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of a faded grandeur which harmonized bet- ingenuousness, the whole of her short hister with her. I can see her now, as she tory, and the explanation of her anomalous stood there with a strange foreign grace, an position. Her name was Florelle de l'Heris, indescribable patrician delicacy mingled with a name once powerful enough among the extreme youthfulness and naïveté, like an nobles of the Midi, and the old woman, old picture in costume, like one of Rapha- Madame Cazot, was her father's foster-sister. el's child-angels in face-poor little Florelle! Of her family, beggared in common with the "You would stay till the storm is over, best aristocracy of France, none were now monsieur? you are welcome to shelter if left; they had dwindled and fallen away, you will,' she said, coming forward to me till of the once great house of L'Heris this timidly yet frankly. Cazot tells me you child remained alone its sole representative: are a stranger, and our mountain-storms are her mother had died in her infancy, and her dangerous if you have no guide.' father, either too idle, or too brokenhearted to care to retrieve his fortunes, lived the life of a hermit among these ruins where I now found his daughter, educating her himself till his death, which occurred when she was only twelve years old, leaving her to poverty and obscurity, and such protection and companionship as her old nurse Cazot could afford her. Such was the story Florelle de l'Heris told me as I sat there that evening waiting till the clouds should clear and the mists roll off enough to let me go to St. Sauveur-a story told simply and pathetically, and which Cazot, sitting knitting in a corner, added to by a hundred gesticulations, expletives, appeals to the Virgin, and prolix addenda, glad, I dare say, of any new confidant, and disposed to regard me with gratitude for my sincere praises of her fried trout-a story which seemed to me to suit the delicate beauty of the flower I had found in the wilderness, and read more like a chapter of some versified novelette, like 'Lucille,' than a bonâ fide page out of the book of one's actual life, especially in a life like mine, of essentially material pleasures and emphatically substantial and palpable ambitions-a life, if any man's ever was, of the world worldly,' as your detestations, the parsons, say when their bishop slights or their patron forgets them, and they are rampant against the world and the hollowness thereof for not recognizing their superior sanctity and proffering them preferment. But there are odd stories in real life!-strange, pathetic ones too-stranger, often, than those that found the plot and underplot of a novel or the basis of a poem; but when such men as I come across them they startle us, they look bizarre and unlike all the other leaves of the book that glitter with worldly aphorisms, philosophical maxims, and pungent ego

"I did not know who Cazot was, but I presumed her to be the old woman, who seemed to be portress, mistress, domestic, cameriste, and all else in her single person, but I thanked her for her permitted shelter, and accepted her invitation to remain till the weather had cleared, as you can imagine. When you have lost your way any asylum is grateful, especially when it is offered by such a châtelaine as this of mine, however desolate and tumble-down the château. They made me welcome, she and the old peasantwoman, with that simple, unstrained, and unostentatious hospitality which is, after all, the true essence of good breeding of which your parvenu knows nothing, when he keeps you waiting, and shows you that you are come at an inapropos moment, in his fussy fear lest every thing should not be comme il faut to do due credit to him. Old Cazot set before me some simple refreshment, a grillade de châtaignes, some maize and milk, and a dish of trout just caught in the Gave below, while I looked at my châtelaine, marvelling how that young delicate creature could come to be shut up with an old peasant on a remote hill-side. I did my best to draw her out and learn her history; she was shy at first of a complete stranger, as was but natural, but the sight of my sketchbook and moist-color-box brought us that rapport which fraternity of taste always produces. I spoke of Gavarnie, of the beauty of the Pyrenees of Tourmalet, and the Lac Bleu, and, warming with enthusiasm for her birthplace, the girl forgot that I was a foreign tourist, unknown to her, and indebted to her for an hour's shelter, and before my impromptu supper was over I had drawn from her, by a few questions which she was too much of a child and had too little to conceal not to answer with a child's

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tisms, and we would fain cut them out; they 'Visitors! Is it likely we should have any, have the ring of that Arcadia whose golden m'sieu? Those that would suit me would gates shut on us when we outgrew boyhood, be bad company for Ma'amselle Florelle, and and in which, en revanche, we have sworn ever since to disbelieve-keeping our word sometimes, perhaps to our own hindranceHeaven knows!

