Chapter II (2)

When Easter Monday came it was obvious that every one (save Mr. Odger's friends--three or four million or so) had gone out of town. There was hardly a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed; there was not a bell that it was any use to pull. The weather was detestable, the rain incessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away gave one plenty of leisure to reflect that the country must be the reverse of enlivening. But all one's friends had gone thither (this is the unanimity I began by talking about), and to keep down as much as possible the proportions of that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so much of London social life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the limits of the dull season any such excursion as one might have projected in commemoration of the first days of spring. After due cogitation I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous journey that I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an account. But I have dallied so much by the way that I have come almost to my rope's end without reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artistically, by relating that I put myself in the humor for remote adventure by going down the Thames on a penny steamboat to--the Tower! This was on the Saturday before Easter and the City was as silent as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my childhood, and having a theory, that from such memories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the Tower is very good--much less cockneyfied than I supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; very vast and grand, historical and romantic. I could not get into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was thus relieved from the obligation to march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the train of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the courts and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging soldiers of the garrison, who made the place more picturesque. At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, which I spied from the railway-train, perched on a grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There were other reasons as well; the place has a small cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens, who lived during the latter years of his life at Gadshill, a couple of miles from the town. All this Kentish country, between London and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the _genius loci_. I found this to be quite the case at Rochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my asking her whether the illustrious master of the house often made his appearance in the town. "Oh, bless you, sir," she said, "we every one of us knew him to speak to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a party of foreigners--as he was dead in his bed on the Friday. He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I _do_ think Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any way particular. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of foreigners." Rochester consists of little more than one long street, stretching away from the castle and the river toward neighboring Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some small, dull quaintness of gable or casement. Nearly opposite to the shop of the old lady with the dissentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed slab set into its face, which must often have provoked a smile in the great master of laughter. The slab relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here established a charity which should furnish "six poor travelers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment gratis and four pence in the morning to go on their way withal, and that in memory of his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor. The poor traveler who avails himself of the testamentary four pence may easily resume his journey as far as Chatham without breaking his treasure. Is not this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a cannon on his journey from London to Dover, to join his aunt, Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really but one, which forms an interminable crooked thoroughfare, crowded, in the dusk, as I measured it up and down, with specimens of the British soldier from the large garrison at Chatham; those trim and firmly-pacing red-coats who seem, to eyes accustomed to the promiscuous continental levies, so picked and disciplined, polished and pomatumed, such ornamental and yet after all, such capable warriors.

The cathedral at Rochester is small and plain, hidden away in rather an awkward corner, without a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and effaced by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent castle. But within it is very charming, especially beyond the detestable wall, the vice of almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and breaks that long vista so properly of the very essence of a great church. Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of steps to pass through the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America, we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remember, however, an old priory gateway which leads you to the church, out of the main street; I remember something in the way of a quiet, weird deanery or canonry, at the base of the eastern walls; I remember a fluted tower that took the afternoon light and let the rooks and the swallows come circling and clamoring around it. Better than these things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of the castle--a most noble and imposing ruin. The old walled precinct has been converted into a little public garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for a band, and the place was not empty, as such places in England never are. The result is agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, involving the destruction and dispersion of many interesting portions of the ruin. I sat there for a long time, however, looking in the fading light at what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive than this towering square of Rochester.

