part I

am a carbonaro. Our lodge was surprised; I was brought, in chains, from Romagna to Rome. Buried in a dungeon lighted night and day by a lamp, I passed thirteen months there. A charitable soul conceived the idea of rescuing me. They dressed me in women’s clothes. As I was coming out of prison and was passing the warders at the last door, one of them cursed the carbonari; I gave him a slap. I assure you that this was not a piece of vain bravado, but simply thoughtlessness. Pursued through the streets of Rome at night after this imprudence, wounded with bayonets, fast losing my strength, I rushed up the stairs of a mansion, the door of which was open; I heard the soldiers coming up after me; I sprang into the garden; I fell down only a few paces from a woman who was walking there.”

“The Countess Vitteleschi, my father’s friend!” said Vanina.

“What! Has she told you?” exclaimed Missirilli. “In any case, the lady, whose name must never be uttered, saved my life. As the soldiers came into her house to seize me, your father took me out of it in his carriage. I feel very ill; for some days this bayonet-wound in my shoulder has prevented me from breathing. I am going to die, in despair, too, because I shall not see you again.”

Vanina had listened with impatience; she went out hastily: Missirilli could discover no pity in her fine eyes; only the expression of a haughty character which had been wounded.

At night, a surgeon appeared; he was alone. Missirilli was in despair; he feared that he would never see Vanina again. He questioned the surgeon, who bled him and gave him no answer. The succeeding days, the same silence. Pietro’s eyes never left the terrace-window by which Vanina had been accustomed to enter; he was very unhappy. Once, about midnight, he thought he saw some one in the shadow on the terrace: was it Vanina?

Vanina came every night to press her cheek against the young carbonaro’s window-panes.

“If I speak to him,” she said to herself, “I am lost! No, I must not see him again!”

Having taken this resolution, she recalled, in spite of herself, the fondness which she had conceived for the young man when she so foolishly took him for a woman. And now, after so sweet an intimacy, she must forget him! In her more reasonable moments, Vanina was terrified at the change which had taken place in her thoughts. Since Missirilli had named himself, all the things she had been accustomed to think about were as if covered with a veil, and seemed very far away.

A week had not passed before Vanina, pale and trembling, entered the young carbonaro’s room with the surgeon. She came to tell him that the prince must be made to promise to let a servant take his place. She did not remain ten seconds; but some days afterwards she came back again with the surgeon, out of humanity. One night, though Missirilli was much better and Vanina had no longer the excuse of fearing for his life, she ventured to come alone. Nothing could exceed Missirilli’s happiness at seeing her, but he thought to conceal his love; above all, he did not wish to forget the dignity of a man. Vanina, who had come to his room covered with blushes and afraid she would have to listen to words of love, was disconcerted by the noble and devoted, but far from tender, friendliness with which he received her. She went away without his trying to detain her.

Some days after, when she returned, the same conduct, the same assurances of respectful devotion and eternal gratitude. So far from having to put a curb on the young carbonaro’s transports, Vanina asked herself if she alone was in love. This young girl, till then so proud, bitterly felt the extent of her folly. She affected gaiety, even coldness, came less often, but could not bring herself to cease seeing the young invalid.

Missirilli, burning with love, but remembering his obscure birth and his duty towards himself, had vowed never to descend to talking of love unless Vanina remained a week without seeing him. The young princess’s pride disputed every foot of the way.

“Well,” she said to herself at last, “if I see him, it is on my own account, it is for my amusement, and I will never avow the interest with which he inspires me.”

She paid long visits to Missirilli, who talked with her as he might have done if twenty people had been present. One night, after having spent the whole day in detesting him and promising herself to be even colder and severer than usual to him, she told him that she loved him. Soon she had nothing left to refuse him.

Though her folly was great, it must be owned that Vanina was perfectly happy. Missirilli had no more thought of what he considered due to his dignity as a man; he loved as they love for the first time at nineteen and in Italy. He had all the scruples of passionate love, even to the extent of acknowledging to the proud young princess the policy which he had employed to make her fall in love with him. He was astonished at the excess of his happiness. Four months passed only too quickly. One day the surgeon gave the invalid his liberty. “But what am I to do?” thought Missirilli. “Am I to remain in hiding under the roof of one of the handsomest women in Rome? And the vile tyrants who kept me thirteen months in prison without letting me see the light of day will think they have broken my spirit! Italy, thou art unfortunate indeed, if thy children abandon thee for so little!”

Vanina never doubted that Pietro’s greatest happiness would be to remain attached to her for ever; he seemed only too happy; but a saying of General Bonaparte rankled in the young man’s soul and influenced all his conduct towards women. In 1796, when General Bonaparte was leaving Brescia, the magistrates, who accompanied him to the gate of the town, said to him that the Brescians loved liberty more than all other Italians.

“Yes,” he answered, “they love to talk about it to their mistresses.”

Missirilli said to Vanina with some constraint:

“As soon as it is night, I must go out.”

“Take good care to be in the palace again before daybreak; I’ll wait for you.”

“At daybreak I’ll be several miles from Rome.”

“Indeed,” said Vanina coldly, “and where are you going to?”

“To Romagna, to take my revenge.”

“Seeing that I am rich,” Vanina said with the calmest air imaginable, “I hope that you will accept some arms and some money from me.”

Missirilli looked at her for a moment without moving a muscle; then, throwing himself into her arms:

“Soul of my soul, you make me forget everything else, even my duty. But, the nobler your heart is, the better you should understand me.”

Vanina wept copiously, and it was settled that he should not leave Rome for another two days yet.

“Pietro,” she said to him next day, “you have often told me that a well-known man, a Roman prince for example, who had command of plenty of money, could render great service to the cause of liberty, if ever Austria should be involved in any great war at a distance from us.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Pietro in astonishment.

“Well then, you have courage; all you lack is position: I am going to offer you my hand and two hundred thousand livres a year. I undertake to get my father’s consent.”

Pietro threw himself at her feet; Vanina was radiant with joy.

“I love you passionately,” he said; “but I am a poor servant of my country; and, the unhappier Italy is, the more faithful I must be to her. To obtain Don Asdrubale’s consent, I should have to play a sorry part for many years. Vanina, I refuse you.”

Missirilli was in a hurry to commit himself by this speech. His courage threatened to fail him.

“My misfortune,” he exclaimed, “is that I love you more than life, that to leave Rome is the worst of tortures for me. Ah! why is Italy not delivered from the barbarians? With what pleasure I should embark along with you to go and live in America!”

Vanina remained as if frozen. This refusal of her hand had astonished her pride; but soon she cast herself into Missirilli’s arms.

“You never seemed so dear to me as now,” she exclaimed; “yes, my little country surgeon, I am yours for ever. You are a great man, like our ancient Romans.”

All ideas of the future, all the gloomy suggestions of good sense disappeared; there was a moment of perfect love. When they were able to talk sensibly, Vanina said:

“I shall be in Romagna almost as soon as you. I’ll get sent to the baths at Poretta. I will stop at our castle at San Nicolo, near Forli----”

“There I’ll spend my life with you!” exclaimed Missirilli.

“My part in future is to dare everything,” Vanina resumed with a sigh. “I shall ruin myself for you, but what matter----. Could you love a woman who has lost her honour?”

“Are you not my wife?” said Missirilli, “and a wife always adored? I shall know how to love you and protect you.”

Vanina had to go and pay visits. Scarcely had she left Missirilli when he began to think his conduct barbarous.

“What is our _country_, after all?” he said to himself. “It is not a being to whom we owe any gratitude for any benefit, and who might be unhappy and curse us if we failed to be grateful. _Country_ and _liberty_ are like my cloak, a thing that is useful to me, that I must buy, no doubt, if I have not inherited it from my father; but after all I love country and liberty because these two things are useful to me. If I can do nothing with them, if they are no more use to me than a cloak in August, what is the good of buying them, at an enormous price too? Vanina is so beautiful! She has such a remarkable mind! People will seek to please her; she will forget me. What woman ever had only one lover? Those Roman princes, whom I despise as citizens, have such an advantage over me! They must be very lovable! Ah, if I go away, she will forget me, and I shall lose her for ever!”

In the middle of the night Vanina came to see him; he told her of the indecision in which he had been plunged, and the examination to which, because he loved her, he had subjected the great word _country_. Vanina was very happy.

“If he had to choose definitely between his country and me,” she said to herself, “the choice would fall on me.”

The clock of the neighbouring church struck three; the moment of their last farewells arrived. Pietro tore himself from the arms of his beloved. He was already descending the little stair, when Vanina, restraining her tears, said to him with a smile:

“If you had been tended by some poor countrywoman, would you not do something out of gratitude? Would you not try to repay her? The future is uncertain; you are going to travel amidst enemies; give me three days out of gratitude, as if I were a poor woman, and in repayment of my trouble.”

Missirilli remained. At last he quitted Rome. Thanks to a passport bought from a foreign embassy, he reached his home. There was great rejoicing; they had given him up for dead. His friends wished to celebrate his safe return by killing one or two carabineers, as the police in the Papal states are called.

“Do not let us kill an Italian that knows the use of arms, unless we are forced to,” said Missirilli; “our country is not an island, like happy England: we need soldiers to resist the intervention of the kings of Europe.”

Shortly afterwards, Missirilli, hard pressed by the carabineers, killed two of them with the pistols that Vanina had given him. A price was set on his head.

Vanina did not make her appearance in Romagna: Missirilli thought he was forgotten. His vanity was hurt; he began to dwell on the difference of rank which separated him from his mistress. In a moment of softening and regret for his past happiness, he took the notion of returning to Rome to see what Vanina was doing. This mad thought was on the point of prevailing over what he believed to be his duty, when one evening the bell of a mountain-church sounded the angelus in a strange fashion, as if the ringer were preoccupied. It was the signal for the meeting of the lodge of carbonari to which Missirilli had been affiliated on his arrival in Romagna. That same night, they all met in a certain hermitage in the woods. The two hermits, stupefied with opium, had no suspicion of the use that was being made of their little dwelling. Missirilli, who arrived very downcast, learned that the head of the lodge had been arrested, and that he, a young man of barely twenty, was to be elected head of a lodge which included men over fifty, who had been engaged in the conspiracies since Murat’s expedition of 1815. Pietro felt his heart beat at receiving this unexpected honour. As soon as he was alone, he resolved to think no more of the young Roman lady who had forgotten him, and to consecrate all his thoughts to _delivering Italy from the barbarians_.[18]

Two days later, Missirilli saw in the list of arrivals and departures sent to him as head of the lodge that the Princess Vanina had just arrived at her castle of San Nicolo. To read this name caused more trouble than pleasure to his soul. In vain he thought to make sure of his fidelity to his country by restraining himself from hastening that very night to the castle of San Nicolo; the thought of Vanina whom he was neglecting prevented his fulfilling his duties in a reasonable fashion. He saw her the next day; she loved him as she had done at Rome. Her father, who wished to marry her, had hindered her departure. She brought two thousand sequins with her. This unexpected assistance helped wonderfully to establish Missirilli in his new dignity. Thanks to them they got daggers made in Corfu, they gained over the confidential secretary of the legate charged with pursuing the carbonari, and also obtained the list of parish priests who served as spies to the government.

It was at this period that one, not the most unreasonable, of the conspiracies that have been attempted in unhappy Italy was finally organized. I shall not enter into details that would be out of place here. I shall content myself with saying that, if the enterprise had been crowned with success, Missirilli would have been able to claim a great share of the glory. According to it several thousand insurgents would have risen at a given signal, and awaited under arms the arrival of their superior heads. The decisive moment was at hand, when, as always happens, the conspiracy was paralysed by the arrests of the leaders.

Vanina had not long arrived in Romagna when she fancied she could see that love of country would make her lover forget all other love. The young Roman’s pride was chafed. She tried in vain to reason with herself; black disappointment took possession of her; she found herself cursing liberty. One day when she had come to Forli to see Missirilli, she was no longer mistress of her grief, which, so far, her pride had always been able to master.

“Really,” she said to him, “you love me like a husband; that’s not what I want.”

Her tears soon began to flow; but they were tears of shame at having descended to reproaches. Missirilli responded to her tears like one preoccupied. All at once it occurred to Vanina to leave him and return to Rome. She found a cruel joy in punishing herself for the weakness which had just made her speak. After some moments’ silence, her mind was made up; she decided that she was unworthy of Missirilli if she did not leave him. She rejoiced in the prospect of his sad surprise when he sought for her at his side, and did not find her. Soon the thought that she had been unable to win the love of the man for whose sake she had committed so many follies revived all her tenderness. She thereupon broke the silence, and did everything in the world to elicit a word of love from him. He said many very tender things to her, with an air of abstraction; but it was with quite a much profounder accent that, talking of his political enterprises, he exclaimed mournfully:

“_Ah, if this affair does not succeed, if the government discovers it this time, I’ll give it up!_”

Vanina remained motionless. For an hour and more she had had the feeling that she was seeing her lover for the last time. His words flashed a fatal ray into her mind. She said to herself:

“The carbonari have already got several thousand sequins from me. There can be no doubt about my devotion to the conspiracy.”

Vanina at last roused herself from her reverie, to say to Pietro:

“Will you come and spend twenty-four hours with me at the castle of San Nicolo? Your gathering this evening does not require your presence. To-morrow morning, at San Nicolo, we can walk about; that will calm your agitation and give you all the coolness that you need at such an important juncture.”

Pietro consented.

Vanina left him to make preparations for the journey, locking, as usual, the little room in which she hid him.

She hastened to a former waiting-woman of hers, who had left her to get married and set up a small business at Forli. On arriving at this woman’s, she hurriedly wrote on the margin of a book of hours, which she found in her room, an exact indication of the place where the lodge of carbonari was to meet that same night. She concluded her denunciation with these words: “This lodge consists of nineteen members; here are their names and addresses.” After writing this list, very exact, except that Missirilli’s name was omitted, she said to the woman, whom she could depend on:

“Take this book to the Cardinal Legate; let him read what is written and give you back the book. Here are ten sequins; if ever the legate pronounces your name, your death is assured; but you will save my life if you get the legate to read the page I have just written.”

Everything succeeded perfectly. The legate’s fears prevented him from behaving like a great lord. He let the woman of the people who asked to speak with him appear in his presence masked, but on condition that she had her hands tied. In this state the shopwoman was brought into the presence of the great person, whom she found entrenched behind an immense table covered with a green cloth.

The legate read the page of the book of hours, holding it well away from him, for fear of some subtle poison. He gave it back to the shopwoman, and did not have her followed. In less than forty minutes after leaving her lover, Vanina, who had seen her former waiting-woman’s return, appeared once more to Missirilli, convinced that thenceforth he was entirely hers. She told him that there was an extraordinary commotion in the town; patrols of carabineers were to be seen in streets where they never used to go.

“If you’ll take my advice,” she added, “we’ll start for San Nicolo at once.”

Missirilli consented to do so. They walked to the young princess’s carriage, which, with her companion, a discreet and well-paid confidante, was waiting for her half a league outside the town.

On arriving at the castle of San Nicolo, Vanina, who was uneasy about the strange step that she had taken, redoubled her tenderness to her lover. But it seemed to her that in talking love to him she was acting a part. The night before, when she played the traitor, she had forgotten about remorse. As she clasped her lover in her arms, she said to herself:

“There is a word that might be uttered in his hearing, and, once it was pronounced, he would have a horror of me at once and for ever.”

In the middle of the night, one of Vanina’s servants came abruptly into her room. This man was a carbonaro, though she did not suspect it. So, then, Missirilli had secrets from her, even about details like that. She shuddered. The man had come to warn Missirilli that during the night the houses of nineteen carbonari at Forli had been searched, and they themselves arrested the moment they returned from the lodge. Although taken by surprise, nine had escaped. The carabineers had been able to take ten of them to prison in the citadel. On entering it, one of them had thrown himself down the well, which is very deep, and had killed himself.

Vanina was covered with confusion; fortunately Pietro did not observe it: he could have read her crime in her eyes.... “At this very moment,” the servant added, “the garrison of Forli is forming a cordon in all the streets. Each soldier is within speaking distance of his neighbour. The inhabitants cannot cross from one side of the street to the other except where an officer is stationed.”

After the man had gone, Pietro was pensive, but only for an instant.

“There is nothing that can be done for the moment,” he said at last.

Vanina was like to die; she trembled beneath her lover’s glance.

“Whatever is wrong with you?” he said at last.

Then he began to think about something else, and ceased to look at her. About the middle of the day, she ventured to say to him:

“That’s another lodge discovered; I should think you’ll keep quiet for some time now.”

“_Very quiet_,” Missirilli answered, with a smile that made her shudder.

