sonorous and silvery voice, without drawling her words and breaking her phrases with virtuous sighs.
“This appeared to me in very good taste; I judged her from the first to be a woman of sense, as indeed she is.
“She was well made, with a very becoming hand and foot; her black costume was arranged with all possible coquettishness, and so gaily that the lugubriousness of the color completely disappeared, and she might have gone to a ball dressed as she was without any one considering it strange. If ever I marry and become a widow, I shall ask for a pattern of her dress, for it becomes her angelically.
“After some conversation we went up to see the old aunt.
“We found her seated in a large, easy-backed arm-chair, with a little stool under her foot, and beside her an old dog, bleared and sullen, which raised its black muzzle at our arrival, and greeted us with a very unfriendly growl.
“I have never looked at an old woman without horror. My mother died when quite young; no doubt, if I had seen her slowly growing old, and seen her features becoming distorted in an imperceptible progression, I should have quietly come to be used to it. In my childhood I was surrounded only by young and smiling faces, so that I have preserved an insurmountable antipathy towards old people. Hence I shuddered when the beautiful “widow” touched the dowager's yellow forehead with her pure, vermilion lips. It is what I could not undertake to do. I know that I shall be like her when I am sixty years old; but it is all the same, I cannot help it, and I pray God that He may make me die young like my mother.
“Nevertheless, this old woman had retained some simple and majestic traces of her former beauty which prevented her from falling into that roast-apple ugliness which is the portion of women. who have been only pretty or simply fresh; her eyes, though terminating at their corners in claws of wrinkles, and covered with large, soft eyelids, still possessed a few sparks of their early fire, and you could see that in the last reign they must have darted dazzling lightnings of passion. Her thin and delicate nose, somewhat curved like the beak of a bird of prey, gave to her profile a sort of serious grandeur, which was tempered by the indulgent smile of her Austrian lip, painted with carmine, after the fashion of the last century.
“Her costume was old-fashioned without being ridiculous, and was in perfect harmony with her face; for headdress she had a simple mob-cap, white, with small lace; her long, thin hands, which you could see had been very beautiful, trembled in mittens without either fingers or thumb; a dress of dead-leaf color, figured with flowerings of deeper hue, a black mantle and an apron of pigeon's neck paduasoy, completed her attire.
“Old women should always dress in this way, and have sufficient respect for their approaching death not to harness themselves with feathers, garlands of flowers, bright-colored ribbons, and a thousand baubles which are becoming only to extreme youth. It is vain for them to make advances to life, life will have no more of them; with the expenses to which they put themselves, they are like superannuated courtesans who plaster themselves with red and white, and are spurned on the pavement by drunken muleteers with kicks and insults.
“The old lady received us with that exquisite ease and politeness which is the gift of those who belonged to the old court, and the secret of which seemingly is being lost from day to day, like so many other excellent secrets, and with a voice which, broken and tremulous as it was, still possessed great sweetness.
“I appeared to please her greatly, and she looked at me for a very long time with much attention and with apparently deep emotion. A tear formed in the corner of her eye and crept slowly down one of her great wrinkles, wherein it was lost and dried. She begged me to excuse her and told me that I was very like a son of hers who had been killed in the army.
“Owing to this real or imaginary likeness, the whole time that I stayed at the mansion I was treated by the worthy dame with extraordinary and quite maternal kindness. I discovered more charms in her than I should have at first believed possible, for the greatest pleasure that elderly people can give me is never to speak to me, and to go away when I- arrive.
“I shall not give you a detailed account of my daily doings at B- If I have been somewhat diffuse through all this commencement, and have sketched you these two or three physiognomies of persons or places with some care, it is because some very singular though very natural things befell me there, things which I ought to have foreseen when assuming the dress of a man.
“My natural levity caused me to be guilty of an indiscretion of which I cruelly repent, for it has filled a good and beautiful soul with a perturbation which I cannot allay without discovering what I am and compromising myself seriously.
“In order to appear perfectly like a man, and to divert myself a little, I thought that I could not do better than woo my friend's sister. It appeared very funny to me to throw myself on all fours when she dropped her glove and restore it to her with profound obeisances, to bend over the back of her easy-chair with an adorably languorous little air, and to drop a thousand and one of the most charming madrigals into the hollow of her ear. As soon as she wished to pass from one room to another I would gracefully offer her my hand; if she mounted on horseback I held the stirrup, and when walking I was always by her side; in the evening I read to her and sang with her; in brief, I performed all the duties of a 'cavaliere servente' with 'scrupulous exactness.'
“I pretended everything that I had seen lovers do, which amused me and made me laugh like the true madcap that I am, when I was alone in my room, and reflected on all {he impertinent things I had just uttered in the most serious tone in the world. “Alcibiades and the old marchioness appeared to view this intimacy with pleasure and very often left us together. I sometimes regretted that I was not really a man, that I might have profited better by it; had I been one, the matter would have been in my own hands, for our charming widow seemed to have totally forgotten the deceased, or, if she did remember him, she would willingly have been faithless to his memory.
“After beginning in this fashion I could not honorably draw back again, and it was very difficult to effect a retreat with arms and baggage; yet I could not go beyond a certain limit, nor had I much knowledge of how to be amiable except in words; I hoped to be able to reach in this way the end of the month which I was to spend at B- and then to retire, promising to return, but without the intention of doing so. I thought that at my departure the fair one would console herself, and seeing me no more would soon forget me.
“But in my sport I had aroused a serious passion, and things turned out differently-an illustration of a long well-known truth, namely, that you should never play either with fire or with love.
“Before seeing me, Rosette knew nothing of love. Married very young to a man much older than herself, she had been unable to feel for him anything more than a sort of filial friendship; no doubt she had been courted, but, extraordinary as it may appear, she had not had a lover: either the gallants who had paid her attention were sorry seducers or, what is more likely, her hour had not yet struck. Country squires and lordlings, always talking of fumets and leashes, hog-steers and antlers, morts and stags of ten, and mingling the whole with almanac charades and madrigals mouldy with age, were certainly little adapted to suit her, and her virtue had not to struggle much to resist them.
“Besides, the natural gaiety and liveliness of her disposition were a sufficient defence to her against love, that soft passion which has such a hold upon the pensive and melancholy; the idea which her old Tithonus had been able to give her of voluptuousness must have been a very indifferent one not to cause her to be greatly tempted to make still further trials, and she was placidly enjoying the pleasure of being a widow so soon and having still so many years in which to be beautiful.
“But on my arrival everything was quite changed. I at first believed that if I had kept within the narrow limits of cold and scrupulous politeness towards her, she would not have taken much notice of me; but, in truth, the sequel obliged me to admit that it would have been just the same, neither more nor less, and that though my supposition was a very modest, it was a purely gratuitous one. Alas! nothing can turn aside the fatal ascendant, and no one can escape the good or evil influence of his star.
“Rosette's destiny was to love only once in her lifetime, and with an impossible love; she must fulfil it, and she will fulfil it.
“I have been loved, O Graciosa! and it is a sweet thing, though it was only by a woman, and though there was an element of pain in such an irregular love which cannot belong to the other;-oh! a very sweet thing! When you awake in the night and rise upon your elbow and say to yourself: 'Some one is thinking or dreaming of me; some one is occupied with my life; a movement of my eyes or lips makes the joy or the sadness of another creature; a word that I have chanced to let fall is carefully gathered up and commented on and turned over for whole hours; I am the pole to which a restless magnet points, my eye is a heaven, my mouth a paradise more desired than the true one; were I to die, a warm rain of tears would revive my ashes, and my tomb would be more