It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand feature--its extraordinary and magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a long walk beneath the walls from the gateway of the close to the far outer end of the last chapel. Of all that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I can give no detailed account; I can speak only of the general impression. This is altogether delightful. None of the rivals of Canterbury have a more complicated and elaborate architecture, a more perplexing intermixture of periods, a more charming jumble of Norman arches and English points and perpendiculars. What makes the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a fine modification of gables and buttresses. It is as if two great churches had joined forces toward the middle--one giving its nave and the other its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge Gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so crumbled and blunted and mellowed is it by time and weather. Like the rest of the structure it has a magnificent color--a sort of rich dull yellow, a something that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly appreciable from the cloister on the farther side of the church--the side, I mean, away from the town and the open garden-sweep I spoke of; the side that looks toward a damp old deanery lurking behind a brown archway, through which you see young ladies in Gainsborough hats playing something on a patch of velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow intermingled with a green quadrangle which serves as a play-ground to a King's School, which is adorned externally with a most precious and picturesque old fragment of Norman staircase. This cloister is not "kept up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapidated, and of course very picturesque. The old black arches and capitals are various and handsome, and in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft grass. Out of the cloister opens the chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which is none the less a magnificent structure; a noble lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a tunnel, and very grand and impressive from its great sweep and its absence of columns, brackets or supports of any kind. The place is now given up to dust and echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests, and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may gaze up and make out the faint, ghostly traces of decorative paint and gold upon the noble ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to give an idea." From one of the angles of the cloister you are recommended by the verger to take a view of the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tremendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and then pile itself away to a height which seems to make the very swallows dizzy, as they fall twittering down its shafted sides. Within the cathedral you hear a great deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the great sensation of the place is to stand on the particular spot where he was murdered and look down at a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon when I first entered the church; there had been a service in the choir, but it was well over and I had the place to myself. The verger, who had some pushing about of benches to attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left me to wander through the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his breast and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. "_De la mort ne pensai-je mye_," he says in the beautiful inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his image; and I too, as I stood there, thought not a whit of death. His bones were in the pavement beneath my feet, but within his rigid bronze his life burned fresh and strong. Simple, handsome and expressive, it is a singularly striking and even touching monument, and in the silent, empty chapel which had held together for so many ages this last remnant of his presence it was possible to feel a certain personal nearness to him. One had been farther off, after all, from other examples of that British valor of which he is the most picturesque type. In this same chapel for many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury, one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. The pavement which lay before it has kept its place, but Henry VIII. swept everything else away into the limbo of his ransacked abbeys and his murdered wives. Becket was originally buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little by little that his martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every grain of his dust became a priceless relic and the pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till I found the place where the frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood there a violent thunder-storm broke over the cathedral; great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the darkness which seemed to deepen and flash in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell, made me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of history. I emerged again, but the rain had settled down and spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to my inn and sat in a chair by the coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable "Memorials" of Canterbury, and wondering over the musty appointments and meagre resources of English hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose), the "Fleur-de-Lis." The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough to let it take me to the inn), but the lily was sadly deflowered. I found compensation at Dover, however, where the "Lord Warden" Hotel struck me as the best inn I had encountered in England. My principal errand at Dover was to look for Miss Betsey Trotwood's cottage, but I am sorry to say I failed to discover it. Was it not upon the downs, overlooking the town and the sea? I saw nothing on the downs but Dover Castle, which, in default of Miss Trotwood's stronghold, I zealously visited. It is an establishment of quite the same character, bristling with offensive and defensive machinery. More seriously speaking, it is a magnificent fortress--a bequest of the Middle Ages turned to excellent account by modern engineers. The day was clear and beautiful, and I walked about for a while among the towers and the grassy bastions; then I stood and gossiped with an amiable gunner who talked to me of Malta, leaning against the rampart and looking across the wrinkled sea to the glimmering cliffs of France.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

THE ELIXIR.

"Oh brew me a potion strong and good!
One golden drop in his wine
Shall charm his sense and fire his blood,
And bend his will to mine."

Poor child of passion! ask of me
Elixir of death or sleep,
Or Lethe's stream; but love is free,
And woman must wait and weep.

EMMA LAZARUS.

LEONIE REGNAULT: A STUDY FROM FRENCH LIFE.

In the pretty town of Macon, on the banks of the Saone, lived Leonie Regnault. She remembered no other home than the gray stone house with its balconied windows that overlooked the beautiful river and the long, somewhat formal promenades that stretch along its banks, with their green trees and many seats, but never a blade of grass--all dry, hard-beaten gravel, after the ugly French fashion, convenient enough, it must be confessed, for the evening loungers, gay or tired, whom the dewy green of Nature might incommode.