She went to make a necessary visit to the village priest of San Nicolo, perhaps a spy of the Jesuits. On returning for dinner at seven o’clock, she found the little room where her lover was hidden deserted. Beside herself, she ran all through the house seeking for him; he was not there. In despair she returned to the little room; only then did she catch sight of a note; she read:

“_I am going to surrender myself to the legate; I despair of our cause; Heaven is against us. Who has betrayed us? Apparently the wretch who threw himself into the well. Since my life is useless to poor Italy, I do not wish that my comrades, seeing that I alone have not been arrested, should imagine that I have sold them. Adieu; if you love me, think on how to avenge me. Ruin, annihilate, the infamous wretch that has betrayed us, even though he be my father._”

Vanina fell into a chair, half-fainting and plunged in the most cruel unhappiness. She was unable to utter a word; her eyes were dry and burning.

At last she flung herself on her knees.

“Great God! accept my vow,” she exclaimed; “yes, I will punish the infamous wretch who has been a traitor; but Pietro must first be restored to liberty.”

An hour later she was on her way to Rome. Her father had long been urging her to return. During her absence, he had arranged her marriage with Prince Livio Savelli. Vanina had scarcely arrived when he mentioned it to her, trembling. To his great astonishment, she consented at the first word. That same evening, at Countess Vitteleschi’s house, her father presented Don Livio almost officially to her; she talked a great deal with him. He was a most elegant young man, and kept the finest possible horses; but, though he was admitted to be clever, his character was supposed to be so light that he was not an object of suspicion to the government. Vanina thought that by first turning his head she would make a convenient agent of him. Since he was nephew to Monsignore Savelli-Catanzara, governor of Rome and minister of police, she supposed that the spies would not presume to follow him.

After having treated the amiable Don Livio exceedingly well for some days, Vanina announced to him that he would never be her husband; he was, according to her, empty-headed.

“If you were not a child,” she told him, “your uncle’s clerks would have no secrets from you. For example, what has been decided about the carbonari who were discovered recently at Forli?”

Two days later Don Livio came to tell her that all the carbonari taken at Forli had made their escape. She fastened her great black eyes upon him with the bitter smile of most profound contempt, and did not deign to speak to him all that evening. The next day but one Don Livio came to acknowledge to her with a blush that he had been deceived the first time.

“But,” he said, “I have got the key to my uncle’s study; I have seen from the papers that I found there that a Congregation (or Commission) composed of some of the leading cardinals and prelates is meeting in the strictest secrecy and discussing whether these carbonari should be tried at Ravenna or at Rome. The nine carbonari taken at Forli and their head, one Missirilli, who has been foolish enough to surrender himself, are at the present moment confined in the castle of San Leo.[19]

At the word “foolish,” Vanina pinched the prince with all her might.

“I want,” she said, “to see the official papers myself, and go into your uncle’s study with you; you have most likely read them wrong.”

At these words Don Livio shuddered; Vanina was demanding a thing almost impossible; but the young woman’s strange genius redoubled his love. A day or two later Vanina, disguised as a man and wearing a pretty little coat of the Savelli livery, was able to spend half an hour amidst the police minister’s most secret papers. She felt a thrill of the keenest delight when she discovered the daily report on “Pietro Missirilli, prisoner awaiting trial.” Her hands trembled as she held the paper. As she read that name she was on the point of being overcome. When they went out from the governor of Rome’s palace Vanina permitted Don Livio to embrace her.

“You are coming well out of the tests to which I am submitting you,” she said.

After a speech like that the young prince would have set fire to the Vatican to please Vanina. That evening there was a ball at the French ambassador’s; she danced a great deal, and almost always with Don Livio. He was intoxicated with happiness; she must not allow him to reflect.

“My father is sometimes strange,” Vanina said to him one day. “This morning he dismissed two of his servants, who came to tell me their sorrows. One of them has asked a place with your uncle, the governor of Rome; the other, who has been an artilleryman with the French, would like to be employed in the castle of Sant’ Angelo.”

“I’ll take them both into my service,” said the young prince briskly.

“Is that what I asked you?” Vanina replied proudly. “I repeated those poor fellows’ petitions word for word; they ought to get what they asked, and not something else.”

There was nothing more difficult. Monsignore Catanzara was anything but an imprudent man, and only admitted servants into his house who were well known to him. In the midst of a life apparently full of all manner of pleasures, Vanina, tormented by remorse, was very unhappy. The slowness of events was killing her. Her father’s man of business had procured money for her. Ought she to flee from her father’s house and go to Romagna, and attempt to get her lover out of prison? Senseless as this notion was she was on the point of carrying it into execution when chance took pity on her.

Don Livio said to her:

“The ten carbonari of Missirilli’s lodge are going to be transferred to Rome on the understanding that they are to be executed in Romagna after they have been condemned. That is what my uncle has got the Pope to sanction this evening. You and I are the only persons in Rome who know this secret. Are you satisfied!”

“You are becoming a man,” Vanina replied; “make me a present of your portrait.”

The day before Missirilli was due to arrive at Rome Vanina found a pretext for going to Città-Castellana. The prison of that town is where the carbonari spend the night when they are transferred from Romagna to Rome. She saw Missirilli in the morning as he came out of prison. He was chained by himself to a cart; he seemed to her to be pale, but by no means downhearted. An old woman threw a bunch of violets to him; Missirilli smiled her his thanks.

Vanina had seen her lover; all her thoughts seemed renewed; she had fresh courage. A long time ago she had procured a good preferment to the Abbate Cari, the chaplain of the castle of Sant’ Angelo, in which her lover was to be confined; she had made this good priest her confessor. At Rome it is no small thing to be confessor of a princess who is niece to the governor.

The trial of the Forli carbonari did not last long. In revenge for their arrival in Rome, which it had been unable to prevent, the extreme party so contrived that the commission which was to try them was composed of the most ambitious prelates. This commission was presided over by the minister of police.

The law against carbonari is clear; those from Forli could cherish no hope; none the less they defended their lives by every possible subterfuge. Not only did their judges condemn them to death, but several declared for atrocious tortures, that their hands should be cut off, and such like. The minister of police, whose fortune was made (for no one leaves that position except to take a red hat), had no use for cut-off hands: when he referred the sentence to the Pope he had the punishment of all the condemned men commuted to several years’ imprisonment. Pietro Missirilli alone was excepted. The minister regarded that young man as a dangerous fanatic, and besides he had already been condemned to death as guilty of the murder of the two carabineers already mentioned. Vanina knew about the sentence and its commutation a few minutes after the minister had returned from his audience of the Pope.

Next day Monsignore Catanzara returned to his palace about midnight and found no sign of his valet in his room; the minister, astonished, rang several times; at last an old, imbecile servant appeared: the minister, out of all patience, decided to undress unaided. He locked his door; it was very warm; he took his gown and threw it in a heap on a chair. The gown, thrown too hard, went over the chair and struck the muslin curtain at the window, and showed the form of a man. The minister quickly rushed to his bed and seized a pistol. As he was returning to the window a very young man, in his livery, came towards him pistol in hand. At this sight the minister raised his pistol and took aim; he was about to fire; the young man said to him, laughing:

“What, Monsignore, do you not recognize Vanina Vanini?”

“What is the meaning of this unseemly pleasantry?” the Minister retorted angrily.

“Let us discuss things coolly,” said the young woman. “To begin with, your pistol is not loaded.”

The Minister, astonished, satisfied himself that such was the case; after which he drew a dagger from his vest-pocket.[20]

Vanina said to him, with a charming little air of authority:

“Let us be seated, Monsignore.”

And she calmly took her place on a sofa.

“Are you alone, though?” the Minister said.

“Absolutely alone, I swear!” exclaimed Vanina.

The Minister was careful to verify this: he went round the room and looked everywhere; after which he sat down on a chair three paces from Vanina.

“What interest should I have,” said Vanina in a gentle and reasonable tone, “in attempting the life of a moderate man, who would probably be succeeded by some weak, hot-headed person that would be capable of undoing himself and others besides.”

“What do you want, pray, madam?” the minister said somewhat testily. “This scene is not to my taste, and must cease.”

“What I am about to add,” Vanina replied haughtily, suddenly forgetting her gracious air, “concerns you more than me. There is a desire that the life of the carbonaro Missirilli should be spared: if he is executed, you will not survive him a week. I have no interest in all this; the folly which you deplore I did to amuse myself in the first place, and next, to oblige a lady who is one of my friends. I wished,” Vanina continued, resuming her affability, “I wished to render a service to an accomplished man, who soon will be my uncle, and, from all appearance, should carry the fortunes of his house to a great pitch.”

The minister cast aside his vexed air: Vanina’s beauty no doubt contributed to this rapid change. Monsignore Catanzara’s taste for pretty women was well known in Rome, and in her disguise of a footman of the house of Savelli, with well-fitting silk stockings, a red vest, her little sky-blue coat laced with silver, and the pistol in her hand, Vanina was ravishing.

“My future niece,” said the minister, almost laughing, “you are committing a great folly, and it will not be your last.”

“I hope that so discreet a person as you will keep my secret, especially from Don Livio; and, to make sure of your promise, my dear uncle, if you grant me the life of my friend’s protégé, I’ll give you a kiss.”

Thus continuing the conversation in that half-jocular tone in which Roman ladies know how to discuss the most important affairs, Vanina contrived to give this interview, which she had begun pistol in hand, the air of a visit paid by the young princess Savelli to her uncle the governor of Rome.

Soon Monsignore Catanzara, although rejecting with scorn the notion of being influenced by fear, went so far as to explain to his niece all the difficulties that he would encounter in saving Missirilli’s life. As he discussed them, the minister walked up and down the room with Vanina; he took up a carafe of lemonade that was on the chimney-piece, and poured some into a crystal glass. When he was on the point of putting it to his lips, Vanina secured it, and, after holding it some time, let it fall into the garden, as if by carelessness. A moment later, the minister took a chocolate pastille out of a sweetmeat-box. Vanina snatched it from him, and said, laughing as she did so:

“Do take care; everything in the house is poisoned, for they intended your death. It is I who have obtained the respite of my future uncle, so as not to enter the family of Savelli absolutely empty-handed.”

Monsignore Catanzara, greatly astonished, thanked his niece, and gave her great hopes of Missirilli’s life.

“Our bargain is settled,” exclaimed Vanina, “and in proof of it, here is your reward,” she said, embracing him.

The minister took his reward.

“I must own, my dear Vanina,” he added, “that I am not fond of blood. Besides, I am still young, though I perhaps look very old to you; and I may live to see the day when blood shed now will leave a stain.”

Two o’clock was striking when Monsignore Catanzara escorted Vanina to the private gate of his garden.

The day after next, when the minister appeared before the Pope, not a little anxious about the course that he had to pursue, His Holiness said to him:

“Before we go any further, I have a favour to ask you. There is one of those carbonari from Forli, who is still under sentence of death; the thought keeps me from sleeping: the man must be saved.”

The minister, seeing that the Pope had made up his mind, made many objections, and ended by writing a decree, or _motu proprio_, which the Pope signed, contrary to custom.

It had occurred to Vanina that she might perhaps obtain her lover’s pardon, but that they would try to poison him. The previous evening, Missirilli had received some small parcels of ship-biscuit from Abbate Cari, her confessor, with a warning not to touch the food provided by the State.

Vanina, having afterwards learned that the Forli carbonari were to be transferred to the castle of San Leo, wished to try to see Missirilli at Città-Castellana on his way; she arrived in that town twenty-four hours in advance of the prisoners; there she found Abbate Cari, who had preceded her by some days. He had got the jailor’s leave for Missirilli to hear Mass at midnight in the prison chapel. He had obtained even more: if Missirilli would allow his arms and legs to be fastened with a chain, the jailor would withdraw to the door of the chapel, so that he could always see the prisoner, for whom he was responsible, but could not hear what he said.

The day which was to decide Vanina’s destiny dawned at last. Early in the morning she shut herself up in the prison chapel. Who could tell the thoughts which agitated her during that long day? Did Missirilli love her sufficiently to pardon her? She had denounced his lodge, but she had saved his life. When reason regained command of that tortured soul, Vanina hoped that he would consent to leave Italy in her company; if she had sinned, it was through excess of love. As four o’clock struck, she heard the tread of the carabineers’ horses on the pavement in the distance. Each tread seemed to ring in her heart. Soon she made out the rumbling of the carts which conveyed the prisoners. They halted in the little square in front of the prison; she saw two carabineers lift out Missirilli, who was alone on a cart and so heavily loaded with irons that he could not move. “At least he is alive,” she said to herself with tears in her eyes; “they have not poisoned him.” The evening was cruel; the altar-lamp, which was hung high up, and which the jailor stinted of oil, was the only light in the gloomy chapel. Vanina’s eyes wandered over the tombs of some great lords of the Middle Ages who had died in the neighbouring prison. Their statues looked ferocious.

All sounds had long ago ceased; Vanina was absorbed in her black thoughts. Shortly after midnight struck, she thought she heard a slight noise like the flutter of a bat. She tried to walk, and fell half-fainting on the altar-rail. At the same instant, two phantoms stood beside her, without her having heard them come. They were the jailor and Missirilli, so loaded with chains that he was almost swathed in them. The jailor opened a lantern, which he placed on the altar-rail, beside Vanina, in such a position that he could see his prisoner clearly. Then he withdrew into the background, near the door. Scarcely had the jailor removed, when Vanina flung herself on Missirilli’s neck. As she clasped him in her arms, she felt nothing but his cold, sharp chains. “Who put these chains on him?” she thought. She felt no pleasure in embracing her lover. To this pain succeeded another more piercing: she believed, for a moment, that Missirilli knew of her crime, his reception of her was so chilly.

“Dear friend,” he said to her at last, “I regret the love which you have conceived for me; though I search, I cannot discover the merit that might have inspired it. Let us return, I entreat you, to more Christian feelings, let us forget the illusions which once led us astray; I cannot be yours. The continual misfortune that has dogged my enterprises proceeds, perhaps, from the state of mortal sin in which I have always lived. Even listening to the counsels of human prudence, why was I not arrested with my friends on that fatal night at Forli? Why was I not found at my post at the moment of danger? Why was it that my absence could authorize the most cruel suspicions?--Because I had another passion than the liberation of Italy.”

Vanina could not recover from the surprise that she felt at the change in Missirilli. Though he did not appear to have grown thinner, he looked like thirty. Vanina attributed this change to the bad treatment that he had suffered in prison; she burst into tears.

“Ah,” she said to him, “the jailors promised so faithfully that they would treat you kindly!”

The fact was that, at the approach of death, all the religious principles that were consistent with his passion for the liberation of Italy had revived in the young carbonaro’s heart. Little by little Vanina perceived that the astonishing change which she noticed in her lover was entirely moral, and in no wise the result of physical ill-treatment. Her grief, which she had thought at its height, was augmented by this discovery.

Missirilli ceased speaking; Vanina seemed on the point of being suffocated by her sobs. He added, with some emotion:

“If I loved anything on earth, it would be you, Vanina; but thanks to God I have only one object left me in life; I will die in prison, or in the endeavour to restore liberty to Italy.”

There was another silence; evidently Vanina was unable to speak: she tried to do so, in vain. Missirilli added:

“Duty is cruel, my friend; but, if there were no pain in accomplishing it, where would heroism be? Give me your word that you will not try to see me again.”

As well as his close-bound chain allowed him, he made a little motion with his wrist and stretched out his fingers to Vanina.

“If you will let a man who was dear to you advise you, be sensible and marry the deserving man whom your father intends for you. Do not make any awkward confidence to him; but on the other hand do not ever try to see me again; let us be strangers to each other in future. You have advanced a considerable sum for the service of your country; if ever it is delivered from its tyrants, that sum will be repaid to you in national funds.”

Vanina was overwhelmed. While he spoke to her, Pietro’s eye had never once flashed, except when he uttered the word “country.”

At last pride came to the rescue of the young princess; she had provided herself with diamonds and small files. Without a word of reply, she offered them to Missirilli. “I accept them out of duty,” he said, “for I must try to escape; but I will never see you again; I swear it in presence of your new benefits. Adieu, Vanina; promise me that you will never write to me, never try to see me; leave all of me to my country, I am dead to you: farewell.”

“No!” Vanina replied furiously, “I wish you to know what I have done, led by the love I had for you.”

With that she told him all her proceedings from the moment that Missirilli quitted the castle of San Nicolo to surrender himself to the legate. When the recital was ended, Vanina said:

“All that is nothing; I did more for love of you.”

And she told him of her treason.

“Ah, monster!” exclaimed Pietro in a rage, hurling himself upon her, and he tried to fell her with his chains.

He would have succeeded in doing so, but for the jailor, who ran forward at his first cries. He seized Missirilli.

