Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced into
his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of trouble and
disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain fair-minded
military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking resemblance
to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it. Order being
re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective lines, and
the commandant of the city appointed, military administration began. The
place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all things were organized on a
French system, the Spaniards were left free to follow “in petto” their
national tastes.
This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it lasted)
had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so difficult
to discover. In the marechal’s army was a regiment, composed almost
entirely of Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene, a man
of remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the military
service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor a Kingdom
of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he had ample
opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that he met with
several. His regiment was composed of the scattered fragments of the
Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the colonial battalions
are to France. Its permanent cantonments, established on the island of
Elba, served as an honorable place of exile for the troublesome sons of
good families and for those great men who have just missed greatness,
whom society brands with a hot iron and designates by the term “mauvais
sujets”; men who are for the most part misunderstood; whose existence
may become either noble through the smile of a woman lifting them out
of their rut, or shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of
some damnable reflection dropped by a drunken comrade.
Napoleon had incorporated these vigorous beings in the sixth of the
line, hoping to metamorphose them finally into generals,--barring those
whom the bullets might take off. But the emperor’s calculation was
scarcely fulfilled, except in the matter of the bullets. This regiment,
often decimated but always the same in character, acquired a great
reputation for valor in the field and for wickedness in private life.
At the siege of Tarragona it lost its celebrated hero, Bianchi, the man
who, during the campaign, had wagered that he would eat the heart of a
Spanish sentinel, and did eat it. Though Bianchi was the prince of the
devils incarnate to whom the regiment owed its dual reputation, he had,
nevertheless, that sort of chivalrous honor which excuses, in the army,
the worst excesses. In a word, he would have been, at an earlier period,
an admirable pirate. A few days before his death he distinguished
himself by a daring action which the marechal wished to reward. Bianchi
refused rank, pension, and additional decoration, asking, for sole
recompense, the favor of being the first to mount the breach at the
assault on Tarragona. The marechal granted the request and then forgot
his promise; but Bianchi forced him to remember Bianchi. The enraged
hero was the first to plant our flag on the wall, where he was shot by a
monk.
This historical digression was necessary, in order to explain how it was
that the 6th of the line was the regiment to enter Tarragona, and why
the disorder and confusion, natural enough in a city taken by storm,
degenerated for a time into a slight pillage.
This regiment possessed two officers, not at all remarkable among these
men of iron, who played, nevertheless, in the history we shall now
relate, a somewhat important part.
The first, a captain in the quartermaster’s department, an officer half
civil, half military, was considered, in soldier phrase, to be fighting
his own battle. He pretended bravery, boasted loudly of belonging to
the 6th of the line, twirled his moustache with the air of a man who was
ready to demolish everything; but his brother officers did not esteem
him. The fortune he possessed made him cautious. He was nicknamed, for
two reasons, “captain of crows.” In the first place, he could smell
powder a league off, and took wing at the sound of a musket; secondly,
the nickname was based on an innocent military pun, which his position
in the regiment warranted. Captain Montefiore, of the illustrious
Montefiore family of Milan (though the laws of the Kingdom of Italy
forbade him to bear his title in the French service) was one of the
handsomest men in the army. This beauty may have been among the secret
causes of his prudence on fighting days. A wound which might have
injured his nose, cleft his forehead, or scarred his cheek, would have
destroyed one of the most beautiful Italian faces which a woman ever
dreamed of in all its delicate proportions. This face, not unlike the
type which Girodet has given to the dying young Turk, in the “Revolt at
Cairo,” was instinct with that melancholy by which all women are more or
less duped.