Leonie's father lived in Paris, and he had brought her when only three years old to the gray stone house and the care of his only sister, Madame Perrin, a childless widow, who gladly received the beautiful little girl to the large shelter of a loving heart. But Leonie never forgot her father. The little creature would sit on her low-cushioned chair and sing to herself, "Mon beau papa! mon beau papa! O comme je t'aime, mon beau papa!" I suppose every tender father appears beautiful to his little child, but Colonel Regnault was indeed a strikingly handsome man, with a perfect grace and dignity of manner which rendered him indispensable to the court of Louis Napoleon, where he had a prominent position on all days of ceremony. Once or twice a year he made his escape from court duties for a brief visit to Leonie, whose love for him grew more intense with years, concentrating in itself all the romance of her enthusiastic nature.

Madame Perrin saw few visitors, and scarcely ever went out except to mass. Every morning her good Louise took Leonie to the girls' school in the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Leonie had her inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so devoted to each other as were Leonie Regnault and Helene Dupres. They sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new--the merest nothing has its poem and history. They had made their first communion together, which was the most important incident hitherto in Leonie's uneventful life. Her father had come down on this occasion, and when she came from the altar he had put aside her white veil and kissed her with tears in his eyes.

Leonie had completed her fifteenth year when she was thrown into great excitement by an unexpected piece of news. Her father was about to marry. The future Madame Regnault was a young widow of good family and large fortune. He had taken this step, he said, for Leonie's sake even more than for his own. He wished to have his daughter with him and to cultivate her talents; and how could this be done without a home in Paris? The marriage would take place early in September, and the first week in October he would come for Leonie. He looked forward with delight to having a home for his beautiful beloved child.

It was the last week in September. The rain was falling in a dull dreary way, as it had been falling all day and almost a week of days.

"I wish it would clear up," said Leonie. "I hate to have everything look so dreary just the last week I have to stay."

"Do you ever think, cherie, how dull it will be for me when you are gone? What shall I do without ma chere petite?" asked Madame Perrin tenderly.

"And what shall I do without you, chere maman? I am afraid I shall not like the new mamma that papa has given me. Or perhaps I am only afraid that she will not like me. You are my real mother," taking her hand caressingly. "I wish I could remember my own mother. Why have you never told me anything about her? I have asked you so many times."

"I never was acquainted with your mother. She lived in Paris, you know, and I lived here."

"But you have seen her. Was she beautiful? Am I like her?"

"Yes," said Madame Perrin with a little start--"so much like her that it frightens me." Then more deliberately, in reply to Leonie's astonished eyes, "I mean that it is sad to be reminded of one who is dead."

"Papa must have loved her very much. I remember when I was a little girl, and began to wonder why I had not a mother like Helene, you said I must never ask papa about her, it would give him so much pain. But now I may, now that he has given her place to somebody else."

"By no means, Leonie--less than ever. If your poor father has at last succeeded in leaving his sorrow behind him, do you wish to drag him back to it, you thoughtless child?"

"Then you must tell me yourself, ma tante. It is very strange that you are so unwilling to tell me anything about my pretty mother who died when I was almost a baby."

"Why will you be so persistent? I do not like to give you so much pain."

"Why, dear aunt, I shall like to hear about her. It is very sad not to have any mother, but I can't feel as distressed about it as if I had known and loved her. She is only a beautiful dream to me. I cannot feel as I should if you were to die and leave me. You must tell me. I shall not let you have any peace till you do. You can't refuse me now, just when I am going away."

"Well, if I must, I must," said Madame Perrin with trembling voice. "What do I know? It may be for your salvation. The Blessed Virgin grant it! Your mother, Leonie, was a great beauty."

"I was sure of it. If I could only have seen her with my dear papa! He is so handsome always."

"She was a great singer too."

"I am glad of it. I shall be a singer when I have learned in Paris. I care more for the lessons in singing than for anything else in the great beautiful city, except being with my own papa."

"But, Leonie, your mother sang in the Grand Opera. She was the best singer in France, or in the world perhaps, and everybody was crazy about her."

"And so papa married an opera-singer? It is quite a romance."

"He did not marry her."

"Not marry her?" said Leonie with white face and great black, wide-open eyes.

"She was married already to one of the singers in the opera, and she left him to live with your father."

Leonie's white lips shaped rather than uttered the question, "What did he do, the husband?"

"He challenged your father, and, though he was so much his inferior, Leon was too generous to hurt his feelings by refusing to fight with him after doing him such an injury. He was so good a swordsman that he easily disarmed him with only a slight wound."

