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The Parisians — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton · English · Gutenberg #7749 · 1,468,664 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Parisians — Complete

Author: Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton


        
Release date: November 27, 2004 [eBook #7749]
                Most recently updated: August 28, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7749

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PARISIANS — COMPLETE ***




Produced by David Widger







THE PARISIANS

By Edward Bulwer-Lytton




PREFATORY NOTE. (BY THE AUTHOR’S SON.)

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

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

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

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




INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

                            TISH.

PARIS, August 28, 1872.




THE PARISIANS.




BOOK I.




CHAPTER I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“True, sir; but--”

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

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

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

“I have been here a fortnight,” replied Alain.

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

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

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

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

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

“A superb place, no--a venerable ruin, yes!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Apropos’, where do you lodge?”

“Rue de l’Universite, Numero --.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.

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

Lemercier spontaneously and unrequested ordered the dinner and the
wines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two gentlemen bowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes; my poor mother’s first cousin.”

“I congratulate you. ‘Tres grande dame.’ She will launch you in ‘puro
cielo,’ as Juno might have launched one of her young peacocks.”

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

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

“A duke of the First Empire, the grandson of a butcher.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

             MR. GRAHAM VANE,

               No. __ Rue d’Anjou.

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

That gentleman made another attempt at the barbarian appellation.

“‘Grar--ham Varne.’ ‘C’est ca!’ I triumph! all difficulties yield to
French energy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not at all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.

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

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

“M. le Marquis jests,” said the old woman, laughing.

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

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

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

“‘Bon repos, M. le Marquis! beaux reves, et bel avenir.’”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alain bowed his head in assent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Rich’ I should think so; one of the Kings of Finance, Ah! observe
those young men on horseback.”

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

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

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

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

“And they keep a shop! You are jesting.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But partners in a shop!”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is your Bourse in London like this?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI.

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

“You have been in London, Frederic?”

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

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

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

“What are the amusements of the lowest class?”

“Getting drunk.”

“Nothing else?”

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

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




CHAPTER VII.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you think she is married?” asked Alain.

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

“But regard that air of unmistakable distinction; regard that expression
of face,-so pure, so virginal: comme il faut she must be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have promised the Englishman?”

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII.

LETTER FROM ISAURA CICOGNA TO MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL.

                         VILLA D’-----, A------.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                         ISAURA.
FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean as a professional composer?”

“Well, yes.”

“And to the abandonment of your vocation as a singer?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM MADAME DE GRANTMESNIL TO ISAURA CICOGNA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        “To case in periods and embalm in ink.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





BOOK II.




CHAPTER I.

It is several weeks after the date of the last chapter; the lime-trees
in the Tuileries are clothed in green.

In a somewhat spacious apartment on the ground-floor in the quiet
locality of the Rue d’Anjou, a man was seated, very still and evidently
absorbed in deep thought, before a writing-table placed close to the
window.

Seen thus, there was an expression of great power both of intellect and
of character in a face which, in ordinary social commune, might rather
be noticeable for an aspect of hardy frankness, suiting well with the
clear-cut, handsome profile, and the rich dark auburn hair, waving
carelessly over one of those broad open foreheads, which, according to
an old writer, seem the “frontispiece of a temple dedicated to Honour.”

The forehead, indeed, was the man’s most remarkable feature. It could
not but prepossess the beholder. When, in private theatricals, he had
need to alter the character of his countenance, he did it effectually,
merely by forcing down his hair till it reached his eyebrows. He no
longer then looked like the same man.

The person I describe has been already introduced to the reader as
Graham Vane. But perhaps this is the fit occasion to enter into
some such details as to his parentage and position as may make the
introduction more satisfactory and complete.

His father, the representative of a very ancient family, came into
possession, after a long minority, of what may be called a fair squire’s
estate, and about half a million in moneyed investments, inherited on
the female side. Both land and money were absolutely at his disposal,
unencumbered by entail or settlement. He was a man of a brilliant,
irregular genius, of princely generosity, of splendid taste, of a
gorgeous kind of pride closely allied to a masculine kind of vanity. As
soon as he was of age he began to build, converting his squire’s hall
into a ducal palace. He then stood for the county; and in days before
the first Reform Bill, when a county election was to the estate of
a candidate what a long war is to the debt of a nation. He won the
election; he obtained early successes in Parliament. It was said by good
authorities in political circles that, if he chose, he might aspire to
lead his party, and ultimately to hold the first rank in the government
of his country.

That may or may not be true; but certainly he did not choose to take the
trouble necessary for such an ambition. He was too fond of pleasure, of
luxury, of pomp. He kept a famous stud of racers and hunters. He was a
munificent patron of art. His establishments, his entertainments, were
on a par with those of the great noble who represented the loftiest (Mr.
Vane would not own it to be the eldest) branch of his genealogical tree.

He became indifferent to political contests, indolent in his attendance
at the House, speaking seldom, not at great length nor with much
preparation, but with power and fire, originality and genius; so that
he was not only effective as an orator, but combining with eloquence
advantages of birth, person, station, the reputation of patriotic
independence, and genial attributes of character, he was an authority of
weight in the scales of party.

This gentleman, at the age of forty, married the dowerless daughter of
a poor but distinguished naval officer, of noble family, first cousin to
the Duke of Alton.

He settled on her a suitable jointure, but declined to tie up any
portion of his property for the benefit of children by the marriage. He
declared that so much of his fortune was invested either in mines, the
produce of which was extremely fluctuating, or in various funds, over
rapid transfers in which it was his amusement and his interest to
have control, unchecked by reference to trustees, that entails and
settlements on children were an inconvenience he declined to incur.

Besides, he held notions of his own as to the wisdom of keeping children
dependent on their father. “What numbers of young men,” said he, “are
ruined in character and in fortune by knowing that when their father
dies they are certain of the same provision, no matter how they
displease him; and in the meanwhile forestalling that provision by
recourse to usurers.” These arguments might not have prevailed over the
bride’s father a year or two later, when, by the death of intervening
kinsmen, he became Duke of Alton; but in his then circumstances
the marriage itself was so much beyond the expectations which the
portionless daughter of a sea-captain has the right to form that Mr.
Vane had it all his own way, and he remained absolute master of his
whole fortune, save of that part of his landed estate on which his
wife’s jointure was settled; and even from this incumbrance he was very
soon freed. His wife died in the second year of marriage, leaving an
only son,--Graham. He grieved for her loss with all the passion of an
impressionable, ardent, and powerful nature. Then for a while he sought
distraction to his sorrow by throwing himself into public life with a
devoted energy he had not previously displayed.

