coblentz. How fares Monseigneur le Duc de Puybonne? He was a good master.”

I assured him that the Duc lived in London by teaching penmanship. In fact, the Duc had recently written to me that he was living in perfect happiness in London on four shillings sixpence a day.

“That may be,” replied M. Larisse, “but you cannot get your hair dressed as well in London as in Paris. The English know how to make constitutions, but they do not know how to make wigs, and the white of their powder is not pure enough.”

M. Larisse had quickly shaved me. My beard then was not very rough. He had no sooner closed his razor than I had seized him by the wrist and said to him, resolutely:

“My dear M. Larisse, you are a brave man; you will come with me to the general assembly of the Postes Section, in the former Saint-Eustache Church. You will testify with me there that M. Eustance has never emigrated.”

At these words M. Larisse became pale, and murmured with a dying voice: “But I do not know M. Eustance.”

“Nor do I,” I replied.

Which was pure truth. I had formed a good augury from M. Larisse’s temperament. He was annihilated. Fear itself threw him in the peril. I took his arm; he followed without resistance.

“But you are leading me to death,” he said softly.

“To glory,” I replied. I do not know if he had read the tragedies, but he was not insensible to honors; he seemed flattered. He knew something of literature, for he said:

“Dear sir, let me put on my fine clothes. In antiquity victims were decked with flowers.”

He took from his closet a blue coat, which he draped around his long and flexible body. It was in this costume that he accompanied me to the general assembly of the Postes Section.

At the threshold of the door, where were inscribed these words, “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death,” M. Larisse felt the perspiration on his brow. He went in, however. One of the citizens who was sleeping there, among the empty bottles, half awakened to examine our affair, and then sent us to the revolutionary committee of the section.

I knew this committee, for I had accompanied M. Berthemet there twice. The president of it was a lodging-house keeper, the most faithful customers of which were young ladies of the world. Among its members were a doorkeeper and a dyer. We went before the latter. He sat without ceremony, with his sleeves rolled up. He said:

“Citizens, since you bring to me a formal testimony, I have no objection to make, because I am a magistrate, and consequently form suffices for me. I will add only one word. A man who has intelligence and wit should not have the authority to quit Paris at this time because, you see, citizens—”

He hesitated, extended his bare arm, lifted it to his forehead, which he struck with his finger, and said:

“We do not need only that” (he meant his arm, instrument of labor); “we need also this (he meant his forehead, the seat of intelligence).

He praised to us afterward his natural genius, and complained that his parents had given no education to him. Then he began to sign our declaration. In spite of his good will this took a long time. While his arms were painfully wielding the pen, Bistac entered the hall. Bistac had not the good humor of his colleague. His mind was that of a Jacobin. When he saw us, wrinkles came to his forehead and his nostrils swelled. He smelled aristocrats. “Who are you? he asked me.

“Pierre Aubier.”

“Well, Pierre Aubier, do you flatter yourself with having slept in your bed last night?

I stood the test well enough, but my companion began to shiver. His bones cracked so loudly that Bistac noticed it, and forgot me to think only of poor Larisse.

“You have the air of a conspirator,” said Bistac, with a terrible voice. “What is your profession?”

“I am a barber, at your service, citizen.”

“All the barbers are conspirators.”

Fright made M. Larisse do ordinarily the most courageous acts. He has confessed to me since that at this moment he had all the trouble in the world to prevent himself from exclaiming, “Long live the King!” He did not shout, but he replied proudly that he did not owe so many thanks to the revolution which had suppressed wigs and powder and that he was tired of trembling incessantly. He added:

“Take my head; I would prefer to die once rather than to fear always.”

This speech made Bistac hesitate.

Then the other invited us to withdraw.

“Go, citizens, but remember that the Republic has need of this,” and he pointed to his forehead.

Madame Berthemet’s brother was released the next day. Amelia’s mother expressed much gratitude to me and kissed me, for she liked to kiss. She did better than this:

“You have,” she said, “acquired rights to Amelia’s gratitude. I want her to come and thank you herself. She owes an uncle to you. It is less than a mother, it is true, but what praises does not your courage deserve?”

She went to get Amelia.

Alone in the parlor I waited. I asked myself if I would have the strength to see her again. I feared, I hoped, I suffered a thousand deaths.

Five minutes afterward Madame Berthemet reappeared alone.

“Excuse an ingrate,” she said to me. “My daughter refuses to come. ‘I could not endure his presence,’ she said to me; ‘his sight would be cruel to me. He is odious to me. He displayed more courage than the man I love; he has acquired a cruel advantage. I shall never see him again. He is generous; he will forgive me.’”

After reporting these words Madame Berthemet concluded by saying:

“Forget an ingrate.”

I promised to try, and I kept my word. In this, events aided me. Terror reigned. The frightful May 31st took from the moderates their last hopes.

Denounced several times as a conspirator because of the correspondence of M. de Puybonne, I was incessantly threatened with loss of liberty and life.

Having no card of citizenship and not daring to ask for one, I could not endure existence.

They were then making a requisition of one million two hundred thousand men, from the age of eighteen years to that of twenty-five. I asked to be inscribed. On the 7th Brumaire of the year II., at six o’clock in the morning, I took the Nancy route to rejoin my regiment. With the police cap, knapsack, and short tunic, I thought that I had a martial air.

From time to time I turned my head toward the great city, where I had suffered and loved so much. Then I went on my way. I thought of singing to strengthen my heart and I recited the hymn of the Marseillais.

At the first station I presented my passport to peasants, who sent me to bed in the stable, in straw. I rested in delicious sleep; and I thought when I awoke:

“This is well. I am no longer risking the guillotine. It seems to me that I no longer love Amelia, or rather it seems to me that I never loved her. I shall have a sword and a gun. I will have to fear nothing but the bullets of the Austrians. Brindamour and Trompelamort are right: there is no more beautiful trade than that of a soldier. But who would have predicted it, when I was studying Latin under the apple trees in bloom of the Abbé Lamadou? Who would have predicted that I was to defend the Republic? Ah! Monsieur Féval, who would have said that your little Pierre would go to the war?”

At the following station a good woman put me in a bed with white sheets because I resembled her son.

I lodged the next day at the house of a canoness, who placed me in a garret open to the wind and rain; and she did it with much sorrow, so dangerous a sort of brigand a defender of the Republic seemed to her.

