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Title: The Parisians, Book 1.

Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7737]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 20, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARISIANS, B1, LYTTON ***




Produced by David Widger





                              THE PARISIANS

                         By Edward Bulwer-Lytton


PREFATORY NOTE.

(BY THE AUTHOR'S SON.)

"The Parisians" and "Kenelm Chillingly" were begun about the same time,
and had their common origin in the same central idea.  That idea first
found fantastic expression in "The Coming Race;" and the three books,
taken together, constitute a special group, distinctly apart from all the
other works of their author.

The satire of his earlier novels is a protest against false social
respectabilities; the humour of his later ones is a protest against the
disrespect of social realities.  By the first he sought to promote social
sincerity and the free play of personal character; by the last, to
encourage mutual charity and sympathy amongst all classes, on whose
interrelation depends the character of society itself.  But in these
three books, his latest fictions, the moral purpose is more definite and
exclusive.  Each of them is an expostulation against what seemed to him
the perilous popularity of certain social and political theories, or a
warning against the influence of certain intellectual tendencies upon
individual character and national life.  This purpose, however, though
common to the three fictions, is worked out in each of them by a
different method.  "The Coming Race" is a work of pure fancy, and the
satire of it is vague and sportive.  The outlines of a definite purpose
are more distinctly drawn in "Chillingly,"--a romance which has the
source of its effect in a highly wrought imagination.  The humour and
pathos of "Chillingly" are of a kind incompatible with the design of "The
Parisians," which is a work of dramatized observation.  "Chillingly" is a
romance; "The Parisians" is a novel.  The subject of "Chillingly" is
psychological; that of "The  Parisians"  is social.  The author's  object
in  "Chillingly"  being to illustrate the effects of "modern ideas" upon
an individual character, he has confined his narrative to the biography
of that one character; hence the simplicity of plot and small number of
dramatis personae, whereby the work gains in height and depth what it
loses in breadth of surface.  "The Parisians," on the contrary, is
designed to illustrate the effect of "modern ideas" upon a whole
community.  This novel is therefore panoramic in the profusion and
variety of figures presented by it to the reader's imagination.  No
exclusive prominence is vouchsafed to any of these figures.  All of them
are drawn and coloured with an equal care, but by means of the bold,
broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so
large and so crowded.  Such figures are, indeed, but the component
features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one
collective impersonal character,--that of the Parisian Society of
Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy
throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine.  This
society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration as being
the most advanced in the progress of "modern ideas."  Thus, for a
complete perception of its writer's fundamental purpose, "The Parisians"
should be read in connection with "Chillingly," and these two books in
connection with "The Coming Race."  It will then be perceived that
through the medium of alternate fancy, sentiment, and observation,
assisted by humour and passion, these three books (in all other respects
so different from each other) complete the presentation of the same
purpose under different aspects, and thereby constitute a group of
fictions which claims a separate place of its own in any thoughtful
classification of their author's works.

One last word to those who will miss from these pages the connecting and
completing touches of the master's hand.  It may be hoped that such a
disadvantage, though irreparable, is somewhat mitigated by the essential
character of the work itself.  The aesthetic merit of this kind of novel
is in the vivacity of a general effect produced by large, swift strokes
of character; and in such strokes, if they be by a great artist, force
and freedom of style must still be apparent, even when they are left
rough and unfinished.  Nor can any lack of final verbal correction much
diminish the intellectual value which many of the more thoughtful
passages of the present work derive from a long, keen, and practical
study of political phenomena, guided by personal experience of public
life, and enlightened by a large, instinctive knowledge of the human
heart.

Such a belief is, at least, encouraged by the private communications
spontaneously made to him who expresses it, by persons of political
experience and social position in France, who have acknowledged the
general accuracy of the author's descriptions, and noticed the suggestive
sagacity and penetration of his occasional comments on the circumstances
and sentiments he describes.




INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

They who chance to have read the "Coming Race" may perhaps remember that
I, the adventurous discoverer of the land without a sun, concluded the
sketch of my adventures by a brief reference to the malady which, though
giving no perceptible notice of its encroachments, might, in the opinion
of my medical attendant, prove suddenly fatal.

I had brought my little book to this somewhat melancholy close a few
years before the date of its publication, and in the meanwhile I was
induced to transfer my residence to Paris, in order to place myself under
the care of an English physician, renowned for his successful treatment
of complaints analogous to my own.

I was the more readily persuaded to undertake this journey,--partly
because I enjoyed a familiar acquaintance with the eminent physician
referred to, who had commenced his career and founded his reputation in
the United States; partly because I had become a solitary man, the ties
of home broken, and dear friends of mine were domiciled in Paris, with
whom I should be sure of tender sympathy and cheerful companionship.  I
had reason to be thankful for this change of residence: the skill of Dr.
C_____ soon restored me to health.  Brought much into contact with
various circles of Parisian society, I became acquainted with the persons
and a witness of the events that form the substance of the tale I am
about to submit to the public, which has treated my former book with so
generous an indulgence.  Sensitively tenacious of that character for
strict and unalloyed veracity which, I flatter myself, my account of the
abodes and manners of the Vril-ya has established, I could have wished to
preserve the following narrative no less jealously guarded than its
predecessor from the vagaries of fancy.  But Truth undisguised, never
welcome in any civilized community above ground, is exposed at this time
to especial dangers in Paris; and my life would not be worth an hour's
purchase if I exhibited her 'in puris naturalibus' to the eyes of a
people wholly unfamiliarized to a spectacle so indecorous.  That care
for one's personal safety which is the first duty of thoughtful man
compels me therefore to reconcile the appearance of 'la Verite' to the
'bienseances' of the polished society in which 'la Liberte' admits no
opinion not dressed after the last fashion.

Attired as fiction, Truth may be peacefully received; and, despite the
necessity thus imposed by prudence, I indulge the modest hope that I do
not in these pages unfaithfully represent certain prominent types of the
brilliant population which has invented so many varieties of Koom-Posh;

     [Koom-Posh, Glek-Nas.  For the derivation of these terms and their
     metaphorical signification, I must refer the reader to the "Coming
     Race," chapter xii., on the language of the Vril-ya.  To those who
     have not read or have forgotten that historical composition, it may
     be convenient to state briefly that Koom-Posh with the Vril-ya is
     the name for the government of the many, or the ascendency of the
     most ignorant or hollow, and may be loosely rendered Hollow-Bosh.
     When Koom-Posh degenerates from popular ignorance into the popular
     ferocity which precedes its decease, the name for that state of
     things is Glek-Nas; namely, the universal strife-rot.]

and even when it appears hopelessly lost in the slough of a Glek-Nas,
re-emerges fresh and lively as if from an invigorating plunge into the
Fountain of Youth.  O Paris, 'foyer des idees, et oeil du monde!'--
animated contrast to the serene tranquillity of the Vril-ya, which,
nevertheless, thy noisiest philosophers ever pretend to make the goal
of their desires: of all communities on which shines the sun and descend
the rains of heaven, fertilizing alike wisdom and folly, virtue and vice;
in every city men have yet built on this earth,--mayest thou, O Paris, be
the last to brave the wands of the Coming Race and be reduced into
cinders for the sake of the common good!
                                                       TISH.

PARIS, August 28, 1872.




                              THE PARISIANS.

                         By Edward Bulwer-Lytton


                                 BOOK I.


CHAPTER I.

It was a bright day in the early spring of 1869.  All Paris seemed to
have turned out to enjoy itself.  The Tuileries, the Champs Elysees, the
Bois de Boulogne, swarmed with idlers.  A stranger might have wondered
where Toil was at work, and in what nook Poverty lurked concealed.
A millionaire from the London Exchange, as he looked round on the
magasins, the equipages, the dresses of the women; as he inquired the
prices in the shops and the rent of apartments,--might have asked
himself, in envious wonder, How on earth do those gay Parisians live?
What is their fortune?  Where does it come from?

As the day declined, many of the scattered loungers crowded into the
Boulevards; the cafes and restaurants began to light up.

About this time a young man, who might be some five or six and twenty,
was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens, heeding little the throng
through which he glided his solitary way: there was that in his aspect
and bearing which caught attention.  He looked a somebody; but though
unmistakably a Frenchman, not a Parisian.  His dress was not in the
prevailing mode: to a practised eye it betrayed the taste and the cut
of a provincial tailor.  His gait was not that of the Parisian,--less
lounging, more stately; and, unlike the Parisian, he seemed indifferent
to the gaze of others.

Nevertheless there was about him that air of dignity or distinction which
those who are reared from their cradle in the pride of birth acquire so
unconsciously that it seems hereditary and inborn.  It must also be
confessed that the young man himself was endowed with a considerable
share of that nobility which Nature capriciously distributes among her
favourites with little respect for their pedigree and blazon, the
nobility of form and face.  He was tall and well shaped, with graceful
length of limb and fall of shoulders; his face was handsome, of the
purest type of French masculine beauty,--the nose inclined to be
aquiline, and delicately thin, with finely-cut open nostrils; the
complexion clear,--the eyes large, of a light hazel, with dark lashes,
--the hair of a chestnut brown, with no tint of auburn,--the beard and
mustache a shade darker, clipped short, not disguising the outline of
lips, which were now compressed, as if smiles had of late been unfamiliar
to them; yet such compression did not seem in harmony with the
physiognomical character of their formation, which was that assigned
by Lavater to temperaments easily moved to gayety and pleasure.

Another man, about his own age, coming quickly out of one of the streets
of the Chausee d'Antin, brushed close by the stately pedestrian above
described, caught sight of his countenance, stopped short, and exclaimed,
"Alain!"  The person thus abruptly accosted turned his eye tranquilly on
the eager face, of which all the lower part was enveloped in black beard;
and slightly lifting his hat, with a gesture of the head that implied,
"Sir, you are mistaken; I have not the honour to know you," continued his
slow indifferent way.  The would-be acquaintance was not so easily
rebuffed.  "Peste," he said, between his teeth, "I am certainly right.
He is not much altered: of course I AM; ten years of Paris would improve
an orang-outang."  Quickening his step, and regaining the side of the man
he had called "Alain," he said, with a well-bred mixture of boldness and
courtesy in his tone and countenance,

"Ten thousand pardons if I am wrong.  Put surely I accost Alain de
Kerouec, son of the Marquis de Rochebriant."

"True, sir; but--"

"But you do not remember me, your old college friend, Frederic
Lemercier?"

"Is it possibly?" cried Alain, cordially, and with an animation which
charged the whole character of his countenance.  "My dear Frederic, my
dear friend, this is indeed good fortune!  So you, too, are at Paris?"

"Of course; and you?  Just come, I perceive," he added, somewhat
satirically, as, linking his arm in his new-found friend's, he glanced at
the cut of that friend's coat-collar.

"I have been herd a fortnight," replied Alain.

"Hem!  I suppose you lodge in the old Hotel de Rochebriant.  I passed it
yesterday, admiring its vast facade, little thinking you were its
inmate."

"Neither am I; the hotel does not belong to me; it was sold some years
ago by my father."

"Indeed!  I hope your father got a good price for it; those grand hotels
have trebled their value within the last five years.  And how is your
father?  Still the same polished grand seigneur?  I never saw him but
once, you know; and I shall never forget his smile, style grand monarque,
when he patted me on the head and tipped me ten napoleons."

"My father is no more," said Alain, gravely; "he has been dead nearly
three years."

"Ciel!  forgive me; I am greatly shocked.  Hem!  so you are now the
Marquis de Rochebriant, a great historical name, worth a large sum in the
market.  Few such names left.  Superb place your old chateau, is it not?"

"A superb place, no--a venerable ruin, yes!"

"Ah, a ruin! so much the better.  All the bankers are mad after ruins: so
charming an amusement to restore them.  You will restore yours, without
doubt.  I will introduce you to such an architect! has the 'moyen age' at
his fingers' ends.  Dear,--but a genius."

The young Marquis smiled,--for since he had found a college friend, his
face showed that it could smile,--smiled, but not cheerfully, and
answered,

"I have no intention to restore Rochebriant.  The walls are solid: they
have weathered the storms of six centuries, they will last my time, and
with me the race perishes."

"Bah! the race perish, indeed! you will marry.  'Parlez moi de ca': you
could not come to a better man.  I have a list of all the heiresses at
Paris, bound in russia leather.  You may take your choice out of twenty.
Ah, if I were but a Rochebriant!  It is an infernal thing to come into
the world a Lemercier.  I am a democrat, of course.  A Lemercier would be
in a false position if he were not.  But if any one would leave me twenty
acres of land, with some antique right to the De and a title, faith,
would not I be an aristocrat, and stand up for my order?  But now we have
met, pray let us dine together.  Ah! no doubt you are engaged every day
for a month.  A Rochebriant just new to Paris must be 'fete' by all the
Faubourg."

"No," answered Alain, simply, "I am not engaged; my range of acquaintance
is more circumscribed than you suppose."

"So much the better for me.  I am luckily disengaged today, which is not
often the case, for I am in some request in my own set, though it is not
that of the Faubourg.  Where shall we dine?--at the Trois Freres?"

"Wherever you please.  I know no restaurant at Paris, except a very
ignoble one, close by my lodging."

"'Apropos', where do you lodge?" "Rue de l'Universite, Numero ___."

"A fine street, but 'triste'.  If you have no longer your family hotel,
you have no excuse to linger in that museum of mummies, the Faubourg St.
Germain; you must go into one of the new quarters by the Champs Elysees.
Leave it to me; I'll find you a charming apartment.  I know one to be had
a bargain,--a bagatelle,--five hundred naps a-year.  Cost you about two
or three thousand more to furnish tolerably, not showily.  Leave all to
me.  In three days you shall be settled.  Apropos! horses!  You must have
English ones.  How many?--three for the saddle, two for your 'coupe'?
I'll find them for you.  I will write to London to-morrow: Reese [Rice]
is your man."

"Spare yourself that trouble, my dear Frederic.  I keep no horses and no
coupe.  I shall not change my apartment."  As he said this, Rochebriant
drew himself up somewhat haughtily.

