Doña Ramona
From The Spanish.
In an empire whose name history has failed to record, there lived in a miserable stable a poor laborer and his wife. Juan and Ramona were their names, though Juan was better known by the nickname “Under present circumstances,” which they gave him because in season or out of season that phrase was continually dropping from his lips. Juan and Ramona were so wretchedly poor that they would have had no roof to cover them unless a laborer of the province of Micomican had taken pity upon them, and given them a hut to live in, which in other days had served as a stable, and was now his property.
“We are badly enough off in a stable,” said Juan: “but we ought to conform ourselves with our lot, since under present circumstances God, though he was God, lived in a stable when he made himself man.”
“You are right,” replied Ramona.
So both worked away, if not happy, at least resigned—Juan in going out day after day to gain his daily reward of a couple of small pieces of money, and Ramona in taking care of the house, if house be a proper term to apply to a stable.
The emperor was very fond of living in the country, and had many palaces of different kinds in the province of Micomican. One day Juan was working in a kitchen garden near the road, when far away he saw the carriage of the emperor coming at a rate almost equal to that of a soul that the devil was trying to carry off.
“I’ll bet you,” said Juan, “that the horses have escaped from his majesty, and some misfortune is going to happen! It would be a great pity, for under present circumstances an emperor is worth an empire.”
Juan was not mistaken. The emperor’s horses had escaped, and the emperor was yelling:
“God take pity on me! I’m going to break my neck over one of those precipices! Isn’t there a son of a gun to save me? To whoever throws himself at the head of these confounded horses, I’ll give whatever he asks, though it be the very shirt on my back.”
But no one dared throw himself at the horses’ heads; for they tore along at such a furious rate that to rush at them was to rush into eternity.
Juan, enraged at the cowardice of the other workmen, and moved by his love for the emperor as well as his natural propensity to do good without looking at the person to whom he did it, threw himself at the horses’ heads, and succeeded in stopping the coach, to the admiration of the emperor himself, who at that moment would not have given a brass farthing for his life.
“Ask whatever you like,” said the emperor to him, “for everything appears to me small as a recompense to the man who has rendered me so signal a service.”
“Sire!” said Juan to him, “I, under present circumstances, am a poor day laborer, and the day that I don’t gain a couple of pesetas my wife and I have to fast. So, if your majesty will only assure me my day’s labor whether it rains or whether it is fine weather, my wife and I will sing our lives away in happiness, for we are people content with very little.”
“That’s pretty clear. Well, go along, it’s granted. The day that you have nothing to do anywhere else, go to one of my palaces, whichever you like, and occupy yourself there in whatever way you please.”
“Thank you, sire!”
“What! No; no reason for thanks, man. That is a mere nothing.”
The emperor went on his road happy enough, and Juan went on his, thinking of the great joy he was about to give his wife when he returned home at night, and told her that he had his day’s work secured for the rest of his life whether it rained or was fine weather.
In fact, his wife was greatly rejoiced when he carried her the good news. They supped, and went to bed in peace and in the grace of God, and Juan slept like one of the blessed; but Ramona passed the whole night turning about in the bed like one who has some trouble or desire that will not let him sleep.
“Do you know what I have been thinking the whole night long, Juan?” said Ramona, the following morning.
“What?”
“That yesterday you were a fool to ask so little from the emperor.”
“Indeed! What more had I to ask?”
“That he would give us a little house to live in, something more suitable and decent than this wretched stable.”
“You are right, woman; but now there is no help for it.”
“Perhaps there may be.”
“How?”
“Look here; go and see the emperor, and ask him.”
“Yes; now is the time to go on such an errand!”
“Go you shall, and quickly, too!”
“But, woman, don’t get angry. My goodness! what a temper you have! Well, well; I will go, and God grant his majesty does not send me off with a flea in my ear, although, under present circumstances, he is a very open‐ hearted, outspoken gentleman.”
Well, Juan set out for the palace of the emperor; and the emperor granted him an audience immediately on his arrival.
“Hallo, Juan!” said his majesty. “What brings you this way, man?”
“Sire!” replied Juan, twirling and twirling the hat which he held in his hand, “my wife, under present circumstances, is as good as gold; but, you see, the stable that we live in is gone to rack and ruin, and we wish to get it out of our sight. So she said to me this morning: ‘If your majesty, who is so kind, would only give us a little house, something better than the one we have, who dare sneeze at us then?’ ”
“Does your wife want nothing more than that? Well, it’s granted. This very moment I will give orders that they place the little white house at her disposal. Go into the dining‐room, and take a mouthful and a drop of something; and, instead of going afterwards to the stable, go to the little white house, and there you will find your wife already installed.”
Juan returned thanks to the emperor for his latest kindness, and, passing on to the dining‐room, filled himself with ham and wine.
Our friend commenced his journey home, and, when he arrived at the white house, his wife rushed out to receive him with tears of joy.
And indeed it was very natural for poor Ramona to find herself so merry, for the little white house was a perfect jewel. It occupied the summit of a gentle acclivity, whence the whole beauty of the plain was spread out before it. A large Muscatel vine covered the whole of the porch, and beneath it there were seats and little plots of pinks and roses. The apartments of the house were a little drawing‐room, very white, and clean, and pretty, with its chairs, its cupboard, and its looking‐glass; an alcove with its bed, so soft and clean and beautiful that the emperor himself might have slept in it; a little kitchen with all its requirements, among which were included the utensils, which shone like gold; and a little bewitching dining‐room, with four chairs, a table, and a sideboard. To the dining‐room there was a fairy entrance, adorned without by an arc of flowers, and through this entrance you passed into a garden, where there were fruits, and flowers, and vegetables, and a small army of chickens clucked; and every egg they laid was as big as Juan’s fist.
When night came on, Juan and Ramona took their supper like a couple of princes in their little dining‐room, and soon after laid them down in their beautiful bed. They both slept well, particularly Juan, who stirred neither hand nor foot the whole night through.
Ramona began to find fault the very next day, and Juan noticed that every night her sleep was more disturbed.
“Woman, what the devil is the matter with you, that all night long you are twisting like a reel?” asked Juan, one morning. “Why, there are no fleas here as there were in the stable.”
“Fleas hinder my sleep very little.”
“Well, then, what hinders it, woman?”
“What hinders it? Your stupidity in asking the emperor so little hinders it.”
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son!... And you still think it little that I have asked, and he granted us?”
“Yes, indeed I do. This little house is so small that one can scarcely turn in it; and if to‐morrow or some other day we have children, what shall we do with them in a hut like this?”
“Say what you like about it, there is no help for it now.”
“Perhaps there may be.”
“And how, I should like to know?”
“Going back and seeing his majesty, and telling him to give us a larger house, of course.”
“Go to Jericho, woman. You don’t catch me going on an errand of that kind!”
“Well, go you shall, then; or we’ll see who is master here.”
“But, wife, don’t you see that my very face would drop from me with shame?”
“Now, that’s enough of talk on the matter. All you have to do is, run along to the palace as fast as you can, if you care to have a quiet time of it.”
“Well, well; since you wish it, I’ll go.”
Juan, who did not possess an ounce of will of his own—a thing which is the greatest misfortune that can befall a husband who is not blessed with such a wife as God ordained for him—set out once more on his road towards the palace of the emperor.
“Indeed,” said he to himself, with more fear than shame, “it is very possible he will send me down‐stairs head foremost, because it is only natural that this abuse of his good‐nature will prove too much, even for him. And it will serve me right for my unfortunate weakness of character.”
Juan’s fears were not realized. So soon as he sought an audience with his majesty it was granted, and the emperor asked him, with a smiling face:
“How goes it at the little white house?”
“Not badly, sire!”
“And your wife, how does she find herself there?”
“Not badly, sire, but your majesty knows what the women are. Give ’em an inch, they’ll take an ell. My wife, under present circumstances, hasn’t a flaw in her; but she says that, if to‐morrow or the day after we have youngsters, we shall all be crowded there like bees in a bottle.”
“You are right. So she wants, of course, a house a little larger?”
“You’ve just hit it, sire!”
“Well, turn into the dining‐room till they give you a snack of something; and, instead of returning to the white house, go to the Azure Palace, where you will find your wife installed with the attendance befitting those who live in a palace.”
Juan returned the emperor thanks for his great goodness, and, after stuffing himself till he looked like a ball in the dining‐room, off he set, as happy as could be, to the Azure Palace, which was one of those that the emperor had in that district.
The Azure Palace was neither very large nor furnished with great wealth; but it was very beautiful and adorned with becoming elegance. A servant in livery received Juan at the door and conducted him to the apartment of the lady. The lady was Ramona, whom her maid had just finished dressing in one of the beautiful robes which she found in her new dwelling. Juan could do nothing but open his mouth and stare in amazement at seeing his wife in such majestic attire.
Juan and Ramona feared they would go mad when they found themselves lords of a palace, well fitted, elegant, and waited on by four servants: namely, a coachman, a footman, a maid, and a cook.
“Take off that clown’s dress,” said Ramona to Juan. “Aren’t you ashamed to show yourself in such a trim before our own servants?”
“This is a new start,” said Juan, astonished at the sally of his wife. “So I, who, under present circumstances, have passed all my life in digging the earth, and things even worse than that, must feel ashamed of the clothes I have worn all my life long!”
“But, you stupid head,” replied Ramona, “if you have costume corresponding to your rank, why didn’t you put it on?”
“My rank!... Come, this woman’s head is turned.”
“Juan, go to your apartment and change your things, and don’t try my patience so much, for you know already that my temper will not stand too great a trial.”
“Well, there’s no need to put yourself out, woman. Here I’m going now,” said Juan, turning to the room from which he saw Ramona come out.
“Blockhead!” said she, catching hold of him and showing him another room, “this apartment is mine, and that is yours.”
“Hallo! this is another surprise. So my wife’s room is not mine also?”
“No; that is only among common folk; but in people of our rank no.”
Juan gave up the dispute, and, entering the room which she had pointed out as his, found therein a wardrobe with a quantity of fine changes befitting a gentleman, and came out again transformed into a milord.
There passed fifteen days since Juan and Ramona came to live in the Azure Palace, and Ramona grew day by day more captious, and slept less and less every night.
“What the deuce ails you? One would think the ants were at you,” said Juan to her, one morning.
“What ails me is that I have the biggest fool for a husband that ever ate bread.”
“Hey for the sweet tempers! So you are not yet content with the sweet little fig that your husband gathered for you?”
“No, sir, I am not. One must be a dolt like you to content herself with what we have, when we might have much more only for the asking.”
“But, woman alive, have you lost your senses? Can the emperor grant us more than he has granted us, or do we need more to make us happy?”
“Yes, he can give us more, and we need it.”
“Explain yourself, and the devil take the explanation, for you’re going to drive me mad with your ambition.”
“Explain myself! I’ll explain myself, and very clearly, too; for, thank God, there are no hairs on my tongue to prevent me speaking to anybody, even to the emperor himself. To make you happy, all that is wanting is what common folk want—a good table where you may stuff yourself with turkey all the day long; but for us who have higher aims, we want something more than chunks of meat and wine that would make an ox dance a hornpipe. You can swell yourself out and look big when you walk out here, and hear them calling you Don Juan; but as for me, I could eat myself with rage when they call me Doña Ramona.”
“Well, and isn’t it better for them to call us that than Juan and Ramona, as they used to call us before? What more do you want, woman?”
“I want them to call me lady marchioness.”
“Have you lost your ears, Ramona? Now I tell you, and tell you again, that that wicked ambition of yours has deprived you of your senses.”
“Look here, Juan, you and I are not going into disputes and obstinacy. You know me well enough already, or if you don’t you ought to, to be certain that it doesn’t take long for my nose to itch. I want to be no less than the Marchioness of Radishe and the Countess of Cabbidge, who at every turn fill their mouths with their grand titles, and, when they meet one, don’t seem to have time to say with their drawling affectation, ‘Adios, Doña Ramona.’ Now, since the emperor has told you, when you saved his life, that you might ask him even for the shirt that he had on his back, go and see him, and ask him to make us Marquises.”
“Go and ask him if he has a head on his shoulders, why don’t you say? But there’s enough about it. Even in fun I don’t like to hear such nonsense.”
“Juan, don’t provoke me; take care that I don’t send you with a flea in your ear.”
“But, woman alive, however much of your husband’s breeches you may wear, could you even imagine that I was going to agree to this new start of yours?”
“I bet you, you will agree.”
“I tell you I am not going again to see the emperor.”
“Go you shall, though you have to go on your head.”
“But, wife, don’t be a fool—”
“Come, come; less talk, and run along.”
“Well, I’m going, then, since you are so anxious about it. The saints protect me, if I don’t deserve to be shot for this chicken‐hearted weakness of character!”
Juan took the road to the court, and solicited a new audience with the emperor. Though he took it for certain that his majesty would send him to Old Nick if he did not throw him to him over the balcony, he found that his majesty was very ready to grant him an audience.
“Sire, your majesty will pardon so many impertinences—” he stammered out, full of shame, when he drew near the emperor.
“Why, man, don’t be ashamed and a fool,” interrupted his majesty kindly. “Well, how goes it in the Azure Palace?”
“Beautifully, sire.”
“And how is that little rib of yours, eh?”
“Who—she? Oh! very well, under present circumstances.”
“And content with her lot? Is it not so?”
“Well, as for that, sire! Well, your majesty knows what the women are. Their mouths are like a certain place I wouldn’t mention before your majesty, always open, and there’s no getting at the bottom of it.”
“Well, and what does the good Doña Ramona ask now?”
“What, sire? But there—one is ashamed to say it.”
“Go on, man; out with it, and don’t be bashful. To the man that saved my life I’d give anything, even the crown I wear.”
“Well, then, sire! She wants to be a marchioness.”
“A marchioness! Is that all? Then from this instant she is the Marchioness of Marville.”
“Thank you, sire.”
“Keep the thanks for your wife; and look into the dining‐room to see if there is anything to lay hands on. And when you go back you will find your wife already installed in the palace belonging to her title, for the Azure Palace is not good enough for marquises.”
Juan passed into the dining‐room, and, after running the danger of bursting, he made his way for the palace of Marville. The palace of Marville was not such a very great wonder as its name might lead one to believe; but, for all that, one might very well pass his life in it!
A crowd of footmen and porters received Juan at the gates of the palace, addressing him as my lord marquis; and Juan, for all his modesty, could not but feel a little inflated with such a reception and such a title.
But there was nothing to hold the pride of his wife (though one might be as big as the bell of Toledo, under which one day there sat down seven tailors and a shoemaker) at hearing herself called by her maids lady marchioness here, and lady marchioness there.
“Well, so you are at last content, wife?” said Juan to her.
“Yes, of course, I am. And indeed it was very provoking to hear one’s self called Doña Ramona, short like, as though one were only the wife of the apothecary or the surgeon. You see the truth of what I have said; if one has only to open her mouth in order to be a marchioness, why shouldn’t she? Now you see that his majesty did not eat you for asking such a reasonable thing.”
“Well, do you know, now, that it cost me something to ask it of him?”
“Ah! get out of that; men are good for nothing.”
“But it gave me more courage when his majesty said to me: ‘Don’t be bashful, man; for to the man that saved my life I’d give even the crown I wear.’ ”
“Whew! so he said that to you?”
“As sure as I’m here.”
“Then why didn’t you ask him more?”
“There we are again! What more had I to ask?”
“You are right; for, as somebody said, ‘there are more days than long sausages,’ and
‘A horse and a friend No work can spend.’ ”
On the following day the Marquis and Marchioness of Marville took a turn in their grandest coach, and it was a sight to see how they rolled along, at every hour in the day, all around those parts, the very wheels seeming to say envy! envy! to the Marchioness of Radishe and the Countess of Cabbidge. Some little trouble took place on account of the actions and complaints of the country folk, who prevented them from passing in their coach over this and that road, or by this and that property. But the marchioness quite forgot all these annoyances when, for example, at meeting the wife of the apothecary or surgeon, she said to them from her coach wherein she reclined in all her glory, “Adios, Doña Fulana,” and the other answered her, trotting along on foot, “Good‐by, my lady marchioness.”
After some time the marquis thought he noticed that his wife was not perfectly happy, because he found her every day more capricious, and she never slept quietly.
One morning, when the day was already advanced, the marquis slept away like a dormouse, and the marchioness, who had passed a more restless and sleepless night than ever, lay awake at his side impatiently waiting for him to awake.
“S. Swithin! what a sleeper!” exclaimed the marchioness; and, no longer able to restrain her impatience, she gave her husband a tremendous pinch, and said, “Wake up, brute.”
“Oh! ten thousand d——!” yelled the marquis.
“Are you not ashamed to sleep so much?”
“Ashamed! of something so natural? More ashamed should the one be who does not sleep, for sleeplessness bespeaks an unquiet conscience. What the devil is the matter with you that you have not ceased the whole night from turning and twisting about?”
“Yes, indeed, if one only had a soul as broad‐shouldered as you.”
“I don’t understand you, woman.”
“Well, then, you shall understand me, blockhead though you are. Now, tell me, Juan, an emperor is greater than a king?”
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
“That is to say, that emperors can make kings?”
