"My dear child," answered the marquise, "I see that you think me a cold and heartless woman. Perhaps you are right; judge for yourself. I will tell you my whole history, and, whatever opinion you may have of me, I, at least, shall not die without having made myself known to some one. Perhaps you will give me some mark of compassion which will soften the bitterness of my recollections.

"When I was sixteen I left Saint Cyr, where I had been educated, to marry the Marquis de R. He was fifty, but I dared not complain, for every one congratulated me on this splendid match, and all my portionless companions envied my lot.

"I was never very bright, and at that time I was positively stupid; the education of the cloister had completely benumbed my faculties. I left the convent with that silly ignorance of life and of the world which is foolishly considered a merit in young girls, and which often results in the misery of their whole lives.

"As a natural consequence, the experience brought me by my brief married life was lodged in so narrow a mind that it was of no use to me. I learned, not to understand life, but to doubt myself.

"I was a widow before I was seventeen, and as soon as I was out of mourning I was surrounded with suitors. I was then in all the splendour of my beauty, and it was generally admitted that there was not a face or a figure which could be compared to mine.

"But my husband, an old, worn-out, and dissipated man, who had never shown me anything but irony and disdain, and who had only married me to obtain an office promised with my hand, had left me such an aversion to marriage, that I could never be brought to contract new ties. In my ignorance of life I fancied that all men resembled him, and that in a second husband I should find M. de R.'s hard heart, his pitiless irony, and that insulting coldness which had so deeply humiliated me. This fatal entrance into life had dispelled for me all the illusions of youth. My heart, which perhaps was not naturally cold, withdrew into itself and grew full of suspicion.

"I was foolish enough to tell my real feelings to several women of my acquaintance. They did not fail to divulge what they had learned, and, without taking any account of the doubts and anguish of my heart, boldly declared that I despised all men. There is nothing which men will not more readily pardon than this feeling; my lovers soon learned to detest me, and continued their flatteries only in the hope of finding an opportunity to

hold me up to ridicule. I saw mockery and treachery written upon every forehead, and my misanthropy increased every day.

"About this time there came to Paris from the provinces a man who had neither talent nor any strong or pleasing quality, but who possessed a frankness and uprightness of feeling very rare among the people with whom I lived. This was the Vicomte de Larrieux. He was soon acknowledged to be my most favoured suitor.

"He, poor fellow, loved me in the sincerity of his soul. His soul! Had he a soul? He was one of those cold, prosaic men who have not even the elegance of vice or the brilliance of falsehood. He was struck only by my beauty, and took no pains to discover my heart. This was not disdain on his part, it was incapacity. Had he found in me the power of loving, he would not have known how to respond to it.

"I do not think that there ever lived a man more wedded to material things than poor Larrieux. He ate with delight, he fell asleep in all the arm-chairs, and the remainder of the time he took snuff. He was always occupied in satisfying some appetite. I do not think he had an idea a day.

"And yet, my dear friend, will you believe it? I never had the energy to get rid of him! For sixty years he has been my torment. Constantly offended by my repulses, yet constantly drawn to me by the very obstacles I placed in the way of his passion, he has had for me the most faithful, the most untiring, the most wearisome love that ever man felt for woman.'

"I am surprised," said I, "that you never should have met, in the course of your life, a man capable of understanding you, and worthy of converting you to real love. Must we conclude that the men of to-day are superior to those of the olden time?"

"That would be a great piece of vanity on your part," answered she, laughing. "I have little reason to speak well of the men of my own time, yet I doubt whether you have made much progress; but I will not moralize. The cause of my misfortune was entirely in myself. I had not the sense to judge. A woman as proud as I was should have possessed a superior character, and should have been able to distinguish at one glance among all the insipid, false, and insignificant men who surrounded me, one of those true and noble beings who are rare in every age. I was too ignorant, too narrow-minded, for this. As I have lived longer I have acquired more judgment, and I have learned that several of the objects of my

hatred deserved far other feelings. But I was then old, and my knowledge came too late." "And while you were young," I rejoined, "were you never tempted to make a second trial? Was this deep-rooted aversion never shaken? It is strange."

The marquise was silent, then hastily laying her gold snuff-box on the table:

"I have begun my confession," said she, "and I will acknowledge everything. Listen! Once, only once in my life, I have loved, but loved as none ever loved, with a love as passionate and indomitable as it was imaginative and ideal. For you see, my child, you young men think you understand women, and you know nothing about them. If many old women of eighty were frankly to tell you the history of their lives, you would perhaps find that the feminine soul contains sources of good and evil of which you have no idea. And now, guess what was the rank of the man for whom I entirely lost my head-I, a marchioness, and one prouder and haughtier than every other?" "The King of France, or the Dauphin, Louis XVI."

