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then, only that, notwithstanding all her errors, this Nelly Robin had nevertheless her heart in the right place, since, in the full tide of passion, in the height of desire, she obeyed an instinct of justice and mercy.

Nelly had lifted Mariette, and made her sit down by her side.

"Do you want, my child," she said, in a kind voice, "that I should give you good advice?"

"Undoubtedly, madame. But first let me tell you how confused I am. I have been saying a thousand follies to you, and I ask your pardon.'

ing also, "The poor little girl! she loved me all the same."

Then, dismissing that unfortunate reminder, he put his room in some sort of order, and nervous, with beating heart, walking like a deer in a cage, he waited the longed-for hour, the moment of triumph and of love, when Nelly should come to him. But at half after five the concierge appeared with a letter which a commissionnaire had just left, without waiting for a reply. And, with a shiver at his heart, Jean Delhy read these dreadful lines:

"Do not wait for me to-night, my dear poet-neither to-night nor ever. Think of me as a wretch, a coquette. Despise me! hate me! But so it is. This morning, after you had gone, I understood all of a sudden that we two were about to

"Let that go. You will thank me later. The brutality with which your lover has left you is a proof, I think, that he has been moved by some sudden impulse violently. He is not like that ordinarily, is he?" "Oh, certainly not. He has always commit a great folly; and it was an inbeen so thoughtful to me."

"Ah, well, you must see him again. Go! I know men. I would swear that at this very hour he is already regretting having been so wicked, for he must have been home and found there that money. You must see him as soon as possible. Can you do it to-day, even?"

"I can go to him, as I used often to go, after six, when I leave the shop."

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Don't fail! You promise me? If your Jean is not lacking in heart, he will blush for his action before those beautiful eyes all disfigured by tears."

"Alas, madame, do you think so? Oh, I am not so proud, and I would be too content if he would love me a little only through pity. But I dare not believe

even that."

"Ah, well, my dear, I am sure that you will be astonished at your warm reception. It is quite understood. You will go this evening; only try not to weep all the way there. And now, kiss me, for I am going to prove to you how truly I am your friend."

And having kissed her forehead, Nelly sent away the young girl, still troubled, yet a little comforted, and stirred by a light hope.

On coming home, Jean Delhy had found on his table the bank-notes left by Mariette.

Bah! I ought to have made her take that money," he said to himself, with a little bad humor and some shame. But he could not prevent himself from think

VOL. LXXXV.-No. 510.-89

significant thing, I assure you, that woke me from my dream. My milliner came to bring me a hat costing five louis, and I remembered then that such flowers did not grow in the window of an attic. In a week I should have regretted my pretty hats and all the rest. You have been mistaken. I am but a woman, though a good-hearted one, who will dispel for you, after all, a gross illusion. Do not seek to see me again. I have just signed an engagement for St. Petersburg, where the Grand Duc who admired me last winter, from a box at the Vaudeville, wishes to see me again. But before going to the white frosts of the North, I shall take a sun-bath, and shall set out this evening for Nice, whither M. le Duc d'Eylau, a friend to whom I have been very unjust, has consented to accompany me. Good-by and good fortune! I hope that in a few days, after reflection, you will not think too hardly of a woman who has been happy enough, my dear poet, to assist at your first début at the theatre, and who will never cease to watch with interest those new successes which you are sure to obtain. Your friend, notwithstanding everything, NELLY ROBIN."

That letter, which Nelly had written in the heat of her good impulse, but with swelling heart moreover and with painful effort, Jean Delhy was re-reading for the tenth time, a prey to all the tortures of wounded self-love, when Mariette entered.

Although the door was unlocked, the

young girl had first discreetly rappedalas! as if at a stranger's. But Jean, in his exasperation, had heard nothing. She appeared suddenly before him, intimidated, and lifting her eyes toward her ungrateful friend with the appealing, faithful look of a beaten dog.