At last I met my regiment on the banks of the Meuse. A sword was given to me. I blushed with pleasure and thought that I was at least a foot taller. Do not make fun of this; it is vanity, I concede, but it is the sort of vanity which makes heroes. We were no sooner equipped than we received the order to start for Maubeuge.

We reached the Sambre in darkness. All was hushed. We saw lighted fires on hills on the other side of the river. I learned that they were the bivouacs of the enemy, and my heart beat as though it would break.

I had formed an image of war from Titus-Livius. Well, I call you to attest, woods, prairies, hills, banks of the Sambre and of the Meuse, that this image was false. War, as I made it, consists in traversing burned-up villages, in sleeping in the mud, in listening to the hissing of bullets during the long and sad watches of the night, but of hand-to-hand fights and of great battles I saw none. We slept little and we did not eat. Floridor, my sergeant, a former member of the French Guard, swore that we led a life of festival; he exaggerated, but we were not miserable, for we had the consciousness of doing our duty and of being useful to the fatherland.

We were justly proud of our regiment, which had covered itself with glory at Wattinnies. It was composed, in great part, of soldiers of the ancient regime, solid and well drilled. As it had lost many men in several battles, the holes had been stuffed with young recruits. Without the veterans who framed us, we should have been worth nothing. It takes a great deal of time to form a soldier, and enthusiasm in war does not replace experience.

My colonel was a former nobleman of my village. He treated me with kindness. An old, provincial Royalist, a soldier and not a courtier, he had taken much time to change the white coat of His Majesty’s troops for the blue coat of the Republic’s soldiers. He detested the Republic and gave all the years of his life for her.

I blessed Providence for having conducted me to the frontier, since I found virtue there.

(Written at the bivouac, on the Sambre, from the Septidi of the 27th Frimaire to the Sextidi of the 6th Nivose, an. II. of the French Republic, by Pierre Aubier, recruit.)

THE DAWN

The Cours-la-Reine was deserted. The great silence of the summer days reigned over the green depths of the Seine, on the old trees, whose shadows were beginning to lengthen toward the east, and in the tranquil azure of the sky without clouds, without wind, without threats, and without smiles. A promenader who had come from the Tuileries was walking slowly toward the hills of Chaillot. He had the agreeable thinness of early youth, and wore the coat, the breeches, and the black stockings of the bourgeois, whose reign had come at last. His face expressed more reverie than enthusiasm. He held a book in his hand; his finger, slipped between two leaves, marked the place of his reading, but he was not reading. At times he stopped and turned his ear to the light and still terrible murmur which was rising in Paris, and in this noise, feebler than a sigh, he divined cries of death, of hatred, of joy, of love, drum-calls, firing of guns; in fine, all that revolutions make ascend from the pavement of streets to the warm sun of stupid ferocity and sublime enthusiasm. At times he turned his head and shivered. All that he had learned, all that he had seen and heard in a few hours, filled his head with confused and terrible images: the Bastille taken, the provost killed by a pistol shot in a furious crowd, the Governor massacred on the stoop of the City Hall, a terrible rabble, pale as hunger and as fear, drunk, beside itself, lost in a dream of blood and of glory, rolling from the Bastille to the Grève, and, above one hundred thousand hallucinated heads, the bodies of invalids hanging to lanterns and the forehead crowned with oak of a conqueror in white and blue uniform; the vanquished, preceded by registers, keys, and the silver plate of the antique fortress, ascending the bloody stairs among acclamations; and before them the people’s magistrates, Lafayette and Bailly, glorious, astonished, their feet in blood, their heads in a cloud of conceit! Then fright, reigning still on the unchained crowd, at the rumor that the royal troops are to enter at night in the city; the grilles of palaces torn and turned into pikes, the citizens raising barricades in the streets, and women going up to the roofs of houses with stones, in order to crush with them the foreign regiments!

These violent scenes had reflected themselves in his young and dreamy imagination. He has taken his favorite book, an English book full of meditations on tombs, and he has walked along the Seine, under the trees of the Cours-la-Reine, toward the white house, where night and day goes his thought. All is calm around it. He sees on the banks fishermen seated with their feet in the water, and he follows dreamily the course of the river. Arrived at the first hills of Chaillot, he meets a patrol, which watches over the communications between Paris and Versailles. This troop, armed with guns, muskets, halberds, is composed of working-men wearing the leather apron, of men of the law in black, of a priest, and of a bearded giant in his night-shirt, with bare legs. They stop whoever wishes to pass. They have surprised communications between the Governor of the Bastille and the Court.

But the promenader is young and his air is ingenuous. He says a few words hardly, and the troop smilingly lets him pass. He ascends an alley perfumed with flowers and stops before a garden gate.

This garden is small, but sinuous paths make its walk longer. Willows dip the ends of their branches into a basin where ducks are swimming. There is a fresh lawn before the house. There, on a rustic bench, a young woman is seated, with head bent; her face is concealed by a large straw hat crowned with natural flowers. She wears on her white and pink striped gown a fichu tied at the waist, which gives to the skirt a graceful litheness. Her arms, tightened in narrow sleeves, rest. A basket of antique form placed at her feet is filled with worsteds. Near her a child, whose blue eyes shine through the curls of his golden hair, makes sand houses with a shovel.

The young woman sat immovable, as if charmed, and he at the gate would not break so sweet a charm. At last she raised her head and showed a face which was young and almost childish, the round and pure features of which had a natural expression of softness and friendship. He bowed to her. She extended her hand.

“Good morning, Monsieur Germain; what is the news?”

“Forgive me, madame, for having disturbed your dreams. I was looking at you. Alone, immovable, you seemed to me to be the angel of dreams.”

“Alone, alone,” she replied, as if she had heard only that word. “Is one ever alone?”

And, as she saw that he looked at her without understanding what she meant, she added:

“Let us drop that subject. They are ideas which I have. What news have you?”

Then he related to her the events of the day: the Bastille vanquished, liberty founded.

Sophie listened gravely; then she said:

“One must rejoice; but our joy must be the austere joy of sacrifice. From now on the French do not belong to themselves; they belong to the revolution which will change the world.”

As she talked, the child leaped joyfully to her knees.

“Look, mamma, look at the beautiful garden.”