"Oh, if you begin in that manner, you will be three hours before you reach my lover. prefer to tell you at once. He was an actor."

I

"He was never famous," answered she, "and was appreciated neither by the court nor the town. I have heard that he was outrageously hissed when he first appeared. Afterwards he was valued for his sensibility, his fire, and the efforts he made to improve himself. He was tolerated, and sometimes applauded, but, on the whole, he was always considered an actor without taste.

"In those days tragedy was played 'properly;' it was necessary to die with taste, to fall gracefully, and to have an air of good breeding even in giving a blow. Dramatic art was modelled upon the usages of good society, and the diction and gestures of the actors were in harmony with the hoops and hair-powder which even then disfigured Phèdre and Clytemnestra. I had never appreciated the defects of this school of art. My reflections did not carry me far; I only knew that tragedy wearied me to death. I bravely endured it twice in the week, for it was the fashion to like it; but I listened with so cold and constrained an air that it was generally said I was insensible to the charms of fine poetry.

"One evening, after a rather long absence from Paris, I went to the Comédie Française to see Le Cid. Lelio had been admitted to this theatre during my stay in the country, and I saw him for the first time. He played Rodrigue. I was deeply moved by the very first tones of his voice. It was penetrating rather than sonorous, but vibrating and strongly accentuated. His voice was much criticized. That of the Cid was supposed to be deep and powerful, just as all the heroes of antiquity were supposed to be tall and strong. A king who was but five feet six could not wear the diadem; it would have been contrary to the decrees of taste.

"Lelio was small and slender; his beauty was not that of the features, but lay in the nobleness of his forehead, the irresistible grace of his attitude, the careless ease of his movements, the proud and melancholy expression of his face. I never saw in a statue, in a painting, in a man, so pure and ideal a capa

"His name was Lelio; he was by birth an Italian, but spoke French admirably. He may have been thirty-five, although upon the stage he often seemed less than twenty. He played Corneille better than he did Racine, but in both he was inimitable."

"I am surprised," said I, interrupting the marquise, "that his name should not appear in the annals of dramatic talent."

been invented for him; it belonged to all his words, to all his glances, to all his motions.

"What shall I say? It was indeed a 'charm' which he threw around me. This man, who stepped, spoke, moved, without system or affectation, who sobbed with his heart as much as with his voice, who forgot himself to become identified with his passion; this man, in whom the body seemed wasted and shattered by the soul, and a single one of whose glances con

tained all the love I had failed to find in real life, exercised over me a really magnetic power. He had not been born in an age which could give him sympathy and fame; I alone could follow and understand him, and he was for five years my king, my life, my love.

I

"I could no longer live without seeing him; he ruled, he governed me. To me he was not a man, but in a different sense from that of Mme. de Ferrières. To me he was much more; his was an intellectual power, which formed my soul at its will. Soon I was unable to conceal the impression he made upon me. gave up my box at the Comédie Française in order not to betray myself. I pretended I had become pious, and that in the evening I went to pray in the churches. Instead of that I dressed myself as a workwoman, and mingled with the common people, that I might listen to him unconstrained. At last I bribed one of the employes of the theatre and obtained possession of a little hidden corner where no one could see me, and which I reached by a side corridor. As an additional precaution, I dressed myself as a school-boy. The follies I committed for a man with whom I had never exchanged a word or a glance, had for me all the charms of mystery and all the illusions of happiness. When the hour for the theatre sounded in the large clock of my drawing-room, I was seized with violent palpitations. While my carriage was getting ready I tried to collect, to control myself; and if Larrieux happened to be with me, I was harsh and rude to him, to send him away. I used infinite art to rid myself of all other intruders. The ingenuity | with which this theatrical passion inspired me is incredible. I must have had great dissimulation and great tact to have hidden it for five years from Larrieux, who was the most jealous of men, and from all the malicious people who surrounded me.

"I must tell you that instead of struggling against this passion, I yielded to it with eagerness, with delight. It was so pure! Why should I have blushed for it? It gave me new life; it initiated me into all the feelings I had wished to experience; it almost made me a

woman.

"I was happy, I was proud to feel myself thrill and tremble. The first time my dormant heart beat aloud was to me a triumph. I learned to pout, to laugh, to be playful and capricious. It was remarked that I grew handsomer every day, that my dark eye softened, that my smile was more expressive, that what I said was truer and had more meaning than could have been expected.

