Kitobni o'qish: «The Martian: A Novel»

"BARTY JOSSELIN IS NO MORE…"

When so great a man dies, it is generally found that a tangled growth of more or less contentious literature has already gathered round his name during his lifetime. He has been so written about, so talked about, so riddled with praise or blame, that, to those who have never seen him in the flesh, he has become almost a tradition, a myth – and one runs the risk of losing all clew to his real personality.

This is especially the case with the subject of this biography – one is in danger of forgetting what manner of man he was who has so taught and touched and charmed and amused us, and so happily changed for us the current of our lives.

He has been idealized as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self‐indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker of practical jokes.

He was in reality the simplest, the most affectionate, and most good‐natured of men, the very soul of honor, the best of husbands and fathers and friends, the most fascinating companion that ever lived, and one who kept to the last the freshness and joyous spirits of a school-boy and the heart of a child; one who never said or did an unkind thing; probably never even thought one. Generous and open‐handed to a fault, slow to condemn, quick to forgive, and gifted with a power of immediately inspiring affection and keeping it forever after, such as I have never known in any one else, he grew to be (for all his quick‐tempered impulsiveness) one of the gentlest and meekest and most humble‐minded of men!

On me, a mere prosperous tradesman, and busy politician and man of the world, devolves the delicate and responsible task of being the first to write the life of the greatest literary genius this century has produced, and of revealing the strange secret of that genius, which has lighted up the darkness of these latter times as with a pillar of fire by night.

This extraordinary secret has never been revealed before to any living soul but his wife and myself. And that is one of my qualifications for this great labor of love.

Another is that for fifty years I have known him as never a man can quite have known his fellow‐man before – that for all that time he has been more constantly and devotedly loved by me than any man can ever quite have been loved by father, son, brother, or bosom friend.

Good heavens! Barty, man and boy, Barty's wife, their children, their grandchildren, and all that ever concerned them or concerns them still – all this has been the world to me, and ever will be.

He wished me to tell the absolute truth about him, just as I know it; and I look upon the fulfilment of this wish of his as a sacred trust, and would sooner die any shameful death or brave any other dishonor than fail in fulfilling it to the letter.

The responsibility before the world is appalling; and also the difficulty, to a man of such training as mine. I feel already conscious that I am trying to be literary myself, to seek for turns of phrase that I should never have dared to use in talking to Barty, or even in writing to him; that I am not at my ease, in short – not me– but straining every nerve to be on my best behavior; and that's about the worst behavior there is.

Oh! may some kindly light, born of a life's devotion and the happy memories of half a century, lead me to mere naturalness and the use of simple homely words, even my own native telegraphese! that I may haply blunder at length into some fit form of expression which Barty himself might have approved.

One would think that any sincere person who has learnt how to spell his own language should at least be equal to such a modest achievement as this; and yet it is one of the most difficult things in the world!

My life is so full of Barty Josselin that I can hardly be said to have ever had an existence apart from his; and I can think of no easier or better way to tell Barty's history than just telling my own – from the days I first knew him – and in my own way; that is, in the best telegraphese I can manage – picking each precious word with care, just as though I were going to cable it, as soon as written, to Boston or New York, where the love of Barty Josselin shines with even a brighter and warmer glow than here, or even in France; and where the hate of him, the hideous, odious odium theologicum – the sæva indignatio of the Church – that once burned at so white a heat, has burnt itself out at last, and is now as though it had never been, and never could be again.

P. S. – (an after‐thought):

And here, in case misfortune should happen to me before this book comes out as a volume, I wish to record my thanks to my old friend Mr. du Maurier for the readiness with which he has promised to undertake, and the conscientiousness with which he will have performed, his share of the work as editor and illustrator.

I also wish to state that it is to my beloved god‐daughter, Roberta Beatrix Hay (née Josselin), that I dedicate this attempt at a biographical sketch of her illustrious father.

Robert Maurice.

Part First

 
"De Paris à Versailles, loo, là,
De Paris à Versailles —
Il y a de belles allées,
Vive le Roi de France!
Il y a de belles allées,
Vivent les écoliers!"
 