“Here, monster! I won’t be indebted to you for anything,” said Missirilli to Vanina, flinging the files and diamonds at her as well as his chains permitted; and he hastened away.

Vanina remained utterly crushed. She returned to Rome, and the newspapers announce that she has just married Prince Don Livio Savelli.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] “_Librar l’Italia de’ barbari_,” a saying of Petrarch’s in 1350, afterwards repeated by Julius II., by Machiavelli, and by Count Alfieri.

[19] Near Rimini in Romagna. It was in this castle that the famous Cagliostro perished; it is said in the district that he was suffocated there.

[20] A Roman prelate would no doubt not be fit to command an army corps bravely, as was more than once done by a general of division who was minister of police at Paris at the time of Mallet’s attempt; but he never would have let himself be held up in his own house so easily. He would have been too much afraid of being quizzed by his colleagues. A Roman who knows that he is hated does not go about without being well armed.

The writer has not thought it necessary to justify some other little differences between the ways of doing and speaking at Paris and those at Rome. So far from toning down these differences, he has thought it right to state them boldly. The Romans whom he describes have not the honour of being Frenchmen.

THE CHILD WITH THE BREAD SHOES THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

Listen to this story which the grandmothers of Germany tell their grandchildren,--Germany, a beautiful country of legends and dreams, where the moonlight, playing on the mists of Old Rhine, creates a thousand fantastic visions.

At the end of the village a poor woman lived alone in a humble cottage: the house was very poor and contained but the barest necessities in the way of furniture.

An old bed with twisted columns whence hung serge curtains yellow with age; a bread-bin; a walnut chest, polished till it shone, but the numerous worm-eaten holes of which were stopped with wax, indicated a long period of service; an arm-chair, covered with tapestry from which the colours had faded and which had been worn thin by the shaking head of the old grandmother; a spinning-wheel polished with use: that was all.

We were about to forget a child’s cradle, quite new, very cosily padded and covered with a pretty flowered counterpane stitched by an indefatigable needle, that of a mother ornamenting the crib of her little Jesus.

All the wealth in the little house was centred there.

The child of a burgomaster or of an aulic councillor could not have been more softly couched. Sacred prodigality, sweet folly of the mother who deprives herself of everything to provide a little luxury, in the midst of her poverty, for her dear nursling!

The cradle gave a festal air to the poor hovel; nature, which is compassionate to the unfortunate, made the bareness of this white-washed cottage gay with tufts of houseleek and velvet moss. Kind plants, full of pity, although they looked like parasites, filled up the holes in the roof and made it as dazzling as a bride’s jewels, and prevented the rain from falling on the cradle; the pigeons alighted on the window and cooed until the child fell asleep.

A little bird, to which young Hans had given a crumb of bread in the winter, when the snow made the ground white, had, when spring came, let a grain fall from his beak at the foot of the wall, and thence had sprung a beautiful bindweed which, clinging to the stones with its green claws, had entered the room by a broken window-pane, and crowned the child’s cradle with its cluster, so that in the morning Hans’s blue eyes and the blue bells of the bindweed woke up at the same time, and looked at each other with an understanding air.

This home, then, was poor but not gloomy.

Hans’s mother, whose husband had died far away at the war, lived as best she could on vegetables from the garden, and the product of her spinning-wheel: very little, it is true, but Hans wanted for nothing and that was enough.

Hans’s mother was a truly pious and believing woman. She prayed, worked and practised virtue; but she had one fault: she looked upon herself with too much complacence and prided herself too much on her son.

It sometimes happens that mothers, seeing these beautiful rosy children, with dimpled hands, white skin and pink heels, think that they belong to them for ever.

But God gives nothing; he only lends, and, like a forgotten creditor, he sometimes comes to demand his own again all of a sudden.

Because this fresh bud had sprung from her stem, Hans’s mother believed that she had made him to be born: and God, who, from within his Paradise with its azure vaults starred with gold, watches everything that happens on earth, and hears from the ends of the infinite the sound that the blade of grass makes as it grows, was not pleased to see this.

He also saw that Hans was greedy and that his mother was too indulgent to this greediness; the naughty child often cried when he had, after grapes or an apple, to eat bread, object of envy to so many unfortunates, and his mother let him throw away the piece of bread he had commenced, or else finished it herself.

Now it happened that Hans fell ill: fever burned him, his breath whistled in his choking throat; he had croup, a terrible illness that has made the eyes of many mothers and fathers red.

At the sight the poor woman was filled with horrible anguish.

You have doubtless seen in some church the image of Our Lady, clothed in mourning and standing under the Cross, with her breast open and her bleeding heart, where lie plunged seven swords of silver, three on one side, four on the other. That means that there is no agony more terrible than that of a mother who sees her child dying.

And yet the Holy Virgin believed in the divinity of Jesus and knew that her son would come to life again.

Now Hans’s mother had not that hope.

During the last days of Hans’s illness his mother, even while watching him, continued to spin mechanically and the whirring of the wheel mingled with the rattle in the throat of the dying child.

If some rich people find it strange that a mother can spin by the bed-side of a dying child, it is because they do not understand what tortures poverty contains for the soul; alas! it does not only break the body, it also breaks the heart.

What she was spinning thus, was the thread for her little Hans’s shroud; she did not wish that any cloth that had been used should cover that dear body, and, as she had no money, she made her spinning-wheel hum with a mournful activity; but she did not pass the thread through her lips as was her custom: enough tears fell from her eyes to moisten it.

At the end of the sixth day, Hans expired. Whether from chance or from sympathy, the cluster of bindweed that caressed his cradle faded, dried up and let its last curled-up flower fall on the bed.

When the mother was quite convinced that the breath had for ever flown from his lips, on which the violets of death had replaced the roses of life, she covered the too dear head with the edge of the sheet, took her bundle of thread under her arm, and made her way towards the weaver’s house.

“Weaver,” she said to him, “here is some very fine thread, very regular and without knots; the spider does not spin any finer between the joists of the ceiling; let your shuttle come and go; from this thread I must have an ell of cloth as soft as the cloth of Friesland or Holland.”

The weaver took the skein, set the warp, and the busy shuttle, drawing the thread after it, began to run hither and thither.

The card strengthened the woof and the thread continued to grow evenly, and without breaking, on the loom; it was as fine as the shift of an archduchess or the linen with which the priest dries the communion-cup at the altar.

When all the thread was used, the weaver gave the cloth to the poor mother, and, as he had understood everything from the settled look of despair on the unhappy woman’s face, he said to her:

“The emperor’s son, who died last year while still an infant, was not wrapped in a finer or softer shroud in his little ebony coffin with silver nails.”

Having folded the cloth, the mother drew from her wasted finger a thin gold ring, all worn with use.

“Good weaver,” she said, “take this ring, my wedding-ring, the only gold I ever possessed.”

The kind weaver-man did not wish to take it; but she said to him:

“Where I am going I shall have no need of a ring; for I feel my Hans’s small arms pulling me into the ground.”

Then she went to the carpenter and said to him:

“Master, get me some oak from the heart of the tree, which will not rot and which the worms will not be able to eat; cut from it five boards and two little boards and make a coffin to these measurements.”

The carpenter took his saw and plane, trimmed the planks, and struck the nails as lightly as possible with his hammer, so as not to let the iron points enter farther into the poor woman’s heart than into the wood.

When the work was finished, it was so carefully and so well done that it might have been taken for a box to put jewels and laces in.

“Carpenter, as you have made so beautiful a coffin for my little Hans, I give you my house at the end of the village, and the little garden behind it, and the well with the vineyard.--You shall not wait long.”

With the shroud and the coffin, which she held under her arm, it was so small, she went through the village streets, and the children, who do not know what death is, said:

“Look at Hans’s mother taking him a beautiful box of toys from Nuremberg; it must be a town with its painted and varnished wooden houses, its steeple covered with tin-foil, its belfry and its tower with battlements, and its trees in the promenades, all curly and green; or else a beautiful violin with its sculptured pegs at the neck and its horsehair bow.--Oh, why have we not a box like it!”

And the mothers, growing pale, kissed them and told them to be quiet:

“Silly children that you are, you must not say that; do not wish for the box of toys, or the violin-case that one carries with tears under one’s arm: you will have it soon enough, poor little ones!”

When Hans’s mother got home, she took the dainty, still pretty, corpse of her son and began to make his last toilet--it must be made carefully, for it has to last for eternity.

She clothed him in his Sunday clothes, his silk dress and fur pelisse, so that he should not be cold in the damp place to which he was going. Beside him she put the doll with the enamel eyes, the doll he loved so much that he always took it to bed with him.

But, just as she was turning down the shroud on the body which she had kissed for the last time a thousand times, she saw that she had forgotten to place his pretty little red slippers on the child’s feet.

She looked for them in the room, for it hurt her to see the little feet bare that used to be so warm and pink, and were now so cold and white; but during her absence the rats had found the shoes under the bed, and for want of better food had nibbled them, gnawed at them, and cut holes in the leather.

It was a great grief to the poor mother that Hans should go away into the other world with bare feet; when the heart is all one wound, it only needs a touch to make it bleed.

She cried to see the slippers: from that inflamed, worn-out eye a tear could still gush.

How could she get shoes for Hans, when she had already given her ring and her house? That was the thought that troubled her. By dint of thinking she had an idea.

In the bread-bin there was still a whole loaf of bread, as, for a long time, the unhappy woman, kept alive by her sorrow, had been eating nothing.

She broke the loaf, remembering that, in the past, she had often made with the soft parts pigeons, geese, chickens, wooden shoes, boats, and other boys’ things to amuse Hans.

Placing the bread in the hollow of her hand, and kneading it with her thumb while she moistened it with her tears, she made a little pair of bread shoes, with which she covered the cold, bluish feet of the dead child, and, her heart consoled, she turned down the shroud and closed the coffin.--While she was kneading the bread, a poor man had come to the door and timidly asked for some bread; but she had signed to him with her hand to go away.

The grave-digger came to take away the box, and buried it in a corner of the cemetery under a clump of white rose-bushes: the air was warm, it was not raining and the ground was not wet; this was a comfort to the mother, who thought that her poor little Hans would not pass the first night in his tomb too uncomfortably.

When she returned home to her solitary house, she placed Hans’s cradle beside her bed, lay down and fell asleep.

Overtaxed nature succumbed.

As she slept, she had a dream or, at least, she believed it was a dream.

Hans appeared to her, clothed, as he was in his coffin, in his Sunday dress and his pelisse lined with swans’-down, in his hand his doll with the enamel eyes and on his feet his bread shoes.

He seemed to be sad.

He had not the halo that death ought to give to the little innocents; for, if a child is placed in the ground, it comes out an angel.

The roses of Paradise were not flourishing on his pale cheeks, coloured white by death; tears fell from his blond eyelashes, and great sighs swelled his little breast.

The vision disappeared, and the mother awoke, bathed in perspiration, delighted at having seen her child, terrified at having seen him so sad; but she reassured herself by saying, “Poor Hans! even in Paradise he cannot forget me.”

The following night, the apparition was repeated: Hans was still more sad and more pale.

His mother, stretching her arms out to him, said:

“Dear child, take comfort, and do not weary in Heaven; I shall soon rejoin you.”

The third night, Hans came again; he moaned and cried more than at the other times, and he disappeared with his little hands joined; he no longer had his doll, but he still had his bread shoes.

His mother, being uneasy, went to consult a venerable priest, who said to her:

“I will watch beside you to-night, and I will question the little ghost; he will answer me; I know what words to say to innocent or guilty spirits.”

Hans appeared at the usual hour, and the priest summoned him, in the consecrated words, to tell him what troubled him in the other world.

“It is the bread shoes which torment me, and hinder me from mounting the diamond staircase of Paradise; they are heavier on my feet than postilion’s boots and I cannot get past the first two or three steps, and that troubles me greatly, for I see above a cloud of beautiful cherubim with rosy wings who are calling to me to play with them and are showing me toys of silver and gold.”

Having said these words, he disappeared.

The good priest, to whom Hans’s mother had made her confession, said to her:

“You have committed a grave fault, you have profaned the daily bread, the sacred bread, our good God’s bread, the bread that Jesus Christ, at his last repast, chose to represent his body, and, after having refused a slice of it to the poor man who came to your door, you kneaded from it slippers for your Hans.

“You must open the coffin, take the bread shoes off the child’s feet, and burn them in the all-purifying fire.”

Accompanied by the grave-digger and the mother, the priest proceeded to the cemetery: with four blows of the spade the coffin was laid bare, and was opened.

Hans was lying inside, just as his mother had laid him there, but his face bore an expression of pain.

The holy priest gently removed the bread shoes from the dead child’s feet and burned them himself at the flames of a candle, reciting a prayer the while.

When night came, Hans appeared to his mother one last time, but he was gay, rosy and happy, and had with him two little cherubim with whom he had already made friends; he had wings of light and a fillet of diamonds.

“Oh, mother, what joy, what happiness, and oh, how beautiful are the gardens of Paradise! We play there all the time and our good God never scolds.”

Next day, the mother saw her son again, not on earth, but in heaven; for she died during the day, her brow pressed against the empty cradle.

THE REVEREND FATHER GAUCHER’S ELIXIR ALPHONSE DAUDET

“Drink this, neighbour, and tell me what you think of it.”

And drop by drop, with the scrupulous care of a lapidary counting pearls, the _curé_ of Graveson poured me out two fingers of a golden-green liquor, warm, shimmering, exquisite.... It warmed my stomach like sunshine.

“That is Father Gaucher’s elixir, the pride and the health of our Provence,” the good man informed me triumphantly. “It is made at the Premonstratensian convent, a couple of leagues from your mill.... Isn’t it worth all their Chartreuses?... And if you only knew how amusing the story of this elixir is! Just listen....”

Thereupon quite innocently, thinking no evil, in the Presbytery dining-room so simple and quiet with its little pictures of the Stations of the Cross and its pretty white starched curtains like surplices, the abbé began to tell me a tale just a little sceptical and irreverent, after the manner of a story from Erasmus or D’Assoucy.

* * * * *

“Twenty years ago the Premonstratensians, or rather the White Fathers, as our Provençals call them, had fallen into great poverty. If you had seen their house in those days, it would have made your heart ache.

“The great wall and St. Pachomius’ tower were falling into pieces. Around the weed-grown cloisters the columns were splitting, the stone saints were crumbling in their niches. Not a window was whole, not a door held fast. In the garths and chapels the Rhone wind blew as it does in the Camargue, extinguishing the candles, breaking the lead of the windows, and driving the holy water out of the stoups. But saddest of all was the convent steeple as silent as a deserted dove-cote, and the fathers, for want of means to buy themselves a bell, forced to ring to matins with clappers of almond-wood!...

“Poor White Fathers! I can see them yet, at a Corpus Christi procession, filing sadly past in their patched mantles, pale, thin from their diet of pumpkins and melons, and behind them his lordship the abbot, who hung down his head as he went, ashamed at letting the sun see his crosier with the gilding worn off and his white woollen mitre all moth-eaten. The ladies of the confraternity wept in their ranks for pity at the sight, and the big banner-carriers grinned and whispered to each other, as they pointed at the poor monks:

“‛Starlings go thin when they go in a flock!’

“The fact is that the unfortunate White Fathers were themselves reduced to debating whether they would not be better to take their flight across the world and seek fresh pasture each one where he could.

“So then, one day when this grave question was being discussed in the chapter, a message was brought to the prior that Brother Gaucher asked to be heard before the council.... You must understand that this Brother Gaucher was the convent cowherd; that is to say, he spent his days in wandering from arch to arch of the cloisters, driving two scraggy cows, which sought for grass in the crevices of the pavement. Brought up until his twelfth year by an old half-witted woman in Les Baux, called Auntie Bégon, and then taken in by the monks, the unfortunate cowherd had never been able to learn anything except to drive his beasts and to repeat his paternoster, and even that he said in Provençal; for he had a thick skull, and his wits were about as sharp as a leaden dagger. A fervent Christian, for all that, though somewhat visionary, quite comfortable in his sackcloth, and disciplining himself with strong conviction and such arms!...

“When they saw him enter the chapter-house, simple and clownish, and salute the assembly with a scrape, prior, canons, treasurer, and every one burst out laughing. That was always the effect produced everywhere that his honest, grizzled face appeared, with its goatee and its somewhat vacuous eyes; so Brother Gaucher was not put about.

“‛Your Reverences,’ he said in a good-natured tone, twisting at his olive-stone beads, ‛it’s a true saying that empty barrels make the most sound. What do you think? By putting my poor brains to steep, though they’re soft enough already, I do believe I’ve found the way to get us all out of our difficulties.

