"What do you mean?"

"I?—nothing."

"Why do you say that?"

"What?"

"You said—Bluebeard."

"Hey?"

"Ay!—what the devil did you mean by that?"

"Upon my soul, I said no such thing," said Blassemare, with a hollow, satirical laugh.

Monsieur Le Prun glanced over his shoulder once or twice, and then hummed to himself for a time.

"Seriously," he repeated, "did you not call me by that name?"

"I!—no; I always call things by their name, and yours is gray."

"Hem!—what is he driving in this shadow for? Tell him to keep in the moonlight—one would think he wanted to break our necks."

Monsieur Le Prun, it was evident, had become fidgety and fanciful.

A few minutes' rapid driving brought the carriage to the hall-door of the chateau, and its wealthy, but, perhaps, after all, not very much to be envied, master conducted his familiar imp, Blassemare, into a saloon, where supper awaited them.

"I don't myself understand these things, Blassemare, but you will be my stage-manager, and get up the spectacle in the best style."

"Why, yes. I don't see why I should not lend a hand, that is to say, if nothing happens to call me away," said Blassemare, who delighted in such affairs, but liked a little importance also.

"How soon is it to take place?"

"She said in about three weeks."

"Ha! very good."

And the Count de Blassemare was instantaneously translated, in spirit, among feu d'artifice, water-works, arches, colored lamps, bands, and all the other splendors and delectations of an elaborate fete.

"I remember," said Le Prun, abruptly dispelling these happy and gorgeous visions with his harsh tones, "when I was at school, reading about Socrates and those invisible demons that were always hovering at his ears; it was devilish odd, Blassemare. But to be sure those were good-natured devils; ay, that is true, and meant him no harm."

"By my faith, I forget all about it; but what the devil connection have these demons, blue, black, or red, with your fete?"

"I sometimes think, Blassemare, you are a worse fellow than I am, for you have no qualms of conscience."

"No qualms of stomach, no fumes of indigestion; as for conscience, it is an infirmity of which we both stand equally acquitted."

"I did not speak of it in a good sense," said Le Prun, gloomily; "it may be remorse or superstition, but I fancy the man who has none of it is already dead, and under his coffin-lid, so far as his spiritual chances are concerned."

"Faith, it is a treat, Le Prun, to hear you talk religion. When do you mean to take orders? I should so like to see you, my buck, in a cassock and cowl begging meal, and telling your beads, and calling yourself brother Ambrose."

"I have not good enough in me for that," he replied, in a tone which might be earnest, or might be a sneer; "besides, I dare say that the grand melange of rapture and diablerie they call religion is altogether true; but par bleu! my good fellow, there is something more than this life—agencies, subtler and more powerful mayhap than those our senses are commonly cognizant of. I say I have had experience of this truth, and of them. You laugh! and I suppose will laugh on, until that irresistible old gentleman-usher, DEATH, presents you to other realities face to face."

"Well, so be it. If they have faces, I suppose they have mouths, and can laugh, and chat, and so, egad I'll make the best of them; it is one comfort, we shall all understand religion then, and need not plague our heads about it any further. But, in the mean time, suppose we have a game of piquet."

"Agreed! call for cards, and, by the time you have got them, I will return."

Le Prun took a candle, and opening a door which led through a passage to a back stair communicating with Lucille's apartments, he directed his steps thither for the purpose of announcing his arrival, and ascertaining at the same time the state of his wife's temper.

He tapped at the door, and, having received permission to enter, did so to the manifest surprise of the occupants of the chamber, who had expected to see one of the servants.

Julie, who was in the very middle of a story about the Marquis de Secqville, her intended husband, (to which Lucille was listening, as she leaned pensively back in her rich fauteuil, with downcast eyes,) suspended her narrative.

"Well, sir?"

"Well, madame?"

Such was the curt and menacing greeting exchanged between the fermier-general and his wife.

"You appear dissatisfied," he said, after an interval, and having taken a chair.

"I am so."

"This is tiresome, ma femme."

"Yes, insupportably; this, and every thing else that passes here."

"It appears to me, you are somewhat hard to please."

"Quite the reverse. I ask but to mix in human society."

"You have society enough, madame."

"I have absolutely none, sir."

"I can't say what society you enjoyed in the Parc de Charrebourg, madame," he began, in an obvious vein of sarcasm. And as he did so, he thought he observed her eyes averted, and her color brighten for a moment. He did not suffer this observation to interrupt him, but he laid it up in the charnel of his evil remembrances, and continued: "I don't know, I say, what society you there enjoyed. It may have been very considerable, or it may have been very limited: it was possibly very dull, or possibly very delightful, madame. But if you had any society there whatever, it was private, secret; it was neither seen nor suspected, madame, and, therefore, you must excuse me if I can't see what sacrifice, in point of society, you have made in exchanging your cottage in the Parc de Charrebourg for a residence in the Chateau des Anges."

"Sir, I have made sacrifices—I have lost my liberty, and gained you."

"I see, my pretty wife, it will be necessary that you and I should understand one another," he said, tranquilly, but with a gloom upon his countenance that momentarily grew darker and darker.

"That is precisely what I desire," replied his undaunted helpmate.

"Leave us, Julie," said the fermier-general, with a forced calmness.

Julie threw an imploring glance at Lucille as she left the room, for she held her uncle in secret dread. As she glided through the door her last look revealed them seated at the little table; he—ugly: black, and venomous; she—beautiful, and glittering in gay colors. It was like a summer fly basking unconsciously within the pounce of a brown and bloated spider.

"Depend upon it, madame, this will never do," he began.

"Never, sir," she repeated emphatically.

"Be silent, and listen as becomes you," he almost shouted, with a sudden and incontrollable explosion of rage, while the blood mounted to his discolored visage. "Don't fancy, madame, that I am doting, or that you can manage me with your saucy coquetry or sulky insolence. I have a will of my own, madame, under which, by Heaven, I'll force yours to bend, were it fifty times as stubborn as ever woman's was yet. You shall obey—you shall submit. If you will not practise your duty cheerfully, you shall learn it in privation and tears; but one way or another, I'll bring you to act, and to speak, and to think as I please, or I'm not your husband."

"Well, sir, try it: and in the mean time, I expect——"

"What do you expect?" he thundered.

"I expect to receive a counterpart of this," she said, with deliberate emphasis, holding the magic vial steadily before his eyes.

For a second or two, the talisman appeared powerless, but only for so long. On a sudden his gaze contracted—he became fascinated, petrified—his face darkened, as if a tide of molten lead were projected through every vessel—and a heavy dew of agony stood in beads upon his puckered forehead. With all this horror was mingled a fury, if possible, more frightful still; every fibre of his face was quivering; the hand that was clenched and drawn back, as if it held a weapon to be hurled into her heart, was quivering too; his mouth seemed gasping in vain for words or voice; he resembled the malignant and tortured victim of a satanic possession; and this frightful dumb apparition was imperceptibly drawing nearer and nearer to her.

A sudden revulsion broke the horrid spell of which he was the slave; like one awaking from a nightmare, conscience-stricken, he uttered a trembling groan of agony, and with one hand upon his breast, the other clutched upon his forehead, he hurried, speechless, like a despairing, detected criminal, from the room.

IX.—THE UNTOLD SECRET.

Julie, who had heard high words as she traversed the apartments which lay en suite, paused in the lobby at the stair-head—a sort of oeil de boeuf, to which several corridors converged, and with a lofty lantern-dome above, from which swung a cluster of rose-colored lamps.

Here she sat down upon a sofa, ill at ease on account of the scene which was then going on so near her; and, in the midst of her reverie, raising her eyes suddenly, she saw Monsieur Le Prun, the thick carpets rendering his tread perfectly noiseless, gliding by her with a countenance guilty and terrible beyond any thing that fancy had ever seen.

Without appearing to see her, like a spectre from the grave he came, passed, and vanished, leaving her frozen with horror, as if she had beheld a phantom from the dead and damned.

With steps winged with hideous alarm she sped through the intervening chambers to that in which she had left Lucille.

She was standing with an ashy smile of triumph on her face, and in her hand was still mechanically grasped the queer little vial with its four spires of gold.

Monsieur Le Prun had recovered his self-possession to a certain extent by the time he reached the apartment where he had left Blassemare. But that observant gentleman did not fail to perceive, at a glance, that something had occurred to agitate his patron profoundly.

"Egad," he thought, "I should not be surprised if the girl were taken at disadvantage by his abrupt visit, and that the venerable Adonis saw something to justify his jealousy. A husband has no right to surprise his wife. Le Prun," he continued carelessly aloud, "I wonder why Nature, who has been so bounteous to the sex, has not furnished husbands, like certain snakes, with rattles to their tails, to give involuntary warning of their approach."

Le Prun poured out a glass of cold water and drank it. Blassemare observed, as he did so, that his hand trembled violently. The fermier-general was silent, and his flippant Mercury did not care just then to hazard any experiment upon his temper.

"Blassemare!" he exclaimed, abruptly arresting his glass, and eyeing his companion with a sort of brutal rage, "I ought to run you through the body, sir, where you stand, for your accursed perfidy."

"What! me?—by my soul, sir, I don't understand you," he replied, at once offended and amazed. "Why the devil should you murder me?"

"You have broken your word with me!"

"In what respect?"

"Exactly where it was most vitally needful to keep it, sir."