"Faith," thought Lemercier, "is it possible that the Marquis is poor?
No.  I have always heard that the Rochebriants were among the greatest
proprietors in Bretagne.  Most likely, with all his innocence of the
Faubourg St. Germain, he knows enough of it to be aware that I, Frederic
Lemercier, am not the man to patronize one of its greatest nobles.
'Sacre bleu!' if I thought that; if he meant to give himself airs to me,
his old college friend,--I would--I would call him out."

Just as M. Lemercier had come to that bellicose resolution, the Marquis
said, with a smile which, though frank, was not without a certain grave
melancholy in its expression, "My dear Frederic, pardon me if I seem to
receive your friendly offers ungraciously.  But I believe that I have.
reasons you will approve for leading at Paris a life which you certainly
will not envy;" then, evidently desirous to change the subject, he said
in a livelier tone, "But what a marvellous city this Paris of ours is!
Remember I had never seen it before: it burst on me like a city in the
Arabian Nights two weeks ago.  And that which strikes me most--I say it
with regret and a pang of conscience--is certainly not the Paris of
former times, but that Paris which M. Buonaparte--I beg pardon, which the
Emperor--has called up around him, and identified forever with his reign.
It is what is new in Paris that strikes and enthrals me.  Here I see the
life of France, and I belong to her tombs!"

"I don't quite understand you," said Lemercier.  "If you think that
because your father and grandfather were Legitimists, you have not the
fair field of living ambition open to you under the Empire, you never
were more mistaken.  'Moyen age,' and even rococo, are all the rage.
You have no idea how valuable your name would be either at the Imperial
Court or in a Commercial Company.  But with your fortune you are
independent of all but fashion and the Jockey Club.

"And 'apropos' of that, pardon me,--what villain made your coat?--let me
know; I will denounce him to the police."  Half amused, half amazed,
Alain Marquis de Rochebriant looked at Frederic Lemercier much as a good-
tempered lion may look upon a lively poodle who takes a liberty with his
mane, and after a pause he replied curtly, "The clothes I wear at Paris
were made in Bretagne; and if the name of Rochebriant be of any value at
all in Paris, which I doubt, let me trust that it will make me
acknowledged as 'gentilhomme,' whatever my taste in a coat or whatever
the doctrines of a club composed--of jockeys."

"Ha, ha!" cried Lemercier, freeing himself from the arm of his friend,
and laughing the more irresistibly as he encountered the grave look of
the Marquis.  "Pardon me,--I can't help it,--the Jockey Club,--composed
of jockeys!--it is too much!--the best joke.  My dear, Alain, there is
some of the best blood of Europe in the Jockey Club; they would exclude
a plain bourgeois like me.  But it is all the same: in one respect you
are quite right.  Walk in a blouse if you please: you are still
Rochebriant; you would only be called eccentric.  Alas!  I am obliged to
send to London for my pantaloons: that comes of being a Lemercier.  But
here we are in the Palais Royal."




CHAPTER II.

The salons of the Trois Freres were crowded; our friends found a table
with some little difficulty.  Lemercier proposed a private cabinet,
which, for some reason known to himself, the Marquis declined.

Lemercier spontaneously and unrequested ordered the dinner and the wines.

While waiting for their oysters, with which, when in season, French 'bon-
vivants' usually commence their dinner, Lemercier looked round the salon
with that air of inimitable, scrutinizing, superb impertinence which
distinguishes the Parisian dandy.  Some of the ladies returned his glance
coquettishly, for Lemercier was 'beau garcon;' others turned aside
indignantly, and muttered something to the gentlemen dining with them.
The said gentlemen, when old, shook their heads, and continued to eat
unmoved; when young, turned briskly round, and looked at first fiercely
at M. Lemercier, but, encountering his eye through the glass which he had
screwed into his socket, noticing the hardihood of his countenance and
the squareness of his shoulders, even they turned back to the tables,
shook their heads, and continued to eat unmoved, just like the old ones.

"Ah!" cried Lemercier, suddenly, "here comes a man you should know, 'mon
cher.'  He will tell you how to place your money,--a rising man, a coming
man, a future minister.  Ah! 'bon jour,' Duplessis, 'bon jour,'" kissing
his hand to a gentleman who had just entered and was looking about him
for a seat.  He was evidently well and favourably known at the Trois
Freres.  The waiters had flocked round him, and were pointing to a table
by the window, which a saturnine Englishman, who had dined off a
beefsteak and potatoes, was about to vacate.

M. Duplessis, having first assured himself, like a prudent man, that his
table was secure, having ordered his oysters, his chablis, and his
'potage a la bisque,' now paced calmly and slowly across the salon, and
halted before Lemercier.

Here let me pause for a moment, and give the reader a rapid sketch of the
two Parisians.

Frederic Lemercier is dressed, somewhat too showily, in the extreme of
the prevalent fashion.  He wears a superb pin in his cravat,--a pin worth
two thousand francs; he wears rings on his fingers, 'breloques' to his
watch-chain.  He has a warm though dark complexion, thick black eyebrows,
full lips, a nose somewhat turned up, but not small, very fine large dark
eyes, a bold, open, somewhat impertinent expression of countenance;
withal decidedly handsome, thanks to colouring, youth, and vivacity of
regard.

Lucien Duplessis, bending over the table, glancing first with curiosity
at the Marquis de Rochebriant, who leans his cheek on his hand and seems
not to notice him, then concentrating his attention on Frederic
Lemercier, who sits square with his hands clasped,--Lucien Duplessis
is somewhere between forty and fifty, rather below the middle height,
slender, but not slight,--what in English phrase is called "wiry."
He is dressed with extreme simplicity: black frockcoat buttoned up; black
cravat worn higher than men who follow the fashions wear their neckcloths
nowadays; a hawk's eye and a hawk's beak; hair of a dull brown, very
short, and wholly without curl; his cheeks thin and smoothly shaven,
but he wears a mustache and imperial, plagiarized from those of his
sovereign, and, like all plagiarisms, carrying the borrowed beauty to
extremes, so that the points of mustache and imperial, stiffened and
sharpened by cosmetics which must have been composed of iron, looked like
three long stings guarding lip and jaw from invasion; a pale olive-brown
complexion, eyes small, deep-sunk, calm, piercing; his expression of face
at first glance not striking, except for quiet immovability.  Observed
more heedfully, the expression was keenly intellectual,--determined about
the lips, calculating about the brows: altogether the face of no ordinary
man, and one not, perhaps, without fine and high qualities, concealed
from the general gaze by habitual reserve, but justifying the confidence
of those whom he admitted into his intimacy.

"Ah, mon cher," said Lemercier, "you promised to call on me yesterday at
two o'clock.  I waited in for you half an hour; you never came."

"No; I went first to the Bourse.  The shares in that Company we spoke of
have fallen; they will fall much lower: foolish to buy in yet; so the
object of my calling on you was over.  I took it for granted you would
not wait if I failed my appointment.  Do you go to the opera to-night?"

"I think not; nothing worth going for: besides, I have found an old
friend, to whom I consecrate this evening.  Let me introduce you to the
Marquis de Rochebriant.  Alain, M. Duplessis."

The two gentlemen bowed.

"I had the honour to be known to Monsieur your father," said Duplessis.

"Indeed," returned Rochebriant.  "He had not visited Paris for many years
before he died."

"It was in London I met him, at the house of the Russian Princess C____."

The Marquis coloured high, inclined his head gravely, and made no reply.
Here the waiter brought the oysters and the chablis, and Duplessis
retired to his own table.

"That is the most extraordinary man," said Frederic, as he squeezed the
lemon over his oysters, "and very much to be admired."

"How so?  I see nothing at least to admire in his face," said the
Marquis, with the bluntness of a provincial.

"His face.  Ah! you are a Legitimist,--party prejudice.  He dresses his
face after the Emperor; in itself a very clever face, surely."

"Perhaps, but not an amiable one.  He looks like a bird of prey."

"All clever men are birds of prey.  The eagles are the heroes, and the
owls the sages.  Duplessis is not an eagle nor an owl.  I should rather
call him a falcon, except that I would not attempt to hoodwink him."

"Call him what you will," said the Marquis, indifferently; "M. Duplessis
can be nothing to me."

"I am not so sure of that," answered Frederic, somewhat nettled by the
phlegm with which the Provincial regarded the pretensions of the
Parisian.  "Duplessis, I repeat it, is an extraordinary man.  Though
untitled, he descends from your old aristocracy; in fact, I believe,
as his name shows, from the same stem as the Richelieus.  His father was
a great scholar, and I believe be has read much himself.  Might have
distinguished himself in literature or at the bar, but his parents died
fearfully poor; and some distant relations in commerce took charge of
him, and devoted his talents to the 'Bourse.'  Seven years ago he lived
in a single chamber, 'au quatrieme,' near the Luxembourg.  He has now a
hotel, not large but charming, in the Champs Elysees, worth at least six
hundred thousand francs.  Nor has he made his own fortune alone, but that
of many others; some of birth as high as your own.  He has the genius of
riches, and knocks off a million as a poet does an ode, by the force of
inspiration.  He is hand-in-glove with the Ministers, and has been
invited to Compiegne by the Emperor.  You will find him very useful."

Alain made a slight movement of incredulous dissent, and changed the
conversation to reminiscences of old school-boy days.

The dinner at length came to a close.  Frederic rang for the bill,--
glanced over it.  "Fifty-nine francs," said he, carelessly flinging down
his napoleon and a half.  The Marquis silently drew forth his purse and
extracted the same sum.  When they were out of the restaurant, Frederic
proposed adjourning to his own rooms.  "I can promise you an excellent
cigar, one of a box given to me by an invaluable young Spaniard attached
to the Embassy here.  Such cigars are not to be had at Paris for money,
nor even for love; seeing that women, however devoted and generous, never
offer you anything better than a cigarette.  Such cigars are only to be
had for friendship.  Friendship is a jewel."

"I never smoke," answered the Marquis, "but I shall be charmed to come to
your rooms; only don't let me encroach on your good-nature.  Doubtless
you have engagements for the evening."

"None till eleven o'clock, when I have promised to go to a soiree to
which I do not offer to take you; for it is one of those Bohemian
entertainments at which it would do you harm in the Faubourg to assist,
--at least until you have made good your position.  Let me see, is not
the Duchesse de Tarascon a relation of yours?"

"Yes; my poor mother's first cousin."

"I congratulate you.  'Tres grande dame.'  She will launch you in 'puro
coelo,' as Juno might have launched one of her young peacocks."

"There has been no acquaintance between our houses," returned the
Marquis, dryly, "since the mesalliance of her second nuptials."

"Mesalliance! second nuptials!  Her second husband was the Duc de
Tarascon."

"A duke of the First Empire, the grandson of a butcher."

"Diable! you are a severe genealogist, Monsieur le Marquis.  How can
you consent to walk arm-in-arm with me, whose great-grandfather supplied
bread to the same army to which the Due de Tarascon's grandfather
furnished the meat?"

"My dear Frederic, we two have an equal pedigree, for our friendship
dates from the same hour.  I do not blame the Duchesse de Tarascon for
marrying the grandson of a butcher, but for marrying the son of a man
made duke by a usurper.  She abandoned the faith of her house and the
cause of her sovereign.  Therefore her marriage is a blot on our
scutcheon."

Frederic raised his eyebrows, but had the tact to pursue the subject
no further.  He who interferes in the quarrels of relations must pass
through life without a friend.

The young men now arrived at Lemercier's apartment, an entresol looking
on the Boulevard des Italiens, consisting of more rooms than a bachelor
generally requires; low-pitched, indeed, but of good dimensions, and
decorated and furnished with a luxury which really astonished the
provincial, though, with the high-bred pride of an oriental, he
suppressed every sign of surprise.

Florentine cabinets, freshly retouched by the exquisite skill of Mombro;
costly specimens of old Sevres and Limoges; pictures and bronzes and
marble statuettes,--all well chosen and of great price, reflected from
mirrors in Venetian frames,--made a 'coup d'oeil' very favourable to that
respect which the human mind pays to the evidences of money.  Nor was
comfort less studied than splendour.  Thick carpets covered the floors,
doubled and quilted portieres excluded all draughts from chinks in the
doors.  Having allowed his friend a few minutes to contemplate and admire
the 'salle a manger' and 'salon' which constituted his more state
apartments, Frederic then conducted him into a small cabinet, fitted up
with scarlet cloth and gold fringes, whereon were artistically arranged
trophies of Eastern weapons and Turkish pipes with amber mouthpieces.

There, placing the Marquis at ease on a divan and flinging himself on
another, the Parisian exquisite ordered a valet, well dressed as himself,
to bring coffee and liqueurs; and after vainly pressing one of his
matchless cigars on his friend, indulged in his own Regalia.

"They are ten years old," said Frederic, with a tone of compassion at
Alain's self-inflicted loss,--"ten years old.  Born therefore about the
year in which we two parted--"

"When you were so hastily summoned from college," said the Marquis, "by
the news of your father's illness.  We expected you back in vain.  Have
you been at Paris ever since?"

"Ever since; my poor father died of that illness.  His fortune proved
much larger than was suspected: my share amounted to an income from
investments in stocks, houses, etc., to upwards of sixty thousand francs
a-year; and as I wanted six years to my majority of course the capital on
attaining my majority would be increased by accumulation.  My mother
desired to keep me near her; my uncle, who was joint guardian with her,
looked with disdain on our poor little provincial cottage; so promising
an heir should acquire his finishing education under masters at Paris.
Long before I was of age, I was initiated into politer mysteries of our
capital than those celebrated by Eugene Sue.  When I took possession of
my fortune five years ago, I was considered a Croesus; and really for
that patriarchal time I was wealthy.  Now, alas! my accumulations have
vanished in my outfit; and sixty thousand francs a-year is the least a
Parisian can live upon.  It is not only that all prices have fabulously
increased, but that the dearer things become, the better people live.
When I first came out, the world speculated upon me; now, in order to
keep my standing, I am forced to speculate on the world.  Hitherto I have
not lost; Duplessis let me into a few good things this year, worth one
hundred thousand francs or so.  Croesus consulted the Delphic Oracle.
Duplessis was not alive in the time of Croesus, or Croesus would have
consulted Duplessis."

Here there was a ring at the outer door of the apartment, and in another
minute the valet ushered in a gentleman somewhere about the age of
thirty, of prepossessing countenance, and with the indefinable air of
good-breeding and 'usage du monde.'  Frederic started up to greet
cordially the new-comer, and introduced him to the Marquis under the name
of "Sare Grarm Varn."

