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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Parisians, by E. B. Lytton, Book 4.
+#167 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+Title: The Parisians, Book 4.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7740]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on May 20, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARISIANS, B4, LYTTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE PARISIANS
+
+                         By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+
+                                 BOOK IV.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.
+
+It is many days since I wrote to you, and but for your delightful note
+just received, reproaching me for silence, I should still be under the
+spell of that awe which certain words of M. Savarin were well fitted to
+produce.  Chancing to ask him if he had written to you lately, he said,
+with that laugh of his, good-humouredly ironical, "No, Mademoiselle, I am
+not one of the _Facheux_ whom Moliere has immortalized.  If the meeting
+of lovers should be sacred from the intrusion of a third person, however
+amiable, more sacred still should be the parting between an author and
+his work.  Madame de Grantmesnil is in that moment so solemn to a genius
+earnest as hers,--she is bidding farewell to a companion with whom, once
+dismissed into the world, she can never converse familiarly again; it
+ceases to be her companion when it becomes ours.  Do not let us disturb
+the last hours they will pass together."
+
+These words struck me much.  I suppose there is truth in them.  I can
+comprehend that a work which has long been all in all to its author,
+concentrating his thoughts, gathering round it the hopes and fears of his
+inmost heart, dies, as it were, to him when he has completed its life for
+others, and launched it into a world estranged from the solitude in which
+it was born and formed.  I can almost conceive that, to a writer like
+you, the very fame which attends the work thus sent forth chills your own
+love for it.  The characters you created in a fairyland, known but to
+yourself, must lose something of their mysterious charm when you hear
+them discussed and cavilled at, blamed or praised, as if they were really
+the creatures of streets and salons.
+
+I wonder if hostile criticism pains or enrages you as it seems to do such
+other authors as I have known.  M. Savarin, for instance, sets down in
+his tablets as an enemy to whom vengeance is due the smallest scribbler
+who wounds his self-love, and says frankly, "To me praise is food,
+dispraise is poison.  Him who feeds me I pay; him who poisons me I break
+on the wheel."  M. Savarin is, indeed, a skilful and energetic
+administrator to his own reputation.  He deals with it as if it were a
+kingdom,--establishes fortifications for its defence, enlists soldiers to
+fight for it.  He is the soul and centre of a confederation in which each
+is bound to defend the territory of the others, and all those territories
+united constitute the imperial realm of M. Savarin.  Don't think me an
+ungracious satirist in what I am thus saying of our brilliant friend.  It
+is not I who here speak; it is himself.  He avows his policy with the
+_naivete_ which makes the charm of his style as writer.  "It is the
+greatest mistake," he said to me yesterday, "to talk of the Republic of
+Letters.  Every author who wins a name is a sovereign in his own domain,
+be it large or small.  Woe to any republican who wants to dethrone me!"
+Somehow or other, when M. Savarin thus talks I feel as if he were
+betraying the cause of, genius.  I cannot bring myself to regard
+literature as a craft,--to me it is a sacred mission; and in hearing this
+"sovereign" boast of the tricks by which he maintains his state, I seem
+to listen to a priest who treats as imposture the religion he professes
+to teach.  M. Savarin's favourite _eleve_ now is a young contributor to
+his journal, named Gustave Rameau.  M. Savarin said the other day in my
+hearing, "I and my set were Young France; Gustave Rameau and his set are
+New Paris."
+
+"And what is the distinction between the one and the other?" asked my
+American friend, Mrs. Morley.
+
+"The set of 'Young France,'" answered M. Savarin, "had in it the hearty
+consciousness of youth; it was bold and vehement, with abundant vitality
+and animal spirits; whatever may be said against it in other respects,
+the power of thews and sinews must be conceded to its chief
+representatives.  But the set of 'New Paris' has very bad health, and
+very indifferent spirits.  Still, in its way, it is very clever; it can
+sting and bite as keenly as if it were big and strong.  Rameau is the
+most promising member of the set.  He will be popular in his time,
+because he represents a good deal of the mind of his time,--namely, the
+mind and the time of 'New Paris.'"
+
+Do you know anything of this young Rameau's writings?  You do not know
+himself, for he told me so, expressing a desire, that was evidently very
+sincere, to find some occasion on which to render you his homage.  He
+said this the first time I met him at M. Savarin's, and before he knew
+how dear to me are yourself and your fame.  He came and sat by me after
+dinner, and won my interest at once by asking me if I had heard that you
+were busied on a new work; and then, without waiting for my answer, he
+launched forth into praises of you, which made a notable contrast to the
+scorn with which he spoke of all your contemporaries,--except indeed M.
+Savarin, who, however, might not have been pleased to hear his favourite
+pupil style him "a great writer in small things."  I spare you his
+epigrams on Dumas and Victor Hugo and my beloved Lamartine.  Though his
+talk was showy, and dazzled me at first, I soon got rather tired of it,
+even the first time we met.  Since then I have seen him very often, not
+only at M. Savarin's, but he calls here at least every other day, and we
+have become quite good friends.  He gains on acquaintance so far that one
+cannot help feeling how much he is to be pitied.  He is so envious! and
+the envious must be so unhappy.  And then he is at once so near and so
+far from all the things that he envies.  He longs for riches and luxury,
+and can only as yet earn a bare competence by his labours.  Therefore he
+hates the rich and luxurious.  His literary successes, instead of
+pleasing him, render him miserable by their contrast with the fame of the
+authors whom he envies and assails.  He has a beautiful head, of which he
+is conscious, but it is joined to a body without strength or grace.  He
+is conscious of this too,--but it is cruel to go on with this sketch.
+You can see at once the kind of person who, whether he inspire affection
+or dislike, cannot fail to create an interest, painful but compassionate.
+
+You will be pleased to hear that Dr. C. considers my health so improved
+that I may next year enter fairly on the profession for which I was
+intended and trained.  Yet I still feel hesitating and doubtful.  To give
+myself wholly up to the art in which I am told I could excel must
+alienate me entirely from the ambition that yearns for fields in which,
+alas! it may perhaps never appropriate to itself a rood for culture,--
+only wander, lost in a vague fairyland, to which it has not the fairy's
+birthright.  O thou great Enchantress, to whom are equally subject the
+streets of Paris and the realm of Faerie, thou who hast sounded to the
+deeps that circumfluent ocean called "practical human life," and hast
+taught the acutest of its navigators to consider how far its courses are
+guided by orbs in heaven,--canst thou solve this riddle which, if it
+perplexes me, must perplex so many?  What is the real distinction between
+the rare genius and the commonalty of human souls that feel to the quick
+all the grandest and divinest things which the rare genius places before
+them, sighing within themselves, "This rare genius does but express that
+which was previously familiar to us, so far as thought and sentiment
+extend"?  Nay, the genius itself, however eloquent, never does, never
+can, express the whole of the thought or the sentiment it interprets; on
+the contrary, the greater the genius is, the more it leaves a something
+of incomplete satisfaction on our minds,--it promises so much more than
+it performs; it implies so much more than it announces.  I am impressed
+with the truth of what I thus say in proportion as I re-peruse and
+re-study the greatest writers that have come within my narrow range of
+reading; and by the greatest writers I mean those who are not exclusively
+reasoners (of such I cannot judge), nor mere poets (of whom, so far as
+concerns the union of words with music, I ought to be able to judge), but
+the few who unite reason and poetry, and appeal at once to the common-
+sense of the multitude and the imagination of the few.  The highest type
+of this union to me is Shakspeare; and I can comprehend the justice of no
+criticism on him which does not allow this sense of incomplete
+satisfaction augmenting in proportion as the poet soars to his highest.
+I ask again, In what consists this distinction between the rare genius
+and the commonalty of minds that exclaim, "He expresses what we feel, but
+never the whole of what we feel"?  Is it the mere power over language, a
+larger knowledge of dictionaries, a finer ear for period and cadence, a
+more artistic craft in casing our thoughts and sentiments in well-
+selected words?  Is it true what Buffon says, "that the style is the
+man"?  Is it true what I am told Goethe said, "Poetry is form"?  I cannot
+believe this; and if you tell me it is true, then I no longer pine to be
+a writer.  But if it be not true, explain to me how it is that the
+greatest genius is popular in proportion as it makes itself akin to us by
+uttering in better words than we employ that which was already within us,
+brings to light what in our souls was latent, and does but correct,
+beautify, and publish the correspondence which an ordinary reader carries
+on privately every day between himself and his mind or his heart.  If
+this superiority in the genius be but style and form, I abandon my dream
+of being something else than a singer of words by another to the music of
+another.  But then, what then?  My knowledge of books and art is
+wonderfully small.  What little I do know I gather from very few books
+and from what I hear said by the few worth listening to whom I happen to
+meet; and out of these, in solitude and revery, not by conscious effort,
+I arrive at some results which appear to my inexperience original.
+Perhaps, indeed, they have the same kind of originality as the musical
+compositions of amateurs who effect a cantata or a quartette made up of
+borrowed details from great masters, and constituting a whole so original
+that no real master would deign to own it.  Oh, if I could get you to
+understand how unsettled, how struggling my whole nature at this moment
+is!  I wonder what is the sensation of the chrysalis which has been a
+silkworm, when it first feels the new wings stirring within its shell,--
+wings, alas! they are but those of the humblest and shortest-lived sort
+of moth, scarcely born into daylight before it dies.  Could it reason, it
+might regret its earlier life, and say, "Better be the silkworm than the
+moth."
+
+
+FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.
+
+Have you known well any English people in the course of your life?  I say
+well, for you must have had acquaintance with many.  But it seems to me
+so difficult to know an Englishman well.  Even I, who so loved and
+revered Mr. Selby,--I, whose childhood was admitted into his
+companionship by that love which places ignorance and knowledge, infancy
+and age, upon ground so equal that heart touches heart, cannot say that I
+understand the English character to anything like the extent to which I
+fancy I understand the Italian and the French.  Between us of the
+Continent and them of the island the British Channel always flows.  There
+is an Englishman here to whom I have been introduced, whom I have met,
+though but seldom, in that society which bounds the Paris world to me.
+Pray, pray tell me, did you ever know, ever meet him?  His name is Graham
+Vane.  He is the only son, I am told, of a man who was a _celebrite_ in
+England as an orator and statesman, and on both sides he belongs to the
+haute aristocratic.  He himself has that indescribable air and mien to
+which we apply the epithet 'distinguished.'  In the most crowded salon
+the eye would fix on him, and involuntarily follow his movements.  Yet
+his manners are frank and simple, wholly without the stiffness or reserve
+which are said to characterize the English.  There is an inborn dignity
+in his bearing which consists in the absence of all dignity assumed.  But
+what strikes me most in this Englishman is an expression of countenance
+which the English depict by the word 'open,'--that expression which
+inspires you with a belief in the existence of sincerity.  Mrs. Morley
+said of him, in that poetic extravagance of phrase by which the Americans
+startle the English, "That man's forehead would light up the Mammoth
+Cave."  Do you not know, Eulalie, what it is to us cultivators of art--
+art being the expression of truth through fiction--to come into the
+atmosphere of one of those souls in which Truth stands out bold and
+beautiful in itself, and needs no idealization through fiction?  Oh, how
+near we should be to heaven could we live daily, hourly, in the presence
+of one the honesty of whose word we could never doubt, the authority of
+whose word we could never disobey!  Mr. Vane professes not to understand
+music, not even to care for it, except rarely, and yet he spoke of its
+influence over others with an enthusiasm that half charmed me once more
+back to my destined calling; nay, might have charmed me wholly, but that
+he seemed to think that I--that any public singer--must be a creature
+apart from the world,--the world in which such men live.  Perhaps that is
+true.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+It was one of those lovely noons towards the end of May in which a rural
+suburb has the mellow charm of summer to him who escapes awhile from the
+streets of a crowded capital.  The Londoner knows its charm when he feels
+his tread on the softening swards of the Vale of Health, or, pausing at
+Richmond under the budding willow, gazes on the river glittering in the
+warmer sunlight, and hears from the villa-gardens behind him the brief
+trill of the blackbird.  But the suburbs round Paris are, I think, a yet
+more pleasing relief from the metropolis; they are more easily reached,
+and I know not why, but they seem more rural,--perhaps because the
+contrast of their repose with the stir left behind, of their redundance
+of leaf and blossom compared with the prim efflorescence of trees in the
+Boulevards and Tuileries, is more striking.  However that may be, when
+Graham reached the pretty suburb in which Isaura dwelt, it seemed to him
+as if all the wheels of the loud busy life were suddenly smitten still.