She said, embracing him:

“You are right, my Emile; nothing in the world is wiser than to make a beautiful garden.”

“It is true,” added Germain; “what gallery made of porphyry and gold is worth a green alley?”

And thinking of the sweet pleasure of accompanying in the shade of trees this young woman leaning on his arm, he exclaimed:

“What care I for men and revolutions?”

“No,” she said, “no. I cannot detach my thought from a great people anxious to found the reign of justice. My attachment to the new ideas surprises you, Monsieur Germain. We have known each other for a short time only. You do not know that my father taught me how to read in the ‘Contrat Social’ and in the Gospels. One day, at the promenade, he pointed out Jean Jacques to me. I was only a child then, but I fell into tears at seeing the darkened face of the wisest of men. I have grown in hatred of prejudices. Later, my husband, a disciple like me of the philosophy of nature, desired that our son should be called Emile and that he should be taught how to work with his hands. In his last letter, written three years ago, on board of the vessel on which he perished several days after, he recommended to me again the precepts of Rousseau on education. I am full of the new spirit. I think that it is necessary to fight for justice and for truth.”

“Like you, madame,” sighed Germain, “I hold fanaticism and tyranny in horror. I like, as you do, liberty; but my soul is without strength. My thought escapes from me at every instant. I do not belong to myself, and I suffer.”

The young woman made no reply. An old man pushed the gate and came with raised arms. He wore neither powder nor wig. Gray and long hair fell on both sides of his bald head. He was dressed in gray; his stockings were blue, his shoes without buckles.

“Victory, victory!” he exclaimed. “The monster is in our hands, and I bring the news of this to you, Sophie!”

“Neighbor, I have just heard it from M. Gerard, whom I present to you. His mother was at Angers my mother’s friend. For six months he has been in Paris. He is willing to come and see me in my hermitage from time to time. M. Gerard, you see before you my neighbor and friend M. Franchot de La Cavanne, man of letters.”

“Say, Nicolas Franchot, laborer.”

“I know, neighbor, that you have signed thus your memoirs on commerce in cereals. I will say then, to please you, and although I think that you are more skilful with the pen than with the plough, Nicolas Franchot, laborer.”

The old man seized Gerard’s hand and exclaimed:

“It has then fallen, this fortress which devoured so many times reason and virtue! They have fallen, the locks under which I spent eight months without air and without light. Thirty-one years ago, February, they threw me into the Bastille for having written a letter on tolerance. At last, to-day, the people have avenged me. Reason and I triumph together. The memory of that day will last as long as the universe: I call to witness this the sun which made Harmodius perish and the Tarquins fly.”

The loud voice of M. Franchot frightened little Emile, who caught his mother’s gown. Franchot, perceiving the child suddenly, raised it from the ground and said with enthusiasm:

“Happier than we, child, you will grow free!”

But Emile, frightened, turned back his head and cried.

“Gentlemen,” said Sophie, wiping away her son’s tears, “you will take supper with me. I expect that M. Duvernay will come, if his patients do not detain him.”

And turning toward Gerard:

“You know that M. Duvernay, the King’s physician, is an Elector of Paris. He would be a Deputy if he were not so modest and had not declined the honor. He is a man of much merit; you shall find pleasure and profit in listening to him.”

“Young man,” added Franchot, “I know M. Duyernay and I know an act of his life which does honor to him. Two years ago the Queen had him called for the Dauphin. Duyernay lived at Sèvres, where a court carriage came every morning to take him to St. Cloud. One day the carriage returned empty to the palace. Duvernay had not come. The next day the Queen reproached him for this. She said:

“‘Had you forgotten the Dauphin?’

“‘Madame,’ replied this honest man, ‘I attend to your son with humanity, but yesterday I was detained by a peasant in childbirth.’”

“Well,” said Sophie, “is this not beautiful and should we not be proud of our friend?”

“Yes, it is beautiful,” replied Germain.

A grave and soft voice was heard near them.

“I do not know,” said the voice, “what excites your enthusiasm, but I like to hear it. There are in these days so many admirable things!”

The man who spoke thus wore a powdered wig and a ruffled shirt with fine lace. It was Jean Duvernay; Gerard knew his face, for he had seen it in a print in the shops of the Palais Royal.

“I come from Versailles,” said Duvernay. “I owe to the Duc of Orleans the pleasure of seeing you this great day, Sophie. He took me to St. Cloud in his carriage. I made the rest of the road in the most convenient way; that is, on foot.”

His silver-buckled shoes and his black stockings were covered with dust. Emile placed his little hands on the steel buttons of the physician’s coat, and Duvernay, pressing him on his knees, smiled for an instant at the lights of that little budding mind. Sophie called Manon. A big girl appeared; she took the child in her arms and hushed, under sonorous kisses, his loud cries.

The table was set in the pavilion. Sophie placed her straw hat on a willow branch; the curls of her blond hair fell on her cheeks.

“you shall have supper in the simplest manner imaginable,” she said, “in the English manner.”

From the place where they sat they could see the Seine and the roofs, the domes and steeples of the city. They remained silent at this spectacle, as if they saw Paris for the first time. Then they talked of the day’s events: of the Assembly, of the reunion of the orders, and of Necker’s exile. They were all four in accord on the point that liberty was forever gained. M. Duvernay foresaw the rise of a new order, and praised the wisdom of the legislators elected by the people. But his thought remained calm, and at times it seemed as if some anxiety was mingled with his hopes. Nicolas Franchot did not preserve this measure. He announced the pacific triumph of the people and the era of fraternity. In vain the savant, in vain the young woman said to him:

“The struggle is only beginning, and we have won only our first victory.”

“Philosophy is governing us,” he replied to them. “What benefits may not reason extend over the men submitted to her powerful empire? The golden age imagined by poets will become a reality. All ills shall disappear with fanaticism and tyranny that engendered them. The virtuous and enlightened man will enjoy all the felicities. What do I say? With the aid of physicians and chemists, he will know how to conquer immortality on earth.”

Sophie shook her head.

“If you wish to deprive us of death, find for us the fountain of youth. Without it your immortality is frightful.”

The old philosopher asked her laughingly if Christian resurrection was more reassuring to her. “As for me,” he said, after emptying his glass, “I fear that the angels and the saints may favor the chorus of virgins at the expense of that of the dowagers.”