"Decidedly," said the visitor, as he took off his paletot and seated
himself beside the Marquis,--"decidedly, my dear Lemercier," said he, in
very correct French, and with the true Parisian accent and intonation,
"you Frenchmen merit that praise for polished ignorance of the language
of barbarians which a distinguished historian bestows on the ancient
Romans.  Permit me, Marquis, to submit to you the consideration whether
Grarm Varn is a fair rendering of my name as truthfully printed on this
card."

The inscription on the card, thus drawn from its case and placed in
Alain's hand, was--

                         MR. GRAHAM VANE,

                              No. __ Rue d'Anjou.

The Marquis gazed at it as he might on a hieroglyphic, and passed it on
to Lemercier in discreet silence.

That gentleman made another attempt at the barbarian appellation.

"'Grar--ham Varne.'  'C'est ca!'  I triumph!  all difficulties yield to
French energy."

Here the coffee and liqueurs were served; and after a short pause the
Englishman, who had very quietly been observing the silent Marquis,
turned to him and said, "Monsieur le Marquis, I presume it was your
father whom I remember as an acquaintance of my own father at Ems.
It is many years ago; I was but a child.  The Count de Chambord was then
at that enervating little spa for the benefit of the Countess's health.
If our friend Lemercier does not mangle your name as he does mine, I
understand him to say that you are the Marquis de Rochebriant."

"That is my name: it pleases me to hear that my father was among those
who flocked to Ems to do homage to the royal personage who deigns to
assume the title of Count de Chambord."

"My own ancestors clung to the descendants of James II. till their claims
were buried in the grave of the last Stuart, and I honour the gallant men
who, like your father, revere in an exile the heir to their ancient
kings."

The Englishman said this with grace and feeling; the Marquis's heart
warmed to him at once.

"The first loyal 'gentilhome' I have met at Paris," thought the
Legitimist; "and, oh, shame! not a Frenchman!"  Graham Vane, now
stretching himself and accepting the cigar which Lemercier offered him,
said to that gentleman "You who know your Paris by heart--everybody and
everything therein worth the knowing, with many bodies and many things
that are not worth it--can you inform me who and what is a certain lady
who every fine day may be seen walking in a quiet spot at the outskirts
of the Bois de Boulogne, not far from the Baron de Rothschild's villa?
The said lady arrives at this selected spot in a dark-blue coupe without
armorial bearings, punctually at the hour of three.  She wears always the
same dress,--a kind of gray pearl-coloured silk, with a 'cachemire'
shawl.  In age she may be somewhat about twenty--a year or so more or
less--and has a face as haunting as a Medusa's; not, however, a face to
turn a man into a stone, but rather of the two turn a stone into a man.
A clear paleness, with a bloom like an alabaster lamp with the light
flashing through.  I borrow that illustration from Sare Scott, who
applied it to Milor Bee-ren."

"I have not seen the lady you describe," answered Lemercier, feeling
humiliated by the avowal; "in fact, I have not been in that sequestered
part of the Bois for months; but I will go to-morrow: three o'clock you
say,--leave it to me; to-morrow evening, if she is a Parisienne, you
shall know all about her.  But, mon cher, you are not of a jealous
temperament to confide your discovery to another."

"Yes, I am of a very jealous temperament," replied the Englishman; "but
jealousy comes after love, and not before it.  I am not in love; I am
only haunted.  To-morrow evening, then, shall we dine at Philippe's,
seven o'clock?"

"With all my heart," said Lemercier; "and you too, Alain?"

"Thank you, no," said the Marquis, briefly; and he rose, drew on his
gloves, and took up his hat.

At these signals of departure, the Englishman, who did not want tact nor
delicacy, thought that he had made himself 'de trop' in the 'tete-a-tete'
of two friends of the same age and nation; and, catching up his paletot,
said hastily, "No, Marquis, do not go yet, and leave our host in
solitude; for I have an engagement which presses, and only looked in at
Lemercier's for a moment, seeing the light at his windows.  Permit me to
hope that our acquaintance will not drop, and inform me where I may have
the honour to call on you."

"Nay," said the Marquis; "I claim the right of a native to pay my
respects first to the foreigner who visits our capital, and," he added
in a lower tone, "who speaks so nobly of those who revere its exiles."

The Englishman saluted, and walked slowly towards the door; but on
reaching the threshold turned back and made a sign to Lemercier,
unperceived by Alain.

Frederic understood the sign, and followed Graham Vane into the adjoining
room, closing the door as he passed.

"My dear Lemercier, of course I should not have intruded on you at this
hour on a mere visit of ceremony.  I called to say that the Mademoiselle
Duval whose address you sent me is not the right one,--not the lady whom,
knowing your wide range of acquaintance, I asked you to aid me in finding
out."

"Not the right Duval?  Diable!  she answered your description, exactly."

"Not at all."

"You said she was very pretty and young,--under twenty."

"You forgot that I said she deserved that description twenty-one years
ago."

"Ah, so you did; but some ladies are always young.  'Age,' says a wit in
the 'Figaro,' 'tis a river which the women compel to reascend to its
source when it has flowed onward more than twenty years.'  Never mind:
'soyez tranquille;' I will find your Duval yet if she is to be found.
But why could not the friend who commissioned you to inquire choose a
name less common?  Duval! every street in Paris has a shop-door over
which is inscribed the name of Duval."

"Quite true, there is the difficulty; however, my dear Lemercier, pray
continue to look out for a Louise Duval who was young and pretty twenty-
one years ago: this search ought to interest me more than that which I
entrusted to you tonight, respecting the pearly-robed lady; for in the
last I but gratify my own whim, in the first I discharge a promise to a
friend.  You, so perfect a Frenchman, know the difference; honour is
engaged to the first.  Be sure you let me know if you find any other
Madame or Mademoiselle Duval; and of course you remember your promise not
to mention to any one the commission of inquiry you so kindly undertake.
I congratulate you on your friendship for M. de Rochebriant.  What a
noble countenance and manner!"

Lemercier returned to the Marquis.  "Such a pity you can't dine with us
to-morrow.  I fear you made but a poor dinner to-day.  But it is always
better to arrange the menu beforehand.  I will send to Philippe's
tomorrow.  Do not be afraid."

The Marquis paused a moment, and on his young face a proud struggle was
visible.  At last he said, bluntly and manfully,

"My dear Frederic, your world and mine are not and cannot be the same.
Why should I be ashamed to own to my old schoolfellow that I am poor,
--very poor; that the dinner I have shared with you to-day is to me a
criminal extravagance?  I lodge in a single chamber on the fourth-story;
I dine off a single plat at a small restaurateur's; the utmost income I
can allow to myself does not exceed five thousand francs a year: my
fortunes I cannot hope much to improve.  In his own country Alain de
Rochebriant has no career."  Lemercier was so astonished by this
confession that he remained for some moments silent, eyes and mouth both
wide open; at length he sprang up, embraced his friend well-nigh sobbing,
and exclaimed, "'Tant mieux pour moi!'  You must take your lodging with
me.  I have a charming bedroom to spare.  Don't say no.  It will raise my
own position to say 'I and Rochebriant keep house together.'  It must be
so.  Come here to-morrow.  As for not having a career,--bah!  I and
Duplessis will settle that.  You shall be a millionaire in two years.
Meanwhile we will join capitals: I my paltry notes, you your grand name.
Settled!"

"My dear, dear Frederic," said the young noble, deeply affected, "on
reflection you will see what you propose is impossible.  Poor I may be
without dishonour; live at another man's cost I cannot do without
baseness.  It does not require to be 'gentilhomme' to feel that: it is
enough to be a Frenchman.  Come and see me when you can spare the time.
There is my address.  You are the only man in Paris to whom I shall be at
home.  Au revoir."  And breaking away from Lemercier's clasp, the Marquis
hurried off.




CHAPTER III.

Alain reached the house in which he lodged.  Externally a fine house, it
had been the hotel of a great family in the old regime.  On the first
floor were still superb apartments, with ceilings painted by Le Brun,
with walls on which the thick silks still seemed fresh.  These rooms were
occupied by a rich 'agent de change;' but, like all such ancient palaces,
the upper stories were wretchedly defective even in the comforts which
poor men demand nowadays: a back staircase, narrow, dirty, never lighted,
dark as Erebus, led to the room occupied by the Marquis, which might be
naturally occupied by a needy student or a virtuous 'grisette.'  But
there was to him a charm in that old hotel, and the richest 'locataire'
therein was not treated with a respect so ceremonious as that which at
tended the lodger on the fourth story.  The porter and his wife were
Bretons; they came from the village of Rochebriant; they had known
Alain's parents in their young days; it was their kinsman who had
recommended him to the hotel which they served: so, when he paused at
the lodge for his key, which he had left there, the porter's wife was in
waiting for his return, and insisted on lighting him upstairs and seeing
to his fire, for after a warm day the night had turned to that sharp
biting cold which is more trying in Paris than even in London.

The old woman, running up the stairs before him, opened the door of his
room, and busied herself at the fire.  "Gently, my good Marthe," said he,
"that log suffices.  I have been extravagant to-day, and must pinch for
it."

"M. le Marquis jests," said the old woman, laughing.

"No, Marthe; I am serious.  I have sinned, but I shall reform.  'Entre
nous,' my dear friend, Paris is very dear when one sets one's foot out
of doors: I must soon go back to Rochebriant."

"When M. le Marquis goes back to Rochebriant he must take with him a
Madame la Marquise,--some pretty angel with a suitable dot."

"A dot suitable to the ruins of Rochebriant would not suffice to repair
them, Marthe: give me my dressing-gown, and good-night."

"'Bon repos, M. le Marquis! beaux reves, et bel avenir.'"

"'Bel avenir!'" murmured the young man, bitterly, leaning his cheek on
his hand; "what fortune fairer than the present can be mine? yet inaction
in youth is more keenly felt than in age.  How lightly I should endure
poverty if it brought poverty's ennobling companion, Labour,--denied to
me!  Well, well; I must go back to the old rock: on this ocean there is
no sail, not even an oar, for me."

Alain de Rochebriant had not been reared to the expectation of poverty.
The only son of a father whose estates were large beyond those of most
nobles in modern France, his destined heritage seemed not unsuitable to
his illustrious birth.  Educated at a provincial academy, he had been
removed at the age of sixteen to Rochebriant, and lived there simply and
lonelily enough, but still in a sort of feudal state, with an aunt, an
elder and unmarried sister to his father.

His father he never saw but twice after leaving college.  That brilliant
seigneur visited France but rarely, for very brief intervals, residing
wholly abroad.  To him went all the revenues of Rochebriant save what
sufficed for the manage of his son and his sister.  It was the cherished
belief of these two loyal natures that the Marquis secretly devoted his
fortune to the cause of the Bourbons; how, they knew not, though they
often amused themselves by conjecturing: and, the young man, as he grew
up, nursed the hope that he should soon hear that the descendant of Henri
Quatre had crossed the frontier on a white charger and hoisted the old
gonfalon with its 'fleur-de-lis.'  Then, indeed, his own career would be
opened, and the sword of the Kerouecs drawn from its sheath.  Day after
day he expected to hear of revolts, of which his noble father was
doubtless the soul.  But the Marquis, though a sincere Legitimist, was
by no means an enthusiastic fanatic.  He was simply a very proud, a very
polished, a very luxurious, and, though not without the kindliness and
generosity which were common attributes of the old French noblesse, a
very selfish grand seigneur.

Losing his wife (who died the first year of marriage in giving birth to
Alain) while he was yet very young, he had lived a frank libertine life
until he fell submissive under tho despotic yoke of a Russian Princess,
who, for some mysterious reason, never visited her own country and
obstinately refused to reside in France.  She was fond of travel, and
moved yearly from London to Naples, Naples to Vienna, Berlin, Madrid,
Seville, Carlsbad, Baden-Baden,--anywhere for caprice or change, except
Paris.  This fair wanderer succeeded in chaining to herself the heart and
the steps of the Marquis de Rochebriant.

She was very rich; she lived semi-royally.  Hers was just the house in
which it suited the Marquis to be the 'enfant qate.'  I suspect that,
cat-like, his attachment was rather to the house than to the person of
his mistress.  Not that he was domiciled with the Princess; that would
have been somewhat too much against the proprieties, greatly too much
against the Marquis's notions of his own dignity.  He had his own
carriage, his own apartments, his own suite, as became so grand a
seigneur and the lover of so grand a dame.  His estates, mortgaged before
he came to them, yielded no income sufficient for his wants; he mortgaged
deeper and deeper, year after year, till he could mortgage them no more.
He sold his hotel at Paris; he accepted without scruple his sister's
fortune; he borrowed with equal 'sang froid' the two hundred thousand
francs which his son on coming of age inherited from his mother.
Alain yielded that fortune to him without a murmur,--nay, with pride;
he thought it destined to go towards raising a regiment for the
fleur-de-lis.

To do the Marquis justice, he was fully persuaded that he should shortly
restore to his sister and son what he so recklessly took from them.  He
was engaged to be married to his Princess so soon as her own husband
died.  She had been separated from the Prince for many years, and every
year it was said he could not last a year longer.  But he completed the
measure of his conjugal iniquities by continuing to live; and one day,
by mistake, Death robbed the lady of the Marquis instead of the Prince.

This was an accident which the Marquis had never counted upon.  He was
still young enough to consider himself young; in fact, one principal
reason for keeping Alain secluded in Bretagne was his reluctance to
introduce into the world a son "as old as myself" he would say
pathetically.  The news of his death, which happened at Baden after a
short attack of bronchitis caught in a supper 'al fresco' at the old
castle, was duly transmitted to Rochebriant by the Princess; and the
shock to Alain and his aunt was the greater because they had seen so
little of the departed that they regarded him as a heroic myth, an
impersonation of ancient chivalry, condemning himself to voluntary exile
rather than do homage to usurpers.  But from their grief they were soon
roused by the terrible doubt whether Rochebriant could still be retained
in the family.  Besides the mortgagees, creditors from half the capitals
in Europe sent in their claims; and all the movable effects transmitted
to Alain by his father's confidential Italian valet, except sundry
carriages and horses which were sold at Baden for what they would fetch,
were a magnificent dressing-case, in the secret drawer of which were some
bank-notes amounting to thirty thousand francs, and three large boxes
containing the Marquis's correspondence, a few miniature female
portraits, and a great many locks of hair.