those that should seek her never do. I recollect the time, m'sieu, when the highest in all the departments were glad to come to the bidding of a De l'Heris; but genera"I stayed as long as I could that even- tions have gone since then, and lands and ing, till the weather had cleared up so long, gold gone too, and, if you cannot feast and the sun was shining again so indisputa- them, what care people for you? That is bly, that I had no longer any excuse to lin- true in the Pyrenees, m'sieu, as well as in ger in the dark-tapestried room, with the the rest of the world. I have not lived chestnuts sputtering among the wood-ashes, eighty years without finding out that. If and Madame Cazot's needles clinking one my child yonder were the heiress of the continual refrain, and the soft gazelle eyes De l'Heris, there would be plenty to court of my young châtelaine glancing from my and seek her; but she lives in these poor, sketches to me with that mixture of shyness broken-down ruins with me, an old peasantand fearlessness, innocence and candor, woman, to care for her as best I can, and which gave so great a charm to her manner. not a soul takes heed of her save the holy She was a new study to me, both for my women at the convent, where, maybe, she palette and my mind-a pretty fresh toy to will seek refuge at last!' amuse me while I should stay in the Midi. I was not going to leave without making sure of a permission to return. I wanted to have that face among my pastels, and when I had thanked her for her shelter and her welcome, I told her my name, and asked her leave to come again where I had been so kindly received.

"Come again, monsieur ? Certainly, if you care to come. But you will find it a long way from Luz, I fear,' she said naïvely, looking up at me with her large, clear, fawnlike eyes-eyes so cloudless and untroubled then as she let me take her hand, and bade me adieu et bonsoir.

"I re-assured her on that score, you can fancy, and left her standing in the deepembrasured window, a great stag-hound at her feet, and the setting sun, all the brighter for its past eclipse, bathing her in light, and shedding an auréole on her Greek-like brow, with its fair silken hair. I can always see her in memory as I saw her then, poor child-Faugh! How hot the night is! Can't we get more air anyhow?

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"She let me out at the gate where I had thundered for admittance two hours before, and, giving her my thanks for her hospitality,-money she would not take,—I wished her good-day, and rode down the bridlepath to St. Sauveur, and onwards to Luz, thinking at intervals of that fair young life that had but just sprung up, and was already destined to wither away its bloom in a convent. Any destiny would be better to proffer to her than that. She interested me already by her childlike loveliness and her strange solitude of position, and I thought she would while away some of the long summer hours during my stay in the Midi when I was tired of chamois and palette, and my lazy dolce under the beech-wood shades. At any rate, she was newer and more charming than the belles of Eaux Bonnes.

"The next morning, I remembered her permission and my promise, and I rode out through the town again, up the mountainroad, to the Nid de l'Aigle. You would have done the same with nothing more to 'If you come again up here, m'sieu, you do than I had to do then in the Pyrenean will be the first visitor the Nid de l'Aigle valley, glad of any thing that gave me an has seen for four years,' said old Cazot, as amusement and a pursuit. I never wholly she showed me out through the dusky-appreciate far niente, I think; perhaps I have vaulted passage. She was a cheerful, garru- lived too entirely in the world—and a world lous old woman, strong in her devotion to ultra-cold and courtly, too-to retain much the De l'Heris of the bygone past; stronger patience for the meditative life, the life of even yet in her love for their single orphan trees and woods, sermons in stones, and representative of the beggared present. monologues in mountains. I am a restless,

ambitious man: I must have a pursuit, be it through her father and the nuns, but it was of a great aim or a small, or I grow weary, a semi-religious and peculiar education, of and my time hangs heavily on hand. Al- which the chief literature had been the legready having found Florelle de l'Heris endary and sacred poetry of France and among these hills, reconciled me more to my Spain, the chief amusement copying the ilpro tempo banishment from society, excite- luminated missals lent her by the nuns, or ment, and pleasure, and I thanked my good joining in the choral services of the confortune for having lighted upon her. The vent; an education that taught her nothing pretty little hermit of the Nid de l'Aigle, destined to the convent walls, would possibly help to amuse the time I had arranged to pass among her native mountains. She was very lovely, and I always care more for the physical than the intellectual charms of any woman. I do not share your visionary requirements on their mental score; I ask but material beauty, and am content with it.

