OTHMAR
BY
OUIDA
'_I fear Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness_'
LYTTON
[Illustration]
_A NEW EDITION_
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1886
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 13
CHAPTER III. 19
CHAPTER IV. 29
CHAPTER V. 32
CHAPTER VI. 36
CHAPTER VII. 51
CHAPTER VIII. 59
CHAPTER IX. 70
CHAPTER X. 77
CHAPTER XI. 86
CHAPTER XII. 96
CHAPTER XIII. 105
CHAPTER XIV. 108
CHAPTER XV. 111
CHAPTER XVI. 117
CHAPTER XVII. 119
CHAPTER XVIII. 131
CHAPTER XIX. 142
CHAPTER XX. 148
CHAPTER XXI. 156
CHAPTER XXII. 160
CHAPTER XXIII. 168
CHAPTER XXIV. 172
CHAPTER XXV. 183
CHAPTER XXVI. 193
CHAPTER XXVII. 202
CHAPTER XXVIII. 207
CHAPTER XXIX. 215
CHAPTER XXX. 223
CHAPTER XXXI. 230
CHAPTER XXXII. 238
CHAPTER XXXIII. 249
CHAPTER XXXIV. 253
CHAPTER XXXV. 261
CHAPTER XXXVI. 274
CHAPTER XXXVII. 285
CHAPTER XXXVIII. 285
CHAPTER XXXIX. 300
CHAPTER XL. 302
CHAPTER XLI. 306
CHAPTER XLII. 312
CHAPTER XLIII. 321
CHAPTER XLIV. 335
CHAPTER XLV. 337
CHAPTER XLVI. 339
CHAPTER XLVII. 341
CHAPTER XLVIII. 346
CHAPTER XLIX. 354
CHAPTER L. 362
CHAPTER LI. 367
CHAPTER LII. 377
CHAPTER LIII. 382
CHAPTER LIV. 391
OTHMAR.
CHAPTER I.
Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court
of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and
tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal diversion
of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.
It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which
had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned
on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its
colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending
into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as
sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from
the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns
and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or
blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with
their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken
and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis
and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear
the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless
air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around
those forests, in '_le pays de rire et de ne rien faire_,' from many a
steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the
great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell
was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.
It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open; the chamber
of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, with grassy seats
raised around it, like the seats of an amphitheatre; an open space
where the forest joined the gardens, with walls, first of clipped bay,
and then of dense oak foliage, around it; the turf had been always
kept shorn and rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble
fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads,
bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of
grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love
just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same
oak-boughs.
'Why should we not hold one also? If we have advanced in anything,
since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hair-splitting.
We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only,
I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we
never or seldom do. They laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in
both; but we do neither, we are _gouailleurs_ always, which is not a
happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.'
So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word
being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o'clock
dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of
late summer in
The hush of old warm woods that lie
Low in the lap of evening, bright
And bathed in vast tranquillity.
She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel,
and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in
costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of
peacock's plumes.
'They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown at the fans,
'but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not know
anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.'
But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty,
so she had let them stay.
'We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in our
discussions,' she had said, 'that one note the more in decoration does
not matter;' and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne,
an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts
of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her
throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had
in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion.
'Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?' she had
objected; and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples,
that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on to that
gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head and his crimson
sash, and his blue eyes full of their and keen witty observation, and
his white hands folded together on his knee.
In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were ranged
the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the house party of
the château; great people all; all the women young and all the men
brilliant, no dull person amongst them, dulness being the one vice
condemned there without any chance of pardon. They were charming
people, distinguished people, handsome people also, and they made a gay
and gracious picture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose
on these grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both
Marguerites:
Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in letters of
gold, were embroidered the wise words, '_Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de
l'esprit!_'
'To return to our original demand--what is the definition of Love?'
asked their queen and president, turning her lovely eyes on to the
great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming gravity:
'Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the theme?'
She smiled a little. 'You know as much as Bembo knew,' she made answer.