The Marquis de Montefiore possessed an entailed property, but his income
was mortgaged for a number of years to pay off the costs of certain
Italian escapades which are inconceivable in Paris. He had ruined
himself in supporting a theatre at Milan in order to force upon a public
a very inferior prima donna, whom he was said to love madly. A fine
future was therefore before him, and he did not care to risk it for the
paltry distinction of a bit of red ribbon. He was not a brave man, but
he was certainly a philosopher; and he had precedents, if we may use so
parliamentary an expression. Did not Philip the Second register a vow
after the battle of Saint Quentin that never again would he put himself
under fire? And did not the Duke of Alba encourage him in thinking that
the worst trade in the world was the involuntary exchange of a crown
for a bullet? Hence, Montefiore was Philippiste in his capacity of rich
marquis and handsome man; and in other respects also he was quite as
profound a politician as Philip the Second himself. He consoled himself
for his nickname, and for the disesteem of the regiment by thinking
that his comrades were blackguards, whose opinion would never be of any
consequence to him if by chance they survived the present war, which
seemed to be one of extermination. He relied on his face to win him
promotion; he saw himself made colonel by feminine influence and a
carefully managed transition from captain of equipment to orderly
officer, and from orderly officer to aide-de-camp on the staff of some
easy-going marshal. By that time, he reflected, he should come into his
property of a hundred thousand scudi a year, some journal would speak of
him as “the brave Montefiore,” he would marry a girl of rank, and no one
would dare to dispute his courage or verify his wounds.
Captain Montefiore had one friend in the person of the quartermaster,
--a Provencal, born in the neighborhood of Nice, whose name was Diard.
A friend, whether at the galleys or in the garret of an artist, consoles
for many troubles. Now Montefiore and Diard were two philosophers, who
consoled each other for their present lives by the study of vice,
as artists soothe the immediate disappointment of their hopes by the
expectation of future fame. Both regarded the war in its results, not
its action; they simply considered those who died for glory fools.
Chance had made soldiers of them; whereas their natural proclivities
would have seated them at the green table of a congress. Nature had
poured Montefiore into the mould of a Rizzio, and Diard into that of
a diplomatist. Both were endowed with that nervous, feverish,
half-feminine organization, which is equally strong for good or evil,
and from which may emanate, according to the impulse of these singular
temperaments, a crime or a generous action, a noble deed or a base one.
The fate of such natures depends at any moment on the pressure, more
or less powerful, produced on their nervous systems by violent and
transitory passions.
Diard was considered a good accountant, but no soldier would have
trusted him with his purse or his will, possibly because of the
antipathy felt by all real soldiers against the bureaucrats. The
quartermaster was not without courage and a certain juvenile generosity,
sentiments which many men give up as they grow older, by dint of
reasoning or calculating. Variable as the beauty of a fair woman, Diard
was a great boaster and a great talker, talking of everything. He said
he was artistic, and he made prizes (like two celebrated generals) of
works of art, solely, he declared, to preserve them for posterity.
His military comrades would have been puzzled indeed to form a correct
judgment of him. Many of them, accustomed to draw upon his funds when
occasion obliged them, thought him rich; but in truth, he was a gambler,
and gamblers may be said to have nothing of their own. Montefiore was
also a gambler, and all the officers of the regiment played with the
pair; for, to the shame of men be it said, it is not a rare thing to
see persons gambling together around a green table who, when the game is
finished, will not bow to their companions, feeling no respect for them.
Montefiore was the man with whom Bianchi made his bet about the heart of
the Spanish sentinel.
Montefiore and Diard were among the last to mount the breach at
Tarragona, but the first in the heart of the town as soon as it was
taken. Accidents of this sort happen in all attacks, but with this pair
of friends they were customary. Supporting each other, they made their
way bravely through a labyrinth of narrow and gloomy little streets in
quest of their personal objects; one seeking for painted madonnas, the
other for madonnas of flesh and blood.
In what part of Tarragona it happened I cannot say, but Diard presently
recognized by its architecture the portal of a convent, the gate of
which was already battered in. Springing into the cloister to put a
stop to the fury of the soldiers, he arrived just in time to prevent two
Parisians from shooting a Virgin by Albano. In spite of the moustache
with which in their military fanaticism they had decorated her face, he
bought the picture. Montefiore, left alone during this episode, noticed,
nearly opposite the convent, the house and shop of a draper, from which
a shot was fired at him at the moment when his eyes caught a flaming
glance from those of an inquisitive young girl, whose head was advanced
under the shelter of a blind. Tarragona taken by assault, Tarragona
furious, firing from every window, Tarragona violated, with dishevelled
hair, and half-naked, was indeed an object of curiosity,--the curiosity
of a daring Spanish woman. It was a magnified bull-fight.