"Deuce take me if I know what you mean."

"You do—you do—a thousand curses! You must know it."

"But hang me if I do."

"You have suffered that calumny to reach her ears."

"What calumny?"

"She must have seen her."

"Her!—whom?"

"She must have spoken with her."

"Do say, plainly, what it is all about?"

"About that—that d—— woman; there, is that intelligible? She is at large, sir, in spite of all I've said—in spite of all you undertook, sir; and she has been filling my wife's ears with those hell-born lies that have been whispered to you, sir, and which it was your business to have suppressed and extinguished. By ——, Blassemare, you deserve my curses and my vengeance."

As he concluded, he struck the glass upon the table with a force that shivered it to pieces.

"Monsieur le Prun," said Blassemare, coolly, "I deprecate no man's vengeance, and fear no man's sword; but whatever be the ground of your present convictions, it is utterly fallacious. The person in question has never stirred abroad—you mean the sister of course—since your marriage, except under close and trustworthy attendance; and the other—that you know is out of the question."

"There has been mismanagement somewhere, or else some new device of infernal malice; I say the thing has been misconducted, with the same cursed blundering that has always attended that affair; and I would rather my wife were in her coffin than have seen what I have seen to-night."

"What! in her coffin!" echoed Blassemare, with a sort of fiendish satire.

"Ay, sir, in her coffin!" said Le Prun, with a black defiance which made Blassemare shrug his shoulders and become silent.

The chill and the smell of death seemed to him to have come with these words into the room. But he would not on any account have betrayed his sensations; on the contrary, he pointed gayly to the cards, and looked a smiling interrogatory towards the fermier. But that excellent gentleman was in no mood for picquet. He declined the challenge gloomily and peremptorily.

"Ma foi! you suffer trifles to plague you strangely," said Blassemare, as they parted for the night. "What on earth does it signify after all? Thwart a woman, and she will strive to vex you—there's nothing new in that; why should not Madame Le Prun share the pretty weaknesses of her sex? On the other hand, indulge her, and she will flatter as much as she teased before. You are too sensitive, too fond, and, therefore, exaggerate trifles. Good night."

Monsieur Le Prun withdrew, and Blassemare muttered—

"Remorseless old criminal! I shall keep my eye close upon you, and if I see any sign of the sort——"

He set his teeth together, smiled resolutely and threateningly, and nodded his head twice or thrice in the direction of the door through which the fermier-general had just disappeared.

The violent explosion we have just described was not followed by any very decisive results. The fermier-general and his wife had not been upon very pleasant terms for some time previous to the scene which had so fearfully agitated the millionaire; and, whatever may have been the immediate promptings of his anger, his temper had cooled down sufficiently, before the morning, to enable him to carry the matter off, like a man of the world, with a tolerable grace. Whatever change for the worse had taken place in his feelings towards his wife, he was able to suppress the manifestation of it: but, as we have said, their relations had of late been by no means cordial, and Monsieur Le Prun did not think it necessary to affect any warmer sentiment toward his wife, nor any abatement of the sinister estrangement which had been gradually growing between them.

Meanwhile the preparations for the fete proceeded at the Chateau des Anges upon a scale worthy of the rarity of the occasion and the vastness of the proprietor's fortune.

All these were carried on by Blassemare, who indulged his gallantry by consulting the beautiful young wife of the fermier-general upon every detail of the tasteful and magnificent arrangements as they proceeded.

Monsieur Le Prun had a special object in gratifying the great lady who had insisted upon this sacrifice. Blassemare had, therefore, a carte blanche in the matter. There were to be musicians from Paris, bands of winged instruments among the trees, galleys and singers upon the waters, illuminated marquees and fanciful grottoes, feu d'artifice, and colored lamps of every dye, in unimaginable profusion, theatricals, gaming, feasting, dancing—in a word, every imaginable species of gayety, revelry, and splendor.

As these grand projects began to unfold themselves, Lucille's ill-temper began to abate. Her interest was awakened, and at last she became pleased, astonished, and even delighted.

Now at length she hoped that the long-cherished object of her wishes was about to be supplied, and that she was indeed to emerge from her chrysalis state, and enjoy, among the sweets and gayeties of life, the glittering freedom for which she felt herself so fitted, and had so long sighed in vain; and which, moreover, as the reader may have suspected, she desired also in furtherance of certain secret and cherished aspirations.

Monsieur de Blassemare found his aesthetic and festive confidences most encouragingly received by the handsome and imperious Madame Le Prun. The subject of his consultations delighted her; and knowing well the close relation in which he stood with her husband, she perhaps thought it no such bad policy to secure him, by a little civility, in her interest. She little imagined, perhaps, engrossed as she was with other images, to what aspiring hopes she was thus unconsciously introducing the Sieur de Blassemare. That gentleman was proud of his bonnes fortunes; and the rapid chemistry of his vanity instantaneously transmuted the lightest show of good-humor, in a handsome woman, into the faint but irrepressible evidences of a warmer sentiment of preference.

Perfectly convinced of the reality of the penchant he believed himself to have inspired, you may be sure the lively scoundrel was not a little flattered at his imaginary conquest. He debated, therefore, in his self-complacent reveries, whether he should take prompt advantage of the weakness of his victim, or pique her by the malice of suspense. He chose the latter tactique, and, with a happy self-esteem, reserved the transports of his confession to reward the longings and agitations of a protracted probationary ordeal.

Thus Blassemare was in his glory, superintending the preparations for a fete, which left him nothing in prodigality and magnificence to desire; enjoying, at the same time, the delightful consciousness of having placed, without an effort, the prettiest woman in France at his feet, and the piquant sense, beside, of his little treason against old Le Prun.

Thus matters proceeded; but, strange to say, while the evening for which all these preparations were being made was still more than a week distant, Madame Le Prun, whose impatience of even that brief delay had been unspeakable, on a sudden lost all her interest in the affair. Such, alas! is the volatility, the caprice, of women. The object for sake of which she had led poor Le Prun a dog's life for so long, was now presented to her, and she turned from it with indifference, if not with disgust. This would, indeed, have been very provoking to Le Prun himself, had he been just then upon speaking terms with his wife; but not happening to be so, and being in no mood to talk about her further to his gay familiar, Blassemare, he was wholly ignorant of those feminine fluctuations of interest and of liking which Blassemare himself did not fully comprehend. The change was so abrupt as to excite his surprise. Her apathy, too, was unaccompanied by ill-temper, and was obviously so genuine, that he could hardly believe it affected merely to pique him. We are disposed to think there was a powerful, but mysterious, cause at work in this change.

It was just about this time that one night, Julie, having sat up rather later than usual, and intending to bid Lucille good night, if she were still awake, entered her suite of apartments, and approached her dressing-room door. She heard her rush across the floor, as she did so, and, with a face of terror, she emerged from the door and stood before it, as if to bar ingress to the room.

Julie was disconcerted and agitated by this apparition; and Lucille was evidently, from whatever cause, greatly terrified. The two girls confronted one another with pale and troubled looks. Lucille was white with fear, and, alas! as it seemed to her companion, with the agitation of guilt. Julie looked at her all aghast.

"Good night, Julie, good night," she whispered, hurriedly.

"Good night," answered she; "I fear I have interrupted—I mean, startled you."

"Good night, good night," repeated Lucille.

As Julie retreated across the lobby, she was overtaken by Lucille, who placed her hand upon her shoulder.

"Julie, will you hate me if I tell you all?" she said, in great agitation, as she hurried with her into her apartment.

"Hate you, Lucille! How could I hate my dear friend and companion?"

"Friend, O yes, friend; what a friend I have proved to you!"

"Come, come, you must not let yourself be excited; you know you are my friend, my only friend and confidante, and you know I love you."

Lucille covered her face with her hands and sobbed or shuddered violently. Julie embraced and kissed her tenderly; but, in the midst of these caresses, her unhappy friend threw her arms about her neck, and, looking earnestly in her face for a few seconds, drew her passionately to her heart and kissed her, murmuring as she did so—

"No, no; she never could forgive me."

And, so saying, she mournfully betook herself away, leaving Julie a prey to all manner of vague and perplexing alarms.

Whatever was the cause of Lucille's profound mental agitation, it was an impenetrable mystery to Julie. Blassemare obviously did not know what to make of it; and as the fete drew near without eliciting any corresponding interest on her part, Julie, who had observed with pleasure the delight with which at first she had anticipated the event, was dismayed and astonished at the change. As often as she had endeavored to recall her to the topic so strangely approached, and inexplicably recoiled from, upon the occasion we have just described, Lucille repulsed her curiosity, or at least evaded it with entire and impenetrable secrecy. Finding, therefore, that the subject was obviously distasteful to her, she forbore to return to it, and contented herself with recording the broken conversation of the night in question among the other unexplained mysteries of her life.

"Well, Lucille," she said to her one day, as they were walking upon the terrace together, and interrupting by the remark a long and gloomy silence, "you do not seem to enjoy the prospect of the gay night which my uncle has prepared, now that it approaches, half so much as you did in the distance."

"Enjoy it? no, no."

"But you longed for such an occasion."

"Perhaps, Julie, I had reasons; perhaps it was not all caprice."

"But do you not still enjoy the prospect? surely it has not lost all its charms?"

"I say, Julie, I had reasons—that is, perhaps I had—for wishing it. I have none now."