Nelly was not mistaken. A comparison of the two women flashed upon the imaginative poet--their two loves. How could he have thought of giving up that sincere child for a vain and perverse girl? He was seized with horror, and then came Mariette to be his consolation. Jean ran toward her, and strained her passionately to his heart. "Forgive me!" he said in a trembling voice; "forgive me, my own, my Mariette! You are candor, you are sincerity, you are true happiness and honest love! And I was going to betray you, abandon you, for a deceiver, for a wretch! But it is all over, I swear to you, and as in the old days I hid nothing from you, here, read,” he added, handing her the letter, "and see for what a worthless woman I was about to make you suffer so much, and become so infamous and so cowardly!”

Mariette, intoxicated and stupefied with happiness, seated herself, trembling, on a chair; and while the poet, fallen at her knees, hid his face, blushing for shame, in Mariette's lap, she read the strange letter and the name signed to it-Nelly Robin! So it was for Nelly Robin that Jean would have left her. It was to Nelly Robin that she had that very morning confided her unhappiness. And understanding at last the generous deceit and the magnanimous sacrifice of her rival, Mariette was touched to the depths of her heart.

VIII.

Now thirty years had passed since then, and the two old friends who have told me their story on a bench on the Esplanade des Invalides, on a warm afternoon in the early spring-time, were none other than Mariette and Nelly. Both sprung from the ranks of the people and from poverty, they had returned there in their old age, driven by adverse fate.

The poetic destiny of Jean Delhy was a meteor. It burned only to disappear quickly. Soon after the success of the Night of Stars, and the book of verse which followed it and gave to the literary world the hope that a great poet was born, he became ill, languished, worked

no more. At scarcely twenty-five he died, worn out by consumption, in the arms of his faithful Mariette, to whom, egoist to the end, he left not even his name. With the scanty resources that were left to her, the poor girl hired a little store, trying to live by her trade. But she was neither clever in business nor adroit at her trade; her establishment did not succeed; and she was too happy, thanks to the little money still left her, to buy the stock and good-will of a newsstand in the Gros-Caillou, where she vegetated, selling stationery and newspapers. Her capacity for suffering died at the bedside of Jean, in the long nights of watching, and her heart closed forever at the last sigh of the poet. Moreover, her feminine charm, all her grace and freshness, faded soon. Little by little, through hard work, through grief, through solitude, she gave up, and became rapidly an old woman, with her cape and linen bonnet.

Nelly, on the contrary, remained beautiful until forty, and continued her life of gayety at St. Petersburg until she was stricken down by paralysis. Her fall was sudden and terrible. Returning to Paris almost powerless, she lived there some time on what she had saved from the wreck, and the sum received from a benefit given her at St. Petersburg. But being without foresight, she soon knew misery again. Her old admirers were dead or scattered. She was forced to accept from some of her comrades of other days, happier or wiser than she, the humiliating position of a friend in need, to whom one gives, now and then, a louis or an old dress. Soon even such wretched alms failed her. Her wearying distress and her infirmities were tiresome. Then, even in her unhappiness, the wretched woman took a little courage. She remembered that, after all, when she was young, she had been ill clad, and often breakfasted on a sausage that was not over-good. As an old actress, she could count on help, very little, but regular, from the Administration des Beaux-Arts and some charitable societies. She sold her last flaunting rags, hired a garret in an obscure quarter near the Champ de Mars, and resigned herself to living in poverty, but without ignominy.

And so one day, to buy her Petit Journal, Nelly Robin, who had had princes of blood at her feet, but whose aspect at present was that of an old wool-carder,

entered the shop of Mariette-Mother Mariette, as they commenced to call her at the Faubourg.

They had met but once in their life, but at what an unforgettable hour! They looked a long time at each other, and, notwithstanding their faces so cruelly ravaged, they recognized at last the look which never changes.

"But-you are Mariette?"
"You are Nelly Robin!"

And, with hearts beating, suffocated with emotion, the two women approached each other, seized hands, and embraced, weeping. They lived every day to talk of the past. Mariette told Nelly then how grateful she had always been to her for having once spared her; and Nelly could tell Mariette that that love which she had given up before the unhappiness of her rival, had been the sole love of her wild life, at the bottom so sad.