"My recollections of this period of my life are disconnected, for their number overwhelms me. As I tell them to you, it seems to me that I grow young again, and that my heart beats once more at the name of Lelio. I have just told you that when I heard the clock strike I trembled with joy and impatience. Even now I seem to feel the delicious oppression which used to overwhelm me at the sound of that clock. Since then, through the vicissitudes of fortune I have come to find myself very happy in the possession of a few small rooms in the Marais. Well, of my magnificent house, my aristocratic faubourg, and my past splendour, I regret only that which could have recalled to me those days of love and dreams. I have saved from the general ruin some pieces of furniture which belonged to me at that time, and which I look upon with as much emotion as if the hour for the theatre were about to strike and my horses were pawing at the door. Oh, my child, never love as I loved. It is a storm which death alone can quell! "Then I started, young, gay, and happy. I learned to take pleasure in being young, wealthy, and beautiful. Happiness revealed itself through every sense, by every pore. Seated in my coach, my feet buried in furs, I could see myself reflected in the mirror in front of me. The costume of that time, which has since been so much laughed at, was of extraordinary richness and splendour. When arranged with taste, and modified in its exaggerations, it endowed a beautiful woman with dignity, a softness, a grace, of which the portraits of that time can give you no idea. A woman, clothed in this panoply of feathers, silks, and flowers, was obliged to move slowly. I have seen very fair women in white robes with long trains of watered silk, their hair powdered and dressed with white plumes, who might without hyperbole have been compared to swans. Despite all Rousseau has said, those enormous folds of satin, that profusion of muslin, which enveloped a slender little body as down envelops the dove, made us resemble birds rather than wasps. Long wings of lace fell from our arms, and our ribbons, our dresses, and our jewels were variegated with the most brilliant colours. Balancing ourselves in our little high-heeled shoes, we seemed to fear to touch the earth, and we walked with the disdainful circumspection of a little bird on the edge of a brook.

"At the time of which I am speaking blond powder began to be worn, and gave the hair a light and soft colour. This method of modifying the crude shades of the hair gave softness

"I created a sensation wherever I appeared, and, when I again found myself in my carriage, I contemplated with much pleasure the reflected image of the woman who loved Lelio, and might have been beloved by him. Until then, the only pleasure I had found in being beautiful lay in the jealousy I excited. But from the moment that I loved, I began to enjoy my beauty for its own sake. It was all I had to offer Lelio as a compensation for the triumphs which were denied him in Paris, and I loved to think of the pride and joy this poor actor, so misjudged, so laughed at, would feel, were he told that the Marquise de R. had dedicated her heart to him.

"These were but dreams, however, as brief as they were beautiful. As soon as my thoughts assumed some consistency, as soon as they took the form of any plan whatever, I had the fortitude to suppress them, and all the pride of rank reasserted its empire over my soul. You seem surprised at this. I will explain it by and-by. Let me still linger in the magic world of my recollections.

"About eight o'clock my carriage stopped at the little church of the Carmelites, near the Luxembourg, and I sent it away, for I was supposed to attend the religious lectures which were given there at that hour. But I only crossed the church and the garden, and came out in another street. I went to the garret of a young needlewoman named Florence, who was devoted to me. I locked myself up in her room, and joyfully laid aside all my adornments to don the black, square-cut coat, the sword and wig of a young college provisor. Tall as I was, with my dark complexion and inoffensive glance, I really had the awkward, hypocritical look of a little priestling who had stolen to the play. I took a hackney-coach, and hastened to hide myself in my little box

"As the vulture surrounds the partridge in his magnetic flight, and holds her panting and motionless in the magic circle he describes above her, the soul of Lelio, that great soul of a poet and tragedian, enveloped all my faculties, and plunged me into a torpor of admiration. I listened, my hands clasped upon my knees, my chin upon the front of the box, and my forehead bathed in perspiration. I hardly breathed; the crude light of the lamps tortured my eyes, which, dry and burning, were fastened on his every gesture, his every step. I wished to seize his least breath, the slightest shadow upon his brow. His feigned emotions, his simulated misfortunes, impressed me as if they were real. I could hardly distinguish between truth and illusion. To me, Lelio no longer existed; he was Rodrigue, Bajazet, Hippolyte. I hated his enemies; I trembled at his dangers; his sorrows drew from me floods of tears; and when he died I was compelled to stifle my screams with my handkerchief. Between the acts I sank down exhausted in the back part of my box; I was as one dead until the meagre tones of the orchestra warned me that the curtain was about to rise again. Then I sprang up, full of strength and ardour, to admire, to feel, to weep. How much freshness, poetry, and youth there was in that man's talent! That whole generation must have been of ice not to have fallen at his feet.