“I think so. For instance, suppose his majesty the emperor wished to say to us, ‘Ha, my good friends the Marquis and Marchioness of Marville, I convert the province of Micomican, which belongs to me, into a kingdom, and I make you the monarchs of my new kingdom,’ I believe nobody could hinder it.”
“Very well, then; I wish his majesty to say and do this at your petition.”
The very house seemed to fall atop of Juan at hearing this from his wife; but this latest caprice of Ramona was so absurd that he had courage to hope in its all being a joke.
“Don’t you think his majesty would give the person a nice slap in the face who was so impudent and barefaced as to go to him with such a petition as this?” he said.
“If you go, he will not; since he has said that he cannot deny even his crown to the man who saved his life. So go along, ducky, hurry and see his majesty.”
“But you mean this?”
“Why shouldn’t I mean it? I have a nice temper for jokes! I want to be queen, in order to let those little folks know their proper places, who pass their lives in digging the earth and eating potatoes, and have the impudence to dare face gentlefolk who condescend to pass wherever they please.”
“Well, well, now it’s clear that you have lost your wits altogether!”
“What you are going to lose, since you have no wits, is your teeth, with a slap in the face, if you don’t make haste and hurry off to the court.”
“I’d lose my head before I’d commit such an absurdity. There. I’ve given way enough already.”
“Indeed! Then from this day forward know that you have no longer a wife. This is my room, and you shall never set foot in it again, nor I in yours.”
“But, woman!”
“No, no; remember we are strangers to each other.”
“Come, don’t be obstinate, my own Ramonita.”
“Don’t I tell you, sir, that all is over between us?”
“Now, look here, pigeon.”
“Stop your prate!”
“The dev—! Well, come, you shall be satisfied; I will go and see his majesty, and tell him that you want to be queen, though I know he will shoot me on the spot.”
Ramona bestowed a caress on her husband in reward for his consent, and our good Juan made his way to the court cursing his own foolish weakness of character.
Contrary to his expectations, the emperor hastened to grant him an audience, and received him with the accustomed smile.
“Well, marquis, what is it?” he asked.
“What ought it to be, sire? A fresh impertinence.”
“Come, out with it man, and don’t be bashful. Something concerning the marchioness, eh?”
“You’ve hit it again, sire. These foolish women are never content.”
“Well, what does yours want?”
“Nothing, sire. She says, would it please your majesty to make her queen?”
“Queen! nothing more than that? Well, she is queen already, then. Now, go into the dining‐room, and see if there is anything there you can destroy; and, instead of returning to the palace of Marville, go to the palace of the Crown, where you will find your wife installed as becomes the Queen of Micomican.”
Juan outdid himself in thanks and courtesies, and, after treating himself in the dining‐rooms right royally, made his way home. On his arrival at the palace of the Crown, a salvo of artillery announced his coming. The troops were drawn up around the palace, where he entered to the sound of the Royal March, and amid the vivas of the people, who became mad in the presence of the husband of their new sovereign.
Her Majesty, the Queen Doña Ramona the First, was holding a levée at the moment when her august spouse arrived at the palace, and he, seating himself by her side, gave also his royal hand to kiss; but it was so dirty that as many as kissed it hurried out of the chamber spitting. To be king, it is necessary to keep the hands very clean.
The King and Queen of Micomican amused themselves mightily during the first weeks of their reign: so that all was feasting and rejoicing in celebration of their happy coming to the throne. But so soon as the festival passed, the Queen Doña Ramona began to grow sad and weary.
The king summoned the chief physician of the court, and held a deep consultation with him.
“Man alive,” said he to him, “I have summoned you in order to see what the devil you have to say to me touching the sorrow and evil state in which I have noticed my august spouse to be for some time past. She is always turning and twisting about in her bed, so that she neither sleeps herself nor lets me sleep, and the worst part of it is, that every day she is sadder, and everything irritates and exasperates her.”
“Well, sire, in the first place, we must please her in everything and by everything.”
“I agree with you there, man; but there are things beyond human power. If it rains, she is put out because it rains; if it blows, she is put out because it blows; if we are in the winter, she is put out because the spring has not come, and her mind is so turned that she cries out: ‘I command it not to rain,’ ‘I command it not to blow,’ ‘I command the spring to come at once.’ Now, you see that it is only by being God one can secure obedience of orders like these. Well, then, to what the deuce do you attribute these whims of my august spouse?”
“Sire, it is very possible that they may presage a happy event.”
“Ah, ah! I take you. Well, to be sure, and I never thought of such a thing. And wouldn’t it be a joy to me and to my august spouse to find ourselves with a direct successor? For, if not, there is no use in deluding ourselves: the day that we close our eyes, in comes civil war, and the kingdom is gone to Old Nick.”
So the Queen Doña Ramona remained watching to see what would happen. But months and months passed, and the queen grew every day sadder and more capricious.
One day the king decided on interrogating very seriously the queen herself, to see if he might draw from her the secret of her sadness and capriciousness.
“Well, let us know, now, what the deuce is the matter with you,” he said, “that you neither sleep nor let me sleep, and remain for ever like the thorn of S. Lucy.”
“I am very unhappy,” answered the queen, beginning to weep like a Magdalen.
“You unhappy?—you who lived in a stable as empty and bare as that which Our Lord lived in when he became man, and under present circumstances you find yourself the somebody of somebodies, a queen clean and complete? What the deuce do you want?”
“It is true, I am a queen. But I die of sadness when from the throne I look back and see nothing of what other queens see.”
“Well, and what do other queens see?”
“For instance, the Queen of Spain sees a series of great and glorious kings, named Recaredo, Pelayo, San Fernando, Alonso the Wise, Isabel the Catholic, Ferdinand the Catholic, Charles V., Philip II., Charles III.—and those kings had blood of hers, and seated themselves on the throne, and loved and made great the people that she loves and makes great.”
“You are right, wife. But you wish to do what is impossible, and that God alone can do.”
“Well, then, those impossibilities are the very things that tease and exasperate me. What is the use of being a queen, if even in the most just desires one sees herself constrained, and unable to realize them? It is a fine afternoon, for instance, and I begin to get ready to go out for a walk in the palace gardens, but a wretched little cloud appears in the sky, as though to say to one, ‘Don’t get ready!’ And when one wishes to go out, that insolent cloud begins to pour down water, and one is obliged to remain at home, disgusted and fretting. What I want is to have power enough to prevent a miserable little cloud from laughing at me.”
“But, woman, don’t I tell you that this power God alone can have?”
“Then I want to be God.”
Juan made the sign of the cross on himself, filled with shame and horror at hearing his wife give utterance to such a thing, whose head was undoubtedly turned by the demon of ambition. But he did not wish to exasperate the poor crazed being with lessons which, had she been in her right senses, she would have deserved.
“But don’t you know, child,” he said to her with sweetness, “that the fulfilment of that desire is as impossible as it is foolish? The emperor has granted us whatever we have asked, but what you want now he cannot grant.”
“Still, I want you to go and see him, and say so to him; for perhaps between him and the Pope they will be able to manage it.”
“But if there is and never can be more than one God, how can you be made God?”
“I have always heard say that God can do everything. If the emperor consults with the Pope, and the Pope has recourse to God, then you’ll see if God, who can do everything, will disappoint them both.”
“But if God cannot?”
“Hold your tongue, Jew, and don’t say such awful things. God can do everything.”
Juan thought it would be more prudent to abstain from contradicting his wife any further. So he retired and summoned the chief physician of the court, in order to lay before him the new and extraordinary phase which the moral malady of the queen displayed. The physician said that in his long professional career he had met with cases of mental aberration even more extraordinary than that of the queen; and insisted that, far from contradicting the august invalid, they should comply with her every wish as far as it was humanly possible.
The king returned soon after to the chamber of his august spouse, who the moment she saw him became a perfect wasp.
“How, sire?” she exclaimed. “So you are the first to disobey my orders?”
“How disobey?”
“Yes, sire! Did I not tell you that I want you to go and see the emperor, and implore him to place himself in communication with the Pope in order to see whether between them they could so manage that I might be God?”
“Yes, you told me so, but—”
“There are no buts for me. How is it that you are not already on the road to comply with my orders? Now, none of your nice little jokes with me, if you please—you, who are no more than the husband of the queen—and, if you ruffle my feathers, I’ll send you off to be hanged as soon as look at you.”
“Come, child, don’t be angry, you shall be obeyed instantly.”
“Remember, none of your pranks, now! And listen: go and tell that health‐ killer whom you seem to have made one of your council, that if you don’t go to see the emperor, and perform in every point the commission which I charge you with, he shall serve you as partner in your dance in the air.”
The king withdrew; and when he reported to the chief physician what his wife had just said to him, the physician insisted more than ever on the necessity of pleasing the august invalid in everything.
So the king set out on his journey to the imperial court. The extravagant and impious nature of his mission disturbed him greatly; but the consideration gave him comfort that he was no longer a Juan nobody, as on other occasions when he had made the same journey, but a monarch about to consult with another monarch. The only thing that weighed at all on his mind was the question of etiquette.
“I don’t know,” said he, “for the life of me what shoes to tread in when I address the emperor. I have heard it said that all we sovereigns call each other cousins, though not a bit of cousinship exists between us: but how do I know, if I call the emperor cousin, that he may not give me a blow that would send all the teeth down my throat?” Occupied with such thoughts, he arrived at the imperial court, and the emperor hastened to receive him when he had scarcely set foot in the palace.
“How is her majesty, Queen Doña Ramona?” asked the emperor kindly.
“Bad enough, under present circumstances.”
“Man, that is the worst news yet! And what ails her?”
“What the devil do I know? The evil one alone understands these women. If your majesty could only guess the commission she has given me—”
“Hallo, hallo! Well, let us hear it.”
“She says—but pshaw! One is ashamed to say it. She says to see if your majesty could consult with the Pope, and between you manage to make her God.”
“Eh! That is a greater request. Make her God, eh!”
“Your majesty sees already that it is a piece of madness; for a woman can’t complain of the small advance in her career who to‐day is a queen, and not a year ago lived in a stable. A stable is a disgrace to nobody, sure enough; for, after all, Our Lord, though he was God, lived in one when he made himself man.”
“So the good Doña Ramona wishes to be God, eh!”
“You’ve hit it, your majesty.”
“Well, we will please her as far as we are able. Let your majesty step into the dining‐room and drive the wolf from the door, and on returning you will find your wife, if not changed into God, changed into something which is like to him.”
The royal consort turned into the dining‐room, but, do what he would, he could scarcely swallow a mouthful. Everything seemed to disagree with him, and the cause of it lay in his feeling within him a restlessness which seemed to forebode some misfortune. He made his way homewards, and on arriving at the palace of the crown he saw, with as great sorrow as dismay, that the palace was closed and deserted.
“What has happened here?” he inquired of a passer‐by.
“The emperor has put an end to the kingdom of Micomican, re‐establishing the ancient province, and re‐incorporating it with the empire.”
Juan had neither courage nor strength to ask more. He wandered about for hours and hours like one demented without knowing whither, when suddenly he found himself at the door of the stable where he had lived with his wife, and on pushing open the door, which revolved on its hinges, he found his wife installed there once more. The only thing Godlike which the woman who had entertained the criminal ambition of becoming like to him, consisted in the similarity of her dwelling to the stable which God occupied when he became man.
The Distaff
“In der guten alten Zeit wo die Königen Bertha spann.”
“In the good old times when Queen Bertha span” is a thrifty proverb still current in France and some parts of Germany where the distaff is yet seen beneath the arm of the shepherdess, looking, as she tends her flock, precisely like S. Genevieve just stept out from her canvas, or that more modern saint of the hidden life, Germaine of Pibrac, who is always represented with her spindle and distaff. In the very same fields where S. Germaine watched her flocks and twirled her spindle in the old scriptural way, keeping her innocent heart all the while united to God, have we seen the young shepherdess clad in the picturesque scarlet or white capuchon of the country, which covers their heads and half veils their forms—guarding their sheep and spinning at the same time.
And the same womanly implement is sometimes found in the hands of those of gentle birth in those old lands where so many still cling to the traditions of the past. We read of the now world‐famous Eugénie de Guérin that the same hand that wrote such charmingly naïve letters and journals did not disdain the spindle and the distaff. She writes thus in her journal: “I have begun my day by fitting myself up a distaff, very round, very firm, and very smart with its bow of ribbon. There, I am going to spin with a small spindle. One must vary work and amusements: tired of a stocking, I take up my needle and then my distaff. So time passes, and carries us away on its wings.” And again a day or two after: “I took my distaff by way of diversion, but all the while I was spinning, my mind spun and wound and turned its spindle at a fine rate. I was not at my distaff. The soul just sets that kind of mechanical work going and then leaves it.”
This reminds us of Uhland’s verse:
“Long, long didactic poems I spin with busy wheel, The lengthened yarns of epic Keep running off my reel:
“My wheel itself has a lyrical whirr, My cat has a tragic mew, While my spindle plays the comic parts And does the dancing too.”
Eugénie’s charming Arcadian life, passed in the primitive occupations of spinning, sewing, superintending the kitchen—even going, like Homer’s Nausicaa, to the margin of the stream to wash the linen in the running waters, and afterwards taking pleasure in spreading it all white on the green grass, or seeing it wave on the lines: all this, we say, without detracting from the poetry and grace of her nature, is enough to make us recall with a sigh the good old days when Queen Bertha span.
And this queen was Berthe au grand pied, the mother of Charlemagne, who had one foot larger than the other, and hence her name:
“You are the beautiful Bertha, the spinner, queen of Helvetia, She whose story I read at a stall in the streets of Southampton, Who, as she rode on her palfrey o’er valley and meadow and mountain, Ever was spinning her thread from a distaff fixed to her saddle. She was so thrifty and good, that her name passed into a proverb.”
Whether this Queen of Helvetia is our Bertha with the great foot we know not. The name is found in many curious old legends like the German one of Frau Bertha, a kind of tutelar genius of spinners, with an immense foot and a long iron nose, which doubtless served as a spindle. And an old manuscript, long hidden in some obscure corner of a German monastery, tells how King Pepin, wishing to wed the fair Bertha of Brittany, sent his chief officers to bring her to his court. The steward, who had charge of the escort, was not without ambitious views respecting his own daughter. He ordered his servants to put Bertha to death on the way. But they, instead of killing her, left her in a forest. Not long after—O happy chance!—King Pepin, overtaken by night while hunting, awaited the dawn in a house where he was served by the most beautiful maid his eyes had ever beheld. Of course it was Bertha with her great foot, which, we may be sure, she gracefully concealed beneath her flowing garments. And so they were married. Old poems sing of her industry, and tell us she knew how to spin like the princesses of scriptural and Homeric days. She is represented, too, on old coins seated on a throne with a distaff in her hands. All writers speak of her as Berthe au grand pied, but as otherwise beautiful and skilful in wielding the earliest implement of feminine industry. We may safely imagine her as tapping the mighty Charlemagne, leader of peerless knights, while yet a boy, with her convenient distaff; for her ascendency over him was such that he always regarded her with great reverence, even after his elevation to power!
And Bertha was not the only princess that laid her hand hold of the spindle. When the tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V. of France, was opened at St. Denis, among other things was found a distaff of gilded wood, but greatly decayed. And there is another in the Hôtel de Cluny, once used by some queen of France, we forget whom, on which is carven all the notable women of the Old Testament.
So too the daughters of Edward the Elder of England, though carefully educated, were so celebrated for their achievements in spinning and weaving that the term spinster is said to be derived from them.
And S. Walburga, the daughter of S. Richard, King of the Saxons, used to spin and weave among the royal and saintly maidens of Wimburn Minster. It was a common custom in those days. The distaff and the spindle were considered “the arms of every virtuous woman.”
The ancients held the use of them as such an accomplishment that Minerva is said to have come down to earth to teach the Greek women how to spin. Venus herself did not disdain to take upon herself the semblance of a spinner of fair wool when she appeared to Helen.
And spinning was as universal an acquirement among the Jewish as the Grecian women. They used to spin by moonlight on the housetops and, true to the instinct of their sex, kept so faithful an eye on their neighbors in the meanwhile that the ancient spinsters’ tongues were potent in the world of gossip. There is a tradition that S. Ann spun the virginal robes of her immaculate child in the pure beams of the chaste Dian.
Of the valiant woman in the Book of Proverbs it is said: “Her fingers have taken hold of the spindle.” And in Exodus we read that “the skilful women gave such things as they spun, violet, purple, and scarlet, and fine linen and goats’ hair, all of their own accord,” for the tabernacle.
We are told that the Jewish maidens who devoted themselves to the service of the temple were employed, among other things, in spinning the fine linen on their spindles of cedar, or ithel, a species of the oriental acacia, black as ebony and probably the same as the setim, or shittim wood, of the Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who passed her early days in the temple, participated and excelled in all the pursuits then carried on. The Protevangelion of S. James the Less relates that, when a new veil was to be made for the temple of our Lord, the priests confided the work to seven virgins of the tribe of David. They cast lots to see “who should spin the gold thread, who the blue, who the scarlet, and who the true scarlet.” It fell to Mary’s lot to spin the purple. Leaving her work, one day, to draw water in her jar, the angel drew near with his Ave Maria.
A distaff lies at Mary’s feet in Raphael’s “Annunciation,” and in many other celebrated paintings she is represented with one. In a “Riposa” by Albert Dürer she is depicted spinning from her distaff beside the Divine Babe who is sleeping in its cradle:
“Inter fila cantans orat Blanda, veni somnuli.”