"This is terrible!" said Leonie. "My father such a wicked man!"

"That is not the way the world looked at it. All the men envied Leon, and the women flattered and spoiled him more than ever."

"I hate my father!" cried Leonie with quick, passionate sobs. "No wonder my poor mother died. I shall be her avenger: I feel it."

"You do not know what you are saying. Your mother avenged herself. She deserted him as she deserted her husband, and you too, my poor child, when you were just learning to say 'Mamma.' Poor Leon! he sinned, but he suffered too. Be merciful to him, Leonie, as you pray God to be merciful to you."

"Is my mother alive?" asked Leonie, shivering.

"No: she died three years ago. Your father never would see her again, but when he heard that she was sick and in want (she had entirely lost her wonderful voice), he gave her an annuity because she was your mother. Father Aubrey used to see her from time to time, and he said she was truly penitent before she died."

"Oh, what shall I do? I shall never be happy again--never, never! What made you tell me? How could you?" said poor Leonie, wringing her little hands and burying her face in the cushions.

"My child, you would hear it sooner or later in that great, wicked city, and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid--" here the poor little woman broke down and began to cry like Leonie, but less violently--"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera, Leonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself."

"I will die first," answered Leonie. "I wish I had never been born."

"Don't tell your father, Leonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the conversation ended.

"What's the matter with Leonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a welcome. What ails the child?"

"She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels sad at leaving Helene and me," replied his sister.

"She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel.

The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and mobile as Leonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire. Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and direful headache _in terrorem_; and the colonel thought he was polite to me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and which heightened the beauty of Leonie, extinguished the delicate color and soft blue eyes of Madame Regnault, and were so little in harmony with her person and character as to have almost the effect of a discord in music.

A year passed, and her heart was made glad by a dear little son, who was named Leon for his father. The little fellow was six weeks old, and his mother had scarcely left the nursery, which was a bit of heaven to her, when Colonel Regnault startled her from her dream of bliss: "I have found just the nurse for the baby, the wife of a small farmer who lives close to Rosny Station. She will wean her child and take him. She is such a fresh, healthy-looking woman, and everything is so clean and tidy in her cottage, that you will be delighted with her, I am sure."

"Oh, Leon, may I not nurse him myself? I cannot give him up to anybody. Who will take so good care of my little precious darling as his own mother?"

"It is not to be thought of, Clemence: it would wear you out. See, you are crying now: it shows how weak and nervous you are. Besides, Leonie needs you. She is losing already, for nobody plays her accompaniments so well as you, and I do not like to have her go to the Conservatoire with a bonne when it can be helped: a girl so striking is likely to be watched and followed. I never feel safe about her unless you are with her. Don't be silly: the baby will be better off in the country."

Madame Regnault was very kind to Leonie: it was impossible for her to be otherwise to any one. She was devoted to her for her father's sake: she felt a thrill of delight in her beauty, in her wonderful talents; but she did not love her. She might have loved her perhaps--though there was not much in common between the ardent, high-spirited girl and the gentle, patient woman, except, indeed, the taste for music--but it is not in nature, and hardly in grace, for a woman thirsting for her husband's love to like being always postponed to some one else. Colonel Regnault seemed to have no perception of anything but his beautiful daughter: his ambition was centred in her even more than his affection. Leonie's talent developed rapidly, and his pride was fed by the praises of her masters and the more flattering compliments of friends and connoisseurs who were present at the musical soirees given from time to time at his own house.

But Leonie did not contribute to the peace of the household. Her aunt had not found it out, Madame Regnault never would have discovered it, but her father's despotic will roused one equally defiant in her, and when they came in contact it was the collision of flint and steel. Leonie often carried her point against her father, and he admired her only the more for it. The contests were quick and sharp--not very frequent, but very unpleasant to Madame Regnault. She grew thin and pale and spiritless. She was not yet thirty, and she had aged by half a score of years in the year and a half of her marriage.

Her mother, Madame Dumesnil, was indignant at what she considered the colonel's neglect of his wife, and mentally threatened to give him "a piece of her mind." She had not long to wait for an occasion.

"I am sorry to see Clemence looking so ill," said she to him as he entered his wife's dressing-room one day a little before breakfast--that is to say, about noon.