"Well, but it seems to me it positively depresses you. Surely, if it were merely indifferent, it need not distress you."

"Ah, Julie, Julie, we are strange creatures; we know not ourselves, neither our strength nor our weakness, our good nor our evil, until time and combinations solve the problem, and show us the sad truth."

"It seems to me," said Julie, with a gentle smile, "you take a wondrous moral tone in treating of a ball, my pretty sage; and, notwithstanding all you say, I suspect you like a fete as well as most young women."

"Julie, when I tell you honestly I hate it—that I would gladly be hidden in the roof or the cellar of the loneliest tower in the chateau upon that evening, you will cease to suspect me of so poor a dissimulation. Honestly, then, and sadly, these crowded festivities, I expected but a short time since with so much delight, are now not only indifferent to me, but repulsive. I no longer wish to meet and mix with people; the idea, on the contrary, depresses, nay, even terrifies me."

"Lucille, you are hiding something from me."

"Hiding!—no, nothing—that is, nothing but my own thoughts, the images of my reflections; nothing, dear Julie, that it would not render you unhappy to hear. Why should I throw upon your mind the gloom and shadows of my own?"

"But perhaps your troubles are fantastic and unreal; and, were you to confide in me, I might convince you that they are so."

"Julie, they are real."

"So thinks every body who is haunted by chimeras."

"These are none. Oh, Julie! would I could tell you all. The agony of the relation would be in some sort recompensed by having one human being to tell my thoughts to. But it cannot be; it is quite, quite impossible."

"This impossibility is also one of the imagination."

"No, no, Julie; the effort to repose this confidence would destroy all confidence between us. I have said enough—let us speak of other matters. My innermost grief, be it what it may, I must endure alone. Julie, it is a hard condition; but I must and will—alone."

Here they were interrupted by Blassemare, who gayly joined them, with a prayer that they would resolve a momentous difficulty, by deciding upon the best site for one of his principal batteries of fireworks; and so, with little good-will, they surrendered themselves for a quarter of an hour to the guidance and the light sarcastic conversation of the master of the revels, with whom for the present we shall leave them.

X.—THE FETE.

At length the eventful night arrived—a beautiful, still, star-lit night. You may fancy the splendor of the more than royal festivities. What a magnificent levee of gayety, rank, and beauty! What unexampled illuminations!—what fantastic and inexhaustible ingenuity of pyrotechnics! How the gorgeous suites of salons laughed with the brilliant crowd! How the terraces, arched and lined with soft-colored lamps, re-echoed with gay laughter or murmured flatteries! What an atmosphere it was of rosy hues, of music, and ceaseless hum of human enjoyment! For miles around, the wandering peasants beheld the wide, misty, prismatic circle that overarched the enchanted ground, and heard the silver harmonies and drumming thunders of the orchestras floating over the woods, and filling the void darkness with sounds of unseen festivities. In such a scene all are in good-humor—all wear their best looks. Each finds his appropriate amusement. The elegant gamester discovers his cards and his companions; the garrulous find listeners; the gossip retails, and imbibes, from a hundred sources, all the current scandal; vanity finds incense—beauty adoration; the young make love, or dance, or in groups give their spirits play in pleasantries, and raillery, and peals of animated laughter; their elders listen to the music, or watch the cards, or in a calmer fashion converse; while all, each according to his own peculiar taste, find whatever pleases their palate best. Whatever is rarest, most fantastic—things only dreamed of—the epicurean connoisseur has only to invoke, and, at a touch of the magic wand of Mammon, it is there before him. Wines, too,—what-not, est-est, tokay, and all the rest, flowing from the inexhaustible tap of the same Mephistopheles, with his golden gimlet. All the demons of luxury riot there, and at your nod ransack the earth for a flavor or a flask; and place it before you, almost before your wish is uttered. It is, indeed, the Mahomet's paradise of all true believers in the stomach, and worshippers of Bacchus. Thus in a realized dream all eddies on in a delicious intoxication, and each is at once the recipient of enjoyment and the dispenser of good-humor, imbibing through every sense enchanted fare, reflecting smiles, and radiating hilarity. Each, indeed, becomes, as it were, a single glowing particle in the genial and brilliant mass, and tends to keep alive the general fire, from which he derives and to which returns at once light and geniality. It is admitted that he who has discovered the grand arcanum, and has the philosopher's stone in his waistcoat-pocket, is, so to speak, ex officio, a magician. But M. Le Prun had no need of any such discoveries. He had the gold itself, and was, therefore, a ready-made magician, and as such was worshipped accordingly with an oriental fanaticism.

Monsieur le Prun had, like other favorites of fortune in the latter days of the monarchy, purchased his patent of noblesse. Every body knew that he was a parvenu; and rumor, as she is wont in such cases, had adorned his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was said and believed that he was a foundling—a Gipsy's son, a wandering beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again, maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the Rue de Bauboug; and were even furnished with a number of pleasant anecdotes about his hardships and adroitness, while in this somewhat undignified position. Indeed, the varieties of positions though which good Mother Gossip sent him were such, and so interminable, that a relation of half of them would alone make a library of fiction. But fortune had consecrated this mean and smutty urchin. He stood now worshipped in the awful glory of his millions, pedestalled on his money-bags, gilded from head to heel; and what could the proudest noblesse upon earth do but forget and forgive the rags and hunger of his infancy, and come together, from the east and from the west, to drink of the cup of his enchantments, and cry, "Long live King Solomon in all his glory?"

"She is beautiful as a divinity," exclaimed the gallant old Marquess de Fauteuil, who had just completed an admiring survey of the fair Madame le Prun.

"Pretty—yes; but she has the manners of a petite moine," said the Duchess de la Cominade, an old flame of the marquis, who, in spite of her marriage and her mistakes, conceived her claims upon his devotions unabated.

"And her little gossip, too, Le Prun's niece, is a charming creature—an exquisitely contrived contrast. By my word, this place deserves its name—is it not truly the Chateau des Anges?"

"Who is that young person whom Le Prun is leading towards them? He is the only man I have seen to-night whose dress is perfect; and he looks like a hero of romance."

"That?—eh? Why that is the Marquis de Secqville."

"What! the horrid man who enslaves us all? I have not seen him for years—how very handsome he is!"

"Yes; and I fancy that melancholy air assists him very much in vanquishing the gentle sex. I once had a little vein of that myself."

"So you had," murmured the duchess, with a tender smile of memory, and a little sigh. "But is it not a madness of poor Le Prun to present that terrible man to his handsome young wife?"

"He is to marry the niece—the affair is concluded. Poor little thing! she looks so frightened; see—a little fluttered pigeon of Venus—it becomes her very much."

Meanwhile Le Prun and the marquis were approaching Lucille and Julie, who were seated together close to a window which opened to the floor, and admitted the soft summer air, charged with such sounds and perfumes as might have hovered among the evergreen groves of Calypso's island.

"He is coming," said Julie, "he is coming with my uncle."

"Who?" asked Lucille, looking coldly on the advancing figures.

"My—my fiance, the Marquis de Secqville," whispered Julie, in trembling haste, blushing, and dropping her eyes.

"Oh, then, I must observe him carefully," said Lucille, with an arch smile.

"Do, and tell me honestly what you think of him."

"Ha! little rogue, I see you are not quite so indifferent as you pretend."

"My heart is indifferent—but—but he is very handsome—don't you think so?"

"Hush! here he is."

"I have the happiness, madame, to present Monsieur le Marquis de Secqville, with whom, as you are aware, we are about to have the honor of being nearly allied."

So said Monsieur le Prun, with a smile of conjugal affection, which may, or may not, have been genuine.

"I was not until now aware of the full extent of the honor and the happiness involved in that alliance," said the marquis, with a glance of respectful admiration.

Madame le Prun acknowledged this little speech with a slight bow, and a cold and haughty smile.

"You have been in the south lately?"

"Yes, madame, with my regiment at Avignon."

"So he says," interrupted the fermier-general, with a cunning leer; "but his colonel swears he never saw him there."

"Then either you or your colonel must be wrong," said Madame le Prun, drily.

"No, no, madame; but Monsieur le Prun likes a jest at my expense."

"Not at all," said Le Prun, laughing; "I protest D'Artois, his colonel, vows he has not seen him for six months at least."

"They are in a conspiracy to quiz me."

"Then you were at Avignon?"

"No such thing, I tell you; the fellow was about some mischief—ha! ha! ha!"

"He is resolved to laugh at me."

"Yes, yes, I say he is a mischievous fellow—the most dangerous dog in France; and so shy that, by my word, it requires a shrewd fellow like myself to discover his rogueries."

"And so he deserves not only all my sins, but a great deal more."

"Stay—here is the Visconte de Charrebourg. Visconte, this is the Marquis de Secqville, my future nephew."

The old visconte looked closely and dubiously for a moment in the young man's face. The marquis, on the contrary, seemed to have some little difficulty in suppressing a smile.

"But that I know I have not had the honor of meeting you before, I should——but no doubt it is a family likeness. I knew your father when he was about your age, and a very handsome fellow, by my faith. Is his brother, the Conte de Cresseron, still living?"

The old gentleman drew the marquis away before he had had time to pay his devoirs to Julie, who had shrunk at his approach into the background, and left the little group to themselves.

