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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Parisians, by E. B. Lytton, Book 12.
+#175 in our series by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
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+Title: The Parisians, Book 12.
+
+Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+Release Date: March 2005  [EBook #7748]
+[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, B12, LYTTON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE PARISIANS
+
+                         By Edward Bulwer-Lytton
+
+
+                                BOOK XII.
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+The last book closed with the success of the Parisian sortie on the 30th
+of November, to be followed by the terrible engagements no less
+honourable to French valour, on the 2nd of December.  There was the
+sanguine belief that deliverance was at hand; that Trochu would break
+through the circle of iron, and effect that junction with the army of
+Aurelles de Paladine which would compel the Germans to raise the
+investment;--belief rudely shaken by Ducrot's proclamation of the 4th, to
+explain the recrossing of the Marne, and the abandonment of the positions
+conquered, but not altogether dispelled till von Moltke's letter to
+Trochu on the 5th announcing the defeat of the army of the Loire and the
+recapture of Orleans.  Even then the Parisians did not lose hope of
+succour; and even after the desperate and fruitless sortie against Le
+Bourget on the 21st, it was not without witticisms on defeat and
+predictions of triumph, that Winter and Famine settled sullenly on the
+city.
+
+Our narrative reopens with the last period of the siege.
+
+It was during these dreadful days, that if the vilest and the most
+hideous aspects of the Parisian population showed themselves at the
+worst, so all its loveliest, its noblest, its holiest characteristics--
+unnoticed by ordinary observers in the prosperous days of the capital--
+became conspicuously prominent.  The higher classes, including the
+remnant of the old noblesse, had, during the whole siege, exhibited
+qualities in notable contrast to those assigned them by the enemies of
+aristocracy.  Their sons had been foremost among those soldiers who never
+calumniated a leader, never fled before a foe; their women had been among
+the most zealous and the most tender nurses of the ambulances they had
+founded and served; their houses had been freely opened, whether to the
+families exiled from the suburbs, or in supplement to the hospitals.  The
+amount of relief they afforded unostentatiously, out of means that shared
+the general failure of accustomed resource, when the famine commenced,
+would be scarcely credible if stated.  Admirable, too, were the fortitude
+and resignation of the genuine Parisian bourgeoisie,--the thrifty
+tradesfolk and small rentiers,--that class in which, to judge of its
+timidity when opposed to a mob, courage is not the most conspicuous
+virtue.  Courage became so now--courage to bear hourly increasing
+privation, and to suppress every murmur of suffering that would discredit
+their patriotism, and invoke "peace at any price."  It was on this class
+that the calamities of the siege now pressed the most heavily.  The
+stagnation of trade, and the stoppage of the rents, in which they had
+invested their savings, reduced many of them to actual want.  Those only
+of their number who obtained the pay of one-and-a-half franc a day as
+National Guards, could be sure to escape from starvation.  But this pay
+had already begun to demoralise the receivers.  Scanty for supply of
+food, it was ample for supply of drink.  And drunkenness, hitherto rare
+in that rank of the Parisians, became a prevalent vice, aggravated in the
+case of a National Guard, when it wholly unfitted him for the duties he
+undertook, especially such National Guards as were raised from the most
+turbulent democracy of the working class.
+
+But of all that population; there were two sections in which the most
+beautiful elements of our human nature were most touchingly manifest--
+the women and the priesthood, including in the latter denomination all
+the various brotherhoods and societies which religion formed and
+inspired.
+
+It was on the 27th of December that Frederic Lemercier stood gazing
+wistfully on a military report affixed to a blank wall, which stated that
+"the enemy, worn out by a resistance of over one hundred days," had
+commenced the bombardment.  Poor Frederic was sadly altered; he had
+escaped the Prussian's guns, but not the Parisian winter--the severest
+known for twenty years.  He was one of the many frozen at their posts--
+brought back to the ambulance with Fox in his bosom trying to keep him
+warm.  He had only lately been sent forth as convalescent,--ambulances
+were too crowded to retain a patient longer than absolutely needful,--and
+had been hunger-pinched and frost-pinched ever since.  The luxurious
+Frederic had still, somewhere or other, a capital yielding above three
+thousand a year, and of which he could not now realise a franc, the
+title-deeds to various investments being in the hands of Duplessis, the
+most trustworthy of friends, the most upright of men, but who was in
+Bretagne, and could not be got at.  And the time had come at Paris when
+you could not get trust for a pound of horse-flesh, or a daily supply of
+fuel.  And Frederic Lemercier, who had long since spent the 2000 francs
+borrowed from Alain (not ignobly, but somewhat ostentatiously, in
+feasting any acquaintance who wanted a feast), and who had sold to any
+one who could afford to speculate on such dainty luxuries,--clocks,
+bronzes, amber-mounted pipes,--all that had made the envied garniture of
+his bachelor's apartment--Frederic Lemercier was, so far as the task of
+keeping body and soul together, worse off than any English pauper who can
+apply to the Union.  Of course he might have claimed his half-pay of
+thirty sous as a National Guard.  But he little knows the true Parisian
+who imagines a seigneur of the Chaussee d'Antin, the oracle of those with
+whom he lived, and one who knew life so well that he had preached
+prudence to a seigneur of the Faubourg like Alain de Rochebriant,
+stooping to apply for the wages of thirty sons.  Rations were only
+obtained by the wonderful patience of women, who had children to whom
+they were both saints and martyrs.  The hours, the weary hours, one had
+to wait before one could get one's place on the line for the distribution
+of that atrocious black bread, defeated men,--defeated most wives if only
+for husbands, were defied only by mothers and daughters.  Literally
+speaking, Lemercier was starving.  Alain had been badly wounded in the
+sortie of the 21st, and was laid up in an ambulance.  Even if he could
+have been got at, he had probably nothing left to bestow upon Lemercier.
+
+Lemercier gazed on the announcement of the bombardment, and the Parisian
+gaiety, which some French historian of the siege calls _douce
+philosophie_, lingering on him still, he said, audibly, turning round to
+any stranger who heard: "Happiest of mortals that we are!  Under the
+present Government we are never warned of anything disagreeable that can
+happen; we are only told of it when it has happened, and then as rather
+pleasant than otherwise.  I get up.  I meet a civil gendarme.  'What is
+that firing?  which of our provincial armies is taking Prussia in the
+rear?  'Monsieur,' says the gendarme, 'it is the Prussian Krupp guns.'
+I look at the proclamation, and my fears varuish,--my heart is relieved.
+I read that the bombardment is a sure sign that the enemy is worn out."
+
+Some of the men grouped round Frederic ducked their heads in terror;
+others, who knew that the thunderbolt launched from the plateau of Avron
+would not fall on the pavements of Paris, laughed and joked.  But in
+front, with no sign of terror, no sound of laughter, stretched, moving
+inch by inch, the female procession towards the bakery in which the
+morsel of bread for their infants was doled out.
+
+"_Hist, mon ami_," said a deep voice beside Lemercier.  "Look at those
+women, and do not wound their ears by a jest."
+
+Lemercier, offended by that rebuke, though too susceptible to good
+emotions not to recognise its justice, tried with feeble fingers to turn
+up his moustache, and to turn a defiant crest upon the rebuker.  He was
+rather startled to see the tall martial form at his side, and to
+recognise Victor de Mauleon.  "Don't you think, M. Lemercier," resumed
+the Vicomte, half sadly, "that these women are worthy of better husbands
+and sons than are commonly found among the soldiers whose uniform we
+wear?"
+
+"The National Guard!  You ought not to sneer at them, Vicomte,--you whose
+troop covered itself with glory on the great days of Villiers and
+Champigny,--you in whose praise even the grumblers of Paris became
+eloquent, and in whom a future Marshal of France is foretold."
+
+"But, alas! more than half of my poor troop was left on the battle-field,
+or is now wrestling for mangled remains of life in the ambulances.  And
+the new recruits with which I took the field on the 21st are not likely
+to cover themselves with glory, or to insure their commander the baton of
+a marshal."
+
+"Ay, I heard when I was in the hospital that you had publicly shamed some
+of these recruits, and declared that you would rather resign than lead
+them again to battle."
+
+"True; and at this moment, for so doing, I am the man most hated by the
+rabble who supplied those recruits."  The men, while thus conversing, had
+moved slowly on, and were now in front of a large cafe, from the interior
+of which came the sound of loud bravos and clappings of hands.
+Lemercier's curiosity was excited.  "For what can be that applause?" he
+said; "let us look in and see."  The room was thronged.  In the distance,
+on a small raised platform, stood a girl dressed in faded theatrical
+finery, making her obeisance to the crowd.
+
+"Heavens!" exclaimed Frederic--"can I trust my eyes?  Surely that is the
+once superb Julie: has she been dancing here?"
+
+One of the loungers, evidently belonging to the same world as Lemercier,
+overheard the question and answered politely: "No, Monsieur: she has been
+reciting verses, and really declaims very well, considering it is not her
+vocation.  She has given us extracts from Victor Hugo and
+De Musset: and crowned all with a patriotic hymn by Gustave Rameau,--her
+old lover, if gossip be true."  Meanwhile De Mauleon, who at first had
+glanced over the scene with his usual air of calm and cold indifference,
+became suddenly struck by the girl's beautiful face, and gazed on it with
+a look of startled surprise.
+
+"Who and what did you say that poor fair creature is, M. Lemercier?"
+
+"She is a Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin, and was a very popular
+_coryphee_.  She has hereditary right to be a good dancer, as the
+daughter of a once more famous ornament of the ballet, _la belle_ Leonie
+--whom you must have seen in your young days."
+
+"Of course.  Leonie--she married a M. Surville, a silly _bourgeois
+gentilhomme_, who earned the hatred of Paris by taking her off the stage.
+So that is her daughter  I see no likeness to her mother--much handsomer.
+Why does she call herself Caumartin?"
+
+"Oh," said Frederic, "a melancholy but trite story."
+
+"Leonie was left a widow, and died in want.  What could the poor young
+daughter do?  She found a rich protector, who had influence to get her an
+appointment in the ballet: and there she did as most girls so
+circumstanced do--appeared under an assumed name, which she has since
+kept."
+
+"I understand," said Victor, compassionately.  "Poor thing! she has
+quitted the platform, and is coming this way, evidently to speak to you.
+I saw her eyes brighten as she caught sight of your face."
+
+Lemercier attempted a languid air of modest self-complacency as the girl
+now approached him.  "_Bonjour_, M. Frederic!  Ah, mon Dieu! how thin you
+have grown!  You have been ill?"
+
+"The hardships of a military life, Mademoiselle.  Ah, for the _beaux
+fours_ and the peace we insisted on destroying under the Empire which we
+destroyed for listening to us!  But you thrive well, I trust.  I have
+seen you better dressed, but never in greater beauty."
+
+The girl blushed as she replied, "Do you really think as you speak?"
+
+"I could not speak more sincerely if I lived in the legendary House of
+Glass."
+
+The girl clutched his arm, and said in suppressed tones, "Where is
+Gustave?"
+
+"Gustave Rameau?  I have no idea.  Do you never see him now?"
+
+"Never,--perhaps I never shall see him again; but when you do meet him,
+say that Julie owes to him her livelihood.  An honest livelihood,
+Monsieur.  He taught her to love verses--told her how to recite them.
+I am engaged at this cafe--you will find me here the same hour every day,
+in case--in case--You are good and kind, and will come and tell me that
+Gustave is well and happy even if he forgets me. _Au revoir_!  Stop, you
+do look, my poor Frederic, as if--as if--pardon me, Monsieur Lemercier,
+is there anything I can do?  Will you condescend to borrow from me?  I am
+in funds."
+
+Lemercier at that offer was nearly moved to tears.  Famished though he
+was, he could not, however, have touched that girl's earnings.
+
+"You are an angel of goodness, Mademoiselle!  Ah, how I envy Gustave
+Rameau!  No, I don't want aid.  I am always a--_rentier_."
+
+"_Bien_!  and if you see Gustave, you will not forget."
+
+"Rely on me.  Come away," he said to De Mauleon; "I don't want to hear
+that girl repeat the sort of bombast the poets indite nowadays.  It is
+fustian; and that girl may have a brain of feather, but she has a heart
+of gold."
+
+"True," said Victor, as they regained the street.  "I overheard what she
+said to you.  What an incomprehensible thing is a woman! how more
+incomprehensible still is a woman's love!  Ah, pardon me; I must leave
+you.  I see in the procession a poor woman known to me in better days."
+
+De Mauleon walked towards the woman he spoke of--one of the long
+procession to the bakery--a child clinging to her robe.  A pale grief-
+worn woman, still young, but with the weariness of age on her face, and
+the shadow of death on her child's.
+
+"I think I see Madame Monnier," said De Mauleon, softly.
+
+She turned and looked at him drearily.  A year ago, she would have
+blushed if addressed by a stranger in a name not lawfully hers.
+
+"Well," she said, in hollow accents broken by cough; "I don't know you,
+Monsieur."
+
+"Poor woman!" he resumed, walking beside her as she moved slowly on,
+while the eyes of other women in the procession stared at him hungrily.
+"And your child looks ill too.  It is your youngest?"
+
+"My only one!  The others are in Pere la  Chaise.  There are but few
+children alive in my street now.  God has been very merciful, and taken
+them to Himself."
+
+De Mauleon recalled the scene of a neat comfortable apartment, and the
+healthful happy children at play on the floor.  The mortality among the
+little ones, especially in the quartier occupied by the working classes,
+had of late been terrible.  The want of food, of fuel, the intense
+severity of the weather, had swept them off as by a pestilence.
+
+"And Monnier--what of him?  No doubt he is a National Guard, and has his
+pay?"
+
+The woman made no answer, but hung down her head.  She was stifling a
+sob.  Till then her eyes seemed to have exhausted the last source of
+tears.
+
+"He lives still?" continued Victor, pityingly: "he is not wounded?"
+
+"No: he is well--in health; thank you kindly, Monsieur."
+
+"But his pay is not enough to help you, and of course he can get no work.
+Excuse me if I stopped you.  It is because I owed Armand Monnier a little
+debt for work, and I am ashamed to say that it quite escaped my memory in
+these terrible events.  Allow me, Madame, to pay it to you," and he
+thrust his purse into her hand.  "I think this contains about the sum I
+owed; if more or less, we will settle the difference later.  Take care of
+yourself."
+
+He was turning away when the woman caught hold of him.
+
+"Stay, Monsieur.  May Heaven bless you!--but--but tell me what name I am
+to give to Armand.  I can't think of any one who owed him money.  It must
+have been before that dreadful strike, the beginning of all our woes.
+Ah, if it were allowed to curse any one, I fear my last breath would not
+be a prayer."
+
+"You would curse the strike, or the master who did not forgive Armand's
+share in it?"
+
+"No, no,--the cruel man who talked him into it--into all that has changed
+the best workman, the kindest heart--the--the--" again her voice died in
+sobs.
+
+"And who was that man?" asked De Mauleon, falteringly.
+
+"His name was Lebeau.  If you were a poor man, I should say 'Shun him.'"
+
+"I have heard of the name you mention; but if we mean the same person,
+Monnier cannot have met him lately.  He has not been in Paris since the
+siege."
+
+"I suppose not, the coward!  He ruined us--us who were so happy before;
+and then, as Armand says, cast us away as instruments he had done with.
+But--but if you do know him, and do see him again, tell him--tell him
+not to complete his wrong--not to bring murder on Armand's soul.  For
+Armand isn't what he was--and has become, oh, so violent!  I dare not
+take this money without saying who gave it.  He would not take money as
+alms from an aristocrat.  Hush! he beat me for taking money from the good
+Monsieur Raoul de Vandemar--my poor Armand beat me!"
+
+De Mauleon shuddered.  "Say that it is from a customer whose rooms he
+decorated in his spare hours on his own account before the strike,--
+Monsieur --------;" here he uttered indistinctly some unpronounceable
+name and hurried off, soon lost as the streets grew darker.  Amid groups
+of a higher order of men-military men, nobles, _ci-devant_ deputies--
+among such ones his name stood very high.  Not only his bravery in the
+recent sorties had been signal, but a strong belief in his military
+talents had become prevalent; and conjoined with the name he had before
+established as a political writer, and the remembrance of the vigour and
+sagacity with which he had opposed the war, he seemed certain, when peace
+and order became established, of a brilliant position and career in a
+future administration: not less because he had steadfastly kept aloof
+from the existing Government, which it was rumoured, rightly or
+erroneously, that he had been solicited to join; and from every
+combination of the various democratic or discontented factions.
+
+Quitting these more distinguished associates, he took his way alone
+towards the ramparts.  The day was closing; the thunders of the cannon
+were dying down.
+
+He passed by a wine-shop round which were gathered many of the worse
+specimens of the _Moblots_ and National Guards, mostly drunk, and loudly
+talking in vehement abuse of generals and officers and commissariat.  By
+one of the men, as he came under the glare of a petroleum lamp (there was
+gas no longer in the dismal city), he was recognised as the commander who
+had dared to insist on discipline, and disgrace honest patriots who
+claimed to themselves the sole option between fight and flight.  The man
+was one of those patriots--one of the new recruits whom Victor had
+shamed and dismissed for mutiny and cowardice.  He made a drunken plunge
+at his former chief, shouting, "A bas Pai-isto!  Comrades, this is the
+coquin De Mauleon who is paid by the Prussians for getting us killed: a
+la lanterne!" "A la lanterne!" stammered and hiccupped others of the
+group; but they did not stir to execute their threat.  Dimly seen as the
+stern face and sinewy form of the threatened man was by their drowsied
+eyes, the name of De Mauleon, the man without fear of a foe, and without
+ruth for a mutineer, sufficed to protect him from outrage; and with a
+slight movement of his arm that sent his denouncer reeling against the
+lamp-post, De Mauleon passed on:--when another man, in the uniform of a
+National Guard, bounded from the door of the tavern, crying with a loud
+voice, "Who said De Mauleon?--let me look on him:" and Victor, who had
+strode on with slow lion-like steps, cleaving the crowd, turned, and saw
+before him in the gleaming light a face, in which the bold frank,
+intelligent aspect of former days was lost in a wild, reckless, savage
+expression--the face of Armand Monnier.
+
+"Ha! are you really Victor de Mauleon?" asked Monnier, not fiercely, but
+under his breath,--in that sort of stage whisper which is the natural
+utterance of excited men under the mingled influence of potent drink and
+hoarded rage.
+
+"Certainly; I am Victor de Mauleon."
+
+"And you were in command of the -- company of the National Guard on the
+30th of November at Champigny and Villiers?"
+
+"I was."
+
+"And you shot with your own hand an officer belonging to another company
+who refused to join yours?"
+
+"I shot a cowardly soldier who ran away from the enemy, and seemed a
+ringleader of other runaways; and in so doing, I saved from dishonour the
+best part of his comrades."
+
+"The man was no coward.  He was an enlightened Frenchman, and worth fifty
+of such aristos as you; and he knew better than his officers that he was
+to be led to an idle slaughter.  Idle--I say idle.  What was France the
+better, how was Paris the safer, for the senseless butchery of that day?
+You mutinied against a wiser general than Saint Trochu when you murdered
+that mutineer."
+
+"Armand Monnier, you are not quite sober to-night, or I would argue with
+you that question.  But you no doubt are brave: how and why do you take
+the part of a runaway?"
+
+"How and why?  He was my brother, and you own you murdered him: my
+brother--the sagest head in Paris.  If I had listened to him, I should
+not be,--bah!--no matter now what I am."
+
+"I could not know he was your brother; but if he had been mine I would
+have done the same."
+
+Here Victor's lip quivered, for Monnier griped him by the arm, and looked
+him in the face with wild stony eyes.  "I recollect that voice!  Yet--
+yet--you say you are a noble, a Vicomte--Victor de Mauleon, and you shot
+my brother!"
+
+Here he passed his left hand rapidly over his forehead.  The fumes of
+wine still clouded his mind, but rays of intelligence broke through the
+cloud.  Suddenly he said in a loud, and calm, and natural voice:
+
+"Mons. le Vicomte, you accost me as Armand Monnier--pray how do you know
+my name?"