“I do not know,” replied the young woman, in a low voice, lifting her eyes. “I do not know of what value these poor charms formed of clay will be to the angels; but I believe that divine power will know better how to repair the outrages of time than your physics and your chemistry. You, who are an atheist, Monsieur Franchot, and who do not believe that God reigns in heaven, may not understand the revolution which is the advent of God on earth.”

She rose. Night had come and the great city was starred with fires.

Gerard offered his arm to Sophie, and, while the old men reasoned together, they walked in the sombre alleys. She told him the name and the history of them.

“We are,” she said, “in the Jean Jacques alley which leads to the Emile drawing-room. This alley was straight. I have made it turn in order that it should pass under the old oak. This oak gives shade to the rustic bench which I have called ‘The Friends’ Rest.’

“Let us sit for a moment on this bench,” said Sophie.

Gerard heard in the silence the palpitations of his heart.

“Sophie, I love you,” he murmured, taking her hand.

She withdrew her hand softly, and showing to him the leaves that a light breeze caused to tremble, she said:

“Do you hear?”

“I hear the wind in the leaves.” She shook her head, and said with a voice as soft as a song:

“Gerard, Gerard, who tells you that it is the wind in the leaves? Who tells you that we are alone? Are you, too, one of those vulgar minds that have divined nothing of the mysterious world?”

And as he questioned her with a look full of anxiety, she said:

“Monsieur Germain, will you go up to my room? You will find a book on the table, and bring it to me.”

He obeyed. While he was absent the young widow looked at the dark foliage that trembled in the wind of night. He came back with a little book, the edges of which were gilt.

“The ‘Idyls of Gesner’; that is it,” said Sophie. “Open the book at the place that I have marked, and if your eyes are good enough to read in the moonlight, read.”

He read these words:

“Ah, often my soul will come to soar around you; often, when full of noble and sublime sentiments you will meditate in solitude, a light breath will touch your cheeks; let then a soft shiver penetrate your soul!”

She stopped him.

“Do you understand now, Gerard, that we are never alone, and that there are words which I may not hear as long as a breath from the ocean shall pass through the leaves of oaks?”

The voices of the two old men came nearer.

“God is the good,” said Duvernay.

“God is evil,” said Franchot, “and we will suppress him.”

They and Gerard said good-by to Sophie.

“Farewell, gentlemen,” she said. “Let us cry, Long live Liberty, and Long live the King, and you, my neighbor, do not prevent us from dying when we have need of it.”

MADAME DE LUZY

I.

When I entered, Pauline de Luzy extended her hand to me. Then we kept silent for a moment. Her straw hat and her scarf rested negligently on an armchair. The prayer in “Orphée” was open on the spinnet. Going to the window, she looked at the sun setting in the horizon.

“Madame,” I said at last, “do you remember the words that you uttered two years ago at the foot of this hill by the river toward which your eyes are now turned?

“Do you remember that with a prophetic hand you pointed out to me in advance the days of trial, the days of crime and terror? You stopped then on my lips the avowal of my love, and you said to me, ‘Live, fight for justice and for liberty!’ Madame, since your hand, which I have not enough covered with tears and kisses, pointed out the way to me, I have walked boldly. I have obeyed you. I have written; I have talked. For two years I have fought without truce against those who sow trouble and hatred, against the tribunes who seduce the people by convulsive demonstrations of false love, and the cowards who make sacrifices to coming dominations.”

She stopped me with a gesture and signalled to me to listen. We heard then coming through the perfumed air of the garden, where the birds were singing, distant cries of death: “The aristocrat to the lantern! His head on a pike!”

Pale, immovable, she held her finger on her mouth.

“It is,” I continued, “some unfortunate that they are pursuing. They make domiciliary visits and arrests night and day in Paris. Perhaps they wish to come in here. I must retire, not to compromise you. Although not well known in this district, I am in these times a dangerous guest.”

“Stay!” she said.

For the second time cries rent the peaceful air of night. They were mingled with the noise of footsteps and gunshots. They came nearer; one could hear, “Close the exits; let not the scoundrel escape!”

Madame de Luzy seemed calmer as danger came nearer.

“Let us go up to the second story,” she said. “We may see there through the blinds what they are doing outside.”

But they had no sooner opened the door than they saw in the vestibule a man, livid, undone, whose teeth chattered, whose knees knocked together. This spectre murmured with a stifled voice:

“Save me, hide me; they are there! They have broken my door, invaded my garden; they are coming!”

II.

Madame de Luzy recognized Planchonnet, the old philosopher who lived in the neighboring house, and asked him in a low voice:

“Did my cook see you?”

“Nobody has seen me.”

“God be praised!”

She led him into her bedroom, where I followed him. We had to consult quickly, to find some hiding place where she might keep Planchonnet for several days, for several hours at least. It was agreed that I should watch the surroundings and that, on a signal which I should give, our poor friend would get out by the small garden gate. Meanwhile he could not stand. He was an astounded man.

He tried to make us Understand that he was persecuted—he, the enemy of priests and of kings—for having conspired with M. de Cazotte against the Constitution, and having joined, August 10th, the defenders of the Tuileries. It was a vile calumny. The truth was that Lubin pursued him with his hatred; Lubin, formerly his butcher, whom he had wished to whip a hundred times to teach him how to weigh his meat, and who now presided over the section where he had kept his store.

While murmuring this name with a strangled voice, he imagined he saw Lubin himself, and he hid his face in his hands. Steps were coming up the stairway. Madame de Luzy drew the latch and pushed the old man behind a screen. Somebody knocked at the door, and Pauline recognized the voice of her cook, who was shouting at her to open the door; that the municipality was at the gate with the national guard, and that they were coming to search the house.

“They say,” the girl added, “that Planchonnet is here. I know very well that he is not, that you would not conceal a scoundrel like him; but they will not believe me.”

“Well, let them come,” shouted Madame de Luzy through the door. “Make them visit the whole house from cellar to garret.”

When he heard this dialogue poor Planchonnet fainted behind his screen, where I had great trouble to revive him by throwing water on his temples. When this was done:

“My friend,” said the young woman to the old man in a low voice, “trust in me. Remember that women are crafty.”

Then with tranquillity, as if she was preoccupied by her domestic and daily task, she drew the bed a little out of the alcove, undid the coverlet, and, with my aid, arranged the three mattresses in such a manner as to make a space between the lowest and the highest.