His speeches served to bring his party into power, and he yielded,
though reluctantly, to the unanimous demand of that party that he should
accept one of the highest offices in the new Cabinet. He acquitted
himself well as an administrator, but declared, no doubt honestly, that
he felt like Sinbad released from the old man on his back, when, a year
or two afterwards, he went out of office with his party. No persuasions
could induce him to come in again; nor did he ever again take a very
active part in debate. “No,” said he, “I was born to the freedom of
a private gentleman: intolerable to me is the thraldom of a public
servant. But I will bring up my son so that he may acquit the debt which
I decline to pay to my country.” There he kept his word. Graham had been
carefully educated for public life, the ambition for it dinned into his
ear from childhood. In his school vacations his father made him learn
and declaim chosen specimens of masculine oratory; engaged an eminent
actor to give him lessons in elocution; bade him frequent theatres,
and study there the effect which words derive from looks and gesture;
encouraged him to take part himself in private theatricals. To all
this the boy lent his mind with delight. He had the orator’s inborn
temperament; quick, yet imaginative, and loving the sport of rivalry and
contest. Being also, in his boyish years, good-humoured and joyous, he
was not more a favourite with the masters in the schoolroom than with
the boys in the play-ground. Leaving Eton at seventeen, he then entered
at Cambridge, and became, in his first term, the most popular speaker at
the Union.

But his father cut short his academical career, and decided, for reasons
of his own, to place him at once in diplomacy. He was attached to the
Embassy at Paris, and partook of the pleasures and dissipations of that
metropolis too keenly to retain much of the sterner ambition to which
he had before devoted himself. Becoming one of the spoiled darlings of
fashion, there was great danger that his character would relax into the
easy grace of the Epicurean, when all such loiterings in the Rose
Garden were brought to abrupt close by a rude and terrible change in his
fortunes.

His father was killed by a fall from his horse in hunting; and when his
affairs were investigated, they were found to be hopelessly involved:
apparently the assets would not suffice for the debts. The elder Vane
himself was probably not aware of the extent of his liabilities. He had
never wanted ready money to the last. He could always obtain that from a
money-lender, or from the sale of his funded investments. But it became
obvious, on examining his papers, that he knew at least how impaired
would be the heritage he should bequeath to a son whom he idolized. For
that reason he had given Graham a profession in diplomacy, and for that
reason he had privately applied to the Ministry for the Viceroyalty of
India, in the event of its speedy vacancy. He was eminent enough not to
anticipate refusal, and with economy in that lucrative post much of
his pecuniary difficulties might have been redeemed, and at least an
independent provision secured for his son.

Graham, like Alain de Rochebriant, allowed no reproach on his father’s
memory; indeed, with more reason than Alain, for the elder Vane’s
fortune had at least gone on no mean and frivolous dissipation.

It had lavished itself on encouragement to art, on great objects of
public beneficence, on public-spirited aid of political objects; and
even in more selfish enjoyments there was a certain grandeur in his
princely hospitalities, in his munificent generosity, in a warm-hearted
carelessness for money. No indulgence in petty follies or degrading
vices aggravated the offence of the magnificent squanderer.

“Let me look on my loss of fortune as a gain to myself,” said Graham,
manfully. “Had I been a rich man, my experience of Paris tells me that I
should most likely have been a very idle one. Now that I have no gold, I
must dig in myself for iron.”

The man to whom he said this was an uncle-in-law,--if I may use that
phrase,--the Right Hon. Richard King, popularly styled “the blameless
King.”

This gentleman had married the sister of Graham’s mother, whose loss in
his infancy and boyhood she had tenderly and anxiously sought to supply.
It is impossible to conceive a woman more fitted to invite love and
reverence than was Lady Janet King, her manners were so sweet and
gentle, her whole nature so elevated and pure.

Her father had succeeded to the dukedom when she married Mr. King, and
the alliance was not deemed quite suitable. Still it was not one to
which the Duke would have been fairly justified in refusing his assent.

Mr. King could not indeed boast of noble ancestry, nor was even a landed
proprietor; but he was a not-undistinguished member of Parliament, of
irreproachable character, and ample fortune inherited from a distant
kinsman, who had enriched himself as a merchant. It was on both sides a
marriage of love.

It is popularly said that a man uplifts a wife to his own rank: it as
often happens that a woman uplifts her husband to the dignity of her
own character. Richard King rose greatly in public estimation after his
marriage with Lady Janet.

She united to a sincere piety a very active and a very enlightened
benevolence. She guided his ambition aside from mere party politics into
subjects of social and religious interest, and in devoting himself to
these he achieved a position more popular and more respected than he
could ever have won in the strife of party.

When the Government of which the elder Vane became a leading Minister
was formed, it was considered a great object to secure a name as high
in the religious world, so beloved by the working classes, as that of
Richard King; and he accepted one of those places which, though not in
the cabinet, confers the rank of Privy Councillor.

When that brief-lived Administration ceased, he felt the same sensation
of relief that Vane had felt, and came to the same resolution never
again to accept office, but from different reasons, all of which need
not now be detailed. Amongst them, however, certainly this: he was
exceedingly sensitive to opinion, thin-skinned as to abuse, and very
tenacious of the respect due to his peculiar character of sanctity and
philanthropy. He writhed under every newspaper article that had made
“the blameless King” responsible for the iniquities of the Government to
which he belonged. In the loss of office he seemed to recover his former
throne.

Mr. King heard Graham’s resolution with a grave approving smile, and his
interest in the young man became greatly increased. He devoted himself
strenuously to the object of saving to Graham some wrecks of his
paternal fortunes, and having a clear head and great experience in
the transaction of business, he succeeded beyond the most sanguine
expectations formed by the family solicitor. A rich manufacturer was
found to purchase at a fancy price the bulk of the estate with the
palatial mansion, which the estate alone could never have sufficed to
maintain with suitable establishments.

So that when all debts were paid, Graham found himself in possession of
a clear income of about L500 a year, invested in a mortgage secured on
a part of the hereditary lands, on which was seated an old hunting-lodge
bought by a brewer.

With this portion of the property Graham parted very reluctantly. It was
situated amid the most picturesque scenery on the estate, and the lodge
itself was a remnant of the original residence of his ancestors before
it had been abandoned for that which, built in the reign of Elizabeth,
had been expanded into a Trenthain-like palace by the last owner.

But Mr. King’s argument reconciled him to the sacrifice. “I can manage,”
 said the prudent adviser, “if you insist on it, to retain that remnant
of the hereditary estate which you are so loath to part with. But how?
by mortgaging it to an extent that will scarcely leave you L50. a year
net from the rents. This is not all. Your mind will then be distracted
from the large object of a career to the small object of retaining a few
family acres; you will be constantly hampered by private anxieties and
fears; you could do nothing for the benefit of those around you,--could
not repair a farmhouse for a better class of tenant, could not rebuild a
labourer’s dilapidated cottage. Give up an idea that might be very well
for a man whose sole ambition was to remain a squire, however beggarly.
Launch yourself into the larger world of metropolitan life with energies
wholly unshackled, a mind wholly undisturbed, and secure of an income
which, however modest, is equal to that of most young men who enter that
world as your equals.”

Graham was convinced, and yielded, though with a bitter pang. It is hard
for a man whose fathers have lived on the soil to give up all trace
of their whereabouts. But none saw in him any morbid consciousness of
change of fortune, when, a year after his father’s death, he reassumed
his place in society. If before courted for his expectations, he was
still courted for himself; by many of the great who had loved his
father, perhaps even courted more.