Wholly unprepared for the ruin that stared him in the face, the young
Marquis evinced the natural strength of his character by the calmness
with which he met the danger, and the intelligence with which he
calculated and reduced it.

By the help of the family notary in the neighbouring town, he made
himself master of his liabilities and his means; and he found that, after
paying all debts and providing for the interest of the mortgages, a
property which ought to have realized a rental of L10,000 a year yielded
not more than L400.  Nor was even this margin safe, nor the property out
of peril; for the principal mortgagee, who was a capitalist in Paris
named Louvier, having had during the life of the late Marquis more than
once to wait for his half-yearly interest longer than suited his
patience,--and his patience was not enduring,--plainly declared that if
the same delay recurred he should put his right of seizure in force; and
in France still more than in England, bad seasons seriously affect the
security of rents.  To pay away L9,600 a year regularly out of L10,000,
with the penalty of forfeiting the whole if not paid,--whether crops may
fail, farmers procrastinate, and timber fall in price,--is to live with
the sword of Damocles over one's head.

For two years and more, however, Alain met his difficulties with prudence
and vigour; he retrenched the establishment hitherto kept at the chateau,
resigned such rural pleasures as he had been accustomed to indulge, and
lived like one of his petty farmers.  But the risks of the future
remained undiminished.

"There is but one way, Monsieur le Marquis," said the family notary,
M. Hebert, "by which you can put your estate in comparative safety.
Your father raised his mortgages from time to time, as he wanted money,
and often at interest above the average market interest.  You may add
considerably to your income by consolidating all these mortgages into one
at a lower percentage, and in so doing pay off this formidable mortgagee,
M. Louvier, who, I shrewdly suspect, is bent upon becoming the proprietor
of Rochebriant.  Unfortunately those few portions of your land which were
but lightly charged, and, lying contiguous to small proprietors, were
coveted by them, and could be advantageously sold, are already gone to
pay the debts of Monsieur the late Marquis.  There are, however, two
small farms which, bordering close on the town of S_____, I think I could
dispose of for building purposes at high rates; but these lands are
covered by M. Louvier's general mortgage, and he has refused to release
them, unless the whole debt be paid.  Were that debt therefore
transferred to another mortgagee, we might stipulate for their exception,
and in so doing secure a sum of more than 100,000 francs, which you could
keep in reserve for a pressing or unforeseen occasion, and make the
nucleus of a capital devoted to the gradual liquidation of the charges on
the estate.  For with a little capital, Monsieur le Marquis, your rent-
roll might be very greatly increased, the forests and orchards improved,
those meadows round S_____  drained and irrigated.  Agriculture is
beginning to be understood in Bretagne, and your estate would soon double
its value in the hands of a spirited capitalist.  My advice to you,
therefore, is to go to Paris, employ a good 'avoue,' practised in such
branch of his profession, to negotiate the consolidation of your
mortgages upon terms that will enable you to sell outlying portions,
and so pay off the charge by instalments agreed upon; to see if some safe
company or rich individual can be found to undertake for a term of years
the management of your forests, the draining of the S_____  meadows, the
superintendence of your fisheries, etc.  They, it is true, will
monopolize the profits for many years,--perhaps twenty; but you are a
young man: at the end of that time you will reenter on your estate with
a rental so improved that the mortgages, now so awful, will seem to you
comparatively trivial."

In pursuance of this advice, the young Marquis had come to Paris
fortified with a letter from M. Hebert to an 'avoue' of eminence, and
with many letters from his aunt to the nobles of the Faubourg connected
with his house.  Now one reason why M. Hebert had urged his client to
undertake this important business in person, rather than volunteer his
own services in Paris, was somewhat extra-professional.  He had a sincere
and profound affection for Alain; he felt compassion for that young life
so barrenly wasted in seclusion and severe privations; he respected, but
was too practical a man of business to share, those chivalrous sentiments
of loyalty to an exiled dynasty which disqualified the man for the age he
lived in, and, if not greatly modified, would cut him off from the hopes
and aspirations of his eager generation.  He thought plausibly enough
that the air of the grand metropolis was necessary to the mental health,
enfeebled and withering amidst the feudal mists of Bretagne; that once in
Paris, Alain would imbibe the ideas of Paris, adapt himself to some
career leading to honour and to fortune, for which he took facilities
from his high birth, an historical name too national for any dynasty not
to welcome among its adherents, and an intellect not yet sharpened by
contact and competition with others, but in itself vigorous, habituated
to thought, and vivified by the noble aspirations which belong to
imaginative natures.

At the least, Alain would be at Paris in the social position which would
afford him the opportunities of a marriage, in which his birth and rank
would be readily accepted as an equivalent to some ample fortune that
would serve to redeem the endangered seigneuries.  He therefore warned
Alain that the affair for which he went to Paris might be tedious, that
lawyers were always slow, and advised him to calculate on remaining
several months, perhaps a year; delicately suggesting that his rearing
hitherto had been too secluded for his age and rank, and that a year at
Paris, even if he failed in the object which took him there, would not be
thrown away in the knowledge of men and things that would fit him better
to grapple with his difficulties on his return.

Alain divided his spare income between his aunt and himself, and had come
to Paris resolutely determined to live within the L200 a year which
remained to his share.  He felt the revolution in his whole being that
commenced when out of sight of the petty principality in which he was the
object of that feudal reverence, still surviving in the more unfrequented
parts of Bretagne, for the representatives of illustrious names connected
with the immemorial legends of the province.

The very bustle of a railway, with its crowd and quickness and
unceremonious democracy of travel, served to pain and confound and
humiliate that sense of individual dignity in which he had been nurtured.
He felt that, once away from Rochebriant, he was but a cipher in the sum
of human beings.  Arrived at Paris, and reaching the gloomy hotel to
which he had been recommended, he greeted even the desolation of that
solitude which is usually so oppressive to a stranger in the metropolis
of his native land.  Loneliness was better than the loss of self in the
reek and pressure of an unfamiliar throng.  For the first few days he had
wandered over Paris without calling even on the 'avoue' to whom M. Hebert
had directed him.  He felt with the instinctive acuteness of a mind
which, under sounder training, would have achieved no mean distinction,
that it was a safe precaution to imbue himself with the atmosphere of the
place, and seize on those general ideas which in great capitals are so
contagious that they are often more accurately caught by the first
impressions than by subsequent habit, before he brought his mind into
collision with those of the individuals he had practically to deal with.

At last he repaired to the 'avoue,' M. Gandrin, Rue St. Florentin.  He
had mechanically formed his idea of the abode and person of an 'avoue'
from his association with M. Hebert.  He expected to find a dull house in
a dull street near the centre of business, remote from the haunts of
idlers, and a grave man of unpretending exterior and matured years.

He arrived at a hotel newly fronted, richly decorated, in the fashionable
quartier close by the Tuileries.  He entered a wide 'porte cochere,' and
was directed by the concierge to mount 'au premier.'  There, first
detained in an office faultlessly neat, with spruce young men at smart
desks, he was at length admitted into a noble salon, and into the
presence of a gentleman lounging in an easy-chair before a magnificent
bureau of 'marqueterie, genre Louis Seize,' engaged in patting a white
curly lapdog, with a pointed nose and a shrill bark.

The gentleman rose politely on his entrance, and released the dog, who,
after sniffing the Marquis, condescended not to bite.

"Monsieur le Marquis," said M. Gandrin, glancing at the card and the
introductory note from M. Hebert, which Alain had sent in, and which lay
on the 'secretaire' beside heaps of letters nicely arranged and labelled,
"charmed to make the honour of your acquaintance; just arrived at Paris?
So M. Hebert--a very worthy person whom I have never seen, but with whom
I have had correspondence--tells me you wish for my advice; in fact, he
wrote to me some days ago, mentioning the business in question,--
consolidation of mortgages.  A very large sum wanted, Monsieur le
Marquis, and not to be had easily."

"Nevertheless," said Alain, quietly, "I should imagine that there must
be many capitalists in Paris willing to invest in good securities at fair
interest."

"You are mistaken, Marquis; very few such capitalists.  Men worth money
nowadays like quick returns and large profits, thanks to the magnificent
system of 'Credit Mobilier,' in which, as you are aware, a man may place
his money in any trade or speculation without liabilities beyond his
share.  Capitalists are nearly all traders or speculators."

"Then," said the Marquis, half rising, "I am to presume, sir, that you
are not likely to assist me."

"No, I don't say that, Marquis.  I will look with care into the matter.
Doubtless you have with you an abstract of the, necessary documents, the
conditions of the present mortgages, the rental of the estate, its
probable prospects, and so forth."

"Sir, I have such an abstract with me at Paris; and having gone into
it myself with M. Hebert, I can pledge you my word that it is strictly
faithful to the facts."

The Marquis said this with naive simplicity, as if his word were quite
sufficient to set that part of the question at rest.  M. Gandrin smiled
politely and said, "'Eh bien,' M. le Marquis: favour me with the
abstract; in a week's time you shall have my opinion.  You enjoy Paris?
Greatly improved under the Emperor.  'Apropos,' Madame Gandrin receives
tomorrow evening; allow me that opportunity to present you to her."
Unprepared for the proffered hospitality, the Marquis had no option but
to murmur his gratification and assent.

In a minute more he was in the streets.  The next evening he went to
Madame Gandrin's,--a brilliant reception,--a whole moving flower-bed of
"decorations" there.  Having gone through the ceremony of presentation to
Madame Gandrin,--a handsome woman dressed to perfection, and conversing
with the secretary to an embassy,--the young noble ensconced himself in
an obscure and quiet corner, observing all and imagining that he escaped
observation.  And as the young men of his own years glided by him, or as
their talk reached his ears, he became aware that from top to toe, within
and without, he was old-fashioned, obsolete, not of his race, not of his
day.  His rank itself seemed to him a waste-paper title-deed to a
heritage long lapsed.  Not thus the princely seigneurs of Rochebriant
made their 'debut' at the capital of their nation.  They had had the
'entree' to the cabinets of their kings; they had glittered in the halls
of Versailles; they had held high posts of distinction in court and camp;
the great Order of St. Louis had seemed their hereditary appanage.  His
father, though a voluntary exile in manhood, had been in childhood a
king's page, and throughout life remained the associate of princes; and
here, in an 'avoue's soiree,' unknown, unregarded, an expectant on an
'avoue's' patronage, stood the last lord of Rochebriant.

It is easy to conceive that Alain did not stay long.  But he stayed long
enough to convince him that on L200 a year the polite society of Paris,
even as seen at M. Gandrin's, was not for him.  Nevertheless, a day or
two after, he resolved to call upon the nearest of his kinsmen to whom
his aunt had given him letters.  With the Count de Vandemar, one of his
fellow-nobles of the sacred Faubourg, he should be no less Rochebriant,
whether in a garret or a palace.  The Vandemars, in fact, though for many
generations before the First Revolution a puissant and brilliant family,
had always recognized the Rochebriants as the head of their house,--the
trunk from which they had been slipped in the fifteenth century, when a
younger son of the Rochebriants married a wealthy heiress and took the
title with the lands of Vandemar.

Since then the two families had often intermarried.  The present count
had a reputation for ability, was himself a large proprietor, and might
furnish advice to guide Alain in his negotiations with M. Gandrin.  The
Hotel do Vandemar stood facing the old Hotel de Rochebriant; it was less
spacious, but not less venerable, gloomy, and prison-like.

As he turned his eyes from the armorial scutcheon which still rested,
though chipped and mouldering, over the portals of his lost ancestral
house, and was about to cross the street, two young men, who seemed two
or three years older than himself, emerged on horseback from the Hotel
de Vandemar.

Handsome young men, with the lofty look of the old race, dressed with the
punctilious care of person which is not foppery in men of birth, but
seems part of the self-respect that appertains to the old chivalric point
of honour.  The horse of one of these cavaliers made a caracole which
brought it nearly upon Alain as he was about to cross.  The rider,
checking his steed, lifted his hat to Alain and uttered a word of apology
in the courtesy of ancient high-breeding, but still with condescension as
to an inferior.  This little incident, and the slighting kind of notice
received from coevals of his own birth, and doubtless his own blood,--for
he divined truly that they were the sons of the Count de Vandemar,--
disconcerted Alain to a degree which perhaps a Frenchman alone can
comprehend.  He had even half a mind to give up his visit and turn back.
However, his native manhood prevailed over that morbid sensitiveness
which, born out of the union of pride and poverty, has all the effects
of vanity, and yet is not vanity itself.

The Count was at home, a thin spare man with a narrow but high forehead,
and an expression of countenance keen, severe, and 'un peu moqueuse.'

He received the Marquis, however, at first with great cordiality,
kissed him on both sides of his cheek, called him "cousin," expressed
immeasurable regret that the Countess was gone out on one of the missions
of charity in which the great ladies of the Faubourg religiously interest
themselves, and that his sons had just ridden forth to the Bois.

As Alain, however, proceeded, simply and without false shame,
to communicate the object of his visit at Paris, the extent of his
liabilities, and the penury of his means, the smile vanished from
the Count's face.  He somewhat drew back his fauteuil in the movement
common to men who wish to estrange themselves from some other man's
difficulties; and when Alain came to a close, the Count remained some
moments seized with a slight cough; and, gazing intently on the carpet,
at length he said, "My dear young friend, your father behaved extremely
ill to you,--dishonourably, fraudulently."

"Hold!" said the Marquis, colouring high.  "Those are words no man can
apply to my father in my presence."

The Count stared, shrugged his shoulders, and replied with 'sang froid,'
"Marquis, if you are contented with your father's conduct, of course it
is no business of mine: he never injured me.  I presume, however, that,
considering my years and my character, you come to me for advice: is it
so?"

Alain bowed his head in assent.

"There are four courses for one in your position to take," said the
Count, placing the index of the right hand successively on the thumb and
three fingers of the left,--"four courses, and no more.

"First.  To do as your notary recommended: consolidate your mortgages,
patch up your income as you best can, return to Rochebriant, and devote
the rest of your existence to the preservation of your property.  By that
course your life will be one of permanent privation, severe struggle; and
the probability is that you will not succeed: there will come one or two
bad seasons, the farmers will fail to pay, the mortgagee will foreclose,
and you may find yourself, after twenty years of anxiety and torment,
prematurely old and without a sou.