+The hour was yet early; he felt sure that he should find Isaura at home.
+The garden-gate stood unfastened and ajar; he pushed it aside and
+entered.  I think I have before said that the garden of the villa was
+shut out from the road and the gaze of neighbours by a wall and thick
+belts of evergreens; it stretched behind the house somewhat far for the
+garden of a suburban villa.  He paused when he had passed the gateway,
+for he heard in the distance the voice of one singing,--singing low,
+singing plaintively.  He knew it was the voice of Isaura-_he passed on,
+leaving the house behind him, and tracking the voice till he reached the
+singer.
+
+Isaura was seated within an arbour towards the farther end of the
+garden,--an arbour which, a little later in the year, must indeed be
+delicate and dainty with lush exuberance of jessamine and woodbine; now
+into its iron trelliswork leaflets and flowers were insinuating their
+gentle way.  Just at the entrance one white rose--a winter rose that had
+mysteriously survived its relations--opened its pale hues frankly to the
+noonday sun.  Graham approached slowly, noiselessly, and the last note of
+the song had ceased when he stood at the entrance of the arbour.  Isaura
+did not perceive him at first, for her face was bent downward musingly,
+as was often her wont after singing, especially when alone; but she felt
+that the place was darkened, that something stood between her and the
+sunshine.  She raised her face, and a quick flush mantled over it as she
+uttered his name, not loudly, not as in surprise, but inwardly and
+whisperingly, as in a sort of fear.
+
+"Pardon me, Mademoiselle," said Graham, entering; "but I heard your voice
+as I came into the garden, and it drew me onward involuntarily.  What a
+lovely air! and what simple sweetness in such of the words as reached me!
+I am so ignorant of music that you must not laugh at me if I ask whose is
+the music and whose are the words?  Probably both are so well known as to
+convict me of a barbarous ignorance."
+
+"Oh, no," said Isaura, with a still heightened colour, and in accents
+embarrassed and hesitating.  "Both the words and music are by an unknown
+and very humble composer, yet not, indeed, quite original,--they have not
+even that merit; at least they were suggested by a popular song in the
+Neapolitan dialect which is said to be very old."
+
+"I don't know if I caught the true meaning of the words, for they seemed
+to me to convey a more subtle and refined sentiment than is common in the
+popular songs of southern Italy."
+
+"The sentiment in the original is changed in the paraphrase, and not, I
+fear, improved by the change."
+
+"Will you explain to me the sentiment in both, and let me judge which I
+prefer?"
+
+"In the Neapolitan song a young fisherman, who has moored his boat under
+a rock on the shore, sees a beautiful face below the surface of the
+waters; he imagines it to be that of a Nereid, and casts in his net to
+catch this supposed nymph of the ocean.  He only disturbs the water,
+loses the image, and brings up a few common fishes.  He returns home
+disappointed, and very much enamoured of the supposed Nereid.  The next
+day he goes again to the same place, and discovers that the face which
+had so charmed him was that of a mortal girl reflected on the waters from
+the rock behind him, on which she had been seated, and on which she had
+her home.  The original air is arch and lively; just listen to it."  And
+Isaura warbled one of those artless and somewhat meagre tunes to which
+light-stringed instruments are the fitting accompaniment.
+
+"That," said Graham, "is a different music indeed from the other, which
+is deep and plaintive, and goes to the heart."
+
+"But do you not see how the words have been altered?  In the song you
+first heard me singing, the fisherman goes again to the spot, again and
+again sees the face in the water, again and again seeks to capture the
+Nereid, and never knows to the last that the face was that of the mortal
+on the rock close behind him, and which he passed by without notice every
+day.  Deluded by an ideal image, the real one escapes from his eye."
+
+"Is the verse that is recast meant to symbolize a moral in love?"
+
+"In love? nay, I know not; but in life, yes,--at least the life of the
+artist."
+
+"The paraphrase of the original is yours, Signorina, words and music
+both.  Am I not right?  Your silence answers 'Yes.'  Will you pardon me
+if I say that, though there can be no doubt of the new beauty you have
+given to the old song, I think that the moral of the old was the sounder
+one, the truer to human life.  We do not go on to the last duped by an
+allusion.  If enamoured by the shadow on the waters, still we do look
+around us and discover the image it reflects."
+
+Isaura shook her head gently, but made no answer.  On the table before
+her there were a few myrtle-sprigs and one or two buds from the last
+winter rose, which she had been arranging into a simple nosegay; she took
+up these, and abstractedly began to pluck and scatter the rose-leaves.
+
+"Despise the coming May flowers if you will, they will soon be so
+plentiful," said Graham; "but do not cast away the few blossoms which
+winter has so kindly spared, and which even summer will not give again;"
+and placing his hand on the winter buds, it touched hers,--lightly,
+indeed, but she felt the touch, shrank from it, coloured, and rose from
+her seat.
+
+"The sun has left this side of the garden, the east wind is rising, and
+you must find it chilly here," she said, in an altered tone; "will you
+not come into the house?"
+
+"It is not the air that I feel chilly," said Graham, with a half-smile;
+"I almost fear that my prosaic admonitions have displeased you."
+
+"They were not prosaic; and they were kind and very wise," she added,
+with her exquisite laugh,--laugh so wonderfully sweet and musical.  She
+now had gained the entrance of the arbour; Graham joined her, and they
+walked towards the house.  He asked her if she had seen much of the
+Savarins since they had met.
+
+"Once or twice we have been there of an evening."
+
+"And encountered, no doubt, the illustrious young minstrel who despises
+Tasso and Corneille?"
+
+"M. Rameau?  Oh, yes; he is constantly at the Savarins.  Do not be severe
+on him.  He is unhappy, he is struggling, he is soured.  An artist has
+thorns in his path which lookers-on do not heed."
+
+"All people have thorns in their path, and I have no great respect for
+those who want lookers-on to heed them whenever they are scratched.  But
+M. Rameau seems to me one of those writers very common nowadays, in
+France and even in England; writers who have never read anything worth
+studying, and are, of course, presumptuous in proportion to their
+ignorance.  I should not have thought an artist like yourself could have
+recognized an artist in a M. Rameau who despises Tasso without knowing
+Italian."
+
+Graham spoke bitterly; he was once more jealous.
+
+"Are you not an artist yourself?  Are you not a writer?  M. Savarin told
+me you were a distinguished man of letters."
+
+"M. Savarin flatters me too much.  I am not an artist, and I have a great
+dislike to that word as it is now hackneyed and vulgarized in England and
+in France.  A cook calls himself an artist; a tailor does the same; a man
+writes a gaudy melodrame, a spasmodic song, a sensational novel, and
+straightway he calls Himself an artist, and indulges in a pedantic jargon
+about 'essence' and 'form,' assuring us that a poet we can understand
+wants essence, and a poet we can scan wants form.  Thank heaven, I am not
+vain enough to call myself artist.  I have written some very dry
+lucubrations in periodicals, chiefly political, or critical upon other
+subjects than art.  But why, a propos of M. Rameau, did you ask me that
+question respecting myself?"
+
+"Because much in your conversation," answered Isaura, in rather a
+mournful tone, "made me suppose you had more sympathies with art and its
+cultivators than you cared to avow; and if you had such sympathies, you
+would comprehend what a relief it is to a poor aspirant to art like
+myself to come into communication with those who devote themselves to any
+art distinct from the common pursuits of the world, what a relief it is
+to escape from the ordinary talk of society.  There is a sort of
+instinctive freemasonry among us, including masters and disciples; and
+one art has a fellowship with other arts.  Mine is but song and music,
+yet I feel attracted towards a sculptor, a painter, a romance-writer, a
+poet, as much as towards a singer, a musician.  Do you understand why I
+cannot contemn M. Rameau as you do?  I differ from his tastes in
+literature; I do not much admire such of his writings as I have read; I
+grant that he overestimates his own genius, whatever that be,--yet I like
+to converse with him.  He is a struggler upwards, though with weak wings,
+or with erring footsteps, like myself."
+
+"Mademoiselle," said Graham, earnestly, "I cannot say how I thank you for
+this candour.  Do not condemn me for abusing it, if--" he paused.
+
+"If what?"
+
+"If I, so much older than yourself,--I do not say only in years, but in
+the experience of life, I whose lot is cast among those busy and
+'positive' pursuits, which necessarily quicken that unromantic faculty
+called common-sense,--if, I say, the deep interest with which you must
+inspire all whom you admit into an acquaintance even as unfamiliar as
+that now between us makes me utter one caution, such as might be uttered
+by a friend or brother.  Beware of those artistic sympathies which you so
+touchingly confess; beware how, in the great events of life, you allow
+fancy to misguide your reason.  In choosing friends on whom to rely,
+separate the artist from the human being.  Judge of the human being for
+what it is in itself.  Do not worship the face on the waters, blind to
+the image on the rock.  In one word, never see in an artist like a M.
+Rameau the human being to whom you could intrust the destinies of your
+life.  Pardon me, pardon me; we may meet little hereafter, but you are a
+creature so utterly new to me, so wholly unlike any woman I have ever
+before encountered and admired, and to me seem endowed with such wealth
+of mind and soul, exposed to such hazard, that--that--" again he paused,
+and his voice trembled as he concluded--"that it would be a deep sorrow
+to me if, perhaps years hence, I should have to say, 'Alas'!  by what
+mistake has that wealth been wasted!'"
+
+While they had thus conversed, mechanically they had turned away from the
+house, and were again standing before the arbour.
+
+Graham, absorbed in the passion of his adjuration, had not till now
+looked into the face of the companion by his side.  Now, when he had
+concluded, and heard no reply, he bent down and saw that Isaura was
+weeping silently.
+
+His heart smote him.
+
+"Forgive me," he exclaimed, drawing her hand into his; "I have had no
+right to talk thus; but it was not from want of respect; it was--
+it was--"
+
+The hand which was yielded to his pressed it gently, timidly, chastely.
+
+"Forgive!" murmured Isaura; "do you think that I, an orphan, have never
+longed for a friend who would speak to me thus?"  And so saying, she
+lifted her eyes, streaming still, to his bended countenance,--eyes,
+despite their tears, so clear in their innocent limpid beauty, so
+ingenuous, so frank, so virgin-like, so unlike the eyes of 'any other
+woman he had encountered and admired.'
+
+"Alas!" he said, in quick and hurried accents, "you may remember, when we
+have before conversed, how I, though so uncultured in your art, still
+recognized its beautiful influence upon human breasts; how I sought to
+combat your own depreciation of its rank among the elevating agencies of
+humanity; how, too, I said that no man could venture to ask you to
+renounce the boards, the lamps,--resign the fame of actress, of singer.
+Well, now that you accord to me the title of friend, now that you so
+touchingly remind me that you are an orphan, thinking of all the perils
+the young and the beautiful of your sex must encounter when they abandon
+private life for public, I think that a true friend might put the
+question, 'Can you resign the fame of actress, of singer?'"
+
+"I will answer you frankly.  The profession which once seemed to me so
+alluring began to lose its charms in my eyes some months ago.  It was
+your words, very eloquently expressed, on the ennobling effects of music
+and song upon a popular audience, that counteracted the growing distaste
+to rendering up my whole life to the vocation of the stage; but now I
+think I should feel grateful to the friend whose advice interpreted the
+voice of my own heart, and bade me relinquish the career of actress."
+
+Graham's face grew radiant.  But whatever might have been his reply was
+arrested; voices and footsteps were heard behind.  He turned round and
+saw the Venosta, the Savarins, and Gustave Rameau.
+
+Isaura heard and saw also, started in a sort of alarmed confusion, and
+then instinctively retreated towards the arbour.  Graham hurried on to
+meet the Signora and the visitors, giving time to Isaura to compose
+herself by arresting them in the pathway with conventional salutations.
+
+A few minutes later Isaura joined them, and there was talk to which
+Graham scarcely listened, though he shared in it by abstracted
+monosyllables.  He declined going into the house, and took leave at the
+gate.  In parting, his eyes fixed themselves on Isaura.  Gustave Rameau
+was by her side.  That nosegay which had been left in the arbour was in
+her hand; and though she was bending over it, she did not now pluck and
+scatter the rose-leaves.  Graham at that moment felt no jealousy of the
+fair-faced young poet beside her.