“‛It’s this way. You know Auntie Bégon, the good woman who took care of me when I was little--God rest her soul, the old sinner! She used to sing some queer songs when she had drink--Well, what I want to tell you, my reverend fathers, is that when Auntie Bégon was alive she knew the herbs that grow in the mountains as well and better than any old hag in Corsica. And, by the same token, in her latter days she compounded an incomparable elixir by blending five or six sorts of simples, which we used to go and gather together in the Alpilles. That’s many a year ago; but I think that with the aid of Saint Augustine, and the permission of our father abbot, I might--if I search carefully--recall the composition of that mysterious elixir. Then we should only have to put it into bottles and sell it a little dear, and the community would be able to get rich at its ease, like our brethren at La Trappe and the Grande....’

“He had not time to finish. The prior got up and fell on his neck. The canons took him by the hands. The treasurer, even more deeply moved than any of the others, respectfully kissed the frayed hem of his cowl.... Then each returned to his stall to deliberate; and in solemn assembly the chapter decided to entrust the cows to Brother Thrasybulus, in order that Brother Gaucher might devote himself entirely to the preparation of his elixir.

* * * * *

“How did the good brother manage to recall Auntie Bégon’s recipe? What efforts, what vigils did it cost him? History does not relate. But this much is certain, at the end of six months the White Fathers’ elixir was very popular already. In all the Comtat, in all the Arles district not a _mas_, not a farm-house but had at the backdoor of its spence, among the bottles of wine syrup and jars of _olives picholines_, a little brown stone flagon sealed with the arms of Provence, with a monk in ecstasy on a silver label. Thanks to the vogue of its elixir the house of the Premonstratensians got rich very rapidly. St Pachomius’ tower was rebuilt. The prior got a new mitre, the church grand new painted windows; and in the fine tracery of the steeple a whole flight of bells, big and little, alighted one fine Easter morning, chiming and pealing in full swing.

“As for Brother Gaucher, the poor lay brother whose rusticities used to amuse the chapter so, he was never mentioned now in the convent. They only knew the Reverend Father Gaucher, a man of brains and ability, who lived quite isolated from the petty, multifarious occupations of the cloister, and shut himself up all day in his distillery, while thirty monks scoured the mountains in search of his fragrant herbs.... This distillery, to which no one, not even the prior, had the right of entry, was an old abandoned chapel at the bottom of the canons’ garden. The good fathers’ simplicity had made it into a very mysterious and formidable place; and any bold and inquisitive monk who managed to reach the rose-window above the door by scrambling up the climbing vines promptly tumbled down, terrified at his peep of Father Gaucher with his necromancer’s beard, stooping over his furnaces, hydrometer in hand; and all around him red stone retorts, gigantic alembics, glass worms, a regular weird litter that glowed as if enchanted in the red gleam of the windows....

“At close of day, when the last stroke of the Angelus sounded, the door of this place of mystery was opened discreetly, and his Reverence betook himself to the church for the evening office. You should have seen the reception that he got as he traversed the monastery! The brethren lined up as he passed. They said:

“‛Hush!... He has the secret!...’

“The treasurer walked behind him and spoke to him, bowing deferentially.... Amid these adulations the Father went his way, wiping his brow, his three-cornered hat with its broad brim on the back of his head like an aureole, looking complacently about him at the wide courts planted with orange-trees, the blue roofs where new vanes were turning, and in the dazzling white cloister, amid the neat flower columns, the canons all newly rigged out, walking two and two with contented faces.

“‛They owe all that to me!’ his Reverence said inwardly; and, as often as he did so, the thought made his pride rise in gusts.

“The poor man was heavily punished for it. You’ll hear how that happened....

* * * * *

“You must understand that one evening, whilst the office was being sung, he arrived at the church in an extraordinary state of agitation: red, breathless, his cowl awry, and so upset that in taking holy water he dipped his sleeves into it up to the elbows. At first they thought that it was excitement at being late; but when they saw him make profound reverences to the organ and the galleries instead of saluting the high altar, rush across the church like a whirlwind, wander about in the choir for five minutes in search of his stall, then, once he was seated, sway right and left, smiling benignly, a murmur of astonishment ran through the nave and aisles. They chuckled to one another behind their breviaries:

“‛Whatever is the matter with our Father Gaucher?... Whatever is the matter with our Father Gaucher?’

“Twice the prior impatiently let his crosier fall on the pavement to command silence.... Down at the end of the choir the psalms still went on; but the responses lacked animation....

“Suddenly, in the middle of the _Ave verum_, lo and behold, Father Gaucher flung himself back in his stall, and sang out at the top of his voice:

“‛In Paris there dwells a White Father, Patatin, patatan, tarabin, taraban....’

“General consternation. Every one rose. There were cries of:

“‛Take him away!... He’s possessed!’

“The canons crossed themselves. His Lordship flourished his crosier.... But Father Gaucher saw nothing, heard nothing; and two sturdy monks had to drag him out by the side-door of the choir, struggling like a demoniac and going on worse than ever with his ‛patatins’ and ‛tarabans.’

* * * * *

“Next morning, at daybreak, the unfortunate man was on his knees in the prior’s oratory, owning his fault with a torrent of tears.

“‛It was the elixir, my lord; it was the elixir that overcame me,’ he said, beating on his breast.

“And seeing him so conscience-smitten, so penitent, the good prior himself was moved.

“‛Come, come, Father Gaucher, set your mind at rest; it will all pass away like dew in the sun.... After all, the scandal has not been so great as you think. To be sure, there was a song that was a little ... hem! hem!... Yet let us hope that the novices would not pick it up.... But now, let us see; tell me frankly how it all happened.... It was when you were trying the elixir, was it not? Perhaps your hand was too heavy?... Yes, yes, I understand.... It is like brother Schwartz, the inventor of gunpowder: you have been the victim of your invention. But tell me, my good friend, is it absolutely necessary for you to try this terrible elixir on yourself?’

“‛Unfortunately it is, my lord! The gauge gives me the strength and the degree of alcohol, it is true; but for the fineness, the velvetiness, I can’t very well trust anything but my tongue!...’

“‛Ah, to be sure!... But listen for another moment to what I am going to say to you.... When you are compelled to taste the elixir thus, does it seem good? Do you derive any pleasure from it?’

“‛Alas, yes, my lord!’ said the unfortunate father, blushing to the roots of his hair. ‛These last two evenings I have found such a bouquet in it, such an aroma!... Surely it must be the Devil that has played me this sorry trick.... And so I have quite decided to use nothing but the gauge in future. If the liquor is not fine enough, if it does not pearl enough, so much the worse....’

“‛For any sake don’t do that,’ the prior interrupted excitedly. ‛We must not run the risk of making our customers dissatisfied.... All you have to do, now that you are forewarned, is to be on your guard.... Let us see, how much do you require to ascertain?... Fifteen or twenty drops, eh?... Let’s say twenty drops.... The Devil will be smart indeed if he catches you with twenty drops.... In any case, to prevent accidents, I’ll dispense you from coming to church in future. You will say the evening office in the distillery.... And, meanwhile, go in peace, reverend father, and, above all things, count your drops carefully.’

“Alas, his poor reverence had much need to count his drops!... The Devil had hold of him, and never afterwards let him go.

“The distillery heard some strange offices!

* * * * *

“So long as it was day, all went well. The father was tolerably calm: he prepared his chafing-dishes and alembics, sorted his herbs carefully, all Provence herbs, fine, grey, serrated, hot with perfume and sunshine.... But in the evening, when the simples were infused and the elixir was cooling in great copper basins, the poor man’s martyrdom began.

“‛Seventeen ... eighteen ... nineteen ... twenty!...’

“The drops fell from the stirring-rod into the silver-gilt goblet. The father swallowed the twenty at a gulp, almost without pleasure. What he longed for was the twenty-first. Oh, that twenty-first drop!... Then, to escape temptation, he went and knelt down at the farthest end of the laboratory, and buried himself in his paternosters. But from the still-warm liquor there rose a faint steam charged with aromas, which came stealing about him and sent him back willy-nilly to his basins.... The liquor was a lovely golden green.... Leaning over it with open nostrils, the father stirred it gently with his stirring-rod, and in the little sparkling bubbles that the emerald wave carried round he seemed to see Auntie Bégon’s eyes laughing and twinkling as they looked at him....

“‛Here goes! Another drop!’

“And with one drop and another the unfortunate at last had his goblet full to the brim. Then, completely vanquished, he sank down in a great arm-chair, and lolling at ease, his eyes half shut, tasted his sin sip by sip, saying softly to himself with a delicious remorse:

“‘Ah! I’m damning myself ... damning myself....’

“The most terrible thing was that at the bottom of this diabolical elixir he rediscovered by some black art or other all Auntie Bégon’s naughty songs: ‛There are three little gossips, who talk of making a banquet’ ... or: ‛Master Andrew’s little shepherdess goes off to the wood by her little self,’ and always the famous one about the White Fathers: ‛Patatin, patatan.’

“Imagine his confusion next day when his cell-mates said to him slyly:

“‛Eh, eh, Father Gaucher, you had a bee in your bonnet last night, when you went to bed!’

“Then it was tears, despair and fasting, sackcloth and discipline. But nothing could avail against the demon of the elixir, and every evening at the same hour his possession began anew.

* * * * *

“All this time orders were pouring into the abbey in excess of expectation. They came from Nîmes, from Aix, from Avignon, from Marseilles.... Every day the convent became more like a factory. There were packing brothers, labelling brothers, others for the accounts, others for the carting; the service of God may have lost a few tolls of the bells now and again by it; but I can assure you that the poor folk of the district lost nothing....

“Well, then, one fine Sunday morning, whilst the treasurer was reading in full chapter his stock-sheet at the end of the year, and the good canons were listening to him with sparkling eyes and smiles on their lips, who should burst into the middle of the meeting but Father Gaucher, shouting out:

“‛That’s an end of it!... I can’t stand it any longer!... Give me my cows again!’

“‛But what is it, Father Gaucher?’ asked the prior, who had his own suspicions of what it was.

“‛What is it, my lord?... I’m on a fair way of preparing myself a fine eternity of flames and pitch-forks.... I drink, and drink, like a lost soul; that’s what it is!...’

‛But I told you to count your drops.’

‛Ah, so you did! To count my drops! But I would need to count by goblets now.... Yes, your Reverences, that’s what I’ve come to. Three bottles an evening!... You know quite well that can’t go on for ever.... So, get whom you like to make the elixir.... God’s fire burn me, if I take anything more to do with it!’

“There was no more laughing for the chapter.

“‛But, wretched man, you’ll ruin us!’ cried the treasurer, brandishing his ledger.

“‛Would you rather I damned myself?’

“Thereupon the prior stood up.

“‛Reverend sirs,’ he said, stretching out his fine white hand, on which the pastoral ring glistened, ‛it can all be arranged.... It’s at night, is it not, my dear son, that the demon assails you?...’

‛Yes, Sir Prior, regularly every evening.... When I see the night coming on, I get all in a sweat, saving your Reverence’s presence, like Capitou’s ass, when he saw them come with the pack-saddle.’

“‛Well, then, keep your mind easy.... In future, every evening, during the office, we’ll recite on your behalf the Prayer of Saint Augustine, to which plenary indulgence is attached.... With that, you are safe, whatever happens.... It is absolution at the very moment of sin.’

“‘O that is good, thank you, Sir Prior.’

“And, without asking anything more, Father Gaucher returned to his alembics as light as a lark.

“And in fact, from that moment, every evening, at the end of compline, the officiant never failed to say:

“‘Let us pray for our poor Father Gaucher, who is sacrificing his soul in the interests of the community. _Oremus, Domine_....’

“And, while the prayer ran along all those white cowls prostrated in the shadow of the naves, like a little breeze over snow, away at the other end of the convent, behind the lighted windows of the distillery, Father Gaucher might be heard chanting open-throated:

“‘In Paris there dwells a White Father, Patatin, patatan, tarabin, taraban; In Paris there dwells a White Father Who sets all the little nuns dancing, Trip, trip, trip, trip in a garden; Who sets all the....’”

* * * * *

At this point the good _curé_ stopped short in horror. “Mercy on us! If my parishioners heard me!”

THE LEGEND OF SAINT JULIAN HOSPITATOR GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

I

Julian’s father and mother lived in a castle in the midst of woods on the slope of a hill.

Its four corner-towers had pointed roofs covered with scales of lead, and the base of the walls rested on masses of rock which went down abruptly right to the bottom of the moat.

The pavements of the court were as clean as the flagged floor of a church. Long gutters, shaped like dragons with down-drooped jaws, vomited the rain-water into the cistern; and on the window-ledges at every storey, in a pot of painted earthenware, a plant of basil or heliotrope opened to the sun.

A second line of defence, formed of stakes, enclosed first an orchard of fruit-trees, then a parterre, where the combinations of the flowers formed patterns, and next a trellis with bowers in which to take the air, and a mall which served to amuse the pages. On the other side were the kennel, the stables, the bakery, the wine-press and the barns. A meadow of green grass extended all around, itself enclosed by a strong hedge of thorns.

They had lived in peace so long that the portcullis was never let down; the moats were full of water; the swallows made their nests in the openings of the battlements; and the archer who walked up and down upon the walls all day long retired into his turret as soon as the sun shone too strongly, and slept there like a monk.

Indoors, the ironwork shone everywhere; tapestries in the rooms gave protection from the cold; and the presses were crammed with linen; the wine-tuns were piled up in the cellars, the oaken coffers groaned with the weight of bags of silver.

In the great hall arms of every age and every nation were to be seen among banners and heads of wild beasts, from the slings of the Amalekites and the javelins of the Garamantes to the scimitars of the Saracens and the chain-coats of the Normans.

The great spit in the kitchen could turn an ox; the chapel was as sumptuous as the oratory of a king. There was even, in a retired corner, a vapour-bath in the Roman fashion; but the good lord of the castle abstained from it, deeming that it was an idolatrous custom.

Always wrapped in a fox pelisse, he walked about his house, did justice among his vassals, and appeased the quarrels of his neighbours. In winter he watched the snow-flakes fall, or had histories read to him. As soon as the good weather came, he went out on his mule along the lanes, amongst the green cornfields, and talked with the rustics, to whom he gave advice. After many adventures, he had taken to wife a damsel of high degree.

She was very fair, somewhat proud and serious. The horns of her head-dress brushed against the lintel of the doors; the train of her cloth gown trailed three paces behind her. Her household was ruled like the interior of a monastery; every morning she gave out their work to her servants, saw to the comfits and unguents, span on her distaff, or embroidered altar-cloths. In answer to her prayers God granted her a son.

Then there were great rejoicings, and a feast which lasted three days and four nights, amid the illumination of torches, to the sound of harps, on floors strawed with leafage. At it they ate the rarest spices, with fowls as big as sheep; as a diversion, a dwarf came out of a pasty; and when the bowls gave out, for the crowd was ever increasing, they were obliged to drink from the horns and helmets.

The young mother was not present at those festivities. She stayed in her bed and kept quiet. One evening she woke and saw, by a moonbeam that shone in at the window, something like a shadow that moved. It was an ancient in a frock of coarse stuff, with a chaplet at his side, a wallet on his shoulder, with all the appearance of a hermit. He came up to her pillow and said without opening his lips:

“Rejoice, O mother! Thy son will be a saint!”

She was about to cry out; but gliding upon the moon-ray he rose gently into the air, then disappeared. The songs of the banquet sounded more loudly than ever. She heard the voices of angels; and her head sank back upon the pillow, which was surmounted by the bone of a martyr in a frame of carbuncles.

Next day all the servants, when questioned, declared that they had not seen any hermit. Dream or reality, this must have been a communication from Heaven; but she was careful to say nothing about it, lest she should be charged with pride.

The revellers departed at break of day; and Julian’s father was outside the postern, where he had been seeing the last of them off, when all at once a mendicant rose up before him in the mist. He was a gipsy with plaited beard, silver rings on both his arms, and sparkling eyeballs. With an inspired air he stammered these inconsequent words:

“Ah! ah! your son!... much blood!... much glory!... always fortunate! An Emperor’s family.”

And, stooping to pick up his alms, he disappeared in the grass and vanished.

The good castellan looked right and left and called his loudest. Not a soul! The wind blew, the morning mists cleared away.

He attributed this vision to lightheadedness from want of sleep. “If I talk about it,” he said to himself, “they will laugh at me.” However, the splendours destined for his son dazzled him, although the promise of them was by no means clear, and he even doubted whether he had heard it.

The spouses kept their secrets from each other. But both cherished the child with equal love; and, respecting him as one marked out by God, they bestowed an infinity of care upon his person. His cradle was stuffed with the finest down; a lamp in the shape of a dove burned over it continually; three nurses lulled him to rest; and, well wrapped in his swaddling-bands, his face rosy, and his eyes blue, with his brocade cloak and his cap trimmed with pearls, he looked like a little Jesus. His teeth came without his uttering a single moan.

