“Why, dear sovereign, have you the chaste and serious air of an antique Diana now, when we should rather have the smiling lips of Venus rising from the sea?”
“You see, D'Albert, it is because I am more like the huntress Diana than anything else. When very young I assumed man's attire for reasons which it would be tedious and useless to tell you. You alone have divined my sex, and, if I have made conquests, they have only been over women, — very superfluous conquests, which have embarrassed me more than once. In a word, although it is an incredible and ridiculous thing, I am virgin, — as virgin as the snow on Himalaya, as the Moon before she had affiliated with Endymion, and I am grave as every one is when about to do a thing on which it is impossible to go back. It is a metamorphosis, a transformation that I am about to undergo: to change the name of girl into the name of woman, to no longer have to-morrow what I had yesterday; something that I did not know and that I am going to learn, an important page turned in the book of life. It is for that reason that I look sad, my friend, and not on account of any fault of yours.”
As she said this she parted the young man's long hair with her two beautiful hands, and laid her softly puckered lips upon his pale forehead.
D'Albert, singularly moved by the gentle and solemn tone in which she uttered this long speech, took her hands and kissed the fingers one after another; then very delicately broke the lacing of her dress so that the corsage opened and the two white treasures appeared in all their splendor: upon the bosom which was as sparkling and as clear as silver bloomed the two beautiful roses of paradise. He pressed their vermilion points lightly in his mouth, and thus went over the whole outline. Rosalind submitted with exhaustless complaisance, and tried to return his caresses as exactly as possible.
“You must find me very awkward and cold, my poor D'Albert; but I scarcely know how to set about it. You will have a great deal to do to teach me, and really I am imposing a very, laborious task upon you.
D'Albert made the simplest reply, he did not reply at all; and, straining her in his arms with fresh passion, he covered her bare shoulders and breast with kisses. The hair of the half-swooning infanta became loosened, and her dress fell to her feet as though by enchantment. She remained quite upright like a white apparition in a simple chemise of the most transparent linen. The blissful lover knelt down, and had soon thrown the two pretty little red- heeled shoes into an opposite corner of the apartment; the stockings with embroidered clocks followed close after them.
The chemise, gifted with a happy spirit of imitation, did not remain long behind the dress; it first slipped from the shoulders without there being any thought of checking it; then, taking advantage of a moment when the arms were perpendicular, it very cleverly came off them and rolled as far as the hips whose undulating outline partially checked it. Rosalind then perceived the perfidiousness of her last garment, and raised her knee a little to prevent it from falling altogether. In this pose she was exactly like those marble statues of goddesses whose intelligent drapery, sorry to cover up so many charms, envelops them with regret, and by a happy piece of treachery stops just below the part that it is intended to conceal. But, as the chemise was not of marble and its folds did not support it, it continued its triumphant descent, sank down altogether upon the dress, and lay round about its mistress's feet like a large white greyhound.
There was certainly a very simple means of preventing all this disorder, namely, to check the fugitive with the hand: this idea, natural as it was, did not occur to our modest heroine.
She remained, then, without any covering, her fallen garments forming a sort of pedestal for her, in all the diaphanous splendor of her beautiful nakedness, beneath the soft light of an alabaster lamp which D'Albert had lighted.
D'Albert, who was dazzled, gazed upon her with rapture.
“I am cold,” she said, crossing her hands upon her shoulders.
“Oh! pray! one minute more!”
Rosalind uncrossed her hands, leant the tip of her finger upon the back of an easy-chair and stood motionless; she gave a slight movement to her hips in such a way as to bring out all the richness of the waving line; she did not appear at all embarrassed, and the imperceptible rose of her cheeks was not a shade deeper: only the somewhat quickened beating of her heart caused the outline of her left breast to tremble.
The young enthusiast for beauty could not sufficiently feast his eyes on such a spectacle; we must say, to Rosalind's boundless praise, that this time the reality was beyond his dream, and that he did not experience the slightest deception.
