From Bentley's Miscellany.

Châtelaine sans Château!" It was a face of great beauty, with a low Greek brow and fair hair, and those large, soft, liquid eyes that you only see in a Southern, and that looked at you from the sketch with an ear

LA CHATELAINE SANS CHATEAU; OR A
DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S LIFE.

BY OUIDA.
I.

THE CRAYON HEAD IN CAVENDISH'S PORT- nest, wistful regard, half childlike, half mel

FOLIO.

ancholy. He looked up, glanced at the sketch, and stretched out his hand hastily, but I held it away from him. "I want to look at it; it is a beautiful head; I wish we had the original here now. 'La Châtelaine sans Château !'-what an unsatisfactory and original title !-her dot, I should suppose, consisted of châteaux en Espagne! Who is the original ? "

As I spoke, holding the sketch up where the light from the room within fell on what I had no doubt was a likeness of some fair face that had beguiled his time in days gone

ing than souvenirs of such episodes in one's life often are, if merely trusted to that inconstant capricieuse, Memory; I might have hit him with a bullet rather than asked him about a mere etude à deux crayons, for he shuddered, that sultry night! and drank off some white Hermitage quickly.

LAST week I was dining with Cavendish, in his house on the Lung' Arno, as I passed through Florence, where he fills never mind what post in the British Legation. The night was oppressively hot; a still, sultry sky brooded over the city, and the stars shining out from a purple mist on to the Campanile near, and the slopes of Bellosguardo in the distance. It was intensely hot; not all the iced wines on his table could remove the oppressive warmth of the evening air, which made both him and me think of evenings we had spent together in the voluptuous lassi-by, a souvenir of one of his loves more lasttude of the East, in days gone by, when we had travelled there, boys of twenty or twenty-two, fresh to life, to new impressions, to all that gives "greenness to the grass, and glory to the flower." The Arno ran on under its bridge, and we leaned out of the balcony where we were sitting and smoking, while I tossed over, without thinking much of what I was doing, a portfolio of his sketches. Position has lost for art many good artists since Sir George Beaumont: Cavendish is one of them; his sketches are masterly; and had he been a vagrant Bohemian instead of an English peer, there might have been pictures on the walls of the R. A. to console one for the meretricious daubs and pet vulgarities of "Parting Cheers," hideous babies, and third-class carriage interiors, which makes one's accustomed annual visit to the rooms that once saw the beauties of Reynolds, and Wilson, and Lawrence, a peine forte et dure to anybody of decent refinement and educated taste. The portfolio stood near me, and I took out a sketch or two now and then between the pauses of our conversation, smoking a narghile of Cavendish's, and looking lazily up the river, while the moonlight shone on Dante's city, that so long forgot, and has, so late, remembered him.

"I had forgotten that was in the portfolio," he said, hurriedly, as he took it from me and put it behind him, with its face against the wall, as though it had been the sketch of a Medusa.

"What do you take it away for? I had not half done looking at it. Who is the original ? "

"One I don't care to mention."
"Because ?"

"Because the sight of that picture gives me a twinge of what you and I ought to be hardened against-regret."

"Regret! Is any woman worth that?" "She was."

"I don't believe it; and I thought you and I thought alike on such points. Of all the women for whom we feel twinges of conscience or self-reproach in melancholy moments, how many loved us? Moralists and poets sentimentalize over it, and make it a stalking-horse whereby to magnify our sins and consign us more utterly to perdition, "By Jove! what a pretty face this is! while they do for themselves a little bit of Who's the original ?" I asked him, drawing poetic morality cheaply; but in reality there out a female head, done with great finish in are uncommonly few women who can love, pastel, under which was written, in his own to begin with, and in the second, vanity, hand, "Florelle," and, in a woman's, "La avarice, jealousy, desires for pretty toilettes,

one or other, or all combined, have quite as much to do with their 'sacrifice' for us as any thing.”