Montefiore forgot the pillage, and heard, for the moment, neither the
cries, nor the musketry, nor the growling of the artillery. The profile
of that Spanish girl was the most divinely delicious thing which he,
an Italian libertine, weary of Italian beauty, and dreaming of an
impossible woman because he was tired of all women, had ever seen.
He could still quiver, he, who had wasted his fortune on a thousand
follies, the thousand passions of a young and blase man--the most
abominable monster that society generates. An idea came into his head,
suggested perhaps by the shot of the draper-patriot, namely,--to set
fire to the house. But he was now alone, and without any means of
action; the fighting was centred in the market-place, where a few
obstinate beings were still defending the town. A better idea then
occurred to him. Diard came out of the convent, but Montefiore said not
a word of his discovery; on the contrary, he accompanied him on a series
of rambles about the streets. But the next day, the Italian had obtained
his military billet in the house of the draper,--an appropriate lodging
for an equipment captain!
The house of the worthy Spaniard consisted, on the ground-floor, of a
vast and gloomy shop, externally fortified with stout iron bars, such
as we see in the old storehouses of the rue des Lombards. This shop
communicated with a parlor lighted from an interior courtyard, a large
room breathing the very spirit of the middle-ages, with smoky old
pictures, old tapestries, antique “brazero,” a plumed hat hanging to
a nail, the musket of the guerrillas, and the cloak of Bartholo. The
kitchen adjoined this unique living-room, where the inmates took their
meals and warmed themselves over the dull glow of the brazier, smoking
cigars and discoursing bitterly to animate all hearts with hatred
against the French. Silver pitchers and precious dishes of plate and
porcelain adorned a buttery shelf of the old fashion. But the light,
sparsely admitted, allowed these dazzling objects to show but slightly;
all things, as in pictures of the Dutch school, looked brown, even the
faces. Between the shop and this living-room, so fine in color and
in its tone of patriarchal life, was a dark staircase leading to
a ware-room where the light, carefully distributed, permitted the
examination of goods. Above this were the apartments of the merchant and
his wife. Rooms for an apprentice and a servant-woman were in a garret
under the roof, which projected over the street and was supported by
buttresses, giving a somewhat fantastic appearance to the exterior of
the building. These chambers were now taken by the merchant and his
wife who gave up their own rooms to the officer who was billeted upon
them,--probably because they wished to avoid all quarrelling.
Montefiore gave himself out as a former Spanish subject, persecuted by
Napoleon, whom he was serving against his will; and these semi-lies
had the success he expected. He was invited to share the meals of the
family, and was treated with the respect due to his name, his birth,
and his title. He had his reasons for capturing the good-will of the
merchant and his wife; he scented his madonna as the ogre scented
the youthful flesh of Tom Thumb and his brothers. But in spite of
the confidence he managed to inspire in the worthy pair the latter
maintained the most profound silence as to the said madonna; and not
only did the captain see no trace of the young girl during the first day
he spent under the roof of the honest Spaniard, but he heard no sound
and came upon no indication which revealed her presence in that ancient
building. Supposing that she was the only daughter of the old couple,
Montefiore concluded they had consigned her to the garret, where, for
the time being, they made their home.
But no revelation came to betray the hiding-place of that precious
treasure. The marquis glued his face to the lozenge-shaped leaded panes
which looked upon the black-walled enclosure of the inner courtyard;
but in vain; he saw no gleam of light except from the windows of the old
couple, whom he could see and hear as they went and came and talked and
coughed. Of the young girl, not a shadow!
Montefiore was far too wary to risk the future of his passion by
exploring the house nocturnally, or by tapping softly on the doors.
Discovery by that hot patriot, the mercer, suspicious as a Spaniard
must be, meant ruin infallibly. The captain therefore resolved to wait
patiently, resting his faith on time and the imperfection of men, which
always results--even with scoundrels, and how much more with honest
men!--in the neglect of precautions.