+
+As he walked slowly back, he muttered to himself, "But am I yet in the
+position to hold myself wholly free?  Am I, am I?  Were the sole choice
+before me that between her and ambition and wealth, how soon it would be
+made!  Ambition has no prize equal to the heart of such a woman; wealth
+no sources of joy equal to the treasures of her love."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.
+
+The day after I posted my last, Mr. Vane called on us.  I was in our
+little garden at the time.  Our conversation was brief, and soon
+interrupted by visitors,--the Savarins and M. Rameau.  I long for your
+answer.  I wonder how he impressed you, if you have met him; how he would
+impress, if you met him now.  To me he is so different from all others;
+and I scarcely know why his words ring in my ears, and his image rests in
+my thoughts.  It is strange altogether; for though he is young, he speaks
+to me as if he were so much older than I,--so kindly, so tenderly, yet as
+if I were a child, and much as the dear Maestro might do, if he thought I
+needed caution or counsel.  Do not fancy, Eulalie, that there is any
+danger of my deceiving myself as to the nature of such interest as he may
+take in me.  Oh, no!  There is a gulf between us there which he does not
+lose sight of, and which we could not pass.  How, indeed, I could
+interest him at all, I cannot guess.  A rich, high-born Englishman,
+intent on political life; practical, prosaic--no, not prosaic; but still
+with the kind of sense which does not admit into its range of vision that
+world of dreams which is familiar as their daily home to Romance and to
+Art.  It has always seemed to me that for love, love such as I conceive
+it, there must be a deep and constant sympathy between two persons,--not,
+indeed, in the usual and ordinary trifles of taste and sentiment, but in
+those essentials which form the root of character, and branch out in all
+the leaves and blooms that expand to the sunshine and shrink from the
+cold,--that the worldling should wed the worldling, the artist the
+artist.  Can the realist and the idealist blend together, and hold
+together till death and beyond death?  If not, can there be true love
+between them?
+
+By true love, I mean the love which interpenetrates the soul, and once
+given can never die.  Oh, Eulalie, answer me, answer!
+
+P. S.--I have now fully made up my mind to renounce all thought of the
+stage.
+
+
+
+FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TOISAURA CICOGNA.
+
+MY DEAR CHILD,--how your mind has grown since you left me, the sanguine
+and aspiring votary of an art which, of all arts, brings the most
+immediate reward to a successful cultivator, and is in itself so divine
+in its immediate effects upon human souls!  Who shall say what may be the
+after-results of those effects which the waiters on posterity presume to
+despise because they are immediate?  A dull man, to whose mind a ray of
+that vague starlight undetected in the atmosphere of workday life has
+never yet travelled; to whom the philosopher, the preacher, the poet
+appeal in vain,--nay, to whom the conceptions of the grandest master of
+instrumental music are incomprehensible; to whom Beethoven unlocks no
+portal in heaven; to whom Rossini has no mysteries on earth unsolved by
+the critics of the pit,--suddenly hears the human voice of the human
+singer, and at the sound of that voice the walls which enclosed him fall.
+The something far from and beyond the routine of his commonplace
+existence becomes known to him.  He of himself, poor man, can make
+nothing of it.  He cannot put it down on paper, and say the next morning,
+"I am an inch nearer to heaven than I was last night;" but the feeling
+that he is an inch nearer to heaven abides with him.  Unconsciously he is
+gentler, he is less earthly, and, in being nearer to heaven, he is
+stronger for earth.  You singers do not seem to me to understand that you
+have--to use your own word, so much in vogue that it has become abused
+and trite--a mission!  When you talk of missions, from whom comes the
+mission?  Not from men.  If there be a mission from man to men, it must
+be appointed from on high.
+
+Think of all this; and in being faithful to your art, be true to
+yourself.  If you feel divided between that art and the art of the
+writer, and acknowledge the first to be too exacting to admit a rival,
+keep to that in which you are sure to excel.  Alas, my fair child! do not
+imagine that we writers feel a happiness in our pursuits and aims more
+complete than that which you can command.  If we care for fame (and, to
+be frank, we all do), that fame does not come up before us face to face,
+a real, visible, palpable form, as it does to the singer, to the actress.
+I grant that it may be more enduring, but an endurance on the length of
+which we dare not reckon.  A writer cannot be sure of immortality till
+his language itself be dead; and then he has but a share in an uncertain
+lottery.  Nothing but fragments remains of the Phrynichus who rivalled
+AEschylus; of the Agathon who perhaps excelled Euripides; of the Alcaeus,
+in whom Horace acknowledged a master and a model; their renown is not in
+their works, it is but in their names.  And, after all, the names of
+singers and actors last perhaps as long.  Greece retains the name of
+Polus, Rome of Roscius, England of Garrick, France of Talma, Italy of
+Pasta, more lastingly than posterity is likely to retain mine.  You
+address to me a question, which I have often put to myself,--"What is the
+distinction between the writer and the reader, when the reader says,
+'These are my thoughts, these are my feelings; the writer has stolen
+them, and clothed them in his own words'?"  And the more the reader says
+this, the more wide is the audience, the more genuine the renown, and,
+paradox though it seems, the more consummate the originality, of the
+writer.  But no, it is not the mere gift of expression, it is not the
+mere craft of the pen, it is not the mere taste in arrangement of word
+and cadence, which thus enables the one to interpret the mind, the heart,
+the soul of the many.  It is a power breathed into him as he lay in his
+cradle, and a power that gathered around itself, as he grew up, all the
+influences he acquired, whether from observation of external nature, or
+from study of men and books, or from that experience of daily life which
+varies with every human being.  No education could make two intellects
+exactly alike, as no culture can make two leaves exactly alike.  How
+truly you describe the sense of dissatisfaction which every writer of
+superior genius communicates to his admirers! how truly do you feel that
+the greater is the dissatisfaction in proportion to the writer's genius,
+and the admirer's conception of it!  But that is the mystery which makes
+--let me borrow a German phrase--the cloud-land between the finite and
+the infinite.  The greatest philosopher, intent on the secrets of Nature,
+feels that dissatisfaction in Nature herself.  The finite cannot reduce
+into logic and criticism the infinite.
+
+Let us dismiss these matters, which perplex the reason, and approach that
+which touches the heart, which in your case, my child, touches the heart
+of woman.  You speak of love, and deem that the love which lasts--the
+household, the conjugal love--should be based upon such sympathies of
+pursuit that the artist should wed the artist.
+
+This is one of the questions you do well to address to me; for whether
+from my own experience, or from that which I have gained from observation
+extended over a wide range of life, and quickened and intensified by the
+class of writing that I cultivate, and which necessitates a calm study of
+the passions, I am an authority on such subjects, better than most women
+can be.  And alas, my child, I come to this result: there is no
+prescribing to men or to women whom to select, whom to refuse.  I cannot
+refute the axiom of the ancient poet, "In love there is no wherefore."
+But there is a time--it is often but a moment of time--in which love is
+not yet a master, in which we can say, "I will love, I will not love."
+
+Now, if I could find you in such a moment, I would say to you, "Artist,
+do not love, do not marry, an artist."  Two artistic natures rarely
+combine.  The artistic nature is wonderfully exacting.  I fear it is
+supremely egotistical,--so jealously sensitive that it writhes at the
+touch of a rival.  Racine was the happiest of husbands; his wife adored
+his genius, but could not understand his plays.  Would Racine have been
+happy if he had married a Corneille in petticoats?  I who speak have
+loved an artist, certainly equal to myself.  I am sure that he loved me.
+That sympathy in pursuits of which you speak drew us together, and became
+very soon the cause of antipathy.  To both of us the endeavour to
+coalesce was misery.
+
+I don't know your M. Rameau.  Savarin has sent me some of his writings;
+from these I judge that his only chance of happiness would be to marry a
+commonplace woman, with _separation de biens_.  He is, believe me, but
+one of the many with whom New Paris abounds, who because they have the
+infirmities of genius imagine they have its strength.
+
+I come next to the Englishman.  I see how serious is your questioning
+about him.  You not only regard him as a being distinct from the crowd of
+a salon; he stands equally apart in the chamber of your thoughts,--you do
+not mention him in the same letter as that which treats of Rameau and
+Savarin.  He has become already an image not to be lightly mixed up with
+others.  You would rather not have mentioned him at all to me, but you
+could not resist it.  The interest you feel in him so perplexed you, that
+in a kind of feverish impatience you cry out to me, "Can you solve the
+riddle?  Did you ever know well Englishmen?  Can an Englishman be
+understood out of his island?" etc.  Yes, I have known well many
+Englishmen; in affairs of the heart they are much like all other men.
+No; I do not know this Englishman in particular, nor any one of his name.
+
+Well, my child, let us frankly grant that this foreigner has gained some
+hold on your thoughts, on your fancy, perhaps also on your heart.  Do not
+fear that he will love you less enduringly, or that you will become
+alienated from him, because he is not an artist.  If he be a strong
+nature, and with some great purpose in life, your ambition will fuse
+itself in his; and knowing you as I do, I believe you would make an
+excellent wife to an Englishman whom you honoured as well as loved; and
+sorry though I should be that you relinquished the singer's fame, I
+should be consoled in thinking you safe in the woman's best sphere,--
+a contented home, safe from calumny, safe from gossip.  I never had that
+home; and there has been no part in my author's life in which I would
+not have given all the celebrity it won for the obscure commonplace of
+such woman-lot.  Could I move human beings as pawns on a chessboard, I
+should indeed say that the most suitable and congenial mate for you, for
+a woman of sentiment and genius, would be a well-born and well-educated
+German; for such a German unites, with domestic habits and a strong sense
+of family ties, a romance of sentiment, a love of art, a predisposition
+towards the poetic side of life, which is very rare among Englishmen of
+the same class.  But as the German is not forthcoming, I give my vote for
+the Englishman, provided only you love him.  Ah, child, be sure of that.
+Do not mistake fancy for love.  All women do not require love in
+marriage, but without it that which is best and highest in you would
+wither and die.  Write to me often and tell me all.  M. Savarin is right.
+My book is no longer my companion.  It is gone from me, and I am once
+more alone in the world.
+
+Yours affectionately.
+
+P. S.--Is not your postscript a woman's?  Does it not require a woman's
+postscript in reply?  You say in yours that you have fully made up your
+mind to renounce all thoughts of the stage.  I ask in mine, "What has the
+Englishman to do with that determination?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Some weeks have passed since Graham's talk with Isaura in the garden; he
+has not visited the villa since.  His cousins the D'Altons have passed
+through Paris on their way to Italy, meaning to stay a few days; they
+stayed nearly a month, and monopolized much of Graham's companionship.
+Both these were reasons why, in the habitual society of the Duke,
+Graham's persuasion that he was not yet free to court the hand of Isaura
+became strengthened, and with that persuasion necessarily came a question
+equally addressed to his conscience.  "If not yet free to court her hand,
+am I free to expose myself to the temptation of seeking to win her
+affection?"  But when his cousin was gone, his heart began to assert its
+own rights, to argue its own case, and suggest modes of reconciling its
+dictates to the obligations which seemed to oppose them.  In this
+hesitating state of mind he received the following note:--
+
+
+                                          VILLA ------, LAC D'ENGHIEN.
+
+MY DEAR MR. VANE,--We have retreated from Paris to the banks of this
+beautiful little lake.  Come and help to save Frank and myself from
+quarrelling with each other, which, until the Rights of Women are firmly
+established, married folks always will do when left to themselves,
+especially if they are still lovers, as Frank and I are.  Love is a
+terribly quarrelsome thing.  Make us a present of a few days out of your
+wealth of time.  We will visit Montmorency and the haunts of Rousseau,
+sail on the lake at moonlight, dine at gypsy restaurants under trees not
+yet embrowned by summer heats, discuss literature and politics,
+"Shakspeare and the musical glasses,"--and be as sociable and pleasant as
+Boccaccio's tale-tellers, at Fiesole.  We shall be but a small party,
+only the Savarins, that unconscious sage and humourist Signora Venosta,
+and that dimple-cheeked Isaura, who embodies the song of nightingales and
+the smile of summer.  Refuse, and Frank shall not have an easy moment
+till he sends in his claims for thirty millions against the Alabama.
+
+                     Yours, as you behave,
+                                   LIZZIE MORLEY.
+
+Graham did not refuse.  He went to Enghien for four days and a quarter.