of the world from which she was shut out, and encouraged all that was self-devoted, visionary, and fervid in her nature, leaving her at seventeen as unconscious of evil as the youngest child. I despair of making you imagine what Florelle de l'Heris then was. Had I never met her, I should have believed in her as little as yourself, and would have discredited the existence of so "I rode up to the Nid de l'Aigle: by a poetic a creation out of the world of fiction; clearer light it stood on a spot of great pic- her ethereal delicacy, her sunny gayety when turesqueness, and before the fury of the any thing amused her, her intense sensitiverevolutionary peasantry in '92 had destroyed ness, pained in a moment by a harsh word, what was the then habitable and stately pleased as soon by a kind one, her innocence château, must have been a place of consid- of all the blots and cruelties, artifices, and erable extent and beauty, and in the feudal evils of that world beyond her Nid de times, fenced in by the natural ramparts of l'Aigle, made a character strangely new to its shelving rocks, no doubt all but impreg- me, and strangely winning, but which to you nable. There were but a few ruins now that I despair of portraying: I could not have held together and had a roof over them-imagined it. Had I never seen her, and had the part where Madame Cazot and the last of I met with it in the pages of a novel, I the De l'Heris lived; it was perfectly soli- should have put it aside as a graceful but tary; there was nothing to be heard round impossible conception of romance. it but the foaming of the river, the music of "I went up that day to the Nid de l'Aigle, the sheep-bells from the flocks that fed in and Florelle received me with pleasure; the clefts and on the slopes of grass-land, perhaps Madame Cazot had instilled into and the shout of some shepherd-boy from her some scepticism that'a grand seigneur,' the path below, but it was as beautiful a spot as the woman was pleased to term me, as any in the Pyrenees, with its overhang- would trouble himself to ride up the mouning beech-woods, its wilderness of wild tains from Luz merely to repeat his thanks flowers, its rocks covered with that soft gray for an hour's shelter and a supper of roasted moss whose tint defies one to repeat it in oil chestnuts. She was a simple-minded, goodor water colors, and its larches and beeches hearted old woman, who had lived all her drooping over into the waters of the Gave. life among the rocks and rivers of the In such a home, with no companions save Hautes-Pyrenées, her longest excursion a her father, old Cazot, and her great stag-market-day to Luz or Bagnères. She looked hound, and, occasionally, the quiet recluses on her young mistress and charge as a child, of St. Marie Purificatrice, with every thing in truth Florelle was but little more,—and to feed her native poetry and susceptibility, thought my visit paid simply from gratitude nothing to teach her any thing of the actual and courtesy, never dreaming of attributing and ordinary world, it were inevitable that it to 'cette beauté héréditaire des L'Heris,' the character of Florelle de l'Heris should which she was proud of boasting was an intake its coloring from the scenes around alienable heirloom to the family. her, and that she should grow up singularly "I often repeated my visits; so often, childlike, imaginative, and innocent of all that in a week or so the old ruined château that in any other life she would unavoidably grew a natural resort in the long summer have known. Well educated she was, days, and Florelle watched for my coming

from the deep-arched window where I had till they are as proud of their master's herseen her 'first, or from under the boughs of aldry as though it were their own, discerned the great copper beech that grew before the that I was of the same rank as her adored gate, and looked for me as regularly as house of De l'Heris—if indeed she admitted though I were to spend my lifetime in the any equal to them—and with all the cheery valley of Luz. Poor child! I never told familiarity of a Frenchwoman treated me her my title, but taught her to call me by with punctilious deference, being as thormy Christian name. It used to sound very oughly imbued with respect and adoration pretty when she said it, with her long South- for the aristocracy as any of those who died ern pronunciation-prettier than it ever for the white lilies in the Place de la Révosounds now from the lips of Beatrice Acqua lution. And Florelle-Florelle watched for d'Oro yonder, in her softest moments, when me, and counted her hours by those I spent she plays at sentiment. She had great nat- with her. You are sure I had not read and ural talent for art, hitherto uncultivated, of played with women's hearts so long-women, course, save by such instructions as one of too, with a thousand veils and evasions and the women at the convent, skilful at illu- artifices, of which she was in pure ignorance minating, had occasionally given her. I even of the existence-without having this amused myself with teaching her to trans-heart, young, unworn, and unoccupied, unfer to paper and canvas the scenery she loved so passionately. I spent many hours training this talent of hers that was of very unusual calibre, and with due culture might have ranked her with Elizabeth Sirani or Rosa Bonheur. Sitting with her in the old room, or under the beech-trees, or by the side of the torrents that tore down the rocks into the Gave, it pleased me to draw out her unsullied thoughts, to spread her mind out before me like a book-a pure book enough, God knows, with not even a stain of the world upon it-to make her eyes glisten and glow and dilate, to fill them with tears or laughter at my will, to wake up her young life from its unconscious, untroubled childish repose to a new happiness, a new pain, which she felt but could not translate, which dawned in her face for me, but never spoke in its true language to her, ignorant then of its very name-it amused me. Bah! our amusements are cruel sentiments, and costly too!