"Course the second.  Rochebriant, though so heavily encumbered as to
yield you some such income as your father gave to his chef de cuisine,
is still one of those superb 'terres' which bankers and Jews and stock-
jobbers court and hunt after, for which they will give enormous sums.
If you place it in good hands, I do not doubt that you could dispose
of the property within three months, on terms that would leave you a
considerable surplus, which, invested with judgment, would afford you
whereon you could live at Paris in a way suitable to your rank and age.
Need we go further?--does this course smile to you?"

"Pass on, Count; I will defend to the last what I take from my ancestors,
and cannot voluntarily sell their roof-tree and their tombs."

"Your name would still remain, and you would be just as well received
in Paris, and your 'noblesse' just as implicitly conceded, if all Judaea
encamped upon Rochebriant.  Consider how few of us 'gentilshommes' of the
old regime have any domains left to us.  Our names alone survive: no
revolution can efface them."

"It may be so, but pardon me; there are subjects on which we cannot
reason,--we can but feel.  Rochebriant may be torn from me, but I cannot
yield it."

"I proceed to the third course.  Keep the chateau and give up its
traditions; remain 'de facto' Marquis of Rochebriant, but accept the new
order of things.  Make yourself known to the people in power.  They will
be charmed to welcome you a convert from the old noblesse is a guarantee
of stability to the new system.  You will be placed in diplomacy;
effloresce into an ambassador, a minister,--and ministers nowadays
have opportunities to become enormously rich."

"That course is not less impossible than the last.  Till Henry V.
formally resign his right to the throne of Saint Louis, I can be servant
to no other man seated on that throne."

"Such, too, is my creed," said the Count, "and I cling to it; but my
estate is not mortgaged, and I have neither the tastes nor the age for
public employments.  The last course is perhaps better than the rest; at
all events it is the easiest.  A wealthy marriage; even if it must be a
'mesalliance.'  I think at your age, with your appearance, that your name
is worth at least two million francs in the eyes of a rich 'roturier'
with an ambitious daughter."

"Alas!" said the young man, rising, "I see I shall have to go back to
Rochebriant.  I cannot sell my castle, I cannot sell my creed, and I
cannot sell my name and myself."

"The last all of us did in the old 'regime,' Marquis.  Though I still
retain the title of Vandemar, my property comes from the Farmer-General's
daughter, whom my great-grandfather, happily for us, married in the days
of Louis Quinze.  Marriages with people of sense and rank have always
been 'marriages de convenance' in France.  It is only in 'le petit monde'
that men having nothing marry girls having nothing, and I don't believe
they are a bit the happier for it.  On the contrary, the 'quarrels de
menage' leading to frightful crimes appear by the 'Gazette des Tribunaux'
to be chiefly found among those who do not sell themselves at the altar."

The old Count said this with a grim 'persiflage.'  He was a Voltairian.

Voltairianism, deserted by the modern Liberals of France, has its chief
cultivation nowadays among the wits of the old 'regime.'  They pick up
its light weapons on the battle-field on which their fathers perished,
and re-feather against the 'canaille' the shafts which had been pointed
against the 'noblesse.'

"Adieu, Count," said Alain, rising; "I do not thank you less for your
advice because I have not the wit to profit by it."

"'Au revoir,' my cousin; you will think better of it when you have been
a month or two at Paris.  By the way, my wife receives every Wednesday;
consider our house yours."

"Count, can I enter into the world which Madame la Comtesse receives, in
the way that becomes my birth, on the income I take from my fortune?"

The Count hesitated.  "No," said he at last, frankly; "not because you
will be less welcome or less respected, but because I see that you have
all the pride and sensitiveness of a 'seigneur de province.'  Society
would therefore give you pain, not pleasure.  More than this, I know,
by the remembrance of my own youth and the sad experience of my own
sons, that you would be irresistibly led into debt, and debt in your
circumstances would be the loss of Rochebriant.  No; I invite you to
visit us.  I offer you the most select but not the most brilliant circles
of Paris, because my wife is religious, and frightens away the birds of
gay plumage with the scarecrows of priests and bishops.  But if you
accept my invitation and my offer, I am bound, as an old man of the world
to a young kinsman, to say that the chances are that you will be ruined."

"I thank you, Count, for your candour; and I now acknowledge that I have
found a relation and a guide," answered the Marquis, with nobility of
mien that was not without a pathos which touched the hard heart of the
old man.

"Come at least whenever you want a sincere if a rude friend;" and though
he did not kiss his cousin's cheek this time, he gave him, with more
sincerity, a parting shake of the hand.

And these made the principal events in Alain's Paris life till he met
Frederic Lemercier.  Hitherto he had received no definite answer from
M. Gandrin, who had postponed an interview, not having had leisure to
make himself master of all the details in the abstract sent to him.




CHAPTER IV.

The next day, towards the afternoon, Frederic Lemercier, somewhat
breathless from the rapidity at which he had ascended to so high an
eminence, burst into Alain's chamber.

"'Br-r!  mon cher;' what superb exercise for the health--how it must
strengthen the muscles and expand the chest!  After this who should
shrink from scaling Mont Blanc?  Well, well.  I have been meditating on
your business ever since we parted.  But I would fain know more of its
details.  You shall confide them to me as we drive through the Bois.  My
coupe is below, and the day is beautiful; come."

To the young Marquis, the gayety, the heartiness of his college friend
were a cordial.  How different from the dry counsels of the Count de
Vandemar!  Hope, though vaguely, entered into his heart.  Willingly he
accepted Frederic's invitation, and the young men were soon rapidly borne
along the Champs Elysees.  As briefly as he could Alain described the
state of his affairs, the nature of his mortgages, and the result of his
interview with M. Gandrin.

Frederic listened attentively.  "Then Gandrin has given you as yet no
answer?"

"None; but I have a note from him this morning asking me to call
to-morrow."

"After you have seen him, decide on nothing,--if he makes you any offer.
Get back your abstract, or a copy of it, and confide it to me.  Gandrin
ought to help you; he transacts affairs in a large way.  'Belle
clientele' among the millionnaires.  But his clients expect fabulous
profits, and so does he.  As for your principal mortgagee, Louvier, you
know, of course, who he is."

"No, except that M. Hebert told me that he was very rich."

"'Rich'  I should think so; one of the Kings of Finance, Ah! observe
those young men on horseback."

Alain looked forth and recognized the two cavaliers whom he had
conjectured to be the sons of the Count de Vandemar.

"Those 'beaux garcons' are fair specimens of your Faubourg," said
Frederic; "they would decline my acquaintance because my grandfather kept
a shop, and they keep a shop between them."

"A shop!  I am mistaken, then.  Who are they?"

"Raoul and Enguerrand, sons of that mocker of man, the Count de
Vandemar."

"And they keep a shop!  You are jesting."

"A shop at which you may buy gloves and perfumes, Rue de la Chaussee
d'Antin.  Of course they don't serve at the counter; they only invest
their pocket-money in the speculation; and, in so doing, treble at least
their pocket-money, buy their horses, and keep their grooms."

"Is it possible! nobles of such birth!  How shocked the Count would be
if he knew it!"

"Yes, very much shocked if he was supposed to know it.  But he is too
wise a father not to give his sons limited allowances and unlimited
liberty, especially the liberty to add to the allowances as they please.
Look again at them; no better riders and more affectionate brothers since
the date of Castor and Pollux.  Their tastes indeed differ--Raoul is
religious and moral, melancholy and dignified; Enguerrand is a lion of
the first water,--elegant to the tips of his nails.  These demigods
nevertheless are very mild to mortals.  Though Enguerrand is the best
pistol-shot in Paris, and Raoul the best fencer, the first is so good-
tempered that you would be a brute to quarrel with him, the last so true
a Catholic, that if you quarrelled with him you need not fear his sword.
He would not die in the committal of what the Church holds a mortal sin."

"Are you speaking ironically?  Do you mean to imply that men of the name
of Vandemar are not brave?"

On the contrary, I believe that, though masters of their weapons, they
are too brave to abuse their skill; and I must add that, though they are
sleeping partners in a shop, they would not cheat you of a farthing.
Benign stars on earth, as Castor and Pollux were in heaven."

"But partners in a shop!"

"Bah! when a minister himself, like the late M. de M______, kept a shop,
and added the profits of 'bons bons' to his revenue, you may form some
idea of the spirit of the age.  If young nobles are not generally
sleeping partners in shops, still they are more or less adventurers in
commerce.  The Bourse is the profession of those who have no other
profession.  You have visited the Bourse?"

"No."

"No! this is just the hour.  We have time yet for the Bois.  Coachman,
drive to the Bourse."

"The fact is," resumed Frederic, "that gambling is one of the wants of
civilized men.  The 'rouge-et-noir' and 'roulette' tables are forbidden;
the hells closed: but the passion for making money without working for it
must have its vent, and that vent is the Bourse.  As instead of a hundred
wax-lights you now have one jet of gas, so instead of a hundred hells you
have now one Bourse, and--it is exceedingly convenient; always at hand;
no discredit being seen there as it was to be seen at Frascati's; on the
contrary, at once respectable, and yet the mode."

The coupe stops at the Bourse, our friends mount the steps, glide through
the pillars, deposit their canes at a place destined to guard them, and
the Marquis follows Frederic up a flight of stairs till he gains the open
gallery round a vast hall below.  Such a din! such a clamour!
disputations, wrangling, wrathful.

Here Lemercier distinguished some friends, whom he joined for a few
minutes.

Alain left alone, looked down into the hall.  He thought himself in some
stormy scene of the First Revolution.  An English contested election in
the market-place of a borough when the candidates are running close on
each other--the result doubtful, passions excited, the whole borough in
civil war--is peaceful compared to the scene at the Bourse.

Bulls and bears screaming, bawling, gesticulating, as if one were about
to strangle the other; the whole, to an uninitiated eye, a confusion, a
Babel, which it seems absolutely impossible to reconcile to the notion of
quiet mercantile transactions, the purchase and sale of shares and
stocks.  As Alain gazed bewildered, he felt himself gently touched, and,
looking round, saw the Englishman.

"A lively scene!" whispered Mr. Vane.  "This is the heart of Paris: it
beats very loudly."

"Is your Bourse in London like this?"

"I cannot tell you: at our Exchange the general public are not admitted:
the privileged priests of that temple sacrifice their victims in closed
penetralia, beyond which the sounds made in the operation do not travel
to ears profane.  But had we an Exchange like this open to all the world,
and placed, not in a region of our metropolis unknown to fashion, but in
some elegant square in St. James's or at Hyde Park Corner, I suspect that
our national character would soon undergo a great change, and that all
our idlers and sporting-men would make their books there every day,
instead of waiting long months in 'ennui' for the Doncaster and the
Derby.  At present we have but few men on the turf; we should then have
few men not on Exchange, especially if we adopt your law, and can
contrive to be traders without risk of becoming bankrupts.  Napoleon I.
called us a shopkeeping nation.  Napoleon III. has taught France to excel
us in everything, and certainly he has made Paris a shopkeeping city."

Alain thought of Raoul and Enguerrand, and blushed to find that what he
considered a blot on his countrymen was so familiarly perceptible to a
foreigner's eye.

"And the Emperor has done wisely, at least for the time," continued the
Englishman, with a more thoughtful accent.  "He has found vent thus for
that very dangerous class in Paris society to which the subdivision of
property gave birth; namely the crowd of well-born, daring young men
without fortune and without profession.  He has opened the 'Bourse' and
said, 'There, I give you employment, resource, an 'avenir.''  He has
cleared the byways into commerce and trade, and opened new avenues of
wealth to the noblesse, whom the great Revolution so unwisely beggared.
What other way to rebuild a 'noblesse' in France, and give it a chance
of power be side an access to fortune? But to how many sides of your
national character has the Bourse of Paris magnetic attraction!  You
Frenchmen are so brave that you could not be happy without facing
danger, so covetous of distinction that you would pine yourselves away
without a dash, coute quo coute, at celebrity and a red ribbon.  Danger!
look below at that arena: there it is; danger daily, hourly.  But there
also is celebrity; win at the Bourse, as of old in a tournament, and
paladins smile on you, and ladies give you their scarves, or, what is
much the same, they allow you to buy their cachemires.  Win at the
Bourse,--what follows?  the Chamber, the Senate, the Cross, the
Minister's 'portefeuille.'  I might rejoice in all this for the sake of
Europe,--could it last, and did it not bring the consequences that
follow the demoralization which attends it.  The Bourse and the Credit
Mobilier keep Paris quiet, at least as quiet as it can be. These are the
secrets of this reign of splendour; these the two lions couchants on
which rests the throne of the Imperial reconstructor."

Alain listened surprised and struck.  He had not given the Englishman
credit for the cast of mind which such reflections evinced.

Here Lemercier rejoined them, and shook hands with Graham Vane, who,
taking him aside, said, "But you promised to go to the Bois, and indulge
my insane curiosity about the lady in the pearl-coloured robe?"

"I have not forgotten; it is not half-past two yet; you said three.
'Soyez tranquille;' I drive thither from the Bourse with Rochebriant."

"Is it necessary to take with you that very good-looking Marquis?"

"I thought you said you were not jealous, because not yet in love.
However, if Rochebriant occasions you the pang which your humble servant
failed to inflict, I will take care that he do not see the lady."

"No," said the Englishman; "on consideration, I should be very much
obliged to any one with whom she would fall in love.  That would
disenchant me.  Take the Marquis by all means."

Meanwhile Alain, again looking down, saw just under him, close by one
of the pillars, Lucien Duplessis.  He was standing apart from the throng,
a small space cleared round himself, and two men who had the air of
gentlemen of the 'beau monde,' with whom he was conferring.  Duplessis,
thus seen, was not like the Duplessis at the restaurant.  It would be
difficult to explain what the change was, but it forcibly struck Alain:
the air was more dignified, the expression keener; there was a look of
conscious power and command about the man even at that distance; the
intense, concentrated intelligence of his eye, his firm lip, his marked
features, his projecting, massive brow, would have impressed a very
ordinary observer.  In fact, the man was here in his native element; in
the field in which his intellect gloried, commanded, and had signalized
itself by successive triumphs.  Just thus may be the change in the great
orator whom you deemed insignificant in a drawing-room, when you see his
crest rise above a reverential audience; or the great soldier, who was
not distinguishable from the subaltern in a peaceful club, could you see
him issuing the order to his aids-de-camp amidst the smoke and roar of
the battle-field.