S. Bonaventura tells us that several of the early sacred writers speak of our Blessed Lady’s industry in spinning and sewing for the support of her Son and S. Joseph in the land of Egypt. So reduced to poverty were they that, according to him, she went from house to house to obtain work, probably flax to spin as she sat watching the Holy Infant in the grove of sycamores of traditional renown. Her unrivalled skill in spinning the fine flax of Pelusium became a matter of tradition, and the name of Virgin’s Thread has been given to that network of dazzling whiteness and almost vaporous texture that floats over the deep valleys in the damp mornings of autumn, says the Abbé Orsini.
It is said the Church at Jerusalem preserved some of Mary’s spindles among its treasures, which were afterwards sent to the Empress Pulcheria, who placed them in one of the churches of Constantinople.
Other nations, too, had their famous spinsters. Dante’s ancestor in Paradise, looking back to earth, tells him of a Florentine dame of an opulent family who,
“With her maidens drawing off The tresses from the distaff, lectured them Old tales of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome.”
And a Spanish writer of past times says, speaking of the model woman: “Behold this wife who purchases flax that she may spin with her maids. See her thus seated in the midst of her women.” Thus did Andromache spin among her attendants.
So have we seen old nuns spinning in the cloisters of the remote provinces of France: the white wool on their distaffs diminishing slowly and calmly as their own even lives. They looked as if spinning out their own serene destinies. Such a happy destiny is not reserved for all whose thread is drawn out by Lachesis.
“Twist ye, twine ye! even so Mingle shades of joy and woe, Hope and fear, and peace and strife, In the thread of human life.”
At Rome there are two white lambs blessed on S. Agnes’ day (“S. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,” says Keats) in her church on the Nomentan road, and then they are placed in a convent till they are shorn, when their wool is spun by the sacred hands of the nuns. Of this the pallium is made—the distinctive mark of a metropolitan.
I have called the distaff the earliest implement of feminine industry. Such is the old tradition. There is a pathetic miniature of the twelfth century depicting an angel giving Adam a spade and Eve a distaff previous to their expulsion from Paradise: and on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus of the fourth century, Adam is represented with a sheaf of grain, for he was to till the earth, and Eve with a lamb whose fleece she was to spin. And we have our old English rhyme:
“When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?”
And so faithfully was the tradition handed down that the distaff has always been regarded as a symbol of womanhood, which woman scorned to see even in the hands of a Hercules.
In these days, when even our rustic belles are overloaded with accomplishments, the piano takes the place of “Hygeia’s harp” on which the fair maidens of the olden time loved to discourse fair music, like the gentle Evangeline of Acadie, seated at her father’s side,
“Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her,”
who, I fear, would be regarded in these days of improvement, at least in our country, with nearly as much horror as those other indefatigable spinners are by the good housewife:
“Weaving spiders, come not here; Hence, you long‐legged spinners, hence!”
What charming pictures some of us retain in our memories of our gray‐ haired grandmothers of New England country life—delicately nurtured, too—sitting down in the afternoon by the huge fire‐place to spin flax on a little carved wheel! How many of us carefully preserve such a wheel in memory of those by‐gone days, when we loved to linger and watch the mysterious process, and look at the face that always was so kindly, and listen to the whirr whose music is now hushed for ever!
But though spinning by hand will soon become one of the lost arts, there is one who will spin on till time shall be no more—one from whose distaff is drawn out the web of our lives—the star‐crowned Clotho:
“Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! Life is short and beset by sin, ’Tis only God endures for ever!”
A Martyr’s Journey
From The French.
In the Beaujolais, the country par excellence of beautiful women and beautiful vines, a little village lies hidden among luxuriant arbors. Each house is clothed in green leaves, and the wine, though rare, is not so wonderful as the immense tuns that hold it. Yet Coigny, with its nectar, its beautiful sky, its coquettish habitations its robust sons and attractive daughters, had not a habitable church. Still it dreamed of one, and four worthy priests worked hard and hopefully for the realization of the dream. One of them climbed well his ladder of orders, and has since become Bishop of Coutances; and if, as it is said, the zeal, piety, and legitimate influence of four ecclesiastics will finish the Cathedral of Cologne, notwithstanding the devil’s theft of the plan, what might not be hoped for Coigny?
So nothing more need be told than that, from amidst the lovely, smiling verdure of the little town, there sprang an exquisite white marble church, a temptation to pray in as well as to see, and the admiration of the entire province.
Madame la Marquise de —— gave all her inimitable guipures to ornament the high altar, and Monsieur le Comte de ——, a great amateur in pictures, placed a true Mignard—a Madonna with a lovely smile—upon the walls, even before they dried.
So each and all offered homage in the new house of God.
Still the beautiful little church lacked a patron, a saint under whose invocation it might be placed, and the blessed one must be represented by his own venerable ashes, a relic of the past, a protection for the future.
The village of Coigny, therefore, spared neither pains nor expense to be satisfied in this regard, and the Holy Father was applied to to select the patron. The dear old man replied favorably to the little town he could scarcely find on the map, and which was more noted for bearing the cross than ringing the bell; and a curious and grave ceremony took place.
They opened the Roman Catacombs, and they descended into the vaults of the cemetery of S. Cyriac, and there they chose the mortal remains of a Christian martyr buried for many centuries.
The stone that closed the cell bore a palm branch and the inscription,
Hilary At Rest,
and indicated he had died for the faith in the early ages of Christianity. His bones and the size of his head denoted only the adolescent, scarcely more than a child; while the whole expressed the courage of the man united to the grace of the angel.
The account from which this is taken adds, this young soldier of Christ was found sleeping peacefully at his post, extended on his granite bier, with his forehead cleft asunder, his neck cut open, of which the little bottle by his side held the precious blood. The figure of the young martyr had been covered with virgin wax, carefully enclosing the sacred bones, and, attired in silk and embroidery, he is holding the palm branch in his hand. The wounded head inclines as if bending to his murderers, his throat lies open in its deep sword‐wound, his hands and feet have bled, and the purple tide gushes from his wounds and trickles over his limbs; but his lips are shut with love, and his eyes are fixed, regarding with S. Stephen the heavens opening to receive him.
So this child of eighteen hundred years ago, this soldier of the faith, taken from the Roman Catacombs, was sent by the Pope to Coigny.
Can we not imagine his reception? Did not the village ring out its festal bells, and scatter flowers on his path, and with thousands of candles in the nave, and incense mounting far above the high altar, did not the little church welcome this contemporary of Nero, who had travelled surrounded by glorious palms in his own carriage over the line from Italy?
He has come, and twenty priests bear him on their shoulders, and his final resting‐place is under the high altar.
Coigny, the coquette, crowned by its green vine branches, bacchante‐like, the pious Coigny, has its martyr in the vaults of its own dear church, no more nor less than if it were a basilica.
True, he was an almost forgotten saint, and anonymously canonized, but the Scriptures told us long ago, “God knows how to recompense his own.”
Odd Stories: III. Peter The Powerful
Long and loud was the flourish of trumpets that greeted the day on which Philip the Mighty was born to his father’s dukedom; so rare was the promise of a babe. Need it be said that, nurtured under the eye of his stern sire, he grew in the strength of justice? To such a degree had he inherited the zeal of his ancestors, that while yet in his cradle he strangled a wretched nurse for stealing his spoon; whereat there was another flourish of trumpets. Subsequent reflections upon the loss of so useful a servant taught him to restrain the exercise of his just powers; and hence, when his tutors failed to instruct him within a given time in the arts, sciences, languages, and literatures, he merely broke their heads. We live to learn; and so it proved even to a prince as well endowed as Philip the Mighty. In these early acts we can see the foundations of that character which was afterwards so great a monument among men.
During the famous period in which our prince served his sire in the administration of justice, the dungeons were never empty of thieves and wranglers, nor the axe long idle for want of miscreant heads. To a peasant who once stole an apple, he said, “How now, varlet, dost confess?” Answered the trembling churl: “Nay, most puissant lord, I stole not the fruit.” Then spoke Philip: “By my halidom, I’ll mend thine honesty”; whereupon the fellow was put on the rack till he broke a blood‐vessel, still not confessing, for it was death to steal an apple out of the duke’s garden. At night the peasant died in his bed of a hemorrhage, piously acknowledging in his last moments that he had committed the theft; whereat was another flourish of trumpets. Life is a great lesson, however, and it must not be supposed that our powerful hero could content himself with a few exploits at court when he felt that he had a mission to reform the world.
Therefore it was that Philip the Mighty set out upon a knight’s errand to slay all the witches, devils, malefactors, giants, goblins, and monsters that came in his path. But one squire rode with him, bearing a golden trumpet, which, when Peter had done to death a sour‐faced hag who shrieked at him on the mountain‐side, he blew right merrily. Now, the old witch had asked the valiant knight for justice against her lord at court. Life is a science not to be mastered without blows; and Philip learned to slay and fear not in such stout earnest that soon he won the renown of being, as in fact he was called, the Champion Wrong‐killer of the age.
When a foul, black‐hearted necromancer was tracked to his hiding‐place, what else should our good knight do but put him to the sword? When a five‐ eyed dwarf was accused of deviltry, who else should carve him for the crows but our duke’s son? When a grim ogre, breathing death and fury, beset him whose arm was so mighty, when malefactors pestered the land, when monsters of all kind raged on every hand, who dealt them such lightning doom as the champion wrong‐killer? On every occasion did his trusty squire blow the trumpet of gold right lustily, to the wonder of lords and people. Now, it was whispered that the slain sorcerers had helped husbandmen and artisans with their strange inventions; that the malefactors were slaughtered outright for the crimes of their fellows; that the giants were amiable men, sometimes, but provoked beyond endurance; that dwarfs and witches were poor old people, seldom as bad as they seemed to be. Nevertheless, the real monsters of the land increased day by day, in spite of the champion killer’s sword and his squire’s golden trumpet.
Weary with much slaughter of false knights and caitiff wretches and monsters, the paladin Philip resolved to undertake the deliverance of the poor from the oppressions of the rich. Filled with this noble idea, he slew a yeoman who was chastising his servant without mercy. Seeing a number of slaves at work, he set them all free by killing their master. He divided the estates of the rich among the poor. He distributed largesses among multitudes of the needy. He rescued honest damsels who were being carried away by villain lords. Alas! for an ingrate world. ’Twas rumored that the yeoman had left a widow and seven children to mourn him. The slaves became marauders; the poor quarrelled among themselves; the beggars got drunk; and some of the honest damsels lamented their fallen lords. Howbeit, the faithful squire blew his trumpet louder than ever.
Meanwhile had our good knight grown religious, and burned men at the stake; but the more the fuel, the greater the flame. The more lances he shattered for honor’s sake, the more swords he blunted for justice’s sake; the more money he spent to give feasts to beggars, and the more land he parcelled among the poor, all the more honor, justice, bounty, estate, remained to be won and adjusted. His sharp judgments had, after all, won him nothing but the sound of his trumpet. He had killed the innocent and robbed the poor, when he intended to do otherwise, and, if he executed Heaven’s judgments, it was by a kind of mistake. One thing he had not slain—himself.
All the while, he who had killed so many monsters was growing in bulk and stature out of all proportion. As his legs and arms increased their strength of muscle, his ears grew longer, and his eyes grew blinder. He scorned, nay, devoured the weak he once defended, and, at last, a monster himself, was killed by a conspiracy of those whose champion he once was. For Philip, though a champion wrong‐killer, was blind to his own wrong‐ doing; and, though a reformer, never allowed people to reform themselves; so he destroyed the wheat with the chaff and killed the good with the bad.
New Publications.
THE BOOK OF THE HOLY ROSARY. A Popular Doctrinal Exposition of its Fifteen Mysteries, mainly Conveyed in Select Extracts from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. By the Rev. Henry Formby, of the Third Order of St. Dominic. Embellished with thirty‐six full‐ page illustrations. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872.
The devotion of the Holy Rosary is one of the most beautiful which the Catholic Church proposes to her children, and is also probably the one which has been received by them everywhere, without distinction of nationality or class, with the most sincere delight. Catholics, it is true, are for the most part familiar with the general history and significance of this devotional practice, which in itself forms a compendium of popular theology. Most of the books, however, on this subject, with which we are acquainted, are intended to excite Christians to the frequent and devout use of this form of prayer, rather than to give them a full and clear understanding of its natural connection with the great and fundamental truths which form the basis of Christianity. The book of F. Formby is both doctrinal and devotional; all the more devotional because the piety which it inculcates is enlightened by true Christian science.
The work is divided into three parts corresponding with the three groups of mysteries of which the Rosary is composed. The author prefaces each of these groups with an introduction, in which he carefully compares its mysteries with their corresponding types in the Old Testament. This comparison is again instituted in a more particular manner as each mystery in turn presents itself for elucidation.
In treating of the different mysteries, he first quotes from Scripture those passages upon which they are formed, and then adduces the corresponding types from the Old Testament, still further illustrating the subject by apposite quotations and allusions taken from the classics of pagan literature. These are followed by extracts from the writings of the great Fathers and Doctors of the church, many of which will be new to the English reader. Thus each chapter of the book forms a comprehensive treatise, both doctrinal and devotional, of the particular mystery in the life of our divine Saviour or that of his Blessed Mother to which it is devoted.
Without going out of his way, F. Formby by the simple exposition of the doctrine and practice of the church shows in the most conclusive manner how utterly groundless are the objections of Protestants to Catholic devotion to the Mother of Christ. We have not for a long time read a book with which we are so perfectly pleased as with this of F. Formby. The clergy especially will find in it a rich mine from which to draw instruction for the people. It may be read with profit, however, by all classes of persons, as the plain and simple style in which it is written does not raise it above the comprehension of even uneducated minds. The book is ornamented with thirty‐six full‐page woodcuts, unusually excellent both in design and execution; which, added to the attractions of clear typography and tasteful binding, make it a work of art as well as of religion.
HENRY PERREYVE. By A. Gratry, Prêtre de l’Oratoire, etc. Translated by special permission. London: Rivingtons. 1872. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
After a life of singular purity and great activity in the cause of truth, F. Gratry entered upon his rest on the 6th of February, 1872. His impulsive and ardent nature hurried him for a moment, towards the close of his life, into a controversy which, for a time, caused the greatest anxiety to his friends, and threatened to throw a cloud over an existence otherwise so brilliant and precious. His heart, however, always remained loyal to the church and to truth, and, when he was made aware of his error, he himself was the first to acknowledge it, and to do all in his power to atone for it. The writings of F. Gratry have always possessed for us a singular charm. He has in a high degree the gift of making his thoughts contagious. He throws the warmth and life of his whole heart into his writings; his words breathe and palpitate and affect one like the presence of a noble and high‐wrought nature. In Henry Perreyve he found a subject peculiarly fitted to call forth these qualities of his style. The history of the outer life of Henry Perreyve was uneventful and short. Designed by his parents for the bar, disposed by his own vigorous and impetuous nature to the military life, he was called of God to the priesthood. When he had once recognized the voice of God, he devoted to this high vocation all the energies of a most gifted and courageous nature. At an early age he developed remarkable talents both for writing and speaking. He possessed the divine gift of eloquence, and Lacordaire, who loved him more than any other man in the world, looked forward to the day when his own voice, having grown feeble by age, would be born again with redoubled strength and warmth on the lips of Henry Perreyve. Alas, that such hope should be delusive! He to whom Lacordaire wrote, “You live in my heart eternally as my son and my friend,” was destined soon to follow his great preceptor to the grave. He died in 1865, when but thirty‐ four years old. The story of his life, as told by F. Gratry, is a poem full of the most exalted sentiment, and impressed with the highest form of beauty. “All who knew him,” says his biographer, “agree on this point, that the one characteristic which stamps his outward life and his inward soul is only to be expressed by that word Beauty. All the inward beauty wherewith courage, intelligence, devotion, and goodness can invest a soul, and all the outward expression of beauty with which such a soul can stamp the living man, were combined in him. Nature and grace had alike done their very best for him; he overflowed with their choicest gifts.” Whoever will read F. Gratry’s sketch will be persuaded that these words are not too strong. The life of Henry Perreyve is another confirmation of the truth that the ideal type of perfect manhood can be developed only in the Catholic Church. We especially recommend this book to the young men of our country. Even though it should not inspire them with the exalted ambition of consecrating their lives to God, it will at least teach them the transcendent beauty of Christian courage, of self‐devotion, of nobility of purpose.
Henry Perreyve was most ardent in urging his friends to aspire to the priesthood. In this connection F. Gratry remarks: “Truly, I know no wiser enthusiasm than that which stimulates men to become laborers for God. We have too few priests; we have far too many soldiers. No man becomes a priest whether he will or no; but on all sides the strong hand of the powers that be constrains men to be soldiers whether they will or no. Why is the priest’s lot to be counted worse than the soldier’s? He who chooses the sacred toil of God’s harvest‐field for his life’s labor, chooses the better part. Surely his ambition is beyond all comparison the greatest, best and noblest: his work the most fruitful, the most necessary. That is but a sorry delusion by which the world would set the priesthood before men as in the shadow of death, and other careers as in a glow of light and glory.”