+
+"How should I not know it?  I have looked into the meetings of the 'Clubs
+rouges.'  I have heard you speak, and naturally asked your name.  _Bon
+soir_ M. Monnier!  When you reflect in cooler moments, you will see that
+if patriots excuse Brutus for first dishonouring and then executing his
+own son, an officer charged to defend his country may be surely pardoned
+for slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he
+saved the man's name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you
+insist on telling the world why he was slain."
+
+"I know your voice--I know it.  Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.
+And if--"
+
+But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on.  Monnier looked
+round, saw him gone, but did not pursue.  He was just intoxicated enough
+to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the
+wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine.  Could you have seen him then
+as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known
+the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.
+You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on a
+great royalty fallen.  For the grandest of all royalties is that which
+takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth.  And Nature
+made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn of
+meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of heart
+which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and home,
+to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal natures
+would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.
+
+How had the royalty of the man's nature fallen thus?  Royalty rarely
+falls from its own constitutional faults.  It falls when, ceasing to be
+royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers.  And what bad advisers,
+always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser, had
+discrowned this mechanic?
+
+"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says the old-fashioned poet.
+
+"Not so," says the modern philosopher; "a little knowledge; is safer than
+no knowledge."  Possibly, as all individuals and all communities must go
+through the stage of a little knowledge before they can arrive at that of
+much knowledge, the philosopher's assertion may be right in the long-run,
+and applied to humankind in general.  But there is a period, as there is
+a class, in which a little knowledge tends to terrible demoralisation.
+And Armand Monnier lived in that period and was one of that class.  The
+little knowledge that his mind, impulsive and ardent, had picked up out
+of books that warred with the great foundations of existing society, had
+originated in ill advices.  A man stored with much knowledge would never
+have let Madame de Grantmesnil's denunciations of marriage rites, or
+Louis Blane's vindication of Robespierre as the representative of the
+working against the middle class, influence his practical life.  He would
+have assessed such opinions at their real worth; and whatever that worth
+might seem to him, would not to such opinions have committed the conduct
+of his life.  Opinion is not fateful: conduct is.  A little knowledge
+crazes an earnest, warm-blooded, powerful creature like Armand Monnier
+into a fanatic.  He takes an opinion which pleases him as a revelation
+from the gods; that opinion shapes his conduct; that conduct is his fate.
+Woe to the philosopher who serenely flings before the little knowledge of
+the artisan dogmas as harmless as the Atlantis of Plato if only to be
+discussed by philosophers, and deadly as the torches of Ate if seized as
+articles of a creed by fanatics!  But thrice woe to the artisan who makes
+himself the zealot of the Dogma!
+
+Poor Armand acts on the opinions he adopts; proves his contempt for the
+marriage state by living with the wife of another; resents, as natures so
+inherently manly must do, the Society that visits on her his defiance of
+its laws; throws himself, head foremost, against that society altogether;
+necessarily joins all who have other reasons for hostility to Society; he
+himself having every inducement not to join indiscriminate strikes--high
+wages, a liberal employer, ample savings, the certainty of soon becoming
+employer himself.  No; that is not enough to the fanatic: he persists on
+being dupe and victim.  He, this great king of labour, crowned by Nature,
+and cursed with that degree of little knowledge which does not comprehend
+how much more is required before a schoolboy would admit it to be
+knowledge at all,--he rushes into the maddest of all speculations--that
+of the artisan with little knowledge and enormous faith--that which
+intrusts the safety and repose and dignity of life to some ambitious
+adventurer, who uses his warm heart for the adventurer's frigid purpose,
+much as the lawyer-government of September used the Communists,--much as,
+in every revolution of France, a Bertrand has used a Raton--much as, till
+the sound of the last trumpet, men very much worse than Victor de Mauleon
+will use men very much better than Armand Monnier, if the Armand Monniers
+disdain the modesty of an Isaac Newton on hearing that a theorem to which
+he had given all the strength of his patient intellect was disputed: "It
+may be so;" meaning, I suppose, that it requires a large amount of
+experience ascertained before a man of much knowledge becomes that which
+a man of little knowledge is at a jump-the fanatic of an experiment
+untried.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+Scarcely had De Mauleon quitted Lemercier before the latter was joined by
+two loungers scarcely less famished than himself--Savarin and De Breze.
+Like himself, too, both had been sufferers from illness, though not of a
+nature to be consigned to an hospital.  All manner of diseases then had
+combined to form the pestilence which filled the streets with unregarded
+hearses--bronchitis, pneumonia, smallpox, a strange sort of spurious
+dysentery much more speedily fatal than the genuine.  The three men, a
+year before so sleek, looked like ghosts under the withering sky; yet all
+three retained embers of the native Parisian humour, which their very
+breath on meeting sufficed to kindle up into jubilant sparks or rapid
+flashes.
+
+"There are two consolations," said Savarin, as the friends strolled or
+rather crawled towards the Boulevards--"two consolations for the gourmet
+and for the proprietor in these days of trial for the gourmand, because
+the price of truffles is come down."
+
+"Truffles!" gasped De Breze, with watering mouth; "impossible!  They are
+gone with the age of gold."
+
+"Not so.  I speak on the best authority--my laundress; for she attends
+the _succursale_ in the Rue de Chateaudun; and if the poor woman, being,
+luckily for me, a childless widow, gets a morsel she can spare, she sells
+it to me."
+
+"Sells it!" feebly exclaimed Lemercier.  "Croesus!  you have money then,
+and can buy?"
+
+"Sells it--on credit!  I am to pension her for life if I live to have
+money again.  Don't interrupt me.  This honest woman goes this morning to
+the _succursale_.  I promise myself a delicious _bifteck_ of horse.  She
+gains the _succursale_, and the employee informs her that there is
+nothing left in his store except--truffles.  A glut of those in the
+market allows him to offer her a bargain-seven francs _la boite_.  Send
+me seven francs, De Breze, and you shall share the banquet."
+
+De Breze shook his head expressively.
+
+"But," resumed Savarin, "though credit exists no more except with my
+laundress, upon terms of which the usury is necessarily proportioned to
+the risk, yet, as I had the honour before to observe, there is comfort
+for the proprietor.  The instinct of property is imperishable."
+
+"Not in the house where I lodge," said Lemercier.  "Two soldiers were
+billeted there; and during my stay in the ambulance they enter my rooms,
+and cart away all of the little furniture left there, except a bed and a
+table.  Brought before a court-martial, they defend themselves by saying,
+'The rooms were abandoned.'  The excuse was held valid.  They were let
+off with a reprimand and a promise to restore what was not already
+disposed of.  They have restored me another table and four chairs."
+"Nevertheless, they had the instinct of property, though erroneously
+developed, otherwise they would not have deemed any excuse for their act
+necessary.  Now for my instance of the inherent tenacity of that
+instinct.  A worthy citizen in want of fuel sees a door in a garden wall,
+and naturally carries off the door.  He is apprehended by a gendarme who
+sees the act.  'Voleur,' he cries to the gendarme, 'do you want to rob me
+of my property?'  'That door your property?  I saw you take it away.'
+'You confess,' cries the citizen, triumphantly--'you confess that it
+is my property; for you saw me appropriate it.'  Thus you see how
+imperishable is the instinct of property.  No sooner does it disappear as
+yours than it reappears as mine."
+
+"I would laugh if I could," said Lemercier, "but such a convulsion would
+be fatal. _Dieu des dieux_, how empty I am!"  He reeled as he spoke, and
+clung to De Breze for support.  De Breze had the reputation of being the
+most selfish of men.  But at that moment, when a generous man might be
+excused for being selfish enough to desire to keep the little that he had
+for his own reprieve from starvation, this egotist became superb.
+"Friends," he cried, with enthusiasm, "I have something yet in my pocket;
+we will dine, all three of us."
+
+"Dine!" faltered Lemercier.  "Dine! I have not dined since I left the
+hospital.  I breakfasted yesterday--on two mice upon toast.  Dainty, but
+not nutritious.  And I shared them with Fox."
+
+"Fox! Fox lives still, then?" cried De Breze, startled.
+
+"In a sort of way he does.  But one mouse since yesterday morning is not
+much; and he can't expect that every day."
+
+"Why don't you take him out?" asked Savarin.  "Give him a chance of
+picking up a bone somewhere."
+
+"I dare not; he would be picked up himself.  Dogs are getting very
+valuable: they sell for 50 francs apiece.  Come, De Breze, where are we
+to dine?"
+
+"I and Savarin can dine at the London Tavern upon rat pate or jugged cat.
+But it would be impertinence to invite a satrap like yourself who has a
+whole dog in his larder--a dish of 50 francs--a dish for a king.  Adieu,
+my dear Frederic.  Allons, Savarin."
+
+"I feasted you on better meats than dog when I could afford it," said
+Frederic, plaintively; "and the first time you invite me you retract the
+invitation.  Be it so. _Bon appetit_."
+
+"_Bah_!"  said De Breze, catching Frederic's arm as he turned to depart.
+"Of course I was but jesting.  Only another day, when my pockets will be
+empty, do think what an excellent thing a roasted dog is, and make up
+your mind while Fox has still some little flesh on his bones."
+
+"Flesh!" said Savarin, detaining them.  "Look!  See how right Voltaire was
+in saying, 'Amusement is the first necessity of civilised man.'  Paris
+can do without bread Paris still retains Polichinello."
+
+He pointed to the puppet-show, round which a crowd, not of children
+alone, but of men-middle-aged and old-were collected; while sous were
+dropped into the tin handed round by a squalid boy.
+
+"And, _mon ami_," whispered De Breze to Lemercier, with the voice of a
+tempting fiend, "observe how Punch is without his dog."
+
+It was true.  The dog was gone,--its place supplied by a melancholy
+emaciated cat.
+
+Frederic crawled towards the squalid boy.  "What has become of Punch's
+dog?"
+
+"We ate him last Sunday.  Next Sunday we shall have the cat in a pie,"
+said the urchin, with a sensual smack of the lips.
+
+"O Fox! Fox!" murmured Frederic, as the three men went slowly down
+through the darkening streets--the roar of the Prussian guns heard afar,
+while distinct and near rang the laugh of the idlers round the Punch
+without a dog.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+While De Breze and his friends were feasting at the cafe Anglais, and
+faring better than the host had promised--for the bill of fare comprised
+such luxuries as ass, mule, peas, fried potatoes, and champagne
+(champagne in some mysterious way was inexhaustible during the time of
+famine)--a very different group had assembled in the rooms of Isaura
+Cicogna.  She and the Venosta had hitherto escaped the extreme
+destitution to which many richer persons had been reduced.  It is true
+that Isaura's fortune placed in the hands of the absent Louvier, and
+invested in the new street that was to have been, brought no return.  It
+was true that in that street the Venosta, dreaming of cent. per cent.,
+had invested all her savings.  But the Venosta, at the first announcement
+of war, had insisted on retaining in hand a small sum from the amount
+Isaura had received from her "_roman_," that might suffice for current
+expenses, and with yet more acute foresight had laid in stores of
+provisions and fuel immediately after the probability of a siege became
+apparent.  But even the provident mind of the Venosta had never foreseen
+that the siege would endure so long, or that the prices of all articles
+of necessity would rise so high.  And meanwhile all resources--money,
+fuel, provisions--had been largely drawn upon by the charity and
+benevolence of Isaura, without much remonstrance on the part of the
+Venosta, whose nature was very accessible to pity.  Unfortunately, too,
+of late money and provisions had failed to Monsieur and Madame Rameau,
+their income consisting partly of rents no longer paid, and the profits
+of a sleeping partnership in the old shop, from which custom had
+departed; so that they came to share the fireside and meals at the rooms
+of their son's fiancee with little scruple, because utterly unaware that
+the money retained and the provisions stored by the Venosta were now
+nearly exhausted.
+
+The patriotic ardour which had first induced the elder Rameau to
+volunteer his services as a National Guard had been ere this cooled if
+not suppressed, first by the hardships of the duty, and then by the
+disorderly conduct of his associates, and their ribald talk and obscene
+songs.  He was much beyond the age at which he could be registered.  His
+son was, however, compelled to become his substitute, though from his
+sickly health and delicate frame attached to that portion of the National
+Guard which took no part in actual engagements, and was supposed to do
+work on the ramparts and maintain order in the city.
+
+In that duty, so opposed to his tastes and habits, Gustave signalised
+himself as one of the loudest declaimers against the imbecility of the
+Government, and in the demand for immediate and energetic action, no
+matter at what loss of life, on the part of all--except the heroic force
+to which he himself was attached.  Still, despite his military labours,
+Gustave found leisure to contribute to Red journals, and his
+contributions paid him tolerably well.  To do him justice, his parents
+concealed from him the extent of their destitution; they, on their part,
+not aware that he was so able to assist them, rather fearing that he
+himself had nothing else for support but his scanty pay as a National
+Guard.  In fact, of late the parents and son had seen little of each
+other.  M. Rameau, though a Liberal politician, was Liberal as a
+tradesman, not as a Red Republican or a Socialist.  And, though little
+heeding his son's theories while the Empire secured him from the
+practical effect of them, he was now as sincerely frightened at the
+chance of the Communists becoming rampant as most of the Parisian
+tradesmen were.  Madame Rameau, on her side, though she had the dislike
+to aristocrats which was prevalent with her class, was a stanch Roman
+Catholic; and seeing in the disasters that had befallen her country the
+punishment justly incurred by its sins, could not but be shocked by the
+opinions of Gustave, though she little knew that he was the author of
+certain articles in certain journals, in which these opinions were
+proclaimed with a vehemence far exceeding that which they assumed in his
+conversation.  She had spoken to him with warm anger, mixed with
+passionate tears, on his irreligious principles; and from that moment
+Gustave shunned to give her another opportunity of insulting his pride
+and depreciating his wisdom.
+
+Partly to avoid meeting his parents, partly because he recoiled almost as
+much from the ennui of meeting the other visitors at her apartments--the
+Paris ladies associated with her in the ambulance, Raoul de Vandeniar,
+whom he especially hated, and the Abbe Vertpre, who had recently come
+into intimate friendship with both the Italian ladies--his visits to
+Isaura had become exceedingly rare.  He made his incessant military
+duties the pretext for absenting himself; and now, on this evening, there
+were gathered round Isaura's hearth--on which burned almost the last of
+the hoarded fuel--the Venosta, the two Rameaus, the Abbe Vertpre, who was
+attached as confessor to the society of which Isaura was so zealous a
+member.  The old priest and the young poetess had become dear friends.
+There is in the nature of a woman (and especially of a woman at once so
+gifted and so childlike as Isaura, combining an innate tendency towards
+faith with a restless inquisitiveness of intellect, which is always
+suggesting query or doubt) a craving for something afar from the sphere
+of her sorrow, which can only be obtained through that "bridal of the
+earth and sky" which we call religion.  And hence, to natures like
+Isaura's, that link between the woman and the priest, which the
+philosophy of France has never been able to dissever.
+
+"It is growing late," said Madame Rameau; "I am beginning to feel uneasy.
+Our dear Isaura is not yet returned."
+
+"You need be under no apprehension," said the Abby.  The ladies attached
+to the ambulance of which she is so tender and zealous a sister incur no
+risk.  There are always brave men related to the sick and wounded who see
+to the safe return of the women.  My poor Raoul visits that ambulance
+daily.  His kinsman, M. de Rochebriant, is there among the wounded."
+
+"Not seriously hurt, I hope," said the Venosta; "not disfigured?  He was
+so handsome; it is only the ugly warrior whom a scar on the face
+improves."
+
+"Don't be alarmed, Signora; the Prussian guns spared his face.  His
+wounds in themselves were not dangerous, but he lost a good deal of
+blood.  Raoul and the Christian brothers found him insensible among a
+heap of the slain."
+
+"M. de Vandemar seems to have very soon recovered the shock of his poor
+brother's death," said Madame Rameau.  "There is very little heart in an
+aristocrat."
+
+The Abbe's mild brow contracted.  "Have more charity, my daughter.  It is
+because Raoul's sorrow for his lost brother is so deep and so holy that
+he devotes himself more than ever to the service of the Father which is
+in heaven.  He said, a day or two after the burial, when plans for a
+monument to Enguerrand were submitted to him: 'May my prayer be
+vouchsafed, and my life be a memorial of him more acceptable to his
+gentle spirit than monuments of bronze or marble.  May I be divinely
+guided and sustained in my desire to do such good acts as he would have
+done had he been spared longer to earth.  And whenever tempted to weary,
+may my conscience whisper, Betray not the trust left to thee by thy
+brother, lest thou be not reunited to him at last."'
+
+"Pardon me, pardon!" murmured Madame Rameau humbly, while the Venosta
+burst into tears.
+
+The Abbe, though a most sincere and earnest ecclesiastic, was a cheery
+and genial man of the world; and, in order to relieve Madame Rameau from
+the painful self-reproach he had before excited, he turned the
+conversation.  "I must beware, however," he said, with his pleasant
+laugh, "as to the company in which I interfere in family questions; and
+especially in which I defend my poor Raoul from any charge brought
+against him.  For some good friend this day sent me a terrible organ of
+communistic philosophy, in which we humble priests are very roughly
+handled, and I myself am especially singled out by name as a pestilent
+intermeddler in the affairs of private households.  I am said to set the
+women against the brave men who are friends of the people, and am
+cautioned by very truculent threats to cease from such villainous
+practices."  And here, with a dry humour that turned into ridicule what
+would otherwise have excited disgust and indignation among his listeners,
+he read aloud passages replete with the sort of false eloquence which was
+then the vogue among the Red journals.  In these passages, not only the
+Abbe was pointed out for popular execration, but Raoul de Vandemar,
+though not expressly named, was clearly indicated as a pupil of the
+Abbe's, the type of a lay Jesuit.
+
+The Venosta alone did not share in the contemptuous laughter with which
+the inflated style of these diatribes inspired the Rameaus.  Her simple
+Italian mind was horror-stricken by language which the Abbe treated with
+ridicule.
+
+"Ah!"  said M. Rameau, "I guess the author--that firebrand Felix Pyat."
+
+"No," answered the Abbe; "the writer signs himself by the name of a more
+learned atheist--Diderot le jeune."  Here the door opened, and Raoul
+entered, accompanying Isaura.  A change had come over the face of the
+young Vandemar since his brother's death.  The lines about the mouth had
+deepened, the cheeks had lost their rounded contour and grown somewhat
+hollow.  But the expression was as serene as ever, perhaps even less
+pensively melancholy.  His whole aspect was that of a man who has
+sorrowed, but been supported in sorrow; perhaps it was more sweet-
+certainly it was more lofty.
+
+And, as if there were in the atmosphere of his presence something that
+communicated the likeness of his own soul to others, since Isaura had
+been brought into his companionship, her own lovely face had caught the
+expression that prevailed in his--that, too, had become more sweet--that,
+too, had become more lofty.
+
+The friendship that had grown up between these two young mourners was of
+a very rare nature.  It had in it no sentiment that could ever warm into
+the passion of human love.  Indeed, had Isaura's heart been free to give
+away, love for Raoul de Vandemar would have seemed to her a profanation.
+He was never more priestly than when he was most tender.  And the
+tenderness of Raoul towards her was that of some saint-like nature
+towards the acolyte whom it attracted upwards.  He had once, just before
+Enguerrand's death, spoken to Isaura with a touching candour as to his
+own predilection for a monastic life.  "The worldly avocations that open
+useful and honourable careers for others have no charm for me.  I care
+not for riches nor power, nor honours nor fame.  The austerities of the
+conventual life have no terror for me; on the contrary, they have a
+charm, for with them are abstraction from earth and meditation on heaven.
+In earlier years I might, like other men, have cherished dreams of human
+love, and felicity in married life, but for the sort of veneration with
+which I regarded one to whom I owe--humanly speaking--whatever of good
+there may be in me.  Just when first taking my place among the society of
+young men who banish from their life all thought of another, I came under
+the influence of a woman who taught me to see that holiness was beauty.