There was to them both an infinite sweetness in speaking of the beloved dead. In remembering him they loved each other. They soon decided to live together, and the good Mariette took the best care in her power of the invalid, and little by little the old actress, by force of example, learned habits of order and neatness. The partnership of their two miseries became supportable. How neat and respectable the two old friends were on the day when they made me their confidant! One would have taken them for two very respectable old ladies, I as

sure you. With what an affectionate gesture Mariette warmed in her hands the almost powerless hand of the paralytic! And how the eyes of Nelly Robin burned with gratitude in looking at her friend, those eyes, still lovely, which had once fired with desire the theatreful of spectators!

"You can have no idea, monsieur, of her devotion to me," said the aged actress, in finishing her story. "But she is a treasure, that Mariette! And so ingenious, so economical! With our four sous together, we lack nothing, truly. Never a complaint, an impatient word, though I am always sick and very troublesome. The most tender girl could do no more. And why is she thus, I ask you. Because, once upon a time, a long while ago, I saw her unhappy and I had a good heart. Tell me if for so little should she think herself my debtor."

But the other interrupted her with a look, and I shall never forget the deep and passionate tone with which she said these words:

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But yes, I am your debtor, your debtor forever! You left me one day what you could have taken from me and what you have never had, alas, my poor Nelly. I can never forget it, never do enough for you; for, look!" she added, turning toward me her wrinkled face, to which her smile lent a fugitive charm"look! a little happy love in youth is all the good we have in life, we poor women."

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When Napoleon thought himself closely observed, he had, according to Sir Walter Scott, "the power of discharging from his countenance all expression save that of an indefinite smile, and presenting to the curious investigator the fixed and rigid eyes of a marble bust." As he is here observed, no matter how curiously or how closely, he is seen as he was. is the face of Napoleon off his guard.

It

Dr. F. Antomarchi, a native of Corsica, and a professor of anatomy at Florence, at the request of Cardinal Fesch and of "Madame Mère," and with the consent of the British government, went to Saint The mask of the Third Napoleon was Helena in 1819 as physician to the exiled taken, of course, at Chiselhurst, and imEmperor. He closed his master's eyes in mediately after death. Louis Napoleon death; and immediately before the official Bonaparte was distinguished, particupost-mortem examination, held the next larly, as being the only Bonaparte, for day, he made the mask in question. He four generations at least, who bore no said in his report that the face was re- resemblance whatever to the Bonaparte laxed, but that the mask was correct so family, not one of the strongly marked far as the shape of the forehead and nose facial traits so universal in the tribe apwas concerned. And unquestionably it pearing in him. is the most truthful portrait of Bonaparte that exists.

The cast of the face of Oliver Cromwell has the following apocryphal pedi

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gree. The original was left by Richard Cromwell, son of Oliver Cromwell, to his, Richard's, daughter Elizabeth. She left it to her cousins Richard and Thomas. Thomas bequeathed it to his daughters, Anne, Elizabeth, and Lucretia. From them it came to Oliver Cromwell in 1802, who left it to his daughter, Mrs. Russell, whose husband, an officer in the British Mint, presented it to the United States Cabinet in 1859." Cromwell, according to the Commonwealth Mercury of November 23, 1658, was buried that day at the east end of the chapel of Henry Seventh, in Westminster Abbey. Dean Stanley accepted this as an established fact, notwithstanding the several reports, long current, that the body was thrown into the Thames, or laid in the field of Naseby, or carried to the vault of the Claypoles in the parish church of Northampton, or stolen during a heavy tempest in the night, or placed in the coffin of Charles First at Windsor, Mr. Samuel Pepys being responsible for the last wild statement. After the Restoration this same

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Mr. Pepys saw the disinterred head of Cromwell in the interior of Westminster Hall, although all the other authorities agree in stating that, with the heads of Ireton and Bradshaw, it adorned the outer walls of that building.

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Both Horace Smith and Cyrus Redding, early in the present century, saw what they fully believed to be the head of Cromwell. It was then in the possession of "a medical gentleman" in London. "The nostrils," said Redding, were filled with a substance like cotton. The brain had been extracted by dividing the scalp. The membranes within were perfect, but dried up, and looked like parchment. The decapitation had evidently been performed after death, as the state of the flesh over the vertebræ of the neck plainly showed."

A correspondent of the London Times, signing himself "Senex," wrote to that journal, under date December 31, 1874, a full history of this head, in which he explained

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