+He was under the same roof as Isaura.  Oh, those happy days! so happy
+that they defy description.  But though to Graham the happiest days he
+had ever known, they were happier still to Isaura.  There were drawbacks
+to his happiness, none to hers,--drawbacks partly from reasons the weight
+of which the reader will estimate later; partly from reasons the reader
+may at once comprehend and assess.  In the sunshine of her joy, all the
+vivid colourings of Isaura's artistic temperament came forth, so that
+what I may call the homely, domestic woman-side of her nature faded into
+shadow.  If, my dear reader, whether you be man or woman, you have come
+into familiar contact with some creature of a genius to which, even
+assuming that you yourself have a genius in its own way, you have no
+special affinities, have you not felt shy with that creature?  Have you
+not, perhaps, felt how intensely you could love that creature, and
+doubted if that creature could possibly love you?  Now I think that
+shyness and that disbelief are common with either man or woman, if,
+however conscious of superiority in the prose of life, he or she
+recognizes inferiority in the poetry of it.  And yet this self-abasement
+is exceedingly mistaken.  The poetical kind of genius is so grandly
+indulgent, so inherently deferential, bows with such unaffected modesty
+to the superiority in which it fears it may fail (yet seldom does fail),
+--the superiority of common-sense.  And when we come to women, what
+marvellous truth is conveyed by the woman who has had no superior in
+intellectual gifts among her own sex!  Corinne, crowned at the Capitol,
+selects out of the whole world as the hero of her love no rival poet and
+enthusiast, but a cold-blooded, sensible Englishman.
+
+Graham Vane, in his strong masculine form of intellect--Graham Vane, from
+whom I hope much, if he live to fulfil his rightful career--had, not
+unreasonably, the desire to dominate the life of the woman whom he
+selected as the partner of his own; but the life of Isaura seemed to
+escape him.  If at moments, listening to her, he would say to himself,
+"What a companion! life could never be dull with her," at other moments
+he would say, "True, never dull, but would it be always safe?"  And then
+comes in that mysterious power of love which crushes all beneath its
+feet, and makes us end self-commune by that abject submission of reason,
+which only murmurs, "Better be unhappy with the one you love than happy
+with one whom you do not."  All such self-communes were unknown to
+Isaura.  She lived in the bliss of the hour.  If Graham could have read
+her heart, he would have dismissed all doubt whether he could dominate
+her life.  Could a Fate or an Angel have said to her, "Choose,--on one
+side I promise you the glories of a Catalani, a Pasta, a Sappho, a De
+Stael, a Georges Sand, all combined into one immortal name; or, on the
+other side, the whole heart of the man who would estrange himself from
+you if you had such combination of glories,"--her answer would have
+brought Graham Vane to her feet.  All scruples, all doubts, would have
+vanished; he would have exclaimed, with the generosity inherent in the
+higher order of man, "Be glorious, if your nature wills it so.  Glory
+enough to me that you would have resigned glory itself to become mine."
+But how is it that men worth a woman's loving become so diffident when
+they love intensely?  Even in ordinary cases of love there is so
+ineffable a delicacy in virgin woman, that a man, be he how refined
+soever, feels himself rough and rude and coarse in comparison; and while
+that sort of delicacy was pre-eminent in this Italian orphan, there came,
+to increase the humility of the man so proud and so confident in himself
+when he had only men to deal with, the consciousness that his
+intellectual nature was hard and positive beside the angel-like purity
+and the fairy-like play of hers.
+
+There was a strong wish on the part of Mrs. Morley to bring about the
+union of these two.  She had a great regard and a great admiration for
+both.  To her mind, unconscious of all Graham's doubts and prejudices,
+they were exactly suited to each other.  A man of intellect so cultivated
+as Graham's, if married to a commonplace English "Miss," would surely
+feel as if life had no sunshine and no flowers.  The love of an Isaura
+would steep it in sunshine, pave it with flowers.  Mrs. Morley admitted
+--all American Republicans of gentle birth do admit--the instincts which
+lead "like" to match with "like," an equality of blood and race.  With
+all her assertion of the Rights of Woman, I do not think that Mrs. Morley
+would ever have conceived the possibility of consenting that the richest
+and prettiest and cleverest girl in the States could become the wife of a
+son of hers if the girl had the taint of negro blood, even though shown
+nowhere save the slight distinguishing hue of her finger-nails.  So had
+Isaura's merits been threefold what they were and she had been the
+wealthy heiress of a retail grocer, this fair Republican would have
+opposed (more strongly than many an English duchess, or at least a Scotch
+duke, would do, the wish of a son), the thought of an alliance between
+Graham Vane and the grocer's daughter!  But Isaura was a Cicogna, an
+offspring of a very ancient and very noble house.  Disparities of
+fortune, or mere worldly position, Mrs. Morley supremely despised.  Here
+were the great parities of alliance,--parities in years and good looks
+and mental culture.  So, in short, she in the invitation given to them
+had planned for the union between Isaura and Graham.  To this plan she
+had an antagonist, whom she did not even guess, in Madame Savarin.  That
+lady, as much attached to Isaura as was Mrs. Morley herself, and still
+more desirous of seeing a girl, brilliant and parentless, transferred
+from the companionship of Signora Venosta to the protection of a husband,
+entertained no belief in the serious attentions of Graham Vane.  Perhaps
+she exaggerated his worldly advantages, perhaps she undervalued the
+warmth of his affections; but it was not within the range of her
+experience, confined much to Parisian life, nor in harmony with her
+notions of the frigidity and morgue of the English national character,
+that a rich and high-born young man, to whom a great career in practical
+public life was predicted, should form a matrimonial alliance with a
+foreign orphan girl, who, if of gentle birth, had no useful connections,
+would bring no correspondent dot, and had been reared and intended for
+the profession of the stage.  She much more feared that the result of any
+attentions on the part of such a man would be rather calculated to
+compromise the orphan's name, or at least to mislead her expectations,
+than to secure her the shelter of a wedded home.  Moreover, she had
+cherished plans of her own for Isaura's future.  Madame Savarin had
+conceived for Gustave Rameau a friendly regard, stronger than that which
+Mrs. Morley entertained for Graham Vane, for it was more motherly.
+Gustave had been familiarized to her sight and her thoughts since he had
+first been launched into the literary world under her husband's auspices;
+he had confided to her his mortification in his failures, his joy in his
+successes.  His beautiful countenance, his delicate health, his very
+infirmities and defects, had endeared him to her womanly heart.  Isaura
+was the wife of all others who, in Madame Savarin's opinion, was made for
+Rameau.  Her fortune, so trivial beside the wealth of the Englishman,
+would be a competence to Rameau; then that competence might swell into
+vast riches if Isaura succeeded on the stage.  She found with extreme
+displeasure that Isaura's mind had become estranged from the profession
+to which she had been destined, and divined that a deference to the
+Englishman's prejudices had something to do with that estrangement.  It
+was not to be expected that a Frenchwoman, wife to a sprightly man of
+letters, who had intimate friends and allies in every department of the
+artistic world, should cherish any prejudice whatever against the
+exercise of an art in which success achieved riches and renown; but she
+was prejudiced, as most Frenchwomen are, against allowing to unmarried
+girls the same freedom and independence of action that are the rights of
+women--French women--when married; and she would have disapproved the
+entrance of Isaura on her professional career until she could enter it as
+a wife, the wife of an artist, the wife of Gustave Rameau.
+
+Unaware of the rivalry between these friendly diplomatists and schemers,
+Graham and Isaura glided hourly more and more down the current, which as
+yet ran smooth.  No words by which love is spoken were exchanged between
+them; in fact, though constantly together, they were very rarely, and
+then but for moments, alone with each other.  Mrs. Morley artfully
+schemed more than once to give them such opportunities for that mutual
+explanation of heart which, she saw, had not yet taken place; with art
+more practised and more watchful, Madame Savarin contrived to baffle her
+hostess's intention.  But, indeed, neither Graham nor Isaura sought to
+make opportunities for themselves.  He, as we know, did not deem himself
+wholly justified in uttering the words of love by which a man of honour
+binds himself for life; and she!--what girl pure-hearted and loving truly
+does not shrink from seeking the opportunities which it is for the man to
+court?  Yet Isaura needed no words to tell her that she was loved,--no,
+nor even a pressure of the hand, a glance of the eye; she felt it
+instinctively, mysteriously, by the glow of her own being in the presence
+of her lover.  She knew that she herself could not so love unless she
+were beloved.
+
+Here woman's wit is keener and truthfuller than man's.  Graham, as I have
+said, did not feel confident that he had reached the heart of Isaura.  He
+was conscious that he had engaged her interest, that he had attracted her
+fancy; but often, when charmed by the joyous play of her imagination, he
+would sigh to himself, "To natures so gifted what single mortal can be
+the all in all."
+
+They spent the summer mornings in excursions round the beautiful
+neigbbourhood, dined early, and sailed on the calm lake at moonlight.
+Their talk was such as might be expected from lovers of books in summer
+holidays.  Savarin was a critic by profession; Graham Vane, if not that,
+at least owed such literary reputation as he had yet gained to essays in
+which the rare critical faculty was conspicuously developed.
+
+It was pleasant to hear the clash of these two minds encountering each
+other; they differed perhaps less in opinions than in the mode by which
+opinions are discussed.  The Englishman's range of reading was wider than
+the Frenchman's, and his scholarship more accurate; but the Frenchman had
+a compact neatness of expression, a light and nimble grace, whether in
+the advancing or the retreat of his argument, which covered deficiencies,
+and often made them appear like merits.  Graham was compelled, indeed, to
+relinquish many of the forces of superior knowledge or graver eloquence,
+which with less lively antagonists he could have brought into the field,
+for the witty sarcasm of Savarin would have turned them aside as pedantry
+or declamation.  But though Graham was neither dry nor diffuse, and the
+happiness at his heart brought out the gayety of humour which had been
+his early characteristic, and yet rendered his familiar intercourse
+genial and playful, still there was this distinction between his humour
+and Savarin's wit,--that in the first there was always something earnest,
+in the last always something mocking.  And in criticism Graham seemed
+ever anxious to bring out a latent beauty, even in writers comparatively
+neglected; Savarin was acutest when dragging forth a blemish never before
+discovered in writers universally read.
+
+Graham did not perhaps notice the profound attention with which Isaura
+listened to him in these intellectual skirmishes with the more glittering
+Parisian.  There was this distinction she made between him and Savarin,--
+when the last spoke she often chimed in with some happy sentiment of her
+own; but she never interrupted Graham, never intimated a dissent from his
+theories of art, or the deductions he drew from them; and she would
+remain silent and thoughtful for some minutes when his voice ceased.
+There was passing from his mind into hers an ambition which she imagined,
+poor girl, that he would be pleased to think he had inspired, and which
+might become a new bond of sympathy between them.  But as yet the
+ambition was vague and timid,--an idea or a dream to be fulfilled in some
+indefinite future.
+
+The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after staying
+out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering still on the
+lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted to superficial
+studies of the positive sciences, including, of course, the most popular
+of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening to speculative
+conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of Sirius, that very
+distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who has led philosophers
+into mortifying reflections upon the utter insignificance of our own poor
+little planet, capable of producing nothing greater than Shakspeares and
+Newtons, Aristotles and Caesars,--mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects
+proportioned to the size of the world in which they flourish.
+
+As it chanced, Isaura and Graham were then standing close to each other
+and a little apart from the rest.  "It is very strange," said Graham,
+laughing low, "how little I care about Sirius.  He is the sun of some
+other system, and is perhaps not habitable at all, except by Salamanders.
+He cannot be one of the stars with which I have established familiar
+acquaintance, associated with fancies and dreams and hopes, as most of us
+do, for instance, with Hesperus, the moon's harbinger and comrade.  But
+amid all those stars there is one--not Hesperus--which has always had
+from my childhood a mysterious fascination for me.  Knowing as little of
+astrology as I do of astronomy, when I gaze upon that star I become
+credulously superstitious, and fancy it has an influence on my life.
+Have you, too, any favourite star?"
+
+"Yes," said Isaura; "and I distinguish it now, but I do not even know its
+name, and never would ask it."
+
+"So like me.  I would not vulgarize my unknown source of beautiful
+illusions by giving it the name it takes in technical catalogues.  For
+fear of learning that name I never have pointed it out to any one before.
+I too at this moment distinguish it apart from all its brotherhood.  Tell
+me which is yours."