When he was seven, his mother taught him to sing. To make him brave, his father hoisted him on to a great horse. The child smiled with satisfaction, and was not long in learning everything about chargers.

A very learned old monk instructed him in the Holy Scriptures, Arabic cyphering, Latin letters, and the art of drawing dainty pictures on vellum. They worked together away up at the top of a tower, out of the noise.

The lesson finished, they went down to the garden, where, walking about side by side, they studied the flowers.

Sometimes they would see a string of pack-animals making their way along the bottom of the vale conducted by a man on foot in Oriental garb. The castellan, who had recognized him for a merchant, would send a servant to him. The stranger, taking confidence, turned out of his way, and, taken into the parlour, he brought out of his coffers pieces of velvet and silk, jewellery, aromatics, strange things of which the use was unknown; in the end the honest man went away with great gain, without having suffered any violence. At other times a group of pilgrims would knock at the door. Their wet garments smoked before the fire; and when they were fed they told their travels: the wanderings of barks on the foaming sea, marches on foot through the burning sands, the ferocity of the Paynims, the caverns of Syria, the Cradle and the Sepulchre. Then they gave the young lord cockle-shells from their mantles.

Often the castellan feasted his old companions-in-arms. As they drank, they recalled their wars, the assaults on fortresses with battering of engines and prodigious wounds. Julian, who was listening, uttered shouts at what he heard; thereupon his father had no doubt that he would some day be a conqueror. But in the evening, when the angelus sounded, as he passed between the bowing poor, he put his hand in his purse with such modesty and such a noble air that his mother was certain he would be an archbishop in course of time.

His place in chapel was beside his parents; and however long the offices might be he remained on his knees at his faldstool, his bonnet on the ground and his hands clasped.

One day during Mass, on raising his head, he noticed a little white mouse which came out of a hole in the wall. It ran on to the first step of the altar, and, after two or three turns to right and left, made off the same way. Next Sunday the thought that he might see it again troubled him. It came back; and each Sunday he waited for it, was annoyed by it, and was seized by hatred of it, and resolved to make away with it.

So, having shut the door and scattered some crumbs of cake on the steps, he stationed himself before the hole with a switch in his hand.

After a very long time a pink muzzle appeared, then all the mouse. He struck a light blow and remained stupefied before the tiny body that no longer moved. A drop of blood stained the pavement. He wiped it off hastily with his sleeve, threw the mouse outside, and said nothing about it to any one.

All sorts of small birds picked at the seeds in the garden. He took it into his head to put peas into a hollow reed. When he heard a twittering in the garden, he approached softly, then raised his tube, puffed his cheeks, and the little creatures rained upon his shoulders so abundantly that he could not keep from laughing, overjoyed at his mischief.

One morning, as he was returning along the wall, he caught sight of a big pigeon on top of the rampart, pouting in the sun. Julian stopped to look at it; there was a gap in the wall just there, a splinter of stone came to his hand. He bent his arm, and the stone knocked down the bird, which fell in a heap into the moat.

He hurried down, tearing himself on the bushes, searching everywhere, more active than a young dog.

The pigeon was quivering with broken wings, hanging in the branches of a privet-bush.

Its persistence in life irritated the child. He set about wringing its neck, and the bird’s convulsions made his heart beat, and filled it with a savage and tumultuous pleasure. When it at last stiffened, he felt himself fainting.

That evening, at supper, his father declared that a boy of his age ought to learn venery; and he went to look for an old manuscript containing all the pastime of the chase in question and answer. In it a master showed his pupil the art of entering dogs and manning hawks, of setting snares, how to recognize the stag by his fumets, the fox by his footprints, the wolf by his pads; the best way to discover their tracks, how they are started, and where their refuges usually are; what are the most favourable winds, with an enumeration of the calls and rules of the quarry.

When Julian could repeat all those things by heart, his father made up a pack of hounds for him.

First were to be seen four and twenty Barbary greyhounds, faster than gazelles, but apt to get out of hand; then seventeen couples of Breton dogs, spotted with white on a red ground, unfaltering in their obedience to command, strong-chested and deep-throated. For the attack of the wild boar and perilous lairs, there were forty griffons, hairy as bears. Mastiffs from Tartary, almost as tall as asses, flame-coloured, broad-backed and straight-legged, were meant to pursue the aurochs. The black coat of the spaniels gleamed like satin; the yelping of the talbots rivalled the music of the beagles. In a separate yard, rattling their chains and rolling their eyes, growled eight Alan bulldogs, formidable brutes, which would spring at a horseman’s belly and were not afraid of lions.

They all were fed on wheaten bread, drank from stone troughs, and bore sonorous names.

The falconry, perhaps, even excelled the kennel. The good lord, by dint of money, had procured tercels from the Caucasus, sakers from Babylon, gerfalcons from Germany, and peregrine falcons captured on the cliffs by the shores of frozen seas in distant lands. They were lodged in a shed covered with thatch, and, fastened in order of their size on the perch, had a sod of turf before them, on which they were set from time to time to keep them limber.

Purse-nets, hooks, spring-traps, all sorts of gins, were constructed.

Often they took out to the fields spaniels, which very soon stood. Then the huntsmen, advancing step by step, cautiously spread an immense net over their motionless bodies. A word made them bark; quails started up; and the ladies of the neighbourhood, who had been invited with their husbands, the children and the waiting-women, all threw themselves upon them and caught them easily.

At other times, a drum was beaten to start the hares; foxes fell into trenches, or else a spring opened and caught a wolf by the foot.

But Julian despised those easy artifices; he preferred to hunt far away from other people, with his horse and his hawk. It was almost always a great tartaret from Scythia, white as snow. Its leather hood was surmounted by a plume, golden bells trembled on its blue feet; and it sat fast on its master’s wrist while his horse galloped and the plains unrolled beneath them. Julian, unfastening its leashes, loosed it all at once; the brave bird mounted straight into the air like an arrow; and two unequal specks could be seen twisting, meeting, then disappearing in the heights of the azure. The falcon was not long in descending, tearing some bird in pieces, and came to resume its place on its master’s gauntlet, its two wings trembling.

In this fashion Julian flew the heron, the kite, the crow, and the vulture.

He loved, sounding his horn, to follow his dogs as they ran along the hill-sides, leapt the brooks, climbed up to the woods; and when the stag began to sigh under their bites he struck it down swiftly, then took pleasure in the fury of the mastiffs as they devoured it, cut in pieces upon its reeking hide.

On misty days, he hid himself in a marsh to watch for geese, otters and wild duck.

Three squires waited for him at break of day at the foot of the porch, and the old monk, leaning out of his attic window, made signs to him in vain. Julian did not turn back, he went his way in the heat of the sun, in the rain, in storm, drank water from the springs in his hand, ate wild apples as he trotted; if he was tired, he rested beneath an oak; and he came home at midnight covered with blood and mire, with thorns in his hair and smelling of wild beasts. He became like them. When his mother embraced him, he submitted coldly to her clasp, and appeared to be dreaming of something deep.

He slew bears with blows of his hunting-knife, bulls with the axe, wild boars with the spear; and once, even, without so much as a stick, he defended himself against wolves which were gnawing some corpses beneath a gallows.

* * * * *

One winter morning, he set out before daylight, well equipped, a cross-bow on his shoulder and a quiverful of bolts at his saddle-bow.

His Danish jennet, followed by two basset-hounds, made the ground ring as it walked with even pace. Drops of sleet clung to his mantle, a strong breeze was blowing. One side of the horizon cleared; and in the paleness of the twilight he saw some rabbits running about at the mouth of their burrows. The two basset-hounds suddenly dashed upon them, and with a quick shake to this side and that broke their necks.

Soon he entered a wood. On the end of a branch a capercaillie benumbed with cold was sleeping with its head under its wing. Julian sliced off both its feet with a backhanded stroke of his sword, and went on his way without picking it up.

Three hours later he found himself on the peak of a mountain so high that the sky seemed almost black. Before him a rock like a long wall sloped down and overhung a precipice; and at its end two wild goats looked down into the abyss. As he had not his bolts, for he had left his horse behind, he determined to climb down to them; crouching, bare-footed, he at last reached the first of the goats and plunged a poniard between its ribs. The second, seized with terror, leapt into space. Julian darted forward to strike it, and, his right foot slipping, he fell across the carcase of the other, his face over the abyss and his arms out-stretched.

Having got down to the plain again, he followed the willows that fringed a stream. Cranes, flying very low, passed over his head from time to time. Julian felled them with his whip and never missed one.

Meanwhile the warmer air had melted the rime, great mists floated about and the sun appeared. He saw shining far away a frozen lake, which looked like lead. In the middle of the lake was a beast which Julian did not know, a beaver with its black muzzle. In spite of the distance, a bolt brought it down; and he was vexed not to be able to carry away its skin.

Then he went on through an avenue of great trees which formed a sort of triumphal arch with their crowns at the edge of a forest. A roe-deer sprang out of a thicket, a fallow-deer appeared in a cross-way, a badger came out of a hole, a peacock on the grass displayed its tail;--and, when he had killed them all, more roe-deer presented themselves, more fallow-deer, more badgers, more peacocks, and blackbirds, jays, polecats, foxes, hedgehogs, lynxes, an infinity of beasts, more numerous at every step. They played about him, trembling, with sweet and supplicating looks. But Julian never grew tired of killing them, now winding his cross-bow, now unsheathing his sword, now thrusting with his cutlass, without a thought in his mind, without recollection of anything whatsoever. He was hunting in some country somewhere, from a time unknown, simply because he was there, everything done with the ease experienced in dreams. An extraordinary spectacle arrested him. Stags filled a valley shaped like a circus; and huddled one against the other they warmed themselves with their breaths, which could be seen reeking in the mist.

The prospect of such carnage choked him with delight for some minutes. Then he dismounted, turned up his sleeves, and began to shoot.

At the whistling of the first bolt, all the stags turned round their heads at once. Gaps showed in their mass; plaintive voices sounded, and a great commotion agitated the herd.

The sides of the valley were too high for them to clear. They sprang about in the enclosure, seeking to escape. Julian aimed, let go, and his arrows fell like the rainstreaks in a storm-shower. The maddened stags fought, reared, climbed upon one another; and their bodies locked by their antlers made a great hillock which crumbled away as it moved.

At last they were dead, lying on the sand, the foam at their nostrils, their entrails protruding, the heaving of their flanks subsiding by degrees. Then all was still.

Night was about to fall; and behind the wood, between the branches, the sky was like a lake of blood.

Julian leant his back against a tree. With listless eye he contemplated the enormity of the massacre, not understanding how he had been able to do it.

On the other side of the valley, at the edge of the forest, he saw a stag, a hind and her fawn.

The stag, which was black and of monstrous size, had sixteen points and a white beard. The hind, light as withered leaves in colour, was browsing on the grass; and the dappled fawn sucked at her dug without hindering her progress.

The cross-bow snored once again. The fawn, that same instant, was killed. Then its dam, looking to the sky, brayed in a voice deep, heart-rending, human. With a shot full in the breast the exasperated Julian stretched her on the earth.

The great stag had seen him, and gave a spring. Julian discharged his last bolt at him. It struck his forehead and remained fixed there.

The great stag did not seem to feel it; striding over the dead he kept advancing, was about to charge down upon him and disembowel him; and Julian drew back in unspeakable terror. The prodigious animal halted; and with flaming eyes, solemn as a patriarch or a justiciary, while a bell tolled in the distance, it thrice repeated:

“Accursed! Accursed! Accursed! Some day, ferocious heart, thou wilt murder thy father and mother!”

It bent its knees, closed its eyelids gently, and died.

Julian was stupefied, then overcome by sudden fatigue; and an immense disgust, an immense sadness, took possession of him. With his head in both his hands, he wept a long time.

His horse was lost; his dogs had left him; the solitude which enfolded him seemed all menacing with vague perils. Then, seized with fright, he took a way across country, chose a path at hazard, and found himself almost immediately at the castle-gate.

That night he did not sleep. Under the swaying of the hanging lamp he continually saw the great black stag. Its prediction obsessed him; he fought against it. “No, no, no! I cannot kill them!” Then he thought, “But what if I wished it?” And he was in dread lest the Devil should inspire him with the desire.

For three long months, his mother prayed in anguish at his pillow, and his father walked continually up and down the corridors in anguish, groaning. He summoned the most famous master-leeches, who ordered quantities of drugs. Julian’s malady, they said, was caused by some noxious wind or some amorous desire. But to all questions the young man shook his head.

* * * * *

His strength came back to him; and they walked him out in the courtyard, the old monk and the good lord each supporting him by an arm.

When he was completely restored, he refrained obstinately from the chase.

His father, wishing to cheer him, made him a present of a great Saracen sword.

It was at the top of a pillar, in a trophy. To reach it a ladder was required. Julian climbed it. The heavy sword slipped through his fingers, and grazed the good lord so closely, as it fell, that his gown was cut by it; Julian thought he had killed his father, and fainted.

Thenceforth he had a dread of weapons. The sight of a naked blade made him blench. This weakness caused great distress to his family.

At length the old monk commanded him in the name of God and for the honour of his ancestors to resume the exercises of a gentleman.

The squires amused themselves every day with throwing the javelin. In this Julian very soon excelled. He sent his into bottle-mouths, broke the teeth of the weather-vanes, hit the nails-studs of the doors at a hundred paces.

One summer evening, at the hour when the mist renders things indistinct, he was under the trellis in the garden and saw down at the end two white wings that fluttered at the height of the fence. He never doubted but it was a stork; and he darted his javelin.

A piercing cry resounded.

It was his mother, whose head-dress with its long lappets remained pinned to the wall.

Julian fled from the castle, and was never seen there again.

II

He joined himself to a band of adventurers who were passing.

He learned to know hunger, thirst, fevers, and vermin. He became accustomed to the din of mellays and the sight of the dying. The wind tanned his skin. His limbs became calloused by contact with his armour; and since he was very strong, courageous, temperate, and of good counsel, he had no trouble in obtaining the command of a company.

At the beginning of a battle he roused his soldiers with a great wave of his sword. With a knotted rope he climbed the walls of citadels at night, swayed about by the hurricane, while the drops of Greek fire stuck to his cuirass, and the boiling pitch and melted lead streamed down from the battlements. Often the hurtling of a stone shivered his buckler. Bridges overloaded with men collapsed beneath him. With a sweep of his mace he rid himself of fourteen horsemen. In the lists he defeated all who came forward. More than a score of times he was taken for dead.

Thanks to divine favour he always escaped; for he protected churchmen, orphans, widows, and especially aged men. When he saw one of these last walking in front of him, he called to him, in order to see his face, as if he were afraid of killing him by mistake.

Fugitive slaves, revolted peasants, portionless bastards, all sorts of desperate men flocked to his banner, and he gathered an army of his own.

It increased. He became famous. He was sought after.

He aided in turn the Dauphin of France and the King of England, the Templars of Jerusalem, the Surenas of the Parthians, the Negus of Abyssinia, and the Emperor of Calicut. He fought Scandinavians covered with fish-scales, negroes furnished with targets of hippopotamus hide and mounted on red asses, golden-skinned Indians, brandishing above their diadems broad sabres brighter than mirrors. He vanquished the Troglodytes and the Anthropophagi. He traversed regions so torrid that under the burning heat of the sun the hair of men’s heads took fire of itself like torches; and others so icy that men’s arms came away from their bodies and fell to the ground; and countries where there were so many fogs that they marched surrounded by phantoms.

States in difficulty consulted him. He obtained unhoped-for terms in interviews with ambassadors. If a monarch governed ill, he arrived suddenly and remonstrated with him. He set peoples free. He delivered queens shut up in towers. It was he, and no other, who smote the great serpent of Milan and the dragon of Oberbirbach.

Now, the Emperor of Occitania, having triumphed over the Spanish Mussulmans, had united in concubinage with the sister of the Caliph of Cordova, and had a daughter by her, whom he had brought up as a Christian. But the Caliph, making as if he wished to be converted, came to him on a visit accompanied by a numerous escort, massacred all his garrison and plunged him into a dungeon-pit, where he treated him most harshly, in order to extract treasure from him.

Julian hastened to his aid, destroyed the army of the infidels, laid siege to the town, slew the Caliph, cut off his head, and threw it like a ball over the ramparts. Then he took the Emperor from his prison and caused him to remount his throne in presence of all his court.

As the price of such a service, the Emperor presented him with much silver in baskets; Julian would have none of it. Believing that he desired more, he offered him three-quarters of his wealth; another refusal. Then to share his kingdom; Julian thanked him and declined. And the Emperor wept for vexation, not knowing how to testify his gratitude, when he struck his forehead, said a word into the ear of a courtier, the curtains of a tapestry were raised, and a young girl appeared.