As she did this the noise of shoes, guns, and harsh voices came from the stairway. It was for us a terrible moment; but the noise ascended little by little above our heads. We understood that the guard, led by the cook, was going through the garret. The ceiling cracked; we could hear threats, coarse laughter, and kicks against the partitions. We breathed; but there was not a second to lose. I helped Planchonnet to slip into the space between the mattresses.

Madame de Luzy was shaking her head. The bed thus undone had a suspicious air. She tried to make it over, but could not succeed.

“I shall have to get into it,” she said.

She looked at the clock. It was seven. She thought that it would not be natural for her to be in bed so soon. As for saying that she was ill, it would not do. The cook would guess the stratagem.

She remained pensive for a few seconds; then, quietly, simply, with august candor, she undressed before me, went to bed, and ordered me to take off my shoes, my coat, and my cravat.

“You must be my lover, and they will surprise us. When they come you will not have had the time to arrange your dress.”

All our preparations had been made when the civic troop came down from the garret. The miserable Planchonnet trembled so that the bed shook.

His breath was so loud that its hissing could be heard in the corridor.

“It is a pity,” murmured Madame de Luzy; “I was so pleased with my little stratagem! Well, God help us!”

The door shook.

“Who is there?” asked Emilie.

“The representatives of the nation.”

“Can you not wait a moment?”

“Open, or we break the door!”

“My friend, open the door.”

Suddenly, by a sort of miracle, Planchonnet stopped trembling.

III.

Lubin was the first to enter. He wore his scarf of office, and was followed by a dozen men carrying pikes. Turning his look from Madame de Luzy to me, he exclaimed:

“We have caught lovers in their nest Excuse us, beautiful girl!”

Then turning toward the guards:

“The sans-culottes alone are moral.”

But in spite of his maxim, he sat on the bed, and holding the chin of the beautiful aristocrat, said:

“It is true that this beautiful mouth was not made to say Paters and Ave Marias night and day. It would be a pity. But the Republic before everything. We are looking for Planchonnet, the traitor. He is here; I am sure of it. I want him. He shall be guillotined.”

“Why don’t you look for him?” They looked under the furniture, in the closet, put their pikes under the bed, and sounded the mattresses with their bayonets.

Lubin, scratching his ear, looked at me from the corner of his eye. Madame de Luzy, fearing for me embarrassing questions, said:

“My friend, you know the house as well as I do. Take the keys and escort M. Lubin. I know that it will be a pleasure for you to escort the patriots.”

I escorted them to the cellar, where they drank a great number of bottles, after which Lubin broke open the wine casks, and then, coming out of the cellar, overflowing with wine, gave the signal to leave. I went with them to the gate, which I closed on their heels, and I ran to tell Madame de Luzy that we were saved.

At this news she called:

“Monsieur Planchonnet, Monsieur Planchonnet!”

A feeble sigh replied to her.

“God be praised!” she exclaimed. “Monsieur Planchonnet, you frightened me. I thought you were dead.” Then turning toward me:

“My poor friend. You had so much pleasure in telling me from time to time that you loved me. You will never say it again!”

DEATH ACCORDED

After wandering for a long time in the deserted streets, André sat on the bank of the Seine and looked at the water whitening the hill where had lived Lucy in the days of joy and hope.

He had not been so quiet for a long time.

At eight o’clock he took a bath. He went to an eating-house of the Palais Royal and looked at the public papers while waiting for his meal. He read in the “Courrier de L’Egalité” the list of those who were condemned to be killed on the Revolution Square the 24th Floréal.

He ate with good appetite. Then he rose, looked in a mirror to see if his dress was in good order and if his complexion was good, and went with a light step across the river to the small house which is at the corner of the Seine and Mazarine streets. It is there that the citizen Lardillon lived. He was the substitute of the public accuser in the revolutionary tribunal, an obliging personage whom André had known as a Capuchin at Angers, and as a sans-culotte in Paris.

He rang the bell. After a few moments a face appeared through a screened door, and Citizen Lardillon, having assured himself prudently that his visitor’s face and his name were not dangerous, opened the door. He had a full face, a florid complexion, a brilliant eye, a humid mouth, and a red ear. His appearance was that of a man jovial but timorous. He led André into the first room of his apartment. A small round table was set with two covers. There were a chicken, a patty, a ham, a tureen of fois gras, and cold meats covered with jelly. On the floor six bottles were cooling in a pail. A pineapple, cheeses, and preserves were on the mantelpiece. Flagons of cordials were placed on a desk encumbered by papers.

“Citizen Lardillon,” said André, “I come to ask a service of you.”

“Citizen, I am ready to serve you if it will cost nothing to the Republic.”

André replied smilingly:

“The service that I ask of you will cost nothing to the Republic or to you.”

At a sign from Lardillon, André took a seat.

“Citizen substitute,” he said, “you know that for two years I have conspired against your friends and that I am the author of the article entitled ‘The Altars of Fear.’ You will do me no favor in arresting me. You will do only your duty. This is not the service which I ask of you. But listen to me: I am in love, and the person with whom I am in love is in prison.”

Lardillon bowed.

“I know that you are not insensible to love, Citizen Lardillon. I pray you to reunite me with the one that I love and to send me at once to Port-Libre.”

“It is more than life, it is happiness, that you ask of me, citizen,” said Lardillon with a smile.

He extended his arm toward his bedroom and cried:

“Epicharis, Epicharis!”

A tall, dark woman appeared in a short skirt with a cockade in her hair.

“Look at the face of this citizen and never forget it,” said Lardillon. “Like us, he knows that separation is the greatest of evils. He wants to go to prison and to the guillotine with the woman that he loves. Epicharis, may we refuse him this favor?”

“No,” replied the girl.

“You have said it. Citizen, give me your address.”

“Is it understood?” said André.

“It is understood,” replied Lardillon, extending his hand.

André said that he regretted not being able to serve him in his turn.

“Humanity wants no salary,” replied Lardillon. “Who knows when our turn will come? In the meanwhile let us drink. Citizen, will you share our meal?”

Epicharis tried to retain André, but he escaped with the promise of the public accuser’s substitute.

AN ANECDOTE OF FLOREAL

I.