"What do you think of him?" whispered Julie, resuming her place by Lucille.

"He is pretty well."

"Monsieur le Marquis is a handsome man," said Blassemare, who at that moment joined them; and, addressing Lucille, "You have seen him before?"

"I?—no. He has just been presented to me for the first time."

"And you think him——"

"Rather handsome—indeed, decidedly handsome; but, somehow, his melancholy spoils him. But I forgot, Julie—I ask your pardon, my pretty niece, for criticising your hero. Remember, however, I admit his beauty, though I can't admire him."

There is no truth of which we have been reminded with such unnecessary reiteration, as the pretty obvious fact that every human enjoyment must, sooner or later, come to an end. The fete at the Chateau des Anges had no exemption from this law of nature and necessity. Musicians, cooks, artists, and artisans of all sorts, gradually disappeared. At length the last equipage whirled down the great avenue, and a stillness and void, more mournful from the immediate contrast, supervened.

The windows were closed—the yawning servants betook themselves to their beds, and the angel of sleep waved his downy wings over the old chateau. The genius of Blassemare was of that electric sort which is not easily unexcited. He could no more have slept than he could have transformed himself into one of the stone Tritons of the fountain by which in the moonlight he now stood alone. Blassemare had had a magnificent triumph; so well-contrived an entertainment had never, perhaps, been known before; and, like certain great generals, he felt desirous to visit the field of his victory after the heat of action was over.

Monsieur Le Prun was also wide awake and astir from other causes. No vein of Blassemare's excitement—not even jealousy, nor conscience, nor any mental malady—kept him waking. The cause of his vigilance was, simply, his late supper and an indigestion.

Now it happened that both these worthies were walking unconsciously almost side by side—Le Prun along the summit, and Blassemare along the base, of the beautiful terrace which stretched in front of the windows of the chateau.

There was a little receding court which lay in front of Madame Le Prun's windows, which were furnished with a heavy stone balcony. On the side opposite was a high wall, which divided the pleasure-grounds from the wild, wooded park that lay immediately beyond, and in this was a door with a private key and a spring lock.

Now it happened that both Monsieur Le Prun and the Sieur de Blassemare, as they approached this point, amid the fumes of expiring lamps and the wreck of fireworks, heard certain sounds of an unexpected sort. These were, in fact, human voices, conversing in earnest but suppressed tones—so low, indeed, that were it not for the breathless stillness of the night they would have been unheard.

"Sacre!" muttered Le Prun, looking up like a toothless old panther.

"Ma foi! what's this?" whispered Blassemare, whose jealousy was also alarmed.

The sounds continued—the eavesdroppers quickened their paces. Le Prun was, however, unfortunately a little asthmatic, as sometimes happens to bridegrooms of a certain age, and, spite of all his efforts to hold it in, he could not contain a burst of coughing.

Its effect was magical. There supervened an instantaneous silence, followed by the dropping of a heavy body upon the ground, as it seemed, under Madame Le Prun's windows. The descent was, however, unfortunately made; a dog, evidently hurt, raised a frightful yelping, making the night additionally hideous. Blassemare hurried up the steps, and at the top encountered Le Prun, running and panting, with his sword drawn. There was a sound, as of hastily closing the casement above the balcony—a light gleamed from it for an instant, and was extinguished—and, at the same moment, they beheld the dim figure of a man hurrying across the court, and darting through the opposite door, which shut with a crash behind him.

"Thieves! robbers!" shouted Le Prun, dashing at the door.

"Robbers! thieves!" cried a shrill voice of alarm from Madame Le Prun's casement.

"Horns! antlers!" halloed Blassemare.

"Robbers! robbers!"

"Thieves! thieves!"

The lady screamed, Le Prun bawled, Blassemare laughed.

"He is gone, however," said the latter, as soon as the explosion had a little subsided. "Suppose we get the key, madame. Please throw us yours from the window. I promise to pink the burglar through the body. Quick—quick!"

"Ay, ay," thundered Le Prun, "the key! the key!"

Madame Le Prun was too much excited to get it in an instant. She ran here, and flew there—she screamed and rummaged. Le Prun stormed. A key was at last thrown out, amid prayers and imprecations. How provoking!—it was a wrong one. Another effort—a new burst of execration from Le Prun—another fit of laughter from Blassemare—more screaming and pressing from the window—and all accompanied by the sustained yelping of the injured lap-dog.

"Here it is—this must be it," and another key clangs and jingles on the ground.

"Yes, this time it is the right key." The door flies open—Le Prun rushes puffing among the bushes. Blassemare sees something drop glittering to the ground as the door opens—a button and a little rag of velvet; he says nothing, but pockets it, and joins the moonlight chase.

It is all in vain. Le Prun, perspiring and purple, his passion as swollen as his veins, knowing not what to think, but fearing every thing, staggered back, silent and exhausted; Blassemare also silent—no longer laughing—abstracted, walks with knit brows, and compressed lips, beside him.

"Of course," said Blassemare, "you have the fullest reliance upon the honor of your wife?"

Monsieur Le Prun growled an inarticulate curse or two, and Blassemare whistled a minuet.

"Come, my dear Le Prun," he resumed, "let us be frank; you are uneasy."

"About what?"

"Madame Le Prun."

"She is not injured?"

"No, but——"

"Ah, she's in league with the thieves, may be?" said Le Prun, with an agitated sneer.

"Precisely so," answered Blassemare, with a cold laugh.

"I know what you think, and I know what I think," replied Le Prun, with suppressed fury.

His suspicions were all awake; he was bursting with rage, and looked truly infernal.

"On the faith of a gentleman," said Blassemare, with a changed tone, "I cannot be said to think any thing about the affair. I have my doubts, but that is all. We men are naturally suspicious; but, after all, there are such things as thieves and housebreakers."

Le Prun said nothing, but looked black and icy as the north wind.

"At all events," said Blassemare, "we men of the world know how to deal with affairs of this sort; so long as any uncertainty exists, put ostensibly the best possible construction upon it. Thus much is due to one's dignity in the eyes of the public; and in private we may prosecute inquiries unsuspected, and with the greater likelihood of success."

"I know the world as well as you, Blassemare. I'm sick of your tone of superiority and advice. I know when to respect and when to defy the world. A man can no more make a fortune without tact than he can lose one without folly."

"Well, well," said Blassemare, who was used to an occasional rebuff, and regarded a gruff word from his principal no more than he did the buzz of a beetle, "I know all that very well; but you, robust fellows, with millions at your back, are less likely to respect those subtle and delicate influences which sometimes, notwithstanding, carry mischief with them, than we poor, sensitive valetudinarians, without a guinea in our pockets; and if you will permit me, I will, when I return to-day, sift the matter for you. I understand woman; it is an art in itself, though not, perhaps, a very high one. A careless conversation with Madame Le Prun will let me further into the mystery, than a year spent in accumulating circumstantial evidence. You may rely on the result."

The fermier-general uttered something between a growl and a grunt, which might or might not convey assent; and, waving Blassemare towards the house, walked along the terrace alone; and sat himself down upon the steps at the further end.

The mental torpor which supervenes under sudden disasters was not, in the case of the fermier-general, without its dreamy groups of ugly images in prospect. As the light broke, and the darkness began to melt eastward into soft crimson mists and streaks of amber, Monsieur Le Prun rose stiffly from his hard, cold seat, and, with the slow step of a man irresolute and oppressed with profound wrath and mortification, began to return homeward.

"Robbers!—thieves!" he muttered bitterly. "How glibly the traitress echoed the cry! The rascal Blassemare gave the true alarm—she did not echo that. D—— her, and d——him! Robbers, indeed! Thieves!—very like. I know what they came a thieving for. Upon her balcony—talking in murmurs—the candle extinguished in such a devil of a hurry—the ready cry of 'Thieves'—the spring door open for his flight—and the long delay to find the key. Bah! what proofs are wanting?"

He heard just at this point a cracked voice singing a gay love verse from an open window. He knew the voice; every association connected with the performance and the performer jarred upon his nerves.

It was indeed the Visconte de Charrebourg, some of whose early gayety had returned with his good fortune. He had, such was the pride of his rich son-in-law, a little household of his own, and kept his state and his own exorbitantly early hours in a suite of rooms assigned him, through one of whose windows, arrayed in a velvet cap and gown of brocade, he was rivalling the lark and greeting the rising sun, and, while sipping his chocolate in the intervals, moved, with the nimble irregularity of idle and active-minded age, about his apartment.

"Well, sir, a pleasant affair this!" cried a harsh voice, interrupting his cheery occupation; and on looking round he saw the purple and sinister face of the fermier-general looming through the window.

"What affair?" asked the visconte, in unfeigned astonishment, for he had been quite certain that his worthy son-in-law was quietly in his bed.

"Your daughter's conduct."

"What of her?"

"Just this—she is a ——!" and, with the term of outrage, Le Prun uttered a forced laugh of fury.

"I cannot have heard you aright: be kind enough to repeat that."

There was a certain air of pomp and menace in this little speech, which drove Le Prun beyond all patience. He repeated the imputation in language still grosser. This was an insult which the ancient blood of the Charrebourgs could not tolerate, and the visconte taunted him with the honor which one of his house had done him in mingling their pure blood with that of a "roturier." Then came the obvious retort, "beggar," and even "trickster," retaliated by a torrent of scarcely articulate scorn and execration, and an appeal to the sword, which, with brutal contempt, (while at the same time, nevertheless, he recoiled instinctively a foot or two from the window,) the wealthy plebeian retorted by threatening to arrest him for the sums he had advanced. Le Prun had the best of it; he left the outraged visconte quivering and shrieking like an old woman in a frenzy. It was some comfort to have wrapt another in the hell-fire that tormented himself.