Her great black eyes shone like two soft lamps. A charming smile parted her lips. The ringlets of her hair were caught in the jewels on her open dress; and under the transparence of her tunic her youthful form was half-revealed. She was all dainty and plump, with a slender waist.

Julian was dazzled with love, the more so as he had so far led a life of extreme chastity.

So he received the Emperor’s daughter in marriage, with a castle which she held of her mother; and, the nuptials ended, they parted with no end of compliments on either side.

The palace was of white marble, built in the Moresque style, on a headland, in a grove of orange-trees. Terraces of flowers stretched down to the border of a bay, where pink shells crunched under the feet. Behind the castle extended a forest in the shape of a fan. The sky was always blue, and the trees bent now beneath the sea-breeze, now beneath the wind from the mountains that framed the distant horizon.

The rooms, full of twilight, were illumined by the incrustations upon the walls. Tall columns, slender as reeds, supported the vaulting of the cupolas, which were decorated with reliefs in imitation of the stalactites of grottoes.

There were fountains in the halls, mosaics in the courtyards, festooned partition-walls, a thousand refinements of architecture and everywhere such silence that one could hear the rustling of a scarf or the echo of a sigh.

Julian made war no longer. He rested, surrounded by a people at peace; and each day a crowd passed before him with genuflexions and hand-kissing in the Oriental fashion.

Clad in purple he leaned on his elbows in a window-recess and recalled his hunts of bygone days; and he could have wished to be coursing over the desert after the gazelles and the ostriches, to be hiding in the bamboos on the watch for leopards, to be traversing the forests full of rhinoceroses, climbing to the summit of the most inaccessible mountains to get better aim at the eagles, or fighting the white bears on the icebergs of the sea.

Sometimes in a dream he saw himself like our father Adam in the midst of Paradise among all the beasts; he stretched out his arm and made them die; or else they passed before him two by two in order of their bigness, from the elephants and the lions to the ermines and the ducks, as on the day when they entered Noah’s Ark. In the shade of a cavern he darted unerring javelins upon them; others came; there was no end to them; and he woke up rolling his eyes savagely.

Princes of his acquaintance invited him to hunt. He always refused, thinking by this sort of penance to avert his misfortune; for it seemed to him that the fate of his parents depended on the murder of the animals. But he suffered from not seeing them, and his other desire became intolerable.

To divert him his wife sent for jugglers and dancing-girls.

She walked with him, in an open litter, in the country; at other times stretched on the side of a skiff they watched the fish straying in the water clear as the sky. Often she threw flowers in his face; sitting at his feet she drew music from a three-stringed mandoline; then, placing her clasped hands on his shoulder, she would ask in a timid voice, “Why, what ails you, my dear lord?”

He gave no reply, or burst into sobs; at last one day he confessed his horrible thought.

She opposed it with very sound arguments: his father and mother were probably dead; if ever he saw them again, by what chance, with what purpose, would he come to work this abomination? Therefore his fears were groundless, and he ought to take to hunting again.

Julian smiled as he heard her, but he did not decide to satisfy her desire.

One evening in the month of August, when they were in their room, she had just gone to bed, and he was kneeling for his prayers, when he heard the barking of a fox, then light footsteps under the window; and caught sight in the dusk of something that looked like animals. The temptation was too strong. He took his quiver down from the peg.

She seemed surprised.

“It is to obey you!” he said, “I shall be back by sunrise.”

For all that, she was apprehensive of some unhappy accident.

He reassured her, then went out, astonished at the inconsequence of her moods.

Soon afterwards a page came to announce that two strangers, in the absence of the lord, asked to see the lady at once.

And soon came into the room an old man and an old woman, bent, dusty, in coarse garments, each leaning on a staff.

They took courage and declared that they brought Julian news of his parents.

She leant forward to listen to them.

Meanwhile, having understood each other by a glance, they asked her if he always loved them still, if he ever spoke about them.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

Then they exclaimed:

“Well, we are they!” And they sat down very weary and overcome with fatigue.

Nothing could persuade the young wife that her husband was their son.

They proved it to her by describing certain marks which he had on his body.

She sprang from her couch, called her page, and a repast was set before them.

Although they were very hungry, they could not eat much; and even at a distance she could perceive the trembling of their gnarled hands as they took the goblets.

They had a thousand questions to ask about Julian. She answered them all, but was careful to say nothing about his gloomy notion with regard to them.

When there was no sign of his return, they had left their castle; and they had travelled for several years, following vague indications, without losing hope. They had required so much money for the ferries and in the hostelries, for the rights of princes and the exactions of robbers, that they had come to the bottom of their purse and were now begging. What matter, now that they were soon to embrace their son? They extolled his happiness in having so gracious a wife, and never wearied admiring her and kissing her.

The richness of the apartment astonished them greatly, and the old man, having examined the walls, asked why they bore the blazon of the Emperor of Occitania.

She replied:

“He is my father!”

At that he trembled, recalling the prediction of the gipsy, and the old woman thought of the word of the hermit. Doubtless her son’s glory was but the dawn of the splendours of eternity; and the pair remained awestruck in the light of the candelabra which illumined the table.

They must have been very handsome in their youth. The mother still had all her hair, the fine braids of which, like wreaths of snow, hung down to the bottom of her cheeks; and the father, with his tall form and his long beard, was like a church statue.

Julian’s wife counselled them not to wait for him. She put them to bed herself in her own room, then closed the casement; they fell asleep. Day was about to appear and outside the window the little birds were beginning to sing.

* * * * *

Julian had crossed the park; and was marching in the forest with vigorous step, rejoicing in the softness of the grass and the sweetness of the air.

The shadows of the trees lay upon the moss. Sometimes the moon made white patches in the glades, and he hesitated to go on, thinking that he saw a sheet of water, or again the surface of calm pools blended with the colour of the herbage. Everywhere was a great silence; and he discovered none of the animals which had been roaming round his castle only a few minutes before.

The wood became thicker, the darkness profound. Puffs of warm wind passed by, full of softening perfumes. He sank in heaps of dead leaves, and leant against an oak to take breath.

All at once, behind him leapt a darker mass, a wild boar. Julian had not time to seize his bow, and grieved at that as if it were a misfortune.

Then, coming out of the wood, he caught sight of a wolf slinking along a hedge.

Julian sent an arrow after it. The wolf halted, turned its head to look at him, and went on its way. It trotted on, always keeping the same distance between them, halted now and then, and, as soon as it was aimed at, took to flight again.

In this manner Julian traversed an interminable plain, then sandhills, and found himself at last on a table-land commanding a great stretch of country. Flat rocks were strewn among caves and ruins. He stumbled over dead men’s bones; here and there mouldering crosses leaned over in melancholy fashion. But shapes moved in the uncertain shadow of the tombs, and out of it came hyenas, excited, panting. Their claws clattering on the flagstones, they came up to him, and smelled him with yawns that showed their gums. He unsheathed his sabre. They fled at once in all directions and, continuing their limping and precipitate gallop, were lost in the distance amid a cloud of dust.

An hour later, he met in a ravine a furious bull, his horns levelled, pawing the sand with his hoof. Julian thrust his lance under his dewlap. It shattered as if the animal had been made of brass; he shut his eyes and waited for his death. When he opened them again, the bull had disappeared.

At that his soul was overwhelmed with shame. A superior power was taking away his strength; and he went back to the forest to return home.

It was entangled with creepers; and he was cutting them with his sabre when a polecat suddenly slipped between his legs, a panther made a spring over his shoulder, a serpent climbed in a spiral about an ash-tree.

In its foliage was a monstrous jackdaw, which looked at Julian; and, here and there, a number of great sparks showed among the branches, as if the sky had caused all its stars to rain down on the forest. They were the eyes of animals, wild cats, squirrels, owls, parrots, monkeys.

Julian darted his arrows at them; the arrows with their feathers settled on the leaves like white butterflies. He hurled stones at them; the stones fell back without hitting anything. He cursed himself, could have struck himself, howled imprecations, was like to choke with rage.

And all the animals that he had pursued were represented, forming a circle close about him. Some were squatted on their rumps, the others standing at their full height. He stood in the centre, frozen with terror, incapable of the smallest movement. By a supreme effort of will, he took a step; the animals perched on the trees spread their wings, those which trod the ground moved their limbs; and all accompanied him.

The hyenas marched before him, the wolf and the wild boar behind. The bull at his right hand rocked its head, and at his left the serpent writhed through the plants, while the panther, with arched back, advanced with velvety step in great strides. He moved as gently as possible, not to irritate them, and from the depths of the thickets he saw issuing porcupines, foxes, vipers, jackals and bears.

Julian started to run; they ran too. The serpent hissed, the foul-smelling beasts drooled. The wild boar rubbed his heels with its tusks, the wolf the palms of his hands with its hairy muzzle. The monkeys grimaced as they pinched him, the polecat rolled over his feet. A bear took away his bonnet with a back-stroke of its paw; and the panther scornfully let fall an arrow which it carried in its mouth.

A certain irony was evident in their stealthy proceedings. Looking at him out of the corner of their eyes, they seemed to be meditating a plan of revenge; and, deafened by the humming of insects, beaten by birds’ tails, suffocated by breaths, he walked with his arms stretched forward, his eyelids closed, like a blind man, without even the strength to cry “Mercy!”

The crow of a cock vibrated in the air. Others answered it; it was day; and over the orange-trees he recognized the summit of his palace.

Then, at the edge of a field, he saw, three paces off, some red partridges fluttering in the stubble. He undid his cloak and flung it over them like a net. When he uncovered them, he could find only one, and that one long dead and rotten.

This deception exasperated him more than all the others. His thirst for carnage came back to him; failing beasts, he could have massacred men.

He climbed the three terraces, burst in the door with a blow of his fist; but at the foot of the stairs the thought of his dear wife relieved his heart. She was sleeping, no doubt, and he would go and surprise her.

Having drawn off his sandals, he turned the lock gently and entered.

The leaded panes obscured the pale light of the dawn. Julian caught his feet in some garments on the floor; further on, he stumbled against a side-board still covered with dishes. “She must have been eating,” he said to himself, and went towards the bed, which was lost in the darkness of the farther side of the room. When he reached the bed-side, in order to embrace his wife, he leant over the pillow where the two heads were reposing side by side. Thereupon he felt the touch of a beard against his mouth.

He recoiled, thinking he was going mad; but he returned to the bed-side, and his fingers, as he felt about, came against hair which was very long. To convince himself of his error, he passed his hand gently over the pillow yet again. It was indeed a beard, this time, and a man!--a man lying with his wife!

Bursting into a wrath beyond measure, he fell upon them with his poniard; and he stamped and foamed, with howls like a savage beast. Then he stopped. The dead, pierced to the heart, had not so much as moved. He listened attentively to the two groanings almost equal, and, as they subsided, another one far away continued them. Indistinct at first, this plaintive, long-drawn voice came nearer, became loud, cruel: and to his terror he recognized it for the belling of the great black stag.

And, as he turned round, he thought he saw in the door-way the phantom of his wife, light in hand.

The din of the murder had brought her. With one staring glance she comprehended all, and, flying in horror, let fall her candle.

He picked it up.

His father and mother lay before him, stretched on their backs, with their bosoms pierced; and their countenances, of a majestic gentleness, were as if they guarded some eternal secret. Smears and clots of blood showed on their white skin, on the sheets, on the floor, upon an ivory crucifix hanging in the alcove. The crimson reflection of the window, touched at that moment by the sun, lit up those crimson stains, and cast yet others all over the apartment. Julian went up to the two bodies saying to himself, trying to persuade himself, that it could not be, that he was mistaken, that there are sometimes extraordinary resemblances. At last he stooped to look more closely at the old man; and he saw between the half-closed eyelids a lifeless eye that burnt him like fire. Then he crossed to the other side of the couch, occupied by the other corpse, the face of which was partially concealed by its white hair. Julian passed his hand under its braids, lifted its head;--and he gazed at it, holding it at the length of his rigid arm, while he lighted himself with the candle in his other hand. Some drops soaking through the mattress fell one by one upon the boards.

At the end of the day he presented himself before his wife; and, in a voice unlike his own, commanded her first, not to answer him, not to come near him, not even to look at him, then to follow, under pain of damnation, all his orders, which were irrevocable.

The obsequies were to be carried out according to the instructions which he had left in writing on a faldstool in the chamber of the dead. He left her his palace, his vassals, all his possessions, not even retaining the clothes on his body, nor his sandals, which they would find at the top of the staircase.

She had obeyed the will of God in being the occasion of his crime, and was to pray for his soul, since thenceforward he should be as one dead.

* * * * *

The dead were magnificently interred in the chapel of a monastery three days’ journey from the castle. A monk with his cowl drawn over his head followed the train far apart from the rest, and no one dared to speak to him.

During the Mass he remained flat on his belly in the porch, his arms out-stretched in a cross, and his brow in the dust.

After the burial, they saw him take the road that led to the mountains. He turned round several times, and at last disappeared.

III

He went away, begging his bread through the world.

He held out his hand to horsemen on the highways, approached the harvesters with genuflexions, or remained motionless before the barriers of courts; and his visage was so sad that they never refused him alms.

In his humility he told his story; thereupon all fled from him, crossing themselves. In the villages where he had already passed, as soon as he was recognized, they shut the doors, shouted threats at him, threw stones at him. The more charitable set a dish on their window-sill, then closed the shutter so as not to see him.

Repulsed everywhere, he avoided men; and nourished himself with roots, plants, wild fruits, and shell-fish which he sought along the shores.

Sometimes on turning a hill he would see below him a confusion of crowded roofs, with stone spires, bridges, towers, black streets crossing one another, whence a continual hum rose up to his ears.

The need of mingling with the existence of others would force him to descend to the town. But the brutish air of the faces, the din of occupations, the indifference of their talk, froze his heart. On feast-days, when the great bell of some cathedral filled the whole people with joy from break of day, he watched the inhabitants issuing from their houses, then the dances in the squares, the fountains running ale at the crossings, the damask hangings outside the lodgings of princes, and at evening, through the panes of the ground-floors, the long family tables, where grandparents held little children on their knees; sobs choked him and he turned back to the country.

He contemplated with transports of love the foals in the pastures, the birds in their nests, the insects on the flowers; at his approach all fled farther away, hid themselves in alarm, flew off as fast as they could.

He sought the solitudes again. But the wind brought what seemed groans of death-agony to his ear; the tears of the dew falling to earth recalled other drops of heavier weight to his mind. The sun showed like blood in the clouds every evening; and every night, in a dream, his parricide began anew.

He made himself a haircloth shirt with iron points. He climbed on his two knees up every hill that had a chapel on its summit. But pitiless thought obscured the splendours of the sanctuaries, and tortured him amid the macerations of his penance.

He did not revolt against God who had inflicted this deed upon him, and yet he was in despair to think that he could have wrought it.

His own person caused him such horror that he adventured himself in perils in the hope of delivering himself from it. He saved paralytics from fires, children from the bottom of gulfs. The abyss rejected him, the flames spared him.

Time did not ease his sufferings. They became intolerable. He resolved to die.

And one day that he found himself at the edge of a fountain, as he stooped over it to judge the depth of the water, he saw facing him an old man, all fleshless, with white beard and so lamentable an aspect that he could not restrain his tears. The other wept also. Without recognizing his own reflection, Julian had a confused remembrance of a face that resembled it. He uttered a cry; it was his father; and he had no more thought of killing himself.

So bearing about the burden of his memory he covered many countries; and he arrived beside a river the crossing of which was dangerous because of its violence, and because there was a great stretch of mud on its banks. No one had dared to cross it for a long time.

An old boat, sunk by the stern, reared its prow among the reeds. On examining it, Julian discovered a pair of oars; and the thought struck him to employ his existence in the service of others.

He began by establishing a sort of causeway on the bank, which would permit of descending to the channel; and he broke his nails dislodging enormous stones, thrust his stomach against them to move them, slid in the mud, sunk in it, all but perished several times.

Then he repaired the boat with some wreckage, and built himself a cabin with clay and tree-trunks.

When the ferry became known, travellers presented themselves. They summoned him from the other bank by waving flags; Julian quickly sprang into his boat. It was very heavy; and they overloaded it with all sort of baggage and bundles, not to speak of the beasts of burden, which, plunging with terror, increased the encumbrance. He asked nothing for his trouble; some gave him scraps of victuals that they took from their wallets, or worn-out clothes that they no longer wanted. Rough characters vociferated blasphemies. Julian reproached them gently, and they retorted with insults. He contented himself with blessing them.