THE SPOKEN WORD; or, The Art of Extemporary Preaching: Its Utility, its Danger, and its True Idea. With an easy and practical Method for its Attainment. By Rev. Thomas J. Potter, Professor of Sacred Eloquence in the Missionary College of All Hallows, Author of “Sacred Eloquence,” etc., etc. Boston: P. Donahoe. 1872.
One of the most favorable omens attending the great Catholic revival in the English‐speaking world is the appearance of works bearing upon the various duties of the sacred ministry. In the earlier days of struggle in England and America, the missionary priest entered upon a life of toil which gave but scant opportunity for adding to the fund of learning that served as its outfit. Hence, while the greatness of the Catholic champions, who entered the arena armed cap‐a‐pie by a long and thorough training, was brought into striking relief, the depression of minds less trained and of less capacity among the clergy was marked by the absence of a native literature suited to their class.
When a priest rarely had a day free from harassing labors, and was barely able to run into debt for the brick, beams, and shingles of a nondescript building wherein to assemble his flock, he certainly did well if, after reading his breviary and peeping into his moral theology, he kept himself informed of current events. Such circumstances of poverty were not favorable to literature or eloquence. Ecclesiastical art, with its intricate ceremonial and its peculiar music, was in a fair way to be lost; and the refinements of clerical education were rather sources of discouragement in the present than of bright anticipation for the future.
But this phase, having in some measure passed away in England, has lost much of its gloom for us in America. Pastors have more time to prepare instructions for their people. Congregations by their magnitude and intelligence call forth the highest efforts of eloquence. The instincts of Catholic devotion require that God’s house should be made a house of prayer, and demand, for their satisfaction and increase, the sacristy and choir, which shall be “for a glory and a beauty.” Meanwhile, increasing wealth furnishes means for fulfilling the requirements of the Roman Ritual.
The work which we notice is one of many signs of the times, and also one of a series of similar efforts by its earnest and experienced author. It is written in a clear and flowing style, slightly marred, however, by the frequent repetition of the adjective “expedite,” as qualifying the noun “knowledge,” and the perpetual recurrence of “a man who,” or “the man who.” The general effect is nevertheless pleasing, and the book itself ought to be read. The title contains a fair analysis of the work. It remains for us to say that the author is thorough in the treatment of his subject. His hints and warnings are useful to those accustomed to preach extempore; while his suggestions for the composition of sermons are entirely applicable to those who perfect their oratorical preparations before ascending the pulpit.
The appearance of the book is also quite in its favor, and we might adduce it as a sign of the times in a department to which we have not yet alluded.
THE BELOVED DISCIPLE. By the Rev. Father Rawes, O.S.C. London: Burns, Oates & Co. 1872. New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.
This is a beautiful sketch of the life of “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Father Rawes, in common with S. Jerome, S. Augustine, and S. Bernard, has a great and special devotion to the Evangelist S. John. This little book is well written and is eminently devotional and instructive.
UNAWARES. By the Author of “The Rose Garden.” Boston: Roberts Bros. 1872.
One experiences a sense of rest and refreshment in reading this unpretending volume. It is a narrative of French life, not at all after the sensational order, but beautifully wrought out, with enough of romance to sustain the interest and chain the attention of the reader, but not a line or word that one could wish unwritten. With a slight plot and few incidents, this pleasing story charms us with a delightfully artistic description of a quaint old town in France, where the grand cathedral stands, the central object of attraction—solemn, steadfast, ever varying—severe or tender, as the case may be—but always inconceivably peaceful.
The characters, drawn with a skilful hand and admirably sustained, the chaste beauty of the language and style, with the gems of thought worthy of life‐long remembrance scattered throughout the volume, lead us to desire an acquaintance with other books this attractive author may have written.
THE VICAR’S DAUGHTER. By George MacDonald. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1872.
If not to be sensational is a merit, this book certainly has that merit. The Introduction, which in most books is apt to be dull, and often is skipped by the reader who wishes to plunge in medias res, is here the spiciest part, the sugar‐coating of the pill—if it be not ill‐natured to call this work a pill. A very mild one it is, and the patient, if none the better, will certainly be none the worse for taking it. Its object seems to be to promulgate some Presbyterian ideas concerning the means to be used for elevating the spiritual condition of the poor. The London poor is the class considered, but the general rules laid down may be supposed good for all poor. Some very queer ideas are broached; among others, that it is better to give a workman a gold watch than a leg of mutton, because by so doing you will pay him a compliment for which he will be grateful, but that he should have nothing given him “which he ought to provide for himself—such as food, or clothing, or shelter.” There is a Miss Clare who is possessed by such a missionary spirit and love for the poor, that we cannot help wishing she might find her proper sphere by becoming a Catholic “Little Sister of the Poor,” or some other equally useful sister of charity. The church utilizes such women much more wisely than they manage to find the best way alone. There is a chapter of Miss Clare’s reading and discussing of the Gospel with some workmen, which, if not positively irreverent itself, will be very likely to make the reader, who has any sense of humor, feel so in spite of his better instincts.
The Vicar’s daughter, Mrs. Percivale, is a very sprightly and well‐drawn character, whom we cannot help liking very much. She is the teller of the story, and in this Dr. MacDonald has shown much skill. It is in some parts so like a woman’s way of thinking and writing, that we can hardly believe it to be the work of a man, especially in Mrs. Percivale’s thoughts after the birth of her child. And in this the author approaches very nearly the Catholic ideal:
“I had read somewhere—and it clung to me although I did not understand it—that it was in laying hold of the heart of his Mother that Jesus laid his first hold of the world to redeem it; and now at length I began to understand it. What a divine way of saving us it was—to let her bear him, carry him in her bosom, wash him and dress him and nurse him and sing him to sleep! ... Such a love might well save a world in which were mothers enough.”
But alas! he makes the vicar himself save his faith from shipwreck by marrying the woman he wants—a queer and new argument for the marriage of the clergy, to be able to believe through such means. Not that this is intended by the author for any such argument; he being a Presbyterian, makes no question of the propriety and wisdom of the clergy marrying, but that a clergyman should be taught belief by getting the woman of his choice is “passing strange.” He also prefers giving his daughter to a sceptic rather than to a “thoroughly religious man,” for fear the latter might “confirm her in doubt.” To a Catholic, this seems a wonderful conclusion.
The chapter called “Child Nonsense” is nonsense indeed, and much below “Mother Goose” in literary merit. We wonder it found a place in the volume, which contains much genuine wit and good writing.
The illustrations to the book are clever, and the type and binding attractive.
AMBITION’S CONTEST; or, Faith and Intellect. By “Christine.” Boston: P. Donahoe. 1872.
We cannot, perhaps, give a better idea of the style and scope of this modest volume than by a quotation from the Preface: “It would be presumptuous to say that I have attempted this little work in order to aid in preventing these numerous wrecks of the soul; for where other and gifted pens, essaying so much and so well in this direction, still find it difficult to do all they would, it would be folly to suppose that my crude effort could accomplish anything. Still it is an effort made for the purpose of accomplishing some good, and written under the auspices of her who has never yet failed to assist the weak, the ever‐glorious and Blessed Virgin‐Mother of God, it may perhaps add a mite to that which is now being done for the proper training of our Catholic youth.”
GARDENING BY MYSELF. By Anna Warner. New York: A. D. F. Randolph. 1872.
We cannot imagine a pleasanter way of studying horticulture than by adopting Miss Warner’s volume as a text‐book. We can overlook the little attempts at moralizing, after the evangelical fashion, as she goes along, in view of the dismal theological efforts made by her sister (if we mistake not) a few years since. We advise our lady readers who have space for cultivating flowers to consult this little manual, assured that the occupation of which it discourses, and its results, will bring them a large store of unalloyed enjoyment.
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY has in press, and will publish early in November, The Life and Times of Sixtus the Fifth, by Baron Hubner. Translated from the original French by James F. Meline.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XVI., NO. 92.—NOVEMBER, 1872
Centres Of Thought In The Past. Second Article. The Universities.
The change from the monastic to the scholastic era was one of which we can hardly form an idea. As radical as that brought about in politics by the tempest of 1793, it was less sudden, and, though to the full as dangerous as the unhappy “Reformation,” it was fortunately shorn of its heretical perils by the vigorous and successful hand laid upon it by the church. Instead of producing an organized system of antagonism to revealed truth, which it seemed at one time on the very verge of doing, it became so thoroughly absorbed into the church’s system that to many minds “scholasticism” is synonymous with “bigotry.” Yet how opposite was the reality to the idea which it conveys to the modern mind! The real temper of the church, the temper which will be hers eternally in heaven, is the temper of Mary; the contemplative, monastic ideal of perfect peace. In the XIIIth century (we say the XIIIth typically, for the change was gradually working some time before, and only grew to its maturity in that age), a giant intellectual convulsion took place, and the church was rudely wakened out of her placid ecstasy, to find herself assailed by brilliant and popular fallacies, urged by men of dazzling talent and fearless powers of questioning. It was as if some holy monk, who from childhood to ripe old age had spent his life on his knees before the silent tabernacle of a huge and perfect abbey‐church, were suddenly to be startled into action by the rude attack of a sacrilegious band on the very altar at whose steps he had worshipped so long. See him spring to his feet, and with unexpected strength throw himself before the priceless treasure, quell by his eagle glance the bewildered assailers of his peace, and convert by his heaven‐ dictated eloquence those very men into saints, those enemies into friends, those proud opponents into fellow‐watchers at the same hallowed shrine. So sprang the church to the defence of those doctrines which hitherto it had been mainly her duty to guard, and the struggle, distasteful as it must have been at first, nevertheless ended by producing a new harvest of saints, and increasing the human prestige as well as the spiritual armory of the church. The reader will no doubt be pleased to see what the writers already quoted have to say of this mighty intellectual revolution, and we gladly yield to them the field of description. “It will suffice to reconcile us to the temporary necessity of the change,” says the author of Christian Schools and Scholars, “that it was accepted by the church, and that she set her seal to the due and legitimate use of those studies which were to develop the human intellect to its full‐grown strength. Nay, more, she absorbed into herself an intellectual movement which, had she opposed it, would have been directed against her authority, and so to a great extent she neutralized its powers of mischief. The scholastic philosophy which, without her direction, would have expanded into an infidel rationalism, was woven into her theology itself, and made to do duty in her defence, and that wondrous spectacle was exhibited, so common in the history of the church, when the dark and threatening thunder‐cloud, which seemed about to send out its lightning‐bolts, only distils in fertilizing rain.” Speaking of S. Dominic, Prior Vaughan, in his Life of S. Thomas of Aquin, says: “He felt that a single man was but a drop in the ocean in the midst of such a vast and organized corruption. Man may be met by man, but a system only can oppose a system. A religious institution, combining the poverty of the first disciples of Christ with eloquence and learning, would alone stand a chance of success in working a regeneration.” He tells us further on that Albertus Magnus, the master of S. Thomas, saw that “Aristotle must be christianized, and that faith itself must be thrown into the form of a vast scientific organism, through the application of christianized philosophy to the dogmata of revealed religion.” The state of men’s minds is thus pithily described by the same author: “For, especially at this period, theory speedily resolved itself into practice; what to‐day was a speculation of the schools, to‐morrow became a fact; men lived quickly, thought quickly, and acted quickly in the days of William of Champeaux and Abelard.” Still, in summing up the character of those strange, contradictory times, so eminently “ages of faith” when contrasted with our day, yet ages of jarring contention when compared with the previous centuries, Prior Vaughan gives us the brighter side of the picture also: “Men were not startled in those days by the unusual deeds and privileges of chosen men. They took God’s word for granted. They believed what they saw; they did not pry and test and examine their souls. They got nearer the truth than we do. Their minds were not corroded by false science.” And in a footnote he adds, speaking of the great difference between heresy in the middle ages and heresy now: “In this (the reverence for authority) is seated the great distinction between the darkness of those days and the darkness of the present. Then, men fell away in detail, they denied this or that truth, or fanatically set up as teachers of novel doctrines, or were cruel, or superstitious, or fond of dress, or of excitement, or self‐display. But they held to the master‐ principle of order and of salvation, they did not reject the authority of the teaching church, or presume to call in question the directive power and controlling office of the sovereign pontiff.”
Now, let us at the outset anticipate one question our readers may very naturally ask themselves: Have we undertaken a sketch of the history of the church, or that of human thought and progress? The latter, undoubtedly. Then, how is it that “the church” runs through the whole, like the ground melody of the system? How is it that, even in the emancipating times on which we have now come, the doctors and masters of the schools are all monks and clerics, the theses chosen from Scripture texts, the disputes all turning on points of doctrine, and those, too, uncompromisingly of Catholic doctrine? We can only answer that such are the facts; secular learning hardly existed, and what there was of it was so tinged with religion that it was hardly distinguishable from that of theologians. Take Dante, for instance, an accomplished scholar, a patriot, a politician, and a keen philosopher. Who would not think him a priest and a theologian, from the way he has cast his grand and unrivalled poem? It is a summary of Catholic doctrine and tradition, a poetical version of S. Thomas’ Summa, without some knowledge of which it is absolutely impossible to read the third part, the Paradiso, and understand it. We cannot help it if we seem to be sketching ecclesiastical, while we are engaged on intellectual, history. Never before the “Reformation” were they divorced, and no better proof than this could be adduced of the essentially teaching mission of the church.