'Ah no, Madame! The times are changed.'
'The times, perhaps; not human nature. However, this is the question
which must be first decided by the Court at large: How is the nature of
Love to be defined?'
A gentleman on her left murmured:
'No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn the poor
butterfly in pieces so often _sans merci_.'
'You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign, with
severity. 'The discussion is to be kept wholly free from all
personalities.'
'A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an Italian village
_festa_, in a free use of the knife all round.'
'If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of court, and shut
up in the library to write out Ovid's "Ars Amatoria." Once more, I
inquire, how are we to define Love?'
'It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.'
'That is merely begging the question,' said their Queen. 'One enjoys
music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a noble sonnet; but all
these things are nevertheless capable of analysis and of reduction to
known laws. So is Love. I ask once more: How is it to be defined? Does
no one seem to know? What curious ignorance!'
'In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexation; and
to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of personal
property in the creature loved.'
'That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general enough. You
must not separate the love of man and the love of woman. We speak of
Love general, human, concrete.'
'With all deference I would observe that, if we did not separate the
two, we should never arrive at any real definition at all, for Love
differs according to sex as much as the physiognomy or the costume.'
'Real Love is devotion!' said a beautiful blonde with blue eyes that
gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.
'Euh! euh!' murmured one impertinent.
'Oh, oh!' murmured another.
'_Ouiche!_' said a third under his breath.
The sovereign smiled ironically:
'Ah, my dear Duchesse! all _that_ died out with the poets of 1830. It
belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, looked at the moon,
and played the harp.'
'If I might venture on a definition in the _langue verte_,' suggested a
handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, 'though I fear I should
be turned out of Court as Rabelais and Scarron are turned out of the
drawing-room----'
'We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you the trouble to
say any more. If the definition of Love be, on the contrary, left to
me, I shall include it all in one word--Illusion.'
'That is a cruel statement!'
'It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily place in the
person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is fortunate enough
to resemble it superficially enough to delude us, unconsciously, into
doing so. You remember the hackneyed saying of the philosopher about
the real John--the John as he thinks himself to be, and the John as
others imagine him: it is never the real John that is loved; always an
imaginary one built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.'
'That is fancy, your Majesty; it is not love.'
'And what is love but fancy?--the fancy of attraction, the fancy of
selection; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to the brightest
plumaged mate?'
'I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based on
intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and contented, it
does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the passions. In any very
great love there is at the commencement a delighted sense of meeting
something long sought, some supplement of ourselves long desired in
vain. When this pleasure is based on the charm of some mind wholly akin
to our own, and filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the
intellect, there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight
should ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it
from those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the
prose of life entails.'
'You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary
euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré's ideal of bliss was to see
his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.'
'Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his
strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with
her irons would have become very tiresome to him.'
'What an argument in favour of ignorance!'
'Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird;
but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit
the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture
of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the
primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.'
'Is this a discussion on Love?'
'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out
of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated,
emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially
a _bourgeois_ ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation,
torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe.
There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate,
loathe, and spurn the _bourgeois_ ideal from their earliest times of
wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet
did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.'
The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.
'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the
Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to
cookery, flat-irons, and the _bourgeois_ ideal which I have always
understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting,
wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us
pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love
except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must
accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what
are its characteristics and its results.'
'The first is exigence and the second is _ennui_.'
'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'
'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be
an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a
state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'
'And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition
(regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous
concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'
'We are coming to the Italian _coltellate_! You both only mean that in
love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much
are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even
become malignity if it take a very severe form.'
'You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is
that inevitable to love?'
'It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is
so.'
'You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his
portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead.
The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.'
'It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'
'No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape
or dismiss.'
'My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'you wander too
far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient
die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of
his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill
sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.'
'For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one
given just now--sympathy.'
'The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy.
Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the
highest natures. They are not numerous.'
'No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest,
and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such
reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful
and foolish chatterbox, _tout en dehors_, and self-absorbed.'
'We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of Ronsard and
Petrarca.'