"And yet, although he offended every conventional idea, although he could not adapt himself to the taste of that silly public, although he scandalized the women by the carelessness of his dress and deportment, and displeased the men by his contempt for their foolish exactions, there were moments when, by an irresistible fascination, by the power of his eye and his voice, he held the whole of this ungrateful public as if in the hollow of his hand, and compelled it to applaud and to tremble. This happened but seldom, for the entire spirit of an age cannot be suddenly changed; but when it did happen, the applause was frantic. It seemed as if the Parisians, subjugated by his genius, wished to atone for all their injustice. As for me, I believed that this man had at times a supernatural power, and that those who most bitterly despised him were compelled to swell his triumph in spite of themselves. In truth, at such times the Comédie Française seemed smitten with madness, and the specta

tors, on leaving the theatre, were amazed to remember that they had applauded Lelio. As for me, I seized the opportunity to give full career to my emotion; I shouted, I wept, I passionately called his name. Happily for me, my weak voice was drowned in the storm which raged around me.

"At other times he was hissed when he seemed to me sublime, and then I left the theatre, my heart full of rage. Those nights were the most dangerous for me. I was violently tempted to seek him out, to weep with him, to curse the age in which we lived, and console him by offering him my enthusiasm and my love.

"One evening, as I left the theatre by the side passage which led to my box, a small, slender man passed in front of me, and turned into the street. One of the stage-carpenters took off his hat and said: 'Good evening, Monsieur Lelio.' Eager to obtain a near view of this extraordinary man, I ran after him, crossed the street, and, forgetting the danger to which I exposed myself, followed him into a café. Fortunately, it was not one in which I was likely to meet any one of my own rank.

"When, by the light of a smoky lamp, I looked at Lelio, I thought I had been mistaken and had followed another man. He was at least thirty-five, sallow, withered, and worn-out. He was badly dressed, he looked vulgar, spoke in a hoarse broken voice, shook hands with the meanest wretches, drank brandy, and swore horribly. It was not until I had heard his name repeated several times that I felt sure that this was the divinity of the theatre, the interpreter of the great Corneille. I could recognize none of those charms which had so fascinated me, not even his glance, so proud, so ardent, and so sad. His eye was dull, dead, almost stupid; his strongly accentuated pronunciation seemed ignoble when he called to the waiter, or talked of gambling and taverns. He walked badly, he looked vulgar, and the paint was only half-wiped from his cheeks. It was no longer Hippolyte—it was Lelio. The temple was empty; the oracle was dumb; the divinity had become a man, not even a manan actor.

"He went out, and I sat stupified, without even presence of mind enough to drink the hot spiced wine I had called for. When I remembered where I was, and perceived the insulting glances which were fixed upon me, I became frightened. It was the first time I had ever found myself in such an equivocal position and in such immediate contact with people of that class.

He

"I rose and tried to escape, but forgot to pay my reckoning. The waiter ran after me; I was terribly ashamed; I was obliged to return, enter into explanations at the desk, and endure all the mocking and suspicious looks which were turned upon me. When I left I thought I was followed. In vain I looked for a hackney-coach; there were none remaining in front of the theatre. I constantly heard heavy steps echoing my own. Trembling, I turned my head, and recognized a tall, illlooking fellow whom I had noticed in one corner of the café, and who had very much the air of a spy or something worse. spoke to me; I do not know what he said; I was too much frightened to hear, but I had still presence of mind enough to rid myself of him. The boldness which terror gives transformed me into a heroine. I struck him in the face with my cane, and, leaving him stunned at my audacity, I started away swift as an arrow, and did not stop till I reached Florence's little garret. When I awoke the next morning in my bed with its wadded curtains and coronal of pink feathers, I almost thought I had dreamed, and felt greatly mortified when I recollected the disillusions of the previous night. I thought myself thoroughly cured of my love, and I tried to rejoice at it, but in vain. I was filled with a mortal regret, the weariness of life again entered my heart, the world had not a pleasure which could charm me.

"Evening came, but brought no more beneficent emotions. Society seemed to me insipid. I went to church, listened to the evening lecture with the determination of becoming pious; I caught cold, and came home quite ill.

"I remained in bed several days. The Comtesse de Ferrières came to see me, assured me that I had no fever, that lying still made me ill, that I must amuse myself, go out, go to the theatre. She compelled me to go with her to see Cinna.' 'You no longer go to the theatre,' said she to me; 'your health is undermined by your piety and the dulness of your life. You have not seen Lelio for some time; he is improved, and he is now sometimes applauded. I think he may some day become very tolerable.'

"I do not know why I allowed myself to be persuaded. However, as I was completely disenchanted with Lelio, I thought I no longer ran any risk in braving his fascinations in public. I dressed myself with excessive brilliance, and, in a great procenium box, fronted a danger in which I no longer believed.