The next day he discovered a hammock in the kitchen, showing plainly
where the servant-woman slept. As for the apprentice, his bed was
evidently made on the shop counter. During supper on the second day
Montefiore succeeded, by cursing Napoleon, in smoothing the anxious
forehead of the merchant, a grave, black-visaged Spaniard, much like the
faces formerly carved on the handles of Moorish lutes; even the wife let
a gay smile of hatred appear in the folds of her elderly face. The lamp
and the reflections of the brazier illumined fantastically the shadows
of the noble room. The mistress of the house offered a “cigarrito” to
their semi-compatriot. At this moment the rustle of a dress and the fall
of a chair behind the tapestry were plainly heard.
“Ah!” cried the wife, turning pale, “may the saints assist us! God grant
no harm has happened!”
“You have some one in the next room, have you not?” said Montefiore,
giving no sign of emotion.
The draper dropped a word of imprecation against the girls. Evidently
alarmed, the wife opened a secret door, and led in, half fainting, the
Italian’s madonna, to whom he was careful to pay no attention; only,
to avoid a too-studied indifference, he glanced at the girl before he
turned to his host and said in his own language:--
“Is that your daughter, signore?”
Perez de Lagounia (such was the merchant’s name) had large commercial
relations with Genoa, Florence, and Livorno; he knew Italian, and
replied in the same language:--
“No; if she were my daughter I should take less precautions. The child
is confided to our care, and I would rather die than see any evil happen
to her. But how is it possible to put sense into a girl of eighteen?”
“She is very handsome,” said Montefiore, coldly, not looking at her face
again.
“Her mother’s beauty is celebrated,” replied the merchant, briefly.
They continued to smoke, watching each other. Though Montefiore
compelled himself not to give the slightest look which might contradict
his apparent coldness, he could not refrain, at a moment when Perez
turned his head to expectorate, from casting a rapid glance at the young
girl, whose sparkling eyes met his. Then, with that science of vision
which gives to a libertine, as it does to a sculptor, the fatal power of
disrobing, if we may so express it, a woman, and divining her shape by
inductions both rapid and sagacious, he beheld one of those masterpieces
of Nature whose creation appears to demand as its right all the
happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun of Spain
had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of seraphic
calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused beneath
that diaphanous complexion,--due, perhaps, to the Moorish blood which
vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her head, fell
thence with black reflections round the delicate transparent ears and
defined the outlines of a blue-veined throat. These luxuriant locks
brought into strong relief the dazzling eyes and the scarlet lips of
a well-arched mouth. The bodice of the country set off the lines of
a figure that swayed as easily as a branch of willow. She was not the
Virgin of Italy, but the Virgin of Spain, of Murillo, the only artist
daring enough to have painted the Mother of God intoxicated with the joy
of conceiving the Christ,--the glowing imagination of the boldest and
also the warmest of painters.
In this young girl three things were united, a single one of which would
have sufficed for the glory of a woman: the purity of the pearl in the
depths of ocean; the sublime exaltation of the Spanish Saint Teresa; and
a passion of love which was ignorant of itself. The presence of such a
woman has the virtue of a talisman. Montefiore no longer felt worn and
jaded. That young girl brought back his youthful freshness.
But, though the apparition was delightful, it did not last. The girl was
taken back to the secret chamber, where the servant-woman carried to her
openly both light and food.
“You do right to hide her,” said Montefiore in Italian. “I will keep
your secret. The devil! we have generals in our army who are capable of
abducting her.”
Montefiore’s infatuation went so far as to suggest to him the idea of
marrying her. He accordingly asked her history, and Perez very willingly
told him the circumstances under which she had become his ward. The
prudent Spaniard was led to make this confidence because he had heard of
Montefiore in Italy, and knowing his reputation was desirous to let him
see how strong were the barriers which protected the young girl from the
possibility of seduction. Though the good-man was gifted with a certain
patriarchal eloquence, in keeping with his simple life and customs, his
tale will be improved by abridgment.