He resigned the diplomatic career, not merely because the rise in
that profession is slow, and in the intermediate steps the chances of
distinction are slight and few, but more because he desired to cast
his lot in the home country, and regarded the courts of other lands as
exile.

It was not true, however, as Lemercier had stated on report, that he
lived on his pen. Curbing all his old extravagant tastes, L500 a year
amply supplied his wants. But he had by his pen gained distinction,
and created great belief in his abilities for a public career. He had
written critical articles, read with much praise, in periodicals of
authority, and had published one or two essays on political questions
which had created yet more sensation. It was only the graver literature,
connected more or less with his ultimate object of a public career, in
which he had thus evinced his talents of composition. Such writings were
not of a nature to bring him much money, but they gave him a definite
and solid station. In the old time, before the first Reform Bill, his
reputation would have secured him at once a seat in Parliament; but
the ancient nurseries of statesmen are gone, and their place is not
supplied.

He had been invited, however, to stand for more than one large and
populous borough, with very fair prospects of success; and, whatever the
expense, Mr. King had offered to defray it. But Graham would not have
incurred the latter obligation; and when he learned the pledges which
his supporters would have exacted, he would not have stood if success
had been certain and the cost nothing. “I cannot,” he said to his
friends, “go into the consideration of what is best for the country with
my thoughts manacled; and I cannot be both representative and slave
of the greatest ignorance of the greatest number. I bide my time, and
meanwhile I prefer to write as I please, rather than vote as I don’t
please.”

Three years went by, passed chiefly in England, partly in travel; and at
the age of thirty, Graham Vane was still one of those of whom admirers
say, “He will be a great man some day;” and detractors reply, “Some day
seems a long way off.”

The same fastidiousness which had operated against that entrance into
Parliament, to which his ambition not the less steadily adapted itself,
had kept him free from the perils of wedlock. In his heart he yearned
for love and domestic life, but he had hitherto met with no one who
realized the ideal he had formed. With his person, his accomplishments,
his connections, and his repute, he might have made many an advantageous
marriage. But somehow or other the charm vanished from a fair face, if
the shadow of a money-bag fell on it; on the other hand, his ambition
occupied so large a share in his thoughts that he would have fled in
time from the temptation of a marriage that would have overweighted
him beyond the chance of rising. Added to all, he desired in a wife an
intellect that, if not equal to his own, could become so by sympathy,--a
union of high culture and noble aspiration, and yet of loving womanly
sweetness which a man seldom finds out of books; and when he does find
it, perhaps it does not wear the sort of face that he fancies. Be that
as it may, Graham was still unmarried and heart-whole.

And now a new change in his life befell him. Lady Janet died of a fever
contracted in her habitual rounds of charity among the houses of the
poor. She had been to him as the most tender mother, and a lovelier soul
than hers never alighted on the earth. His grief was intense; but what
was her husband’s?--one of those griefs that kill.

To the side of Richard King his Janet had been as the guardian angel.
His love for her was almost worship: with her, every object in a life
hitherto so active and useful seemed gone. He evinced no noisy passion
of sorrow. He shut himself up, and refused to see even Graham. But after
some weeks had passed, he admitted the clergyman in whom on spiritual
matters he habitually confided, and seemed consoled by the visits; then
he sent for his lawyer and made his will; after which he allowed Graham
to call on him daily, on the condition that there should be no reference
to his loss. He spoke to the young man on other subjects, rather drawing
him out about himself, sounding his opinion on various grave matters,
watching his face while he questioned, as if seeking to dive into his
heart, and sometimes pathetically sinking into silence, broken but by
sighs. So it went on for a few more weeks; then he took the advice
of his physician to seek change of air and scene. He went away alone,
without even a servant, not leaving word where he had gone. After a
little while he returned, more ailing, more broken than before. One
morning he was found insensible,--stricken by paralysis. He regained
consciousness, and even for some days rallied strength. He might have
recovered, but he seemed as if he tacitly refused to live. He expired at
last, peacefully, in Graham’s arms.

At the opening of his will it was found that he had left Graham his sole
heir and executor. Deducting government duties, legacies to servants,
and donations to public charities, the sum thus bequeathed to his lost
wife’s nephew was two hundred and twenty thousand pounds.

With such a fortune, opening indeed was made for an ambition so long
obstructed. But Graham affected no change in his mode of life; he still
retained his modest bachelor’s apartments, engaged no servants, bought
no horses, in no way exceeded the income he had possessed before. He
seemed, indeed, depressed rather than elated by the succession to a
wealth which he had never anticipated.

Two children had been born from the marriage of Richard King: they had
died young, it is true, but Lady Janet at the time of her own decease
was not too advanced in years for the reasonable expectation of other
offspring; and even after Richard King became a widower, he had given
to Graham no hint of his testamentary dispositions. The young man was no
blood-relation to him, and naturally supposed that such relations
would become the heirs. But in truth the deceased seemed to have no
blood-relations: none had ever been known to visit him; none raised a
voice to question the justice of his will.

Lady Janet had been buried at Kensal Green; her husband’s remains were
placed in the same vault.

For days and days Graham went his way lonelily to the cemetery. He might
be seen standing motionless by that tomb, with tears rolling down his
cheeks; yet his was not a weak nature,--not one of those that love
indulgence of irremediable grief. On the contrary, people who did not
know him well said “that he had more head than heart,” and the character
of his pursuits, as of his writings, was certainly not that of a
sentimentalist. He had not thus visited the tomb till Richard King had
been placed within it. Yet his love for his aunt was unspeakably greater
than that which he could have felt for her husband. Was it, then, the
husband that he so much more acutely mourned; or was there something
that, since the husband’s death, had deepened his reverence for the
memory of her whom he had not only loved as a mother, but honoured as a
saint?

These visits to the cemetery did not cease till Graham was confined to
his bed by a very grave illness,--the only one he had ever known. His
physician said it was nervous fever, and occasioned by moral shock or
excitement; it was attended with delirium. His recovery was slow, and
when it was sufficiently completed he quitted England; and we find him
now, with his mind composed, his strength restored, and his spirits
braced, in that gay city of Paris; hiding, perhaps, some earnest purpose
amid his participation in its holiday enjoyments. He is now, as I have
said, seated before his writing-table in deep thought. He takes up a
letter which he had already glanced over hastily, and reperuses it with
more care.