+
+Isaura pointed and explained.  The Englishman was startled.  By what
+strange coincidence could they both have singled out from all the host of
+heaven the same favourite star?  "Cher Vane," cried Savarin, "Colonel
+Morley declares that what America is to the terrestrial system Sirius is
+to the heavenly.  America is to extinguish Europe, and then Sirius is to
+extinguish the world."
+
+"Not for some millions of years; time to look about us," said the
+Colonel, gravely.  "But I certainly differ from those who maintain that
+Sirius recedes from us.  I say that he approaches.  The principles of a
+body so enlightened must be those of progress."  Then addressing Graham
+in English, he added, "there will be a mulling in this fogified planet
+some day, I predicate.  Sirius is a keener!"
+
+"I have not imagination lively enough to interest myself in the destinies
+of Sirius in connection with our planet at a date so remote," said
+Graham, smiling.  Then he added in a whisper to Isaura, "My imagination
+does not carry me further than to wonder whether this day twelvemonth--
+the 8th of July-we two shall both be singling out that same star, and
+gazing on it as now, side by side."
+
+This was the sole utterance of that sentiment in which the romance of
+love is so rich that the Englishman addressed to Isaura during those
+memorable summer days at Enghien.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+The next morning the party broke up.  Letters had been delivered both to
+Savarin and to Graham, which, even had the day for departure not been
+fixed, would have summoned them away.  On reading his letter, Savarin's
+brow became clouded.  He made a sign to his wife after breakfast, and
+wandered away with her down an alley in the little garden.  His trouble
+was of that nature which a wife either soothes or aggravates, according
+sometimes to her habitual frame of mind, sometimes to the mood of temper
+in which she may chance to be,--a household trouble, a pecuniary trouble.
+
+Savarin was by no means an extravagant man.  His mode of living, though
+elegant and hospitable, was modest compared to that of many French
+authors inferior to himself in the fame which at Paris brings a very good
+return in francs; but his station itself as the head of a powerful
+literary clique necessitated many expenses which were too congenial to
+his extreme good-nature to be regulated by strict prudence.  His hand was
+always open to distressed writers and struggling artists, and his sole
+income was derived from his pen and a journal in which he was chief
+editor and formerly sole proprietor.  But that journal had of late not
+prospered.  He had sold or pledged a considerable share in the
+proprietorship.  He had been compelled also to borrow a sum large for
+him, and the debt obtained from a retired bourgeois who lent out his
+moneys "by way," he said, "of maintaining an excitement and interest in
+life," would in a few days become due.  The letter was not from that
+creditor; but it was from his publisher, containing a very disagreeable
+statement of accounts, pressing for settlement, and declining an offer of
+Savarin for a new book (not yet begun) except upon terms that the author
+valued himself too highly to accept.  Altogether, the situation was
+unpleasant.  There were many times in which Madame Savarin presumed to
+scold her distinguished husband for his want of prudence and thrift.  But
+those were never the times when scolding could be of no use.  It could
+clearly be of no use now.  Now was the moment to cheer and encourage him;
+to reassure him as to his own undiminished powers and popularity, for he
+talked dejectedly of himself as obsolete and passing out of fashion; to
+convince him also of the impossibility that the ungrateful publisher whom
+Savarin's more brilliant successes had enriched could encounter the odium
+of hostile proceedings; and to remind him of all the authors, all the
+artists, whom he in their earlier difficulties had so liberally assisted,
+and from whom a sum sufficing to pay the bourgeois creditor when the day
+arrived could now be honourably asked and would be readily contributed.
+In this last suggestion the homely prudent good-sense of Madame Savarin
+failed her.  She did not comprehend that delicate pride of honour which,
+with all his Parisian frivolities and cynicism, dignified the Parisian
+man of genius.  Savarin could not, to save his neck from a rope, have
+sent round the begging-hat to friends whom he had obliged.  Madame
+Savarin was one of those women with large-lobed ears, who can be
+wonderfully affectionate, wonderfully sensible, admirable wives and
+mothers, and yet are deficient in artistic sympathies with artistic
+natures.  Still, a really good honest wife is such an incalculable
+blessing to her lord, that, at the end of the talk in the solitary alley,
+this man of exquisite finesse, of the undefinably high-bred temperament,
+and, alas! the painful morbid susceptibility, which belongs to the
+genuine artistic character, emerged into the open sunlit lawn with his
+crest uplifted, his lip curved upward in its joyous mockery, and
+perfectly persuaded that somehow or other he should put down the
+offensive publisher, and pay off the unoffending creditor when the day
+for payment came.  Still he had judgment enough to know that to do this
+he must get back to Paris, and could not dawdle away precious hours in
+discussing the principles of poetry with Graham Vane.
+
+There was only one thing, apart from "the begging-hat," in which Savarin
+dissented from his wife.--She suggested his starting a new journal in
+conjunction with Gustave Rameau, upon whose genius and the expectations
+to be formed from it (here she was tacitly thinking of Isaura wedded to
+Rameau, and more than a Malibran on the stage) she insisted vehemently.
+Savarin did not thus estimate Gustave Rameau, thought him a clever,
+promising young writer in a very bad school of writing, who might do well
+some day or other.  But that a Rameau could help a Savarin to make a
+fortune!  No; at that idea he opened his eyes, patted his wife's
+shoulder, and called her "enfant."
+
+Graham's letter was from M. Renard, and ran thus:--
+
+     MONSIEUR,--I had the honour to call at your apartment this morning,
+     and I write this line to the address given to me by your concierge
+     to say that I have been fortunate enough to ascertain that the
+     relation of the missing lady is now at Paris.  I shall hold myself
+     in readiness to attend your summons.  Deign to accept, Monsieur, the
+     assurance of my profound consideration.
+                                             J.  RENARD.
+
+This communication sufficed to put Graham into very high spirits.
+Anything that promised success to his research seemed to deliver his
+thoughts from a burden and his will from a fetter.  Perhaps in a few days
+he might frankly and honourably say to Isaura words which would justify
+his retaining longer, and pressing more ardently, the delicate hand which
+trembled in his as they took leave.
+
+On arriving at Paris, Graham despatched a note to M. Renard requesting to
+see him, and received a brief line in reply that M. Renard feared he
+should be detained on other and important business till the evening, but
+hoped to call at eight o'clock.  A few minutes before that hour he
+entered Graham's apartment.
+
+"You have discovered the uncle of Louise Duval!" exclaimed Graham; "of
+course you mean M. de Mauleon, and he is at Paris?"
+
+"True so far, Monsieur; but do not be too sanguine as to the results of
+the information I can give you.  Permit me, as briefly as possible, to
+state the circumstances.  When you acquainted me with the fact that M. de
+Mauleon was the uncle of Louise Duval, I told you that I was not without
+hopes of finding him out, though so long absent from Paris.  I will now
+explain why.  Some months ago, one of my colleagues engaged in the
+political department (which I am not) was sent to Lyons, in consequence
+of some suspicions conceived by the loyal authorities there of a plot
+against the emperor's life.  The suspicions were groundless, the plot a
+mare's nest.  But my colleague's attention was especially drawn towards a
+man not mixed up with the circumstances from which a plot had been
+inferred, but deemed in some way or other a dangerous enemy to the
+Government.  Ostensibly, he exercised a modest and small calling as a
+sort of courtier or _agent de change_; but it was noticed that certain
+persons familiarly frequenting his apartment, or to whose houses he used
+to go at night, were disaffected to the Government,--not by any means of
+the lowest rank,--some of them rich malcontents who had been devoted
+Orleanists; others, disappointed aspirants to office or the 'cross;' one
+or two well-born and opulent fanatics dreaming of another Republic.
+Certain very able articles in the journals of the excitable _Midi_,
+though bearing another signature, were composed or dictated by this man,
+--articles evading the censure and penalties of the law, but very
+mischievous in their tone.  All who had come into familiar communication
+with this person were impressed with a sense of his powers; and also with
+a vague belief that he belonged to a higher class in breeding and
+education than that of a petty _agent de change_.  My colleague set
+himself to watch the man, and took occasions of business at his little
+office to enter into talk with him.  Not by personal appearance, but by
+voice, he came to a conclusion that the man was not wholly a stranger to
+him,--a peculiar voice with a slight Norman breadth of pronunciation,
+though a Parisian accent; a voice very low, yet very distinct; very
+masculine, yet very gentle.  My colleague was puzzled till late one
+evening he observed the man coming out of the house of one of these rich
+malcontents, the rich malcontent himself accompanying him.  My colleague,
+availing himself of the dimness of light, as the two passed into a lane
+which led to the agent's apartment, contrived to keep close behind and
+listen to their conversation; but of this he heard nothing,--only, when
+at the end of the lane, the rich man turned abruptly, shook his companion
+warmly by the hand, and parted from him, saying, 'Never fear; all shall
+go right with you, my dear Victor.' At the sound of that name 'Victor,'
+my colleague's memories, before so confused, became instantaneously
+clear.  Previous to entering our service, he had been in the horse
+business, a votary of the turf; as such he had often seen the brilliant
+'sportman,' Victor de Mauleon; sometimes talked to him.  Yes, that was
+the voice,--the slight Norman intonation (Victor de Mauleon's father had
+it strongly, and Victor had passed some of his early childhood in
+Normandy), the subdued modulation of speech which had made so polite the
+offence to men, or so winning the courtship to women,--that was Victor de
+Mauleon.  But why there in that disguise?  What was his real business and
+object?  My confrere had no time allowed to him to prosecute such
+inquiries.  Whether Victor or the rich malcontent had observed him at
+their heels, and feared he might have overheard their words, I know not;
+but the next day appeared in one of the popular journals circulating
+among the _ouvriers_ a paragraph stating that a Paris spy had been seen
+at Lyons, warning all honest men against his machinations, and containing
+a tolerably accurate description of his person.  And that very day, on
+venturing forth, my estimable colleague suddenly found himself hustled by
+a ferocious throng, from whose hands he was with great difficulty rescued
+by the municipal guard.  He left Lyons that night; and for recompense of
+his services received a sharp reprimand from his chief.  He had committed
+the worst offence in our profession, _trop de zele_.  Having only heard
+the outlines of this story from another, I repaired to my _confrere_
+after my last interview with Monsieur, and learned what I now tell you
+from his own lips.  As he was not in my branch of the service, I could
+not order him to return to Lyons; and I doubt whether his chief would
+have allowed it.  But I went to Lyons myself, and there ascertained that
+our supposed Vicomte had left that town for Paris some months ago, not
+long after the adventure of my colleague.  The man bore a very good
+character generally,--was said to be very honest and inoffensive; and the
+notice taken of him by persons of higher rank was attributed generally to
+a respect for his talents, and not on account of any sympathy in
+political opinions.  I found that the confrere mentioned, and who alone
+could identify M. de Mauleon in the disguise which the Vicomte had
+assumed, was absent on one of those missions abroad in which he is
+chiefly employed.  I had to wait for his return, and it was only the day
+before yesterday that I obtained the following particulars.  M. de
+Mauleon bears the same name as he did at Lyons,--that name is Jean
+Lebeau; he exercises the ostensible profession of a 'letter-writer,' and
+a sort of adviser on business among the workmen and petty bourgeoisie,
+and he nightly frequents the cafe Jean Jacques, Rue Faubourg Montmartre.
+It is not yet quite half-past eight, and, no doubt, you could see him at
+the cafe this very night, if you thought proper to go."
+
+"Excellent!  I will go!  Describe him!"
+
+"Alas! that is exactly what I cannot do at present; for after hearing
+what I now tell you, I put the same request you do to my colleague, when,
+before he could answer me, he was summoned to the bureau of his chief,
+promising to return and give me the requisite description.  He did not
+return; and I find that he was compelled, on quitting his chief, to seize
+the first train starting for Lille upon an important political
+investigation which brooked no delay.  He will be back in a few days,
+and then Monsieur shall have the description."
+
+"Nay; I think I will seize time by the forelock, and try my chance
+tonight.  If the man be really a conspirator, and it looks likely enough,
+who knows but what he may see quick reason to take alarm and vanish from
+Paris at any hour?--Cafe Jean Jacques, Rue ------; I will go.  Stay; you
+have seen Victor de Mauleon in his youth: what was he like then?"
+
+"Tall, slender, but broad-shouldered, very erect, carrying his head high,
+a profusion of dark curls, a small black mustache, fair clear complexion,
+light-coloured eyes with dark lashes, _fort bel homme_.  But he will not
+look like that now."
+
+"His present age?"