The proximate cause of the greatness of the University of Paris may be traced through four or five generations of scholars up to our Saxon master Alcuin. His pupil Rabanus, the great Abbot of Fulda, formed Lupus of Ferrières in his own mould; he in turn instructed Henry of Auxerre, the scholasticus or master of the Auxerre school, where he found Remigius, destined to become the re‐establisher of sacred studies at Rheims, the Canterbury of France. From Rheims this Remigius removed to Paris (in the Xth century), and from his time the schools of that city continued to increase in reputation and importance till they developed into the great university. He it was “who opened the first public school which we know with any certainty to have been established in Paris.”(81) The first rudiments of the laws governing the greatest corporate institution of scholastic times seem to have sprung from the very disorders occasioned by the immense numbers and pugnacious national characteristics of the rival students of all nations who flocked to Paris. In 1195, we find a certain John, Abbot of S. Alban’s, associated with the body of elect masters,(82) and the year previous Pope Celestine III. ruled that the students should be subject to ecclesiastical tribunals only, and should be exempt from all civic interference in their affairs on the part of the town authorities.(83) In 1200, the university is acknowledged by Philip Augustus as a corporate body, governed by a head who shall not be responsible for his acts to any civil tribunal whatsoever. And now begins in good earnest a system the like of which was never seen, and for brilliancy as for license will never be surpassed. It is like plunging into the seething cauldron of a “witches’ Sabbath” to read of the marvellous and feverish state of things in the Paris of the XIIIth century, and even of that of earlier days. For a vivid description of the turbulent city we can refer our readers to the recent work of the Benedictine, Prior Vaughan, and to the no less graphic pen of Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris. A grotesqueness wholly French pervades the latter work, but gives perhaps a truer picture of the reality than any less fastidious language could convey. In the Paris of old, as in our own day, things seem to have been inextricably mingled: the sage and the buffoon are elbowing each other in the streets; students who have come for fashion’s sake flaunt their vulgar splendor and their disgusting shamelessness in vice in the face of the poor scholar who sits attentive and eager on the straw‐covered floor of the lecture‐room; midnight orgies that seldom end in less than murder take place within a few feet of the oases of monastic life, where the canonical hours are still faithfully repeated and the rule still silently kept up. Vanity and frivolity are there, and the arrogance of wealthy dunces. Witness the young man whose father sent him to Paris with an annual allowance of a hundred livres. “What does he do?” asks a chronicler of that time, Odofied. “Why, he has his books bound and ornamented with gold initials and strange monsters, and has a new pair of boots every Saturday.” This was at the time that pointed shoes were the “rage,” and the university even passed a decree against them as follies unbecoming a scholar.(84) “We read of starving, friendless lads with their unkempt heads and tattered suits, who walked the streets, hungering for bread and famishing for knowledge, and hankering after a sight of some of those famous doctors of whom they had heard so much when far away in the woods of Germany or the fields of France.”(85) Many had to share their miserable garments with their companions, and take it by turns to wear their one tunic so as to make a decent appearance in the lecture‐hall, while the rest stayed at home. Others spent all they had on parchment, and were in need of oil for their lamps to study at nights. Long before the collegiate system became general, the lay‐students were huddled together in unhealthy tenements, over the shops of the burghers, with whom they had many an affray on the score of extortion and injustice. While the rich students employed their many servants and the tradesmen they patronized as instruments in their shameful intrigues, the poor scholars struggled on, some selling books at ruinously low prices, others absolutely begging their food in the streets or at the doors of the rich shopkeepers, while others again, more miserable because less determined, took refuge in the taverns, and drank away the little remains of vitality left in them, or as often were despatched in the unseemly brawls which tavern‐life was sure to foster. Then, as the brighter side of the picture, there were the monasteries, especially that of the Dominicans of S. James, where eager scholars studied in peace and order; the cloisters of Notre Dame, where venerable orthodoxy was long entrenched; the Sorbonne, destined to be for ages the most celebrated school of theology in Europe, and to hold its own long after the mediæval university had decayed. Disputed cases were sent to the Sorbonne for decision, popes took the advice of its doctors on important ecclesiastical matters, and its students possessed even greater personal immunities than their fellows of other colleges. Then, if we are to take the personal representatives of this wonderful university into account, what a forest of illustrious names starts up before our bewildered vision! In the XIth century, quite at the latter end, we are introduced to the gifted Abelard, who during the first half of the XIIth century gathered together all the stormy elements of the age, and centred upon himself the attention of the intellectual world. “He appears to have possessed,” says Prior Vaughan, “the special gift of rendering articulate the cravings of the age in which he lived.... One day he took into his hands Ezechiel the Prophet, and boasted that next morning he would deliver a lecture on the Prophecy. With bitter irony some of his companions implored him to take a little longer time to prepare; he replied with disdain, ‘My road is not the road of custom, but the road of genius.’ He was true to his word, and mockery was speedily turned to amazement when his companions, overcome with his eloquence, followed him verse after verse as he unfolded the hidden sense of the obscurest of prophecies, with a facility of diction and clearness of exposition and a readiness of resource which subdued the mind and captivated the imagination.” Success was his idol, pride his natural temper. He thought no question above his understanding, no truth beyond his apprehension; he threw down the glove in the face of a system more for the sake of routing its exponent than of impugning its truth, and when all eyes were upon him, and the populace of Paris rushed madly out on its door‐steps and house‐tops to cheer him as he passed, his end was won and his dearest wish fulfilled. One by one all his opponents were silenced; from school to school he rose, till at last the chair of Notre Dame was his; his name eclipsed that of all the masters of Paris, and drove from men’s minds even the fame of the doctors of the church.... And then what was the climax? It is told in three words—Héloïse, Soissons, and Sens. True, there was a long interval between the two misfortunes represented by the first two names, and that galling one which at last proved his salvation at Sens, and during the interval his fame revived, and again at Paris, though at S. Geneviève and no longer at Notre Dame, his prestige broke down all prejudice and his victorious career began afresh. Then see the last drama of his stormy, eventful life. He meets S. Bernard at Sens before a court of bishops, monks, and princes, his own disciples crowding triumphantly around him, a huge concourse of people heaving before him, he “the spokesman of thousands, from whose midst he would, as it were, advance and proclaim the creed of human reason.”(86) Opposed to him stands one whose cheeks are furrowed with tears, and who has made no preparation to meet the irrefragable dialectician, the prince of debate, but who, “though in appearance but an emaciated mystic from the solitude of his cell, would represent as many thousands more who saw beyond the range of human vision, and judged the highest natural gifts of God from the elevation of a life of faith.”(87) History gives us the thrilling denouement in startlingly simple form. When summoned to defend, deny, or explain the heretical propositions drawn from his brilliant works, Abelard turns in sudden contempt from the august assembly, and answers thus: “I appeal to the Sovereign Pontiff.” But all felt that this was defeat, the blow had been struck, the heresy was dead. And the heretic? Let many who have tried to‐day to walk in the dizzy path his footsteps have marked out, strive rather to imitate the end of his life; let them follow him to the solitary Benedictine Abbey where his gentle friend Peter the Venerable led him like a little child, and where his earnest, passionate nature, that could do nothing by halves, soon transformed him into a saint. And let the world which knows him chiefly through his sin and early shame fix its eyes upon him as one who, having abdicated honors greater than those of the greatest throne, having sorrowed with more than David’s sorrow, and taught with more than Solomon’s wisdom, at last found peace and justification in a narrow cell and in his daily avocations of instructing a small and obscure community on “divine humility and the nothingness of human things.”(88) Among the other great names that stand out in the tumult of Paris as stars of learning and holiness are William of Champeaux, Abelard’s chief adversary, and the founder of that saintly school of S. Victor which gathered in one the spirit of the old cloisters with that of the new scholastic teachers, and led the way through its famous doctor‐saints, Hugh and Richard, to the final welding together of the new form of theology, the incomparable Summa of S. Thomas. Then, too, we have the preacher Fulk of Neuilly, who became a scholar at a ripe age, and soon surpassed the young students whose aim was display rather than knowledge—the man who preached the fifth crusade at the tournament of Count Thibault de Champagne,(89) and was followed by such crowds that, to rid himself of them and their inconvenient homage (shown by cutting pieces out of his habit), he called out, “My habit is not blessed, but I will bless the cloak of yonder man, and you can take what you please.”(90) John of St. Quentin, also, a famous doctor, who, preaching on holy poverty and the vanity of all learning, all riches, and all honors, suddenly stops, descends the pulpit‐stairs, kneels at the feet of the astonished prior of the Dominicans, and will not rise before the latter has thrown around him his own black cloak and enrolled him in the army of that holy poverty he had just praised with so much zeal. Then Albert the Great, whose followers were so numerous that he had to leave the schools and speak in the open air, so that the square where he delivered his lectures was called Place du maître Albert, which name later on became corrupted into the form it still bears, Place Maubert. Albert brings before us the school of Cologne, inferior of course to the mighty university, but yet a centre, at least for Germany. There S. Thomas of Aquin first studied, and now and then astonished his undiscerning companions by the “bellowings of the great dumb Sicilian ox,” until he was finally sent to Paris, the scene of his matchless and altogether spiritual triumph. In him, the heir of the old Benedictine school of quies, sanctity worked that marvellous union of the old spirit and the new which ended by harmonizing the truths of the church with the clamoring aspirations of a new and venturesome age. But, inseparably connected though he be with the crisis of the XIIIth century, when passion was at its hottest, and the intoxication of world‐wide success made Paris reel like a drunken man, we feel nothing but peace in the life of the Angel of the Schools, the greatest scholar of the European university. A divine calm seems to curtain off his soul from the contentions in which his mind and body are engaged; his lessons seem rather to be given from a holy of holies than from a professor’s chair, and, while we see in him the greatest thinker of the age, we feel that above all he was its greatest saint. One might say of him, with all due reverence, that he was the only man of that turbulent and questioning day who had looked upon the face of God and lived. Beside him was his gentle friend, Bonaventure, of whom, though a professor also, we hear but little intellectually, but whom the highest authority on earth has sealed as a doctor of the church, a burning seraph of love.
And here we must leave that greatest of centres, Paris, whose prosperity at that time seemed so unalterable, and take a glance, necessarily a cursory one, at the other continental universities. Bologna undoubtedly claims the first place. It was called the “Mater Studiorum” of Italy, and vied more successfully with Paris than any other of the universities. The great Countess Mathilda of Tuscany, the liberal patroness of learning and protectress of the Holy See, was connected with its foundation, and by the end of the XIth century it was celebrated as the first law school in Europe.(91) This characteristic it always retained, while in the XIIth century canon law began to be equally studied there. Connected with Bologna was the publication of the Decretals of Gratian, a summary of the decrees of the popes, of a hundred and fifty councils, of selections from various royal codes, and of extracts from the fathers and other ecclesiastical writers.(92) The few errors in this gigantic work have often served as a peg whereon to hang many calumnies against the church; but the whole scope of the undertaking, so bold in its conception, so lucid in its exposition—has it ever been sufficiently examined outside the church? And will the world be astonished to know who was its compiler and who spent twenty‐five years of his hidden life upon it? A simple Benedictine monk of Chiusi, of whom nothing is known but his immortal work.
M. de Maistre has cleverly said, “Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tartare,” and we might adapt the pithy saying thus: Raise but the thinnest crust of what we call civilization, and you will find beneath the solid structure, the immovable foundation of monasticism.
In 1138, Frederic Barbarossa consulted the Bolognese doctors as to the framing of a code of laws for his Germano‐Italian Empire, and in return for their help gave them the Habita, or series of protective ordinances which raised the Italian university almost to the level of that of Paris. Alexander III., formerly a theologian in its schools, also favored Bologna, and a tide of scholars from all parts of Europe began to flow towards the Apennines. Among these we find S. Thomas of Canterbury, who, as we know, made such brave use of the legal science he acquired there. Bologna was the second centre of the Dominican Order, the teaching order of the church—the instrument raised up in the warm‐hearted but intemperate middle ages to guide aright those lava‐streams of misdirected enthusiasm which at one time threatened to rationalize or fanaticize the intellectual world. It is at Bologna that we read of the miracles of the gentle and bright S. Dominic, and of the angels that constantly followed him to do the bidding of him who through opposition and misunderstanding was always doing God’s bidding. Here, too, S. Thomas of Aquin came once, and, being unknown to the procurator of the convent, was required to carry the basket while his companion collected the friars’ daily pittance through the streets. A true monk, he gladly obeyed, and was pained and confused when some of the passers‐by told the procurator of the mistake he had made.
Italy was fruitful in universities, for, to mention only prominent names, there were Padua, Pavia, Salerno, and Naples, besides Rome, where the tradition of learning, especially sacred learning, was never quite broken. Padua was an offshoot from Bologna, and became famous in the XIIIth century for its devotion to classic literature and the liberal arts. At the time of the “Renaissance” it had become, however, a notorious focus of atheism.(93) Salerno was a school of medicine, and Pavia a brilliant and wicked resort of every intellectual aberration. We remember reading an excellent description of its vices, its dangers, and its attractions, in the life of a Venetian, a poet and child of genius, the friend and librettist of Mozart, whose name we cannot, however, recall. Even in those days of moral decadence the picture seemed appalling, and at Pavia as at Paris, as at Oxford in old times and our own day, there appears to have been no lack of brainless young profligates whose college career was a disgrace to their early education, and must have been a remorse prepared for their more sober conscience in later life.
The University of Naples, as we learn from Prior Vaughan, was the creation of Frederick II., the Sybarite emperor whose splendid barbaric physique knew how to make all Eastern luxury of body and Greek luxury of mind minister to his sovereign pleasure. The description of his harem, his kiosks, his palaces, his gardens at Naples, reads like a page from the Arabian Nights, and rival the impossible tales that are told of Bagdad’s lavish magnificence under the caliphs. Utterly pagan the university seems to have avowedly been. It had no being of its own, but was a royal appurtenance, as the other institutions of Frederick II. Learning was a luxury, and it behooved the emperor to have all luxuries at his feet. Students from all parts of his kingdom of Naples were compelled by arbitrary enactments to study nowhere else but in the exotic university; the professors were all paid from the public treasury, and among them, with characteristic pride and contemptuous eclecticism, the imperial patron had canonists, theologians, and monks. Astrology and the wildest theories were broached, Michael Scott, the pretended seer and alchemist, was conspicuous for his brilliant talents and pagan tendencies, the existence of the soul was freely questioned, materialism openly professed, and many literati ostentatiously paraded their preference of the philosophy of Epicurus or Pythagoras over the religion of Jesus Christ. A secret society is also alluded to in a popular poem of the day, its express purpose being the expunging of Christianity and the introducing of the exploded obscenities of paganism in its place.(94) This reminds us of Disraeli’s Lothair, in which such prominence is given to a secret society called Madre Natura, framed for the identical purpose we have just mentioned. It is said to have existed ever since the time of Julian the Apostate, and always with the same intent. The materialistic theories of the artist Phœbus concerning the absolute necessity of “beauty worship” and the superiority of the Aryan over the Semitic races (or principles) are only modern echoes of this pestilential teaching of the deification of materialism. Whether Disraeli, descended from that high race whose history and laws are a standing protest, and have been for ages a bulwark, against the “concupiscence of the flesh,” believes in these theories, is more than we can tell; he has at any rate clothed them with suspiciously gratuitous beauty in his recent work, and has, moreover, tried to fix upon the Anglo‐ Saxon race the stigma of practically adopting them as her own. The monastic history of the countrymen of Bede and Wilfrid tells a very different tale, and nevertheless does not omit to mention the love of sport and athletic exercises peculiar to Englishmen. How far, however, is the character of the young race‐riders(95) and fox‐hunters(96) of monastic England from that of the voluptuous Oriental and sensuous Greek!
Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Spain, and Flanders likewise had their own centres, more local, however, than those of Italy, all of them under the new form of universities, and all more or less emancipated from the strictly monastic spirit of the older centres of learning. Vienna, Erfurt, Heidelberg, and Wittenberg were the foremost in Germany; Cracow was founded by a saint, the holy Hedwige of Poland; and Prague, which gave so much trouble and anxiety to the church in former times and hardly less in our own day, owes much of its glory to the holy women of the middle ages. Thus Dombrowka, a princess of Bohemia, married to a Polish chief, and Hedwige, the great queen and patron saint of Poland, established colleges there and endowed them liberally. Salamanca had a wider reputation, and fell heir to all the brilliant learning of the Arabian and Jewish schools, whose influence on Christian thought in the days of S. Thomas of Aquin had been so dangerous. All the scientific knowledge of the East thus became its natural property, while the intensely Catholic mind of the Spaniards held them aloof from what was poisonous in Eastern philosophy. And here let us stop to remark that Spain, ranked as it has always been among the Latin nations, nevertheless owes its first Christian traditions, and, no doubt, also its imperial notions of universal sway, to the vigorous Gothic races, mingled with the Frankish and Burgundian blood brought in by intermarriage with the Merovingian princes of France. There is something in Spanish history, in Spanish perseverance, we might almost say in Spanish toughness, that reveals the Visigoth, the man of the northern forests, with his indomitable energy and insatiable thirst for the sole rule of land and sea. Alcala, the creation of Cardinal Ximenes, and Coimbra, besides twenty‐four colleges dignified by the name of universities, make up the quota contributed by Spain to the intellectual progress of Europe. We wish we had more space and time to devote to them.
Flanders, the home of art in the middle ages, and the model of dignified and successful civic government, was not fated to be behind‐hand in the world of letters. As early as 1360, a gay scholar of the University of Paris, and a native of Deventer, returned to his birthplace with the halo of success and worldly fame about him. After a few years of vain display, Gerard of Deventer suddenly, through the agency of a holy companion, became an altered and converted man. Having fitted himself for a spiritual career by a three years’ seclusion among the Carthusians, he returned to his native city and instituted a congregation of Canons Regular, whom he entrusted to a disciple of his, a former canon of Utrecht. He himself died soon after, but under his successor, Florentius, the school grew in importance and renown till, in 1393, a scholar entered its cloisters, by name Thomas Hammerlein, now known to the Christian world as Thomas à Kempis, the reputed author of The Following of Christ. His life is too entirely spiritual to be mentioned here, but of the institute in which he was reared the same rule will not apply. Although the aim of the Deventer school was to revive the old monastic ideal, and although its spirit seems forcibly to remind us of Bede and Rabanus of Fulda, still it gave forth scholars like the “Illustrious Nicholas of Cusa, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor’s cap at Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and mathematical learning.”(97) It is also told of the Deventer brethren that they “displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of printing, and that one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their college.”(98) The famous Erasmus passed his first years of study at Deventer in the latter end of the XVth century, and drew from his masters the prediction that he would “one day be the light of his age.” The later Flemish University of Louvain, founded in 1425, by Duke John of Brabant, was eminently an orthodox institution, and became, in the XVIth century, “one of the soundest nurseries of the faith,” as well as the chief seat of learning in Flanders. Even Erasmus owned in his letters that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those of Paris. Here, as usual, the Dominicans were foremost in the breach, and enjoyed great privileges, while their influence made itself powerfully felt throughout the university. S. Thomas of Aquin was, of course, the recognized authority followed by the whole university in matters of theology.
Ireland was not so fortunate during the scholastic as during the monastic era of intellectual development, but what benefits she had she owed them again to the same institution which had educated her sons in olden days. The first University of Dublin was founded in 1320, and had for its first master a Dominican friar. It soon decayed for want of funds and in consequence of the troubles of the times, but the Dominicans would not let learning perish, if they could help it. In 1428, a century later, they opened a free “high school” on Usher’s Island, where they taught gratuitously all branches of knowledge, from grammar to theology, and admitted all students, lay and ecclesiastical. Between this college and their convent in the city they built a stone bridge, the only erection of such solid material known in Dublin for two centuries afterwards, and, says Mr. Wyse in a speech on Education delivered at Cork in 1844, “it is an interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a convent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning where the whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously.”(99) A few years later, the four Mendicant orders, headed by the Dominicans, obtained from Pope Sixtus IV. a brief constituting their Dublin schools one university, with the same ecclesiastical rights and privileges enjoyed by the great University of Oxford, and this body corporate is mentioned as in active exercise of its powers just before the “Reformation.” It showed the general destruction brought by the apostasy of England on all monastic bodies, but such as it was it was the church’s creation, and a fitting successor to those centres of rare learning, the Columbanian monasteries of the VIIth and VIIIth centuries.
The Scotch universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen have been purposely left out, as we have no records of them at hand; of the latter, the remains of which we happened to visit some years ago, it will suffice to say that it possesses a library, the germs of which are due to Catholic collectors, and still has some very fine specimens of illuminated manuscripts. The wood carvings of the choir stalls and screen, of Flemish workmanship, are very beautiful, and the collegiate chapel, still existing, bears marks of the harmony and symmetry natural to the grand worship it once typified.