+She gradually associated me with her acts of benevolence, and from her I
+learned to love God too well not to be indulgent to his creatures.  I
+know not whether the attachment I felt to her could have been inspired in
+one who had not from childhood conceived a romance, not perhaps justified
+by history, for the ideal images of chivalry.  My feeling for her at
+first was that of the pure and poetic homage which a young knight was
+permitted, _sans reproche_, to render to some fair queen or chatelaine,
+whose colours he wore in the lists, whose spotless repute he would have
+perilled his life to defend.  But soon even that sentiment, pure as it
+was, became chastened from all breath of earthly love, in proportion as
+the admiration refined itself into reverence.  She has often urged me to
+marry, but I have no bride on this earth.  I do but want to see
+Enguerrand happily married, and then I quit the world for the cloister."
+
+But after Enguerrand's death, Raoul resigned all idea of the convent.
+That evening, as he attended to their homes Isaura and the other ladies
+at  to the ambulance, he said, in answer to inquiries about his mother,
+"She is resigned and calm.  I have promised her I will not, while she
+lives, bury her other son: I renounce my dreams of the monastery."
+
+Raoul did not remain many minutes at Isaura's.  The Abbe accompanied him
+on his way home.  "I have a request to make to you," said the former;
+"you know, of course, your distant cousin the Vicomte de Mauleon?"
+
+"Yes.  Not so well as I ought, for Enguerrand liked him."
+
+"Well enough, at all events, to call on him with a request which I am
+commissioned to make, but it might come better from you as a kinsman.  I
+am a stranger to him, and I know not whether a man of that sort would not
+regard as an officious intermeddling any communication made to him by a
+priest.  The matter, however, is a very simple one.  At the convent of
+------- there is a poor nun who is, I fear, dying.  She has an intense
+desire to see M. de Mauleon, whom she declares to be her uncle, and her
+only surviving relative.  The laws of the convent are not too austere
+to prevent the interview she seeks in such a case.  I should add that I
+am not acquainted with her previous history.  I am not the confessor of
+the sisterhood; he, poor man, was badly wounded by a chance ball a few
+days ago when attached to an ambulance on the ramparts.  As soon as the
+surgeon would allow him to see any one, he sent for me, and bade me go to
+the nun I speak of--Sister Ursula.  It seems that he had informed her
+that M. de Mauleon was at Paris, and had promised to ascertain his
+address.  His wound had prevented his doing so, but he trusted to me to
+procure the information.  I am well acquainted with the Superieure of the
+convent, and I flatter myself that she holds me in esteem.  I had
+therefore no difficulty to obtain her permission to see this poor nun,
+which I did this evening.  She implored me for the peace of her soul to
+lose no time in finding out M. de Mauleon's address, and entreating him
+to visit her.  Lest he should demur, I was to give him the name by which
+he had known her in the world--Louise Duval.  Of course I obeyed.  The
+address of a man who has so distinguished himself in this unhappy siege I
+very easily obtained, and repaired at once to M. de Mauleon's apartment.
+I there learned that he was from home, and it was uncertain whether he
+would not spend the night on the ramparts."
+
+"I will not fail to see him early in the morning," said Raoul, "and
+execute your commission."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+M. Mauleon was somewhat surprised by Raoul's visit the next morning.  He
+had no great liking for a kinsman whose politely distant reserve towards
+him, in contrast to poor Euguerrand's genial heartiness, had much wounded
+his sensitive self-respect; nor could he comprehend the religious
+scruples which forbade Raoul to take a soldier's share in the battle-
+field, though in seeking there to save the lives of others so fearlessly
+hazarding his own life.
+
+"Pardon," said Raoul, with his sweet mournful smile, "the unseasonable
+hour at which I disturb you.  But your duties on the ramparts and mine in
+the hospital begin early, and I have promised the Abbe Vertpre to
+communicate a message of a nature which perhaps you may deem pressing."
+He proceeded at once to repeat what the Abbe had communicated to him the
+night before relative to the illness and the request of the nun.
+
+"Louise Duval!" exclaimed the Vicomte, "discovered at last, and a
+religieuse!  Ah! I now understand why she never sought me out when I
+reappeared at Paris.  Tidings of that sort do not penetrate the walls of
+a convent.  I am greatly obliged to you, M. de Vandemar, for the trouble
+you have so kindly taken.  This poor nun is related to me, and I will at
+once obey the summons.  But this convent des ------- I am ashamed to say
+I know not where it is.  A long way off, I suppose?"
+
+"Allow me to be your guide," said Raoul; "I should take it as a favour to
+be allowed to see a little more of a man whom my lost brother held in
+such esteem."
+
+Victor was touched by this conciliatory speech, and in a few minutes more
+the two men were on their way to the convent on the other side of the
+Seine.
+
+Victor commenced the conversation by a warm and heartfelt tribute to
+Euguerrand's character and memory.  "I never," he said, "knew a nature
+more rich in the most endearing qualities of youth; so gentle, so high-
+spirited, rendering every virtue more attractive, and redeeming such few
+faults or foibles as youth so situated and so tempted cannot wholly
+escape, with an urbanity not conventional, not artificial, but reflected
+from the frankness of a genial temper and the tenderness of a generous
+heart.  Be comforted for his loss, my kinsman.  A brave death was the
+proper crown of that beautiful life."
+
+Raoul made no answer, but pressed gratefully the arm now linked within
+his own.  The companions walked on in silence; Victor's mind settling on
+the visit he was about to make to the niece so long mysteriously lost,
+and now so unexpectedly found.  Louise had inspired him with a certain
+interest from her beauty and force of character, but never with any warm
+affection.  He felt relieved to find that her life had found its close in
+the sanctuary of the convent.  He had never divested himself of a certain
+fear, inspired by Louvier's statement that she might live to bring
+scandal and disgrace on the name he had with so much difficulty, and
+after so lengthened an anguish, partially cleared in his own person.
+
+Raoul left De Mauleon at the gate of the convent, and took his way
+towards the hospitals where he visited, and the poor whom he relieved.
+
+Victor was conducted silently into the convent _parloir_; and, after
+waiting there several minutes, the door opened, and the _Superieure_
+entered.  As she advanced towards him, with stately step and solemn
+visage, De Mauleon recoiled, and uttered a half-suppressed exclamation
+that partook both of amaze and awe.  Could it be possible?  Was this
+majestic woman, with the grave impassible aspect, once the ardent girl
+whose tender letters he had cherished through stormy years, and only
+burned on the night before the most perilous of his battle-fields?  This
+the one, the sole one, whom in his younger dreams he had seen as his
+destined wife?  It was so--it was.  Doubt vanished when he heard her
+voice; and yet how different every tone, every accent, from those of the
+low, soft, thrilling music that had breathed in the voice of old!
+
+"M. de Mauleon," said the Superieure, calmly, "I grieve to sadden you by
+very mournful intelligence.  Yesterday evening, when the Abbe undertook
+to convey to you the request of our Sister Ursula, although she was
+beyond mortal hope of recovery--as otherwise you will conceive that I
+could not have relaxed the rules of this house so as to sanction your
+visit--there was no apprehension of immediate danger.  It was believed
+that her sufferings would be prolonged for some days.  I saw her late
+last night before retiring to my cell, and she seemed even stronger than
+she had been for the last week.  A sister remained at watch in her cell.
+Towards morning she fell into apparently quiet sleep, and in that sleep
+she passed away."  The Superieure here crossed herself, and murmured
+pious words in Latin.  "Dead!  my poor niece!" said Victor, feelingly,
+roused from his stun at the first sight of the Superieure by her measured
+tones, and the melancholy information she so composedly conveyed to him.
+"I cannot, then, even learn why she so wished to see me once more,--or
+what she might have requested at my hands!"
+
+"Pardon, M. le Vicomte.  Such sorrowful consolation I have resolved to
+afford you, not without scruples of conscience, but not without sanction
+of the excellent Abbe Vertpre, whom I summoned early this morning to
+decide my duties in the sacred office I hold.  As soon as Sister Ursula
+heard of your return to Paris, she obtained my permission to address to
+you a letter, subjected, when finished, to my perusal and sanction.  She
+felt that she had much on her mind which her feeble state might forbid
+her to make known to you in conversation with 'sufficient fulness; and as
+she could only have seen you in presence of one of the sisters she
+imagined that there would also be less restraint in a written
+communication.  In fine, her request was that, when you called, I might
+first place this letter in your hands, and allow you time to read it,
+before being admitted to her presence; when a few words conveying your
+promise to attend to the wishes with which you would then be acquainted,
+would suffice for an interview in her exhausted condition.  Do I make
+myself understood?"
+
+"Certainly, Madame,--and the letter?"
+
+"She had concluded last evening; and when I took leave of her later in
+the night, she placed it in my hands for approval.  M. le Vicomte, it
+pains me to say that there is much in the tone of that letter which I
+grieve for and condemn.  And it was my intention to point this out to our
+sister at morning, and tell her that passages must be altered before I
+could give to you the letter.  Her sudden decease deprived me of this
+opportunity.  I could not, of course, alter or erase a line--a word.  My
+only option was to suppress the letter altogether, or give it you intact.
+The Abbe thinks that, on the whole, my duty does not forbid the dictate
+of my own impulse--my own feelings; and I now place this letter in your
+hands."
+
+De Mauleon took a packet, unsealed, from the thin white fingers of the
+Superieure; and as he bent to receive it, lifted towards her eyes
+eloquent with sorrowful, humble pathos, in which it was impossible for
+the heart of a woman who had loved not to see a reference to the past
+which the lips did not dare to utter.
+
+A faint, scarce-perceptible blush stole over the marble cheek of the nun.
+But, with an exquisite delicacy, in which survived the woman while
+reigned the nun, she replied to the appeal.
+
+"M. Victor de Mauleon, before, having thus met, we part for ever, permit
+a poor _religieuse_ to say with what joy--a joy rendered happier because
+it was tearful--I have learned through the Abbe Vertpre that the honour
+which, as between man and man, no one who had once known you could ever
+doubt, you have lived to vindicate from calumny."
+
+"Ah; you have heard that--at last, at last!"
+
+"I repeat--of the honour thus deferred, I never doubted."  The Superieure
+hurried on.  "Greater joy it has been to me to hear from the same
+venerable source that, while found bravest among the defenders of your
+country, you are clear from all alliance with the assailants of your God.
+Continue so, continue so, Victor de Mauleon,"
+
+She retreated to the door, and then turned towards him with a look in
+which all the marble had melted away, adding, with words more formally
+nunlike, yet unmistakably womanlike, than those which had gone before,
+"That to the last you may be true to God, is a prayer never by me
+omitted."
+
+She spoke, and vanished.
+
+In a kind of dim and dreamlike bewilderment, Victor de Mauleon found
+himself without the walls of the convent.  Mechanically, as a man does
+when the routine of his life is presented to him, from the first Minister
+of State to the poor clown at a suburban theatre, doomed to appear at
+their posts, to prose on a Beer Bill, or grin through a horse-collar,
+though their hearts are bleeding at every pore with some household or
+secret affliction,--mechanically De Mauldon went his way towards the
+ramparts, at a section of which he daily drilled his raw recruits.
+Proverbial for his severity towards those who offended, for the
+cordiality of his praise of those who pleased his soldierly judgment,
+no change of his demeanour was visible that morning, save that he might
+be somewhat milder to the one, somewhat less hearty to the other.  This
+routine duty done, he passed slowly towards a more deserted because a
+more exposed part of the defences, and seated himself on the frozen sward
+alone.  The cannon thundered around him.  He heard unconsciously: from
+time to time an _obus_ hissed and splintered close at his feet;--he saw
+with abstracted eye.  His soul was with the past; and, brooding over all
+that in the past lay buried there, came over him a conviction of the
+vanity of the human earth-bounded objects for which we burn or freeze,
+far more absolute than had grown out of the worldly cynicism connected
+with his worldly ambition.  The sight of that face, associated with the
+one pure romance of his reckless youth, the face of one so estranged, so
+serenely aloft from all memories of youth, of romance, of passion, smote
+him in the midst of the new hopes of the new career, as the look on the
+skull of the woman he had so loved and so mourned, when disburied from
+her grave, smote the brilliant noble who became the stern reformer of La
+Trappe.  And while thus gloomily meditating, the letter of the poor
+Louise Duval was forgotten.  She whose existence had so troubled, and
+crossed, and partly marred the lives of others,--she, scarcely dead, and
+already forgotten by her nearest kin.  Well--had she not forgotten, put
+wholly out of her mind, all that was due to those much nearer to her than
+is an uncle to a niece?
+
+The short, bitter, sunless day was advancing towards its decline before
+Victor roused himself with a quick impatient start from his reverie, and
+took forth the letter from the dead nun.
+
+It began with expressions of gratitude, of joy at the thought that she
+should see him again before she died, thank him for his past kindness,
+and receive, she trusted, his assurance that he would attend to her last
+remorseful injunctions.  I pass over much that followed in the
+explanation of events in her life sufficiently known to the reader.  She
+stated, as the strongest reason why she had refused the hand of Louvier,
+her knowledge that she should in due time become a mother--a fact
+concealed from Victor, secure that he would then urge her not to annul
+her informal marriage, but rather insist on the ceremonies that would
+render it valid.  She touched briefly on her confidential intimacy with
+Madame Marigny, the exchange of name and papers, her confinement in the
+neighbourhood of Aix, the child left to the care of the nurse, the
+journey to Munich to find the false Louise Duval was no more.  The
+documents obtained through the agency of her easy-tempered kinsman, the
+late Marquis de Rochebriant, and her subsequent domestication in the
+house of the von Rudesheims,--all this it is needless to do more here
+than briefly recapitulate.  The letter then went on: "While thus kindly
+treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the terms
+of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble birth.  He
+was the only man I ever cared for.  I loved him with frail human passion.
+I could not tell him, my true history.  I could not tell him that I had a
+child; such intelligence would have made him renounce me at once.  He had
+a daughter, still but an infant, by a former marriage, then brought up in
+France.  He wished to take her to his house, and his second wife to
+supply the place of her mother.  What was I to do with the child I had
+left near Aix?  While doubtful and distracted, I read an advertisement in
+the journals to the effect that a French lady, then staying in Coblentz,
+wished to adopt a female child not exceeding the age of six: the child to
+be wholly resigned to her by the parents, she undertaking to rear and
+provide for it as her own.  I resolved to go to Coblentz at once.  I did
+so.  I saw this lady.  She seemed in affluent circumstances, yet young,
+but a confirmed invalid, confined the greater part of the day to her sofa
+by some malady of the spine.  She told me very frankly her story.  She
+had been a professional dancer on the stage, had married respectably,
+quitted the stage, become a widow, and shortly afterwards been seized
+with the complaint that would probably for life keep her a secluded
+prisoner in her room.  Thus afflicted, and without tie, interest, or
+object in the world, she conceived the idea of adopting a child that she
+might bring up to tend and cherish her as a daughter.  In this, the
+imperative condition was that the child should never be sought by the
+parents.  She was pleased by my manner and appearance: she did not wish
+her adopted daughter to be the child of peasants.  She asked me for no
+references,--made no inquiries.  She said cordially that she wished for
+no knowledge that, through any indiscretion of her own, communicated to
+the child might lead her to seek the discovery of her real parents.  In
+fine, I left Coblentz on the understanding that I was to bring the
+infant, and if it pleased Madame Surville, the agreement was concluded.
+
+"I then repaired to Aix.  I saw the child.  Alas!  unnatural mother that
+I was, the sight only more vividly brought before me the sense of my own
+perilous position.  Yet the child was lovely! a likeness of myself, but
+lovelier far, for it was a pure, innocent, gentle loveliness.  And they
+told her to call me 'Maman.'  Oh, did I not relent when I heard that
+name?  No; it jarred on my ear as a word of reproach and shame.  In
+walking with the infant towards the railway station, imagine my dismay
+when suddenly I met the man who had been taught to believe me dead.  I
+soon discovered that his dismay was equal to my own,--that I had nothing
+to fear from his desire to claim me.  It did occur to me for a moment to
+resign his child to him.  But when he shrank reluctantly from a half
+suggestion to that effect, my pride was wounded, my conscience absolved.
+And, after all, it might be unsafe to my future to leave with him any
+motive for tracing me.  I left him hastily.  I have never seen nor heard
+of him more.  I took the child to Coblentz.  Madame Surville was charmed
+with its prettiness and prattle,--charmed still more when I rebuked the
+poor infant for calling me 'Maman,' and said, 'Thy real mother is here.'
+Freed from my trouble, I returned to the kind German roof I had quitted,
+and shortly after became the wife of Ludovico Cicogna.
+
+"My punishment soon began.  His was a light, fickle, pleasure-hunting
+nature.  He soon grew weary of me.  My very love made me unamiable to
+him.  I became irritable, jealous, exacting.  His daughter, who now came
+to live with us, was another subject of discord.  I knew that he loved
+her better than me.  I became a harsh step-mother; and Ludovico's
+reproaches, vehemently made, nursed all my angriest passions.  But a son
+of this new marriage was born to myself.  My pretty Luigi! how my heart
+became wrapt up in him!  Nursing him, I forgot resentment against his
+father.  Well, poor Cicogna fell ill and died.  I mourned him sincerely;
+but my boy was left.  Poverty then fell on me,--poverty extreme.
+Cicogna's sole income was derived from a post in the Austrian dominion in
+Italy, and ceased with it.  He received a small pension in compensation;
+that died with him.
+
+"At this time, an Englishman, with whom Ludovico had made acquaintance in
+Venice, and who visited often at our house in Verona, offered me his
+hand.  He had taken an extraordinary liking to Isaura, Cicogna's daughter
+by his first marriage.  But I think his proposal was dictated partly by
+compassion for me, and more by affection for her.  For the sake of my boy
+Luigi I married him.  He was a good man, of retired learned habits with
+which I had no sympathy.  His companionship overwhelmed me with ennui.
+But I bore it patiently for Luigi's sake.  God saw that my heart was as
+much as ever estranged from Him, and He took away my all on earth--my
+boy.  Then in my desolation I turned to our Holy Church for comfort. I
+found a friend in the priest, my confessor.  I was startled to learn from
+him how guilty I had been--was still.  Pushing to an extreme the
+doctrines of the Church, he would not allow that my first marriage,
+though null by law, was void in the eyes of Heaven.  Was not the death of
+the child I so cherished a penalty due to my sin towards the child I had
+abandoned?
+
+"These thoughts pressed on me night and day.  With the consent and
+approval of the good priest, I determined to quit the roof of M. Selby,
+and to devote myself to the discovery of my forsaken Julie.
+
+"I had a painful interview with M. Selby.  I announced my intention to
+separate from him.  I alleged as a reason my conscientious repugnance to
+live with a professed heretic--an enemy to our Holy Church.  When M.
+Selby found that he could not shake my resolution, he lent himself to it
+with the forbearance and generosity which he had always exhibited.  On
+our marriage he had settled on me five thousand pounds, to be absolutely
+mine in the event of his death.  He now proposed to concede to me the
+interest on that capital during his life, and he undertook the charge of
+my step-daughter Isaura, and secured to her all the rest he had to leave;
+such landed property as he possessed in England passing to a distant
+relative.
+
+"So we parted, not with hostility--tears were shed on both sides.  I set
+out for Coblentz.  Madame Surville had long since quitted that town,
+devoting some years to the round of various mineral spas in vain hope of
+cure.  Not without some difficulty I traced her to her last residence in
+the neighbourhood of Paris, but she was then no more--her death
+accelerated by the shock occasioned by the loss of her whole fortune,
+which she had been induced to place in one of the numerous fraudulent
+companies by which so many have been ruined.  Julie, who was with her at
+the time of her death, had disappeared shortly after it--none could tell
+me whither; but from such hints as I could gather, the poor child, thus
+left destitute, had been betrayed into sinful courses.
+
+"Probably I might yet by searching inquiry have found her out; you will
+say it was my duty at least to institute such inquiry.  No doubt; I now
+remorsefully feel that it was.  I did not think so at the time.  The
+Italian priest had given me a few letters of introduction to French
+ladies with whom, when they had sojourned at Florence, he had made
+acquaintance.  These ladies were very strict devotees, formal observers
+of those decorums by which devotion proclaims itself to the world.  They
+had received me not only with kindness but with marked respect.  They
+chose to exalt into the noblest self-sacrifice the act of my leaving M.