"Quite true; but il y a femmes et femmes, perhaps, and it was not of that sort of regret that I spoke."

"Of what sort, then ?"

Cavendish didn't answer: he broke the ash off his Manilla, and smoked silently some moments, leaning over the balcony and watching the monotonous flow of the Arno, with deeper gloom on his face than I remembered to have seen there any time before. I was sorry I had chanced to light upon a sketch that had brought him back such painful recollections of whatever kind they might be, and I smoked too, sending the perfumed tobacco out into the still sultry night that was brooding over Florence.

of society as it was-and to spend my days in the mountains with my sketching-block and my gun. But I did not like Eaux Bonnes; it was intensely warm. There were several people who knew me really; no end of others who got hold of my name, and wanted me to join their riding parties, and balls, and picnics. That was not what I wanted, so I left the place and went on to Luz, hoping to find solitude there. That valley of Luz-you know it ?-is it not as lovely as any artist's dream of Arcadia in the evening, when the sunset light has passed off the meadows and corn-lands of the lower valley, and just lingers golden and rosy on the crests of the mountains, while the glowworms are coming out among the grasses, and the lights are being lit in the little homesteads nestling among their orchards one above another on the hill-sides, and its hundred streams are rushing down the mountains and under the trees, foaming, and tumbling, and rejoicing on their way! When I have had my fill of ambition and of pleasure, I shall go and live at Luz, I think. When! Well! you are quite right to repeat He leaned back, his face in shadow, so it ironically; that time will never come, I dare that I could not see it, and with the Arno's say, and why should it? I am not the stuff to ebb and flow making mournful river music cogitate away my years in country solitudes. under our windows, while the purple glories If prizes are worth winning, they are worth of the summer night deepened round Giot-working for till one's death; a man should to's Tower, where, in centuries past, the Immortal of Florence had sat dreaming of the Paradiso, the mortals passing by whispering him as "the man who had seen hell," and the light within the room shone on the olives and grapes, the cut-glass and silver claret-chiefly lying about under the great beechjugs, the crimson Moltepulciano and the white Hermitage on the table, he told me the story of "La Châtelaine sans Château."

"Of what sort?" said he, abruptly after some minutes' pause. "Shall I tell you? Then you can tell me whether I was a fool who made one grand mistake, or a sensible man of the world who kept himself from a grand folly. I have been often in doubt myself."

II.

THE FLOWER OF THE VALLEY OF LUZ.

"Two years ago I went into the South of France. I was attaché at Constantinople then, you remember, and the climate had told upon me. I was not over well, and somebody recommended me the waters of Eaux Bonnes. The waters I put little faith in, but in the air of the Pyrenees, in the change from diplomacy to a life en rase campagne, I put much, and I went to Eaux Bonnes accordingly, for July and August, with a vow to forswear any society I might find at the baths-I had had only too much

never give up the field while he has life left in him. Well! I went to Luz, and spent a pleasant week or so there, knocking over a few chamois or izards, or sketching on the sides of the Pic du Midi, or Tourmalet, but

trees in the shade, listening to the tinkle of the sheep-bells, like an idle fellow, as I meant to be for the time I had allotted myself. One day-" He stopped and blew some whiffs from his Manilla into the air. He seemed to linger over the prelude to his story, and shrink from going on with the story itself, I thought; and he smothered a sigh as he raised himself. "How warm the night is; we shall have a tempest. Reach me that wine, there's a good fellow. No, not the Amontillado, the Château Margaux, please; one can't drink hot, dry wines such a night as this. How well I remember that splendid Madeira of your father's; is there much of it left at Longleaf now? We used to have pleasant vacations in those college days at your governor's, Hervey; some few