'And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, I should be
tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfection, the sense that
another life is absolutely necessary to our own, is lovely despite its
faults, and even in its follies is delightful and precious to us, we
cannot probably say why, and is to us as the earth to the moon, as the
moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night
to the flower.'
'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive
of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But----'
'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'
'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another
question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'
'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes
never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very
long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full
vigour.'
'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I
agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'
'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of
themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They
call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy,
but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'
'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of
cattle, sheep and man.'
'"_La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour
l'amour._" Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely
true. _Une bouffée de désir_, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of
mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting
star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy.
She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while
it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things
Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for
the _chambre meublée_, or at most for the _saison aux eaux_.'
'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice.
'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on"
with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned
and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread
and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and
deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have
two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get
passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the
passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on
some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some
fool.'
'That is only because all human life is a game of cross purposes; one
only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse the gods or make
them weep.'
'That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory analysis.
Besides, the world has been wondering about that ever since the
beginning of time, and has never received any answer to its queries.'
'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in lieu of
an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the Prince de Ligne's
"_Dans l'amour il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants_." In
the middle of the romance I see you all yawn, at the end you usually
quarrel. Some wise man--I forget who--has said that it requires much
more talent and much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably
than to begin it.'
'Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is easy to be
so.'
'Admit also that there are very few characters which will stand the
test of intimacy; very few minds of sufficient charm and originality to
be able to bear the strain of long and familiar intercourse.'
'What has the mind to do with it?'
'That question is flippant and even coarse. The mind has something to
do with it, even in animals; or why should the lion prefer one lioness
to another? When d'Aubiac went to the gallows kissing a tiny velvet
muff of Margaret de Valois, or when young Calixte de Montmorin knelt on
the scaffold pressing to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon which had
belonged to Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a
love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the senses.'
'It was a sentiment.'
'A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all fear of
death or personal regret. The muff, the ribbon, were symbols of an
imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles, like Psyche's
butterfly, were representative of an immortal element in mortal life
and mortal feeling.'
'M. de Béthune would go to the scaffold like that himself,' said the
sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indulgent derision.
'And our lady,' hinted the Duc de Béthune, 'forgets her own rule, that
all personalities are forbidden.'
'It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have not also
the power to transgress them. Well, if immortality is to enter into
love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded every day, but
every day one is liable to be bored. _J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec
de l'esprit._ Every intellectual person must exact that. To worship
my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue my patience and my ear. The
majority of people divorce love and wit. They are very wrong. It is
only wit which can tell love when he has gone too far, or is losing
ground, has repeated himself _ad nauseam_, or requires absence to
restore his charm.'
'_Ah, Majesté!_ by the time he has become such a philosopher has he not
ceased to be love at all?'
'Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court expressly for
the truth it contains. Why does most love end so drearily in a sudden
death by quarrelling or in a lingering death by tedium? Because it
has had no wit, no judgment, no reserve, no skill. By way of showing
itself to be eternal, it has hammered itself into pieces on the rock
of repetition. _Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit!_ What a world of
endured _ennui_ sighs forth in that appeal!'
'No woman upon earth has had so much love given her as the châtelaine
of Amyôt, and no woman on earth ever viewed love with such unkind and
airy contempt.'
She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusation.
'She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks down on the
weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by them,' said the Duc de
Béthune.
She replied again, '_Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit._'
'It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon amusement than
upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what may have the good fortune
to be considered "_esprit_" by her? I fear she finds us all very dull
to-day.'
'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.'
'Your heaviest word of censure!'
'To return to our theme: do you not punish inconstancy?'
'Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly
involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second, if any
one be so stupid that he or she cannot keep the affections they have
once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim no pity.'
'Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited fate?'
'Unmerited--no. They have not known how to keep what they had got.
Probably they have worried it till it escaped in desperation, as a
child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes itself through
the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself on the road to the
certainty of being strangled in prison.'
'Who would not prefer it?'