+Selby's house.  Exaggerating the simple cause assigned to it in the
+priest's letter, they represented me as quitting a luxurious home and an
+idolising husband rather than continue intimate intercourse with the
+enemy of my religion.  This new sort of flattery intoxicated me with its
+fumes.  I recoiled from the thought of shattering the pedestal to which I
+had found myself elevated.  What if I should discover my daughter in one
+from the touch of whose robe these holy women would recoil as from the
+rags of a leper!  No; it would be impossible for me to own her--
+impossible for me to give her the shelter of my roof.  Nay, if discovered
+to hold any commune with such an outcast, no explanation, no excuse short
+of the actual truth, would avail with these austere judges of human
+error.  And the actual truth would be yet deeper disgrace.  I reasoned
+away my conscience.  If I looked for example in the circles in which I
+had obtained reverential place, I could find no instance in which a girl
+who had fallen from virtue was not repudiated by her nearest relatives.
+Nay, when I thought of my own mother, had not her father refused to see
+her, to acknowledge her child, from no other offence than that of a
+misalliance which wounded the family pride?  That pride, alas! was in my
+blood--my sole inheritance from the family I sprang from.
+
+"Thus it went on, till I had grave symptoms of a disease which rendered
+the duration of my life uncertain.  My conscience awoke and tortured me.
+I resolved to take the veil.  Vanity and pride again!  My resolution was
+applauded by those whose opinion had so swayed my mind and my conduct.
+Before I retired into the convent from which I write, I made legal
+provision as to the bulk of the fortune which, by the death of M. Selby,
+has become absolutely at my disposal.  One thousand pounds amply sufficed
+for dotation to the convent: the other four thousand pounds are given in
+trust to the eminent notary, M. Nadaud, Rue -------.  On applying to him,
+you will find that the sum, with the accumulated interest, is bequeathed
+to you,--a tribute of gratitude for the assistance you afforded me in the
+time of your own need, and the kindness with which you acknowledged our
+relationship and commiserated my misfortunes.
+
+"But oh, my uncle, find out--a man can do so with a facility not accorded
+to a woman--what has become of this poor Julie, and devote what you may
+deem right and just of the sum thus bequeathed to place her above want
+and temptation.  In doing so, I know you will respect my name: I would
+not have it dishonour you, indeed.
+
+"I have been employed in writing this long letter since the day I heard
+you were in Paris.  It has exhausted the feeble remnants of my strength.
+It will be given to you before the interview I at once dread and long
+for, and in that interview you will not rebuke me.  Will you, my kind
+uncle?  No, you will only soothe and pity!
+
+"Would that I were worthy to pray for others, that I might add, 'May the
+Saints have you in their keeping and lead you to faith in the Holy
+Church, which has power to absolve from sins those who repent as I do.'"
+
+The letter dropped from Victor's hand.  He took it up, smoothed it
+mechanically, and with a dim, abstracted, be wildered, pitiful wonder.
+Well might the _Superieure_ have hesitated to allow confessions,
+betraying a mind so little regulated by genuine religious faith, to pass
+into other hands.  Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from
+want or from sin the writer's forsaken child, that had overborne all
+other considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she
+consulted.
+
+Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding!  what
+a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so
+obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the
+conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of being
+thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger than the
+moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose errors, if
+she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was alone
+responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love for a
+name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained; and that
+concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which there was
+so qualified a reparation!
+
+More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points of
+similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,
+between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted.  By one of those
+singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary rules
+presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not unjustly
+impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for this
+child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left to the
+discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of the
+consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction of
+respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in
+condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of
+individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human
+opinion.  For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,
+inasmuch as the secrecy he sought was for the sake, not of his own
+memory, but that of her whom the world knew only as his honoured wife.
+The conduct of Louise admits no such excuse; she dies as she had lived;
+an Egotist.  But, whatever the motives of the parents, what is the fate
+of the deserted child?  What revenge does the worldly opinion, which the
+parents would escape for themselves, inflict on the innocent infant to
+whom the bulk of their worldly possessions is to be clandestinely
+conveyed?  Would all the gold of Ophir be compensation enough for her?
+
+Slowly De Mauleon roused himself, and turned from the solitary place
+where he had been seated to a more crowded part of the ramparts.  He
+passed a group of young _Moblots_, with flowers wreathed round their gun-
+barrels.  "If," said one of them gaily, "Paris wants bread, it never
+wants flowers."  His companions laughed merrily, and burst out into a
+scurrile song in ridicule of St. Trochu.  Just then an _obus_ fell a few
+yards before the group.  The sound only for a moment drowned the song,
+but the splinters struck a man in a coarse, ragged dress, who had stopped
+to listen to the singers.  At his sharp cry, two men hastened to his
+side: one was Victor de Mauleon; the other was a surgeon, who quitted
+another group of idlers--National Guards--attracted by the shriek that
+summoned his professional aid.  The poor man was terribly wounded.  The
+surgeon, glancing at De Mauleon, shrugged his shoulders, and muttered,
+"Past help!"  The sufferer turned his haggard eyes on the Vicomte, and
+gasped out, "M. de Mauleon?"
+
+"That is my name," answered Victor, surprised, and not immediately
+recognising the sufferer.
+
+"Hist, Jean Lebeau!--look at me: you recollect me now,--Mart le Roux,
+_concierge_ to the Secret Council.  Ay, I found out who you were long ago
+--followed you home from the last meeting you broke up.  But I did not
+betray you, or you would have been murdered long since.  Beware of
+the old set--beware of--of--"  Here his voice broke off into shrill
+exclamations of pain.  Curbing his last agonies with a powerful effort,
+he faltered forth, "You owe me a service--see to the little one at home
+--she is starving."  The death-_rale_ came on; in a few moments he was no
+more.
+
+Victor gave orders for the removal of the corpse, and hurried away.  The
+surgeon, who had changed countenance when he overheard the name in which
+the dying man had addressed De Mauleon, gazed silently after De Mauleon's
+retreating form, and then, also quitting the dead, rejoined the group he
+had quitted.  Some of those who composed it acquired evil renown later in
+the war of the Communists, and came to disastrous ends: among that number
+the Pole Loubinsky and other members of the Secret Council.  The Italian
+Raselli was there too, but, subtler than his French confreres, he divined
+the fate of the Communists, and glided from it--safe now in his native
+land, destined there, no doubt, to the funereal honours and lasting
+renown which Italy bestows on the dust of her sons who have advocated
+assassination out of love for the human race.
+
+Amid this group, too, was a National Guard, strayed from his proper post,
+and stretched on the frozen ground; and, early though the hour, in the
+profound sleep of intoxication.
+
+"So," said Loubinsky, "you have found your errand in vain, Citizen le
+Noy; another victim to the imbecility of our generals."
+
+"And partly one of us," replied the Medecin des Pauvres.  "You remember
+poor le Roux, who kept the old baraque where the Council of Ten used to
+meet?  Yonder he lies."
+
+"Don't talk of the Council of Ten.  What fools and dupes we were made by
+that _vieux gredin_, Jean Lebeau!  How I wish I could meet him again!"
+
+Gaspard le Noy smiled sarcastically.  "So much the worse for you, if you
+did.  A muscular and a ruthless fellow is that Jean Lebeau!"  Therewith
+he turned to the drunken sleeper and woke him up with a shake and a kick.
+"Armand--Armand Monnier, I say, rise, rub your eyes.  What if you are
+called to your post?  What if you are shamed as a deserter and a coward?"
+
+Armand turned, rose with an effort from the recumbent to the sitting
+posture, and stared dizzily in the face of the _Medecin des Pauvres_.
+
+"I was dreaming that I had caught by the throat," said Armand, wildly,
+"the aristo who shot my brother; and lo, there were two men, Victor de
+Mauleon and Jean Lebeau."
+
+"Ah! there is something in dreams," said the surgeon.  "Once in a
+thousand times a dream comes true."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+The time now came when all provision of food or of fuel failed the modest
+household of Isaura; and there was not only herself and the Venosta to
+feed and warm--there were the servants whom they had brought from Italy,
+and had not the heart now to dismiss to the 'certainty of famine.  True,
+one of the three, the man, had returned to his native land before the
+commencement of the siege; but the two women had remained.  They
+supported themselves now as they could on the meagre rations accorded by
+the Government.  Still Isaura attended the ambulance to which she was
+attached.  From the ladies associated with her she could readily have
+obtained ample supplies: but they had no conception of her real state of
+destitution; and there was a false pride generally prevalent among the
+respectable classes, which Isaura shared, that concealed distress lest
+alms should be proffered.
+
+The destitution of the household had been carefully concealed from the
+parents of Gustave Rameau, until, one day, Madame Rameau, entering at the
+hour at which she generally, and her husband sometimes, came for a place
+by the fireside and a seat at the board, found on the one only ashes, on
+the other a ration of the black nauseous compound which had become the
+substitute for bread.
+
+Isaura was absent on her duties at the ambulance hospital,--purposely
+absent, for she shrank from the bitter task of making clear to the
+friends of her betrothed the impossibility of continuing the aid to their
+support which their son had neglected to contribute; and still more from
+the comment which she knew they would make on his conduct, in absenting
+himself so wholly of late, and in the time of such trial and pressure,
+both from them and from herself.  Truly, she rejoiced at that absence so
+far as it affected herself.  Every hour of the day she silently asked her
+conscience whether she were not now absolved from a promise won from her
+only by an assurance that she had power to influence for good the life
+that now voluntarily separated itself from her own.  As she had never
+loved Gustave, so she felt no resentment at the indifference his conduct
+manifested.  On the contrary, she hailed it as a sign that the annulment
+of their betrothal would be as welcome to him as to herself.  And if so,
+she could restore to him the sort of compassionate friendship she had
+learned to cherish in the hour of his illness and repentance.  She had
+resolved to seize the first opportunity he afforded to her of speaking to
+him with frank and truthful plainness.  But, meanwhile, her gentle nature
+recoiled from the confession of her resolve to appeal to Gustave himself
+for the rupture of their engagement.
+
+Thus the Venosta alone received Madame Rameau; and while that lady was
+still gazing round her with an emotion too deep for immediate utterance,
+her husband entered with an expression of face new to him--the look of a
+man who has been stung to anger, and who has braced his mind to some
+stern determination.  This altered countenance of the good-tempered
+bourgeois was not, however, noticed by the two women.  The Venosta did
+not even raise her eyes to it, as with humbled accents she said, "Pardon,
+dear Monsieur, pardon, Madame, our want of hospitality; it is not our
+hearts that fail.  We kept our state from you as long as we could.  Now
+it speaks for itself; '_la fame e una bretta festin._'"
+
+"Oh, Madame! and oh, my poor Isaura!" cried Madame Rameau, bursting into
+tears.  "So we have been all this time a burden on you,--aided to bring
+such want on yon!  How can we ever be forgiven?  And my son--to leave us
+thus,--not even to tell us where to find him!"
+
+"Do not degrade us, my wife," said M. Rameau, with unexpected dignity,
+"by a word to imply that we would stoop to sue for support to our
+ungrateful child.  No, we will not starve!  I am strong enough still to
+find food for you.  I will apply for restoration to the National Guard.
+They have augmented the pay to married men; it is now nearly two francs
+and a half a-day to a _pere de famille_, and on that pay we all can at
+least live.  Courage, my wife!  I will go at once for employment.  Many
+men older than I am are at watch on the ramparts, and will march to the
+battle on the next sortie."
+
+"It shall not be so," exclaimed Madame Rameau, vehemently, and winding
+her arm round her husband's neck.  "I loved my son better than thee once
+--more shame to me.  Now, I would rather lose twenty such sons than peril
+thy life, my Jacques!  Madame," she continued, turning to the Venosta,
+"thou wert wiser than I.  Thou wert ever opposed to the union between thy
+young friend and my son.  I felt sore with thee for it--a mother is so
+selfish when she puts herself in the place of her child.  I thought that
+only through marriage with one so pure, so noble, so holy, Gustave could
+be saved from sin and evil.  I am deceived.  A man so heartless to his
+parents, so neglectful of his affianced, is not to be redeemed.  I
+brought about this betrothal: tell Isaura that I release her from it.
+I have watched her closely since she was entrapped into it.  I know how
+miserable the thought of it has made her, though, in her sublime devotion
+to her plighted word, she sought to conceal from me the real state of her
+heart.  If the betrothal bring such sorrow, what would the union do!
+Tell her this from me.  Come, Jacques, come away!"
+
+"Stay, Madame!" exclaimed the Venosta, her excitable nature much affected
+by this honest outburst of feeling.  "It is true that I did oppose, so
+far as I could, my poor Piccola's engagement with M. Gustave.  But I dare
+not do your bidding.  Isaura would not listen to me.  And let us be just!
+M. Gustave may be able satisfactorily to explain his seeming indifference
+and neglect.  His health is always very delicate; perhaps he may be again
+dangerously ill.  He serves in the National Guard; perhaps--" she paused,
+but the mother conjectured the word left unsaid, and, clasping her hands,
+cried out in anguish, "Perhaps dead!--and we have wronged him!  Oh,
+Jacques, Jacques! how shall we find out-how discover our boy?  Who can
+tell us where to search? at the hospital--or in the cemeteries?"  At the
+last word she dropped into a seat, and her whole frame shook with her
+sobs.
+
+Jacques approached her tenderly, and kneeling by her side, said:
+
+"No, _m'amie_, comfort thyself, if it be indeed comfort to learn that thy
+son is alive and well.  For my part, I know not if I would not rather he
+had died in his innocent childhood.  I have seen him--spoken to him.  I
+know where he is to be found."
+
+"You do, and concealed it from me?  Oh, Jacques!"
+
+"Listen to me, wife, and you, too, Madame; for what I have to say should
+be made known to Mademoiselle Cicogna.  Some time since, on the night of
+the famous sortie, when at my post on the ramparts, I was told that
+Gustave had joined himself to the most violent of the Red Republicans,
+and had uttered at the Club de la Vengeance sentiments, of which I will
+only say that I, his father and a Frenchman, hung my head with shame when
+they were repeated to me.  I resolved to go to the club myself.  I did.
+I heard him speak--heard him denounce Christianity as the instrument of
+tyrants."
+
+"Ah!" cried the two women, with a simultaneous shudder.
+
+"When the assembly broke up, I waylaid him at the door.  I spoke to him
+seriously.  I told him what anguish such announcement of blasphemous
+opinions would inflict on his pious mother.  I told him I should deem it
+my duty to inform Mademoiselle Cicogna, and warn her against the union on
+which he had told us his heart was bent.  He appeared sincerely moved by
+what I said; implored me to keep silence towards his mother and his
+betrothed; and promised, on that condition, to relinquish at once what he
+called 'his career as an orator,' and appear no more at such execrable
+clubs.  On this understanding I held my tongue.  Why, with such other
+causes of grief and suffering, should I tell thee, poor wife, of a sin
+that I hoped thy son had repented and would not repeat?  And Gustave kept
+his word.  He has never, so far as I know, attended, at least spoken, at
+the Red clubs since that evening."
+
+"Thank heaven so far," murmured Madame Rameau.
+
+"So far, yes; but hear more.  A little time after I thus met him he
+changed his lodging, and did not confide to us his new address, giving as
+a reason to us that he wished to avoid a clue to his discovery by that
+pertinacious Mademoiselle Julie."
+
+Rameau had here sunk his voice into a whisper, intended only for his
+wife, but the ear of the Venosta was fine enough to catch the sound, and
+she repeated, "Mademoiselle Julie!  Santa Maria! who is she?"
+
+"Oh!" said M. Rameau, with a shrug of his shoulders, and with true
+Parisian _sangfroid_ as to such matters of morality, "a trifle not worth
+considering.  Of course, a good-looking _garcon_ like Gustave must have
+his little affairs of the heart before he settles for life.  Unluckily,
+amongst those of Gustave was one with a violent-tempered girl who
+persecuted him when he left her, and he naturally wished to avoid all
+chance of a silly scandal, if only out of respect to the dignity of his
+fiancee.  But I found that was not the true motive, or at least the only
+one, for concealment.  Prepare yourself, my poor wife.  Thou hast heard
+of these terrible journals which the _decheance_ has let loose upon us.
+Our unhappy boy is the principal writer of one of the worst of them,
+under the name of 'Diderot le Jeune."'
+
+"What!" cried the Venosta.  "That monster!  The good Abbe Vertpre was
+telling us of the writings with that name attached to them.  The Abbe
+himself is denounced by name as one of those meddling priests who are to
+be constrained to serve as soldiers or pointed out to the vengeance of
+the _canaille_.  Isaura's _fiancee_ a blasphemer!"
+
+"Hush, hush!" said Madame Rameau, rising, very pale but self-collected.
+"How do you know this, Jacques?"
+
+"From the lips of Gustave himself.  I heard first of it yesterday from
+one of the young reprobates with whom he used to be familiar, and who
+even complimented me on the rising fame of my son, and praised the
+eloquence of his article that day.  But I would not believe him.  I
+bought the journal--here it is; saw the name and address of the printer
+--went this morning to the office--was there told that 'Diderot le Jeune'
+was within revising the press--stationed myself by the street door, and
+when Gustave came out I seized his arm, and asked him to say Yes or No if
+he was the author of this infamous article,--this, which I now hold in my
+hand.  He owned the authorship with pride; talked wildly of the great man
+he was--of the great things he was to do; said that, in hitherto
+concealing his true name, he had done all he could to defer to the
+bigoted prejudices of his parents and his fiancee; and that if genius,
+like fire, would find its way out, he could not help it; that a time was
+rapidly coming when his opinions would be uppermost; that since October
+the Communists were gaining ascendancy, and only waited the end of the
+siege to put down the present Government, and with it all hypocrisies and
+shams, religious or social.  My wife, he was rude to me, insulting!  but
+he had been drinking--that made him incautious: and he continued to walk
+by my side towards his own lodging, on reaching which he ironically
+invited me to enter, saying, 'I should meet there men who would soon
+argue me out of my obsolete notions.'  You may go to him, wife, now, if
+you please.  I will not, nor will I take from him a crust of bread.  I
+came hither, determined to tell the young lady all this, if I found her
+at home.  I should be a dishonoured man if I suffered her to be cheated
+into misery.
+
+"There, Madame Venosta, there!  Take that journal, show it to
+Mademoiselle; and report to her all I have said."
+
+M. Rameau, habitually the mildest of men, had, in talking, worked himself
+up into positive fury.
+
+His wife, calmer but more deeply affected, made a piteous sign to the
+Venosta not to say more; and without other salutation or adieu took her
+husband's arm, and led him from the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Obtaining from her husband Gustave's address, Madame Rameau hastened to
+her son's apartment alone through the darkling streets.  The house in
+which he lodged was in a different quarter from that in which Isaura had
+visited him.  Then, the street selected was still in the centre of the
+_beau monde_--now, it was within the precincts of that section of the
+many-faced capital in which the _beau monde_ was held in detestation or
+scorn; still the house had certain pretensions, boasting a courtyard and
+a porter's lodge.  Madame Rameau, instructed to mount _au second_, found
+the door ajar, and, entering, perceived on the table of the little salon
+the remains of a feast which, however untempting it might have been in
+happier times, contrasted strongly with the meagre fare of which
+Gustave's parents had deemed themselves fortunate to partake at the board
+of his betrothed; remnants of those viands which offered to the
+inquisitive epicure an experiment in food much too costly for the popular
+stomach--dainty morsels of elephant, hippopotamus, and wolf, interspersed
+with half-emptied bottles of varied and high-priced wines.  Passing these
+evidences of unseasonable extravagance with a mute sentiment of anger and
+disgust, Madame Rameau penetrated into a small cabinet, the door of which
+was also ajar, and saw her son stretched on his bed half dressed,
+breathing heavily in the sleep which follows intoxication.  She did not
+attempt to disturb him.  She placed herself quietly by his side, gazing
+mournfully on the face which she had once so proudly contemplated, now
+haggard and faded,--still strangely beautiful, though it was the beauty
+of ruin.