A little table, a stool, a bed of dead leaves and three earthenware cups, that was all his furniture. Two holes in the wall served for windows. On one side, as far as the eye could reach, extended sterile plains with pale meres on their surface here and there; and in front of him the great river rolled its greenish waves. In spring the humid earth had an odour of rottenness. Then a wanton wind would raise the dust in clouds. It came in everywhere, muddied the water, crunched under his teeth. A little later, there were clouds of mosquitoes, whose trumpeting and stinging never ceased day or night. Next came cruel frosts, which gave things the rigidity of stone and caused a mad longing to eat flesh.

Months passed without Julian seeing any person. Often he closed his eyes, trying by way of memory to return to his youth;--and a castle yard appeared with greyhounds in a porch, serving-men in the hall, and beneath an arbour of vines a fair-haired youth between an old man in furs and a lady with a great head-dress; all at once the two corpses were there. He threw himself flat on his face upon his bed and weeping repeated:

“Ah, poor father! poor mother! poor mother!” and fell into a swoon in which the doleful visions continued.

* * * * *

One night as he slept he thought he heard some one calling him. He listened intently and could make out nothing but the roaring of the waves. But the same voice repeated:

“Julian!”

It came from the other side, which seemed extraordinary, considering the breadth of the river.

A third time the call came:

“Julian!”

And the loud voice had the tone of a church-bell.

Lighting his lantern he went out of his cabin. A furious hurricane filled the night. The darkness was profound, rent here and there by the whiteness of leaping waves.

After a moment’s hesitation, Julian unfastened the moorings. The water immediately became calm, the boat glided upon it and touched the other bank, where a man was waiting.

He was wrapped in a tattered sheet, his face like a plaster mask, and his two eyes redder than coals. On holding his lantern to him, Julian saw that he was covered with a hideous leprosy; yet he had in his bearing a sort of kingly majesty.

As soon as he entered the boat, it sank prodigiously, crushed under his weight; a shock sent it up again, and Julian began to row.

At each stroke of the oar the surge of the waves heaved up the bow. The water, blacker than ink, rushed furiously past either side of the planking. It scooped out abysses, it made mountains, and the skiff now leaped up, now sank back into depths where it spun round, tossed about by the wind.

Julian bent his back, stretched his arms, and taking a purchase with his feet, came back, bending from his waist, in order to get more power. The hail lashed his hands, the rain ran down his back, the violence of the wind choked him, he halted. Then the boat was carried away by the current. But, comprehending that some great thing was afoot, some order which he durst not disobey, he took to his oars again; and the creaking of the tholes broke on the clamour of the tempest.

The little lantern burned in front of him. Birds flying past hid it at intervals. But he saw always the eyes of the Leper, who sat up in the stern immobile as a column.

And this lasted long, very long!

When they arrived in the cabin, Julian shut the door; and he saw him sitting on the stool. The sort of shroud that covered him had fallen to his haunches; and his shoulders, his chest, his meagre arms, were hidden under patches of scaly pustules. Enormous wrinkles furrowed his brow. Like a skeleton, he had a hole in place of a nose; and his bluish lips gave out a breath as thick as a fog and nauseating.

“I’m hungry,” he said.

Julian gave him what he had, an old piece of bacon and the crusts of a black loaf.

When he had devoured them, the table, the dish, and the haft of the knife all bore the same marks as were to be seen on his body.

Next he said, “I’m thirsty!”

Julian went to get his pitcher; and as he took it an aroma came from it which made his heart swell and his nostrils dilate, it was wine; what a find! But the Leper put out his arm and emptied the whole pitcher at one draught.

Then he said, “I’m cold!”

With his candle Julian set light to a bundle of fern in the middle of the hut.

The Leper went to it to warm himself; and, squatted on his heels, he trembled in every limb, became weaker; his eyes no longer shone, his sores ran, and in a voice almost inaudible he murmured:

“Your bed!”

Julian aided him gently to drag himself to it, and even spread over him, to cover him, the sail of his boat.

The Leper groaned. The corners of his mouth exposed his teeth, a quicker rattle shook his breast, and at each breath his belly sank in to his backbone.

Then he closed his eyelids.

“My bones are like ice! Come beside me!”

And Julian, lifting up the canvas, lay down on the dead leaves, beside him.

The Leper turned his head.

“Undress yourself, so that I can have the warmth of your body!”

Julian stripped off his garments, then, naked as at the day of his birth, got into bed again, and against his thigh he felt the Leper’s skin, colder than a serpent and rough as a file.

He tried to cheer him, and the other answered panting:

“Ah, I am dying!... Come close to me, warm me! No, not with your hands! No, with your whole body!”

Julian stretched himself full length upon him, mouth against mouth and breast against breast.

Then the Leper caught him in his embrace, and his eyes all at once assumed the brightness of stars; his hair lengthened out like sunbeams, the breath of his nostrils had the sweetness of roses; a cloud of incense rose from the hearth; the waves sang. There at a fulness of delight, a joy more than human, descended like a flood upon Julian’s fainting soul; and he whose arms clasped him grew greater and greater; till he touched either wall of the hut with his head and feet. The roof flew off, the firmament opened wide,--and Julian mounted up to the azure spaces, face to face with Our Lord Jesus, who bore him away into Heaven.

* * * * *

Such is the story of Saint Julian Hospitator, almost exactly as it is to be seen in a church-window in my native province.

THE GATE-KEEPER FRANÇOIS COPPÉE

Her Majesty the Queen of Bohemia--for story-tellers there will always be a kingdom of Bohemia--is travelling in the strictest and most modest incognito, under the name of the Comtesse des Sept-Châteaux and accompanied only by the old Baroness de Georgenthal, her reader, and General Horschowitz, her gentleman in waiting.

In spite of their hot-water pans and furs, it has been cold all the time in their reserved compartment, and when the Queen, tired of her English novel, or fidgetted by the general’s knitting--for the general knits--wished to look out at the landscape white with snow, she was forced to rub a moment with her handkerchief on the carriage-window, which the frost covered with sparkling crystals and delicate ferns of ice. It is a singular caprice indeed that her Majesty has had, and well worthy of a twenty-year-old head, to set out for Paris in mid-winter, there to meet her mother, the Queen of Moravia, though she had arranged to see her at Prague next spring. In spite of that, she must needs start on her journey in ten degrees below zero, the baroness has had to shake up her old rheumatic bones, the general, in despair, has left a magnificent bedspread behind him that he was busy knitting for his daughter-in-law, taking nothing with him to beguile the tedium of the journey but material for a modest pair of worsted stockings. The journey has been bad; all Europe is covered with snow, and they have come half-way across, with many delays and difficulties, on railways where the service is disorganized by the severity of the season. At last the end is coming near; this evening, at nine o’clock, they have dined in the refreshment room at Mâcon, and now, though to-night the foot-warmers are once more barely lukewarm, and outside the great flakes whirl in the darkness, the baroness and the general, slumbering under their furred mantles and their rugs, dream in their corners of their arrival and their stay in Paris, where the good lady will be able to fulfil a special little piece of devotion, and where the old campaigner will betake himself without delay to a certain wool-shop in the Rue Saint-Honoré, the only one where he can match his green skeins to his satisfaction.

As for the Queen, she is not sleeping.

Feverish and shivering in her great blue-fox pelisse, her elbow in the padded rest, and her hand clenched amid the disorder of her magnificent straw-coloured hair which escapes from her smart travelling toque, she is reflecting, her great eyes open in the half-shadow, listening mechanically to the vague and distant music that the tired ears of travellers fancy they hear in the iron gallop of an express. She reviews in memory all her existence, poor young Queen, and she reflects that she is very unhappy.

* * * * *

First she sees herself again as the little princess with red hands and a flat waist, beside her twin sister, the one who is married far away in the North, her sister whom she loved so, and who resembled her so closely that when they were dressed alike they had to have different-coloured bows put in their hair to distinguish them. That was before the rising had overthrown her parents’ throne; and she loved the calm, sleepy atmosphere of the little court of Olmutz, where etiquette was tempered with homeliness; that was the time when her father, the good King Louis V., who has since died in exile of a broken heart, used to take her for a walk across the park, without laying aside his court-suit and his stars, to drink coffee with her sister at four o’clock in the afternoon, in a Chinese pavilion overrun with convolvulus and virgin’s bower, from which the course of the river was seen and the distant amphitheatre of the hills reddened by the autumn.

Then there was her marriage and the grand state-ball, on that lovely night in July, when they heard through the open windows the murmur ascending from the crowd that thronged the illuminated gardens. How she trembled when she had been left alone for an instant in the conservatory with the young King! Yet she loved him already, she had always loved him from her first glimpse of him, when he had advanced, the white aigrette in his busby, so elegant and supple in his blue uniform all over diamonds, at each step jingling the curved gold spurs on his little grey boots with a thousand folds. After the first waltz Ottokar had taken her arm, and, caressing his long black moustache all the time, had led her to the conservatory, had made her sit down under a great palm, then, placing himself beside her and taking her hand with the most noble ease, had said to her, looking her in the eyes, “Princess, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” Then she had blushed, bowed her head, and replied, repressing with one hand the mad beating of her heart, “Yes, Sire!” while the furious violins of the Hungarians attacked all together the first notes of the Czech March, that sublime song of enthusiasm and triumph!

Alas, how quickly that happiness had taken wings! Six months of error and illusion, barely six months, and then, one day, when soon to become a mother, a brutal chance had informed her that she had been deceived, that the King did not love her, never had loved her, that the very day after his marriage he had supped with La Gazella, the _première danseuse_ at the Prague Theatre, a common strumpet. And that was not all! She had then learned what every one knew but herself, Ottokar’s old liaison with the Comtesse de Pzibrann, by whom he had three children, whom he had never quitted amid a hundred passing fancies, and whom he had had the audacity to make first lady in waiting to his wife. At one blow the Queen’s love was killed, that frail and timid love which she had never dared to avow to her husband, and which she now compared to the pet bird that she had smothered when she was a little girl through closing her hand suddenly at the noise of a Chinese vase broken by a housemaid.

Her son! To be sure she had a son, and she loved him; but, dreadful thought, very often, when seated beside the gilded cradle adorned with the royal crown in which her little Ladislas was sleeping, the Queen had felt an icy pang shoot through her heart as she looked at the child, begotten by a man who had cruelly, cynically outraged her. Besides, she never had him to herself, at least to herself alone. Things were not as they had been at home with her good parents, whom--a fresh grief--a revolution had lately driven far away, and everything in this old-fashioned and pompous court of Bohemia was done according to the laws of the most rigid ceremonial. A whole swarm of duennas and dry nurses, ancient ladies with grand airs and imposing head-gear, bustled about the royal cradle, and, when the Queen went to look at her son and embrace him, they would say to her solemnly, “His Highness was coughing a little during the night.... His Highness’s teeth are troubling him....” And she felt as if the icy breaths of those women blew on her mother’s heart to freeze it and extinguish it.

Ah, she was indeed helpless, poor Queen, and life was too cruel! So sometimes, giving way to vexation and weariness, she obtained permission from the King to go and see the Queen of Moravia, a refugee in France; she escaped away, she stole out as if from a prison--alone, for tradition forbade the Heir Apparent to travel without his father--and she hastened to pour out all her tears, with her arms round the neck of her grey-haired mother.

This time she had left suddenly, without asking permission, and after a hasty kiss on the brow of the sleeping Ladislas; for she was almost mad with disgust and shame. The King’s debauchery was becoming more notorious every day; he now had establishments and families in all the towns of Bohemia, at all his hunting-resorts. It was food for derision everywhere, and satirical verses were sung in the streets of Prague, asking what was to become of this illegitimate race, and if Ottokar, like Augustus the Strong in his day, would not form a squadron of Life Guards from his bastards. To meet the expense of such a warren, the King was turning everything into money, was exhausting and burdening the state. The trade in decorations was particularly scandalous, and a case was quoted of a tailor in Vienna who had made a fortune by selling connoisseurs of foreign crosses, for five hundred florins, black coats, in the pocket and button-hole of which the purchaser found the diploma and ribbon of Bohemia’s most illustrious order, a military order that dates back to the Thirty Years’ War.

* * * * *

But what is the matter? For the last minute the train has been slowing down; it stops. What is the meaning of this halt in the open country, at dead of night? The general and the baroness have waked up, much alarmed; and the gentleman in waiting, having let down the window, leans out into the darkness, and, see, the guard’s lamp, who was running alongside the carriages in the snow, stops, is raised, and all at once illumines the general’s long, white, bristling moustache and his otter cap.

“What’s the matter? What’s the reason of this stoppage?” asks old Horschowitz.

“The matter is, sir, that we are held up for an hour at least.... Two feet of snow! No way of getting further!... The Parisians will have to do without their coffee to-morrow.”

“What? An hour to wait here, in this weather!... You know that the foot-warmers are cold....”

“What can we do, sir?... They have just telegraphed to Tonnerre for a gang to clear the line.... But, I repeat, we’re here for an hour at least.”

And the man goes off with his lamp toward the engine.

“But this is abominable! Your Majesty will catch cold!” chirps the baroness.

“Yes, I do feel cold,” says the Queen, with a shiver.

The general divines that now is the moment to be heroic; he jumps down to the rails, sinks knee-deep in the snow and overtakes the man with the lamp. He says something to him in an undertone.

“I don’t care though it was the Grand Mogul, I couldn’t do anything,” answers the railwayman. “However, we are opposite a gate-keeper’s house, there should be a fire there.... And if the lady cares to get down.... Hey, Sabatier!...”

A second lamp comes up.

“Just go and see if there is a fire in the gate-keeper’s house.”

By great good-fortune there is. The general is happier than if he had won a battle or finished the last strip of his famous knitted bedspread. He returns to the Queen’s compartment, announces the result of his exertions, and, an instant afterwards, the three travellers, with much stamping of feet to shake off the snow that has gathered under their shoes, are in the low room of the tiny house, where the gate-keeper, who has just let them in and has kept on his goatskin, kneels in front of the fire and puts dead wood on the fire-dogs.

The Queen, seated in front of the cheerful blaze, has thrown her pelisse over the back of her straw-bottomed chair; she has taken off her long suède gloves to warm her hands, and is looking about her.

It is a peasant’s room. The floor is hard and uneven underfoot; bunches of onions hang from the smoky beams; there is an old poacher’s gun on two nails over the fire-place, and some flowered dishes on the dresser. The general has just made a wry face on catching sight of two Épinal pictures fastened to the wall with pins: the portrait of M. de Thiers, decorated with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, and that of Garibaldi in a red shirt. But what attracts the young Queen’s attention is, beside the great bed, and half hidden by the curtains of striped calico, a wicker cradle, from which the whimpering of a waking child has just sounded.

In a moment the gate-keeper has left his fire and has gone to the cradle, and there he is rocking it gently.

“Go bye-bye, my biddie, go bye-bye! It’s nothing, it’s friends of papa.”

He looks a good father, the man in the goatskin, with his bald Saint Peter’s pate, his fierce old soldier’s moustache, and the two great, sad wrinkles in his cheeks.

“Is that your little girl?” the Queen asks him, interested.

“Yes, ma’am, she’s my Cecily.... She’ll be three years old next month.”

“But ... her mother?” Her Majesty asks with some hesitation, and, as the man shakes his head, “you are a widower?”

But he makes another sign of negation. At that the Queen, greatly moved, rises, goes to the cradle, and looks at Cecily, who has fallen asleep again, tenderly clasping to her heart a little pasteboard poodle.

“Poor child!” she murmurs.

“Don’t you think, ma’am,” the gate-keeper thereupon says in a hoarse voice, “don’t you think that a mother must be very heartless to leave her daughter at that age? As for her leaving me, after all, that is partly my fault.... I was wrong to marry a wife too young for me, wrong to let her go to town, where she made undesirable acquaintances. But to leave this darling!... Is it not a scandal?... Well, well, I’ll have to rear her all by myself, poor little brat!... It’s difficult, I can tell you, because of my duties.... At night I have often to leave her there screaming and crying, when I hear the train whistle.... But in the day-time, you see, I carry her about with me, and she is quite used to it already, the darling, she’s not afraid of the railway now.... Why, yesterday I held her in my left arm, while I held out my flag with my right. Well, she did not even tremble when the express passed.... What bothers me most, you know, is sewing her dresses and bonnets. It’s a good thing that I’ve been a corporal in the Zouaves in my day, and know a little about needles and thread.”

“But, my poor man,” replies the Queen, “that is a very difficult task.... See here, I should like to help you.... There must be a village in the neighbourhood, and in that village some respectable people who would undertake to look after your little girl.... If it’s only a question of money....”

But the gate-keeper shook his head again.

“No, ma’am, no, thank you kindly. I am not proud, and I would cheerfully accept any offer of help for my little Cecily ... but I will never part from her ... never, not even for an hour!”

“But why?”