The letter is from his cousin, the Duke of Alton, who had succeeded
a few years since to the family honours,--an able man, with no small
degree of information, an ardent politician, but of very rational and
temperate opinions; too much occupied by the cares of a princely estate
to covet office for himself; too sincere a patriot not to desire office
for those to whose hands he thought the country might be most safely
entrusted; an intimate friend of Graham’s. The contents of the letter
are these:--

   MY DEAR GRAHAM,--I trust that you will welcome the brilliant opening
   into public life which these lines are intended to announce to you.
   Vavasour has just been with me to say that he intends to resign his
   seat for the county when Parliament meets, and agreeing with me that
   there is no one so fit to succeed him as yourself, he suggests the
   keeping his intention secret until you have arranged your committee
   and are prepared to take the field. You cannot hope to escape a
   contest; but I have examined the Register, and the party has gained
   rather than lost since the last election, when Vavasour was so
   triumphantly returned. The expenses for this county, where there
   are so many outvoters to bring up, and so many agents to retain, are
   always large in comparison with some other counties; but that
   consideration is all in your favour, for it deters Squire Hunston,
   the only man who could beat you, from starting; and to your
   resources a thousand pounds more or less are a trifle not worth
   discussing. You know how difficult it is nowadays to find a seat
   for a man of moderate opinions like yours and mine. Our county
   would exactly suit you. The constituency is so evenly divided
   between the urban and rural populations, that its representative
   must fairly consult the interests of both. He can be neither an
   ultra-Tory nor a violent Radical. He is left to the enviable
   freedom, to which you say you aspire, of considering what is best
   for the country as a whole.

   Do not lose so rare an opportunity. There is but one drawback to
   your triumphant candidature. It will be said that you have no
   longer an acre in the county in which the Vanes have been settled so
   long. That drawback can be removed. It is true that you can never
   hope to buy back the estates which you were compelled to sell at
   your father’s death: the old manufacturer gripes them too firmly to
   loosen his hold; and after all, even were your income double what it
   is, you would be overhoused in the vast pile in which your father
   buried so large a share of his fortune. But that beautiful old
   hunting-lodge, the Stamm Schloss of your family, with the adjacent
   farms, can be now repurchased very reasonably. The brewer who
   bought them is afflicted with an extravagant son, whom he placed in
   the--Hussars, and will gladly sell the property for L5,000 more than
   he gave: well worth the difference, as he has improved the farm-
   buildings and raised the rental. I think, in addition to the sum
   you have on mortgage, L3,000 will be accepted, and as a mere
   investment pay you nearly three per cent. But to you it is worth
   more than double the money; it once more identifies your ancient
   name with the county. You would be a greater personage with that
   moderate holding in the district in which your race took root, and
   on which your father’s genius threw such a lustre, than you would be
   if you invested all your wealth in a county in which every squire
   and farmer would call you “the new man.” Pray think over this most
   seriously, and instruct your solicitor to open negotiations with the
   brewer at once. But rather put yourself into the train, and come
   back to England straight to me. I will ask Vavasour to meet you.
   What news from Paris? Is the Emperor as ill as the papers
   insinuate? And is the revolutionary party gaining ground?

   Your affectionate cousin,

                  ALTON.

As he put down this letter, Graham heaved a short impatient sigh.

“The old Stamm Schloss,” he muttered,--“a foot on the old soil once
more! and an entrance into the great arena with hands unfettered. Is it
possible!--is it?--is it?”

At this moment the door-bell of the apartment rang, and a servant whom
Graham had hired at Paris as a laquais de place announced “Ce Monsieur.”

Graham hurried the letter into his portfolio, and said, “You mean the
person to whom I am always at home?”

“The same, Monsieur.”

“Admit him, of course.”

There entered a wonderfully thin man, middle-aged, clothed in black, his
face cleanly shaven, his hair cut very short, with one of those faces
which, to use a French expression, say “nothing.” It was absolutely
without expression: it had not even, despite its thinness, one salient
feature. If you had found yourself anywhere seated next to that man,
your eye would have passed him over as too insignificant to notice;
if at a cafe, you would have gone on talking to your friend without
lowering your voice. What mattered it whether a bete like that overheard
or not? Had you been asked to guess his calling and station, you might
have said, minutely observing the freshness of his clothes and the
undeniable respectability of his tout ensemble, “He must be well off,
and with no care for customers on his mind,--a ci-devant chandler who
has retired on a legacy.”

Graham rose at the entrance of his visitor, motioned him courteously
to a seat beside him, and waiting till the laquais had vanished, then
asked, “What news?”

“None, I fear, that will satisfy Monsieur. I have certainly hunted out,
since I had last the honour to see you, no less than four ladies of the
name of Duval, but only one of them took that name from her parents, and
was also christened Louise.”

“Ah--Louise!”

“Yes, the daughter of a perfumer, aged twenty-eight. She, therefore, is
not the Louise you seek. Permit me to refer to your instructions.” Here
M. Renard took out a note-book, turned over the leaves, and
resumed, “Wanted, Louise Duval, daughter of Auguste Duval, a French
drawing-master, who lived for many years at Tours, removed to Paris
in 1845, lived at No. 12, Rue de S---- at Paris for some years, but
afterwards moved to a different guartier of the town, and died 1848,
in Rue I----, No. 39. Shortly after his death, his daughter Louise
left that lodging, and could not be traced. In 1849 official documents
reporting her death were forwarded from Munich to a person (a friend of
yours, Monsieur). Death, of course, taken for granted; but nearly five
years afterwards, this very person encountered the said Louise Duval at
Aix-la-Chapelle, and never heard nor saw more of her. Demande submitted,
to find out said Louise Duval or any children of hers born in 1848-9;
supposed in 1852-3 to have one child, a girl, between four and five
years old. Is that right, Monsieur?”

“Quite right.”

“And this is the whole information given to me. Monsieur on giving it
asked me if I thought it desirable that he should commence inquiries
at Aix-la-Chapelle, where Louise Duval was last seen by the
person interested to discover her. I reply, No; pains thrown away.
Aix-la-Chapelle is not a place where any Frenchwoman not settled there
by marriage would remain. Nor does it seem probable that the said Duval
would venture to select for her residence Munich, a city in which she
had contrived to obtain certificates of her death. A Frenchwoman who has
once known Paris always wants to get back to it; especially, Monsieur,
if she has the beauty which you assign to this lady. I therefore
suggested that our inquiries should commence in this capital.
Monsieur agreed with me, and I did not grudge the time necessary for
investigation.”

“You were most obliging. Still I am beginning to be impatient if time is
to be thrown away.”

“Naturally. Permit me to return to my notes. Monsieur informs me that
twenty-one years ago, in 1848, the Parisian police were instructed to
find out this lady and failed, but gave hopes of discovering her through
her relations. He asks me to refer to our archives; I tell him that
is no use. However, in order to oblige him, I do so. No trace of such
inquiry: it must have been, as Monsieur led me to suppose, a strictly
private one, unconnected with crime or with politics; and as I have the
honour to tell Monsieur, no record of such investigations is preserved
in our office. Great scandal would there be, and injury to the peace of
families, if we preserved the results of private inquiries intrusted
to us--by absurdly jealous husbands, for instance. Honour,--Monsieur,
honour forbids it. Next I suggest to Monsieur that his simplest
plan would be an advertisement in the French journals, stating, if I
understand him right, that it is for the pecuniary interest of Madame
or Mademoiselle Duval, daughter of Auguste Duval, artiste en dessin, to
come forward. Monsieur objects to that.”