+
+From time to time he stirred uneasily, and muttered broken words, in
+which fragments of his own delicately-worded verse were incoherently
+mixed up with ribald slang, addressed to imaginary companions.  In his
+dreams he was evidently living over again his late revel, with episodical
+diversions into the poet-world, of which he was rather a vagrant nomad
+than a settled cultivator.  Then she would silently bathe his feverish
+temples with the perfumed water she found on his dressing-table.  And so
+she watched till, in the middle of the night, he woke up, and recovered
+the possession of his reason with a quickness that surprised Madame
+Rameau.  He was, indeed, one of those men in whom excess of drink, when
+slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the effect of nervous
+exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to his mother, seemed a
+propitious lucidity of the moral sense.
+
+Certainly on seeing her he threw himself on her breast, and began to shed
+tears.  Madame Rameau had not the heart to reproach him sternly.  But by
+gentle degrees she made him comprehend the pain he had given to his
+father, and the destitution in which he had deserted his parents and his
+affianced.  In his present mood Gustave was deeply affected by these
+representations.  He excused himself feebly by dwelling on the excitement
+of the times, the preoccupation of his mind, the example of his
+companions; but with his excuses he mingled passionate expressions of
+remorse, and before daybreak mother and son were completely reconciled.
+Then he fell into a tranquil sleep; and Madame Rameau, quite worn out,
+slept also in the chair beside him, her arm around his neck.  He awoke
+before she did at a late hour in the morning; and stealing from her arm,
+went to his escritoire, and took forth what money he found there, half of
+which he poured into her lap, kissing her till she awoke.
+
+"Mother," he said, "henceforth I will work for thee and my father.  Take
+this trifle now; the rest I reserve for Isaura."
+
+"Joy!  I have found my boy again.  But Isaura, I fear that she will not
+take thy money, and all thought of her must also be abandoned."
+
+Gustave had already turned to his looking-glass, and was arranging with
+care his dark ringlets: his personal vanity--his remorse appeased by this
+pecuniary oblation--had revived.
+
+"No," he said gaily, "I don't think I shall abandon her; and it is not
+likely, when she sees and hears me, that she can wish to abandon me!  Now
+let us breakfast, and then I will go at once to her."
+
+In the mean while, Isaura, on her return to her apartment at the wintry
+nightfall, found a cart stationed at the door, and the Venosta on the
+threshold, superintending the removal of various articles of furniture--
+indeed, all such articles as were not absolutely required.
+
+"Oh, Piccola!" she said, with an attempt at cheerfulness, "I did not
+expect thee back so soon.  Hush! I have made a famous bargain.  I have
+found a broker to buy these things which we don't want just at present,
+and can replace by new and prettier things when the siege is over and we
+get our money.  The broker pays down on the nail and thou wilt not go to
+bed without supper.  There are no ills which are not more supportable
+after food."
+
+Isaura smiled faintly, kissed the Venosta's cheek, and ascended with
+weary steps to the sitting-room.  There she seated herself quietly,
+looking with abstracted eyes round the bare dismantled space by the light
+of the single candle.
+
+When the Venosta re-entered, she was followed by the servants, bringing
+in a daintier meal than they had known for days--a genuine rabbit,
+potatoes, _marrons glaces_, a bottle of wine, and a pannier of wood.  The
+fire was soon lighted, the Venosta plying the bellows.  It was not till
+this banquet, of which Isaura, faint as she was, scarcely partook, had
+been remitted to the two Italian women-servants, and another log been
+thrown on the hearth, that the Venosta opened the subject which was
+pressing on her heart.  She did this with a joyous smile, taking both
+Isaura's hands in her own, and stroking them fondly.
+
+"My child, I have such good news for thee!  Thou hast escaped--thou art
+free!" and then she related all that M. Rameau had said, and finished by
+producing the copy of Gustave's unhallowed journal.
+
+When she had read the latter, which she did with compressed lips and
+varying colour, the girl fell on her knees--not to thank Heaven that she
+would now escape a union from which her soul so recoiled--not that she
+was indeed free, but to pray, with tears rolling down her cheeks, that
+God would yet save to Himself, and to good ends, the soul that she had
+failed to bring to Him.  All previous irritation against Gustave was
+gone: all had melted into an ineffable compassion.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+When, a little before noon, Gustave was admitted by the servant into
+Isaura's salon, its desolate condition, stripped of all its pretty
+feminine elegancies, struck him with a sense of discomfort to himself
+which superseded any more remorseful sentiment.  The day was intensely
+cold: the single log on the hearth did not burn; there were only two or
+three chairs in the room; even the carpet, which had been of gaily
+coloured Aubusson, was gone.  His teeth chattered; and he only replied by
+a dreary nod to the servant who informed him that Madame Venosta was gone
+out, and Mademoiselle had not yet quitted her own room.
+
+If there be a thing which a true Parisian of Rameau's stamp associates
+with love of woman, it is a certain sort of elegant surroundings, a
+pretty _boudoir_, a cheery hearth, an easy _fauteuil_.  In the absence of
+such attributes, "fuyit retro Venus."  If the Englishman invented the
+word comfort, it is the Parisian who most thoroughly comprehends the
+thing.  And he resents the loss of it in any house where he has been
+accustomed to look for it, as a personal wrong to his feelings.
+
+Left for some minutes alone, Gustave occupied himself with kindling the
+log, and muttering, "_Par tous les diables, quel chien de rhume je vais
+attraper_?"  He turned as he heard the rustle of a robe and a light slow
+step.  Isaura stood before him.  Her aspect startled him.  He had come
+prepared to expect grave displeasure and a frigid reception.  But the
+expression of Isaura's face was more kindly, more gentle, more tender,
+than he had seen it since the day she had accepted his suit.
+
+Knowing from his mother what his father had said to his prejudice, he
+thought within himself, "After all, the poor girl loves me better than I
+thought.  She is sensible and enlightened; she cannot pretend to dictate
+an opinion to a man like me."
+
+He approached with a complacent self-assured mien, and took her hand,
+which she yielded to him quietly, leading her to one of the few remaining
+chairs, and seating himself beside her.
+
+"Dear Isaura," he said, talking rapidly all the while he performed this
+ceremony, "I need not assure you of my utter ignorance of the state to
+which the imbecility of our Government, and the cowardice, or rather the
+treachery, of our generals, has reduced you.  I only heard of it late
+last night from my mother.  I hasten to claim my right to share with you
+the humble resources which I have saved by the intellectual labours that
+have absorbed all such moments as my military drudgeries left to the
+talents which, even at such a moment, paralysing minds less energetic,
+have sustained me:"--and therewith he poured several pieces of gold and
+silver on the table beside her chair.
+
+"Gustave," then said Isaura, "I am well pleased that you thus prove that
+I was not mistaken when I thought and said that, despite all appearances,
+all errors, your heart was good.  Oh, do but follow its true impulses,
+and--"
+
+"Its impulses lead me ever to thy feet," interrupted Gustave, with a
+fervour which sounded somewhat theatrical and hollow.
+
+The girl smiled, not bitterly, not mockingly; but Gustave did not like
+the smile.
+
+"Poor Gustave," she said, with a melancholy pathos in her soft voice,
+"do you not understand that the time has come when such commonplace
+compliments ill suit our altered positions to each other?  Nay, listen to
+me patiently; and let not my words in this last interview pain you to
+recall.  If either of us be to blame in the engagement hastily
+contracted, it is I.  Gustave, when you, exaggerating in your imagination
+the nature of your sentiments for me, said with such earnestness that on
+my consent to our union depended your health, your life, your career;
+that if I withheld that consent you were lost, and in despair would seek
+distraction from thought in all from which your friends, your mother, the
+duties imposed upon Genius for the good of Man to the ends of God, should
+withhold and save you--when you said all this, and I believed it, I felt
+as if Heaven commanded me not to desert the soul which appealed to me in
+the crisis of its struggle and peril.  Gustave, I repent; I was to
+blame."
+
+"How to blame?"
+
+"I overrated my power over your heart: I overrated still more, perhaps,
+my power over my own."
+
+"Ah, your own!  I understand now.  You did not love me?"
+
+"I never said that I loved you in the sense in which you use the word.
+I told you that the love which you have described in your verse, and
+which," she added, falteringly, with heightened colour and with hands
+tightly clasped, "I have conceived possible in my dreams, it was not mine
+to give.  You declared you were satisfied with such affection as I could
+bestow.  Hush! let me go on.  You said that affection would increase,
+would become love, in proportion as I knew you more.  It has not done so.
+Nay, it passed away; even before this time of trial and of grief, I
+became aware how different from the love you professed was the neglect
+which needs no excuse, for it did not pain me."
+
+"You are cruel indeed, Mademoiselle."
+
+"No, indeed, I am kind.  I wish you to feel no pang at our parting.
+Truly I had resolved, when the siege terminated, and the time to speak
+frankly of our engagement came, to tell you that I shrank from the
+thought of a union between us; and that it was for the happiness of both
+that our promises should be mutually cancelled.  The moment has come
+sooner than I thought.  Even had I loved you, Gustave, as deeply as--as
+well as the beings of Romance love, I would not dare to wed one who calls
+upon mortals to deny God, demolish His altars, treat His worship as a
+crime.  No; I would sooner die of a broken heart, that I might the sooner
+be one of those souls privileged to pray the Divine Intercessor for
+merciful light on those beloved and left dark on earth."
+
+"Isaura!" exclaimed Gustave, his mobile temperament impressed, not by the
+words of Isaura, but by the passionate earnestness with which they were
+uttered, and by the exquisite spiritual beauty which her face took from
+the combined sweetness and fervour of its devout expression,--"Isaura, I
+merit your censure, your sentence of condemnation; but do not ask me to
+give back your plighted troth.  I have not the strength to do so.  More
+than ever, more than when first pledged to me, I need the aid, the
+companionship, of my guardian angel.  You were that to me once; abandon
+me not now.  In these terrible times of revolution, excitable natures
+catch madness from each other.  A writer in the heat of his passion says
+much that he does not mean to be literally taken, which in cooler moments
+he repents and retracts.  Consider, too, the pressure of want, of hunger.
+It is the opinions that you so condemn which alone at this moment supply
+bread to the writer.  But say you will yet pardon me,--yet give me trial
+if I offend no more--if I withdraw my aid to any attacks on your views,
+your religion--if I say, 'Thy God shall be my God, and thy people shall
+be my people.'"
+
+"Alas!" said Isaura, softly, "ask thyself if those be words which I can
+believe again.  Hush!" she continued, checking his answer with a more
+kindling countenance and more impassioned voice.  "Are they, after all,
+the words that man should address to woman?  Is it on the strength of
+Woman that Man should rely?  Is it to her that he should say, 'Dictate my
+opinions on all that belongs to the Mind of man; change the doctrines
+that I have thoughtfully formed and honestly advocate; teach me how to
+act on earth, clear all my doubts as to my hopes of heaven'? No, Gustave;
+in this task man never should repose on woman.  Thou are honest at this
+moment, my poor friend; but could I believe thee to-day, thou wouldst
+laugh tomorrow at what woman can be made to believe."
+
+Stung to the quick by the truth of Isaura's accusation, Gustave exclaimed
+with vehemence: "All that thou sayest is false, and thou knowest it.  The
+influence of woman on man for good or for evil defies reasoning.  It does
+mould his deeds on earth; it does either make or mar all that future
+which lies between his life and his gravestone, and of whatsoever may lie
+beyond the grave.  Give me up now, and thou art responsible for me, for
+all I do, it may be against all that thou deemest holy.  Keep thy troth
+yet awhile, and test me.  If I come to thee showing how I could have
+injured, and how for thy dear sake I have spared, nay, aided, all that
+thou dost believe and reverence, then wilt thou dare to say, 'Go thy ways
+alone--I forsake thee!'"
+
+Isaura turned aside her face, but she held out her hand--it was as cold
+as death.  He knew that she had so far yielded, and his vanity exulted:
+he smiled in secret triumph as he pressed his kiss on that icy hand and
+was gone.
+
+"This is duty--it must be duty," said Isaura to herself.  "But where is
+the buoyant delight that belongs to a duty achieved?--where? oh where?"
+And then she stole with drooping head and heavy step into her own room,
+fell on her knees, and prayed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+In vain persons, be they male or female, there is a complacent self-
+satisfaction in any momentary personal success, however little that
+success may conduce to--nay, however much it may militate against--the
+objects to which their vanity itself devotes its more permanent desires.
+A vain woman may be very anxious to win A------, the magnificent, as a
+partner for life; and yet feel a certain triumph when a glance of her eye
+has made an evening's conquest of the pitiful B-------, although by that
+achievement she incurs the imminent hazard of losing A------ altogether.
+So, when Gustave Rameau quitted Isaura, his first feeling was that of
+triumph.  His eloquence had subdued her will; she had not finally
+discarded him.  But as he wandered abstractedly in the biting air, his
+self-complacency was succeeded by mortification and discontent.  He felt
+that he had committed himself to promises which he was by no means
+prepared to keep.  True, the promises were vague in words; but in
+substance they were perfectly clear--"to spare, nay, to aid all that
+Isaura esteemed and reverenced."  How was this possible to him?  How
+could he suddenly change the whole character of his writings?--how become
+the defender of marriage and property, of church and religion?--how
+proclaim himself so utter an apostate?  If he did, how become a leader
+of the fresh revolution? how escape being its victim?  Cease to write
+altogether?
+
+But then how live?  His pen was his sole subsistence, save 30 sous a-day
+as a National Guard--30 sous a day to him, who, in order to be Sybarite
+in tastes, was Spartan in doctrine.  Nothing better just at that moment
+than Spartan doctrine, "Live on black broth and fight the enemy."  And
+the journalists in vogue so thrived upon that patriotic sentiment, that
+they were the last persons compelled to drink the black broth or to fight
+the enemy.
+
+"Those women are such idiots when they meddle in politics," grumbled
+between his teeth the enthusiastic advocate of Woman's Rights on all
+matters of love.  "And," he continued, soliloquising, "it is not as if
+the girl had any large or decent dot; it is not as if she said, 'In
+return for the sacrifice of your popularity, your prospects, your
+opinions, I give you not only a devoted heart, but an excellent table and
+a capital fire and plenty of pocket-money.' _Sacre bleu_! when I think of
+that frozen salon, and possibly the leg of a mouse for dinner, and a
+virtuous homily by way of grace, the prospect is not alluring; and the
+girl herself is not so pretty as she was--grown very thin. _Sur mon ame_,
+I think she asks too much--far more than she is worth.  No, No; I had
+better have accepted her dismissal. _Elle n'est pas digne de moi_."
+
+Just as he arrived at that conclusion, Gustave Rameau felt the touch of a
+light, a soft, a warm, yet a firm hand, on his aria.  He turned, and
+beheld the face of the woman whom, through so many dreary weeks, he had
+sought to shun--the face of Julie Caumartin.  Julie was not, as Savarin
+had seen her, looking pinched and wan, with faded robes, nor, as when met
+in the cafe by Lemercier, in the faded robes of a theatre.  Julie never
+looked more beautiful, more radiant, than she did now; and there was a
+wonderful heartfelt fondness in her voice when she cried, "_Mon homme!
+mon homme! seul homme au monde a mon coeur, Gustave, cheri adore_!  I
+have found thee-at last--at last!"  Gustave gazed upon her, stupefied.
+Involuntarily his eye glanced from the freshness of bloom in her face
+which the intense cold of the atmosphere only seemed to heighten into
+purer health, to her dress, which was new and handsome--black--he did
+not know that it was mourning--the cloak trimmed with costly sables.
+Certainly it was no mendicant for alms who thus reminded the shivering
+Adonis of the claims of a pristine Venus.  He stammered out her naive,
+"Julie!"--and then he stopped.
+
+"_Oui, ta Julie!  Petit ingrat_!  how I have sought for thee! how I have
+hungered for the sight of thee!  That monster Savarin! he would not give
+me any news of thee.  That is ages ago.  But at least Frederic Lemercier,
+whom I saw since, promised to remind thee that I lived still.  He did not
+do so, or I should have seen thee--n'est ce, pas?"
+
+"Certainly, certainly--only--_chere amie_--you know that--that--as I
+before announced to thee, I--I--was engaged in marriage--and--and--"
+
+"But are you married?"
+
+"No, no.  Hark!  Take care--is not that the hiss of an obus?"
+
+"What then?  Let it come!  Would it might slay us both while my hand is
+in thine!"
+
+"Ah!" muttered Gustave, inwardly, "what a difference!  This is love!  No
+preaching here! _Elle est plus digne de moi que d'autre_."
+
+"No," he said, aloud, "I am not married.  Marriage is at best a pitiful
+ceremony.  But if you wished for news of me, surely you must have heard
+of my effect as an orator not despised in the Salle Favre.  Since, I have
+withdrawn from that arena.  But as a journalist I flatter myself that I
+have had a _beau succes_."
+
+"Doubtless, doubtless, my Gustave, my Poet!  Wherever thou art, thou must
+be first among men.  But, alas it is my fault--my misfortune.  I have not
+been in the midst of a world that perhaps rings of thy name."
+
+"Not my name.  Prudence compelled me to conceal that.  Still, Genius
+pierces under any name.  You might have discovered me under my nom de
+plume."
+
+"Pardon me--I was always _bete_.  But, oh!  for so many weeks I was so
+poor--so destitute.  I could go nowhere, except--don't be ashamed of me--
+except--"
+
+"Yes?  Go on."
+
+"Except where I could get some money.  At first to dance--you remember my
+bolero.  Then I got a better engagement.  Do you not remember that you
+taught me to recite verses?  Had it been for myself alone, I might have
+been contented to starve.  Without thee, what was life?  But thou wilt
+recollect Madeleine, the old _bonne_ who lived with me.  Well, she had
+attended and cherished me since I was so high-lived with my mother.
+Mother! no; it seems that Madame Surville was not my mother after all.
+But, of course, I could not let my old Madeleine starve; and therefore,
+with a heart as heavy as lead, I danced and declaimed.  My heart was not
+so heavy when I recited thy songs."
+
+"My songs! _Pauvre ange_!" exclaimed the Poet.
+
+"And then, too, I thought, 'Ah, this dreadful siege!  He, too, may be
+poor--he may know want and hunger;' and so all I could save from
+Madeleine I put into a box for thee, in case thou shouldst come back to
+me some day.  _Mon homme_, how could I go to the Salle Favre?  How could
+I read journals, Gustave?  But thou art not married, Gustave?  _Parole
+d'honneur_?"
+
+"_Parole d'honneur_!  What does that matter?"
+
+"Everything!  Ah! I am not so _mechante_, so _mauvaise tete_ as I was
+some months ago.  If thou went married, I should say, 'Blessed and sacred
+be thy wife!  Forget me.'  But as it is, one word more.  Dost thou love
+the young lady, whoever she be? or does she love thee so well that it
+would be sin in thee to talk trifles to Julie?  Speak as honestly as if
+thou wert not a poet."
+
+"Honestly, she never said she loved me.  I never thought she did.  But,
+you see, I was very ill, and my parents and friends and my physician said
+that it was right for me to arrange my life, and marry, and so forth.
+And the girl had money, and was a good match.  In short, the thing was
+settled.  But oh, Julie, she never learned my songs by heart!  She did
+not love as thou mayst, and still dost.  And--ah! well--now that we meet
+again--now that I look in thy face--now that I hear thy voice--No, I do
+not love her as I loved, and might yet love thee.  But--but--"
+
+"Well, but? oh, I guess.  Thou seest me well dressed, no longer dancing
+and declaiming at cafes: and thou thinkest that Julie has disgraced
+herself? she is unfaithful?"
+
+Gustave had not anticipated that frankness, nor was the idea which it
+expressed uppermost in his mind when he said, "but, but--"  There were
+many buts all very confused, struggling through his mind as he spoke.
+However, he answered as a Parisian sceptic, not ill-bred, naturally would
+answer:
+
+"My dear friend, my dear child" (the Parisian is very fond of the word
+child or enfant in addressing a woman), "I have never seen thee so
+beautiful as thou art now; and when thou tellest me that thou are no
+longer poor, and the proof of what thou sayest is visible in the furs,
+which, alas'.  I cannot give thee, what am I to think?"
+
+"Oh, _mon homme, mon homme_! thou art very _spirituel_, and that is why I
+loved thee.  I am very _bete_, and that is excuse enough for thee if thou
+couldst not love me.  But canst thou look me in the face and not know
+that my eyes could not meet thine as they do, if I had been faithless to
+thee even in a thought, when I so boldly touched thine arm?  _Viens chez
+moi_, come and let me explain all.  Only--only let me repeat, if another
+has rights over thee which forbid thee to come, say so kindly, and I will
+never trouble thee again."