“Why?” the man answered in a sad tone. “Because I will trust no one but myself to make the child what her mother has not been ... a good woman! But excuse me, would you be so kind as rock Cecily for a little?... I’m wanted on the line.”

Will it ever be known what the young Queen of Bohemia thought about that winter night when she nursed a poor gate-keeper’s child for a whole hour, while the general and the baroness, whose help she had refused, sat mightily offended by the fire? When the guard opened the door and called, “Come, ladies and gentlemen, the express is about to start again ... all aboard!” the Queen laid her purse well filled with gold, and the bunch of violets from her waist, on little Cecily’s cradle, then she climbed back into the carriage.

But her Majesty spent only two days in Paris; she went back at once to Prague, from which she is scarcely ever absent now, and where she devotes herself entirely to her son’s education. The governesses with thirty quarterings who used to cast the shadow of their funereal head-gear over the infancy of the Heir Apparent have only sinecures now. If there are still kings in Europe when little Ladislas has grown up, he will be what his father has not been, a good king. At five years of age he is already very popular, and when he travels with his mother on those dear Bohemian railways that crawl like four-wheelers, and when he sees from the window of the saloon-carriage a gate-keeper carrying a baby on one arm and presenting his little flag with the other, the royal child, to whom his mother has made a sign, always throws him a kiss.

MADEMOISELLE PERLE GUY DE MAUPASSANT

I

What a strange notion indeed of mine to choose Mademoiselle Perle for queen this evening.

Every year I go to my old friend Chantal’s for Twelfth-night. My father, whose most intimate friend he was, used to take me there when a child. I have kept up the custom, and no doubt will continue to keep it up as long as I live, and as long as there is a Chantal in this world.

The Chantals, I ought to say, lead a singular existence: they live at Paris as if they were at Grasse, Yvetot, or Pont-à-Mousson.

They have a house with a small garden near the Observatory. There they live their own life as if they were in the country. Of Paris, the real Paris, they have no knowledge and no suspicion: they are so far, far away from it! Sometimes, however, they take a journey, a long journey, there. Madame Chantal goes to lay in supplies, as they say in the family. This is how they lay in supplies.

Mademoiselle Perle, who keeps the keys of the pantry-presses (for the linen-presses are administered by the mistress of the house herself), Mademoiselle Perle notices that the sugar is running down, that the preserves are exhausted, that there is not much more left at the bottom of the coffee-sack.

Thus warned against famine, Madame Chantal inspects the remains, and takes notes in a note-book. Then, when she has written a great many figures, she plunges first into long calculations, then into long discussions with Mademoiselle Perle. The upshot of it is, however, that they come to an agreement and settle upon the quantities of each article that they will provide for a quarter, sugar, rice, prunes, coffee, preserves, tins of green peas, of haricot beans, of lobster, salt and smoked fish, and so on, and so on.

This done, they fix the day for their shopping, and set out in a cab, a cab with a rail, to a biggish grocer, whose shop is across the bridges, in the new districts.

Madame Chantal and Mademoiselle Perle make this expedition in company, mysteriously, and come home at dinner-time quite exhausted, though still excited, and shaken up in the cab, the top of which is covered with parcels and bags, like a removal van.

For the Chantals all Paris on the other side of the Seine is the new districts, districts inhabited by a strange population, noisy, not too honest, that passes its days in dissipation, its nights in feasting, and makes ducks and drakes of its money. Nevertheless the young ladies are now and again taken to the theatre, the Opéra-Comique or the Théâtre Français, when the piece is approved by the newspaper that M. Chantal reads.

The young ladies are now nineteen and seventeen years old; they are two pretty girls, tall and fresh, very well brought up, too well brought up, so well brought up that they pass unnoticed like two pretty dolls. It would never enter my head to pay attentions or to pay court to Mesdemoiselles Chantal: one scarcely dares to speak of them, they seem so immaculate, and as for bowing to them, one almost fears he is taking a liberty.

As for their father, he is a charming man, very well informed, very frank, very cordial, but whose one desire is repose and peace and quietness, and who is largely responsible for thus mummifying his family in order to live as he desires in stagnant immobility. He reads a great deal, is fond of conversation, is easily touched. The absence of all contact, elbowing and collisions has made him very sensitive and thin-skinned. The least thing excites him, agitates him, and hurts him.

Yet the Chantals do have some acquaintances, but restricted acquaintances, carefully selected in their neighbourhood. They also exchange two or three annual visits with some relatives who live at a distance.

As for me, I dine with them on the 15th of August and on Twelfth-night. The latter is part of my duty, like a Catholic’s Easter communion.

On the 15th of August some friends are invited, but on Twelfth-night I am the only guest.

II

So this year, as in other years, I have been dining at the Chantals’ to celebrate Epiphany.

According to custom I embraced M. Chantal, Madame Chantal and Mademoiselle Perle, and made a profound bow to Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. They asked me a thousand questions, about town gossip, about politics, about popular opinion on the events in Tonkin, and about our representatives. Madame Chantal, a stout lady, whose ideas always give me the impression that they are squared like so many hewn stones, had a habit of enouncing the phrase, “That will bear evil fruit some day,” as the conclusion of every political discussion. Why have I always imagined that Madame Chantal’s ideas are square? I do not know, the fact remains that everything she says assumes this shape in my mind; a square, a big square with four equal angles. There are other persons whose ideas always seem to be round and rolling like circles. No sooner have they commenced a phrase on some subject, than it goes rolling and issues in a dozen, a score, fifty round ideas, big and little, which I see running one after the other to the farthest horizon. Other persons, again, have pointed ideas.... But that is neither here nor there.

We sat down to table as usual, and the dinner passed without anything being said worth remembering.

At dessert, the Twelfth-cake was brought in. Now, every year M. Chantal was king. Whether that was a repeated coincidence or a family arrangement, I do not know, but he used infallibly to find the bean in his share of the cake, and used to proclaim Madame Chantal queen. So I was astounded to feel in a mouthful of cake something very hard, which almost broke a tooth for me. I carefully removed the thing from my mouth and saw a little china doll no bigger than a bean. In my surprise, I exclaimed, “Ah!” They looked at me, and Chantal clapped his hands and shouted, “Gaston’s got it! Gaston’s got it! Long live the king! Long live the king!”

Everybody repeated in chorus, “Long live the king!” and I blushed up to my ears, as one will blush, for no reason whatever, in rather foolish situations. I sat looking down at the cloth, with the scrap of china in my finger and thumb, forcing a laugh, and at a loss what to say or do, when Chantal resumed, “Now, you must choose a queen.”

At that I was overwhelmed. In a second, a thousand thoughts, a thousand suppositions flashed through my mind. Did they mean me to single out one of the Chantal girls? Was this a plan for making me say which one I preferred? Was it a gentle, slight, insensible impulse from the parents towards a possible marriage? The notion of marriage is constantly lurking in all those houses with grown-up daughters, and takes all sorts of forms, all sorts of disguises, all sorts of measures. I felt horribly afraid of compromising myself, and also excessively timid in face of the obstinately correct and composed attitude of Mesdemoiselles Louise and Pauline. To elect one of them to the detriment of the other was, to my mind, as difficult as to choose between two drops of water; and, besides, I was dreadfully scared by the fear of risking myself in an affair where I should be led on to marriage against my will by procedures so discreet, so imperceptible, and so calm as this trumpery royalty.

But all at once I had an inspiration, and I offered the symbolical doll to Mademoiselle Perle. They were all surprised at first; then they undoubtedly appreciated my delicacy and my discretion, for they applauded furiously. “Long live the queen, long live the queen!” they shouted.

As for her, poor old maid, she had lost countenance entirely: she trembled, quite scared, and stammered, “Oh no.... Oh no.... Oh no ... not me.... I pray you ... not me.... I pray you!”

At that I considered Mademoiselle Perle for the first time in my life, and began to ask myself what she was.

I was accustomed to seeing her in that house, as one sees the old tapestry arm-chairs on which one has sat from childhood, without ever noticing them. Some day, no one knows why, because a sunbeam falls on the chair, one says, “Why, this is very interesting.” And one discovers that the wood has been wrought by an artist, and that the covering is remarkable. I had never taken any notice of Mademoiselle Perle.

She was a member of the Chantal household, and nothing more. But why, on what footing?--She was a tall, thin person, who kept herself in the background, but was not insignificant. They treated her friendly, better than a housekeeper, not so well as a relative. Now, however, on a sudden I grasped some fine distinctions which I had not troubled about before! Madame Chantal said “Perle,” the girls, “Mademoiselle Perle,” and Chantal always called her “Mademoiselle,” though perhaps more respectfully than they did.

I began to consider her.--What was her age? Forty? Yes, forty.--She was not an old maid, she was growing old. This observation suddenly occurred to me. She did her hair, dressed, adorned herself in a ridiculous fashion, yet for all that she was not ridiculous, she had such a simple, natural grace about her, a veiled grace, studiously concealed. What a strange creature, to be sure! Why had I never observed her better? She did her hair in a grotesque fashion, in little, droll, old-fashioned ringlets. Yet under this antiquated Virgin’s hairdressing appeared a broad, calm forehead, scored by two deep wrinkles, two wrinkles of long-continued griefs, then two blue eyes, large and gentle, so timid, so startled, so humble, two beautiful eyes that had remained so innocent; so full of maiden astonishment, of youthful sensations, and also of disappointments that had entered into them and softened without troubling them.

Her whole face was intelligent and discreet, one of those faces which have toned down without being worn out or faded by the fatigues or the great emotions of life.

What a pretty mouth! and what pretty teeth! Yet one would have said that she dared not smile!

And suddenly I compared her with Madame Chantal! Why, to be sure! Mademoiselle Perle was handsomer, a hundred times handsomer, more intelligent, more noble, more dignified.

I was stupefied with the result of my observations. Champagne was poured out. I held my glass towards the queen, and proposed her health in a well-turned compliment. She would have liked, I could see, to hide her face in her napkin. Then, as she dipped her lips in the clear wine, every one cried, “The queen drinks, the queen drinks!” At that she blushed all over and choked; but I could see that she was greatly beloved in that house.

III

As soon as dinner was over, Chantal took me by the arm. It was the hour for his cigar, a sacred hour. When he was alone, he went out to smoke it in the street; when he had any one to dinner, they went up to the billiard-room, and he smoked as he played. This evening they had even lighted a fire in the billiard-room in honour of Twelfth-night, and my old friend took his cue, a very thin cue, which he chalked with great care, then he said:

“You lead off, my boy!”

For he always called me “my boy,” in spite of my five-and-twenty years; but then he had seen me when I was a baby.

So I commenced the game; I made some cannons, and missed others; but, as Mademoiselle Perle was always running through my mind, I suddenly asked:

“I say, Monsieur Chantal, is Mademoiselle Perle any relation of yours?”

He stopped playing in great surprise, and looked at me.

“What, don’t you know? Have you never heard Mademoiselle Perle’s story?”

“No.”

“Did your father never tell you?”

“No.”

“Well, well, that is strange! That is indeed strange! Why, it is quite a romance!”

He was silent, then began again:

“If you only knew how singular it is that you should ask me that question to-day, on Twelfth-night!”

“Why?”

“Ah! Why? Listen. It was forty-one years ago, forty-one years this very day, Epiphany. We were then living at Roüy-le-Tors, on the ramparts. But I must first describe the house, in order that you may understand properly. Roüy is built on a slope, or rather on a knoll which commands a wide extent of that country. We had a house there with a fine hanging garden, supported in the air by the old city walls. So the house was in the town, in the street, while the garden overlooked the plain. There was also a postern-gate from this garden to the country, at the foot of a secret staircase which went down in the thickness of the walls, like those read of in romances. A road passed by this gate, which was furnished with a big bell, for the peasants used to bring their provisions that way to escape the long round about.

“You can see the places, can’t you? Well, that year, on Twelfth-day, it had been snowing for a week. It looked like the end of the world. It chilled our very soul when we went to the ramparts to look at the plain, the great white landscape, all white, icy, shining like varnish. It looked as if the good Lord had wrapped up the Earth to send it to the lumber-room of old worlds. I can assure you that it was very dreary.

“The whole family was together at that moment, and we were numerous, very numerous, my father, my mother, my uncle and aunt, my two brothers, and my four cousins; pretty girls they were. I am married to the youngest. Of all that company there are only three alive now, my wife, myself, and my sister-in-law at Marseilles. Bless me, how a family slips away! It makes me tremble when I think of it. I was fifteen then; now I am fifty-six.

“Well, we were going to keep Twelfth-night, and we were very merry, very merry! All were in the drawing-room waiting dinner, when my elder brother, Jacques, suddenly said, ‛There’s a dog been howling in the plain for the last ten minutes. It must be some poor beast that is lost.’

“We had not finished speaking when the garden-bell rang. It had a deep church-bell tone, which made one think of the dead. We all shivered at the sound. My father called the servant and told him to go and look. There was perfect silence as we waited; we were thinking of the snow that covered all the earth. When the man returned, he declared that he had seen nothing. The dog was still howling incessantly, and the sound came from exactly the same place.

“We sat down to table, but we were still a little upset, especially we young people. All went nicely until the joint, when, hark, the bell began ringing again, three times in succession, three great, long peals, which thrilled us to our finger-tips and made us catch our breath. We sat looking at each other, our forks in the air, still listening, seized with a sort of supernatural fear.

“At last my mother spoke. ‛It is extraordinary that they should have waited so long before coming back. Do not go alone, Baptiste; one of these gentlemen will go with you.’

“My uncle François rose. He was a Hercules, very proud of his strength, and afraid of nothing on earth. My father said to him, ‛Take a gun. You never know what it may be.’

“But my uncle only took a stick, and went out at once with the servant.

“We others remained behind, trembling with terror and anxiety, without eating, without speaking. My father tried to reassure us. ‛You will see,’ he said, ‛that it will be some beggar or some traveller lost in the snow. After he rang the first time, seeing that the door was not opened at once, he has tried to find his way, then, failing to do so, he has come back to our door.’

“We felt as if our uncle’s absence lasted an hour. Then he returned furious and swearing. ‛There’s nothing, as I’m alive! Some one’s playing a trick! There’s nothing but that confounded dog howling a hundred yards away from the walls. If I had had my gun, I’d have shot him to make him quiet!’

“We sat down again, but we all continued anxious. We felt that this was not the end of it, that something was going to happen, and that presently the bell would ring again.

“And it did sound, at the very moment when we were cutting the Twelfth cake. All the men got up together. My uncle François, who had drunk some champagne, declared that he was going to massacre IT, so furiously that my mother and my aunt caught hold of him to stop him. My father, in spite of being quite calm and not very fit (he dragged one leg ever after it had been broken by a fall from a horse), declared in his turn that he wanted to know what it was, and that he was going. My brothers, aged nineteen and twenty, ran to get their guns; and, as no one paid much attention to me, I possessed myself of a rook-rifle and so prepared to accompany the expedition.

“It set out at once. My father and my uncle led, with Baptiste carrying a lantern. My brothers Jacques and Paul followed, and I brought up the rear in spite of my mother’s entreaties, who remained with her sister and my cousins on the door-step.

“The snow had begun again the last hour, and the trees were laden. The pines were bending under the heavy dusky mantle, like white pyramids, or enormous sugar loaves; and through the grey curtain of fine hurrying flakes it was almost impossible to make out the smaller shrubs, all pale in the gloom. The snow was falling so quickly that nothing else could be seen ten paces off. But the lantern threw a great light before us. When we began to descend the corkscrew staircase hollowed in the thickness of the wall, I was afraid in good earnest. I felt as if some one was walking behind me; as if some one was about to catch me by the shoulders and carry me off; and I wanted to go home. But, as I should have had to go all the way back through the garden, I did not dare.

“I heard the door to the plain being opened; then my uncle began to swear afresh. ‛Hang it! he’s off again. If I could see his shadow, I’d not miss him, the--.’

“It was eerie to see the plain, or rather to feel it was there before one; for it could not be seen, all that was visible was an endless veil of snow, above, below, in front, to right, to left, everywhere.

“My uncle spoke again, ‛Wait, there is the dog howling. I’ll go and show it how I can shoot. That will always be something.’

“But my father, who was a kindly man, replied, ‛Better go and look for the poor animal that’s crying with hunger. It’s barking for help, poor wretch. It’s calling like a human being in distress. Let’s go to it.’

“And we set out through that curtain, through that dense unceasing fall, through that powder that filled the night and the air, that moved, floated, fell, and froze the flesh as it melted, froze as if it would burn, with a short sharp sting on the skin at each touch of the tiny white flakes.

“We sank to the knees in the soft chill dust, and had to step very high to walk at all. As we advanced the dog’s bark became clearer and louder. My uncle cried, ‛There it is!’ We halted to observe it, as one ought to do on encountering an unknown enemy in the dark.

“For my