The Press.
London, England, 1858-10-23 00:00:00

1031

as if in play, crossed the double breast of his coat, and,
with her white and taper fingers, passed each button into
its proper button-hole. He profited by her absorption in
this little effort to raise the tresses of her blond hair and

inhale the natural perfume they gave out. As soon as
she had finished, without changing her position she
stretched out her hand, seized the " Sacred Heart " she
had just embroidered, and fastened it, in the twinkling
of an eye, upon her husband's breast. This done, she
rose and went to take down one of the swords which

were suspended beneath the portrait of her father. Paul
had risen too, and, not less inquisitive than am szed, fol-
lowed sll her movements with a vague Meting of anxiety.
When she returned towards him, she was no longer the
same woman. He shuddered from head to foot.

" Monsieur le Marquis," said she, in a Srm voice, " take
this sword. It has already served the holy cause, and
you will nut have to watt long before drawing it front
its sheath. Rejoice ! everything is propared ; the great
days are returned. To morrow morning you will be
roused by the tocsin. The general rendezvous is at
Torfou, of glorious memory. All our nobles will be there
on horseback by break of day. You have not forgotten
the battle cry of our family= Penarvan, toujours avant !'
They rely upon seeing you among them; and you will
not be the last to arrive."
An admirably worked-up scene follows, in
which—as usually happens in such contests—the
feeble Paul, after a burst of passionate and almost
coarse republicanism, finally succumbs to the
stern, unyielding resistance of his one-idead wife.
In screwing him up to this point, no inconsiderable
influence is accorded to the becoming effect of a
broad-brimmed hat with a white cockade, a cache-
mir scarf, and a pair of jack-boots with steel
spurs, all which articles had been placed in his
room by the relentless RenCe, as at once a bait
and a surprise. The idea of calling in the aid of
such an auxiliary as the toilette was certainly a
bold one, and we pay a high compliment to the
author's ability in conceding that he has managed
to do this without falling into the ludicrous.
Perhaps to a Frenchman only could such an idea
have suggested itself—and yet, after all, there
may be more universality of application in it than
we care to allow.

Poor Paul fulfils his destiny and joins the
royalist heroes of La Vendite, by whose side he
deports himself with becoming bravery. At the
end of three weeks, however, he is brought home
in a cart, with a ball through his breast. During
a long and rigorous winter his wife, to whose
eyes he is now a veritable hero, attends him with
the most exalted devotion. But her lavished
tenderness awakens no response now :

Three months of sickness teach us more about the chs•
racier of those who live with us than ten years of health.
Paul had penetrated into his wife's heart ; he had reached
the bottom of it. _

One day he had suffered from fever, from delirium.
Grown calmer towards the evening, he had fallen asleep,
and Renee went out upon the balcony. When she returned
to her husband's pillow she found him sitting up, his head
resting upon his hand, with a mien of deeper and more
sombre despondency than usual. Tears coursed each
other in silence down his emaciated cheeks, without any
endeavour on his part to check or hide them...
" You weep, you weep !" said she.
"Yes, I weep," said Paul ; " I weep the life I have lost,
not that which is about to escape me—it is not worth a
regret—but the free happy life I carried so lightly and so
gaily! Oh, my plough, my oxen l my modest patrimony I
Why did I quit you? What did I come to seek here?
Ah ! it will cost me dear, that silly whiff of vanity which
you blew into my brain."
" Tears! regrets ! reproaches ! Is this, then,' cried
Renee," the price of my love and my devotion ?"
" the price of your love, of your devotion," replied
Paul, with a bitter smile. " Hold, I pity the error in which
you have lived so long. J owe you nothing. Renee. It is
not I that you love. For the last three months your pride
has been exalting itself for a being that does not exist,
devoting itself for a phantom, idolizing an illusion. You
love a hero, a paladin. lam nothing of the kind. You
are proud of my wound. I suffer cruelly from it, and be-
lieve I shall die of it. That is all I see clearly in the
matter. The lustre of my name is more precious to you
than my life. We differ on that point. As for me I hate
this fatal name—l hate it ; it is this name which is kill-
ing me. I reproach you not, and yet, when I think of all
the follies, all the puerilities upon which you live, and for
which I die, I cannot help a little indignation. Ah,
Renee, if you had only wished it! How much I loved you!
But, alas ! you wanted a hero, and I was but a poor youth
made to adore you. Take back your love : it belongs not
to me. I restore it to you. And yet l have paid for it
with my blood."

For the further destinies of poor Paul, and his
expected " son and heir," who, by the way, turns
out to be a daughter, we must refer the reader
to the work itself.

The "Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre,"
while equally free from any approach to a dis-
regard of " the decorums," possesses another fea-
ture in common with " La Maison de Penarvan."
Its most prominent character is, in like manner,
the impoverished representative of an ancient and
noble family—a coincidence in which the spece.