We have left Oxford to the last, since its history is perhaps almost unique. No university of its day can match it; its vitality has outlasted the “Reformation” itself, and its spirit and statutes remain to this moment as obstinately Catholic as in the days of Bacon and Duns Scotus. True, infidelity has not respected it, but no more did it respect the University of Paris in the XIIIth century, and far more vigorous than its great mediæval rival, Oxford still epitomizes the genius of a nation, while Paris has lost every vestige of its former academical sway. Its beginnings are lost in the ages of fable, for tradition asserts that long before Alfred there were schools and disputations there. The schools of Osney Abbey, and the Benedictine school in connection with Winchcomb Abbey, are among the earliest foundations, but as yet (in 1175) there were no buildings of any architectural pretensions. About that time a great fire destroyed the greater part of the city, and for a long while very little order prevailed among its motley inhabitants. Robert Pulleyn, an English scholar from Paris, who had set up a school in 1133 and in 1142, went to Rome, was made cardinal there, and obtained many ecclesiastical privileges for the Oxford scholars. Law already began to be studied in this century, but a historian of the time complains bitterly that “purity of speech had decayed, philosophy was neglected, and nothing but Parisian quirks prevailed. Had the monastic schools retained their ascendency,” he says, “polite letters would never have fallen into such neglect.”(100) In the XIIIth century there were 30,000 students at Oxford, though many among them were “a set of varlets who pretended to be scholars,” and passed their time in thieving and villany. The brawls of these said “varlets” were to the full as violent as those of the Rue Coupegueule, and much of the same kind of license disgraced Oxford as it did Paris. Nationality seems to have been a common pretext for fights, and S. George’s, S. Patrick’s, and S. David’s days were, instead of peaceful festivals, days of bloodshed and plunder. At last every demonstration on these days had to be forbidden under pain of excommunication. “Town and gown” fights too were frequent, and even internecine battles took place among the scholars themselves over a false quantity in pronunciation or a disputed axiom in philosophy. The fare in those days seems to have been scanty; here for instance is a collegiate menu: “At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the broth of the said beef, with salt and oatmeal and nothing else.” When they went to bed, “they were fain to run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet,” and what the beds were may be surmised from the fact of the students lodging where they could, generally in lofts over the burghers’ shops, as at Paris.
In the earlier part of the XIIIth century Cambridge was founded, and Peter of Blois, the continuator of Ingulphus, tells us that from this “little fountain (the first lectures given successively in the same barn, on various subjects, by three or four monks of Croyland) of Cottenham, the abbot’s manor near Cambridge, which has swelled to a great river, we now behold the whole city of God made glad, and teachers issuing from Cambridge, after the likeness of the Holy Paradise.” Cambridge seems to have cultivated the Anglo‐Saxon tongue, as Tavistock also did, a monastic school where the language was regularly taught “to assist the monks in deciphering their own ancient charters.”
“Old Oxford” was not the imposing pile of ecclesiastical buildings its later representative is now. Osney and S. Frideswide stood like castles in its surrounding meadows, but the main body of the university consisted in straw‐thatched houses and timber schools. There were pilgrimage wells where, on Rogation Days, various blessings were invoked on the fruits of the earth, and these were called by our forefathers “Gospel places.” It was a sort of religious “Maying,” the students carrying poles adorned with flowers and singing the Benedicite. The streets bore singular names—“School Street,” “Logic Lane,” “Street of the Seven Deadly Sins.” Here is the “Schedesyerde,” where abode the sellers of parchment, the schedes or sheets of which gave their name to the locality. The schools can be distinguished by pithy inscriptions over dingy‐looking doors—Ama scientiam, Impostu ras fuge, Litteras disce—but you will look in vain for public schools or collegiate piles. In these humble schools many great scholars were reared: S. Edmund of Canterbury, who, for instance, unless he chanced to spend it in relieving the distress of some poor scholar or little orphan child, left the money his pupils paid him lying loose on the window‐sill, where he would strew it with ashes, saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; or, again, S. Richard, Edmund’s friend, and afterwards his chancellor at Canterbury, who while at Oxford was so poor that he could seldom allow himself the luxury of mutton, then reckoned as ordinary scholar’s fare, and who lodged with two companions, of whom we hear the Parisian tale of the single gown worn alternately at lecture by each, while the others remained at home; Robert Grossetêle, the Franciscan, a universal genius and a most holy man, a zealous lover of natural science, and so well versed in the Scriptures that one of his modern biographers has candidly admitted that his “wonderful knowledge of them might probably be worth remark in our day, though in its own not more than was possessed by all theological students”; Roger Bacon, the greatest natural philosopher who appeared in England before the time of Newton; and Alexander of Hales, “the Irrefragable Doctor,” who also taught in the Franciscan schools of Paris—were among prominent Oxford scholars of the middle ages. Then the marvellous Duns Scotus a scholar of Merton and afterwards a Franciscan monk, an Abelard in brilliancy, versatility, and keenness of argument, who, disputing one day before the doctors of the Sorbonne (to whom he was personally unknown), was interrupted by one of them with this exclamation, “This must be either an angel from heaven, a demon from hell, or Duns Scotus from Oxford!” A similar legend is told of Alanus de Insulis, a Paris doctor, who, having left the schools and become a lay‐brother at Citeaux, accompanied the abbot to Rome to take charge of his horses. Being allowed to sit at the abbot’s feet during the council against the Albigenses, and finding the scales inclining in favor of the heretics, he rose, and, begging the abbot’s blessing, suddenly poured forth his irresistible arguments and defeated the sophistry of the Albigenses, who, baffled and furious, exclaimed, “This must be either the devil himself or Alanus.”
Thomas of Cantilupe, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, was another representative Oxford scholar. Of noble birth and great intellectual powers, he rose to the highest dignities of the realm, and, though Oxford was still a scene of violent disorders, he preserved his purity and calmness through all its dangers. The collegiate system soon came to put an end to this state of things, and Merton was the first college, properly so‐called, where moral order and architectural proportions received some attention. The aspect of the university now rapidly changed. Lollardism seriously affected the great seat of learning, and at first its doctrines were much upheld by the jealous secular teachers, who saw in his calumnies a weapon to be used against the saintly and successful friars; the tone of the university declined, and literature was wofully neglected for a time. However, as Lollardism faded from men’s minds, a revival of letters took place, and in the XVIth century Erasmus, who was very kindly entertained and welcomed at Oxford, pays the following tribute to its literary proficiency: “I have found here classic erudition, and that not trite and shallow, but profound and accurate, both Latin and Greek, so that I no longer sigh for Italy.”(101) And again: “I think, from my very soul, there is no country where abound so many men skilled in every kind of learning as there are here”(102) (in England). His own Greek learning was chiefly acquired at Oxford, for, previous to his coming hither, his knowledge of that language was very superficial.
We have lingered over the history of mediæval Oxford longer than our readers may be inclined to think reasonable, and we must confess that our interest in the only institution of the middle ages which stands yet unimpaired in glory, influence, and renown, has led us beyond the limits we had honestly proposed to ourselves.
Little now remains to be said. We have come upon the uninviting times when reason broke away from faith and carried desolation in its headlong course through the field of the human intellect. A literary and philosophical madness settled on men’s minds, and Babel seemed to have come again, except where the calm round of old studies was pursued with the old spirit of quies within the sphere of the ancient faith. All beyond was confusion and hurry; every one set up as a teacher before having been a disciple; each man dictated and no one listened; each would be the originator of a system which his first follower was sure to alter, with the perspective of having his alterations remodelled again by his first pupil, and so on ad libitum, till systems came to be called by men’s names, and to vary in meaning according to the particular temper of each one that undertook to explain them.
With all its turbulence and occasional excesses contrasted with the cynical refinement and polite indifferentism of to‐day, was not the older system the better one?
Fleurange.
By Mrs. Craven, Author Of “A Sister’s Story.”
Translated From The French, With Permission.
Part Third.
The Banks Of The Neckar.
XXXIX.
About a fortnight after Christmas, Clement was returning to his lodgings a little sooner than usual, when he met Wilhelm Müller at the door.
“Ah! you have come at the right moment,” said he. “Let me tell you why. A courier from St. Petersburg arrived this morning with important news, which will have a serious effect on our business.”
“Are you referring to the death of the Emperor Alexander? I knew that yesterday. What else is there?”
“Quite another affair, indeed. Constantine has been set aside, and the Grand Duke Nicholas is to succeed his brother.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. But that is not all; we knew that yesterday. The news the courier brought this morning is more serious. It seems a conspiracy has broken out—”
“A conspiracy! Where?”
“At St. Petersburg. The courier left the twenty‐fourth of December. They were then fighting on the square before the palace, and the emperor was in the midst of the fight.”
“Constantine?”
“No, indeed; his brother.”
“The Grand Duke Nicholas? Is he at the head of the plot?”
“No; on the contrary, it seems to be Constantine, and yet it is not he either.—In fact, no one knows anything about it, the report is so very confused. But come and help me, if you will. We have despatches to send in every direction. We shall certainly have further news this evening. I dare say Waltheim (the chief member of the firm of which they were the principal clerks) is this very moment beside himself.”
The two friends set off together. They had hardly gone two steps before they came upon quite a group standing around the doorway of a fine house almost opposite Müller’s. It was the residence of the Russian legation. They were told in reply to their questions that a courier had just arrived on horseback, covered with dust and half‐dead with fatigue. He left St. Petersburg on the twenty‐sixth, and had been ten days on the way.
“Does anybody know what news he has brought?” asked Müller of the man who gave him this information.
“Nothing definite, of course. And we shall learn nothing there,” pointing to the diplomatic residence, “except what they please to tell us.”
Müller and Clement stopped no longer.
“The twenty‐sixth!” said Müller. “I should like to know the contents of the despatch.”
“The other legations must soon have news of as late a date, to say nothing of our own correspondent, who will give us the earliest information possible. But, now I think of it, one of the attachés of the French legation is somewhat of a friend of mine; what if I go and ask him for the details?”
Müller thought this a capital idea, and Clement left him at once to go to the residence of the French legation. Müller kept on to his office at Waltheim’s, where he would wait for him.
The young attaché referred to was the Vicomte de Noisy. He had been present at one of the public assemblies in which Clement distinguished himself as a speaker, and conceived a fancy for him from that time. They frequently made excursions together on foot or horseback, and the vicomte sought every opportunity of meeting Clement with an eagerness the latter sometimes reproached himself for not responding to with more warmth. He relied, therefore, on a cordial reception, and, in fact, as soon as he was announced, he was taken into a small room next the chancellerie, where M. de Noisy passed the greater part of his time. He found him seated at a table covered with papers. Before Clement had time to utter a word, the young attaché exclaimed, without leaving his place:
“Have you come with news? or to get some?”
“What a question! You know well our commercial agents are never able to rival the speed of the bearers of political despatches.”
“And yet it happens sometimes.”
“But not this time, unfortunately. The Russian legation has just received a despatch from St. Petersburg dated the twenty‐sixth.”
“So we have just heard. It came in an incredibly short time. I fear ours will not do as well. And yet the French embassy at St. Petersburg is not often caught napping.”
Some one rang furiously. A hussar opened the door and made a sign to the vicomte, who sprang forward.
“The courier!” he exclaimed. “Bravo! Vive l’ambassadeur! To be only one hour behind the Russian courier is wonderful! Here, mon cher, are some cigars. Take the arm‐chair and wait till I return. I shall soon be back, and will bring you the news.”
Clement threw himself into the arm‐chair, lit a cigar, took up a newspaper, and patiently awaited the young attaché’s return beside a good fire, which, without prejudice to the large stove at one end of the room, did not give out too much heat at this rigorous season. At the end of an hour, however, he was beginning to feel he was losing his time, when the Vicomte de Noisy reappeared with his hands full of letters, which he threw on the table.
“There,” he said. “To decipher and read these is not all: they are to be answered, and I do not know when I shall be able to leave the chancellerie.”
“Would it be indiscreet for you to tell me the nature of your despatches?”
“By no means. We have good news. It is all over. The struggle was severe, but short. The new emperor conducted admirably. The regiments in revolt have returned to their duty, all the leaders of the insurrection have been taken. The only serious thing is that among the latter are several belonging to the noblesse, and a great many gentlemen of social standing are compromised. This interests me more than anything else, because I was connected with the embassy at St. Petersburg before I came here, and know them all.”
“Have they given any of the leader’s names?”
“Oh! yes: Troubetzkoï, Rilieff, Mouravieff, Wolkonsky, and a host of others. But among all these names there is one I am amazed at finding. Who would ever have thought Walden would be drawn into such a row?”
Clement’s heart gave a leap. “Walden, did you say? What, the Count George de Walden?”
“The very person. Do you happen to know him?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Well, can you conceive of a man of his ability and distinction being mixed up in such a plot? It was an atrocious conspiracy to assassinate the emperor, and a foolish attempt to establish a republic. Constantine’s name was only made use of as a pretext.”
“And is Count George seriously compromised?” asked Clement.
“He could not be more so. He is classed among those who have no other alternative but Siberia or death.—But excuse me, Dornthal, I am forced to leave you. I dare say we shall have to work all night. Here,” said he, searching in his pocket, “here is a letter I have received from St. Petersburg by the courier. You may find in it some additional details that will interest you.”
The attaché hurried off through the door of the chancellerie, and Clement left the house. It was not till he found himself in the street that he began to recover from the stupefaction caused by the news he had just heard. He turned mechanically towards the office, where Müller was waiting for him, and gave him an account of what he had just learned, with the exception of the one fact of this political event of infinitely more importance to him than all the rest. He remained some time at his post, making an almost superhuman effort to control his bewildered mind and keep it on the work he had to do. At last he took leave of Müller and went back to his lodgings. Without stopping, as he usually did, to see the family, he went directly up‐stairs, and shut himself up in his room. He wished to be alone, that he might decide at leisure upon the course to pursue in consequence of so unforeseen and serious an event.
Gabrielle!—He thought of her—and her alone. How would she support such a blow? How was she to be informed of it?
He remained a long time buried in these reflections without thinking of the letter in his pocket. At length he bethought himself of it, and with the hope of getting some light began to read it attentively. After some preamble, which he ran over hastily, he came to what follows:
“This conspiracy, which broke out with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, and appeared to be only the spontaneous result of the prevailing doubt at the beginning of the present reign as to which of the two brothers was the real emperor, was really arranged a long time before, it seems. It is said to have had deep and extensive ramifications, and they who fomented and directed the plot only availed themselves of the circumstances that followed Alexander’s death as a pretext. It is said their plans were to have been executed in the spring, if the deceased emperor’s life had been prolonged till that time. But what seems equally certain is that a great number of those who are now seriously compromised had only a very imperfect idea of what was going on. Among these, I cannot doubt, is our poor friend George de Walden. You know he has always been dreaming of possible or impossible reforms. As evil would have it, he met in Italy during the past year a certain man named Lasko—very intelligent and capable, but an intriguer ready for anything, and mixed up with all the plots that have agitated Italy and Germany the past ten years. Imprisoned, then released, Heaven knows how, assuming a thousand names, in a word, one of those evil‐minded persons who are docile instruments in the hands of the real leaders of the great plots of the day, George was accidentally brought in contact with him, and once, only once, was persuaded to attend one of their meetings through mere curiosity. There by a still more unfortunate accident he happened to meet one of the leaders just referred to. The latter at once saw the influence to be derived from George’s name, position, enthusiasm, and even his ignorance of the extent of their schemes. He persuaded him to repair to St. Petersburg at a given time, and hold himself in readiness to second a combined movement, secretly arranged, but too extensive to be suppressed. This movement, he said, was to bring about the realization of some of George’s theories. I had these details from the Marquis Adelardi, the genial Milanais who spent a winter here three years ago, and is, you know, George’s intimate friend. The marquis, uneasy about the count’s sudden departure from Florence, and still more so when three months passed away without his return, came here to join him. He arrived only three days before the fatal twenty‐fourth. It appears George was certainly on the square that day and in the foremost ranks of the insurgents. Adelardi declares he went there sincerely convinced, by the representations of those who were desirous of leading him on, that Constantine’s renunciation was a pretence, and his rights ought to be maintained in the interests of their projects, which that prince, they declared, was ready to second. However that may be, it is only too certain that close beside him on the square was this same Lasko, who was killed at the very moment of firing at the Grand Duke Michael. One witness—and but one, for it requires some courage to testify in favor of a man in his situation—has stated it was George who turned his deadly weapon aside (thus saving the grand duke’s life) before the aide‐de‐camp of the latter shot the assassin. But there is so strong a feeling against him, both at court and in the city, that no one dares insist how much this circumstance is in his favor. He himself obstinately refuses to take advantage of it, and his haughty attitude since his arrest is by no means favorable to his interests. What makes his case more complicated, his secretary was an Italian most intimately connected with Lasko. This man, Fabiano Dini by name, was also on the square the day of the insurrection, and was severely wounded.”
Here Clement stopped. These last lines increased his agitation to the highest pitch. All their vague fears were thus confirmed—his cousin’s fatal destiny pursued him to the end! Unfortunate himself and a source of misfortune to others! Yes, that was Felix: capable of realizing his disgrace, but not of repairing it; seeking the post of danger and the opportunity of displaying his courage, reluctant to leave the obscurity in which he had hidden his life, he became one of those secret agitators who were then, perhaps even more than now, silently undermining Europe. He soon became their agent, and his talents, contempt of danger and death, made him a useful one. In this way he speedily came to an end that was inevitable.