+
+"Forty-seven or forty-eight.  But before you go, I must beg you to
+consider well what you are about.  It is evident that M. de Mauleon has
+some strong reason, whatever it be, for merging his identity in that of
+Jean Lebeau.  I presume, therefore, that you could scarcely go up to M.
+Lebeau, when you have discovered him, and say, 'Pray, Monsieur le
+Vicomte, can you give me some tidings of your niece, Louise Duval?'  If
+you thus accosted him, you might possibly bring some danger on yourself,
+but you would certainly gain no information from him."
+
+"True."
+
+On the other hand, if you make his acquaintance as M. Lebeau, how can you
+assume him to know anything about Louise Duval?"
+
+"Parbleu!  Monsieur Renard, you try to toss me aside on both horns of the
+dilemma; but it seems to me that, if I once make his acquaintance as M.
+Lebeau, I might gradually and cautiously feel my way as to the best mode
+of putting the question to which I seek reply.  I suppose, too, that the
+man must be in very poor circumstances to adopt so humble a calling, and
+that a small sum of money may smooth all difficulties."
+
+"I am not so sure of that," said M. Renard, thoughtfully; "but grant that
+money may do so, and grant also that the Vicomte, being a needy man, has
+become a very unscrupulous one,--is there anything in your motives for
+discovering Louise Duval which might occasion you trouble and annoyance,
+if it were divined by a needy and unscrupulous man; anything which might
+give him a power of threat or exaction?  Mind, I am not asking you to
+tell me any secret you have reasons for concealing, but I suggest that it
+might be prudent if you did not let M. Lebeau know your real name and
+rank; if, in short, you could follow his example, and adopt a disguise.
+But no; when I think of it, you would doubtless be so unpractised in the
+art of disguise that he would detect you at once to be other than you
+seem; and if suspecting you of spying into his secrets, and if those
+secrets be really of a political nature, your very life might not be
+safe."
+
+"Thank you for your hint; the disguise is an excellent idea, and combines
+amusement with precaution.  That this Victor de Mauleon must be a very
+unprincipled and dangerous man is, I think, abundantly clear.  Granting
+that he was innocent of all design of robbery in the affair of the
+jewels, still, the offence which he did own--that of admitting himself at
+night by a false key into the rooms of a wife, whom he sought to surprise
+or terrify into dishonour--was a villanous action; and his present course
+of life is sufficiently mysterious to warrant the most unfavourable
+supposition.  Besides, there is another motive for concealing my name
+from him: you say that he once had a duel with a Vane, who was very
+probably my father, and I have no wish to expose myself to the chance of
+his turning up in London some day, and seeking to renew there the
+acquaintance that I had courted at Paris.  As for my skill in playing any
+part I may assume, do not fear; I am no novice in that.  In my younger
+days I was thought clever in private theatricals, especially in the
+transformations of appearance which belong to light comedy and farce.
+Wait a few minutes, and you shall see."
+
+Graham then retreated into his bedroom, and in a few minutes reappeared
+so changed, that Renard at first glance took him for a stranger.  He had
+doffed his dress--which habitually, when in Capitals, was characterized
+by the quiet, indefinable elegance that to a man of the great world,
+high-bred and young, seems "to the manner born"--for one of those coarse
+suits which Englishmen are wont to wear in their travels, and by which
+they are represented in French or German caricatures,--loose jacket of
+tweed with redundant pockets, waistcoat to match, short dust-coloured
+trousers.  He had combed his hair straight over his forehead, which, as I
+have said somewhere before, appeared in itself to alter the character of
+his countenance, and, without any resort to paints or cosmetics, had
+somehow or other given to the expression of his face an impudent, low-
+bred expression, with a glass screwed on to his right eye,--such a look
+as a cockney journeyman, wishing to pass for a "swell" about town, may
+cast on a servant-maid in the pit of a suburban theatre.
+
+"Will it do, old fellow?" he exclaimed, in a rollicking, swaggering tone
+of voice, speaking French with a villanous British accent.
+
+"Perfectly," said Renard, laughing.  "I offer my compliments, and if ever
+you are ruined, Monsieur, I will promise you a place in our police.  Only
+one caution,--take care not to overdo your part."
+
+"Right.  A quarter to nine; I'm off."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+There is generally a brisk exhilaration of spirits in the return to any
+special amusement or light accomplishment associated with the pleasant
+memories of earlier youth; and remarkably so, I believe, when the
+amusement or accomplishment has been that of the amateur stage-player.
+Certainly I have known persons of very grave pursuits, of very dignified
+character and position, who seem to regain the vivacity of boyhood when
+disguising look and voice for a part in some drawing-room comedy or
+charade.  I might name statesmen of solemn repute rejoicing to raise and
+to join in a laugh at their expense in such travesty of their habitual
+selves.
+
+The reader must not therefore be surprised, nor, I trust, deem it
+inconsistent with the more serious attributes of Graham's character, if
+the Englishman felt the sort of joyful excitement I describe, as, in his
+way to the cafe Jean Jacques, he meditated the role he had undertaken;
+and the joyousness was heightened beyond the mere holiday sense of
+humouristic pleasantry by the sanguine hope that much to effect his
+lasting happiness might result from the success of the object for which
+his disguise was assumed.
+
+It was just twenty minutes past nine when he arrived at the cafe Jean
+Jacques.  He dismissed the _fiacre_ and entered.
+
+The apartment devoted to customers comprised two large rooms.  The first
+was the cafe properly speaking; the second, opening on it, was the
+billiard-room.  Conjecturing that he should probably find the person of
+whom he was in quest employed at the billiard-table, Graham passed
+thither at once.  A tall man, who might be seven-and-forty, with a long
+black beard, slightly grizzled, was at play with a young man of perhaps
+twenty-eight, who gave him odds,--as better players of twenty-eight ought
+to give odds to a player, though originally of equal force, whose eye is
+not so quick, whose hand is not so steady, as they were twenty years ago.
+Said Graham to himself, "The bearded man is my Vicomte."  He called for a
+cup of coffee, and seated himself on a bench at the end of the room.
+
+The bearded man was far behind in the game.  It was his turn to play;
+the balls were placed in the most awkward position for him.  Graham
+himself was a fair billiard-player, both in the English and the French
+game.  He said to himself, "No man who can make a cannon there should
+accept odds."  The bearded man made a cannon; the bearded man continued
+to make cannons; the bearded man did not stop till he had won the game.
+The gallery of spectators was enthusiastic.  Taking care to speak in
+very bad, very English-French, Graham expressed to one of the
+enthusiasts seated beside him his admiration of the bearded man's
+playing, and ventured to ask if the bearded man were a professional
+or an amateur player.
+
+"Monsieur," replied the enthusiast, taking a short cutty-pipe from his
+mouth, "it is an amateur, who has been a great player in his day, and is
+so proud that he always takes less odds than he ought of a younger man.
+It is not once in a month that he comes out as he has done to-night; but
+to-night he has steadied his hand.  He has had six petits verres."
+
+"Ah, indeed!  Do you know his name?"
+
+"I should think so: he buried my father, my two aunts, and my wife."
+
+"Buried?" said Graham, more and more British in his accent; "I don't
+understand."
+
+"Monsieur, you are English."
+
+"I confess it."
+
+"And a stranger to the Faubourg Montmartre."
+
+"True."
+
+"Or you would have heard of M. Giraud, the liveliest member of the State
+Company for conducting funerals.  They are going to play La Poule."
+
+Much disconcerted, Graham retreated into the cafe, and seated himself
+haphazard at one of the small tables.  Glancing round the room, he saw no
+one in whom he could conjecture the once brilliant Vicomte.
+
+The company appeared to him sufficiently decent, and especially what may
+be called local.  There were some blouses drinking wine, no doubt of the
+cheapest and thinnest; some in rough, coarse dresses, drinking beer.
+These were evidently English, Belgian, or German artisans.  At one table,
+four young men, who looked like small journeymen, were playing cards.
+At three other tables, men older, better dressed, probably shop-keepers,
+were playing dominos.  Graham scrutinized these last, but among them all
+could detect no one corresponding to his ideal of the Vicomte de Mauleon.
+"Probably," thought he, "I am too late, or perhaps he will not be here
+this evening.  At all events, I will wait a quarter of an hour."  Then,
+the _garcon_ approaching his table, he deemed it necessary to call for
+something, and, still in strong English accent, asked for lemonade and an
+evening journal.  The _garcon_ nodded and went his way.  A monsieur at
+the round table next his own politely handed to him the "Galignani,"
+saying in very good English, though unmistakably the good English of a
+Frenchman, "The English journal, at your service."
+
+Graham bowed his head, accepted the "Galignani," and inspected his
+courteous neighbour.  A more respectable-looking man no Englishman could
+see in an English country town.  He wore an unpretending flaxen wig, with
+limp whiskers that met at the chin, and might originally have been the
+same colour as the wig, but were now of a pale gray,--no beard, no
+mustache.  He was dressed with the scrupulous cleanliness of a sober
+citizen,--a high white neckcloth, with a large old-fashioned pin,
+containing a little knot of hair covered with glass or crystal, and
+bordered with a black framework, in which were inscribed letters,--
+evidently a mourning pin, hallowed to the memory of lost spouse or child,
+--a man who, in England, might be the mayor of a cathedral town, at least
+the town-clerk.  He seemed suffering from some infirmity of vision, for
+he wore green spectacles.  The expression of his face was very mild and
+gentle; apparently he was about sixty years old,--somewhat more.
+
+Graham took kindly to his neighbour, insomuch that, in return for the
+"Galignani," he offered him a cigar, lighting one himself.
+
+His neighbour refused politely.
+
+
+"Merci!  I never smoke, never; _mon medecin_ forbids it.  If I could be
+tempted, it would be by, an English cigar.  Ah, how you English beat us
+in all things,--your ships, your iron, your tabac,--which you do not
+grow!"
+
+This speech rendered literally as we now render it may give the idea of a
+somewhat vulgar speaker.  But there was something in the man's manner, in
+his smile, in his courtesy, which did not strike Graham as vulgar; on the
+contrary, he thought within himself, "How instinctive to all Frenchmen
+good breeding is!"
+
+Before, however, Graham had time to explain to his amiable neighbour the
+politico-economical principle according to which England, growing no
+tobacco, had tobacco much better than France, which did grow it, a rosy
+middle-aged monsieur made his appearance, saying hurriedly to Graham's
+neighbour, "I'm afraid I'm late, but there is still a good half-hour
+before us if you will give me my revenge."
+
+"Willingly, Monsieur Georges. _Garcon_, the dominos."
+
+"Have you been playing at billiards?" asked M. Georges.
+
+"Yes, two games."
+
+"With success?"
+
+"I won the first, and lost the second through the defect of my eyesight;
+the game depended on a stroke which would have been easy to an infant,--
+I missed it."
+
+Here the dominos arrived, and M. Georges began shuffling them; the other
+turned to Graham and asked politely if he understood the game.
+
+"A little, but not enough to comprehend why it is said to require so much
+skill."
+
+"It is chiefly an affair of memory with me; but M. Georges, my opponent,
+has the talent of combination, which I have not."
+
+"Nevertheless," replied M. Georges, gruffly, "you are not easily beaten;
+it is for you to play first, Monsieur Lebeau."  Graham almost started.
+Was it possible!  This mild, limp-whiskered, flaxen-wigged man Victor de
+Mauleon, the Don Juan of his time; the last person in the room he should
+have guessed.  Yet, now examining his neighbour with more attentive eye,
+he wondered at his stupidity in not having recognized at once the
+ci-devant _gentilhomme_ and _beau garcon_.  It happens frequently that
+our imagination plays us this trick; we form to ourselves an idea of some
+one eminent for good or for evil,--a poet, a statesman, a general, a
+murderer, a swindler, a thief.  The man is before us, and our ideas have
+gone into so different a groove that he does not excite a suspicion; we
+are told who he is, and immediately detect a thousand things that ought
+to have proved his identity.
+
+Looking thus again with rectified vision at the false Lebeau, Graham
+observed an elegance and delicacy of feature which might, in youth, have
+made the countenance very handsome, and rendered it still good-looking,
+nay, prepossessing.  He now noticed, too, the slight Norman accent, its
+native harshness of breadth subdued into the modulated tones which
+bespoke the habits of polished society.  Above all, as M. Lebeau moved
+his dominos with one hand, not shielding his pieces with the other (as M.