[From the Examiner.]

MAZZINI ON ITALY.

We may—we do differ from Mazzini in many of his political views, and in our estimate of what may be the wisest policy for Italian liberals in existing circumstances. We think that he seeks to impart to politics a mathematical precision of which they are not susceptible, and does not sufficiently regard a principle the correctness of which has been admitted by himself, that the fact of a thing being true in principle cannot give the right of suddenly enthroning it in practice. But his errors are all on the large and generous side. He is too apt to attribute to society the precise convictions and spirit he feels within himself, and so to expect impossibilities, by impossible means. But there is a power of reasoning in Mazzini, an unsullied moral purity, a chivalrous veracity and frankness, an utter abnegation of self, and a courage that has stood the severest trials, which command not only respect but veneration. He belongs to the martyr age of Italian liberalism, and possesses himself the highest qualities of the martyr.

His declared object in publishing the small volume[27] before us is to correct public opinion in England as to the Italian movement in which he took part. But it is a statement of principles rather than a narrative of details. It is always dignified in tone, often singularly eloquent, and substantially it contains little which would be likely to draw forth an expression of willing disagreement from any well-educated, high-minded, liberal Englishman.

Mr. Mazzini thus declares his reasons

WHY THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD BE REPUBLICAN.

The Italian tradition is eminently republican. In England, the aristocratic element has a powerful influence, because it has a history: well or ill, it has organized society: it has created a power, snatched from royalty, by conquering guarantees for the rights of the subject; it has founded in part the wealth and the influence of England abroad. The monarchical element has still great influence over the tendencies of France, because it also claims an important page in the national history; it has produced a Charlemagne, a Louis XI., a Napoleon; it has contributed to found the unity of France; it has shared with the communes the risks and the honors of the struggle against feudalism; it has surrounded the national banner with a halo of military glory. What is the history of the monarchy and of the aristocracy of Italy? What prominent part have they played in the national development? What vital element have they supplied to Italian strength, or to the unification of the future existence of Italy? The history of our royalty in fact commences with the dominion of Charles V., with the downfall of our liberties; it is identified with servitude and dismemberment; it is written on a foreign page, in the cabinets of France, of Austria, and of Spain. Nearly all of them the issue of foreign families, viceroys of one or other of the great powers, our kings do not offer the example of a single individual redeeming by brilliant personal qualities the vice of subalternity, to which his position condemned him; not a single one who has ever evinced any grand national aspiration. Around them in the obscurity of their courts, gather idle or retrograde courtiers, men who call themselves noble, but who have never been able to constitute an aristocracy. An aristocracy is a compact independent body, representing in itself an idea, and from one extremity of the country to another, governed, more or less, by one and the same inspiration: our nobles have lived upon the crumbs of royal favor, and if on some rare occasions they have ventured to place themselves in opposition to the monarch, it has not been in the cause of the nation, but of the foreigner, or of clerical absolutism. The nobility can never be regarded as an historical element: it has furnished some fortunate Condottieri, powerful even to tyranny, in some isolated town; it has knelt at the feet of the foreign emperors who have passed the Alps or crossed the sea. The original stock being nearly everywhere extinct, the races have become degenerated amidst corruption and ignorance. The descendants of our noble families at Genoa, at Naples, at Venice, and at Rome, are, for the most part specimens of absolute intellectual nullity. Almost every thing that has worked its difficult way in art, in literature, or in political activity, is plebeian.

In Italy the initiative of progress has always belonged to the people, to the democratic element. It is through her communes that she has acquired all she has ever had of liberty: through her workmen in wool or silk, through her merchants of Genoa, Florence, Venice, and Pisa, that she has acquired her wealth; through her artists, plebeian and republican, from Giotto to Michael Angelo, that she has acquired her renown; through her navigators,—plebeian,—that she has given a world to humanity; through her Popes—sons of the people even they—that until the twelfth century she aided in the emancipation of the weak, and sent forth a word of unity to humanity. All her memories of insurrection against the foreigner are memories of the people: all that has made the greatness of our towns, dates almost always from a republican epoch: the educational book, the only book read by the inhabitant of the Alps or the Transteverin who can read, is an abridgment of the history of the Ancient Roman Republic. This is the reason why the same men who have so long been accused of coldness, and who had in fact witnessed with indifference the aristocratic and royal revolutions of 1820 and 1821, arose with enthusiasm and with a true power of self-sacrifice at the cry of St. Mark and the Republic, God and the People! These words contained for them a guarantee. They awoke in them, even unconsciously to themselves, the all-powerful echo of a living past, a confused recollection of glory, of strength, of conscience, and of dignity.

With such elements how would it be possible to found a monarchy surrounded with an aristocracy? How can one speak of a balance of powers, where there are but two forces—foreign absolutism, and the people? How could one organize a constitutional monarchy where the aristocracy is without a past, and where royalty inspires neither affection nor respect?

It will surprise many candid readers to find Mr. Mazzini repeatedly declaring in this book that the republican, or, as he calls it, the national party, are not responsible for the disunion, which, at a time when the whole nation was armed against the foreigners and might have driven them from the country, turned its forces against its own citizens. He gives proof that his own advice was for union till the day of victory, and not till then for discussion as to what party should reap its fruits. Whether to monarch, or to people, he affirms that he was ready to submit; he asserts repeatedly that it was only after having been betrayed that the national party set up for themselves; and he expresses his belief that even now, when a union of princes has been seen to be impossible, the leadership of a single prince would be accepted by all, supposing such a fitting leader could be found. He thus describes

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THEIR DETRACTORS.

They have said, and they say again, without taking advantage of the favorable position in which events have placed them:—Let the nation arise; let her make herself mistress of her own territory; then, the victory once gained, let her freely decide who shall reap the fruits. Monarch or People, we will submit ourselves to the power she herself shall organize. Is it possible that so moderate and rational a proposition should be the object of such false interpretations, in a country which reveres the idea of right and of self-government? Is it possible that its leaders should be the object of so much calumny?

It is time that these calumnies should cease. It matters little to us, who act as our conscience dictates, without troubling ourselves as to the personal result; and to whom faith and exile have given the habit of looking higher than the praise or blame of this earth. But it should be recognized as most important by all who believe that political questions agitated by whole nations, are questions eminently religious. For religion, to all those who see more in it than the mere materialism of forms and formulae, is not only a thought of heaven, but the impulse which seeks to apply that thought, as far as possible to government on earth, our rule of action for the good of all, and for the moral development of humanity. Politics then are like religion—sacred; and all good men are bound to see them morally respected. Every question has a right to serious, calm, and honest discussion. Calumny should be the weapon of those only who have to defend not ideas, but crimes.

It is immoral to say to men who have preached clemency throughout the whole of their political career, who have initiated their rule by the abolition of capital punishment, who, when in power, never signed a single sentence of exile against those who had persecuted them, nor even against the known enemies of their principle.—"You are the sanguinary organizers of terror, men of vengeance and of cruelty." It is immoral to ascribe to them views which they never had, and to choose to forget that they have, through the medium of the press here and elsewhere, attracted and refuted those communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and to say to them, "You are communists, you desire to abolish property." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of personal interest and of pillage, against men who have serenely endured the sufferings of poverty, and whose life, accessible to all, has never betrayed either cupidity or the desire of luxury. It is immoral continually to proclaim, as the act of a whole party, the death of a statesman killed by an unknown hand, under the influence of the irritation produced by his own acts and by the attacks of another political party, many months before the Republican party recommenced its activity.

Mr. Mazzini charges no direct treachery against Carlo Alberto. He declares him to have been himself the victim of the weakness which caused others as well as himself so much loss and misery. For the impossible political project of a Kingdom of the North he was content to surrender the grand reality of a United People which fate had placed within his hands.

CHARLES ALBERT.

Genius, love, and faith were wanting in Charles Albert. Of the first, which reveals itself by a life entirely, logically, and resolutely devoted to a great idea, the career of Charles Albert does not offer the least trace; the second was stifled in him by the continual mistrust of men and things, which was awakened by the remembrance of an unhappy past; the last was denied him by his uncertain character, wavering always between good and evil, between to do and not to do, between daring and not daring. In his youth, a thought, not of virtue, but of Italian ambition—the ambition however which may be profitable to nations—had passed through his soul like lightning; but he recoiled in affright, and the remembrance of this one brilliant moment of his youth presented itself hourly to him, and tortured him like the incessant throbbing of an old wound, instead of acting upon him as an excitement to a new life. Between the risk of losing, if he failed, the crown of his little kingdom, and the fear of the liberty which the people, after having fought for him, would claim for themselves, he went hesitating on, with this spectre before his eyes, stumbling at every step, without energy to confront these dangers, without the will or power to comprehend that to become King of Italy he must first of all forget that he was King of Piedmont. Despotic from rooted instinct, liberal from self-love, and from a presentiment of the future, he submitted alternately to the government of Jesuits, and to that of men of progress. A fatal disunion between thought and action, between the conception and the faculty of execution, showed itself in every act. Most of those who endeavored to place him at the head of the enterprise, were forced to agree to this view of his character. Some of those intimate with him went so far as to whisper that he was threatened with lunacy. He was the Hamlet of Monarchy.