“I object to it extremely; as I have told you, this is a strictly
confidential inquiry; and an advertisement which in all likelihood would
be practically useless (it proved to be so in a former inquiry)
would not be resorted to unless all else failed, and even then with
reluctance.”

“Quite so. Accordingly, Monsieur delegates to me, who have been
recommended to him as the best person he can employ in that department
of our police which is not connected with crime or political
surveillance, a task the most difficult. I have, through strictly
private investigations, to discover the address and prove the identity
of a lady bearing a name among the most common in France, and of whom
nothing has been heard for fifteen years, and then at so migratory an
endroit as Aix-la-Chapelle. You will not or cannot inform me if since
that time the lady has changed her name by marriage.”

“I have no reason to think that she has; and there are reasons against
the supposition that she married after 1849.”

“Permit me to observe that the more details of information Monsieur can
give me, the easier my task of research will be.”

“I have given you all the details I can, and, aware of the difficulty of
tracing a person with a name so much the reverse of singular, I adopted
your advice in our first interview, of asking some Parisian friend of
mine, with a large acquaintance in the miscellaneous societies of your
capital, to inform me of any ladies of that name whom he might chance
to encounter; and he, like you, has lighted upon one or two, who alas!
resemble the right one in name and nothing more.”

“You will do wisely to keep him on the watch as well as myself. If it
were but a murderess or a political incendiary, then you might trust
exclusively to the enlightenment of our corps, but this seems an affair
of sentiment, Monsieur. Sentiment is not in our way. Seek the trace of
that in the haunts of pleasure.”

M. Renard, having thus poetically delivered himself of that
philosophical dogma, rose to depart.

Graham slipped into his hand a bank-note of sufficient value to justify
the profound bow he received in return.

When M. Renard had gone, Graham heaved another impatient sigh, and said
to himself, “No, it is not possible,--at least not yet.”

Then, compressing his lips as a man who forces himself to something he
dislikes, he dipped his pen into the inkstand, and wrote rapidly thus to
his kinsman:

   MY DEAR COUSIN,--I lose not a post in replying to your kind and
   considerate letter. It is not in my power at present to return to
   England. I need not say how fondly I cherish the hope of
   representing the dear old county some day. If Vavasour could be
   induced to defer his resignation of the seat for another session, or
   at least for six or seven months, why then I might be free to avail
   myself of the opening; at present I am not. Meanwhile I am sorely
   tempted to buy back the old Lodge; probably the brewer would allow
   me to leave on mortgage the sum I myself have on the property, and a
   few additional thousands. I have reasons for not wishing to
   transfer at present much of the money now invested in the Funds. I
   will consider this point, which probably does not press.

   I reserve all Paris news till my next; and begging you to forgive so
   curt and unsatisfactory a reply to a letter so important that it
   excites me more than I like to own, believe me your affectionate
   friend and cousin,

               GRAHAM.




CHAPTER II.

AT about the same hour on the same day in which the Englishman held
the conference with the Parisian detective just related, the Marquis de
Rochebriant found himself by appointment in the cabinet d’affaires of
his avoue M. Gandrin that gentleman had hitherto not found time to give
him a definite opinion as to the case submitted to his judgment. The
avoue received Alain with a kind of forced civility, in which the
natural intelligence of the Marquis, despite his inexperience of life,
discovered embarrassment.

“Monsieur le Marquis,” said Gandrin, fidgeting among the papers on his
bureau, “this is a very complicated business. I have given not only my
best attention to it, but to your general interests. To be plain,
your estate, though a fine one, is fearfully encumbered--fearfully--
frightfully.”

“Sir,” said the Marquis, haughtily, “that is a fact which was never
disguised from you.”

“I do not say that it was, Marquis; but I scarcely realized the
amount of the liabilities nor the nature of the property. It will be
difficult--nay, I fear, impossible--to find any capitalist to advance a
sum that will cover the mortgages at an interest less than you now pay.
As for a Company to take the whole trouble off your hands, clear off the
mortgages, manage the forests, develop the fisheries, guarantee you an
adequate income, and at the end of twenty-one years or so render up to
you or your heirs the free enjoyment of an estate thus improved, we
must dismiss that prospect as a wild dream of my good friend M. Hebert.
People in the provinces do dream; in Paris everybody is wide awake.”

“Monsieur,” said the Marquis, with that inborn imperturbable loftiness
of sang froid which has always in adverse circumstances characterized
the French noblesse, “be kind enough to restore my papers. I see that
you are not the man for me. Allow me only to thank you, and inquire the
amount of my debt for the trouble I have given.”

“Perhaps you are quite justified in thinking I am not the man for you,
Monsieur le Marquis; and your papers shall, if you decide on dismissing
me, be returned to you this evening. But as to my accepting remuneration
where I have rendered no service, I request M. le Marquis to put that
out of the question. Considering myself, then, no longer your avoue,
do not think I take too great a liberty in volunteering my counsel as a
friend,--or a friend at least to M. Hebert, if you do not vouchsafe my
right so to address yourself.”

M. Gandrin spoke with a certain dignity of voice and manner which
touched and softened his listener.

“You make me your debtor far more than I pretend to repay,” replied
Alain. “Heaven knows I want a friend, and I will heed with gratitude and
respect all your counsels in that character.”

“Plainly and briefly, my advice is this: M. Louvier is the principal
mortgagee. He is among the six richest capitalists of Paris. He does
not, therefore, want money, but, like most self-made men, he is very
accessible to social vanities. He would be proud to think he had
rendered a service to a Rochebriant. Approach him, either through me,
or, far better, at once introduce yourself, and propose to consolidate
all your other liabilities in one mortgage to him, at a rate of interest
lower than that which is now paid to some of the small mortgagees. This
would add considerably to your income and would carry out M. Hebert’s
advice.”

“But does it not strike you, dear M. Gandrin, that such going
cap-in-hand to one who has power over my fate, while I have none
over his, would scarcely be consistent with my self-respect, not as
Rochebriant only, but as Frenchman?”

“It does not strike me so in the least; at all events, I could make the
proposal on your behalf, without compromising yourself, though I should
be far more sanguine of success if you addressed M. Louvier in person.”

“I should nevertheless prefer leaving it in your hands; but even for
that I must take a few days to consider. Of all the mortgagees M.
Louvier has been hitherto the severest and most menacing, the one whom
Hebert dreads the most; and should he become sole mortgagee, my whole
estate would pass to him if, through any succession of bad seasons and
failing tenants, the interest was not punctually paid.”

“It could so pass to him now.”

“No; for there have been years in which the other mortgagees, who are
Bretons and would be loath to ruin a Rochebriant, have been lenient and
patient.”

“If Louvier has not been equally so, it is only because he knew nothing
of you, and your father no doubt had often sorely tasked his endurance.
Come, suppose we manage to break the ice easily. Do me the honour to
dine here to meet him; you will find that he is not an unpleasant man.”

