Chapter XVII: Part II: Vi.--The Miniature (2)

"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."