"I had not noticed that she was ailing," he rejoined with a quick glance at his wife.

"It is well that somebody has eyes," continued Madame Dumesnil. "I did not expect that my daughter was to become a governess when she married you. Her previous life had not prepared her for such arduous duties."

"My wife does not complain," said the colonel haughtily.

"Clemence complain! She would not complain if she suffered martyrdom." Madame Regnault looked imploringly at her mother, but she went on more sternly than before: "If Clemence had a spark of spirit she would never have had Leonie in the house. It is a shame for her to be made a slave to the opera-singer's girl, and I am not the only one who thinks so."

"Pardon me, madame," responded her son-in-law, "the conversation is too exciting for me. I have the honor to wish you a good-morning;" and he bowed himself out with the most exasperating courtesy.

"Oh, mother, what have you done?" cried Madame Regnault, trembling and tearful. "How could you make him so angry?"

"How _could_ I, indeed! I wish I were his wife a little while: he wouldn't find it so easy to tyrannize over me. I don't know where you got your disposition from: you didn't take it from me, that's certain."

"Jacques," said Colonel Regnault to the porter as he left the house, "when Madame Dumesnil calls to see your mistress hereafter, let me know it, and remember that I am never at home."

Leonie, though she felt a certain hardness in the manner of Madame Dumesnil when she happened to meet her, was wholly unaware of what was passing in the heart of Madame Regnault, who had a genuine sympathetic interest in the development of her remarkable powers, playing her accompaniments unweariedly for hours daily and giving her the benefit of her own delicate and highly-cultivated taste. They were happy years for Leonie. Her young soul, full of the inspiration and power of genius, felt its wings growing. There is an atmosphere of art in Paris which is powerfully stimulating to any one of aesthetic tendencies; and how exhilarating was this subtle atmosphere to Leonie! The Conservatoire, with its seventy professors and its thousand students, its competitions, concerts and public exercises, stimulated her zeal and inspired ever higher ideals that made close, hard study the play of her fresh and delighted faculties. Once a week her father took her to the opera. It happened that the first opera she heard was _Faust_, and she sat as if in a dream, white and scared, seeming to see in the scenes the spectre of her mother. But this impression wore away, and ere many weeks had passed her heart dilated, her eyes kindled with the triumphs of the singer, and she felt as Correggio when he looked on Raphael's _St. Cecilia_ and exclaimed, "I, too, am a painter!"

Thus the days went on, not too slowly, till Leonie had entered her nineteenth year and approached the close of her studies. The finest concerts of Paris and the most exclusive are those of the Conservatoire, six in number, which occur once a fortnight from the middle of January to the middle of April. Leonie had often sung in the small concert-hall at examinations and private exercises, but now she was to sing in the Salle de Spectacle for the celebrated Societe des Concerts. This wonderful company is composed mostly of the professors and teachers at the Conservatoire, and it is a rare honor for a pupil to sing or play at these concerts; but Leonie was a rare pupil, and whatever may be said of the jealousy of artists, I hold that true genius always exults in the recognition of genius. Leonie sang in each of the six concerts of her last year at the Conservatoire, and her singing gave exquisite delight to the appreciative listeners: the applause was heart-felt, enthusiastic, inspiring. But on the last night her father's rapture and pride reached their height. The beautiful concert-hall, so refined and classic with its Pompeii-like decorations, was filled with the most brilliant audience of a most brilliant city. The symphony had ended, and Leonie was to sing some selections from the opera of _Fidelio_. The applause which greeted her as she advanced on the stage was perhaps a tribute to her superb beauty and perfect grace. She was paler than usual, her large black eyes were full of that intense light which only emotion gives, but she showed no embarrassment, and felt none. She saw not the faces, heard not the plaudits. She was alone with her art. Her soul went forth into the song, and one listened in rapture, touched with pain that aught so sweet should be so evanescent. When the wonderful voice seemed to die like a vanishing soul there was silence for a moment--silence most eloquent of eulogies--and then came a burst of applause, the most enthusiastic that ever relieved a listener's heart or charmed a singer's ear.