The doorkeeper has closed the gate of the prison on the former Countess Fanny d’Aveny, arrested as a measure of public security, as the register says, but in reality for having given asylum to refugees. She is in the old building where formerly the solitaries of Port Royal enjoyed solitude in common, and which has been changed into a prison without alteration of any sort.

Seated on a bench while the clerk inscribes her name, she is thinking:

“Why do you do such things and what do you want of me?”

The jailer has an air more rough than wicked, and his daughter, who is pretty, wears pleasingly the white bonnet with a cockade, and the bows in colors of the nation. The man leads Fanny into a big yard, in the midst of which is a beautiful acacia. She will wait there until he prepares for her a bed and a table in a room where five or six persons are already imprisoned, for the house is full. In vain he sends to the guillotine every day its overflowing numbers. Every day the committees fill it anew.

In the yard Fanny sees a young woman busy engraving a monogram on the bark of a tree, and recognizes Antoinette d’Auriac, her friend.

“You here, Antoinette?”

“You here, Fanny? Have your bed placed near mine. We shall have many things to say to each other.”

“Many things. How about M. d’Auriac, Antoinette?”

“My husband? I had almost forgotten him. This was unjust. He was always very good to me. I suppose that he is in prison somewhere.”

“And what are you doing here, Antoinette?”

“Hush. What time is it? If it is five o’clock the friend whose name I unite with mine on this tree is no longer in this world, for he went at noon before the revolutionary tribunal. His name was Gesrin, and he was a volunteer in the northern army. I made his acquaintance in this prison. We have passed sweet hours together at the foot of this tree. He was a praiseworthy young man. But I have to think of making things comfortable for you here.”

And she led Fanny into the room where she had a bed, and obtained the jailer’s consent that the two friends should be together.

They agreed to scrub the next morning the floor of their room.

The evening meal, served meagrely by a patriotic caterer, was eaten in common. Each prisoner brought his plate and his wooden fork and spoon and received his portion of pork and cabbage. Fanny saw at this coarse table women whose gayety astonished her. Like Madame d’Auriac, they were studiously dressed. They were near death, and retained the desire to please. Their conversation was as elegant as their appearance, and Fanny soon learned of intrigues made and unmade in these sombre halls where death excited love. Then, seized by indescribable embarrassment, she felt a great desire to press a friendly hand. She remembered the one whom she loved, and a regret as cruel as a remorse rent her heart. Ardent tears fell on her cheeks. In the light of the smoky lamp she observed her companions, whose eyes burned with fever, and she thought:

“We are to die together. How is it that I am sad and that my mind is troubled, while for these women life and death are equally light?” And she wept all night.

II.

Twenty long, monotonous days had passed heavily. The yard where the lovers go to find silence and shade is deserted to-night. Fanny, who felt smothered in the humid air of the corridors, comes to sit on the grass which surrounds the foot of the old acacia by which the yard is shaded. The acacia is in bloom, and the breeze which caresses it comes out of it all perfumed. Fanny sees a placard nailed on the bark of the tree, under the monogram engraved by Antoinette. She reads on the placard verses by the poet Vigée, a prisoner like herself.

After reading these verses, Fanny dreams. She reviews mentally her life, sweet and calm; her loveless marriage, her mind amused by music and poetry, preoccupied by friendship, grave, without trouble; then the love of an honest man, which had enveloped without touching her, and which she felt better in the silence of the prison. And, thinking that she was about to die, she lamented her fate. A perspiration of agony ascended to her temples. In her anguish she lifted her ardent eyes to the sky, which was full of stars, and she murmured:

“My God, give me hope!”

At this moment a light step came near her. It was Rosine, the daughter of the jailer, who wished to talk to her in secret.

“Citizeness,” said the pretty girl, “a man who loves you will wait for you in the avenue of the observatory with a carriage. Take this bundle; it contains clothes similar to those which I wear; put them on in your room at supper time. You are of my size and blond like me. In the dark, one of us may be taken for the other. A guard, who is my lover and whom we have put in the plot, will go to your room and bring to you the basket with which I go to market.

“You will go with him down the stairway, whereof he has the key, and which leads to my father’s lodge. On that side the door is neither closed nor guarded. You must only avoid my father’s seeing you. My lover will place his back against the lodge’s window and will talk to you as he talks to me. He will say to you, ‘Good-by, Citizeness Rose, and do not be so wicked.’ You will walk quietly into the street. Then I will go out of the front gate and meet you in the carriage which is to take us away.”

Fanny drank with these words the breaths of nature and spring. With all the forces of her breast swollen with life, she breathed in liberty.

She saw, relished her salvation in advance; and, as an idea of love was mingled with it, she placed her two hands on her heart in order to restrain her happiness. But little by little, reflection, which was powerful in her, prevailed over sentiment. She fixed on the jailer’s daughter an attentive look, and said to her:

“My beautiful child, for what reason are you so devoted to me, whom you do not know?”

“It is,” replied Rose, “because your good friend will give me a great deal of money when you shall be free, and that I will marry then Florentin, my lover. You see, citizeness, that it is for me that I am working. But I like better to save you than to save another.”

“I thank you, my child; but why do you prefer?”

“Because you are gentle and your good friend has a great deal of sorrow. It is agreed, is it not?”

Fanny extended her hand in order to take the bundle which Rose was handing to her. But withdrawing her arm at once:

“Rose, do you know that if we are discovered the discovery will be death to you?”

“Death!” exclaimed the young girl; “you frighten me. Oh, no! I did not know it.”

Then, already reassured, she said:

“Citizeness, your good friend would know how to conceal me.”

“There is no safe hiding place in Paris. I thank you for your devotion, Rose, but I do not accept it.”

Rose remained stupefied.

“You shall be guillotined, citizeness, and I shall not marry Florentin!”

“Be reassured, Rose. I can serve you without accepting what you propose.”

“Oh, no. It would be stolen money.”

The jailer’s daughter prayed, cried, entreated for a long time. She knelt and took the edge of Fanny’s dress.

Fanny pushed her away and turned her head. A ray of the moon illuminated the calmness of her beautiful face.

The night was smiling, a breeze was passing; the prisoners’ tree, shaking its odoriferous branches, shed pale flowers on the head of the voluntary victim.