At the period when the French Revolution changed the manners and
morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a street
prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of its
fall. The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic adventures
and strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other woman of her
class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great lords struck with
her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged with gold and jewels
and all the delights of excessive wealth,--flowers, carriages, pages,
maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like those of Catherine II.); in
short, the life of a queen, despotic in her caprices and obeyed, often
beyond her own imaginings. Then, without herself, or any one, chemist,
physician, or man of science, being able to discover how her gold
evaporated, she would find herself back in the streets, poor, denuded of
everything, preserving nothing but her all-powerful beauty, yet living
on without thought or care of the past, the present, or the future.
Cast, in her poverty, into the hands of some poor gambling officer, she
attached herself to him as a dog to its master, sharing the discomforts
of the military life, which indeed she comforted, as content under the
roof of a garret as beneath the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and
Spanish both, she fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion,
and more than once she had said to love:--
“Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God.”
But this slime permeated with gold and perfumes, this careless
indifference to all things, these unbridled passions, these religious
beliefs cast into that heart like diamonds into mire, this life begun,
and ended, in a hospital, these gambling chances transferred to the
soul, to the very existence,--in short, this great alchemy, for which
vice lit the fire beneath the crucible in which fortunes were melted
up and the gold of ancestors and the honor of great names evaporated,
proceeded from a _cause_, a particular heredity, faithfully transmitted
from mother to daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman
was La Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the
idea, person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown
since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a
name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the constant
heredity of the same office devolving on the family.
Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which united
and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served to
express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of that
sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day can
give an idea. Ninon de l’Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone played,
in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas who, in
preceding centuries, gathered around them the cassock, gown, and
sword. An Imperia built I forget which church in Rome in a frenzy of
repentance, as Rhodope built, in earlier times, a pyramid in Egypt. The
name Marana, inflicted at first as a disgrace upon the singular family
with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its veritable
name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.
One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this event
was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it was in a moment
of repentance and melancholy, this Marana of the nineteenth century
stood with her feet in the slime and her head raised to heaven. She
cursed the blood in her veins, she cursed herself, she trembled lest she
should have a daughter, and she swore, as such women swear, on the honor
and with the will of the galleys--the firmest will, the most scrupulous
honor that there is on earth--she swore, before an altar, and believing
in that altar, to make her daughter a virtuous creature, a saint, and
thus to gain, after that long line of lost women, criminals in love, an
angel in heaven for them all.
The vow once made, the blood of the Maranas spoke; the courtesan
returned to her reckless life, a thought the more within her heart. At
last she loved, with the violent love of such women, as Henrietta Wilson
loved Lord Ponsonby, as Mademoiselle Dupuis loved Bolingbroke, as the
Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love, she adored
one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the virtues which
she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there was of vice
between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless marriage
unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to justify, but which
no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at last, that she had a
daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom to desire a noble life
and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy or not happy, opulent or
beggared, she had in her heart a pure, untainted sentiment, the highest
of all human feelings because the most disinterested. Love has its
egotism, but motherhood has none. La Marana was a mother like none
other; for, in her total, her eternal shipwreck, motherhood might still
redeem her. To accomplish sacredly through life the task of sending
a pure soul to heaven, was not that a better thing than a tardy
repentance? was it not, in truth, the only spotless prayer which she
could lift to God?
So, when this daughter, when her Marie-Juana-Pepita (she would fain have
given her all the saints in the calendar as guardians), when this dear
little creature was granted to her, she became possessed of so high an
idea of the dignity of motherhood that she entreated vice to grant her a
respite. She made herself virtuous and lived in solitude. No more fetes,
no more orgies, no more love. All joys, all fortunes were centred now
in the cradle of her child. The tones of that infant voice made an oasis
for her soul in the burning sands of her existence. That sentiment could
not be measured or estimated by any other. Did it not, in fact, comprise
all human sentiments, all heavenly hopes? La Marana was so resolved not
to soil her daughter with any stain other than that of birth, that she
sought to invest her with social virtues; she even obliged the young
father to settle a handsome patrimony upon the child and to give her
his name. Thus the girl was not know as Juana Marana, but as Juana di
Mancini.