The concert ended. Her father, proud and exultant, clasped her in his arms. Did he hear the whispers that Leonie's quick ear caught? "Colonel Regnault's daughter, the opera-singer's child. You remember that old story?"--"Ah, indeed! Wonderfully like her mother: more distinguished manner. Something of her father too. Will Regnault let her go on the stage, do you think?"--"I cannot tell. Il est fou d'elle. He brings her up in his own family."--"Vraiment? Good wife, Madame Regnault." Leonie shrank involuntarily from her father's embrace.

The competitive examinations came, and naturally Leonie received the highest prize in singing.

"I do not envy you, mademoiselle," said one of the unsuccessful candidates with a look and tone that accentuated the sneer: "there are other things that people inherit besides their musical talents."

"There will be plenty of spitefulness for your children to inherit, whether there is any talent or not," retorted Leonie, her eyes flashing with resentful pride. It was the first time that any one had deliberately alluded to the taint upon her birth, and it stung.

"I have something to tell you," said her father to Leonie a few days after. "The director of the opera has been talking to me about you. He is only waiting for my consent to bring you out at the Imperial Opera."

Leonie's face lighted up with a quick gleam of surprise and pleasure, which was followed by a sudden terror.

"You may think it strange that I felt any reluctance: you are so young that you do not know enough of society to appreciate the objections. Not that there are any insuperable objections. In an art-loving community like ours the career of a great artist is prouder than a queen's."

The color had faded from Leonie's face, but her father did not notice it.

"The empress condescended to speak to me about it to-day. Her Majesty has the welfare of the opera very much at heart, and, as she says, one is responsible for a talent like yours. It is the rarest of gifts. Why not consecrate it to the elevation of art and the delight of the world? A vocation for art is as sacred as one for religion, and it would be almost a crime in me to hold you back from so manifest a destiny as yours. Well, what have you to say, child?" and he looked full into his daughter's pale, agitated face. "It is too much for you, my darling: you are quite overcome. Think it over and tell me to-morrow night." And he kissed her trembling lips with unusual emotion.

Leonie went to her room, but not to sleep. How short was that sleepless night, with its whirl of conflicting resolutions, its torrent of emotion, its ceaseless panorama of dissolving views! Opera after opera unrolled in magical splendor before her eyes, resounded in bursts of harmony in her ears and flowed in waves of delicious sweetness into her heart. And in all she was queen, and hearts rose and fell at her bidding as the ocean-waves beneath the strong and sweet compelling of the moon. It was intoxication, but underlying it was the deep satisfaction of a soul that has found the true outlet of its highest powers. "All the current of her being" surged and eddied into this one career that opened so invitingly before her. But she could not say "I will," though she wished to do so. The glories faded and another vision came. Her mother seemed to lie before her, dying, forsaken, remorseful, sinful. Was it her mother? was it herself? "Art thou stronger than I?" asked the voiceless lips.--"Yea, I am stronger," replied the soul of Leonie. And then a sudden revelation of incipient vanities and weaknesses and pride flashed across her consciousness as in the great light of God. Leonie shrank away self-abased. "Did my worship of art, which I thought so holy, hide all this?" she questioned.

The morning light came faintly through the curtained windows. Leonie rose, dressed herself quickly, and calling a bonne went to the Madeleine to early mass. After mass she entered the confessional of the white-haired father who had been her spiritual guide for the three years and a half of her life in Paris. On her return she locked herself into her room and passed the day alone.

"Well, my girl," inquired her father in the evening, "what am I to tell the director? Have you chosen the opera for your debut already?"

"I shall never sing in the opera, father."

"Why, what is this, Leonie? If I have got over my scruples, I do not see that you need have any. I thought it would be just what you were longing for."

"I do long for it," said Leonie firmly, "and therefore I think it is not best."

"Don't speak in riddles," rejoined her father angrily. "Do you mean to tell me that you are going to throw away your glorious possibilities--certainties, I might say--for a whim?"

"Not for a whim, but because it is right."

"It is incomprehensible!" cried the colonel, walking the floor excitedly. "Here have you been for years in one rhapsody of music, nothing else in life--your mother and I and everything given up to help you on--and now, when such a prospect opens before you, a career that a princess might envy, when even the empress condescends to solicit it--'No, I am not going to sing. I'll throw it all away--my talent, my father's wishes.' Oh, it is insufferable! It is just like the perverse willfulness of women;" and he turned upon her in a white rage.