THE LITTLE LEAD SOLDIER

That night, as fever of influenza prevented me from sleeping, I heard very distinctly three knocks on the glass of a case which is at the side of my bed and in which live, pell-mell, figurines in porcelain of Saxony or in bisque of Sèvres, statuettes of terra-cotta of Tanagra or of Myrina, small bronzes of the Renaissance, Japanese ivories, glass of Venice, cups of china, boxes in Martin varnish, trays in lacquer, enamel caskets; in fine, a thousand nothings that I venerate unto fetichism and that animate for me the remembrance of smiling or melancholy hours. The knocks were light but distinct, and I recognized by the light of the lamp that it was a little soldier of lead, lodged in the furniture, who was trying to obtain his liberty. He succeeded, and soon, under his fist, the glass door opened itself. To tell the truth, I was not surprised. This little soldier always seemed to me to have the air of a very tough customer. And for two years, since Madame G. M. gave it to me, I have expected from him all sorts of impudences. He wears the white coat bordered with blue. He is a member of the French Guard, and everybody knows that that regiment was not distinguished for its discipline.

“Hello, there,” I cried, “La Fleur, Brindamour, La Tulipe! Could you not manage to make less noise and let me rest in peace? I am ill.”

The fellow replied, grumbling:

“Such as I am, bourgeois, a hundred years ago I took the Bastille, after which I emptied a great number of bottles. I do not think that there remain many leaden soldiers as old as I am. Goodnight. I am going to the parade.”

“La Tulipe,” I replied severely, “your regiment was broken by order of Louis XVI., August 31, 1789. You are not to go to any parade. Remain in your case.”

La Tulipe curled his mustache, and looking at me from the corner of his eye with contempt, said:

“You do not know that every year, in the night of December 31, while the children are asleep, the grand review of leaden soldiers passes in files on the roofs, among the chimneys, that smoke joyfully, and from which escape the last ashes of the Yule logs? It is a heedless cavalcade, wherein rides many a cavalier who is headless. The shades of all the leaden soldiers who died in the war pass thus in an infernal racket. There are only twisted bayonets and broken sabres. And the souls of the dead dolls, all pale in the moonlight, see them pass.”

This discourse perplexed me.

“And so, La Tulipe, it is a custom, a solemn usage. I have much respect for customs, traditions, legends, and popular beliefs. We call that sort of thing folklore, and make of it studies which divert us a great deal. La Tulipe, I see with great pleasure that you are a traditionist. Yet I do not know if I must let you come out of your case.”

“You must,” said a harmonious and pure voice which I had not yet heard and which I recognized at once to he that of the young Tanagra woman who, tightened in the folds of her himation, stood near the French guard, whom she dominated by the elegant majesty of her height. “You must. All the customs transmitted by our ancestors are equally respectable. Our fathers knew better than we do what is permissible and what is reprehensible, for they were nearer the gods. It is proper, therefore, to let this soldier accomplish the warlike rites of his ancestors. In my time they did not wear, like this one, a ridiculous blue coat with red revers. They were covered by their shields only. And we were much afraid of them. They were barbarians. You also are a barbarian. In vain you have read the poets and the historians. You do not know what is the beauty of life. You were not at the Agora, while I spinned the wool of Milet in the yard of the house, under the antique mulberry tree.”

I did my best to reply with moderation:

“Beautiful Pannychis, your little Greek nation has conceived some forms that rejoice our minds and eyes forever. But there were spoken every day on your Agora as many silly things as may be ground out in one session of our municipal councillors. I do not regret that I was not a citizen of Larisse or of Tanagra. However, it is well to acknowledge that you have spoken well. Customs must be followed, or else they are no longer customs. White Pannychis, you who spinned the wool of Milet under the antique mulberry, you shall not have made me hear in vain good words of advice; on your recommendation I permit La Tulipe to go wherever folk-lore calls him.”

Then a little dairy-maid in bisque of Sèvres, her two hands on her churn, turned toward me her entreating looks.

“Sir, do not let him go. He promised marriage to me. He is the lover of the eleven thousand virgins. If he goes I will never see him again.”

And, hiding her round cheeks in her apron, she cried with all her heart. La Tulipe had become as red as the rever of his coat. He cannot endure scenes, and it is extremely disagreeable to him to hear reproaches that he has deserved. I reassured, in the best way that I could, the little dairy-maid, and warned my French guard not to remain late after the review in some witch’s wine-room. He promised, and I wished him good luck. But he did not go. Strangely, he remained quiet on his shelf, budging no more than the other figures that surrounded him. I expressed my surprise to him. He said:

“Be patient. I could not go under, your eyes without going against all the laws of the occult. When you fall asleep it will be easy for me to escape in a ray of moonlight, for I am subtle. But there is nothing pressing, and I can wait an hour or two. We can do nothing better than talk. Do you want me to tell you some old-time tales? I know more than one.”

“Tell one,” said Pannychis.

“Tell one,” said the dairy-maid.

“Tell one, La Tulipe,” said I, in my turn.

He took a seat, stuffed his pipe, asked for a glass of beer, coughed, and began in these terms:

“Ninety-nine years ago I was on a table with a dozen comrades who resembled me as if we were brothers; some were standing, others were lying down; several were damaged in the head or in the foot: heroic ruins of a box of leaden soldiers bought the preceding year at the Saint Germain fair. The room was hung in pale-blue silk. A spinnet, chairs having lyres for backs, a table of mahogany, a white bed ornamented with roses, doves in couples along the cornice, all smiled with tender grace. The lamp shone softly and the flames in the hearth made wings palpitate in the shade. Seated in front of the table in her dressing-gown, her delicate neck bent under the magnificent and pale aureola of her hair, Julie was turning the pages of the letters that slept in the drawers.

“Midnight rang; it is the sign of the ideal passage from one year to another. The pretty clock, where laughed a gilded Cupid, announced that the year was finished.

“At the moment when the hands of the clock met, a little ghost appeared. A pretty child came out of the room where he slept, threw himself in the arms of his mother, and wished her a happy new year.

“‘A happy new year, Pierre; I thank you. But do you know what a happy year is?

“He thought he knew. However, she wished to tell him.

“‘A year is good, my dear, for those who went through it without hatred and without fear.”