"Ah, Marquis!" said Graham Vane, "are you gazing at Duplessis?  He is the
modern genius of Paris.  He is at once the Cousin, the Guizot, and the
Victor Hugo of speculation.  Philosophy, Eloquence, audacious Romance,--
all Literature now is swallowed up in the sublime epic of 'Agiotage,' and
Duplessis is the poet of the Empire."

"Well said, M. Grarm Varn," cried Frederic, forgetting his recent lesson
in English names.  "Alain underrates that great man.  How could an
Englishman appreciate him so well?"

"'Ma foi!'" returned Graham, quietly.  "I am studying to think at Paris,
in order some day or other to know how to act in London.  Time for the
Bois.  Lemercier, we meet at seven,--Philippe's."




CHAPTER V.

"What do you think of the Bourse?" asked Lemercier, as their carriage
took the way to the Bois.

"I cannot think of it yet; I am stunned.  It seems to me as if I had been
at a 'Sabbat,' of which the wizards were 'agents de change,' but not less
bent upon raising Satan."

"Pooh!  the best way to exorcise Satan is to get rich enough not to be
tempted by him.  The fiend always loved to haunt empty places; and of all
places nowadays he prefers empty purses and empty stomachs."

"But do all people get rich at the Bourse? or is not one man's wealth
many men's ruin?"

"That is a question not very easy to answer; but under our present system
Paris gets rich, though at the expense of individual Parisians.  I will
try and explain.  The average luxury is enormously increased even in my
experience; what were once considered refinements and fopperies are now
called necessary comforts.  Prices are risen enormously, house-rent
doubled within the last five or six years; all articles of luxury are
very much dearer; the very gloves I wear cost twenty per cent more than I
used to pay for gloves of the same quality.  How the people we meet live,
and live so well, is an enigma that would defy AEdipus if AEdipus were
not a Parisian.  But the main explanation is this: speculation and
commerce, with the facilities given to all investments, have really
opened more numerous and more rapid ways to fortune than were known a few
years ago.

"Crowds are thus attracted to Paris, resolved to venture a small capital
in the hope of a large one; they live on that capital, not on their
income, as gamesters do.  There is an idea among us that it is necessary
to seem rich in order to become rich.  Thus there is a general
extravagance and profusion.  English milords marvel at our splendour.
Those who, while spending their capital as their income, fail in their
schemes of fortune, after one, two, three, or four years, vanish.  What
becomes of them, I know no more than I do what becomes of the old moons.
Their place is immediately supplied by new candidates.  Paris is thus
kept perennially sumptuous and splendid by the gold it engulfs.  But then
some men succeed,--succeed prodigiously, preternaturally; they make
colossal fortunes, which are magnificently expended.  They set an example
of show and pomp, which is of course the more contagious because so many
men say, 'The other day those millionnaires were as poor as we are; they
never economized; why should we?'  Paris is thus doubly enriched,--by the
fortunes it swallows up, and by the fortunes it casts up; the last being
always reproductive, and the first never lost except to the individuals."

"I understand: but what struck me forcibly at the scene we have left was
the number of young men there; young men whom I should judge by their
appearance to be gentlemen, evidently not mere spectators,--eager,
anxious, with tablets in their hands.  That old or middle-aged men should
find a zest in the pursuit of gain I can understand, but youth and
avarice seem to me a new combination, which Moliere never divined in his
'Avare.'"

"Young men, especially if young gentlemen, love pleasure; and pleasure in
this city is very dear.  This explains why so many young men frequent the
Bourse.  In the old gaining now suppressed, young men were the majority;
in the days of your chivalrous forefathers it was the young nobles, not
the old, who would stake their very mantles and swords on a cast of the
die.  And, naturally enough, _mon cher_; for is not youth the season of
hope, and is not hope the goddess of gaming, whether at _rouge-et-noir_
or the Bourse?"

Alain felt himself more and more behind his generation.  The acute
reasoning of Lemercier humbled his _amour propre_.  At college Lemercier
was never considered Alain's equal in ability or book-learning.  What a
stride beyond his school-fellow had Lemercier now made!  How dull and
stupid the young provincial felt himself to be as compared with the easy
cleverness and half-sportive philosophy of the Parisian's fluent talk!

He sighed with a melancholy and yet with a generous envy.  He had too
fine a natural perception not to acknowledge that there is a rank of mind
as well as of birth, and in the first he felt that Lemercier might well
walk before a Rochebriant; but his very humility was a proof that he
underrated himself.

Lemercier did not excel him in mind, but in experience.  And just as the
drilled soldier seems a much finer fellow than the raw recruit, because
he knows how to carry himself, but after a year's discipline the raw
recruit may excel in martial air the upright hero whom he now
despairingly admires, and never dreams he can rival; so set a mind from a
village into the drill of a capital, and see it a year after; it may
tower a head higher than its recruiting-sergeant.




CHAPTER VI.

"I believe," said Lemercier, as the _coupe_ rolled through the lively
alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, "that Paris is built on a loadstone, and
that every Frenchman with some iron globules in his blood is irresistibly
attracted towards it.  The English never seem to feel for London the
passionate devotion that we feel for Paris.  On the contrary, the London
middle class, the commercialists, the shopkeepers, the clerks, even the
superior artisans compelled to do their business in the capital, seem
always scheming and pining to have their home out of it, though but in a
suburb."

"You have been in London, Frederic?"

"Of course; it is the mode to visit that dull and hideous metropolis."

"If it be dull and hideous, no wonder the people who are compelled to do
business in it seek the pleasures of home out of it."

"It is very droll that though the middle class entirely govern the
melancholy Albion, it is the only country in Europe in which the middle
class seem to have no amusements; nay, they legislate against amusement.
They have no leisure-day but Sunday; and on that day they close all their
theatres, even their museums and picture-galleries.  What amusements
there may be in England are for the higher classes and the lowest."

"What are the amusements of the lowest class?"

"Getting drunk."

"Nothing else?"

"Yes.  I was taken at night under protection of a policeman to some
cabarets, where I found crowds of that class which is the stratum below
the working class; lads who sweep crossings and hold horses, mendicants,
and, I was told, thieves, girls whom a servant-maid would not speak to,
very merry, dancing quadrilles and waltzes, and regaling themselves on
sausages,--the happiest-looking folks I found in all London; and, I must
say, conducting themselves very decently."

"Ah!" Here Lemercier pulled the check-string.  "Will you object to a walk
in this quiet alley?  I see some one whom I have promised the Englishman
to--But heed me, Alain, don't fall in love with her."




CHAPTER VII.

The lady in the pearl-coloured dress!  Certainly it was a face that might
well arrest the eye and linger long on the remembrance.

There are certain "beauty-women" as there are certain "beauty-men," in
whose features one detects no fault, who are the show figures of any
assembly in which they appear, but who, somehow or other, inspire no
sentiment and excite no interest; they lack some expression, whether of
mind, or of soul, or of heart, without which the most beautiful face is
but a beautiful picture.  This lady was not one of those "beauty-women."
Her features taken singly were by no means perfect, nor were they set off
by any brilliancy of colouring.  But the countenance aroused and
impressed the imagination with a belief that there was some history
attached to it, which you longed to learn.  The hair, simply parted over
a forehead unusually spacious and high for a woman, was of lustrous
darkness; the eyes, of a deep violet blue, were shaded with long lashes.

Their expression was soft and mournful, but unobservant.  She did not
notice Alain and Lemercier as the two men slowly passed her.  She seemed
abstracted, gazing into space as one absorbed in thought or revery.  Her
complexion was clear and pale, and apparently betokened delicate health.

Lemercier seated himself on a bench beside the path, and invited Alain to
do the same.  "She will return this way soon," said the Parisian, "and we
can observe her more attentively and more respectfully thus seated than
if we were on foot; meanwhile, what do you think of her?  Is she French?
is she Italian? can she be English?"

"I should have guessed Italian, judging by the darkness of the hair and
the outline of the features; but do Italians have so delicate a fairness
of complexion?"

"Very rarely; and I should guess her to be French, judging by the
intelligence of her expression, the simple neatness of her dress, and by
that nameless refinement of air in which a Parisienne excels all the
descendants of Eve,--if it were not for her eyes.  I never saw a
Frenchwoman with eyes of that peculiar shade of blue; and if a
Frenchwoman had such eyes, I flatter myself she would have scarcely
allowed us to pass without making some use of them."

"Do you think she is married?" asked Alain.

"I hope so; for a girl of her age, if _comme il faut_, can scarcely walk
alone in the Bois, and would not have acquired that look so intelligent,
--more than intelligent,--so poetic."

"But regard that air of unmistakable distinction; regard that expression
of face,-so pure, so virginal: _comme il faut_ she must be."

As Alain said these last words, the lady, who had turned back, was
approaching them, and in full view of their gaze.  She seemed unconscious
of their existence as before, and Lemercier noticed that her lips moved
as if she were murmuring inaudibly to herself.

She did not return again, but continued her walk straight on till at the
end of the alley she entered a carriage in waiting for her, and was
driven off.

"Quick, quick!" cried Lemercier, running towards his own coupe; "we must
give chase."

Alain followed somewhat less hurriedly, and, agreeably to instructions
Lemercier had already given to his coachman, the Parisian's coupe set off
at full speed in the track of the strange lady's, which was still in
sight.

In less than twenty minutes the carriage in chase stopped at the grille
of one of those charming little villas to be found in the pleasant suburb
of A-----; a porter emerged from the lodge, opened the gate; the carriage
drove in, again stopped at the door of the house, and the two gentlemen
could not catch even a glimpse of the lady's robe as she descended from
the carriage and disappeared within the house.

"I see a cafe yonder," said Lemercier; "let us learn all we can as to the
fair unknown, over a _sorbet_ or a _petit verre_."  Alain silently, but
not reluctantly, consented.  He felt in the fair stranger an interest new
to his existence.

They entered the little cafe, and in a few minutes Lemercier, with the
easy _savoir vivre_ of a Parisian, had extracted from the _garcon_ as
much as probably any one in the neighbourhood knew of the inhabitants of
the villa.

It had been hired and furnished about two months previously in the name
of Signora Venosta; but, according to the report of the servants, that
lady appeared to be the gouvernante or guardian of a lady much younger,
out of whose income the villa was rented and the household maintained.

It was for her the _coupe_ was hired from Paris.  The elder lady very
rarely stirred out during the day, but always accompanied the younger in
any evening visits to the theatre or the houses of friends.

It was only within the last few weeks that such visits had been made.

The younger lady was in delicate health, and under the care of an English
physician famous for skill in the treatment of pulmonary complaints.  It
was by his advice that she took daily walking exercise in the Bois.  The
establishment consisted of three servants, all Italians, and speaking but
imperfect French.  The _garcon_ did not know whether either of the ladies
was married, but their mode of life was free from all scandal or
suspicion; they probably belonged to the literary or musical world, as
the _garcon_ had observed as their visitors the eminent author M. Savarin
and his wife; and, still more frequently, an old man not less eminent as
a musical composer.

"It is clear to me now," said Lemercier, as the two friends reseated
themselves in the carriage, "that our pearly _ange_ is some Italian
singer of repute enough in her own country to have gained already a
competence; and that, perhaps on account of her own health or her
friend's, she is living quietly here in the expectation of some
professional engagement, or the absence of some foreign lover."

"Lover! do you think that?" exclaimed Alain, in a tone of voice that
betrayed pain.

"It is possible enough; and in that case the Englishman may profit little
by the information I have promised to give him."

"You have promised the Englishman?"

"Do you not remember last night that he described the lady, and said that
her face haunted him: and I--"

"Ah! I remember now.  What do you know of this Englishman?  He is rich, I
suppose."

"Yes, I hear he is very rich now; that an uncle lately left him an
enormous sum of money.  He was attached to the English Embassy many years
ago, which accounts for his good French and his knowledge of Parisian
life.  He comes to Paris very often, and I have known him some time.
Indeed he has intrusted to me a difficult and delicate commission.  The
English tell me that his father was one of the most eminent members of
their Parliament, of ancient birth, very highly connected, but ran out
his fortune and died poor; that our friend had for some years to maintain
himself, I fancy, by his pen; that he is considered very able; and, now
that his uncle has enriched him, likely to enter public life and run a
career as distinguished as his father's."

"Happy man! happy are the English," said the Marquis, with a sigh; and as
the carriage now entered Paris, he pleaded the excuse of an engagement,
bade his friend goodby, and went his way musing through the crowded
streets.




CHAPTER VIII.

LETTER FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

                                                 VILLA D'-----, A------.

I can never express to you, my beloved Eulalie, the strange charm which a
letter from you throws over my poor little lonely world for days after it
is received.  There is always in it something that comforts, something
that sustains, but also a something that troubles and disquiets me.  I
suppose Goethe is right, "that it is the property of true genius to
disturb all settled ideas," in order, no doubt, to lift them into a
higher level when they settle down again.

Your sketch of the new work you are meditating amid the orange groves of
Provence interests me intensely; yet, do you forgive me when I add that
the interest is not without terror?  I do not find myself able to
comprehend how, amid those lovely scenes of Nature, your mind voluntarily
surrounds itself with images of pain and discord.  I stand in awe of the
calm with which you subject to your analysis the infirmities of reason
and the tumults of passion.  And all those laws of the social state which
seem to me so fixed and immovable you treat with so quiet a scorn, as if
they were but the gossamer threads which a touch of your slight woman's
hand could brush away.  But I cannot venture to discuss such subjects
with you.  It is only the skilled enchanter who can stand safely in the
magic circle, and compel the spirits that he summons, even if they are
evil, to minister to ends in which he foresees a good.

We continue to live here very quietly, and I do not as yet feel the worse
for the colder climate.  Indeed, my wonderful doctor, who was recommended
to me as American, but is in reality English, assures me that a single
winter spent here under his care will suffice for my complete
re-establishment.  Yet that career, to the training for which so many
years have been devoted, does not seem to me so alluring as it once did.