Leonie did not quail. "Father," said she, speaking very low, but with crystal clearness, "do you wish me to be like my mother?"

Colonel Regnault staggered back. "My poor child," he whispered faintly, "who told you that story? Who could have the heart?"

The next day Leonie, with her father's permission, went to Macon to spend some weeks with her aunt. Soon after her departure Madame Regnault asked, "Now that Leonie is gone, cannot we have the children home?"

"We will bring Leon home," replied her husband. "He is a fine little fellow, and will make the house cheerful, but the baby will be better off in the country a year longer. We will have him in for a few days if you like, and the nurse can come with him."

"I will go out this very afternoon," said the mother. "Jeanne will go with me."

"No, my dear, it is too hard a jaunt for you: I will go to-morrow."

"Let me go, Leon: I feel so uneasy about the children. I cannot tell why, but it seems as if something was going to happen to them."

"What could happen to them? and what difference will a day make? I am glad I am not a woman, to be so anxious about nothing," said the colonel, smiling.

About eleven o'clock on the morrow the colonel reached Rosny, and was startled as he approached the house by an appearance of unusual stir, persons going in and out in a hurried and excited way. He entered. The nurse rushed toward him in vehement anguish: "Oh, Colonel Regnault, you are here! John has told you. Where is he? Did he not return with you?"

"I have not seen your husband, good woman. What is the matter? Are the children ill? I came out for them."

"Oh, I cannot tell him! I cannot tell him!" sobbed the unhappy woman. "The dear beautiful babies! It breaks my heart!"

"May God help you to bear it, sir: it is a heavy grief," said an aged woman. "The little boys are dead."

"Dead!" cried the heartstricken father--"my children dead! One of them, you mean--not both, not both!"

It was true. The baby, a dear little fellow six or seven months old, had had for several days a cold which the nurse did not think serious: during the night he had been attacked by croup, and about eight o'clock in the morning, almost before the doctor had arrived, the child was dead. Absorbed in the grief and terror of this sudden death, the nurse forgot to mind Leon, and the restless, active child slipped out of the house unheeded, and, playing on the railway-track, had been killed by a passing train not an hour before his father came for him.

Colonel Regnault's grief was violent and remorseful. "I have killed my children," he would say to his pitying friends. "If I had but listened to my wife and had them brought up at home! What is the croup with a watchful, intelligent mother, and a skillful physician at the very door? and how could any accident have happened to Leon here? So many idle servants in my house, and my own child to die for lack of care!"

Madame Regnault never knew how Leon died. The little body was not mangled: it had been caught and thrown aside by something attached to the engine--I do not know exactly how--and the mother was left to believe that he had died of sickness like the baby. She bore her sorrow with the still meekness consonant with her character, and with wifely tenderness exerted herself to soothe her husband's violent grief.

A little later in the summer the war broke out. Colonel Regnault went gladly, even rashly, into danger, and found neither death nor wounds, but in his anguish for the desolation of his country he made a truce with his own remorse.

The last time I was in Paris--which was in 1874--General and Madame Regnault called on me at my old friend's, Madame Le Fort's. A charming little girl about three years old was with them, a blue-eyed, fair-haired child--very beautiful, and as much like her father as a little girl can be like a man approaching fifty. I was not surprised to see that she was, as her mother said, "une petite fille gatee." I inquired for Leonie.

"Can you believe that Leonie has not been in Paris since you saw her here?" replied her father. "She is a thorough little provincial. She has been married more than a year now."

"Ah, I congratulate you! I hope her marriage was pleasing to you," I added, as he did not respond immediately.

"Assez. Her husband is a very worthy young man for a provincial--Theophile Dupres, the brother of a little school-friend of hers. I went down to the wedding, not to grieve Leonie, but I shall never be reconciled to it--never! To think what that girl threw away! Such talent! and to have it lost, utterly lost! It is inexplicable. Every motive that could influence a girl on the one hand, and--But I give it up. Let us not talk of it," he concluded with a little wave of his hand, as if dismissing Leonie and all that pertained to her.