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der my power at once, plastic to mould as wax, ready to receive any impressions at my hands, and moulded easily to my will. Florelle had read no love stories to help her to translate this new life to which I awoke her, or to put her on her guard against it. I went there often, every day at last, teaching my pupil the art which she was only too glad and too eager to learn, stirring her vivid imagination with descriptions of that brilliant outside world, of whose pleasures, gayeties, and pursuits she was as ignorant as any little gentian flower on the rocks; keeping her spell-bound with glimpses of its life, which looked to her like fairyland, bizarre bal masqué though it be to us; and pleasing myself with awakening new thoughts, new impressions, new emotions, which swept over her telltale face like the lights and shades over meadow-land as the sun fades on and off it. She was a new study, a new amusement to me, after the women of our world, and I beguiled my time with her, not thoughtlessly, as I might have done, not too hastily, as I should have done ten years before, but pleased with my new amusement, and more charmed with Florelle than I at first knew, though I confess I soon wished to make her love me, and soon tried my best to make her do so-an easy task when one has had some practice in the rose-hued atmosphere of the boudoir, among the most difficile and the most brilliant coquettes of Europe, and succeeded with most of them! Florelle de l'Heris, with a nature singularly loving, and a mind singularly imaginative, with no rival for me even in her fancy, soon

lavished on me all the love of which her im- | knowledge of all their legends, superstitions, passioned and poetic character was capable. histories, and associated memories, gathered She did not know it, but I did. She loved from the oral lore of the peasantry, the crame, poor child!-love more pure, unselfish, dle songs of Madame Cazot, and the stories and fond than I ever won before, than I shall of the old chronicles of the South. Heavens! ever win again. what a wealth of imagination, talent, genius, "Basta! why need you have lighted on lay in her if I had not destroyed it! that crayon head, and make me rake up this "At length the time drew near when my story? I loathe looking at the past. What so-called sojourn at the Baths must end, and good ever comes of it? A wise man lives I must return to Constantinople. One day only in his present. La vita è appunto una Florelle and I were out sketching, as usual; memoria, una speranza un punto,' writes the she sat under one of the great beeches, within fool of a poet, as though the bygone memo- a few feet of one of the cascades that fell into ries and the unrealized hopes were worth a the Gave du Pau, and I lay on the grass by straw. It is that very present instant' that her, looking into those clear gazelle eyes he despises that is available, and in which, that met mine so brightly and trustfully, when we are in our senses, we absorb our-watching the progress of her brush, and selves, knowing that that alone will yield a throwing twigs and stones into the spray of fruit worth having. What are the fruits of the torrent. I can remember the place as the others? only Dead Sea apples that crumble into ash. I knew that Florelle loved me; that I, and I alone, filled both her imagination and her heart. I would not precipitately startle her into any avowal of it. I liked to see it dawn in her face and gleam in her eyes, guilelessly and unconsciously. It was a new pleasure to me, a new charm in that book of woman's love of which I had thought I knew every phase, and had exhausted every reading. I taught Florelle to love me, but I would not give her a name to my teaching till she found it herself. I returned it? Oh, yes, I loved her, selfishly, as most people, men or women, do love, let them say what they will; very selfishly, perhaps a love that was beneath her a love for which, had she seen into my heart, she might have disdained and hated me, if her soft nature could have been moved to so fierce a thing as hate-a love that sought its own gratification, and thought nothing of her welfare-a love not worthy of her, as I sometimes felt then, as I believe now.

though it were yesterday, the splash of the foam over the rocks, the tinkle of the sheepbells from the hills, the scent of the wild flowers growing round, the glowing golden light that spread over the woodlands, touching even the distant crest of Mont Aigu and the Pic du Midi. Strange how some scenes will stamp themselves on the camera of the brain never to be effaced, let one try all that one may.

"There, that morning, I, for the first time since we had met, spoke of leaving Luz, and of going back to that life which I had so often amused her by describing. Happy in her present, ignorant of how soon the scenes so familiar and dear to her would tire and pall on me, and infinitely too much of a child to have looked beyond, or speculated upon any thing which I had not spoken of to her, it had not presented itself to her that this sort of life could not go on forever; that even she would not reconcile me long to the banishment from my own world, and that in the nature of things we must either become "I had been about six weeks in the Pyr- more to each other than we were now, or part enees since the day I lost myself en route as strangers, whom chance had thrown tofrom Gavarnie; most of the days I had spent gether for a little time. She loved me; but, three or four hours, often more, at the Nid as I say, so innocently and uncalculatingly, de l'Aigle, giving my painting lessons to Flo- that she never knew it till I spoke of leaving relle, or being ciceroned by her among the her; then she grew very pale, her eyes filled beech-wooded and mountain passes near her with tears, and shunned mine for the first home. The dreariest fens and flats might time, and, as an anatomist watches the quiver have gathered interest from such a guide, of pain in his victim, so I watched the sufand the glorious beauties of the Midi, well fering of mine. It was her first taste of the suited to her, gained additional poetry from bitterness of life, and while I inflicted the her impassioned love for them, and her fond | pain I smiled at it, pleased in my egotism to

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