I have much to say on this subject, which I defer till I can better
collect my own thoughts on it; at present they are confused and
struggling.  The great Maestro has been most gracious.

In what a radiant atmosphere his genius lives and breathes!  Even in his
cynical moods, his very cynicism has in it the ring of a jocund music,--
the laugh of Figaro, not of Mephistopheles.

We went to dine with him last week.  He invited to meet us Madame S-----,
who has this year conquered all opposition, and reigns alone, the great
S-----; Mr. T--------, a pianist of admirable promise; your friend
M. Savarin, wit, critic, and poet, with his pleasant, sensible wife;
and a few others, who, the Maestro confided to me in a whisper, were
authorities in the press.  After dinner S----- sang to us, magnificently,
of course.  Then she herself graciously turned to me, said how much she
had heard from the Maestro in my praise, and so and so.  I was persuaded
to sing after her.  I need not say to what disadvantage.  But I forgot my
nervousness; I forgot my audience; I forgot myself, as I always do when
once my soul, as it were, finds wing in music, and buoys itself in the
air, relieved from the sense of earth.  I knew not that I had succeeded
till I came to a close, and then my eyes resting on the face of the grand
prima donna, I was seized with an indescribable sadness, with a keen pang
of remorse.  Perfect artiste though she be, and with powers in her own
realm of art which admit of no living equal, I saw at once that I had
pained her: she had grown almost livid; her lips were quivering, and it
was only with a great effort that she muttered out some faint words
intended for applause.  I comprehended by an instinct how gradually there
can grow upon the mind of an artist the most generous that jealousy which
makes the fear of a rival annihilate the delight in art.  If ever I
should achieve S-----'s fame as a singer, should I feel the same.
jealousy?--I think not now, but I have not been tested.  She went away
abruptly.  I spare you the recital of the compliments paid to me by my
other auditors, compliments that gave me no pleasure; for on all lips,
except those of the Maestro, they implied, as the height of eulogy, that
I had inflicted torture upon S-----.  "If so," said he, "she would be as
foolish as a rose that was jealous of the whiteness of a lily.  You would
do yourself great wrong, my child, if you tried to vie with the rose in
its own colour."

He patted my bended head as he spoke, with that kind of fatherly
king-like fondness with which he honours me; and I took his hand in mine,
and kissed it gratefully.  "Nevertheless," said Savarin, "when the lily
comes out there will be a furious attack on it, made by the clique that
devotes itself to the rose: a lily clique will be formed en revanche, and
I foresee a fierce paper war.  Do not be frightened at its first
outburst: every fame worth having must be fought for."

Is it so? have you had to fight for your fame, Eulalie?  and do you hate
all contests as much as I do?

Our only other gayety since I last wrote was a soiree at M. Louvier's.
That republican millionaire was not slow in attending to the kind letter
you addressed to him recommending us to his civilities.  He called at
once, placed his good offices at our disposal, took charge of my modest
fortune, which he has invested, no doubt, as safely as it is
advantageously in point of interest, hired our carriage for us, and in
short has been most amiably useful.

At his house we met many to me most pleasant, for they spoke with such
genuine appreciation of your works and yourself.  But there were others
whom I should never have expected to meet under the roof of a Croesus who
has so great a stake in the order of things established.  One young man--
a noble whom he specially presented to me, as a politician who would be
at the head of affairs when the Red Republic was established--asked me
whether I did not agree with him that all private property was public
spoliation, and that the great enemy to civilization was religion, no
matter in what form.

He addressed to me these tremendous questions with an effeminate lisp,
and harangued on them with small feeble gesticulations of pale dirty
fingers covered with rings.

I asked him if there were many who in France shared his ideas.

"Quite enough to carry them some day," he answered with a lofty smile.
"And the day may be nearer than the world thinks, when my confreres will
be so numerous that they will have to shoot down each other for the sake
of cheese to their bread."

That day nearer than the world thinks!  Certainly, so far as one may
judge the outward signs of the world at Paris, it does not think of such
things at all.  With what an air of self-content the beautiful city
parades her riches!  Who can gaze on her splendid palaces, her gorgeous
shops, and believe that she will give ear to doctrines that would
annihilate private rights of property; or who can enter her crowded
churches, and dream that she can ever again install a republic too
civilized for religion?

Adieu.  Excuse me for this dull letter.  If I have written on much that
has little interest even for me, it is that I wish to distract my mind
from brooding over the question that interests me most, and on which I
most need your counsel.  I will try to approach it in my next.

                                                 ISAURA.



FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

Eulalie, Eulalie!--What mocking spirit has been permitted in this modern
age of ours to place in the heart of woman the ambition which is the
prerogative of men?  You indeed, so richly endowed with a man's genius,
have a right to man's aspirations.  But what can justify such ambition in
me?  Nothing but this one unintellectual perishable gift of a voice that
does but please in uttering the thoughts of others.  Doubtless I could
make a name familiar for its brief time to the talk of Europe,--a name,
what name? a singer's name.  Once I thought that name a glory.  Shall I
ever forget the day when you first shone upon me; when, emerging from
childhood as from a dim and solitary bypath, I stood forlorn on the great
thoroughfare of life, and all the prospects before me stretched sad in
mists and in rain?  You beamed on me then as the sun coming out from the
cloud and changing the face of earth; you opened to my sight the fairy-
land of poetry and art; you took me by the hand and said, "Courage!
there is at each step some green gap in the hedgerows, some, soft escape
from the stony thoroughfare.  Beside the real life expands the ideal life
to those who seek it.  Droop not, seek it: the ideal life has its
sorrows, but it never admits despair; as on the ear of him who follows
the winding course of a stream, the stream ever varies the note of its
music,--now loud with the rush of the falls; now low and calm as it
glides by the level marge of smooth banks; now sighing through the stir
of the reeds; now babbling with a fretful joy as some sudden curve on the
shore stays its flight among gleaming pebbles,--so to the soul of the
artist is the voice of the art ever fleeting beside and before him.
Nature gave thee the bird's gift of song: raise the gift into art, and
make the art thy companion.

"Art and Hope were twin-born, and they die together."  See how faithfully
I remember, methinks, your very words.  But the magic of the words, which
I then but dimly understood, was in your smile and in your eye, and the
queen-like wave of your hand as if beckoning to a world which lay before
you, visible and familiar as your native land.  And how devotedly, with
what earnestness of passion, I gave myself up to the task of raising my
gift into an art!  I thought of nothing else, dreamed of nothing else;
and oh, now sweet to me then were words of praise!  "Another year yet,"
at length said the masters, "and you ascend your throne among the queens
of song."  Then--then--I would have changed for no other throne on earth
my hope of that to be achieved in the realms of my art.  And then came
that long fever: my strength broke down, and the Maestro said, "Rest, or
your voice is gone, and your throne is lost forever."  How hateful that
rest seemed to me!  You again came to my aid.  You said, "The time you
think lost should be but time improved.  Penetrate your mind with other
songs than the trash of Libretti.  The more you habituate yourself to the
forms, the more you imbue yourself with the spirit, in which passions
have been expressed and character delineated by great writers, the more
completely you will accomplish yourself in your own special art of singer
and actress."  So, then, you allured me to a new study.  Ah! in so doing
did you dream that you diverted me from the old ambition?  My knowledge
of French and Italian, and my rearing in childhood, which had made
English familiar to me, gave me the keys to the treasure-houses of three
languages.  Naturally I began with that in which your masterpieces are
composed.  Till then I had not even read your works.  They were the first
I chose.  How they impressed, how they startled me! what depths in the
mind of man, in the heart of woman, they revealed to me!  But I owned to
you then, and I repeat it now, neither they nor any of the works in
romance and poetry which form the boast of recent French literature
satisfied yearnings for that calm sense of beauty, that divine joy in a
world beyond this world, which you had led me to believe it was the
prerogative of ideal art to bestow.  And when I told you this with the
rude frankness you had bid me exercise in talk with you, a thoughtful,
melancholy shade fell over your face, and you said quietly, "You are
right, child; we, the French of our time, are the offspring of
revolutions that settled nothing, unsettled all: we resemble those
troubled States which rush into war abroad in order to re-establish peace
at home.  Our books suggest problems to men for reconstructing some
social system in which the calm that belongs to art may be found at last:
but such books should not be in your hands; they are not for the
innocence and youth of women as yet unchanged by the systems which
exist."  And the next day you brought me 'l'asso's great poem, the
"Gerusalemme Liberata," and said, smiling, "Art in its calm is here."

You remember that I was then at Sorrento by the order of my physician.
Never shall I forget the soft autumn day when I sat amongst the lonely
rocklets to the left of the town,--the sea before me, with scarce a
ripple; my very heart steeped in the melodies of that poem, so marvellous
for a strength disguised in sweetness, and for a symmetry in which each
proportion blends into the other with the perfectness of a Grecian
statue.  The whole place seemed to me filled with the presence of the
poet to whom it had given birth.  Certainly the reading of that poem
formed an era in my existence: to this day I cannot acknowledge the
faults or weaknesses which your criticisms pointed out; I believe because
they are in unison with my own nature, which yearns for harmony, and,
finding that, rests contented.  I shrink from violent contrasts, and can
discover nothing tame and insipid in a continuance of sweetness and
serenity.  But it was not till after I had read "La Gerusalemme" again
and again, and then sat and brooded over it, that I recognized the main
charm of the poem in the religion which clings to it as the perfume
clings to a flower,--a religion sometimes melancholy, but never to me
sad.  Hope always pervades it.  Surely if, as you said, "Hope is twin-
born with art," it is because art at its highest blends itself
unconsciously with religion, and proclaims its affinity with hope by its
faith in some future good more perfect than it has realized in the past.

Be this as it may, it was in this poem so pre-eminently Christian that I
found the something which I missed and craved for in modern French
masterpieces; even yours,--a something spiritual, speaking to my own
soul, calling it forth; distinguishing it as an essence apart from mere
human reason; soothing, even when it excited; making earth nearer to
heaven.  And when I ran on in this strain to you after my own wild
fashion, you took my head between your hands and kissed me, and said,
"Happy are those who believe! long may that happiness be thine!"  Why did
I not feel in Dante the Christian charm that I felt in Tasso?  Dante in
your eyes, as in those of most judges, is infinitely the greater genius;
but reflected on the dark stream of that genius the stars are so
troubled, the heaven so threatening.

Just as my year of holiday was expiring, I turned to English literature;
and Shakspeare, of course, was the first English poet put into my hands.
It proves how childlike my mind still was, that my earliest sensation in
reading him was that of disappointment.  It was not only that, despite my
familiarity with English (thanks chiefly to the care of him whom I call
my second father), there is much in the metaphorical diction of
Shakspeare which I failed to comprehend; but he seemed to me so far like
the modern French writers who affect to have found inspiration in his
muse, that he obtrudes images of pain and suffering without cause or
motive sufficiently clear to ordinary understandings, as I had taught
myself to think it ought to be in the drama.

He makes Fate so cruel that we lose sight of the mild deity behind her.
Compare, in this, Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet."  In the
first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are
blessed.  The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed.  But when
we have put down the English tragedy,--when Hamlet and Ophelia are
confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not
what good end for humanity is achieved.  The passages that fasten on our
memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible
problems, to which they give us no solution.

In the "Horaces" of Corneille there are fierce contests, rude passions,
tears drawn from some of the bitterest sources of human pity; but then
through all stands out, large and visible to the eyes of all spectators,
the great ideal of devoted patriotism.  How much of all that has been
grandest in the life of France, redeeming even its worst crimes of
revolution in the love of country, has had its origin in the "Horaces" of
Corneille.  But I doubt if the fates of Coriolanus and Caesar and Brutus
and Antony, in the giant tragedies of Shakspeare, have made Englishmen
more willing to die for England.  In fine, it was long before--I will not
say I understood or rightly appreciated Shakspeare, for no Englishman
would admit that I or even you could ever do so, but before I could
recognize the justice of the place his country claims for him as the
genius without an equal in the literature of Europe.  Meanwhile the
ardour I had put into study, and the wear and tear of the emotions which
the study called forth, made themselves felt in a return of my former
illness, with symptoms still more alarming; and when the year was out I
was ordained to rest for perhaps another year before I could sing in
public, still less appear on the stage.  How I rejoiced when I heard that
fiat! for I emerged from that year of study with a heart utterly
estranged from the profession in which I had centred my hopes before--
Yes, Eulalie, you had bid me accomplish myself for the arts of utterance;
by the study of arts in which thoughts originate the words they employ;
and in doing so I had changed myself into another being.  I was forbidden
all fatigue of mind: my books were banished, but not the new self which
the books had formed.  Recovering slowly through the summer, I came
hither two months since, ostensibly for the advice of Dr. C-------, but
really in the desire to commune with my own heart and be still.

And now I have poured forth that heart to you, would you persuade me
still to be a singer?  If you do, remember at least how jealous and
absorbing the art of the singer and the actress is,--how completely I
must surrender myself to it, and live among books or among dreams no
more.  Can I be anything else but singer? and if not, should I be
contented merely to read and to dream?

I must confide to you one ambition which during the lazy Italian summer
took possession of me; I must tell you the ambition, and add that I have
renounced it as a vain one.  I had hoped that I could compose, I mean in
music.  I was pleased with some things I did: they expressed in music
what I could not express in words; and one secret object in coming here
was to submit them to the great Maestro.  He listened to them patiently:
he complimented me on my accuracy in the mechanical laws of composition;
he even said that my favourite airs were "touchants et gracieux."

And so he would have left me, but I stopped him timidly, and said, "Tell
me frankly, do you think that with time and study I could compose music
such as singers equal to myself would sing to?"

"You mean as a professional composer?"

"Well, yes."

"And to the abandonment of your vocation as a singer?"

"Yes."

"My dear child, I should be your worst enemy if I encouraged such a
notion: cling to the career in which you call be greatest; gain but
health, and I wager my reputation on your glorious success on the stage.
What can you be as a composer?  You will set pretty music to pretty
words, and will be sung in drawing-rooms with the fame a little more or
less that generally attends the compositions of female amateurs.  Aim at
something higher, as I know you would do, and you will not succeed.  Is
there any instance in modern times, perhaps in any times, of a female
composer who attains even to the eminence of a third-rate opera-writer?
Composition in letters may be of no sex.  In that Madame Dudevant and
your friend Madame de Grantmesnil can beat most men; but the genius of
musical composition is _homme_, and accept it as a compliment when I say
that you are essentially _femme_."