“She kissed him, she carried him into the bed from which he had escaped, and then she came back to her seat before the table. She looked at the flame which shone in the hearth, and the letters, from which dried flowers fell. She did not like to burn them. She had to burn them, for if these letters were discovered they would send to the guillotine the one who wrote them and the one who received them. If it were only for herself she would not burn them, so tired is she of disputing her life against the executioners. But she thought of him, a refugee, denounced, sought for, hidden in some garret at the other end of Paris. One of these letters would have sufficed to send him to death.

“Pierre slept warmly in the other room; the cook and Nanon had retired in the rooms on the top floor. The grand silence of snow-time reigned. The vivid and pure air agitated the flame in the hearth. Julie is to burn these letters, and it is a task which she may not accomplish without profound and sad thoughts. She does not burn these letters without rereading them.

“They were in good order, for Julie put in all that surrounded her the exactness of her mind.

“These, already yellowed, are three years of age, and Julie lives again in the silence of the night her enchanted hours. She yields a page to the flames only after she has spelled ten times its adored syllables.

“The calmness around her is profound. From hour to hour she goes to the window, lifts the curtain, sees in the silent shadow the steeple of Saint Germain des Prés, silvered by the moon, then begins again her work of slow and pious destruction. And how could she refrain from drinking again these delicious pages? How could she deliver to the flames those lines so dear, before imprinting them in her heart? The calm around her is profound. Her mind palpitates with youth and love. She reads:

“‘Absent, I see you, Julie; I walk surrounded by the images that my thought creates. I see you, not immovable and cold, but vivid, animated, always diverse, and always perfect. I assemble around you in my dreams the most magnificent spectacles of the universe. Happy the lover of Julie. All charms him because he sees everything in her. In loving her he likes to live; he admires this world that she illuminates; he cherishes this earth that she ornaments. Love reveals to him the hidden meaning of things. He understands the infinite forms of creation; all show to him the image of Julie; he hears the voices without number in nature; they all murmur to him the name of Julie. He bathes his looks with delight in the light of day, thinking that this happy light bathes also the face of Julie, and throws a divine caress over the most beautiful of human forms. To-night the first stars will make him startle; he will say to himself: She is looking at them perhaps at this moment. He breathes her in all the perfumes of the air. He wants to kiss the earth that carries her.

“‘My Julie, if I must fall under the hatchet of the executioners, if I must, like Sidney, die for liberty, death itself shall not be able to retain in the shade where you shall not be my indignant remains. I will fly to thee, my beloved. Often my soul will come in thy presence.’

“She reads and thinks. Night comes to an end. Already a livid light comes through the curtains: it is morning. The servants have begun their work. She wants to finish her own. Has she not heard voices? No, the calmness around her is profound. The calmness is profound because the snow hushes the sound of steps. People are there. Blows make the door fall. To hide the letters, to close the drawers, it is too late. All that she can do, she does; she takes the papers in her arms and throws them under the sofa.

Some of the letters fall on the carpet. She pushes them with her foot, takes a book, and throws herself into an armchair. The president of the district enters, followed by twelve men carrying pikes. He is a former taxidermist, named Brochet, who shakes with fever and whose bloodshot eyes swim in perpetual horror.

“He makes a sign to his men to guard the doors, and addressing Julie, says, ‘Citizeness, we have just learned that you are in correspondence with the agents of Pitt, the émigrés and the conspirators in the prisons. In the name of the law, I come to take your papers. You have long been pointed out to me as an aristocrat of the most dangerous sort. The Citizen Rapoix, who stands before your eyes, has confessed that in the winter of you gave money and clothes to him in order to bribe him. Moderate magistrates have spared you too long, but I am the master in my turn, and you shall not escape the guillotine. Give us your papers, citizeness.’

“‘Take them yourself,’ said Julie; ‘my desk is open.’

“There were still some birth-cards, marriage announcements, bills and bonds, that Brochet examined one by one. He felt them and turned them round like a man who does not know how to read and is distrustful, and he said, from time to time:

“‘ Bad! The name of the King has not been erased. This is bad, bad!

“Julie inferred that the visit would be long and minute. She could not restrain from casting a furtive look toward the sofa, and she saw the corner of a letter project from under it like the white ear of a cat. At this view her anguish ceased suddenly. The certainty of her being discovered, placed into her mind a tranquil assurance, and on her face a calmness similar to that of security. She is sure that the men will see that piece of paper which she sees. White on the red carpet, it explodes in one’s eyes. But she does not know if they will discover it at once, or if they will take time to see it. This doubt preoccupies and amuses her. She has a sort of mental pleasure in this tragic moment in looking at the patriots coming near or away from the sofa.

“Brochet, who has finished with the papers in the table, becomes impatient, and says that he will find what he is looking for.

“He overturns the furniture, looks behind the pictures, and strikes the woodwork with the hilt of his sword. He discovers no hiding-places. He takes out the mirror to see if there is anything at the back of it. There is nothing.

“Meanwhile his men take up some of the flooring. They swear that an aristocrat will not mock the sans-culotte. But not one of them has seen the little white paper coming out from under the sofa.

“They lead Julie into the other rooms of the apartment and ask for all the keys. They break open the furniture and the glass in the windows. And they find nothing.

“Still Brochet does not despair. He returns to the bedroom.

“‘The papers are here, I am sure.’

“He examines the sofa, declares that it is suspicious, and cuts it open with his sword. He finds nothing that he is looking for, swears frightfully, and gives to his men the order to leave.

“He is already at the door, when, turning toward Julie his clenched fist, he says:

“Tremble, for you will see me again. I am the sovereign people!”

“And he is the last to go out.”

At last they have gone. She hears the noise of their steps on the stairway. She is saved! Her imprudence has not betrayed her! She runs to kiss her Pierre, who is sleeping with closed fists as if nothing had been touched around his cradle.”

Having thus spoken, La Tulipe lighted his pipe and emptied his glass.

“My friend,” I said, “one must be just. For a French guard you narrate with delicacy. But it seems to me that I have read this story somewhere.”

“It may be that Julie related it. She is a person of infinite wit.”

“And what became of her?”

“There were beautiful days for her in the time of the consulate; still she murmured at night to the trees of her park secrets which were painful. You see, sir, she was better armed against death than against love.”

“And he who wrote such elegant letters?”

“He became a baron and prefect under the Empire.”

“And little Pierre?”

“He died a colonel of gendarmerie at Versailles, in 1859.”

“The deuce he did!”

THE END