Everything was united in the beautiful form standing before him-delicacy and strength, grace and color, the lines of a Greek statue of the best period and the tone of a Titian. There he saw, palpable and crystallized, the cloudy chimera that he had so often vainly sought to stay in its flight; he was not obliged, in the manner he used to complain of to his friend Silvio, to limit his gaze to a certain fairly well-formed part and not stray beyond it, on pain of seeing something frightful, and his amorous eye passed down from the head to the feet and ascended again from the feet to the head, and was ever sweetly soothed by a correct and harmonious form.
The limbs were proudly and superbly turned, the knees were admirably pure, the ankles elegant and slender, the arms and shoulders of the most magnificent character, the skin as lustrous as an agate, the bosom enough to make gods come down from heaven to kiss it; a torrent of beautiful brown hair slightly crisped, such as we see on the heads by the old masters, fell in little waves along an ivory back whose whiteness it brought out in wonderful relief.
The painter satisfied, the lover resumed the ascendancy; for, whatever love a man may have for art, there are things that he cannot long be satisfied with looking at.
He took up the fair one in his arms and bore her to the couch.
Our fair reader would possibly pout at her lover if we revealed to her the sum total of the lessons imparted by D'Albert's love, assisted by Rosalind's curiosity. Let her recall the best occupied and most charming of her nights, the night which would be remembered a hundred thousand days, did not death come before; let her lay her book aside and compute on the tips of her pretty white fingers how many times she was loved by him who loved her most, and thus fill up the void left by us in this glorious history.
Rosalind was prodigiously apt, and made enormous progress in that single night. The ingenuousness of body which was astonished at everything, and the rakishness of mind which was astonished at nothing, formed the most piquant and adorable contrast. D'Albert was ravished, distracted, transported, and would have wished the night to last forty-eight hours, like that in which Hercules was conceived. However, towards morning, in spite of a multitude of kisses, caresses, and the most amorous endearments in the world, well adapted to keep one awake, he finally found himself obliged to take some little repose. A soft and voluptuous sleep touched his eyes with the tip of its wing, his head drooped, and he slumbered between the breasts of his beautiful mistress. The latter contemplated him for some time with an air of melancholy and profound thought; then, as the dawn shot its whitish rays through the curtains, she gently raised him, laid him beside her, stood up, and passed lightly over his body.
She went to her clothes and dressed again in haste, then returned to the bed, leaned over D'Albert who was still asleep, and kissed both his eyes on their long and silky lashes. This done, she withdrew backwards, still looking at him.
Instead of returning to her own room she entered Rosette's. What she there said and did I have never been able to ascertain, although I have made the most conscientious researches. Neither in Graciosa's papers, nor in those belonging to D'Albert and Silvio, have I found anything having relation to this visit. Only, a maid of Rosette's informed me of the following singular circumstance: although her mistress had not slept with her lover that night, the bed was disturbed and tossed and bore the impress of two bodies. Further, she showed me two pearls, exactly similar to those worn in his hair by Theodore when acting the part of Rosalind. She had found them in the bed when making it I leave this remark to the reader's sagacity, and give him liberty to draw thence any inferences that he likes; for myself, I have made a thousand conjectures about it, each more unreasonable than the rest, and so absurd that I really dare not write them even in the most virtuously periphrastic style.
It was quite noon when Theodore left Rosette's room. He did not appear at dinner or supper. D'Albert and Rosette did not seem at all surprised at this. He went to bed very early, and the following morning, as soon as it was light, without giving notice to any one, he saddled his page's horse and his own, and left the mansion, telling a footman that they were not to wait dinner for him, and that he might perhaps not return for a few days.
D'Albert and Rosette were extremely astonished, and did not know how to account for this strange disappearance, especially D'Albert, who decidedly thought that his behavior on the first night had entitled him to a second. Towards the end of the week, the unhappy, disappointed lover received from Theodore a letter, which we