Then, after seven years of joy, and kisses, and intoxicating happiness,
the time came when the poor Marana deprived herself of her idol. That
Juana might never bow her head under their hereditary shame, the mother
had the courage to renounce her child for her child’s sake, and to seek,
not without horrible suffering, for another mother, another home, other
principles to follow, other and saintlier examples to imitate. The
abdication of a mother is either a revolting act or a sublime one; in
this case, was it not sublime?
At Tarragona a lucky accident threw the Lagounias in her way, under
circumstances which enabled her to recognize the integrity of the
Spaniard and the noble virtue of his wife. She came to them at a time
when her proposal seemed that of a liberating angel. The fortune and
honor of the merchant, momentarily compromised, required a prompt and
secret succor. La Marana made over to the husband the whole sum she
had obtained of the father for Juana’s “dot,” requiring neither
acknowledgment nor interest. According to her own code of honor, a
contract, a trust, was a thing of the heart, and God its supreme
judge. After stating the miseries of her position to Dona Lagounia, she
confided her daughter and her daughter’s fortune to the fine old Spanish
honor, pure and spotless, which filled the precincts of that ancient
house. Dona Lagounia had no child, and she was only too happy to obtain
one to nurture. The mother then parted from her Juana, convinced that
the child’s future was safe, and certain of having found her a mother, a
mother who would bring her up as a Mancini, and not as a Marana.
Leaving her child in the simple modest house of the merchant where the
burgher virtues reigned, where religion and sacred sentiments and honor
filled the air, the poor prostitute, the disinherited mother was enabled
to bear her trial by visions of Juana, virgin, wife, and mother, a
mother throughout her life. On the threshold of that house Marana left a
tear such as the angels garner up.
Since that day of mourning and hope the mother, drawn by some invincible
presentiment, had thrice returned to see her daughter. Once when Juana
fell ill with a dangerous complaint:
“I knew it,” she said to Perez when she reached the house.
Asleep, she had seen her Juana dying. She nursed her and watched her,
until one morning, sure of the girl’s convalescence, she kissed her,
still asleep, on the forehead and left her without betraying whom she
was. A second time the Marana came to the church where Juana made her
first communion. Simply dressed, concealing herself behind a column, the
exiled mother recognized herself in her daughter such as she once had
been, pure as the snow fresh-fallen on the Alps. A courtesan even
in maternity, the Marana felt in the depths of her soul a jealous
sentiment, stronger for the moment than that of love, and she left
the church, incapable of resisting any longer the desire to kill Dona
Lagounia, as she sat there, with radiant face, too much the mother of
her child. A third and last meeting had taken place between mother and
daughter in the streets of Milan, to which city the merchant and his
wife had paid a visit. The Marana drove through the Corso in all
the splendor of a sovereign; she passed her daughter like a flash of
lightning and was not recognized. Horrible anguish! To this Marana,
surfeited with kisses, one was lacking, a single one, for which she
would have bartered all the others: the joyous, girlish kiss of a
daughter to a mother, an honored mother, a mother in whom shone all the
domestic virtues. Juana living was dead to her. One thought revived the
soul of the courtesan--a precious thought! Juana was henceforth safe.
She might be the humblest of women, but at least she was not what her
mother was--an infamous courtesan.
The merchant and his wife had fulfilled their trust with scrupulous
integrity. Juana’s fortune, managed by them, had increased tenfold.
Perez de Lagounia, now the richest merchant in the provinces, felt for
the young girl a sentiment that was semi-superstitious. Her money had
preserved his ancient house from dishonorable ruin, and the presence of
so precious a treasure had brought him untold prosperity. His wife, a
heart of gold, and full of delicacy, had made the child religious, and
as pure as she was beautiful. Juana might well become the wife of either
a great seigneur or a wealthy merchant; she lacked no virtue necessary
to the highest destiny. Perez had intended taking her to Madrid and
marrying her to some grandee, but the events of the present war delayed
the fulfilment of this project.
“I don’t know where the Marana now is,” said Perez, ending the above
history, “but in whatever quarter of the world she may be living, when
she hears of the occupation of our province by your armies, and of the
siege of Tarragona, she will assuredly set out at once to come here and
see to her daughter’s safety.”