+Georges warily did), but allowing it to rest carelessly on the table, he
+detected the hands of the French aristocrat,--hands that had never done
+work; never (like those of the English noble of equal birth) been
+embrowned or freckled, or roughened or enlarged by early practice in
+athletic sports; but hands seldom seen save in the higher circles of
+Parisian life,--partly perhaps of hereditary formation, partly owing
+their texture to great care begun in early youth, and continued
+mechanically in after life,--with long taper fingers and polished nails;
+white and delicate as those of a woman, but not slight, not feeble;
+nervous and sinewy as those of a practised swordsman.
+
+Graham watched the play, and Lebeau good-naturedly explained to him its
+complications as it proceeded; though the explanation, diligently
+attended to by M. Georges, lost Lebeau the game.
+
+The dominos were again shuffled, and during that operation M. Georges
+said, "By the way, Monsieur Lebeau, you promised to find me a _locataire_
+for my second floor; have you succeeded?"
+
+"Not yet.  Perhaps you had better advertise in 'Les Petites Affiches.'
+You ask too much for the habitues of this neighbourhood,--one hundred
+francs a month."
+
+"But the lodging is furnished, and well too, and has four rooms.  One
+hundred francs are not much."
+
+A thought flashed upon Graham.  "Pardon, Monsieur," he said, "have you an
+_appartement de garcon_ to let furnished?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur, a charming one.  Are you in search of an apartment?"
+
+"I have some idea of taking one, but only by the month.  I am but just
+arrived at Paris, and I have business which may keep me here a few weeks.
+I do but require a bedroom and a small cabinet, and the rent must be
+modest.  I am not a milord."
+
+"I am sure we could arrange, Monsieur," said M. Georges, "though I could
+not well divide my logement.  But one hundred francs a month is not
+much!"
+
+"I fear it is more than I can afford; however, if you will give me your
+address, I will call and see the rooms,--say the day after to-morrow.
+Between this and then, I expect letters which may more clearly decide my
+movements."
+
+"If the apartments suit you," said M. Lebeau, "you will at least be in
+the house of a very honest man, which is more than can be said of every
+one who lets furnished apartments.  The house, too, has a concierge, with
+a handy wife who will arrange your rooms and provide you with coffee--or
+tea, which you English prefer--if you breakfast at home."  Here M.
+Georges handed a card to Graham, and asked what hour he would call.
+
+"About twelve, if that hour is convenient," said Graham, rising.  "I
+presume there is a restaurant in the neighbourhood where I could dine
+reasonably."
+
+"_Je crois bien_, half-a-dozen.  I can recommend to you one where you can
+dine _en prince_ for thirty sous.  And if you are at Paris on business,
+and want any letters written in private, I can also recommend to you my
+friend here, M. Lebeau.  Ay, and on affairs his advice is as good as a
+lawyer's, and his fee a bagatelle."
+
+"Don't believe all that Monsieur Georges so flatteringly says of me," put
+in M. Lebeau, with a modest half-smile, and in English.  "I should tell
+you that I, like yourself, am recently arrived at Paris, having bought
+the business and goodwill of my predecessor in the apartment I occupy;
+and it is only to the respect due to his antecedents, and on the score of
+a few letters of recommendation which I bring from Lyons, that I can
+attribute the confidence shown to me, a stranger in this neighbourhood.
+Still I have some knowledge of the world, and I am always glad if I can
+be of service to the English.  I love the English"--he said this with a
+sort of melancholy earnestness which seemed sincere; and then added in a
+more careless tone,--"I have met with much kindness from them in the
+course of a chequered life."
+
+"You seem a very good fellow,--in fact, a regular trump, Monsieur
+Lebeau," replied Graham, in the same language.  "Give me your address.
+To say truth, I am a very poor French scholar, as you must have seen, and
+am awfully bother-headed how to manage some correspondence on matters
+with which I am entrusted by my employer, so that it is a lucky chance
+which has brought me acquainted with you."
+
+M. Lebeau inclined his head gracefully, and drew from a very neat morocco
+case a card, which Graham took and pocketed.  Then he paid for his coffee
+and lemonade, and returned home well satisfied with the evening's
+adventure.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+The next morning Graham sent for M. Renard, and consulted with that
+experienced functionary as to the details of the plan of action which he
+had revolved during the hours of a sleepless night.
+
+"In conformity with your advice," said he, "not to expose myself to the
+chance of future annoyance, by confiding to a man so dangerous as the
+false Lebeau my name and address, I propose to take the lodging offered
+to me, as Mr. Lamb, an attorney's clerk, commissioned to get in certain
+debts, and transact other matters of business, on behalf of his
+employer's clients.  I suppose there will be no difficulty with the
+police in this change of name, now that passports for the English are not
+necessary?"
+
+"Certainly not.  You will have no trouble in that respect."
+
+"I shall thus be enabled very naturally to improve acquaintance with the
+professional letter-writer, and find an easy opportunity to introduce the
+name of Louise Duval.  My chief difficulty, I fear, not being a practical
+actor, will be to keep up consistently the queer sort of language I have
+adopted, both in French and in English.  I have too sharp a critic in a
+man so consummate himself in stage trick and disguise as M. Lebeau not
+to feel the necessity of getting through my role as quickly as I can.
+Meanwhile, can you recommend me to some _magasin_ where I can obtain a
+suitable change of costume?  I can't always wear a travelling suit, and I
+must buy linen of coarser texture than mine, and with the initials of my
+new name inscribed on it."
+
+"Quite right to study such details; I will introduce you to a magasin
+near the Temple, where you will find all you want."
+
+"Next, have you any friends or relations in the provinces unknown to M.
+Lebeau, to whom I might be supposed to write about debts or business
+matters, and from whom I might have replies?"
+
+"I will think over it, and manage that for you very easily.  Your letters
+shall find their way to me, and I will dictate the answers."
+
+After some further conversation on that business, M. Renard made an
+appointment to meet Graham at a cafe near the, Temple later in the
+afternoon, and took his departure.
+
+Graham then informed his _laquais de place_ that, though he kept on his
+lodgings, he was going into the country for a few days, and should not
+want the man's services till he returned.  He therefore dismissed and
+paid him off at once, so that the laquais might not observe, when he
+quitted his rooms the next day, that he took with him no change of
+clothes, etc.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+Graham Vane has been for some days in the apartment rented of M. Georges.
+He takes it in the name of Mr. Lamb,--a name wisely chosen, less common
+than Thompson and Smith, less likely to be supposed an assumed name, yet
+common enough not to be able easily to trace it to any special family.
+He appears, as he had proposed, in the character of an agent employed by
+a solicitor in London to execute sundry commissions and to collect
+certain outstanding debts.  There is no need to mention the name of the
+solicitor; if there were, he could give the name of his own solicitor,
+to whose discretion he could trust implicitly.  He dresses and acts up to
+his assumed character with the skill of a man who, like the illustrious
+Charles Fox, has, though in private representations, practised the stage-
+play in which Demosthenes said the triple art of oratory consisted; who
+has seen a great deal of the world, and has that adaptability of
+intellect which knowledge of the world lends to one who is so thoroughly
+in earnest as to his end that he agrees to be sportive as to his means.
+
+The kind of language he employs when speaking English to Lebeau is that
+suited to the role of a dapper young underling of vulgar mind habituated
+to vulgar companionships.  I feel it due, if not to Graham himself, at
+least to the memory of the dignified orator whose name he inherits, so to
+modify and soften the hardy style of that peculiar diction in which he
+disguises his birth and disgraces his culture, that it is only here and
+there that I can venture to indicate the general tone of it; but in order
+to supply my deficiencies therein, the reader has only to call to mind
+the forms of phraseology which polite novelists in vogue, especially
+young-lady novelists, ascribe to well-born gentlemen, and more
+emphatically to those in the higher ranks of the Peerage.  No doubt
+Graham, in his capacity of critic, had been compelled to read, in order
+to review, those contributions to refined literature, and had
+familiarized himself to a vein of conversation abounding with "swell" and
+"stunner" and "awfully jolly," in its libel on manners and outrage on
+taste.
+
+He has attended nightly the cafe Jean Jacques; he has improved
+acquaintance with M. Georges and M. Lebeau; he has played at billiards,
+he has played at dominos, with the latter.  He has been much surprised at
+the unimpeachable honesty which M. Lebeau has exhibited in both these
+games.  In billiards, indeed, a man cannot cheat except by disguising his
+strength; it is much the same in dominos,--it is skill combined with
+luck, as in whist; but in whist there are modes of cheating which dominos
+do not allow,--you can't mark a domino as you can a card.  It was
+perfectly clear to Graham that M. Lebeau did not gain a livelihood by
+billiards or dominos at the cafe Jean Jacques.  In the former he was not
+only a fair but a generous player.  He played exceedingly well, despite
+his spectacles; but he gave, with something of a Frenchman's lofty
+_fanfaronnade_, larger odds to his adversary than his play justified.  In
+dominos, where such odds could not well be given, he insisted on playing
+such small stakes as two or three francs might cover.  In short,
+M. Lebeau puzzled Graham.  All about M. Lebeau, his manner, his talk,
+was irreproachable, and baffled suspicion; except in this,--Graham
+gradually discovered that the cafe had a quasi-political character.
+Listening to talkers round him, he overheard much that might well have
+shocked the notions of a moderate Liberal; much that held in disdain the
+objects to which, in 1869, an English Radical directed his aspirations.
+Vote by ballot, universal suffrage, etc.,--such objects the French had
+already attained.  By the talkers at the cafe Jean Jacques they were
+deemed to be the tricky contrivances of tyranny.  In fact, the talk was
+more scornful of what Englishmen understand by radicalism or democracy
+than Graham ever heard from the lips of an ultra-Tory.  It assumed a
+strain of philosophy far above the vulgar squabbles of ordinary party
+politicians,--a philosophy which took for its fundamental principles the
+destruction of religion and of private property.  These two objects
+seemed dependent the one on the other.  The philosophers of the Jean
+Jacques held with that expounder of Internationalism, Eugene Dupont,
+"Nous ne voulons plus de religion, car les religions etouffent
+l'intelligence."
+
+     [Discours par Eugene Dupont a la Cloture du Congres de Bruxelles,
+     Sept.  3, 1868]
+
+Now and then, indeed, a dissentient voice was raised as to the existence
+of a Supreme Being, but, with one exception, it soon sank into silence.
+No voice was raised in defence of private property.  These sages appeared
+for the most part to belong to the class of _ouvriers_ or artisans.  Some
+of them were foreigners,--Belgian, German, English; all seemed well off
+for their calling.  Indeed they must have had comparatively high wages,
+to judge by their dress and the money they spent on regaling themselves.
+The language of several was well chosen, at times eloquent.  Some brought
+with them women who seemed respectable, and who often joined in the
+conversation, especially when it turned upon the law of marriage as a
+main obstacle to all personal liberty and social improvement.  If this
+was a subject on which the women did not all agree, still they discussed
+it, without prejudice and with admirable sang froid.  Yet many of them
+looked like wives and mothers.  Now and then a young journeyman brought
+with him a young lady of more doubtful aspect, but such a couple kept
+aloof from the others.  Now and then, too, a man evidently of higher
+station than that of ouvrier, and who was received by the philosophers
+with courtesy and respect, joined one of the tables and ordered a bowl of
+punch for general participation.  In such occasional visitors, Graham,
+still listening, detected a writer of the press; now and then, a small
+artist or actor or medical student.  Among the _habitues_ there was one
+man, an _ouvrier_, in whom Graham could not help feeling an interest.  He
+was called Monnier, sometimes more familiarly Armand, his baptismal
+appellation.  This man had a bold and honest expression of countenance.
+He talked like one who, if he had not read much, had thought much on the
+subjects he loved to discuss.  He argued against the capital of employers
+quite as ably as Mr. Mill has argued against the rights of property in
+land.  He was still more eloquent against the laws of marriage and
+Heritage.  But his was the one voice not to be silenced in favour of a
+Supreme Being.  He had at least the courage of his opinions, and was
+always thoroughly in earnest.  M. Lebeau seemed to know this man, and
+honoured him with a nod and a smile, when passing by him to the table he
+generally occupied.  This familiarity with a man of that class, and of
+opinions so extreme, excited Graham's curiosity.  One evening he said to
+Lebeau, "A queer fellow that you have just nodded to.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"Well, he has queer notions."
+
+"Notions shared, I believe, by many of your countrymen?"