The Marquis hesitated, but the thought of the sharp and seemingly
hopeless struggle for the retention of his ancestral home to which he
would be doomed if he returned from Paris unsuccessful in his errand
overmastered his pride. He felt as if that self-conquest was a duty he
owed to the very tombs of his fathers. “I ought not to shrink from the
face of a creditor,” said he, smiling somewhat sadly, “and I accept the
proposal you so graciously make.”

“You do well, Marquis, and I will write at once to Louvier to ask him to
give me his first disengaged day.”

The Marquis had no sooner quitted the house than M. Gandrin opened a
door at the side of his office, and a large portly man strode into the
room,--stride it was rather than step,--firm, self-assured, arrogant,
masterful.

“Well, mon ami,” said this man, taking his stand at the hearth, as a
king might take his stand in the hall of his vassal, “and what says our
petit muscadin?”

“He is neither petit nor muscadin, Monsieur Louvier,” replied Gandrin,
peevishly; “and he will task your powers to get him thoroughly into your
net. But I have persuaded him to meet you here. What day can you dine
with me? I had better ask no one else.”

“To-morrow I dine with my friend O-----, to meet the chiefs of the
Opposition,” said M. Louvier, with a sort of careless rollicking
pomposity. “Thursday with Pereire; Saturday I entertain at home. Say
Friday. Your hour?”

“Seven.”

“Good! Show me those Rochebriant papers again; there is something I had
forgotten to note. Never mind me. Go on with your work as if I were not
here.”

Louvier took up the papers, seated himself in an armchair by the
fireplace, stretched out his legs, and read at his ease, but with a very
rapid eye, as a practised lawyer skims through the technical forms of a
case to fasten upon the marrow of it.

“Ah! as I thought. The farms could not pay even the interest on my
present mortgage; the forests come in for that. If a contractor for the
yearly sale of the woods was bankrupt and did not pay, how could I get
my interest? Answer me that, Gandrin.”

“Certainly you must run the risk of that chance.”

“Of course the chance occurs, and then I foreclose, seize,--Rochebriant
and its seigneuries are mine.”

As he spoke he laughed, not sardonically,--a jovial laugh,--and opened
wide, to reshut as in a vice, the strong iron hand which had doubtless
closed over many a man’s all.

“Thanks. On Friday, seven o’clock.” He tossed the papers back on the
bureau, nodded a royal nod, and strode forth imperiously as he had
strode in.




CHAPTER III.

MEANWHILE the young Marquis pursued his way thoughtfully through the
streets, and entered the Champs Elysees. Since we first, nay, since we
last saw him, he is strikingly improved in outward appearances. He has
unconsciously acquired more of the easy grace of the Parisian in
gait and bearing. You would no longer detect the Provincial--perhaps,
however, because he is now dressed, though very simply, in habiliments
that belong to the style of the day. Rarely among the loungers in the
Champs Elysees could be seen a finer form, a comelier face, an air of
more unmistakable distinction.

The eyes of many a passing fair one gazed on him, admiringly or
coquettishly. But he was still so little the true Parisian that they got
no smile, no look in return. He was wrapped in his own thoughts; was he
thinking of M. Louvier?

He had nearly gained the entrance of the Bois de Boulogne, when he was
accosted by a voice behind, and turning round saw his friend Lemercier
arm-in-arm with Graham Vane.

“Bonjour, Alain,” said Lemercier, hooking his disengaged arm into
Rochebriant’s. “I suspect we are going the same way.”

Alain felt himself change countenance at this conjecture, and replied
coldly, “I think not; I have got to the end of my walk, and shall turn
back to Paris;” addressing himself to the Englishman, he said with
formal politeness, “I regret not to have found you at home when I
called some weeks ago, and no less so to have been out when you had the
complaisance to return my visit.”

“At all events,” replied the Englishman, “let me not lose the
opportunity of improving our acquaintance which now offers. It is true
that our friend Lemercier, catching sight of me in the Rue de Rivoli,
stopped his coupe and carried me off for a promenade in the Bois. The
fineness of the day tempted us to get out of his carriage as the Bois
came in sight. But if you are going back to Paris I relinquish the Bois
and offer myself as your companion.”

Frederic (the name is so familiarly English that the reader might think
me pedantic did I accentuate it as French) looked from one to the other
of his two friends, half amused and half angry.

“And am I to be left alone to achieve a conquest, in which, if I
succeed, I shall change into hate and envy the affection of my two best
friends? Be it so.

     “’ Un veritable amant ne connait point d’amis.’”

“I do not comprehend your meaning,” said the Marquis, with a compressed
lip and a slight frown.

“Bah!” cried Frederic; “come, franc jeu; cards on the table. M. Gram
Varn was going into the Bois at my suggestion on the chance of having
another look at the pearl-coloured angel; and you, Rochebriant, can’t
deny that you were going into the Bois for the same object.”

“One may pardon an enfant terrible,” said the Englishman, laughing, “but
an ami terrible should be sent to the galleys. Come, Marquis, let us
walk back and submit to our fate. Even were the lady once more visible,
we have no chance of being observed by the side of a Lovelace so
accomplished and so audacious!”

“Adieu, then, recreants: I go alone. Victory or death.” The Parisian
beckoned his coachman, entered his carriage, and with a mocking grimace
kissed his hand to the companions thus deserting or deserted.

Rochebriant touched the Englishman’s arm, and said, “Do you think that
Lemercier could be impertinent enough to accost that lady?”

“In the first place,” returned the Englishman, “Lemercier himself tells
me that the lady has for several weeks relinquished her walks in the
Bois, and the probability is, therefore, that he will not have the
opportunity to accost her. In the next place, it appears that when she
did take her solitary walk, she did not stray far from her carriage, and
was in reach of the protection of her laquais and coachman. But to speak
honestly, do you, who know Lemercier better than I, take him to be a man
who would commit an impertinence to a woman unless there were viveurs of
his own sex to see him do it?”

Alain smiled. “No. Frederic’s real nature is an admirable one, and if
he ever do anything that he ought to be ashamed of, ‘twill be from the
pride of showing how finely he can do it. Such was his character at
college, and such it still seems at Paris. But it is true that the lady
has forsaken her former walk; at least I--I have not seen her since the
day I first beheld her in company with Frederic. Yet--yet, pardon me,
you were going to the Bois on the chance of seeing her. Perhaps she has
changed the direction of her walk, and--and--”

The Marquis stopped short, stammering and confused.