But I could not turn my thoughts from her so quickly. Even now, when I am, so to speak, in another world, she causes me not a little perplexity. Was she right? was she wrong? Can one ever be happy in suppressing a great talent? How it strives and agonizes for some manifestation of itself! and when it slowly dies, stifled in its living grave, must not one feel a bitter regret for having slain the nobler part of one's self?

But is it not heresy to doubt that a woman can sacrifice genius for love, and be content--yea, glad--with an infinite joy? And why not have love and genius too? Alas! most lives are opaque planets, like the earth on which they are evolved, and can have only one bright side at a time.

Madame Regnault was little changed: she preserved the old sweet gentleness and quiet refinement of manner, but she seemed more at ease with her husband, and did not watch so timidly his least gesture. Colonel--or rather General--Regnault had changed more. He had grown quite gray: he was still a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with the same exquisite urbanity of manner, but the disappointment of his ambition for Leonie, the anguish which had smitten him for his children's death, and the great calamity which had almost crushed France, the idol of every Frenchman, had softened and humanized him. He was less like an Apollo exulting in his own divinity; and when I marked his tender thoughtfulness for his wife, his unwonted appreciation of her lovely character, and especially his indulgence of the caprices of little Aimee, who was almost always his companion, I was ready to believe in his entire conversion.

But can the Ethiopian change his skin? One morning Madame Le Fort's little dressmaker came rushing in in a very excited way: "Mon Dieu! I am so glad to get here! Quel homme terrible!"

"What is the matter?" asked madame.

"I have just been trying on Madame Regnault's new costume, the gray faille and velvet, you know, that she selected when she came with you. It is a charming costume, and she looked sweetly in it. The general came in before I got through. 'Do you call that a costume?' he asked in a passion. 'It makes her look like a fright. Take it away: never let me see it again.' Poor little madame hurried me to get it off. 'Take it away! out of the house with it!' cried he as if he were commanding a regiment of dragoons.--'I can't take it away,' said I. 'It was made to order--madame selected it herself--and you cannot expect me to take it back.' I was frightened to death, but I couldn't lose the money, you know. The window was open: he seized the unlucky costume, and giving it a little whirl, sent it flying out of the window over the balustrade. Madame was going to send her maid for it, but no; the wind caught it, and away it went out of the court, and where it lighted or who picked it up is more than I know, or madame either. It may be a fine thing to be a general's wife, but I'd rather be a dressmaker."

And the little dressmaker laughed till she cried to think of madame's handsome costume sailing out of the window over the Avenue Haussmann, and lighting like a balloon on the head of some lucky or luckless passer-by.

MARY E. BLAIR.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

For a long period, France, with her ancient university and her venerable scholastic institutions--which after the Renaissance drew to themselves the flower of the youth of Europe--may be said to have led the way as regards general education. It has only been in modern times that the progress made by the Anglo-Saxon and German nations has placed, at all events, primary instruction in France somewhat in the rear of other countries. As for her system of secondary and superior education, it has even within the last few years elicited many expressions of approval from foreigners competent to form a judgment on the subject. In the following pages we propose giving a succinct account of the actual system and position of primary and secondary education in France, speaking of what has been done since the close of the war in 1871, and of what yet remains to be done.

PRIMARY EDUCATION.

The great crying evil in France is the lack of education among the poorer classes, who nevertheless, by the democratic constitution of their country, are called upon, together with the rich and the middle classes, to take their share in the government. This evil is recognized in France, and each fresh Assembly meets at Versailles with the determination of having primary schools built and of having every child taught at least to read and write. But these good intentions are terribly hampered by the all-absorbing military appropriations, which, swallowing up some 500,000,000 francs annually, do not allow the ministers and deputies, well disposed as they are, to appropriate to the education of all France a sum much exceeding that expended by the single State of Pennsylvania in the same cause. Still, the acknowledgment of the existence of the evil is in itself a great step toward remedying it, and the France of to-day is making progress in this respect. Before the last war, instead of saying with Terence,

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto,

the French citizen might rather have cried, "I am a _Frenchman_, and that which is not French is foreign to me." A salutary reaction has set in since the war, and nothing is more common than to hear Frenchmen observe that their country was conquered not by Moltke or Krupp, but rather by the German _Schullehrer_.