A characteristic passage of the volume has relation to

LAMARTINE'S VIEWS OF ITALIAN INDEPENDENCE.

The war between the two principles was general in Europe—the enthusiasm excited by the movements in Italy, especially the Lombard insurrection and the prodigies of the five days, was immense; and Italy could, had she willed it and known how, have drawn thence sufficient force to counterbalance all the strength of hostile reaction. But to do this, it was necessary, whatever the mean policy of the Moderates might fear, to give to the movement a character so audaciously national as to alarm our enemies, and to offer the most powerful element of support to our friends. Both felt the time was ripe, and began to believe that Italy would be but Italy, and not the Kingdom of the North. I remember the consoling words Lamartine addressed to me, at his house, on the eve of my departure for Italy, and in presence, amongst others, of Alfred de Vigny, and of the same Forbin Janson whom I was afterwards to meet preaching the papal restoration, and getting up various petty conspiracies and ridiculous intrigues at Rome.

"The hour has struck for you," said the minister, "and I am so firmly convinced of it, that the first words with which I have charged Monsieur d'Harcourt for the Pope are these; Holy Father, you know that you ought to be the President of the Italian Republic." But Monsieur d'Harcourt had quite other things to say to the Pope, on the part of that faction which involved Lamartine in its snares whilst he imagined that he could control it. For myself I attached no importance, except as a symptom, to these words of Lamartine, a man of impulse and of noble instincts, but unstable in belief, without energy for a fixed purpose, and without real knowledge of men and things. He was indeed the echo of a tendency all-powerful, in those moments of excitement, upon the French mind; and every re-awakening nationality, every political programme, which, if not absolutely republican, was like that, at least, of the Italian constituent, would have compelled the support of the most hesitating government in France.

From great things great things are born. The dwarfish conception of the Moderates froze up all souls, and imposed an utter change of politics upon France. The ITALIAN PEOPLE was an ally more than sufficiently powerful to preserve the Republic from all danger of a foreign war; a Kingdom of the North, in the hands of princes little to be relied upon, and hostile, by long tradition, to the Republicans of France, did but add a dangerous element to the league of kings. The French nation became silent, and left its government free to exist without any foreign policy, and to leave the destinies of the republic to the impenetrable future.

The incidents described in most detail are those immediately preceding and following the fatal surrender of Milan; and it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast of the royal and the republican party, assuming the statement to be in all respects correct. But passing this ignominious period, there ought to be small difference of opinion in a free and educated country as to where the right lay in the subsequent Roman struggle. What sensible or honest Protestant would not sympathize with the indignant eloquence of this earnest Italian protesting against the flimsy oratory of a Jesuit Frenchman?

MAZZINI TO MONTALEMBERT.

"You base your argument upon the void; you discuss that which was, not that which is. The Papacy is dead, choked in blood and mire; dead, because it has betrayed its own mission of protection to the weak against the oppressor; dead, because for three centuries and a half it has prostituted itself with princes; dead, because in the name of egotism and before the palaces of all the corrupt, hypocritical, and skeptical governments, it has for the second time crucified Christ; dead, because it has uttered words of faith which it did not itself believe; dead, because it has denied human liberty and the dignity of our immortal souls; dead, because it has condemned science in Galileo, philosophy in Giordano Bruno, religious aspiration in John Huss and Jerome of Prague, political life by an anathema against the rights of the people, civil life by Jesuitism, the terrors of the inquisition, and the example of corruption, the life of the family by confession converted into a system of espionage, and by division introduced between father and son, brother and brother, husband and wife; dead, for the princes, by the treaty of Westphalia; dead, for the peoples, with Gregory XI., in 1378, and with the commencement of the schism; dead, for Italy, since 1530, when Clement VII. and Charles V., the Pope and the Emperor, signed an infamous compact, and extinguished, at Florence, the dying liberties of Italy, as to-day you have attempted to extinguish her rising liberties in Rome; dead, because the people has risen, because Pius IX. has fled, because the multitude curses him, because those very men who for fifteen years have made war upon the priests, in the name of Voltaire, now hypocritically defend them, because you and yours defend them, with intolerance and by force of arms, and declare that the Papacy and liberty cannot live side by side? You ask Victor Hugo to point out to you an idea which has been worshipped for eighteen centuries. It is that idea which you have declared irreconcilable with the Papacy, and which was breathed into humanity by God; the idea which has withdrawn from Catholicism the half of the Christian world, the idea which has snatched from you Lammennais and the flower of the intellects of Europe, the idea of Christ, that pure, holy, and sacred liberty which you invoked for Poland some years back, which Italy invokes for herself to-day, under the form, and with the guarantee of nationality, and which you cannot pretend to be good for one country and bad for another, unless you believe it a part of religion to create a pariah people in the bosom of humanity."

Very admirably, too, and nobly written, are Mr. Mazzini's later remarks on the republican and anti-papal administration of Rome, and the coldness it met with in England and elsewhere. We must admit that it is hard for a people to struggle, suffer, and bleed alone, yet hold themselves in this temperate attitude. It is not generous, as Mr. Mazzini too truly complains, in a nation having the enjoyment and the consciousness of liberty herself, to wait until the hour of victory has sounded for another nation before she stretches out a sister's hand towards her.

WHAT THE REPUBLICANS DID AND ENGLAND MIGHT HAVE DONE.

I affirm that with the exception of Ancona, where the triumvirate were obliged energetically to repress certain criminal acts of political vengeance, the republican cause was never sullied by the slightest excess; that no censorship was assumed over the press before the siege, and that no occasion arose for exercising it during the siege. Not a single condemnation to death or exile bore witness to a severity which it would have been our right to have exercised, but which the perfect unanimity which reigned amongst all the elements of the state rendered useless. I affirm that, except in the case of three or four priests, who had been guilty of firing upon our combatants, and who were killed by the people during the last days of the siege, not a single act of personal violence was committed by any fraction of the population against another, and that if ever there was a city presenting the spectacle of a band of brothers pursuing a common end, and bound together by the same faith, it was Rome under the republican rule. The city was inhabited by foreigners from all parts of the world, by the consular agents, by many of your countrymen; let any one of them arise and under the guarantee of his own signature deny, if he can, the truth of what I say. Terror now reigns in Rome; the prisons are choked with men who have been arrested and detained without trial; fifty priests are confined in the castle of St. Angelo, whose only crime consists in their having lent their services in our hospitals; the citizens, the best known for their moderation, are exiled; the army is almost entirely dissolved, the city disarmed, and the "factious" sent away even to the last man; and yet France dares not consult in legal manner the will of the populations, but re-establishes the papal authority by military decree. I do not believe that since the dismemberment of Poland there has been committed a more atrocious injustice, a more gross violation of the eternal right which God has implanted in the peoples, that of appreciating and defining for themselves their own life, and governing themselves in accordance with their own appreciation of it. And I cannot believe that it is well for you or for Europe that such things can be accomplished in the eyes of the world, without one nation arising out of its immobility to protest in the name of universal justice. This is to enthrone brute force, where, by the power of reason, God alone should reign; it is to substitute the sword and poniard for law—to decree a ferocious war without limit of time or means between oppressors rendered suspicious by their fears, and the oppressed abandoned to the instincts of reaction and isolation. Let Europe ponder upon these things. For if the light of human morality becomes but a little more obscured, in that darkness there will arise a strife that will make those who come after us shudder with dread.

The balance of power in Europe is destroyed. It consisted formerly in the support given to the smaller states by the great powers: now they are abandoned. France in Italy, Russia in Hungary, Prussia in Germany, a little later perhaps in Switzerland; these are now the masters of the continent. England is thus made a nullity; the "celsa sedet in Eolus in arce," which Canning delighted to quote, to express the moderating function which he wished to reserve for his country, is now a meaningless phrase. Let not your preachers of the theory of material interests, your speculators upon extended markets deceive themselves; there is history to teach them that political influence and commercial influence are closely bound together. Political sympathies hold the key of the markets; the tariff of the Roman Republic will appear to you, if you study it, to be a declaration of sympathy towards England to which your government did not think it necessary to respond.

* * * * *

And yet, above the question of right, above the question of political interest, both of which were of a nature to excite early the attention of England, there is, as I have said, another question being agitated at Rome of a very different kind of importance, and which ought to have aroused all those who believe in the vital principle of religious reformation—it is that of liberty of conscience. The religious question which broods at the root of all political questions showed itself there great and visible in all its European importance. The Pope at Gaeta was the theory of absolute infallible authority exiled from Rome for ever; and exiled from Rome was to be exiled from the world. The abolition of the temporal power evidently drew with it, in the minds of all those who understood the secret of the papal authority, the emancipation of men's minds from the spiritual authority. The principle of liberty and of free consent, elevated by the Constituent Assembly into a living active right, tended rapidly to destroy the absolutist dogma which from Rome aims more than ever to enchain the universe. The high aristocracy of the Roman Catholic clergy well know the impossibility of retaining the soul in darkness, in the midst of light inundating the intelligence of men; for this reason they carried off their Pope to Gaeta; for this reason they now refuse all compromise. They know that any compromise would be fatal to them; that they must re-enter as conquerors, or not at all. And in the same way that the aristocracy of the clergy felt this inseparability of the two powers, the French government, in its present reactionary march, has felt that the keystone of despotism is at Rome—that the ruin of the spiritual authority of the middle ages would be the ruin of its own projects—and that the only method of securing to it a few more years of existence was to rebuild for it a temporal domination.