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years have gone since then-ten, twelve, | over the valley, a heavy storm had come up, fifteen-how many? More than that, by and, somehow or other, I lost the way, and Jove! But to satisfy your curiosity about could not tell where I was, whether St. this crayon study. One day I thought I Sauveur was to the left or the right, behind would go to Gavarnie. I had heard a good me or in front of me. The horse, a miserdeal, of course, about the great marble wall, able little Pyrenean beast, was too frightand the mighty waterfalls, the rocks of ened by the lightning to take the matter Marboré, and the Brêche de Roland, but, as into his hands as he had done on the road it chanced, I had never been up to the Cer- through the Chaos, and I saw nothing for it cle, nor, indeed, in that part of the Midi at but to surrender and come to grief in any all, so I went. The gods favored me, I re- way the elements best pleased; swearing at member there were no mists, the sun was myself for not having stayed at the inn at brilliant, and the great amphitheatre was Gavarnie or Gedre; wishing myself at the for once unobscured; the white marble flash- vilest mountain auberge that ever sheltered ing brown and purple, rose and golden, in men and mules pêle-mêle; and calling mythe light; the cascades tumbling and leap- self hard names for not having listened to ing down into the gigantic basin; the vast my landlady's dissuasions of that morning plains of snow glittering in the sunshine; as I left her door, from my project of going the twin rocks standing in the clear air, to Gavarnie without a guide, which seemed straight and fluted as any two Corinthian to her the acme of all she had ever known columns hewn and chiselled by man. Good or heard of English strangers' fooleries. Heaven! before a scene like Gavarnie, what The storm only increased, the great black true artist must not fling away his colors rocks echoing the roll of the thunder, and and his brushes in despair and disgust with the Gave lashing itself into fury in its narhis own puerility and impotence? What can row bed; happily I was on decently level be transferred to canvas of such a scene as ground, and the horse being, I suppose, tolthat? What does the best beauty of Claude, erably used to storms like it, I pushed him the grandest sublimity of Salvator, the great- on at last, by dint of blows and conjurations est power of Poussin, look beside Nature combined, to where, in the flashes of the when she reigns as she reigns at Gavar- lightning, I saw what looked to me like the nie? I am an art worshipper, as you know; outline of a homestead: it stood in a cleft but there are times in my life, places on earth, between two shelving sides of rock, and a that make me ready to renounce art forever! narrow bridle-path led up to it, through The day was beautiful, and thinking I knew high yews and a tangled wilderness of rhodothe country pretty well, I took no guide. I dendrons, boxwood, and birch—one of those hate them when I can possibly dispense with green slopes, so common in the Pyrenees, them. But the mist soon swooped down that look in full sunlight doubly bright and over the Cercle, and I began to wish I had Arcadian-like, from the contrast of the dark, had one when I turned my horse's head back bare, perpendicular rocks that shut them in. again. You know the route, of course? I could see but little of its beauty then in Through the Chaos,-Heaven knows it is the fog that shrouded both it and me, but I deserving of its name!-down the break- saw the shape and semblance of a house, and neck little bridle path, along the Gave, and urging the horse up the ascent, thundered over the Scia bridge to St. Sauveur. You on its gate-panels with my whip-handle till know it? Then you know that it is much the rocks round echoed again with the tintaeasier to break your neck down it than to marre. find your way by it, though by some hazard I did not break my neck, nor the animal's knees either, but managed to get over the bridge without falling into the torrent, and to pick my way safely down into more level ground; once there, I thought I should easily enough find my way to St. Sauveur, but I was mistaken; the mists had spread

"There was no answer, and I knocked again a little louder, if possible, than before. I was wet to the skin with that wretched storm, and swore not mildly at the inhospitable roof that would not admit me under it. I knocked again, inclined to pick up a bit of granite and beat the panel in; and at last a face an old woman's weather-beaten

face, but with black Southern eyes that had | trayal of a face whose expression Raphael lost little of their fire with age-looked and Sassoferrato themselves would have through at me and asked me what I wanted. failed to render in its earnest, innocent, ele"I want shelter if you can give it me,' vated regard. She was very youngI answered her. I have lost my way coming from Gavarnie, and am drenched through. I will pay you liberally if you will give me an asylum till the weather clears.'