+
+"I should think not many.  Those poor simpletons yonder may have caught
+'em from their French fellow-workmen, but I don't think that even the
+_gobemouches_ in our National Reform Society open their mouths to swallow
+such wasps."
+
+"Yet I believe the association to which most of those _ouvriers_ belong
+had its origin in England."
+
+"Indeed! what association?"
+
+"The International."
+
+"Ah, I have heard of that."
+
+Lebeau turned his green spectacles full on Graham's face as he said
+slowly, "And what do you think of it?"
+
+Graham prudently checked the disparaging reply that first occurred to
+him, and said, "I know so little about it that I would rather ask you."
+
+"I think it might become formidable if it found able leaders who knew how
+to use it.  Pardon me, how came you to know of this cafe?  Were you
+recommended to it?"
+
+"No; I happened to be in this neighbourhood on business, and walked in,
+as I might into any other cafe."
+
+"You don't interest yourself in the great social questions which are
+agitated below the surface of this best of all possible worlds?"
+
+"I can't say that I trouble my head much about them."
+
+"A game at dominos before M. Georges arrives?"
+
+"Willingly.  Is M. Georges one of those agitators below the surface?"
+
+"No, indeed.  It is for you to play."
+
+Here M. Georges arrived, and no further conversation on political or
+social questions ensued.
+
+Graham had already called more than once at M. Lebeau's office, and asked
+him to put into good French various letters on matters of business, the
+subjects of which had been furnished by M. Renard.  The office was rather
+imposing and stately, considering the modest nature of M. Lebeau's
+ostensible profession.  It occupied the entire ground-floor of a corner
+house, with a front-door at one angle and a back-door at the other.  The
+anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to wait some
+minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled, and not only
+by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance, might be fairly
+supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid as polite letter-
+writers,--not only by servant-maids and grisettes, by sailors, zouaves,
+and journeymen workmen,--but not unfrequently by clients evidently
+belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class of society,--men with
+clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again, who, less fashionably
+attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers of well-to-do
+families,--the first generally young, the last generally middle-aged.
+All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by a saturnine clerk
+into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in precedence of the
+_ouvriers_ and _grisettes_.
+
+"What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this humble
+business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy concealed,--the
+International Association?"  And so pondering, the clerk one day singled
+him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau's cabinet.  Graham
+thought the time had now arrived when he might safely approach the
+subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.
+
+"You are very good," said Graham, speaking in the English of a young earl
+in our elegant novels,--"you are very good to let me in while you have so
+many swells and nobs waiting for you in the other room.  But, I say, old
+fellow, you have not the cheek to tell me that they want you to correct
+their cocker or spoon for them by proxy?"
+
+"Pardon me," answered M. Lebeau in French, "if I prefer my own language
+in replying to you.  I speak the English I learned many years ago, and
+your language in the _beau monde_, to which you evidently belong, is
+strange to me.  You are quite right, however, in your surmise that I have
+other clients than those who, like yourself, think I could correct their
+verbs or their spelling.  I have seen a great deal of the world,--I know
+something of it, and something of the law; so that many persons come to
+me for advice and for legal information on terms more moderate than those
+of an _avoue_.  But my ante-chamber is full, I am pressed for time;
+excuse me if I ask you to say at once in what I can be agreeable to you
+to-day."
+
+"Ah!" said Graham, assuming a very earnest look, "you do know the world,
+that is clear; and you do know the law of France, eh?"
+
+"Yes, a little."
+
+"What I wanted to say at present may have something to do with French
+law, and I meant to ask you either to recommend to me a sharp lawyer, or
+to tell me how I can best get at your famous police here."
+
+"Police?"
+
+"I think I may require the service of one of those officers whom we in
+England call detectives; but if you are busy now, I can call to-morrow."
+
+"I spare you two minutes.  Say at once, dear Monsieur, what you want with
+law or police."
+
+"I am instructed to find out the address of a certain Louise Duval,
+daughter of a drawing-master named Adolphe Duval, living in the Rue ----
+in the year 1848."
+
+Graham, while he thus said, naturally looked Lebeau in the face,--not
+pryingly, not significantly, but as a man generally does look in the face
+the other man whom he accosts seriously.  The change in the face he
+regarded was slight, but it was unmistakable.  It was the sudden meeting
+of the eyebrows, accompanied with the sudden jerk of the shoulder and
+bend of the neck, which betoken a man taken by surprise, and who pauses
+to reflect before he replies.  His pause was but momentary,
+
+"For what object is this address required?"
+
+"That I don't know; but evidently for some advantage to Madame or
+Mademoiselle Duval, if still alive, because my employer authorizes me to
+spend no less than L100 in ascertaining where she is, if alive, or where
+she was buried, if dead; and if other means fail, I am instructed to
+advertise to the effect that if Louise Duval, or, in case of her death,
+any children of hers living in the year 1849, will communicate with some
+person whom I may appoint at Paris, such intelligence, authenticated, may
+prove to the advantage of the party advertised for.  I am, however, told
+not to resort to this means without consulting either with a legal
+adviser or the police."
+
+"Hem!  have you inquired at the house where this lady was, you say,
+living in 1848?"
+
+"Of course I have done that; but very clumsily, I dare say, through a
+friend, and learned nothing.  But I must not keep you now.  I think I
+shall apply at once to the police.  What should I say when I get to the
+bureau?"
+
+"Stop, Monsieur, stop.  I do not advise you to apply to the police.  It
+would be waste of time and money.  Allow me to think over the matter.  I
+shall see you this evening at the cafe Jean Jacques at eight o'clock.
+Till then do nothing."
+
+"All right; I obey you.  The whole thing is out of my way of business
+awfully.  Bonjour."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Punctually at eight o'clock Graham Vane had taken his seat at a corner
+table at the remote end of the cafe Jean Jacques, called for his cup of
+coffee and his evening journal, and awaited the arrival of M. Lebeau.
+His patience was not tasked long.  In a few minutes the Frenchman
+entered, paused at the comptoir, as was his habit, to address a polite
+salutation to the well-dressed lady who there presided, nodded as usual
+to Armand Monnier, then glanced round, recognized Graham with a smile,
+and approached his table with the quiet grace of movement by which he was
+distinguished.
+
+Seating himself opposite to Graham, and speaking in a voice too low to be
+heard by others, and in French, he then said,
+
+"In thinking over your communication this morning, it strikes me as
+probable, perhaps as certain, that this Louise Duval or her children, if
+she have any, must be entitled to some moneys bequeathed to her by a
+relation or friend in England.  What say you to that assumption, Monsieur
+Lamb?"
+
+"You are a sharp fellow," answered Graham.  "Just what I say to myself.
+Why else should I be instructed to go to such expense in finding her out?
+Most likely, if one can't trace her, or her children born before the date
+named, any such moneys will go to some one else; and that some one else,
+whoever he be, has commissioned my employer to find out.  But I don't
+imagine any sum due to her or her heirs can be much, or that the matter
+is very important; for, if so, the thing would not be carelessly left in
+the hands of one of the small fry like myself, and clapped in along with
+a lot of other business as an off-hand job."
+
+"Will you tell me who employed you?"
+
+"No, I don't feel authorized to do that at present; and I don't see the
+necessity of it.  It seems to me, on consideration, a matter for the
+police to ferret out; only, as I asked before, how should I get at the
+police?"
+
+"That is not difficult.  It is just possible that I might help you better
+than any lawyer or any detective."
+
+"Why, did you ever know this Louise Duval?"
+
+"Excuse me, Monsieur Lamb; you refuse me your full confidence; allow me
+to imitate your reserve."
+
+"Oho!" said Graham; "shut up as close as you like; it is nothing to me.
+Only observe, there is this difference between us, that I am employed by
+another.  He does not authorize me to name him, and if I did commit that
+indiscretion, I might lose my bread and cheese.  Whereas you have
+nobody's secret to guard but your own, in saying whether or not you ever
+knew a Madame or Mademoiselle Duval; and if you have some reason for not
+getting me the information I am instructed to obtain, that is also a
+reason for not troubling you further.  And after all, old boy" (with a
+familiar slap on Lebeau's stately shoulder), "after all, it is I who
+would employ you; you don't employ me.  And if you find out the lady, it
+is you who would get the L100., not I."
+
+M. Lebeau mechanically brushed, with a light movement of hand, the
+shoulder which the Englishman had so pleasantly touched, drew himself and
+chair some inches back, and said slowly,--
+
+"Monsieur Lamb, let us talk as gentleman to gentleman.  Put aside the
+question of money altogether; I must first know why your employer wants
+to hunt out this poor Louise Duval.  It may be to her injury, and I would
+do her none if you offered thousands where you offer pounds.  I forestall
+the condition of mutual confidence; I own that I have known her,--it is
+many years ago; and, Monsieur Lamb, though a Frenchman very often injures
+a woman from love, he is in a worse plight for bread and cheese than I am
+if he injures her for money."
+
+"Is he thinking of the duchess's jewels?" thought Graham.  "Bravo, mon
+vieux," he said aloud; "but as I don't know what my employer's motive in
+his commission is, perhaps you can enlighten me.  How could his inquiry
+injure Louise Duval?"
+
+"I cannot say; but you English have the power to divorce your wives.
+Louise Duval may have married an Englishman, separated from him, and he
+wants to know where he can find, in order to criminate and divorce her,
+or it may be to insist on her return to him."
+
+"Bosh! that is not likely."
+
+"Perhaps, then, some English friend she may have known has left her a
+bequest, which would of course lapse to some one else if she be not
+living."
+
+"By gad!" cried Graham, "I think you hit the right nail on the head:
+_c'est cela_.  But what then?"
+
+"Well, if I thought any substantial benefit to Louise Duval might result
+from the success of your inquiry, I would really see if it were in my
+power to help you.  But I must have time to consider."
+
+"How long?"
+
+"I can't exactly say; perhaps three or four days."
+
+"Bon! I will wait.  Here comes M. Georges.  I leave you to dominos and
+him.  Good-night."
+
+Late that night M. Lebeau was seated alone in a chamber connected with
+the cabinet in which he received visitors.  A ledger was open before him,
+which he scanned with careful eyes, no longer screened by spectacles.
+The survey seemed to satisfy him.  He murmured, "It suffices, the time
+has come," closed the book, returned it to his bureau, which he locked
+up, and then wrote in cipher the letter here reduced into English:--
+
+
+     "DEAR AND NOBLE FRIEND,--Events march; the Empire is everywhere
+     undermined.  Our treasury has thriven in my hands; the sums
+     subscribed and received by me through you have become more than
+     quadrupled by advantageous speculations, in which M. Georges has
+     been a most trustworthy agent.  A portion of them I have continued
+     to employ in the mode suggested,--namely, in bringing together men
+     discreetly chosen as being in their various ways representatives and
+     ringleaders of the motley varieties that, when united at the right
+     moment, form a Parisian mob.  But from that right moment we are as
+     yet distant.  Before we can call passion into action, we must
+     prepare opinion for change.  I propose now to devote no
+     inconsiderable portion of our fund towards the inauguration of a
+     journal which shall gradually give voice to our designs.  Trust me
+     to insure its success, and obtain the aid of writers who will have
+     no notion of the uses to which they ultimately contribute.  Now that
+     the time has come to establish for ourselves an organ in the press,
+     addressing higher orders of intelligence than those which are needed
+     to destroy and incapable of reconstructing, the time has also
+     arrived for the reappearance in his proper name and rank of the man
+     in whom you take so gracious an interest.  In vain you have pressed
+     him to do so before; till now he had not amassed together, by the
+     slow process of petty gains and constant savings, with such
+     additions as prudent speculations on his own account might
+     contribute, the modest means necessary to his resumed position; and
+     as he always contended against your generous offers, no
+     consideration should ever tempt him either to appropriate to his
+     personal use a single sou intrusted to him for a public purpose, or
+     to accept from friendship the pecuniary aid which would abase him
+     into the hireling of a cause.  No!  Victor de Mauleon despises too
+     much the tools that he employs to allow any man hereafter to say,
+     'Thou also wert a tool, and hast been paid for thy uses.'
+
+     "But to restore the victim of calumny to his rightful place in this
+     gaudy world, stripped of youth and reduced in fortune, is a task
+     that may well seem impossible.  To-morrow he takes the first step
+     towards the achievement of the impossible.  Experience is no bad
+     substitute for youth, and ambition is made stronger by the goad of
+     poverty.
+
+     "Thou shalt hear of his news soon."
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARISIANS, B4, LYTTON ***
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