He left me, of course, mortified and humbled; but I feel he is right as
regards myself, though whether in his depreciation of our whole sex I
cannot say.  But as this hope has left me, I have become more disquieted,
still more restless.  Counsel me, Eulalie; counsel, and, if possible,
comfort me.
                                                  ISAURA.



FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

No letter from you yet, and I have left you in peace for ten days.  How
do you think I have spent them?  The Maestro called on us with
M. Savarin, to insist on our accompanying them on a round of the
theatres.  I had not been to one since my arrival.  I divined that the
kind-hearted composer had a motive in this invitation.  He thought that
in witnessing the applauses bestowed on actors, and sharing in the
fascination in which theatrical illusion holds an audience, my old
passion for the stage, and with it the longing for an artiste's fame,
would revive.

In my heart I wished that his expectations might be realized.  Well for
me if I could once more concentrate all my aspirations on a prize within
my reach!

We went first to see a comedy greatly in vogue, and the author thoroughly
understands the French stage of our day.  The acting was excellent in its
way.  The next night we went to the Odeon, a romantic melodrama in six
acts, and I know not how many tableaux.  I found no fault with the acting
there.  I do not give you the rest of our programme.  We visited all the
principal theatres, reserving the opera and Madame S------  for the last.
Before I speak of the opera, let me say a word or two on the plays.

There is no country in which the theatre has so great a hold on the
public as in France; no country in which the successful dramatist has so
high a fame; no country perhaps in which the state of the stage so
faithfully represents the moral and intellectual condition of the people.
I say this not, of course, from my experience of countries which I have
not visited, but from all I hear of the stage in Germany and in England.

The impression left on my mind by the performances I witnessed is, that
the French people are becoming dwarfed.  The comedies that please them
are but pleasant caricatures of petty sections in a corrupt society.
They contain no large types of human nature; their witticisms convey no
luminous flashes of truth; their sentiment is not pure and noble,--it is
a sickly and false perversion of the impure and ignoble into travesties
of the pure and noble.

Their melodramas cannot be classed as literature: all that really remains
of the old French genius is its vaudeville.  Great dramatists create
great parts.  One great part, such as a Rachel would gladly have
accepted, I have not seen in the dramas of the young generation.

High art has taken refuge in the opera; but that is not French opera.
I do not complain so much that French taste is less refined.  I complain
that French intellect is lowered.  The descent from "Polyeucte" to "Ruy
Blas" is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of
thought; but the descent from "Ruy Blas" to the best drama now produced
is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give not
even the glimpse of a mountain-top.

But now to the opera.  S------ in Norma!  The house was crowded, and its
enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine.  You tell me that S------ never
rivalled Pasta, but certainly her Norma is a great performance.  Her
voice has lost less of its freshness than I had been told, and what is
lost of it her practised management conceals or carries off.

The Maestro was quite right: I could never vie with her in her own line;
but conceited and vain as I may seem even to you in saying so, I feel in
my own line that I could command as large an applause,--of course taking
into account my brief-lived advantage of youth.  Her acting, apart from
her voice, does not please me.  It seems to me to want intelligence of
the subtler feelings, the under-current of emotion which constitutes the
chief beauty of the situation and the character.  Am I jealous when I say
this?  Read on and judge.

On our return that night, when I had seen the Venosta to bed, I went into
my own room, opened the window, and looked out.  A lovely night, mild as
in spring at Florence,--the moon at her full, and the stars looking so
calm and so high beyond our reach of their tranquillity.  The evergreens
in the gardens of the villas around me silvered over, and the summer
boughs, not yet clothed with leaves, were scarcely visible amid the
changeless smile of the laurels.  At the distance lay Paris, only to be
known by its innumerable lights.  And then I said to myself,

"No, I cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that
vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps.  Out on those stage-robes and
painted cheeks!  Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by
rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has its
drill!"

Then I gazed on those stars which provoke our questionings, and return no
answer, till my heart grew full,--so full,--and I bowed my head and wept
like a child.




FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

And still no letter from you!  I see in the journals that you have left
Nice.  Is it that you are too absorbed in your work to have leisure to
write to me?  I know you are not ill, for if you were, all Paris would
know of it.  All Europe has an interest in your health.  Positively I
will write to you no more till a word from yourself bids me do so.

I fear I must give up my solitary walks in the Bois de Boulogne: they
were very dear to me, partly because the quiet path to which I confined
myself was that to which you directed me as the one you habitually
selected when at Paris, and in which you had brooded over and revolved
the loveliest of your romances; and partly because it was there that,
catching, alas! not inspiration but enthusiasm from the genius that had
hallowed the place, and dreaming I might originate music, I nursed my own
aspirations and murmured my own airs.  And though so close to that world
of Paris to which all artists must appeal for judgment or audience, the
spot was so undisturbed, so sequestered.  But of late that path has lost
its solitude, and therefore its charm.

Six days ago the first person I encountered in my walk was a man whom I
did not then heed.  He seemed in thought, or rather in revery, like
myself; we passed each other twice or thrice, and I did not notice
whether he was young or old, tall or short; but he came the next day, and
a third day, and then I saw that he was young, and, in so regarding him,
his eyes became fixed on mine.  The fourth day he did not come, but two
other men came, and the look of one was inquisitive and offensive.  They
sat themselves down on a bench in the walk, and though I did not seem to
notice them, I hastened home; and the next day, in talking with our kind
Madame Savarin, and alluding to these quiet walks of mine, she hinted,
with the delicacy which is her characteristic, that the customs of Paris
did not allow demoiselles _comme il faut_ to walk alone even in the most
sequestered paths of the Bois.

I begin now to comprehend your disdain of customs which impose chains so
idly galling on the liberty of our sex.

We dined with the Savarins last evening: what a joyous nature he has!
Not reading Latin, I only know Horace by translations, which I am told
are bad; but Savarin seems to me a sort of half Horace,--Horace on his
town-bred side, so playfully well-bred, so good-humoured in his
philosophy, so affectionate to friends, and so biting to foes.  But
certainly Savarin could not have lived in a country farm upon endives and
mallows.  He is town-bred and Parisian, _jusqu'au bout des ongles_.  How
he admires you, and how I love him for it!  Only in one thing he
disappoints me there.  It is your style that he chiefly praises:
certainly that style is matchless; but style is only the clothing of
thought, and to praise your style seems to me almost as invidious as the
compliment to some perfect beauty, not on her form and face, but on her
taste and dress.

We met at dinner an American and his wife,--a Colonel and Mrs. Morley:
she is delicately handsome, as the American women I have seen generally
are, and with that frank vivacity of manner which distinguishes them from
English women.  She seemed to take a fancy to me, and we soon grew very
good friends.

She is the first advocate I have met, except yourself, of that doctrine
upon the rights of Women, of which one reads more in the journals than
one hears discussed in salons.  Naturally enough I felt great interest in
that subject, more especially since my rambles in the Bois were
forbidden; and as long as she declaimed on the hard fate of the women
who, feeling within them powers that struggle for air and light beyond
the close precinct of household duties, find themselves restricted from
fair rivalry with men in such fields of knowledge and toil and glory as
men since the world began have appropriated to themselves, I need not say
that I went with her cordially: you can guess that by my former letters.
But when she entered into the detailed catalogue of our exact wrongs and
our exact rights, I felt all the pusillanimity of my sex and shrank back
in terror.

Her husband, joining us when she was in full tide of eloquence, smiled at
me with a kind of saturnine mirth.  "Mademoiselle, don't believe a word
she says: it is only tall talk!  In America the women are absolute
tyrants, and it is I who, in concert with my oppressed countrymen, am
going in for a platform agitation to restore the Rights of Men."

Upon this there was a lively battle of words between the spouses, in
which, I must own, I thought the lady was decidedly worsted.

No, Eulalie, I see nothing in these schemes for altering our relations
towards the other sex which would improve our condition.  The
inequalities we suffer are not imposed by law,--not even by convention:
they are imposed by nature.

Eulalie, you have had an experience unknown to me: you have loved.  In
that day did you,--you, round whom poets and sages and statesmen gather,
listening to your words as to an oracle,--did you feel that your pride of
genius had gone out from you, that your ambition lived in whom you loved,
that his smile was more to you than the applause of a world?

I feel as if love in a woman must destroy her rights of equality, that it
gives to her a sovereign even in one who would be inferior to herself if
her love did not glorify and crown him.  Ah! if I could but merge this
terrible egotism which oppresses me, into the being of some one who is
what I would wish to be were I man!  I would not ask him to achieve fame.
Enough if I felt that he was worthy of it, and happier methinks to
console him when he failed than to triumph with him when he won.  Tell
me, have you felt this?  When you loved did you stoop as to a slave, or
did you bow down as to a master?



FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TO ISAURA CICOGNA.

_Chere enfant_,--All your four letters have reached me the same day.  In
one of my sudden whims I set off with a few friends on a rapid tour along
the Riviera to Genoa, thence to Turin on to Milan.  Not knowing where we
should rest even for a day, my letters were not forwarded.

I came back to Nice yesterday, consoled for all fatigues in having
insured that accuracy in description of localities which my work
necessitates.

You are, my poor child, in that revolutionary crisis through which genius
passes in youth before it knows its own self, and longs vaguely to do or
to be a something other than it has done or has been before.  For, not to
be unjust to your own powers, genius you have,--that inborn undefinable
essence, including talent, and yet distinct from it.  Genius you have,
but genius unconcentrated, undisciplined.  I see, though you are too
diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer,
because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny
crown of author.  I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should be your
worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling
success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation,
you would not ask whether you were fit for it; you would be impelled to
it by the terrible star which presides over the birth of poets.

Have you, who are so naturally observant, and of late have become so
reflective, never remarked that authors, however absorbed in their own
craft, do not wish their children to adopt it?  The most successful
author is perhaps the last person to whom neophytes should come for
encouragement.  This I think is not the case with the cultivators of the
sister arts.

The painter, the sculptor, the musician, seem disposed to invite
disciples and welcome acolytes.  As for those engaged in the practical
affairs of life, fathers mostly wish their sons to be as they have been.

The politician, the lawyer, the merchant, each says to his children,
"Follow my steps."  All parents in practical life would at least agree
in this,--they would not wish their sons to be poets.  There must be some
sound cause in the world's philosophy for this general concurrence of
digression from a road of which the travellers themselves say to those
whom they love best, "Beware!"

Romance in youth is, if rightly understood, the happiest nutriment of
wisdom in after-years; but I would never invite any one to look upon the
romance of youth as a thing

               "To case in periods and embalm in ink."

Enfant, have you need of a publisher to create romance?  Is it not in
yourself?  Do not imagine that genius requires for its enjoyment the
scratch of the pen and the types of the printer.  Do not suppose that the
poet, the romancier, is most poetic, most romantic, when he is striving,
struggling, labouring, to check the rush of his ideas, and materialize
the images which visit him as souls into such tangible likenesses of
flesh and blood that the highest compliment a reader can bestow on them
is to say that they are lifelike:  No: the poet's real delight is not in
the mechanism of composing; the best part of that delight is in the
sympathies he has established with innumerable modifications of life and
form, and art and Nature, sympathies which are often found equally keen
in those who have not the same gift of language.  The poet is but the
interpreter.  What of?--Truths in the hearts of others.  He utters what
they feel.  Is the joy in the utterance?  Nay, it is in the feeling
itself.  So, my dear, dark-bright child of song, when I bade thee open,
out of the beaten thoroughfare, paths into the meads and river-banks at
either side of the formal hedgerows, rightly dost thou add that I
enjoined thee to make thine art thy companion.  In the culture of that
art for which you are so eminently gifted, you will find the ideal life
ever beside the real.  Are you not ashamed to tell me that in that art
you do but utter the thoughts of others?  You utter them in music;
through the music you not only give to the thoughts a new character, but
you make them reproductive of fresh thoughts in your audience.

You said very truly that you found in composing you could put into music
thoughts which you could not put into words.  That is the peculiar
distinction of music.  No genuine musician can explain in words exactly
what he means to convey in his music.

How little a libretto interprets an opera; how little we care even to
read it!  It is the music that speaks to us; and how?--Through the human
voice.  We do not notice how poor are the words which the voice warbles.
It is the voice itself interpreting the soul of the musician which
enchants and enthralls us.  And you who have that voice pretend to
despise the gift.  What! despise the power of communicating delight!--the
power that we authors envy; and rarely, if ever, can we give delight with
so little alloy as the singer.

And when an audience disperses, can you guess what griefs the singer
may have comforted? what hard hearts he may have softened?  what high
thoughts he may have awakened?

You say, "Out on the vamped-up hypocrite!  Out on the stage-robes and
painted cheeks!"

I say, "Out on the morbid spirit which so cynically regards the mere
details by which a whole effect on the minds and hearts and souls of
races and nations can be produced!"

There, have I scolded you sufficiently?  I should scold you more, if I
did not see in the affluence of your youth and your intellect the cause
of your restlessness.  Riches are always restless.  It is only to poverty
that the gods give content.

You question me about love; you ask if I have ever bowed to a master,
ever merged my life in another's: expect no answer on this from me.
Circe herself could give no answer to the simplest maid, who, never
having loved, asks, "What is love?"

In the history of the passions each human heart is a world in itself; its
experience profits no others.  In no two lives does love play the same
part or bequeath the same record.

I know not whether I am glad or sorry that the word "love" now falls on
my ear with a sound as slight and as faint as the dropping of a leaf in
autumn may fall on thine.

I volunteer but this lesson, the wisest I can give, if thou canst
understand it: as I bade thee take art into thy life, so learn to look on
life itself as an art.  Thou couldst discover the charm in Tasso; thou
couldst perceive that the requisite of all art, that which pleases, is in
the harmony of proportion.  We lose sight of beauty if we exaggerate the
feature most beautiful.

Love proportioned adorns the homeliest existence; love disproportioned
deforms the fairest.

Alas! wilt thou remember this warning when the time comes in which it may
be needed?

E----- G-------.





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