England has understood nothing of this. She has not understood what there was of sublime and prophetic in this cry of emancipation, in this protestation in favor of human liberty, issuing from the very heart of ancient Rome, in the face of the Vatican. She has not felt that the struggle in Rome was to cut the Gordian knot of moral servitude against which she has long and vainly opposed her Bible Societies, her Christian and Evangelical Alliances; and that there was being opened, had she but extended a sisterly hand to the movement, a mighty pathway for the human mind. She has not understood that one bold word, "respect for the liberty of thought," opposed to the hypocritical language of the French government, would have been sufficient to have inaugurated the era of a new religious policy, and to have conquered for herself a decisive ascendency upon the continent.

The writer of such passages as these may nevertheless be of good heart. Though we may not think him exactly qualified to conduct to a successful issue practical political movements in the existing state of Italian society, we think him qualified for something far higher and nobler. Like Knox and Wicliffe, Huss and Luther, Mr. Mazzini is no maker of ephemeral arrangements and compromises; but like them he is the uncompromising asserter of principles, and the creator of a national sentiment, that will in time give law to the makers of such arrangements. Looking to the yet weak and timid condition of public opinion in Italy—looking to the narrow provincial views which still hamper general society—above all, looking to the limited power of its princes and prelates, and to the imbecile and demoralized characters of its Pio Nonos and Antonellis, we must confess that we see no hope of any immediate political settlement, the attainment of which need make it worth while for Mr. Mazzini to compromise or abandon for a moment his most extreme political opinions. Nothing is to be accomplished at present; and he is therefore more usefully employed in rallying his party by fervent reiteration of his principles, and in forming a pure and elevated public sentiment alike by his precepts and his example.

How masterly is this sketch of the career of

PIO NONO.

A Pope arose, by his tendencies, his progressive instincts and his love of popularity, an exception to the Popes of later times: to whom Providence, as if to teach mankind the absolute powerlessness of the institution, opened, in the love and in the illusions of the people, the path to a new life. So great is the fascination exercised by great memories—so great is the power of ancient customs—so feverish, in these multitudes who are said to be agitated by the breath of anarchy, is the desire for authority as the guide and sanction of their progress, that a word of pardon and tolerance from the Pope's lips sufficed to gather round him, in an enthusiasm and intoxication of affection, friends and enemies, believers and unbelievers, the ignorant and the men of thought. One long cry, the cry of millions ready to make themselves martyrs or conquerors at his nod, saluted him as their father and benefactor, the regenerator of the Catholic faith and of humanity. The experience of three ages and the inexorable logic of ideas, were at once forgotten; writers, powerful by their intellect and doctrines, until then dreaded as adversaries, employed themselves in founding around that One man systems destined to prepare for him the way to a splendid initiative. The many advocates of liberty of conscience, weary of the spectacle of anarchy revealed by the Protestant sects, remained in doubt. The few believers in the future church remained silent and thoughtful. It might be that history had decided too rashly, it might be amongst the secrets of Providence that an institution, which had for ten centuries at least given life and movement to Europe, should rise again, reconciled with the life and movement of humanity, from its own tomb. The minds of the whole civilized world hung, troubled and excited, upon the word which was to issue from the Vatican.

And where now is Pius IX.?

In the camp of the enemy: irrevocably disjoined from the progressive destinies of humanity; irrevocably adverse to the desires, to the aspirations which agitate his people and the people of believers. The experiment is complete. The abyss between Papacy and the world is hollowed out. No earthly power can fill it up.

Impelled by the impulses of his heart to seek for popularity and affection, but drawn on by the all-powerful logic of the principle that he represents, to the severity of absolute dictatorship; seduced by the universal movement of men's minds, by living examples in other countries, by the spirit of the age, to feel, to understand the sacred words of progress, of people, of free brotherhood, but incapable of making himself their interpreter; fearful of the consequences, and trembling like one who feels himself insecure, lest he should see the people, raised to a new consciousness of its own faculties and of its own rights, question the authority of the pontificate—Pius IX. vacillated contemptibly between the two paths presented to him, muttered words of emancipation, which he neither knew how nor intended to make good, and promises of country and independence to Italy which his followers betrayed by conspiring with Austria. Then, struck with sudden terror, he fled before the multitudes who cried aloud to him courage; he sheltered himself under the protection of a Prince whom he despised—the executioner of his subjects; he imbibed his tendencies, and in order to revenge himself for the quiet with which Rome, provoked in vain to a civil war, was organizing a new government, he solicited foreign aid; and he who had, from a horror of bloodshed, shortly before endeavored to withdraw Roman assistance from the Lombard struggle, agreed that French, Austrian, Neapolitan, and Spanish bayonets should rebuild his throne. He now wanders amidst the fallacies of secret protocols, the servant of his protectors, the servant of all except of duty and of the wish of those who hoped in him, turning to the frontiers of Rome and yet not expecting to re-enter there, and as if kept back by the phantoms of the slain. The Louis XVI. of Papacy, he has destroyed it for ever. The cannon ball of his allies discharged against the Vatican, gave the last blow to the institution.

Whilst these things were happening, a Prince was pursuing in the north of our peninsula a similar course, accompanied by the same hopes, by the same illusions and delusions of the people. He was saluted by the title of the Sword of Italy. The choicest spirits from all parts pointed out to him Austria and the Alps, and suspended, in order to make the last trial of monarchy, the propagandism of their most cherished ideas. He was preceded by the encouragement of all Europe, and followed by a numerous and valiant army. Where died Charles Albert?

Thus has Providence shown to our people, desirous of the right, but lukewarm in faith and too credulous in the illusions of the old world, the powerlessness of monarchy to insure the safety of Italy, and the irreconcilability of papacy with the free progress of humanity. The dualism of the middle ages is henceforward a mere form without life or soul; the Guelph and Ghibelline insignia are now those of the tomb. Neither Pope, nor King! God and the people only shall henceforth disclose to us the regions of the future.

* * * * *

Future times—nay the present will do ample justice to Mazzini, as well as to Pio Nono. In the first will be frankly recognized one of those iron men who are able to beard tyranny and profligacy even while they stand alone, the apostles of reformation, the originators and heralds of after change. In the other—but the words just quoted anticipate as it seems to us, and in no ungenerous spirit, the verdict and language of history.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Royalty and Republicanism in Italy; or Notes and Documents relating to the Lombard Insurrection, and to the Royal War of 1848. By Joseph Mazzini. Charles Gilpin.



[From the Keepsake for 1851.]

THE MOTHER'S LAST SONG.

BY BARRY CORNWALL.

Sleep!—the ghostly winds are blowing; No moon's abroad; no star is glowing; The river is deep, and the tide is flowing To the land where you and I are going! We are going afar, Beyond moon or star, To the land where the sinless angels are!

I lost my heart to your heartless sire; ('Twas melted away by his looks of fire;) Forgot my God, and my father's ire, All for the sake of a man's desire:— But now we'll go Where the waters flow, And make us a bed where none shall know.

The world is cruel; the world's untrue; Our foes are many; our friends are few; No work, no bread, however we sue! What is there left for us to do— But fly—fly, From the cruel sky, And hide in the deepest deeps—and die!



[From the Ladies' Companion.]

A DRIVE ABOUT MY NEIGHBORHOOD IN 1850.

BY MARY RUSSEL MITFORD.

If there be one thing more than another in the nice balance of tastes and prejudices (for I do not speak here of principles) which incline us now to the elegance of Charles, now to the strength of Cromwell,—which disgust us alternately with the license of the Cavaliers and the fanaticism of the Roundheads; it would be the melancholy ruin of cast-down castles and plundered shrines, that meet our eyes all over our fair land, and nowhere in greater profusion than in this district, lying as it does in the very midst of some of the most celebrated battles of the Civil Wars. To say nothing of the siege of Reading, which more even than the vandalism of the Reformation completed the destruction of that noble abbey, the third in rank and size in England, with its magnificent church, its cloisters, and its halls, covering thirty acres of buildings,—and such buildings! within the outer courts;—to say nothing of that most reckless barbarity just at our door—we in our little village of Aberleigh lie between Basting-House to the south, whose desperately defended walls offer little more now than a mere site,—and Donnington to the west, where the ruined Gatehouse upon the hill alone remains of that strong fortress, which overlooked the well-contested field of Newbury,—and Chalgrove to the north, where the reaper, as he binds his sheaf, still pauses to tell you the very place where Hampden fell; every spot has a history! Look at a wooden spire, and your companion shakes his head, and says that it has been so ever since the Cavaliers were blown up in the church tower! Ask the history of a crumbling wall, and the answer is pretty sure to be, Cromwell! That his Highness the Lord Protector did leave what an accomplished friend of mine calls "his peculiar impressions" upon a great many places in our neighborhood is pretty certain; on so many, that there is no actual or authentic catalogue of all; and in some cases there is nothing but general tradition, and the nature of the "impressions" in question, to vouch for the fact of their destruction at that period.