'The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales of
proportion are weighted unevenly: there is generally one lighter than
the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great nature; say it is a
strong passion and a passing caprice; say it is a profound temperament
and a shallow one; in some way or other the scales are almost always
imperfectly adjusted. When they are quite even--which happens once
out of a million times--then there is a great and felicitous love; an
exquisite and imperishable sympathy.'
'But who holds these magical scales? It is the holder who is
responsible.'
'The holder is Fate.'
'Chance.'
'Opportunity.'
'Destiny.'
'Predestination.'
'Circumstance.'
'Affinity.'
'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect
love is the result.'
'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two
roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel; perhaps
the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an earthly
paradise.'
'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'
'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'
'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or
commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'
'Nay, _Majesté_; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest
dilemma of Love?'
'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'
'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'
'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's
conscience.'
'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'
'Whoever loves most loves longest.'
'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'
'How is that to be explained?'
'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain
everything.'
'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least loved
is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'
'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'
'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'
'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which
gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one
side the pleasure also is one-sided.'
'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than Dante?'
'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed--the
difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider that
you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is the
greatest dilemma of Love?'
'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown
old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another passion newly come
thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of April in its sunny hair.'
'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case? Shall
he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'
'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the thinner
and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame passion grow.'
'And the newly-come one?'
'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with
the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until
he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his
flowers are dead.'
'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'
'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love,
with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of itself,
before it dies.'
'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love
at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy,
masquerading in his dress.'
'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal forms?'
'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of
self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of
insignificance; the _memento mori_ which is always with us. And yet
we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will
make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the
knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can be _gouailleur_, but we
cannot be gay if we would.'
'There is too great a tendency here to use _gros mots_--devotion,
death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which
wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I
think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have
all read too much German philosophy.'
'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the shades
of Brantôme.'
'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court
to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid
ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this:
that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist
the moment it is contented.'
'A cruel sentence, Madame!'
'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'
When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through all
the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for that
day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as the chimes
of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.
'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the queen,
as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the smooth turf.
'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and nobody has ever
thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'
'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so, had he
been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.
She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the
network of green leaves:
'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice between
an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious dilemma to him.
Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even if he be buried
with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'
'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'
'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. _Tout
cela pourrira._ It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the
consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past him.'
She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall heads
of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.
'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with contrition
and mortification.
'That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.
As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland was a herd
of cows and calves already passing away in the distance, going to their
byres; far behind them, lingering willingly, were the herdsman and his
love; he a comely lad in a blue blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling
buxom maiden with dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing
like a 'Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.'
'Lubin and Lisette,' said Béthune with a smile, 'practically
illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-drawing
of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer than we to the
story-tellers of the Heptameron.'
The châtelaine of Amyôt looked at the two rustic lovers with a little
wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.
They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the rose-glow of
evening illumined their interlaced figures as they followed their cows.
'"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted. 'I suppose
that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to think that love as a
sentiment is the product of education. The cows know almost as much of
it as your Lubin and Lisette.'
'Brandès says,' observed one of her party, 'that love as a sentiment
was always unknown in a state of nature, and was only created with the
first petticoat. Petticoats have invariably been responsible for a
great deal. They ruined France, according to the Great Frederic; but
if they have raised us from the level of the cattle they have redeemed
their repute.'
'Poor cattle! They have as much poetry in their eyes as there is in the
Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are _Naturkinder_; but when both a cow
and Lisette become the property of Lubin, he will assign the higher
place to the first, both in life and in death.'
'Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so apropos an
instant,' she answered with, a little smile. 'Perhaps the only word of
truth that has been said in the whole discussion was the quotation:
"_Il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants!_"'
The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke opened into
an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the branches meeting and
interlacing overhead until the opening at the farther end looked like
an arched doorway closing a cathedral aisle. The archway was filled
with dim golden suffused light, and within that archway of twilight and
golden haze there rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain;
it was the first of the _grandes eaux_ of the garden of Amyôt. And the
sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the Princess
Napraxine.