The Englishman scanned his countenance with the rapid glance of a
practised observer of men and things, and after a short pause said: “If
the lady has selected some other spot for her promenade, I am ignorant
of it; nor have I ever volunteered the chance of meeting with her, since
I learned--first from Lemercier, and afterwards from others--that her
destination is the stage. Let us talk frankly, Marquis. I am accustomed
to take much exercise on foot, and the Bois is my favourite resort: one
day I there found myself in the allee which the lady we speak of used
to select for her promenade, and there saw her. Something in her face
impressed me; how shall I describe the impression? Did you ever open a
poem, a romance, in some style wholly new to you, and before you were
quite certain whether or not its merits justified the interest which the
novelty inspired, you were summoned away, or the book was taken out
of your hands? If so, did you not feel an intellectual longing to have
another glimpse of the book? That illustration describes my impression,
and I own that I twice again went to the same allee. The last time
I only caught sight of the young lady as she was getting into her
carriage. As she was then borne away, I perceived one of the custodians
of the Bois; and learned, on questioning him, that the lady was in the
habit of walking always alone in the same allee at the same hour on most
fine days, but that he did not know her name or address. A motive of
curiosity--perhaps an idle one--then made me ask Lemercier, who boasts
of knowing his Paris so intimately, if he could inform me who the lady
was. He undertook to ascertain.”

“But,” interposed the Marquis, “he did not ascertain who she was; he
only ascertained where she lived, and that she and an elder companion
were Italians;--whom he suspected, without sufficient ground, to be
professional singers.”

“True; but since then I ascertained more detailed particulars from
two acquaintances of mine who happen to know her,--M. Savarin, the
distinguished writer, and Mrs. Morley, an accomplished and beautiful
American lady, who is more than an acquaintance. I may boast the honour
of ranking among her friends. As Savarin’s villa is at A------, I
asked him incidentally if he knew the fair neighbour whose face had
so attracted me; and Mrs. Morley being present, and overhearing me, I
learned from both what I now repeat to you.

“The young lady is a Signorina Cicogna,--at Paris, exchanging (except
among particular friends), as is not unusual, the outlandish designation
of Signorina for the more conventional one of Mademoiselle. Her father
was a member of the noble Milanese family of the same name, therefore
the young lady is well born. Her father has been long dead; his widow
married again an English gentleman settled in Italy, a scholar and
antiquarian; his name was Selby. This gentleman, also dead, bequeathed
the Signorina a small but sufficient competence. She is now an orphan,
and residing with a companion, a Signora Venosta, who was once a singer
of some repute at the Neapolitan Theatre, in the orchestra of which her
husband was principal performer; but she relinquished the stage several
years ago on becoming a widow, and gave lessons as a teacher. She has
the character of being a scientific musician, and of unblemished
private respectability. Subsequently she was induced to give up general
teaching, and undertake the musical education and the social charge of
the young lady with her. This girl is said to have early given promise
of extraordinary excellence as a singer, and excited great interest
among a coterie of literary critics and musical cognoscenti. She was to
have come out at the Theatre of Milan a year or two ago, but her career
has been suspended in consequence of ill-health, for which she is now
at Paris under the care of an English physician, who has made remarkable
cures in all complaints of the respiratory organs. ------, the great
composer, who knows her, says that in expression and feeling she has no
living superior, perhaps no equal since Malibran.”

“You seem, dear Monsieur, to have taken much pains to acquire this
information.”

“No great pains were necessary; but had they been I might have taken
them, for, as I have owned to you, Mademoiselle Cicogna, while she was
yet a mystery to me, strangely interested my thoughts or my fancies.
That interest has now ceased. The world of actresses and singers lies
apart from mine.”

“Yet,” said Alain, in a tone of voice that implied doubt, “if I
understand Lemercier aright, you were going with him to the Bois on the
chance of seeing again the lady in whom your interest has ceased.”

“Lemercier’s account was not strictly accurate. He stopped his carriage
to speak to me on quite another subject, on which I have consulted him,
and then proposed to take me on to the Bois. I assented; and it was
not till we were in the carriage that he suggested the idea of seeing
whether the pearly-robed lady had resumed her walk in the allee. You may
judge how indifferent I was to that chance when I preferred turning back
with you to going on with him. Between you and me, Marquis, to men of
our age, who have the business of life before them, and feel that if
there be aught in which noblesse oblige it is a severe devotion to noble
objects, there is nothing more fatal to such devotion than allowing the
heart to be blown hither and thither at every breeze of mere fancy, and
dreaming ourselves into love with some fair creature whom we never could
marry consistently with the career we have set before our ambition. I
could not marry an actress,--neither, I presume, could the Marquis de
Rochebriant; and the thought of a courtship which excluded the idea of
marriage to a young orphan of name unblemished, of virtue unsuspected,
would certainly not be compatible with ‘devotion to noble objects.’”

Alain involuntarily bowed his head in assent to the proposition, and, it
may be, in submission to an implied rebuke.

The two men walked in silence for some minutes, and Graham first spoke,
changing altogether the subject of conversation. “Lemercier tells me you
decline going much into this world of Paris, the capital of capitals,
which appears so irresistibly attractive to us foreigners.”

“Possibly; but, to borrow your words, I have the business of life before
me.”

“Business is a good safeguard against the temptations to excess in
pleasure, in which Paris abounds. But there is no business which does
not admit of some holiday, and all business necessitates commerce
with mankind. A propos, I was the other evening at the Duchese de
Tarascon’s,--a brilliant assembly, filled with ministers, senators, and
courtiers. I heard your name mentioned.”

“Mine?”

“Yes; Duplessis, the rising financier--who rather to my surprise was
not only present among these official and decorated celebrities, but
apparently quite at home among them--asked the Duchess if she had not
seen you since your arrival at Paris. She replied, ‘No; that though you
were among her nearest connections, you had not called on her;’ and bade
Duplessis tell you that you were a monstre for not doing so. Whether or
not Duplessis will take that liberty I know not; but you must pardon me
if I do. She is a very charming woman, full of talent; and that
stream of the world which reflects the stars, with all their mythical
influences on fortune, flows through her salons.”

“I am not born under those stars. I am a Legitimist.”

“I did not forget your political creed; but in England the leaders
of opposition attend the salons of the Prime Minister. A man is
not supposed to compromise his opinions because he exchanges social
courtesies with those to whom his opinions are hostile. Pray excuse me
if I am indiscreet, I speak as a traveller who asks for information: but
do the Legitimists really believe that they best serve their cause by
declining any mode of competing with its opponents? Would there not be
a fairer chance of the ultimate victory of their principles if they made
their talents and energies individually prominent; if they were known as
skilful generals, practical statesmen, eminent diplomatists, brilliant
writers? Could they combine,--not to sulk and exclude themselves from
the great battle-field of the world, but in their several ways to render
themselves of such use to their country that some day or other, in
one of those revolutionary crises to which France, alas! must long
be subjected, they would find themselves able to turn the scale of
undecided councils and conflicting jealousies.”

“Monsieur, we hope for the day when the Divine Disposer of events
will strike into the hearts of our fickle and erring countrymen the
conviction that there will be no settled repose for France save under
the sceptre of her rightful kings. But meanwhile we are,--I see it more
clearly since I have quitted Bretagne,--we are a hopeless minority.”