Clement paced up and down his chamber a long time unable to calm his confused mind, but, after much reflection, came to the conclusion George’s trial would probably be prolonged, and might terminate less tragically than was to be feared from this letter. At all events, he ought to spare Fleurange all the anguish of this uncertainty as long as possible. This would not be difficult at Rosenheim, for the professor was not allowed to read the newspapers, and therefore none were left about the rooms occupied by the family. Hansfelt alone read them and communicated the news. Clement hastened to write his sister Hilda a few lines, confiding to her all he had just learned, and recommending her, as well as Hansfelt, to withhold from Gabrielle all information on the subject. “I shall be at Rosenheim in a week,” said he at the close, “and we will consult together, dear sister, about what will then be advisable. Meanwhile, I rely on your prudence and affection for her.”
Clement and his sister had never discussed the subject now referred to, but they had long read one another’s thoughts. They were now of the same mind, and Fleurange would have remained a long time ignorant of what they wished to conceal from her, had not an unforeseen circumstance overthrown, a few days after, all the plans laid by their prudence and affection.
XL.
The poor you always have with you. This is our Saviour’s declaration, and it accords with human experience. We find the poor everywhere, unless we wilfully turn away our eyes with culpable indifference. Mademoiselle Josephine, we are well aware, was not of the number of these blind or insensible persons. She therefore found quite as much work on her hands at Heidelberg as at Paris, with this difference, which was a keen mortification—she was unable to hold any communication with the objects of her bounty, except by gestures rarely expressive enough on either side to be understood. This forced her to dispense with what had always been the most pleasant feature of charity—kind words, and sometimes long chats with the poor on whom she bestowed alms.
“I only wish they understood a little French,” she said. “It seems as if it might be easy enough for them, whereas it is utterly impossible for me to learn German.” In a word, not to know French and to understand German seemed to Mademoiselle Josephine among the mysteries of nature. Nevertheless, as the poor people persisted in using only their own language, and resentment must not be carried so far as to refuse aiding them, mademoiselle was very glad to accept Fleurange as her interpreter and the agent of her charity. The young girl came every day at the same hour, either to accompany her or receive her orders and make the daily round in her stead.
She generally found mademoiselle in her laboratory, that is, in a room on the ground‐floor, in which the principal piece of furniture was an immense armoire, containing all kinds of things to be distributed among her actual or anticipated protégés. She liked to have a good supply on hand, and it was seldom a poor person found her without the means of aiding them at once.
“Here, Gabrielle,” said she one morning, when Fleurange appeared as usual, basket in hand, to get the charitable supplies for the day. “See, everything is ready.” And she pointed towards the things on the table, which, with the large armoire and two chairs, comprised all the furniture in the room. Everything was indeed arranged in fine order: on one side were two pairs of stockings and a woollen skirt; on the other, a covered tureen of broth, a small quantity of sugar, a bottle of wine, some tobacco, and two or three newspapers. To all these things she added a small vial, the contents of which required some explanation.
“The stockings and skirt,” said mademoiselle, “are for the mother of the little girl to whom you carried clothes yesterday. The broth and sugar are for our poor old woman, as well as this little vial of eau de mélisse of my own preparation, and not the worse for that. And the wine and tobacco are for the invalid soldier, the old carpenter whom you visited last week. His daughter succeeded in making me understand yesterday that nothing would give this poor man more pleasure than to lend him a newspaper occasionally. You can give him these which I procured for him this morning. Ah!—apropos, your cousin Clement left two nice cigars for him which I forgot. While I am gone for them, you can put all these things in your basket.”
The kind woman left the room to get the cigars. They were up‐stairs, but she never thought of counting her steps when it was a question of doing a kind act, however insignificant, for another. Only, she did not ascend the stairs quite as nimbly as she once did, and on this occasion it took her about fifteen minutes to go and return.
During this time Fleurange, standing at the table, proceeded to stow away all the things in her basket, and last of all was about to put in the newspapers when her eye fell on a paragraph in one of them that gave her a start. She seized the paper, opened it, and began to read with ardent curiosity. All at once she uttered a feeble cry, the journal dropped from her trembling hands, a mist came over her eyes, and, when her old friend returned, she found her lying on the floor, pale, cold, and senseless.
Fortunately, Mademoiselle Josephine did not lack presence of mind or experience. She flew to Fleurange, knelt beside her, raised her head, and supported her in her arms. Then she drew a smelling‐bottle from her pocket to revive her, and while showing her these attentions she racked her brains to guess what could have caused one so robust and generally so calm to faint in this mysterious way. All at once she noticed the newspaper, which had fallen at the young girl’s feet. “Ah!” she said, “she read something in that medley, perhaps some bad news; but, merciful heavens! what could it have been to produce such an effect?—Dear child,” she continued, looking tenderly at the pale and lovely face resting on her shoulders, “she said yesterday she never fainted but once in her life, and that was at our house in Paris two years ago when she was overcome by weakness and hunger.”
Poor Mademoiselle Josephine! compassion, and the remembrances thus awakened, doubly affected her, and her eyes were still filled with tears when Fleurange opened hers with an expression of surprise soon followed by an indistinct recollection. She rose slowly up, but, before mademoiselle could aid her, she threw her arms around her old friend’s neck.
“O dear mademoiselle!” she murmured, “did you know it?—did you know it?”
Poor Josephine had never been so embarrassed. To say she was totally ignorant of the point was to invite a confidence quite unsuitable at such a moment, and a contrary reply would also have its inconveniences. She therefore took refuge in an innocent subterfuge.
“Well, well, my poor child, what use is there in speaking of it now? Be calm, and do not say anything at present. We will talk about it another time. Be easy,” she added at a venture, “everything will be arranged if you take what I am going to give you.”
Then aiding Fleurange to rise, and placing her in a chair, she ran for a glass of water, into which she poured a few drops of eau de mélisse—a genuine panacea in her estimation—which she held to the young girl’s lips. Fleurange drank it all, and then gave a long sigh.
“What happened to me?” she said.
“Nothing. You were only faint. That is all.”
“That is strange, for I never faint.” And she passed her hand over her forehead.
“O my God! I remember it all now,” she suddenly exclaimed. “But is it true? May not this be false—a mere idle tale?”
“Who can tell?” replied mademoiselle vaguely. “That is quite possible. They say so many things.”
“But tell me all you know.”
“No, no, not now, Gabrielle, not now. You are not able to hear it. Do as I say, and we will talk about it at another time.”
Fleurange made no reply. A moment after, she rose. “I am well now,” she said; “I feel revived.”
She gathered up her long hair, which had fallen around her shoulders, took the journal and put it in her pocket, then put on the little velvet hat trimmed with fur which she generally wore in winter, and said: “Thanks, dear mademoiselle, and pardon me. I have quite recovered, but do not feel equal, however, to the visits you expected me to make to‐day.”
“No, indeed, of course not.”
“I must go home at once.”
“Yes, certainly, I am going with you. You must go to bed. You are generally pale, but now your cheeks are as red as those curtains,” pointing to the bright cotton curtains at the window.
“No, no, I am not ill,” said Fleurange, her eyes aflame. “The air will do me good. Do not feel uneasy. You see my faintness has entirely passed off.”
As mademoiselle had not the least idea of the cause of this sudden indisposition, and the young girl really seemed quite recovered, she did not oppose her wish to go home alone and on foot. The distance was not far. Fleurange came every day without any escort, she allowed her therefore to go, merely accompanying her as far as the gate of her little yard, where they separated, bidding each other good‐by till evening.
XLI.
The thermometer was down to five or six degrees. The little hat Fleurange wore protected her forehead, but showed the tresses of her thick hair behind. She drew up her hood when she wished to guard more effectually against the severity of the weather. But now she did not take this precaution. She only drew the folds of her thick cloak around her form, and set off with rapid steps. The keen, frosty air was refreshing to her burning cheeks and revived her strength, and, with the exception of an unusual glow in her complexion and in her eyes, there was no trace of her recent faintness when she reached home. As soon as she entered, without stopping an instant, she went directly upstairs, and, giving a slight knock at the door, entered the chamber between her own and Hilda’s, which Hansfelt had used as a study since his arrival at Rosenheim. When Fleurange entered, she found him and his young wife together. They started with surprise at seeing her, and stopped talking, with a certain embarrassment which did not escape Fleurange.
“I can guess the subject of your conversation,” she said with emotion, but without hesitation, “and it is what I wish to speak to you about.”
Her cousin looked at her, uncertain what reply she ought to make.
“Hilda,” said Fleurange, “you agreed never to mention Count George’s name to me till I should speak of him first. Well, I have now come to speak of him, and beg you both to tell me all you know about him. Here,” continued she, throwing the newspaper she had brought on the table, “read that, and then tell me all I am still ignorant of.”
What could they say? She stood before them so calm, resolute, and decided, that any reticence seemed useless. Hansfelt ran over the journal. He saw the article Fleurange referred to did not contain any details, but only a list of the accused, followed by some very clear comments on the fate which awaited them. Count George’s name figured among the first on the list.
“What is he accused of? What is the crime in question?” asked she in a decided tone.
Hansfelt still hesitated. But his wife knew better than he the character of her who was questioning them. “Karl,” said she, “you can tell her, and ought to do so. We must conceal nothing more from Gabrielle.”
“And why have you done so hitherto?” said Fleurange. “Ah! yes, I understand”—and a slight blush mounted to her forehead—“the secret I thought so well hidden has been discovered by you all!”
“No, no,” cried Hilda, “only by me—and you know I can conceal nothing from Karl—by me and Clement.”
“Clement also?” said Fleurange, with a start of surprise and a confusion which deepened her blush. “But, after all, what difference does it make?” she continued. “I shall conceal nothing more from any one, and I wish nothing to be kept from me either. Come, Karl, I assure you earnestly I do not lack fortitude, and hereafter you must not try to spare me. Surprise alone overpowered me for an instant. Now I am prepared for the worst, and ready to hear what you have to tell.”
But in spite of these words, when Hansfelt at last decided, after some further hesitation, to satisfy her, while he was giving her a circumstantial account of all Count George had done to forfeit his life, the color produced by the keen air, her walking so fast, and her agitation, vanished completely from the young girl’s face, and she became as pale as death.
“Siberia or death!” she repeated two or three times in a low tone, as if it were as difficult to understand as to utter such terrible words.
“As to the worst of these two sentences, it is to be hoped he will escape,” said Hansfelt.
Fleurange shuddered. Was it really of him—him!—they were talking in this way? “But tell me, Karl, is there no other alternative? May he not be condemned to prison or expatriation? They are also great and fearful punishments. Why speak only of two sentences, one almost as horrible as the other?”
Hansfelt shook his head. “His name, his rank, the benefits the government had conferred on his family, the favors so many times offered him, will all aggravate his crime in the eyes of his judges. His life, I trust, will be spared, but—”
“But—the mines, fetters, and fearful rigors of Siberia—do you think he will be condemned to suffer all these penalties without any alleviation?”
Hansfelt was silent. Hilda pressed Fleurange’s hands and tenderly kissed her colorless cheeks.
“I have said enough, and too much,” said Hansfelt. “Why will you ask me such questions, Gabrielle? And why do you tell me to answer her, Hilda?”
“Because I wish to know everything,” said Fleurange, raising her head, which she had rested a moment on her cousin’s shoulder, and recovering her firmness of voice. After a moment’s hesitation she continued: “Then nothing can save him?”
“You wished for the truth without any disguise, Gabrielle, and I have not concealed it from you. According to all human probability, nothing can save Count George from the fate that awaits him: that is beyond doubt. But it sometimes happens in Russia that sudden caprice on the part of the sovereign arrests the hand of justice. Nevertheless, it would be deceiving you if I did not add that there is nothing to lead us to hope he will be such an object of clemency. On the contrary, all the reports agree in stating that the irritation against him is extreme, and surpasses that against all the other conspirators.”
Fleurange remained a long time absorbed in thought. “Thank you, Karl,” said she at length. “You will hereafter tell me all you learn, will you not?”
After receiving the promise asked for, she turned to leave the chamber. “One more question,” said she. “My head must be very much confused, or I should have asked you before in what way his poor mother learned the news, and how she bears it.”
“Clement heard she was at Florence, as usual at this season, but on learning the news started at once for St. Petersburg.”
“St. Petersburg! at this time of year! The poor woman will die on the way.”
“I can tell you nothing more. Clement will be here this evening. He may have additional news.”
But when Clement arrived that night, Fleurange, prostrated by the anxiety and excitement of the day, was unable to leave her chamber. Her aunt, who remained with her, declared she should see no one else till the next day, and the interview she hoped to have with Clement was deferred. Meanwhile the latter was steeling himself for the new phase in the trial before him by listening to all the details of what had occurred. Mademoiselle Josephine informed them of what had happened to Fleurange at her house, and in return learned with interest mingled with profound astonishment the real cause of her fainting. Of all the sufferings in the world, those caused by love were the most unintelligible to her. If she had been suddenly informed that her dear Gabrielle had lost her mind, or was going into a consumption, she would not have been more surprised and disturbed. Perhaps less so, for the terror mystery lends to distress, and a complete ignorance of the suitable remedies for such a case, added powerlessness to anxiety. She, who had so many remedies of all kinds for every occasion, could absolutely think of nothing suitable for this. How this unknown person, whose name she had never heard until to‐day, could all at once become so essential to the happiness of this dear child, who was surrounded by so much affection from others and had always seemed so happy, was in her eyes a still greater phenomenon than knowing German. As for that language, she now resolved to study it, thinking the day might again arrive when there would be something within her comprehension and power to do for her. “I will endeavor to acquire it, that I may not lose an opportunity of profiting by it,” said she. This vague hope consoled her for her present incompetency, and satisfied, for the time, the devotedness of her kind heart, now quite out of its latitude.
XLII.
The following morning Fleurange, quite recovered from the physical effects of her agitation, was up at her usual hour, that is, at daybreak. She put on her thick cloak, her little fur‐trimmed hat, and started off to church for the first Mass, which she daily attended at this season. At her arrival she threw back her hood, and knelt as near the altar as possible. The church was so dark that each one brought a lantern, a bit of candle, or some other portable light to read by. These lamps and tapers, increasing with the number of worshippers, at last diffused sufficient light throughout the church to enable one to distinguish the people and objects in it. Fleurange did not bring a candle and needed none, for she had no prayer‐book, but she was not the less profoundly recollected. Pale and motionless, her hands clasped, her head raised, her eyes fastened on the altar, the delicate and regular outline of her face distinctly visible by a neighboring taper, she resembled a statue of white marble wrapped in sombre drapery. She prayed with fervor, but without agitation, without tears, and even without moving her lips. Her whole soul seemed centred in her eyes. Her look at once expressed the faith that implores and hopes, submission to God’s will, and courage to fulfil it. It was a prayer that must prevail, or leave the heart submissive and strengthened.
The Mass ended, all the lights were extinguished one after the other, but the faint glimmering in the east soon increased to such a degree that, when Fleurange rose after the church was nearly empty, she recognized Clement only a few steps off. He followed her to the door, she took the holy water from his hand, and they went out together.
It was now broad daylight, but the sky was veiled with gray clouds, a violent wind swept before it the snow that covered the ground, and when they issued into the street they were met by a perfect whirlwind of driving snow which Fleurange was scarcely able to withstand. Clement supported her, then retained her arm, and they walked on for some time without speaking. He had dreaded this interview in spite of himself, and now rallied all his strength to listen calmly to what she was about to say. But, at last, as she remained silent, he spoke first:
“You were ill last evening, Gabrielle. I was far from expecting to find you at church so early in such severe weather.”
“Ill?” replied Fleurange. “No; I was not ill, but suffering from a great shock, as you know, do you not, Clement?”
“Yes, Gabrielle, I know it.”
These few words broke down the barrier. What had haunted Clement’s thoughts now proved to be an actual reality; but energetic natures prefer the most terrible realities to vague apprehensions, and even to vague hopes, and he felt his courage rise in proportion as self‐abnegation became more completely rooted in his soul. After a moment’s silence, he said:
“Gabrielle, why have you not treated me of late with the same confidence you once showed me?”
She replied without any hesitation: “Because I made a resolution never to mention him—I made it,” she continued, without noticing the slight start Clement was unable to repress, “because I wished to forget him. It was therefore better for me to be reserved even with Hilda—even with you, Clement. But now,” continued she, with a kind of exaltation in which grief and joy were confounded, “now I think of that no longer. It seems as if a new life had commenced for him and for me. And yet we are separated, as it were, by death. But death breaks down barriers, and reunites, too. What shall I say, Clement? I seem nearer to him to‐day than yesterday, and in spite of myself (for I am well aware it is an illusion) I feel I shall be able to serve him in some way or other. At all events, I no longer have any motive for concealing my feelings, and to throw off this restraint is in itself a comfort.”
Clement listened without interrupting her. Each word gave him a sharp pang, but he steeled himself, somewhat as one does to the clash of arms and the firing of cannon till there is not even a movement of the eyelids to betray the fear of death or the possibility of being wounded. As to the illusion she spoke of, it was the last dream of sorrow and love. He would not try to dispel it.
“Let us hope, my dear cousin,” said he in a calm tone. “So many unforeseen circumstances may occur during a trial like that about to commence! There is no reason to despair.—Whatever may happen,” added he, as they approached the house, “promise me, Gabrielle, from this time forth, to show the same confidence in me you once did—a confidence which will induce you to tell me everything, and rely on me under all circumstances. You once made me such a promise: have you forgotten it?”