Amongst these, one of the edifices that must have been best worth preserving, and is even now most interesting to see, is the grand old castellated mansion, which in the reign of Elizabeth belonged to one of her favorite courtiers, and was known as Master Comptroller's House, at Grays.

The very road to it is singularly interesting. Passing through the town, which increases in growth every day, until one wonders when and where it will stop, and looking with ever fresh admiration at the beautiful lacework window of the old Friary, which I long to see preserved in the fitliest manner, by forming again the chief ornament of a church, and then driving under the arch of the Great Western Railway, and feeling the strange vibration of some monster train passing over our heads,—a proceeding which never fails to make my pony show off his choicest airs and graces, pricking up his pretty ears, tossing his slender head, dancing upon four feet, and sometimes rearing upon two,—we arrive at the long, low, picturesque old bridge, the oldest of all the bridges that cross the Thames, so narrow that no two vehicles can pass at once, and that over every pier triangular spaces have been devised for the safety of foot passengers. On the centre arch is a fisherman's hut, occupying the place once filled by a friar's cell, and covering a still existing chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, now put to secular uses—a dairy or a cellar.

A little way down the river is one of the beautiful islands of the Thames, now a smooth and verdant meadow, edged round with old willow pollards calmly reflected in the bright, clear waters, but giving back in the twelfth century a far different scene. Here was fought a wager of battle between Robert de Montford, appellant, and Henry de Essex, hereditary Standard-bearer of the kings of England, defendant, by command, and in the presence of Henry the Second. The story is told very minutely and graphically by Stowe. Robert de Montford at length struck down his adversary, "who fell," says the old historian, "after receiving many wounds; and the King, at the request of several noblemen, his relations, gave permission to the monks to inter the body, commanding that no further violence should be offered to it. The monks took up the vanquished knight, and carried him into the abbey, where he revived. When he recovered from his wounds, he was received into the community, and assumed the habit of the order, his lands being forfeited to the King." I have always thought that this story would afford excellent scope to some great novelist, who might give a fair and accurate picture of monastic life, and, indeed, of the monastic orders, as landlords, neighbors, teachers, priests, without any mixture of controversial theology, or inventing any predecessors of Luther or Wicliffe. How we should have liked to have heard all about "The Monastery," about the "Abbot" and Father Eustace, untroubled by Henry Warden or John Knox! From the moment that they appear, our comfort in the book vanishes, just as completely as that of the good easy Abbot Boniface himself. There we are in the middle of vexed questions, with the beautiful pile of Melrose threatening every moment to fall about our ears!

Our business now, however, is to get over the bridge, which after the excitement of one dispute with a pugnacious carrier, and another with a saucy groom, whose caracoling horse had well nigh leaped over the parapets on either side; after some backing of other carriages, and some danger of being forced back to our own, we at last achieve, and enter unscathed, the pleasant village of Caversham.

To the left, through a highly ornamented lodge, lies the road to the ancient seat of the Blounts, another house made famous by Pope, where the fair ladies of his love, the sisters Martha and Teresa, lived and died. A fine old place it is; and a picturesque road leads to it, winding through a tract called the Warren, between the high chalk-cliffs, clothed with trees of all varieties, that for so many miles fence in the northern side of the Thames, and the lordly river itself, now concealed by tall elms, now open and shining in the full light of the summer sun. There is not such a flower bank in Oxfordshire as Caversham Warren.

Our way, however, leads straight on. A few miles further, and a turn to the right conducts us to one of the grand old village churches, which give so much of character to English landscape. A large and beautiful pile it is. The tower half clothed with ivy, standing with its charming vicarage and its pretty vicarage-garden on a high eminence, overhanging one of the finest bends of the great river. A woody lane leads from the church to the bottom of the chalk-cliff, one side of which stands out from the road below, like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel hedges and flowery arbors of the vicarage-garden, and crested by a noble cedar of Lebanon. This is Shiplake church, famed far and near for its magnificent oak carving, and the rich painted glass of its windows, collected, long before such adornments were fashionable, by the fine taste of the late vicar, and therefore filled with the very choicest specimens of mediaeval art, chiefly obtained from the remains of the celebrated Abbey of St. Bertin, near St. Omers, sacked during the first French Revolution. In this church Alfred Tennyson was married. Blessings be upon him! I never saw the great Poet in my life, but thousands who never may have seen him either, but who owe to his poetry the purest and richest intellectual enjoyment, will echo and re-echo the benison.

A little way farther, and a turn to the left leads to another spot consecrated by genius,—Woodcot, where Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton passed the earlier years of his married life, and wrote several of his most powerful novels. I have always thought that the scenery of Paul Clifford caught some of its tone from that wild and beautiful country, for wild and beautiful it is. The terrace in the grounds commands a most extensive prospect; and beneath a clump of trees on the common behind the house, is the only spot where on a clear day Windsor may be seen on one side, and Oxford on the other,—looking almost like the domes, and towers, and pinnacles that sometimes appear in the clouds—a fairy picture that the next breeze may waft away! This beautiful residence stands so high, that one of its former possessors, Admiral Fraser (grandfather to that dear friend of mine who is the present owner), could discover Woodcot Clump from the mast of his own ship at Spithead, a distance of sixty miles.

Wyfold's Court, another pretty place a little farther on, which also belonged once to a most dear friend, possesses the finest Wych-elms in England. Artists come from far and near to paint these stately trees, whose down-dropping branches and magnificent height are at once so graceful and so rich. They are said always to indicate ecclesiastical possession, but no trace of such dependency is to be found in the title-deeds, or in the tenure by which in feudal times the lands were held,—that of presenting a rose to the King, should he pass by a certain road on a May-day.

And now we approach Rotherfield Grays,—its bowery lanes, its wild rugged commons, and its vast beech woods, from the edge of which projects every here and there a huge cherry-tree, looking, in the blossoming springtime, as if carved in ivory, so exquisite is the whiteness, casting upon the ferny-turf underneath showers of snowy petals that blanch the very ground, and diffusing around an almond-like odor, that mingles with the springing thyme and the flowering gorse, and loads the very air with heavy balm.

Exquisite is the pleasantness of these beech woods, where the light is green from the silky verdure of the young leaves, and where the mossy wood-paths are embroidered with thousands of flowers, from the earliest violet and primrose, the wood-anemone, the wood-sorrel, the daffodil, and the wild hyacinth of spring, to the wood-vetch, the woodroof, the campanulas, and the orchises of summer;—for all the English orchises are here: that which so curiously imitates the dead oak leaf, that again which imitates the human figure; the commonest but most pretty bee orchis, and the parallel ones which are called after the spider, the frog, and the fly. Strange freak of nature this, in a lower order of creation, to mimic her own handyworks in a higher!—to mimic even our human mimicry!—for that which is called the man orchis is most like the imitation of a human figure that a child might cut from colored paper. Strange, strange mimicry! but full of variety, full of beauty, full of odor. Of all the fragrant blossoms that haunt the woods, I know none so exquisite as that night-scented orchis which is called indifferently, the butterfly or the lily of the valley. Another glory of these woods, an autumnal glory, is the whole fungus tribe, various and innumerable as the mosses; from the sober drab-colored fungi, spotted with white, which so much resemble a sea-egg, to those whose deep and gorgeous hues would shame the tinting of an Indian shell. Truffles, too, are found beneath the earth; and above it are deposited huge masses of the strange compound called in modern geological phrase Agglomerate. Flint and coral, and gravel, and attrited pebbles enter into the combination of this extraordinary natural conglomeration, which no steel, however hardened, can separate, and which seems to have been imitated very successfully by the old builders in their cements and the substances used in the filling up of their grandest structures, as may be seen in the layers which unite the enormous slabs of granite in the Roman walls at Silchester, as well as in the works of the old monkish architects at Reading Abbey. Another beauty of this country is to be found in the fields,—now of the deep-red clover, with its shining crimson tops, now of the gay and brilliant saintfoin (the holy hay), the bright pink of whose flowery spikes gives to the ground the look of a bed of roses.

And now we reach the gate that admits us down a steep descent to the Rectory-house, a large substantial mansion, covered with Banksia roses, and finely placed upon a natural terrace,—a fertile valley below, and its own woods and orchard-trees above.

My friend the rector, raciest of men, is an Oxford divine of the old school; a ripe scholar; one who has travelled wide and far, and is learned in the tongues, the manners, and the literature of many nations; but who is himself English to the backbone in person, thought, and feeling. Orthodox is he, no doubt. Nowhere are church and schools, and parish visitings, better cared for; but he has a knack of attending also to the creature comforts of all about him, of calling beef and blankets in aid of his precepts, which has a wonderful effect in promoting their efficacy. Mansion and man are large alike, and alike overflowing with hospitality and kindliness. His original and poignant conversation is so joyous and good-humored, the making every body happy is so evidently his predominant taste, that the pungency only adds to the flavor of his talk, and never casts a moment's shade over its sunny heartiness.

Right opposite the Rectory terrace, framed like a picture by the rarest and stateliest trees, stands the object of my pilgrimage, Grays' Court, a comparatively modern house, erected amongst the remains of a vast old castellated mansion, belonging first to the noble family of Gray, who gave their name not merely to the manor, but to the district; then to the house of Knollys; and latterly to the Stapletons, two venerable ladies of that name being its present possessors.