+
+Gustave had been hitherto walking slowly by the side of Julie, amidst the
+distant boom of the besiegers' cannon, while the short day began to
+close; and along the dreary boulevards sauntered idlers turning to look
+at the young, beautiful, well-dressed woman who seemed in such contrast
+to the capital whose former luxuries the "Ondine" of imperial Paris
+represented.  He now offered his arm to Julie; and, quickening his pace,
+said, "There is no reason why I should refuse to attend thee home, and
+listen to the explanations thou dost generously condescend to volunteer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+"Ah, indeed! what a difference! what a difference!" said Gustave to
+himself when he entered Julie's apartment.  In her palmier days, when he
+had first made her acquaintance, the apartment no doubt had been
+infinitely more splendid, more abundant in silks and fringes and flowers
+and nicknacks; but never had it seemed so cheery and comfortable and
+home-like as now.  What a contrast to Isaura's dismantled chilly salon!
+She drew him towards the hearth, on which, blazing though it was, she
+piled fresh billets, seated him in the easiest of easy-chairs, knelt
+beside him, and chafed his numbed hands in hers; and as her bright eyes
+fixed tenderly on his, she looked so young and so innocent!  You would
+not then have called her the "Ondine of Paris."
+
+But when, a little while after, revived by the genial warmth and moved by
+the charm of her beauty, Gustave passed his arm round her neck and sought
+to draw her on his lap, she slid from his embrace, shaking her head
+gently, and seated herself, with a pretty air of ceremonious decorum, at
+a little distance.
+
+Gustave looked at her amazed.
+
+"Causons," said she, gravely, "thou wouldst know why I am so well
+dressed, so comfortably lodged, and I am longing to explain to thee all.
+Some days ago I had just finished my performance at the cafe--, and was
+putting on my shawl, when a tall Monsieur, _fort bel homme_, with the air
+of a grand seigneur, entered the cafe, and approaching me politely, said,
+'I think I have the honour to address Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin?'
+'That is my name,' I said, surprised; and, looking at him more intently,
+I recognised his face.  He had come into the cafe a few days before with
+thine old acquaintance Frederic Lemercier, and stood by when I asked
+Frederic to give me news of thee.  'Mademoiselle,' he continued, with a
+serious melancholy smile, 'I shall startle you when I say that I am
+appointed to act as your guardian by the last request of your mother.'
+'Of Madame Surville?'  'Madame Surville adopted you, but was not your
+mother.  We cannot talk at ease here.  Allow me to request that you will
+accompany me to Monsieur  -----, the _avoue_.  It is not very far from
+this--and by the way--I will tell you some news that may sadden, and some
+news that may rejoice.'
+
+"There was an earnestness in the voice and look of this Monsieur that
+impressed me.  He did not offer me his arm; but I walked by his side in
+the direction he chose.  As we walked he told me in very few words that
+my mother had been separated from her husband, and for certain family
+reasons had found it so difficult to rear and provide for me herself,
+that she had accepted the offer of Madame Surville to adopt me as her own
+child.  While he spoke, there came dimly back to me the remembrance of a
+lady who had taken me from my first home, when I had been, as I
+understood, at nurse, and left me with poor dear Madame Surville, saying,
+'This is henceforth your mamma.'
+
+"I never again saw that lady.  It seems that many years afterwards my true
+mother desired to regain me.  Madame Surville was then dead.  She failed
+to trace me out, owing, alas! to my own faults and change of name.  She
+then entered a nunnery, but, before doing so, assigned a sum of 100,000
+francs to this gentleman, who was distantly connected with her, with full
+power to him to take it to himself, or give it to my use should he
+discover me, at his discretion.  'I ask you,' continued the Monsieur,
+'to go with me to Mons. N------'s, because the sum is still in his hands.
+He will confirm my statement.  All that I have now to say is this, If you
+accept my guardianship, if you obey implicitly my advice, I shall
+consider the interest of this sum which has accumulated since deposited
+with M.  ----- due to you; and the capital will be your dot on marriage,
+if the marriage be with my consent.'"
+
+Gustave had listened very attentively, and without interruption, until
+now; when he looked up, and said with his customary sneer, "Did your
+Monsieur, _fort bel homme_, you say, inform you of the value of the
+advice, rather of the commands, you were implicitly to obey?"
+
+"Yes," answered Julie, "not then, but later.  Let me go on.  We arrived
+at M. N-----'s, an elderly grave man.  He said that all he knew was that
+he held the money in trust for the Monsieur with me, to be given to him,
+with the accumulations of interest, on the death of the lady who had
+deposited it.  If that Monsieur had instructions how to dispose of the
+money, they were not known to him.  All he had to do was to transfer it
+absolutely to him on the proper certificate of the lady's death.  So you
+see, Gustave, that the Monsieur could have kept all from me if he had
+liked."
+
+"Your Monsieur is very generous.  Perhaps you will now tell me his name."
+
+"No; he forbids me to do it yet."
+
+"And he took this apartment for you, and gave you money to buy that smart
+dress and these furs.  Bah! _mon enfant_, why try to deceive me?  Do I
+not know my Paris?  A _fort bel homme_ does not make himself guardian to
+a _fort belle fine_ so young and fair as Mademoiselle Julie Caumartin
+without certain considerations which shall be nameless, like himself."
+
+Julie's eyes flashed.  "Ah, Gustave! ah, Monsieur!" she said, half
+angrily, half plaintively, "I see that my guardian knew you better than
+I did.  Never mind; I will not reproach.  Thou halt the right to despise
+me."
+
+"Pardon! I did not mean to offend thee," said Gustave, somewhat
+disconcerted.  "But own that thy story is strange; and this guardian, who
+knows me better than thou--does he know me at all?  Didst thou speak to
+him of me?"
+
+"How could I help it?  He says that this terrible war, in which he takes
+an active part, makes his life uncertain from day to day.  He wished to
+complete the trust bequeathed to him by seeing me safe in the love of
+some worthy man who"--she paused for a moment with an expression of
+compressed anguish, and then hurried on--"who would recognise what was
+good in me,--would never reproach me for--for--the past.  I then said
+that my heart was thine: I could never marry any one but thee."
+
+"Marry me," faltered Gustave--"marry!"
+
+"And," continued the girl, not heeding his interruption, "he said thou
+wert not the husband he would choose for me: that thou wert not--no, I
+cannot wound thee by repeating what he said unkindly, unjustly.  He bade
+me think of thee no more.  I said again, that is impossible."
+
+"But," resumed Rameau, with an affected laugh, "why think of anything so
+formidable as marriage?  Thou lovest me, and--"  He approached again,
+seeking to embrace her.  She recoiled.  "No, Gustave, no.  I have sworn
+solemnly by the memory of my lost mother--O--that I will never sin again.
+I will never be to thee other than thy friend--or thy wife."
+
+Before Gustave could reply to these words, which took him wholly by
+surprise, there was a ring at the outer door, and the old bonne ushered
+in Victor de Mauleon.  He halted at the threshold, and his brow
+contracted.
+
+"So you have already broken faith with me, Mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, Monsieur, I have not broken faith," cried Julie; passionately.
+"I told you that I would not seek to find out Monsieur Rameau.  I did not
+seek, but I met him unexpectedly.  I owed to him an explanation.  I
+invited him here to give that explanation.  Without it, what would he
+have thought of me?  Now he may go, and I will never admit him again
+without your sanction."
+
+The Vicomte turned his stern look upon Gustave, who though, as we know,
+not wanting in personal courage, felt cowed by his false position; and
+his eye fell, quailed before De Mauleon's gaze.
+
+"Leave us for a few minutes alone, Mademoiselle," said the Vicomte.
+"Nay, Julie," he added, in softened tones, "fear nothing.  I, too, owe
+explanation--friendly explanation--to M. Rameau."
+
+With his habitual courtesy towards women, he extended his hand to Julie,
+and led her from the room.  Then, closing the door, he seated himself,
+and made a sign to Gustave to do the same.
+
+"Monsieur," said De Mauleon, "excuse me if I detain you.  A very few
+words will suffice for our present interview.  I take it for granted that
+Mademoiselle has told you that she is no child of Madame Surville's: that
+her own mother bequeathed her to my protection and guardianship with a
+modest fortune which is at my disposal to give or withhold.  The little I
+have seen already of Mademoiselle impresses me with sincere interest in
+her fate.  I look with compassion on what she may have been in the past;
+I anticipate with hope what she may be in the future.  I do not ask you
+to see her in either with my eyes.  I say frankly that it is my
+intention, and I may add, my resolve, that the ward thus left to my
+charge shall be henceforth safe from the temptations that have seduced
+her poverty, her inexperience, her vanity, if you will, but have not yet
+corrupted her heart. _Bref_, I must request you to give me your word of
+honour that you will hold no further communication with her.  I can allow
+no sinister influence to stand between her fate and honour."
+
+"You speak well and nobly, M. le Vicomte," said Rameau, "and I give the
+promise you exact."  He added, feelingly: "It is true her heart has never
+been corrupted that is good, affectionate, unselfish as a child's. _J'ai
+l'honneur de vous saluer_, M. le Vicomte."
+
+He bowed with a dignity unusual to him, and tears were in his eyes as he
+passed by De Mauleon and gained the anteroom.  There a side-door suddenly
+opened, and Julie's face, anxious, eager, looked forth.
+
+Gustave paused: "Adieu, Mademoiselle!  Adieu, though we may never meet
+again,--though our fates divide us,--believe me that I shall ever cherish
+your memory--and--"
+
+The girl interrupted him, impulsively seizing his arm, and looking him in
+the face with a wild fixed stare.  "Hush! dost thou mean to say that we
+are parted,--parted forever?"
+
+"Alas!" said Gustave, "what option is before us?  Your guardian rightly
+forbids my visits; and even were I free to offer you my hand, you
+yourself say that I am not a suitor he would approve."
+
+Julie turned her eyes towards De Mauleon, who, following Gustave into the
+ante-room, stood silent and impassive, leaning against the wall.
+
+He now understood and replied to the pathetic appeal in the girl's eyes.
+
+"My young ward," he said, "M. Rameau expresses himself with propriety and
+truth.  Suffer him to depart.  He belongs to the former life; reconcile
+yourself to the new."
+
+He advanced to take her hand, making a sign to Gustave to depart.  But as
+he approached Julie, she uttered a weak piteous wail, and fell at his
+feet senseless.  De Mauleon raised and carried her into her room, where
+he left her to the care of the old bonne.  On re-entering the anteroom,
+he found Gustave still lingering by the outer door.  "You will pardon me,
+Monsieur," he said to the Vicomte, "but in fact I feel so uneasy, so
+unhappy.  Has she--?  You see, you see that there is danger to her
+health, perhaps to her reason, in so abrupt a separation, so cruel a
+rupture between us.  Let me call again, or I may not have strength to
+keep my promise."
+
+De Mauleon remained a few minutes musing.  Then he said in a whisper,
+"Come back into the salon.  Let us talk frankly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+"M. Rameau," said De Mauleon, when the two men had reseated themselves in
+the salon, "I will honestly say that my desire is to rid myself as soon
+as I can of the trust of guardian to this young lady.  Playing as I do
+with fortune, my only stake against her favours is my life.  I feel as if
+it were my duty to see that Mademoiselle is not left alone and friendless
+in the world at my decease.  I have in my mind for her a husband that I
+think in every way suitable: a handsome and brave young fellow in my
+battalion, of respectable birth, without any living relations to consult
+as to his choice.  I have reason to believe that if Julie married him,
+she need never fear as a reproach to her antecedents.  Her dot would
+suffice to enable him to realise his own wish of a country town in
+Normandy.  And in that station, Paris and its temptations would soon pass
+from the poor child's thoughts, as an evil dream.  But I cannot dispose
+of her hand without her own consent; and if she is to be reasoned out of
+her fancy for you, I have no time to devote to the task.  I come to the
+point,  You are not the man I would choose for her husband.  But,
+evidently, you are the man she would choose.  Are you disposed to marry
+her?  You hesitate, very naturally; I have no right to demand an
+immediate answer to a question so serious.  Perhaps you will think over
+it, and let me know in a day or two?  I take it for granted that if you
+were, as I heard, engaged before the siege to marry the Signora Cicogna,
+that engagement is annulled?"
+
+"Why take it for granted?" asked Gustave, perplexed.  "Simply because I
+find you here.  Nay, spare explanations and excuses.  I quite understand
+that you were invited to come.  But a man solemnly betrothed to a
+_mademoiselle_ like the Signora Cicogna, in a time of such dire calamity
+and peril, could scarcely allow himself to be tempted to accept the
+invitation of one so beautiful, and so warmly attached to him, as is
+Mademoiselle Julie; and on witnessing the passionate strength of that
+attachment, say that he cannot keep a promise not to repeat his visits.
+But if I mistake, and you are still betrothed to the Signorina, of course
+all discussion is at an end."
+
+Gustave hung his head in some shame, and in much bewildered doubt.
+
+The practised observer of men's characters, and of shifting phases of
+mind, glanced at the, poor poet's perturbed countenance with a half-smile
+of disdain.
+
+"It is for you to judge how far the very love to you so ingenuously
+evinced by my ward--how far the reasons against marriage with one whose
+antecedents expose her to reproach--should influence one of your advanced
+opinions upon social ties.  Such reasons do not appear to have with
+artists the same weight they have with the bourgeoisie.  I have but to
+add that the husband of Julie will receive with her hand a dot of nearly
+120,000 francs; and I have reason to believe that that fortune will be
+increased--how much, I cannot guess-when the cessation of the siege will
+allow communication with England.  One word more.  I should wish to rank
+the husband of my ward in the number of my friends.  If he did not oppose
+the political opinions with which I identify my own career, I should be
+pleased to make any rise in the world achieved by me assist to the
+raising of himself.  But my opinions, as during the time we were
+brought together you were made aware, are those of a practical man
+of the world, and have nothing in common with Communists, Socialists,
+Internationalists, or whatever sect would place the aged societies of
+Europe in Medea's caldron of youth.  At a moment like the present,
+fanatics and dreamers so abound that the number of such sinners will
+necessitate a general amnesty when order is restored.  What a poet so
+young as you may have written or said at such a time will be readily
+forgotten and forgiven a year or two hence, provided he does not put his
+notions into violent action.  But if you choose to persevere in the views
+you now advocate, so be it.  They will not make poor Julie less a
+believer in your wisdom and genius.  Only they will separate you from me,
+and a day may come when I should have the painful duty of ordering you to
+be shot--_Die meliora_.  Think over all I have thus frankly said.  Give
+me your answer within forty-eight hours; and meanwhile hold no
+communication with my ward.  I have the honour to wish you good-day."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+The short grim day was closing when Gustave, quitting Julie's apartment,
+again found himself in the streets.  His thoughts were troubled and
+confused.  He was the more affected by Julie's impassioned love for him,
+by the contrast with Isaura's words and manner in their recent interview.
+His own ancient fancy for the "Ondine of Paris" became revived by the
+difficulties between their ancient intercourse which her unexpected
+scruples and De Mauleon's guardianship interposed.  A witty writer thus
+defines _une passion, "_une caprice inflamme par des obstacles_."  In the
+ordinary times of peace, Gustave, handsome, aspiring to reputable
+position in the _beau monde_, would not have admitted any considerations
+to compromise his station by marriage with a _fagurante_.  But now the
+wild political doctrines he had embraced separated his ambition from that
+_beau monde_, and combined it with ascendancy over the revolutionists of
+the populace--a direction which he must abandon if he continued his suit
+to Isaura.  Then, too, the immediate possession of Julie's dot was not
+without temptation to a man who was so fond of his personal comforts, and
+who did not see where to turn for a dinner, if, obedient to Isaura's
+"prejudices," he abandoned his profits as a writer in the revolutionary
+press.  The inducements for withdrawal from the cause he had espoused,
+held out to him with so haughty a coldness by De Mauleon, were not wholly
+without force, though they irritated his self-esteem.  He was dimly aware
+of the Vicomte's masculine talents for public life; and the high
+reputation he had already acquired among military authorities, and even
+among experienced and thoughtful civilians, had weight upon Gustave's
+impressionable temperament.  But though De Mauleon's implied advice here
+coincided in much with the tacit compact he had made with Isaura, it
+alienated him more from Isaura herself, for Isaura did not bring to him
+the fortune which would enable him to suspend his lucubrations, watch the
+turn of events, and live at ease in the meanwhile; and the dot to be
+received with De Mauleon's ward had those advantages.
+
+While thus meditating Gustave turned into one of the cantines still open,
+to brighten his intellect with a _petit verre_, and there he found the
+two colleagues in the extinct Council of Ten, Paul Grimm and Edgar
+Ferrier.  With the last of these revolutionists Gustave had become
+intimately _lie_.  They wrote in the same journal, and he willingly
+accepted a distraction from his self-conflict which Edgar offered him in
+a dinner at the cafe Riche, which still offered its hospitalities at no
+exorbitant price.  At this repast, as the drink circulated, Gustave waxed
+confidential.  He longed, poor youth, for an adviser.  Could he marry a
+girl who had been a ballet-dancer, and who had come into an unexpected
+heritage?  "_Es-tu fou d'en douter_?" cried Edgar.  "What a sublime
+occasion to manifest thy scorn of the miserable banalities of the
+bourgeoisie!  It will but increase thy moral power over the people.  And
+then think of the money.  What an aid to the cause!  What a capital for
+the launch!--journal all thine own!  Besides, when our principles
+triumph--as triumph they must--what would be marriage but a brief and
+futile ceremony, to be broken the moment thou hast cause to complain of
+thy wife or chafe at the bond?  Only get the dot into thine own hands.
+_L'amour passe--reste la cassette_."
+
+Though there was enough of good in the son of Madame Rameau to revolt at
+the precise words in which the counsel was given, still, as the fumes of
+the punch yet more addled his brains, the counsel itself was acceptable;
+and in that sort of maddened fury which intoxication produces in some
+excitable temperaments, as Gustave reeled home that night leaning on the
+arm of stouter Edgar Ferrier, he insisted on going out of his way to pass
+the house in which Isaura lived, and, pausing under her window, gasped
+out some verses of a wild song, then much in vogue among the votaries of
+Felix Pyat, in which everything that existent society deems sacred was
+reviled in the grossest ribaldry.  Happily Isaura's ear heard it not.
+The girl was kneeling by her bedside absorbed in prayer.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+Three days after the evening thus spent by Gustave Rameau, Isaura was
+startled by a visit from M. de Mauleon.  She had not seen him since the
+commencement of the siege, and she did not recognise him at first glance
+in his military uniform.
+
+"I trust you will pardon my intrusion, Mademoiselle," he said, in the low
+sweet voice habitual to him in his gentler moods, "but I thought it
+became me to announce to you the decease of one who, I fear, did not
+discharge with much kindness the duties her connection with you imposed.
+Your father's second wife, afterwards Madame Selby, is no more.  She died
+some days since in a convent to which she had retired."
+
+Isaura had no cause to mourn the dead, but she felt a shock in the
+suddenness of this information; and in that sweet spirit of womanly
+compassion which entered so largely into her character, and made a part
+of her genius itself, she murmured tearfully, "The poor Signora!  Why
+could I not have been with her in illness?  She might then have learned
+to love me.  And she died in a convent, you say?  Ah, her religion was
+then sincere!  Her end was peaceful?"
+
+"Let us not doubt that, Mademoiselle.  Certainly she lived to regret any
+former errors, and her last thought was directed towards such atonement
+as might be in her power.  And it is that desire of atonement which now
+strangely mixes me up, Mademoiselle, in your destinies.  In that desire
+for atonement, she left to my charge, as a kinsman distant indeed, but
+still, perhaps, the nearest with whom she was personally acquainted--a
+young ward.  In accepting that trust, I find myself strangely compelled
+to hazard the risk of offending you."
+
+"Offending me?  How?  Pray speak openly."
+
+"In so doing, I must utter the name of Gustave Rameau."