“Does not history tell us that the great changes of the world have been
wrought by minorities,--but on the one condition that the minorities
shall not be hopeless? It is almost the other day that the Bonapartists
were in a minority that their adversaries called hopeless, and the
majority for the Emperor is now so preponderant that I tremble for his
safety. When a majority becomes so vast that intellect disappears in the
crowd, the date of its destruction commences; for by the law of reaction
the minority is installed against it. It is the nature of things that
minorities are always more intellectual than multitudes, and intellect
is ever at work in sapping numerical force. What your party want is
hope; because without hope there is no energy. I remember hearing
my father say that when he met the Count de Chambord at Ems, that
illustrious personage delivered himself of a belle phrase much admired
by his partisans. The Emperor was then President of the Republic, in
a very doubtful and dangerous position. France seemed on the verge of
another convulsion. A certain distinguished politician recommended the
Count de Chambord to hold himself ready to enter at once as a candidate
for the throne. And the Count, with a benignant smile on his handsome
face, answered, ‘All wrecks come to the shore: the shore does not go to
the wrecks.’”

“Beautifully said!” exclaimed the Marquis.

“Not if ‘Le beau est toujours le vrai.’ My father, no inexperienced nor
unwise politician, in repeating the royal words, remarked: ‘The fallacy
of the Count’s argument is in its metaphor. A man is not a shore. Do you
not think that the seamen on board the wrecks would be more grateful to
him who did not complacently compare himself to a shore, but considered
himself a human being like themselves, and risked his own life in
a boat, even though it were a cockleshell, in the chance of saving
theirs?”

Alain de Rochebriant was a brave man, with that intense sentiment of
patriotism which characterizes Frenchmen of every rank and persuasion,
unless they belong to the Internationalists; and, without pausing to
consider, he cried, “Your father was right.”

The Englishman resumed: “Need I say, my dear Marquis, that I am not a
Legitimist? I am not an Imperialist, neither am I an Orleanist nor a
Republican. Between all those political divisions it is for Frenchmen
to make their choice, and for Englishmen to accept for France that
government which France has established. I view things here as a simple
observer. But it strikes me that if I were a Frenchman in your position,
I should think myself unworthy my ancestors if I consented to be an
insignificant looker-on.”

“You are not in my position,” said the Marquis, half mournfully, half
haughtily, “and you can scarcely judge of it even in imagination.”

“I need not much task my imagination; I judge of it by analogy. I was
very much in your position when I entered upon what I venture to call
my career; and it is the curious similarity between us in circumstances,
that made me wish for your friendship when that similarity was made
known to me by Lemercier, who is not less garrulous than the true
Parisian usually is. Permit me to say that, like you, I was reared
in some pride of no inglorious ancestry. I was reared also in the
expectation of great wealth. Those expectations were not realized: my
father had the fault of noble natures,--generosity pushed to imprudence:
he died poor and in debt. You retain the home of your ancestors; I had
to resign mine.”

The Marquis had felt deeply interested in this narrative, and as Graham
now paused, took his hand and pressed it. “One of our most eminent
personages said to me about that time, ‘Whatever a clever man of your
age determines to do or to be, the odds are twenty to one that he has
only to live on in order to do or to be it.’ Don’t you think he spoke
truly? I think so.”

“I scarcely know what to think,” said Rochebriant; “I feel as if you had
given me so rough a shake when I was in the midst of a dull dream, that
I am not yet quite sure whether I am asleep or awake.”

Just as he said this, and towards the Paris end of the Champs Elysees,
there was a halt, a sensation among the loungers round them; many of
them uncovered in salute.

A man on the younger side of middle age, somewhat inclined to
corpulence, with a very striking countenance, was riding slowly by.
He returned the salutations he received with the careless dignity of
a Personage accustomed to respect, and then reined in his horse by the
side of a barouche, and exchanged some words with a portly gentleman
who was its sole occupant. The loungers, still halting, seemed to
contemplate this parley--between him on horseback and him in the
carriage--with very eager interest. Some put their hands behind their
ears and pressed forward, as if trying to overhear what was said.

“I wonder,” quoth Graham, “whether, with all his cleverness, the Prince
has in any way decided what he means to do or to be.”

“The Prince!” said Rochebriant, rousing himself from revery; “what
Prince?”

“Do you not recognize him by his wonderful likeness to the first
Napoleon,--him on horseback talking to Louvier, the great financier.”

“Is that stout bourgeois in the carriage Louvier,--my mortgagee,
Louvier?”

“Your mortgagee, my dear Marquis? Well, he is rich enough to be a very
lenient one upon pay-day.”

“Hein!--I doubt his leniency,” said Alain. “I have promised my avoue to
meet him at dinner. Do you think I did wrong?”

“Wrong! of course not; he is likely to overwhelm you with civilities.
Pray don’t refuse if he gives you an invitation to his soiree next
Saturday; I am going to it. One meets there the notabilities most
interesting to study,--artists, authors, politicians, especially those
who call themselves Republicans. He and the Prince agree in one thing;
namely, the cordial reception they give to the men who would destroy the
state of things upon which Prince and financier both thrive. Hillo! here
comes Lemercier on return from the Bois.”

Lemercier’s coupe stopped beside the footpath. “What tidings of the
Belle Inconnue?” asked the Englishman. “None; she was not there. But I
am rewarded: such an adventure! a dame of the haute volee; I believe
she is a duchess. She was walking with a lap-dog, a pure Pomeranian. A
strange poodle flew at the Pomeranian, I drove off the poodle, rescued
the Pomeranian, received the most gracious thanks, the sweetest smile:
femme superbe, middle aged. I prefer women of forty. Au revoir, I am due
at the club.”

Alain felt a sensation of relief that Lemercier had not seen the lady
in the pearl-coloured dress, and quitted the Englishman with a lightened
heart.




CHAPTER IV.

“Piccola, piccola! com e cortese! another invitation from M. Louvier for
next Saturday,--conversazione.” This was said in Italian by an elderly
lady bursting noisily into the room,--elderly, yet with a youthful
expression of face, owing perhaps to a pair of very vivacious black
eyes. She was dressed, after a somewhat slatternly fashion, in a wrapper
of crimson merino much the worse for wear, a blue handkerchief twisted
turban-like round her head, and her feet encased in list slippers. The
person to whom she addressed herself was a young lady with dark hair,
which, despite its evident repugnance, was restrained into smooth glossy
braids over the forehead, and at the crown of the small graceful head
into the simple knot which Horace has described as “Spartan.” Her dress
contrasted the speaker’s by an exquisite neatness.

We have seen her before as the lady in the pearl-coloured robe; but
seen now at home she looks much younger. She was one of those whom,
encountered in the streets or in society, one might guess to be
married,--probably a young bride; for thus seen there was about her an
air of dignity and of self-possession which suits well with the ideal of
chaste youthful matronage; and in the expression of the face there was a
pensive thoughtfulness beyond her years. But as she now sat by the open
window arranging flowers in a glass bowl, a book lying open on her lap,
you would never have said, “What a handsome woman!” you would have said,
“What a charming girl!” All about her was maidenly, innocent, and fresh.
The dignity of her bearing was lost in household ease, the pensiveness
of her expression in an untroubled serene sweetness.

Perh

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