“No, Clement, and I now renew it. You are my best friend, as I once told you. My opinion has not changed.”
Yes, she had said so. He had forgotten neither the day nor the spot, and his heart throbbed at the remembrance! Though he was but little more than twenty years of age, and the honeysuckle he still preserved in memory of that hour was scarcely withered, a long life seemed to have intervened since they exchanged nearly the same words.
But when they separated with a pressure of the hand at the end of the conversation, on that gloomy winter morning, Clement was left with a less painful impression than that which came over him on the banks of the Neckar, when, in the pale light of the moon, he had so sudden and fatal a revelation from the expression of her eyes and the tone of her voice. She had told him nothing to‐day he did not know before. Instead of happiness, a vague perspective of devotedness opened before him. But even this was something to live for.
The following days passed without any new incident. The necessity of concealing their preoccupation from the professor obliged them all to make an effort which was beneficial especially to Fleurange, who remained faithful to her ordinary duties, passing as much time as usual beside her uncle’s arm‐chair, and with Mademoiselle Josephine and her poor protégées. But a feverish anxiety was sometimes apparent in her movements and in the troubled expression of her eyes when she went daily at the regular hour to ask Hansfelt what was in the newspapers. For more than a week, however, there was nothing new either to comfort her or to increase her sorrow. Clement had returned to Frankfort, and the days dragged along with deep and silent anguish. One morning, when least looked for, he suddenly appeared with unexpected news: the Princess Catherine was at Frankfort, and would be at Heidelberg the following day!
Fleurange trembled.—The Princess Catherine!—All the remembrances connected with that name revived with an intensity that for a moment overpowered her. She felt incapable of uttering a word.—“Coming here?” she said at length. “To Heidelberg? What for? What can bring her here? How do you know? Who told you? Oh! tell me everything, and at once, Clement!”
Clement implored her to be calm, and she became so by degrees while he related what he had learned the night before from the Princess Catherine herself. At her arrival at Frankfort, she was informed by M. Waldheim, her banker, that young Dornthal was in the city, and she begged him to call on her. Clement complied, but not without emotion, with the wish of Count George’s mother, and found her fearfully prostrated with grief and illness. He had, however, a long conversation with her, the substance of which was that, leaving Florence as soon as she learned the fatal news, she travelled night and day till she reached Paris, where she fell ill. After four days, however, she resumed her journey, but when she arrived at Frankfort the physician declared her utterly incapable of continuing it, and especially of enduring the increasing severity of the weather in proportion as she approached St. Petersburg. Able to go no further, she resolved at least to keep on as far as Heidelberg, hoping the care of a young physician of that city, since and even then very celebrated, would speedily enable her to resume her sad journey.
“I shall make the effort,” said the princess, “for I wish to live. I wish to go to him, if possible. I long to behold him once more! I hope much from Dr. Ch——’s attendance, as well as your cousin Gabrielle’s. I depend on her, tell her so. Tell her,” added she, weeping, “that I long to see her again, and beg her to come to me as soon as I arrive at Heidelberg.”
“And she will be here to‐morrow?” said Fleurange, much affected.
“Yes, towards night. I am going to notify the physician, and have the best apartments in the city prepared for her. Though she did not say so, I am sure, Gabrielle, she expects to meet you at her arrival.”
Fleurange merely replied she would be there, but her heart beat with a joy she thought she could never feel again. To behold George’s mother once more, and at such a time! Was it not like catching a glimpse of him? She would be sure of constantly hearing his name—of constant and direct news respecting him—in a word, this was the realization of a secret wish she had not dared utter.
The next day, a long time before the appointed hour, Fleurange was in the room prepared for the princess, arranging the furniture in the way she knew would suit her, trying to give everything a cheerful aspect, to lessen the sadness of the poor traveller, who, towards the close of this long day, at length arrived exhausted with fatigue, and fell sobbing into the young girl’s arms.
The time when she feared no other danger for her son than Gabrielle’s presence was forgotten. The impressions of the moment always overruled all others, and her present troubles were, besides, well calculated to absorb every thought. Therefore, in meeting her young protégée she only thought of the pleasure of seeing her again, of the comfort to be derived from her care and presence at a time when they were most needed, and everything except her first fancy for Fleurange seemed to be effaced from her memory.
XLIII.
A subdued light veiled every object. A bright fire sparkled in the small fireplace, only intended to be ornamental, as the room was otherwise heated by a stove. The princess was, as we have already seen her, reclining on a canapé sheltered by a large screen. Her elbow rested on a small table loaded with the various objects she always carried with her; her feet were covered with a large shawl, and near her sat Fleurange on a stool in the old familiar attitude.
There was a great change, however. They no longer resorted to reading as they once did, or followed the lead of the princess’ thoughts, generally more or less frivolous. One subject alone absorbed every faculty—a subject which she who listened with such ardent interest was still less weary of than herself.
To this the afflicted mother continually came back, sometimes with agitation, sometimes with a dull despair, but always with profound grief, heart‐rending to her whose sorrow equalled her own.
It was the first time the Princess Catherine had ever been subdued by misfortune. Subdued, but not changed, she not only instinctively retained all her elegant habits, but her passionate nature was unchanged, and burst forth into recriminations against all whom she thought implicated in her son’s misfortunes. This enabled her to pity, without blaming, him. It was one of these occasions Fleurange heard her exclaim that “Fabiano Dini was his evil genius!” and she shuddered in recalling her presentiment, so soon and so fatally justified.
“Yes,” said the princess during one of their conversations, “it was he—it was that Fabiano Dini who brought him in contact with that reprobate of a Lasko!”
And then she told the young girl about that person whose tragical end did not seem to have sufficiently expiated all the evil he had done her son—about his arrival at Florence, the ascendency he acquired over George, and the skill and promptness with which he took advantage of all his weak points. She had been incredulous at first, notwithstanding Adelardi’s warnings—alas! too long, too foolishly incredulous! But her fears once roused, how much had she not suffered! What efforts had she not made! Alas! but in vain!
“He was always so—that dear, unfortunate child! No prudence, no fear of danger, ever stopped him on the very brink where his inclinations led him. Oh! those wretches! they soon discovered his imprudence, his generosity, and his courage! And now,” she exclaimed, rising from her pillow, while her thick but somewhat gray hair fell over her shoulders in unusual disorder, “can he possibly be confounded with them? Oh! if I could only get well, only strong enough to start, to make the journey, to see the young empress even but once, I should obtain his pardon, I am sure!”
Then she fell back exhausted, murmuring as she wrung her hands: “And Vera!—Vera absent from St. Petersburg at such a time! She was expected there, but who knows if she may not arrive too late? And above all, who knows but she will be his worst enemy, and if he has not foolishly poisoned the very source whence he might now derive safety?”
These words, which perhaps might have caused fresh trouble, were not heard by her to whom they were addressed. Fleurange had softly left the princess’ side as she laid her weary head on her pillow, and was at the other end of the room preparing a soothing draught which the poor invalid mechanically took from her hand from hour to hour without obtaining the relief of a moment’s sleep. This overpowering excitement, which resisted every remedy, was somewhat soothed at the arrival of one of the Marquis Adelardi’s frequent letters. He was still at St. Petersburg, and kept her accurately informed of all that happened, sometimes reviving her hopes, and again confirming her fears. But hitherto he had not succeeded in learning anything certain as to the fate reserved for his friend. Sometimes, therefore, after eagerly reading these letters, she threw them into the fire with despair.
So much agitation at length brought on a high fever, and the princess had been confined to her bed several days, when one morning another letter arrived from St. Petersburg. Fleurange softly approached the bedside, and perceived the invalid was fast asleep. It was important this brief moment of repose should not be disturbed, and, besides, the physician had requested, some days previous, that no letter should be given her till it had been read, for fear she might learn some distressing news before she was prepared—as it was easy to foresee might happen. Fleurange promised to read the letters first, and with the less scruple that for more than a week she had been obliged to read them to the princess, who was too worn out to do so herself.
She now left her to the care of the faithful Barbara, and went into the salon, where, carefully closing the door, she broke the seal of the letter in her hands, which was also from the Marquis Adelardi. “At last,” he wrote, “I think I can certainly reassure you as to the most terrible of the events that seemed possible. The extreme rigor of the law will only be enforced against the acknowledged leaders of the conspiracy—four or five in number. All the others, among whom is George, will incur, alas! a terrible penalty, but we must be thankful not to look forward to one more frightful—I say we, my dear unfortunate friend, for, as to him, I fear this sentence will produce a contrary effect. I am persuaded he will consider it a thousand times more dreadful than the other.
“Since I last wrote you, through the intervention of one of the ambassadors, I have been allowed the privilege of entering the fortress where George is confined, and having a private interview with him. Pardon has been offered him if he will reveal the names of some of his accomplices. You will not be surprised at his refusing. But the numerous proofs of their criminal projects, which have been set before him in order to wrest some acknowledgment from him, have convinced him of the nature of the enterprise in which he risked his honor and life. The effect of this discovery has been to plunge him in the deepest dejection, and his only fear now is that his life may be spared.
“ ‘I merit death for my folly, Adelardi,’ said he: ‘you were right in warning me there would be no consolation in such a reflection at the extremity I am now in. But I shall submit to my fate without weakness, as you do me the honor to believe, I hope. I do not wish, however, to appear more courageous than I am, and if, instead of death, I am sentenced to drag out the life of a criminal in Siberia, I do not know what my despair might lead me to do.’
“As much precaution therefore must be taken in informing him of the mitigation of his punishment, as in announcing to others the severity of theirs. Before that time, I hope to obtain entrance again.
“Meanwhile I have learned with as much admiration as surprise that several who are doomed to the same punishment as he are to have an unexpected and unparalleled consolation. Their wives—their admirable and heroic wives—have begged to be allowed to share their fate, and at this very moment several ladies whom you know, young, beautiful, and accomplished, are preparing to follow their husbands to Siberia by inuring themselves to the rigor of the season. These unfortunate men, degraded from the nobility, deprived of their wealth, and stripped of everything in the world, cannot be deprived of the affection of these self‐sacrificing creatures whose noble devotedness nothing daunts. I confess this amazes and confuses me, for I never before realized, or even suspected, how much heroism and generosity there is in the heart of a woman!”—
Fleurange’s own heart throbbed so violently she was unable to continue the letter. With overflowing eyes she was still dwelling on the page she had just finished—reading it over and over—when she was told the princess was awake, and wished to know if there was a letter for her. For some days her mind had been so full of terrible anticipations about the final result as sometimes to produce fits of delirium. When, therefore, the contents of this letter were communicated to her, she felt an unexpected—an unhoped‐ for relief. His life—George’s life!—would be spared! There was yet time for her to effect something. She began to hope everything from the future, and became calmer than she had been for a long time. She was even to get up in the evening. She conversed, she spoke eagerly of her plans, her hopes, all she would do to soften her son’s exile, and the efforts she would make to abridge it; but what was extraordinary, Fleurange seemed absent‐minded and made scarcely any reply.
About nine o’clock Julian or Clement always came to accompany her back to Rosenheim—a half‐hour’s walk from the princess’ house, which was at the other end of the city. On this occasion, when she was sent for, she was so absorbed in her own thoughts that she did not notice which of the two was with her. It was starlight, but very cold, and her hair was blown about by the wind from beneath her little velvet hat.
“Draw your hood up, Gabrielle; it has not been so cold this winter.”
It was Clement’s voice which suddenly roused her from her reverie.
“Is it you, Clement?—Excuse me, I did not know whether I was with you or Julian.”
He gently attempted to raise her hood.
“No, no!” she said earnestly. “Let me breathe the air. Though it is scarcely more than two years since I saw snow for the first time in my life, I am not afraid of the cold. I could if necessary endure far more severe weather than this.—There!” And she took off her hat and walked some steps with her head completely exposed to the frosty night air. “You know,” she continued, with an animation that singularly contrasted with her previous silence—“you know, during the Russian campaign, those who endured the cold best were the Neapolitan soldiers. Well, like them, I have brought a supply of sunshine from the South which much harder frosts than this could not exhaust!”
Nevertheless, at Clement’s renewed entreaties, she laughingly put on her hat, and they walked quickly along, leaving scarcely a trace of their steps on the hard snow, deep as it was.
Her liveliness that evening was strange! Clement noticed it without comprehending the cause. Her cheerful tone and charming smile, instead of delighting him as usual, now made him inexpressibly uneasy, and sadder than ever!
XLIV.
As is often the case with people of violent and impressionable natures, the Princess Catherine seldom saw things long in the same light. Though her thoughts were sorrowfully fastened on one subject in consequence of the tragical events that so suddenly threw a dark, ominous veil over a life hitherto so smiling, she found means of giving a thousand different shades to her misfortune, and it was not always easy to follow her in the fitful turns of her grief. What consoled her one day was a source of irritation the next: what she affirmed in the morning, she vehemently denied in the evening. Sometimes she expressed her fears on purpose that they might be opposed; at other times, she burst into tears at the slightest contradiction, and, if they endeavored to reassure her, she accused them of cruelty and indifference to her troubles.
In consequence of one of these sudden fluctuations, the day following the arrival of the Marquis Adelardi’s letter which had seemed so consoling, Fleurange, at the hour of her usual visit, found her abandoned to the deepest dejection. Everything had assumed a new aspect, or perhaps it would be more just to say that everything now wore the terrible aspect of truth. And was it really enough that her idolized son was delivered from death? Was not the prospect she now dwelt on almost as fearful to bear? He—George!—her son!—in her eyes the perfect model of manly beauty, elegance, and nobleness of character, clad in the frightful garb of a criminal!—and going alone amid that wretched crowd to that dreary region, where the hardest and most humiliating labor awaited him, without even the consoling voice of a friend to encourage him, to take him by the hand, to love him, and to tell him so!
“Oh!” she exclaimed, in that accent which is as different from every other, as the grief of a mother differs from every other grief—“oh! feeble, ill, and exhausted as I am, why cannot I accompany him? It really seems to me, Gabrielle, if I were allowed, I should find strength, I should have the courage to go. I would start, I would go and share his wretched existence, I would participate in all the severities of so frightful a life, and by dint of affection I would make it endurable for him!”
This energetic cry of disinterested affection—its evident sincerity—was so rare a thing with the princess that it was the more affecting. Pale, silent, and motionless before her, Fleurange listened with an emotion that prevented her uttering the words that hung on her trembling lips. The poor princess was sobbing aloud, with both hands to her face, apparently exhausted by her own vehemence, when Fleurange, suddenly kneeling beside her, said in a low tone:
“Do you remember, princess, the promise you exacted from your son, one evening?”
The princess raised her head with surprise and a shade of resentment: “What do you mean? Do you wish to reproach me at such a time? The moment is well chosen, but such a thing from you, Gabrielle, surprises me!”
“Reproach you!” cried Fleurange. “No, I did not think of such a thing. It was a request, a petition, or, rather, it was a question I wished to ask you.”
“A question!” The princess looked at Fleurange. She was struck by the expression of her countenance, and interest, mingled with surprise, roused her from her dejection. What request was she going to make in so extraordinary a manner? And why did she look so determined, and speak in so supplicating a tone?
“Go on, speak, ask whatever you wish, Gabrielle.”
“Well, first let me tell you this: The eve of my departure from Florence, while descending from San Miniato with him—with Count George, he asked if I would be his wife, adding he was sure of obtaining your consent.”
“Why recall all these remembrances, Gabrielle? I thought you generous, but you are without mercy!”
Fleurange went on as if she did not hear: “I replied that I would never listen to him, unless, by some unforeseen circumstance impossible to conceive, his mother—you, princess—would gladly consent to receive me as a daughter.” She stopped a moment, as if too agitated to continue.
“What are you aiming at?” said the princess.
“I beg you to listen to me, princess. Here is my question: When this terrible sentence is pronounced, when Count George de Walden is degraded from his rank, deprived of his wealth, and even of his name (you shudder, alas! and I also at the thought)—but to return—when that day comes, if he asks the consent he promised you to wait for, will you grant it?”
The princess looked at her with astonishment, without appearing to comprehend her.
“Will you allow me to tell him you have consented? Will you on that day tell me you are willing I should become your daughter?”
The princess began to catch at her meaning, but she was too stupefied to reply.
“Ah! say the word, princess,” continued Fleurange, her face expressing both angelic tenderness and a more than feminine courage, “say it, and I will start. I will be at St. Petersburg before his sentence is pronounced, and when he comes out of his dungeon I will be there, and before he departs for the place of his exile a tie shall unite us that will permit me to accompany him and share all its severity!”—She continued in faltering tones: “And if ever the tenderness of a mother, the care of a sister, or the love of a wife, were able to alleviate misfortune, my heart shall have the combined power of these various affections.”
We are aware that, when certain chords were touched in the princess’ heart, they vibrated strongly, and made her for a moment forget herself. But never, under any circumstances of her life, had she felt an emotion equal to that now caused by Fleurange’s words and accents. She looked at her a moment in silence while great tears rolled down her cheeks, then, opening her arms and pressing the young girl passionately to her heart, she covered her forehead and eyes with kisses, repeating at intervals with a voice broken by sobs: “Yes, yes, Gabrielle, be my daughter: I consent with joy—with gratitude. I give you now my consent and a mother’s blessing!”—
To Be Continued.