+
+Isaura turned pale and recoiled, but she did not speak.  "Did he inform
+me rightly that, in the last interview with him three days ago, you
+expressed a strong desire that the engagement between him and yourself
+should cease; and that you only, and with reluctance, suspended your
+rejection of the suit he had pressed on you, in consequence of his
+entreaties, and of certain assurances as to the changed direction of the
+talents of which we will assume that he is possessed?"
+
+"Well, well, Monsieur," exclaimed Isaura, her whole face brightening;
+"and you come on the part of Gustave Rameau to say that on reflection he
+does not hold me to our engagement--that in honour and in conscience I am
+free?"
+
+"I see," answered De Mauleon, smiling, "that I am pardoned already.  It
+would not pain you if such were my instructions in the embassy I
+undertake?"
+
+"Pain me?  No.  But--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"Must he persist in a course which will break his mother's heart, and
+make his father deplore the hour that he was born?  Have you influence
+over him, M. de Mauleon?  If so, will you not exert it for his good?"
+
+"You interest yourself still in his fate, Mademoiselle?"
+
+"How can I do otherwise?  Did I not consent to share it when my heart
+shrank from the thought of our union?  And now when, if I understand you
+rightly, I am free, I cannot but think of what was best in him."
+
+"Alas!  Mademoiselle, he is but one of many--a spoilt child of that
+Circe, imperial Paris.  Everywhere I look around, I see but corruption.
+It was hidden by the halo which corruption itself engenders.  The halo
+is gone, the corruption is visible.  Where is the old French manhood?
+Banished from the heart, it comes out only at the tongue.  Were our
+deeds like our words, Prussia would beg on her knee to be a province of
+France. Gustave is the fit poet for this generation.  Vanity--desire to
+be known for something, no matter what, no matter by whom--that is the
+Parisian's leading motive power;--orator, soldier, poet, all alike.
+Utterers of fine phrases; despising knowledge, and toil, and discipline;
+railing against the Germans as barbarians, against their generals as
+traitors; against God for not taking their part.  What can be done to
+weld this mass of hollow bubbles into the solid form of a nation--the
+nation it affects to be?  What generation can be born out of the unmanly
+race, inebriate with brag and absinthe?  Forgive me this tirade; I have
+been reviewing the battalion I command.  As for Gustave Rameau,--if we
+survive the siege, and see once more a Government that can enforce
+order, and a public that will refuse renown for balderdash,--I should
+not be surprised if Gustave Rameau were among the prettiest imitators of
+Lamartine's early Meditations.  Had he been born under Louis XIV. how
+loyal he would have been!  What sacred tragedies in the style of Athalie
+he would have written, in the hope of an audience at Versailles!  But I
+detain you from the letter I was charged to deliver you.  I have done so
+purposely, that I might convince myself that you welcome that release
+which your too delicate sense of honour shrank too long from demanding."
+
+Here he took forth and placed a letter in Isaura's hand; and, as if to
+allow her to read it unobserved, retired to the window recess.
+
+Isaura glanced over the letter.  It ran thus:
+
+"I feel that it was only to your compassion that I owed your consent to
+my suit.  Could I have doubted that before, your words when we last met
+sufficed to convince me.  In my selfish pain at the moment, I committed a
+great wrong.  I would have held you bound to a promise from which you
+desired to be free.  Grant me pardon for that; and for all the faults by
+which I have offended you.  In cancelling our engagement, let me hope
+that I may rejoice in your friendship, your remembrance of me, some
+gentle and kindly thought.  My life may henceforth pass out of contact
+with yours; but you will ever dwell in my heart, an image pure and holy
+as the saints in whom you may well believe-they are of your own kindred."
+
+"May I convey to Gustave Rameau any verbal reply to his letter?" asked De
+Mauleon, turning as she replaced the letter on the table.
+
+"Only my wishes for his welfare.  It might wound him if I added, my
+gratitude for the generous manner in which he has interpreted my heart,
+and acceded to its desires."
+
+"Mademoiselle, accept my congratulations.  My condolences are for the
+poor girl left to my guardianship.  Unhappily she loves this man; and
+there are reasons why I cannot withhold my consent to her union with him,
+should he demand it, now that, in the letter remitted to you, he has
+accepted your dismissal.  If I can keep him out of all the follies and
+all the evils into which he suffers his vanity to mislead his reason,
+I will do so;--would I might say, only in compliance with your
+compassionate injunctions.  But henceforth the infatuation of my ward
+compels me to take some interest in his career.  Adieu, Mademoiselle!
+I have no fear for your happiness now."
+
+Left alone, Isaura stood as one transfigured.  All the bloom of her youth
+seemed suddenly restored.  Round her red lips the dimples opened,
+countless mirrors of one happy smile.  "I am free, I am free," she
+murmured--"joy, joy!" and she passed from the room to seek the Venosta,
+singing clear, singing loud, as a bird that escapes from the cage and
+warbles to the heaven it regains the blissful tale of its release.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+In proportion to the nearer roar of the besiegers' cannon, and the
+sharper gripe of famine within the walls, the Parisians seemed to
+increase their scorn for the skill of the enemy, and their faith in the
+sanctity of the capital.  All false news was believed as truth; all
+truthful news abhorred as falsehood.  Listen to the groups round the
+cafes.  "The Prussian funds have fallen three per cent. at Berlin," says
+a threadbare ghost of the Bourse (he had been a clerk of Louvier's).
+"Ay," cries a National Guard, "read extracts from La Liberte.  The
+barbarians are in despair.  Nancy is threatened, Belfort is freed.
+Bourbaki is invading Baden.  Our fleets are pointing their cannon upon
+Hamburg.  Their country endangered, their retreat cut off, the sole hope
+of Bismarck and his trembling legions is to find a refuge in Paris.  The
+increasing fury of the bombardment is a proof of their despair."
+
+"In that case," whispered Savarin to De Breze, "suppose we send a flag of
+truce to Versailles with a message from Trochu that, on disgorging their
+conquests, ceding the left bank of the Rhine, and paying the expenses of
+the war, Paris, ever magnanimous to the vanquished; will allow the
+Prussians to retire."
+
+"The Prussians!  Retire!" cried Edgar Ferrier, catching the last word and
+glancing fiercely at Savarin.  "What Prussian spy have we among us?  Not
+one of the barbarians shall escape.  We have but to dismiss the traitors
+who have usurped the government, proclaim the Commune and the rights of
+labour, and we give birth to a Hercules that even in its cradle can
+strangle the vipers."
+
+Edgar Ferrier was the sole member of his political party among the group
+which he thus addressed; but such was the terror which the Communists
+already began to inspire among the bourgeoisie that no one volunteered a
+reply.
+
+Savarin linked his arm in De Breze's, and prudently drew him off.
+
+"I suspect," said the former, "that we shall soon have worse calamities
+to endure than the Prussian obus and the black loaf.  The Communists will
+have their day."
+
+"I shall be in my grave before then," said De Breze, in hollow accents.
+"It is twenty-four hours since I spent my last fifty sous on the purchase
+of a rat, and I burnt the legs of my bedstead for the fuel by which that
+quadruped was roasted."
+
+"Entre nous, my poor friend, I am much in the same condition," said
+Savarin, with a ghastly attempt at his old pleasant laugh.  "See how I am
+shrunken!  My wife would be unfaithful to the Savarin of her dreams if
+she accepted a kiss from the slender gallant you behold in me.  But I
+thought you were in the National Guard, and therefore had not to vanish
+into air."
+
+"I was a National Guard, but I could not stand the hardships, and being
+above the age, I obtained my exemption.  As to pay, I was then too proud
+to claim my wage of 1 franc 25 centimes.  I should not be too proud now.
+Ah, blessed be Heaven! here comes Lemercier; he owes me a dinner--he
+shall pay it."
+
+"Bon jour, my dear Frederic! How handsome you look in your kepi!  Your
+uniform is brilliantly fresh from the soil of powder. What a contrast to
+the tatterdemalions of the Line!"
+
+"I fear," said Lemercier, ruefully, "that my costume will not look so
+well a day or two hence.  I have just had news that will no doubt seem
+very glorious--in the news papers.  But then newspapers are not subjected
+to cannonballs."
+
+"What do you mean?" answered De Breze.
+
+"I met, as I emerged from my apartment a few minutes ago, that fire-
+eater, Victor de Mauleon, who always contrives to know what passes at
+headquarters.  He told me that preparations are being made for a great
+sortie.  Most probably the announcement will appear in a proclamation
+tomorrow, and our troops march forth to-morrow night.  The National Guard
+(fools and asses who have been yelling out for decisive action) are to
+have their wish, and to be placed in the van of battle,--amongst the
+foremost, the battalion in which I am enrolled.  Should this be our last
+meeting on earth, say that Frederic Lemercier has finished his part in
+life with eclat."
+
+"Gallant friend," said De Breze, feebly seizing him by the arm, "if it be
+true that thy mortal career is menaced, die as thou hast lived.  An
+honest man leaves no debt unpaid.  Thou owest me a dinner."
+
+"Alas! ask of me what is possible.  I will give thee three, however, if I
+survive and regain my _rentes_.  But today I have not even a mouse to
+share with Fox."
+
+"Fox lives then?" cried De Breze, with sparkling hungry eyes.
+
+"Yes.  At present he is making the experiment how long an animal can live
+without food."
+
+"Have mercy upon him, poor beast!  Terminate his pangs by a noble death.
+Let him save thy friends and thyself from starving.  For myself alone I
+do not plead; I am but an amateur in polite literature.  But Savarin, the
+illustrious Savarin,--in criticism the French Longinus--in poetry the
+Parisian Horace--in social life the genius of gaiety in pantaloons,--
+contemplate his attenuated frame!  Shall he perish for want of food while
+thou hast such superfluity in thy larder?  I appeal to thy heart, thy
+conscience, thy patriotism.  What, in the eyes of France, are a thousand
+Foxes compared to a single Savarin?"
+
+"At this moment," sighed Savarin, "I could swallow anything, however
+nauseous, even thy flattery, De Breze.  But, my friend Frederic, thou
+goest into battle--what will become of Fox if thou fall?  Will he not be
+devoured by strangers?  Surely it were a sweeter thought to his faithful
+heart to furnish a repast to thy friends?--his virtues acknowledged, his
+memory blest!"
+
+"Thou dost look very lean, my poor Savarin!  And how hospitable thou wert
+when yet plump!" said Frederic, pathetically.  "And certainly, if I live,
+Fox will starve; if I am slain, Fox will be eaten.  Yet, poor Fox, dear
+Fox, who lay on my breast when I was frostbitten.  No; I have not the
+heart to order him to the spit for you.  Urge it not."
+
+"I will save thee that pang," cried De Breze.  "We are close by thy
+rooms.  Excuse me for a moment: I will run in and instruct thy bonne."
+
+So saying, he sprang forward with an elasticity of step which no one
+could have anticipated from his previous languor.  Frederic would have
+followed, but Savarin clung to him, whimpering: "Stay; I shall fall like
+an empty sack, without the support of thine arm, young hero.  Pooh! of
+course De Breze is only joking--a pleasant joke.  Hist! a secret: he has
+moneys, and means to give us once more a dinner at his own cost,
+pretending that we dine on thy dog.  He was planning this when thou
+camest up.  Let him have his joke, and we shall have a _festin de
+Balthazar_."
+
+"Hein!" said Frederic, doubtfully; "thou art sure he has no designs upon
+Fox?"
+
+"Certainly not, except in regaling us.  Donkey is not bad, but it is 14
+francs a pound.  A pullet is excellent, but it is 30 francs.  Trust to De
+Breze; we shall have donkey and pullet, and Fox shall feast upon the
+remains."
+
+Before Frederic could reply, the two men were jostled and swept on by a
+sudden rush of a noisy crowd in their rear.  They could but distinguish
+the words--Glorious news--victory--Faidherbe--Chanzy.  But these words
+were sufficient to induce them to join willingly in the rush.  They
+forgot their hunger; they forget Fox.  As they were hurried on, they
+learned that there was a report of a complete defeat of the Prussians by
+Faidherbe near Amiens, of a still more decided one on the Loire by
+Chanzy.  These generals, with armies flushed with triumph, were pressing
+on towards Paris to accelerate the destruction of the hated Germans.  How
+the report arose no one exactly knew.
+
+All believed it, and were making their way to the Hotel de Ville to hear
+it formally confirmed.
+
+Alas! before, they got there they were met by another crowd returning,
+dejected but angry.  No such news had reached the Government.  Chanzy and
+Faidherbe were no doubt fighting bravely,--with every probability of
+success; but--
+
+The Parisian imagination required no more.  "We should always be
+defeating the enemy," said Savarin, "if there were not always a but;" and
+his audience, who, had he so expressed himself ten minutes before, would
+have torn him to pieces, now applauded the epigram; and with execrations
+on Trochu, mingled with many a peal of painful sarcastic laughter,
+vociferated and dispersed.
+
+As the two friends sauntered back towards the part of the Boulevards on
+which De Breze had parted company with them, Savarin quitted Lemercier
+suddenly, and crossed the street to accost a small party of two ladies
+and two men who were on their way to the Madeleine.  While he was
+exchanging a few words with them, a young couple, arm in arm, passed by
+Lemercier,--the man in the uniform of the National Guard-uniform as
+unsullied as Frederic's, but with as little of a military air as can well
+be conceived.  His gait was slouching; his head bent downwards.  He did
+not seem to listen to his companion, who was talking with quickness and
+vivacity, her fair face radiant with smiles.  Lemercier looked at them as
+they passed by.  "Sur mon ame," muttered Frederic to himself, "surely
+that is la belle Julie; and she has got back her truant poet at last."
+
+While Lemercier thus soliloquised, Gustave, still looking down, was led
+across the street by his fair companion, and into the midst of the little
+group with whom Savarin had paused to speak.  Accidentally brushing
+against Savarin himself, he raised his eyes with a start, about to mutter
+some conventional apology, when Julie felt the arm on which she leant
+tremble nervously.  Before him stood Isaura, the Countess de Vandemar by
+her side; her two other companions, Raoul and the Abbe Vertpre, a step or
+two behind.
+
+Gustave uncovered, bowed low, and stood mute and still for a moment,
+paralysed by surprise and the chill of a painful shame.
+
+Julie's watchful eyes, following his, fixed themselves on the same face.
+On the instant she divined the truth.  She beheld her to whom she had
+owed months of jealous agony, and over whom, poor child, she thought she
+had achieved a triumph.  But the girl's heart was so instinctively good
+that the sense of triumph was merged in a sense of compassion.  Her rival
+had lost Gustave.  To Julie the loss of Gustave was the loss of all that
+makes life worth having.  On her part, Isaura was moved not only by the
+beauty of Julie's countenance, but still more by the childlike
+ingenuousness of its expression.
+
+So, for the first time in their lives, met the child and the stepchild of
+Louise Duval.  Each so deserted, each so left alone and inexperienced
+amid the perils of the world, with fates so different, typifying orders
+of womanhood so opposed.  Isaura was naturally the first to break the
+silence that weighed like a sensible load on all present.
+
+She advanced towards Rameau, with sincere kindness in her look and tone.
+
+"Accept my congratulations," she said, with a grave smile.  "Your mother
+informed me last evening of your nuptials.  Without doubt I see Madame
+Gustave Rameau;"--and she extended her hand towards Julie.  The poor
+Ondine shrank back for a moment, blushing up to her temples.  It was the
+first hand which a woman of spotless character had extended to her since
+she had lost the protection of Madame Surville.  She touched it timidly,
+humbly, then drew her bridegroom on; and with head more downcast than
+Gustave, passed through the group without a word.
+
+She did not speak to Gustave till they were out of sight and hearing of
+those they had left.  Then, pressing his arm passionately, she said: "And
+that is the demoiselle thou halt resigned for me!  Do not deny it.  I am
+so glad to have seen her; it has done me so much good.  How it has
+deepened, purified, my love for thee!  I have but one return to make; but
+that is my whole life.  Thou shalt never have cause to blame me--never--
+never!"
+
+Savarin looked very grave and thoughtful when he rejoined Lemercier.
+
+"Can I believe my eyes?" said Frederic.  "Surely that was Julie Caumartin
+leaning on Gustave Rameau's arm!  And had he the assurance, so
+accompanied, to salute Madame de Vandemar, and Mademoiselle Cicogna, to
+whom I understood he was affianced?  Nay, did I not see Mademoiselle
+shake hands with the Ondine? or am I under one of the illusions which
+famine is said to engender in the brain?"
+
+"I have not strength now to answer all these interrogatives.  I have a
+story to tell; but I keep it for dinner.  Let us hasten to thy apartment.
+De Breze is doubtless there waiting us."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+Unprescient of the perils that awaited him, absorbed in the sense of
+existing discomfort, cold, and hunger, Fox lifted his mournful visage
+from his master's dressing-gown, in which he had encoiled his shivering
+frame, on the entrance of De Breze and the concierge of the house in
+which Lemercier had his apartment.  Recognising the Vicomte as one of his
+master's acquaintances, he checked the first impulse that prompted him to
+essay a feeble bark, and permitted himself, with a petulant whine, to be
+extracted from his covering, and held in the arms of the murderous
+visitor.
+
+"_Dieu des dieux_!" ejaculated De Breze, "how light the poor beast has
+become!"  Here he pinched the sides and thighs of the victim.  "Still,"
+he said, "there is some flesh yet on these bones.  You may grill the
+paws, _fricassee_ the shoulders, and roast the rest.  The _rognons_ and
+the head accept for yourself as a perquisite."  Here he transferred Fox
+to the arms of the concierge, adding, "_Vite au besogne, mon ami_."
+
+"Yes, Monsieur.  I must be quick about it while my wife is absent.  She
+has a _faiblesse_ for the brute.  He must be on the spit before she
+returns."
+
+"Be it so; and on the table in an hour--five o'clock precisely--I am
+famished."
+
+The concierge disappeared with Fox.  De Breze then amused himself by
+searching into Frederic's cupboards and buffets, from which he produced a
+cloth and utensils necessary for the repast.  These he arranged with
+great neatness, and awaited in patience the moment of participation in
+the feast.
+
+The hour of five had struck before Savarin and Frederio entered the
+salon; and at their sight De Breze dashed to the staircase and called out
+to the concierge to serve the dinner.
+
+Frederic, though unconscious of the Thyestean nature of the banquet,
+still looked round for the dog; and, not perceiving him, began to call
+out, "Fox! Fox! where hast thou hidden thyself?"
+
+"Tranquillise yourself," said De Breze.  "Do not suppose that I have not
+.  .  .  ."
+
+NOTE BY THE AUTHOR'S SON.--[See also Prefatory Note]--The hand that wrote
+thus far has left unwritten the last scene of the tragedy of poor Fox.
+In the deep where Prospero has dropped his wand are now irrevocably
+buried the humour and the pathos of this cynophagous banquet.  One detail
+of it, however, which the author imparted to his son, may here be faintly
+indicated.  Let the sympathising reader recognise all that is dramatic in
+the conflict between hunger and affection; let him recall to mind the
+lachrymose loving-kindness of his own post-prandial emotions after
+blissfully breaking some fast, less mercilessly prolonged, we will hope,
+than that of these besieged banqueters, and then, though unaided by the
+fancy which conceived so quaint a situation, he may perhaps imagine what
+tearful tenderness would fill the eyes of the kind-hearted Frederic, as
+they contemplate the well-picked bones of his sacrificed favourite on the
+plate before him; which he pushes away, sighing, "Ah, poor Fox!  how he
+would have enjoyed those bones!"
+
+The chapter immediately following this one also remains unfinished.  It
+was not intended to close the narrative thus left uncompleted; but of
+those many and so various works which have not unworthily associated with
+almost every department of literature the name of a single English
+writer, it is CHAPTER THE LAST.  Had the author lived to finish it, he
+would doubtless have added to his Iliad of the Siege of Paris its most
+epic episode, by here describing the mighty combat between those two
+princes of the Parisian Bourse, the magnanimous Duplessis and the
+redoubtable Louvier.  Amongst the few other pages of the book which have
+been left unwritten, we must also reckon with regret some pages
+descriptive of the reconciliation between Graham Vane and Isaura Cicogna;
+but, fortunately for the satisfaction of every reader who may have
+followed thus far the fortunes of Die Parisians, all that our curiosity
+is chiefly interested to learn has been recorded in the Envoi, which was
+written before the completion of the novel.
+
+We know not, indeed, what has become of these two Parisian types of a
+Beauty not of Holiness, the poor vain Poet of the Pave, and the good-
+hearted Ondine of the Gutter.  It is obvious, from the absence of all
+allusion to them in Lemercier's letter to Vane, that they had passed out
+of the narrative before that letter was written.  We must suppose the
+catastrophe of their fates to have been described, in some preceding
+chapter, by the author himself; who would assuredly not have left 141.
+Gustave Rameau in permanent pos session of his ill-merited and ill-
+ministered fortune.  That French representative of the appropriately
+popular poetry of modern ideas, which prefers "the roses and raptures of
+vice" to "the lilies and languors of virtue," cannot have been
+irredeemably reconciled by the sweet savours of the domestic pot-au jeu,
+even when spiced with pungent whiffs of repudiated disreputability, to
+any selfish betrayal of the cause of universal social emancipation from
+the personal proprieties.  If poor Julie Caumartin has perished in the
+siege of Paris, with all the grace of a self-wrought redemption still
+upon her, we shall doubtless deem her fate a happier one than any she
+could have found in prolonged existence as Madame Rameau;  and a certain
+modicum of this world's good things will, in that case, have been rescued
+for worthier employment by Graham Vane.  To that assurance nothing but
+Lemercier's description of the fate of Victor de Mauleon (which will be
+found in the Envoi) need be added for the satisfaction of our sense of
+poetic justice and if on the mimic stage, from which they now
+disappear, all these puppets have rightly played their parts in the drama
+of an empire's fall, each will have helped to "point a moral" as well as
+to "adorn a tale." _Valete et plaudite_!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE LAST.
+
+Among the refugees which the _convoi_ from Versailles disgorged on the
+Paris station were two men, who, in pushing through the crowd, came
+suddenly face to face with each other.
+
+"Aha!  Bon jour, M. Duplessis," said a burly voice.  "Bon jour, M.
+Louvier," replied Duplessis.
+
+"How long have you left Bretagne?"
+
+"On the day that the news of the armistice reached it, in order to be
+able to enter Paris the first day its gates were open.  And you--where
+have you been?"
+
+"In London."
+
+"Ah! in London!" said Duplessis, paling.  "I knew I had an enemy
+there."
+
+"Enemy! I?  Bah! my dear Monsieur.  What makes you think me your enemy?"
+
+"I remember your threats."
+
+"_A propos_ of Rochebriant.  By the way, when would it be convenient to
+you and the dear Marquis to let me into prompt possession of that
+property?  You can no longer pretend to buy it as a _dot_ for
+Mademoiselle Valerie."
+
+"I know not that yet.  It is true that all the financial operations
+attempted by my agent in London have failed.  But I may recover myself
+yet, now that I re-enter Paris.  In the mean time, we have still six
+months before us; for, as you will find--if you know it not already--the
+interest due to you has been lodged with Messrs. ---- of ------, and you
+cannot foreclose, even if the, law did not take into consideration the
+national calamities as between debtor and creditor."
+
+"Quite true.  But if you cannot buy the property it must pass into my
+hands in a very short time.  And you and the Marquis had better come to
+an amicable arrangement with me.  Apropos, I read in the Times newspaper
+that Alain was among the wounded in the sortie of December."
+
+"Yes; we learnt that through a pigeon-post.  We were afraid .  .  .  ."
+
+
+
+
+L'ENVOI.
+
+The intelligent reader will perceive that the story I relate is virtually
+closed with the preceding chapter; though I rejoice to think that what
+may be called its plot does not find its _dinoument_ amidst the crimes
+and the frenzy of the _Guerre des Communeaux_.  Fit subjects these,
+indeed, for the social annalist in times to come.  When crimes that
+outrage humanity have their motive or their excuse in principles that
+demand the demolition of all upon which the civilisation of Europe has
+its basis-worship, property, and marriage--in order to reconstruct a new
+civilisation adapted to a new humanity, it is scarcely possible for the
+serenest contemporary to keep his mind in that state of abstract
+reasoning with which Philosophy deduces from some past evil some existent
+good.  For my part, I believe that throughout the whole known history of
+mankind, even in epochs when reason is most misled and conscience most
+perverted, there runs visible, though fine and threadlike, the chain of
+destiny, which has its roots in the throne of an All-wise and an All-
+good; that in the wildest illusions by which muititudes are frenzied,
+there may be detected gleams of prophetic truths; that in the fiercest
+crimes which, like the disease of an epidemic, characterise a peculiar
+epoch under abnormal circumstances, there might be found instincts or
+aspirations towards some social virtues to be realised ages afterwards by
+happier generations, all tending to save man from despair of the future,
+were the whole society to unite for the joyless hour of his race in the
+abjuration of soul and the denial of God, because all irresistibly
+establishing that yearning towards an unseen future which is the leading
+attribute of soul, evincing the government of a divine Thought which
+evolves out of the discords of one age the harmonies of another, and, in
+the world within us as in the world without, enforces upon every
+unclouded reason the distinction between Providence and chance.
+
+The account subjoined may suffice to say all that rests to be said of
+those individuals in whose fate, apart from the events or personages that
+belong to graver history, the reader of this work may have conceived an
+interest.  It is translated from the letter of Frederic Lemercier to
+Graham Vane, dated June ----, a month after the defeat of the Communists.
+
+"Dear and distinguished Englishman, whose name I honour but fail to
+pronounce, accept my cordial thanks for your interests in such remains
+of Frederic Lemercier as yet survive the ravages of Famine, Equality,
+Brotherhood, Petroleum, and the Rights of Labour.  I did not desert my
+Paris when M. Thiers, '_parmula non bene relicta_,' led his sagacious
+friends and his valiant troops to the groves of Versailles, and confided
+to us unarmed citizens the preservation of order and property from the
+insurgents whom he left in possession of our forts and cannon.  I felt
+spellbound by the interest of the _sinistoe melodrame_, with its quick
+succession of scenic effects and the metropolis of the world for its
+stage.  Taught by experience, I did not aspire to be an actor; and even
+as a spectator, I took care neither to hiss nor applaud.  Imitating your
+happy England, I observed a strict neutrality; and, safe myself from
+danger, left my best friends to the care of the gods.
+
+"As to political questions, I dare not commit myself to a conjecture.  At
+this _rouge et noir_ table, all I can say is, that whichever card turns
+up, it is either a red or a black one.  One gamester gains for the moment
+by the loss of the other; the table eventually ruins both.
+
+"No one believes that the present form of government can last; every one
+differs as to that which can.  Raoul de Vandemar is immovably convinced
+of the restoration of the Bourbons.  Savarin is meditating a new journal
+devoted to the cause of the Count of Paris.  De Brew and the old Count de
+Passy, having in turn espoused and opposed every previous form of
+government, naturally go in for a perfectly novel experiment, and are for
+constitutional dictatorship under the Duc d'Aumale, which he is to hold
+at his own pleasure, and ultimately resign to his nephew the Count, under
+the mild title of a constitutional king;--that is, if it ever suits the
+pleasure of a dictator to depose himself.  To me this seems the wildest
+of notions.  If the Duc's administration were successful, the French
+would insist on keeping it; and if the uncle were unsuccessful, the
+nephew would not have a chance.  Duplessis retains his faith in the
+Imperial dynasty; and that Imperialist party is much stronger than it
+appears on the surface.  So many of the bourgeoisie recall with a sigh
+eighteen years of prosperous trade; so many of the military officers, so
+many of the civil officials, identify their career with the Napoleonic
+favour; and so many of the Priesthood, abhorring the Republic, always
+liable to pass into the hands of those who assail religion,--unwilling to
+admit the claim of the Orleanists, are at heart for the Empire.
+
+"But I will tell you one secret.  I and all the quiet folks like me (we
+are more numerous than any one violent faction) are willing to accept any
+form of government by which we have the best chance of keeping our coats
+on our backs.  _Liberte, Egalite, Fraternity_, are gone quite out of
+fashion; and Mademoiselle--has abandoned her great chant of the
+Marseillaise, and is drawing tears from enlightened audiences by her
+pathetic  delivery of '_O Richard!  O mon roi_!'"
+
+"Now about the other friends of whom you ask for news.
+
+"Wonders will never cease.  Louvier and Duplessis are no longer deadly
+rivals.  They have become sworn friends, and are meditating a great
+speculation in common, to commence as soon as the Prussian debt is paid
+off.  Victor de Mauleon brought about this reconciliation in a single
+interview during the brief interregnum between the Peace and the _Guerre
+des Communeaux_.  You know how sternly Louvier was bent upon seizing
+Alain de Rochebriant's estates.  Can you conceive the true cause?  Can
+you imagine it possible that a hardened money-maker like Louvier should
+ever allow himself to be actuated, one way or the other, by the romance
+of a sentimental wrong?  Yet so it was.  It seems that many years ago he
+was desperately in love with a girl who disappeared from his life, and
+whom he believed to have been seduced by the late Marquis de Rochebriant.
+It was in revenge for this supposed crime that he had made himself the
+principal mortgagee of the late Marquis; and, visiting the sins of the
+father on the son, had, under the infernal disguise of friendly interest,
+made himself sole mortgagee to Alain, upon terms apparently the most
+generous.  The demon soon showed his _griffe_, and was about to
+foreclose, when Duplessis came to Alain's relief; and Rochebriant was to
+be Valerie's dot on her marriage with Alain.  The Prussian war, of
+course, suspended all such plans, pecuniary and matrimonial.  Duplessis,
+whose resources were terribly crippled by the war, attempted operations
+in London with a view of raising the sum necessary to pay off the
+mortgage;--found himself strangely frustrated and baffled.  Louvier was
+in London, and defeated his rival's agent in every speculation.  It
+became impossible for Duplessis to redeem the mortgage.  The two men came
+to Paris with the peace.  Louvier determined both to seize the Breton
+lands and to complete the ruin of Duplessis, when he learned from De
+Mauleon that he had spent half his life in a baseless illusion; that
+Alain's father was innocent of the crime for which his son was to
+suffer;--and Victor, with that strange power over men's minds which was
+so peculiar to him, talked Louvier into mercy if not into repentance.  In
+short, the mortgage is to be paid off by instalments at the convenience
+of Duplessis.  Alain's marriage with Valerie is to take place in a few
+weeks.  The _fournisseurs_ are already gone to fit up the old chateau for
+the bride, and Louvier is invited to the wedding.
+
+"I have all this story from Alain, and from Duplessis himself.  I tell
+the tale as 'twas told to me, with all the gloss of sentiment upon its
+woof.  But between ourselves, I am too Parisian not to be sceptical as to
+the unalloyed amiability of sudden conversions.  And I suspect that
+Louvier was no longer in a condition to indulge in the unprofitable whim
+of turning rural seigneur.  He had sunk large sums and incurred great
+liabilities in the new street to be called after his name; and that
+street has been twice ravaged, first by the Prussian siege, and next by
+the _Guerre des Communeaux_; and I can detect many reasons why Louvier
+should deem it prudent not only to withdraw from the Rochebriant seizure,
+and make sure of peacefully recovering the capital lent on it, but
+establishing joint interest and quasi partnership with a financier so
+brilliant and successful as Armand Duplessis has hitherto been.
+
+"Alain himself is not quite recovered from his wound, and is now at
+Rochebriant, nursed by his aunt and Valerie.  I have promised to visit
+him next week.  Raoul de Vandemar is still at Paris with his mother,
+saying, there is no place where one Christian man can be of such service.
+The old Count declines to come back, saying there is no place where a
+philosopher can be in such danger.
+
+"I reserve as my last communication, in reply to your questions, that
+which is the gravest.  You say that you saw in the public journals brief
+notice of the assassination of Victor de Mauleon; and you ask for such
+authentic particulars as I can give of that event, and of the motives of
+the assassin.
+
+"I need not, of course, tell you how bravely the poor Vicomte behaved
+throughout the siege; but he made many enemies among the worst members of
+the National Guard by the severity of his discipline; and had he been
+caught by the mob the same day as Clement Thomas, who committed the same
+offence, would have certainly shared the fate of that general.  Though
+elected a _depute_, he remained at Paris a few days after Thiers & Co.
+left it, in the hope of persuading the party of Order, including then no
+small portion of the National Guards, to take prompt and vigorous
+measures to defend the city against the Communists.  Indignant at their
+pusillanimity, he then escaped to Versailles.  There he more than
+confirmed the high reputation he had acquired during the siege, and
+impressed the ablest public men with the belief that he was destined to
+take a very leading part in the strife of party.  When the Versailles
+troops entered Paris, he was, of course, among them in command of a
+battalion.
+
+"He escaped safe through that horrible war of barricades, though no man
+more courted danger.  He inspired his men with his own courage.  It was
+not till the revolt was quenched on the evening of the 28th May that he
+met his death.  The Versailles soldiers, naturally exasperated, were very
+prompt in seizing and shooting at once every passenger who looked like a
+foe.  Some men under De Mauleon had seized upon one of these victims, and
+were hurrying him into the next street for execution, when, catching
+sight of the Vicomte, he screamed out, 'Lebeau, save me!'
+
+"At that cry De Mauleon rushed forward, arrested his soldiers, cried,
+'This man is innocent--a harmless physician.  I answer for him.'  As he
+thus spoke, a wounded Communist, lying in the gutter amidst a heap of the
+slain, dragged himself up, reeled towards De Mauleon, plunged a knife
+between his shoulders, and dropped down dead.
+
+"The Vicomte was carried into a neighbouring house, from all the windows
+of which the tricolour was suspended; and the Medecin whom he had just
+saved from summary execution examined and dressed his wound.  The Vicomte
+lingered for more than an hour, but expired in the effort to utter some
+words, the sense of which those about him endeavoured in vain to seize.
+
+"It was from the Medecin that the name of the assassin and the motive for
+the crime were ascertained.  The _miscreant_ was a Red Republican and
+Socialist named Armand Monnier.  He had been a very skilful workman, and
+earning, as such, high wages.  But he thought fit to become an active
+revolutionary politician, first led into schemes for upsetting the world
+by the existing laws of marriage, which had inflicted on him one woman
+who ran away from him, but being still legally his wife, forbade him to
+marry another woman with whom he lived, and to whom he seems to have been
+passionately attached.
+
+"These schemes, however, he did not put into any positive practice till
+he fell in with a certain Jean Lebeau, who exercised great influence over
+him, and by whom he was admitted into one of the secret revolutionary
+societies which had for their object the overthrow of the Empire.  After
+that time his head became turned.  The fall of the Empire put an end to
+the society he had joined: Lebeau dissolved it.  During the siege Monnier
+was a sort of leader among the _ouvriers_; but as it advanced and famine
+commenced, he contracted the habit of intoxication.  His children died of
+cold and hunger.  The woman he lived with followed them to the grave.
+Then he seems to have become a ferocious madman, and to have been
+implicated in the worst crimes of the Communists.  He cherished a wild
+desire of revenge against this Jean Lebeau, to whom he attributed all his
+calamities, and by whom, he said, his brother had been shot in the sortie
+of December.
+
+"Here comes the strange part of the story.  This Jean Lebeau is alleged
+to have been one and the same person with Victor de Mauleon.  The Medecin
+I have named, and who is well known in Belleville and Montmartre as the
+Medecin des Pauvres, confesses that he belonged to the secret society
+organised by Lebeau; that the disguise the Vicomte assumed was so
+complete, that he should not have recognised his identity with the
+conspirator but for an accident.  During the latter time of the
+bombardment, he, the __Medecin des Pauvres_, was on the eastern ramparts,
+and his attention was suddenly called to a man mortally wounded by the
+splinter of a shell.  While examining the nature of the wound; De
+Mauleon, who was also on the ramparts, came to the spot.  The dying man
+said, 'M. le Vicomte, you owe me a service.  My name is Marc le Roux.
+I was on the police before the war.  When M. de. Mauleon reassumed his
+station, and was making himself obnoxious to the Emperor, I might have
+denounced him as Jean Lebeau the conspirator.  I did not.  The siege has
+reduced me to want.  I have a child at home--a pet.  Don't let her
+starve.'  'I will see to her,' said the Vicomte.  Before we could get the
+man into the ambulance cart he expired.
+
+"The Medecin who told this story I had the curiosity to see myself, and
+cross-question.  I own I believe his statement.  Whether De Mauleon did
+or did not conspire against a fallen dynasty, to which he owed no
+allegiance, can little, if at all, injure the reputation he has left
+behind of a very remarkable man--of great courage and great ability--who
+might have had a splendid career if he had survived.  But, as Savarin
+says truly, the first bodies which the car of revolution crushes down are
+those which first harness themselves to it.
+
+"Among De Mauleon's papers is the programme of a constitution fitted for
+France.  How it got into Savarin's hands I know not.  De Mauleon left no
+will, and no relations came forward to claim his papers.  I asked Savarin
+to give me the heads of the plan, which he did.  They are as follows:
+
+"The American republic is the sole one worth studying, for it has lasted.
+The causes of its duration are in the checks to democratic fickleness and
+disorder.  1st.  No law affecting the Constitution can be altered without
+the consent of two-thirds of Congress.  2nd.  To counteract the impulses
+natural to a popular Assembly chosen by universal suffrage, the greater
+legislative powers, especially in foreign affairs, are vested in the
+Senate, which has even executive as well as legislative functions.  3rd.
+The Chief of the State, having elected his government, can maintain it
+independent of hostile majorities in either Assembly.
+
+"'These three principles of safety to form the basis of any new
+constitution for France.
+
+"'For France it is essential that the chief magistrate, under whatever
+title he assume, should be as irresponsible as an English sovereign.
+Therefore he should not preside at his councils; he should not lead his
+armies.  The day for personal government is gone, even in Prussia.  The
+safety for order in a State is that, when things go wrong, the Ministry
+changes, the State remains the same.  In Europe, Republican institutions
+are safer where the chief magistrate is hereditary than where elective.'
+
+"Savarin says these axioms are carried out at length, and argued with
+great ability.
+
+"I am very grateful for your proffered hospitalities in England.  Some
+day I shall accept them-viz., whenever I decide on domestic life, and the
+calm of the conjugal foyer.  I have a penchant for an English Mees, and
+am not exacting as to the dot.  Thirty thousand livres sterling would
+satisfy me--a trifle, I believe, to you rich islanders.
+
+"Meanwhile I am naturally compelled to make up for the miseries of that
+horrible siege.  Certain moralising journals tell us that, sobered by
+misfortunes, the Parisians are going to turn over a new leaf, become
+studious and reflective, despise pleasure and luxury, and live like
+German professors.  Don't believe a word of it.  My conviction is that,
+whatever may be said as to our frivolity, extravagance, &c., under the
+Empire, we shall be just the same under any form of government--the
+bravest, the most timid, the most ferocious, the kindest-hearted, the
+most irrational, the most intelligent, the most contradictory, the most
+consistent people whom Jove, taking counsel of Venus and the Graces, Mars
+and the Furies, ever created for the delight and terror of the world;--in
+a word, the Parisians.--Votre tout divoue, 'FREDERIC LEMERCIER.'"
+
+
+It is a lovely noon on the bay of Sorrento, towards the close of the
+autumn of 1871.  Upon the part of the craggy shore, to the left of the
+town, on which her first perusal of the loveliest poem in which the
+romance of Christian heroism has ever combined elevation of thought with
+silvery delicacies of speech, had charmed her childhood, reclined the
+young bride of Graham Vane.  They were in the first month of their
+marriage.  Isaura had not yet recovered from the effects of all that had
+preyed upon her life, from the hour in which she had deemed that in her
+pursuit of fame she had lost the love that had coloured her genius and
+inspired her dreams, to that in which .  .  .  .
+
+The physicians consulted agreed in insisting on her passing the winter in
+a southern climate; and after their wedding, which took place in
+Florence, they thus came to Sorrento.
+
+As Isaura is seated on the small smoothed rock, Graham reclines at her
+feet, his face upturned to hers with an inexpressible wistful anxiety in
+his impassioned tenderness.  "You are sure you feel better and stronger
+since we have been here?"
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARISIANS, B12, LYTTON ***
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