One sultry Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1847 I sat at my desk in the junior school‐room, or salle d'études des petits, of the Institution F. Brossard, Rond‐point de l'Avenue de St.‐Cloud; or, as it is called now, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne – or, as it was called during the Second Empire, Avenue du Prince Impérial, or else de l'Impératrice; I'm not sure.

There is not much stability in such French names, I fancy; but their sound is charming, and always gives me the nostalgia of Paris – Royal Paris, Impérial Paris, Republican Paris!.. whatever they may call it ten or twelve years hence. Paris is always Paris, and always will be, in spite of the immortal Haussmann, both for those who love it and for those who don't.

All the four windows were open. Two of them, freely and frankly, on to the now deserted play‐ground, admitting the fragrance of lime and syringa and lilac, and other odors of a mixed quality.

Two other windows, defended by an elaborate network of iron wire and a formidable array of spiked iron rails beyond, opened on to the Rond‐point, or meeting of the cross‐roads – one of which led northeast to Paris through the Arc de Triomphe; the other three through woods and fields and country lanes to such quarters of the globe as still remain. The world is wide.

In the middle of this open space a stone fountain sent up a jet of water three feet high, which fell back with a feeble splash into the basin beneath. There was comfort in the sound on such a hot day, and one listened for it half unconsciously; and tried not to hear, instead, Weber's "Invitation à la Valse," which came rippling in intermittent waves from the open window of the distant parloir, where Chardonnet was practising the piano.

 
"Tum‐te‐dum‐tum‐tum …
Tum‐te‐dum‐di, diddle‐iddle um!"
 

e da capo, again and again. Chardonnet was no heaven‐born musician.

Monsieur Bonzig – or "le Grand Bonzig," as he was called behind his back – sat at his table on the estrade, correcting the exercises of the eighth class (huitième), which he coached in Latin and French. It was the lowest class in the school; yet one learnt much in it that was of consequence; not, indeed, that Balbus built a wall – as I'm told we learn over here (a small matter to make such a fuss about, after so many years) – but that the Lord made heaven and earth in six days, and rested on the seventh.

He (Monsieur Bonzig) seemed hot and weary, as well he might, and sighed, and looked up every now and then to mop his brow and think. And as he gazed into the green and azure depths beyond the north window, his dark brown eyes quivered and vibrated from side to side through his spectacles with a queer quick tremolo, such as I have never seen in any eyes but his.

About five‐and‐twenty boys sat at their desks; boys of all ages between seven and fourteen – many with closely cropped hair, "à la malcontent," like nice little innocent convicts; and nearly all in blouses, mostly blue; some with their garments loosely flowing; others confined at the waist by a tricolored ceinture de gymnastique, so deep and stiff it almost amounted to stays.

As for the boys themselves, some were energetic and industrious – some listless and lazy and lolling, and quite languid with the heat – some fidgety and restless, on the lookout for excitement of any kind: a cab or carriage raising the dust on its way to the Bois – a water‐cart laying it (there were no hydrants then); a courier bearing royal despatches, or a mounted orderly; the Passy omnibus, to or fro every ten or twelve minutes; the marchand de coco with his bell; a regiment of the line with its band; a chorus of peripatetic Orphéonistes – a swallow, a butterfly, a humblebee; a far‐off balloon, oh, joy! – any sight or sound to relieve the tedium of those two mortal school‐hours that dragged their weary lengths from half past one till half past three – every day but Sunday and Thursday.

(Even now I find the early afternoon a little trying to wear through without a nap, say from two to four.)

At 3.30 there would come a half‐hour's interval of play, and then the class of French literature from four till dinner‐time at six – a class that was more than endurable on account of the liveliness and charm of Monsieur Durosier, who journeyed all the way from the Collége de France every Saturday afternoon in June and July to tell us boys of the quatrième all about Villon and Ronsard, and Marot and Charles d'Orléans (exceptis excipiendis, of course), and other pleasant people who didn't deal in Greek or Latin or mathematics, and knew better than to trouble themselves overmuch about formal French grammar and niggling French prosody.

Besides, everything was pleasant on a Saturday afternoon on account of the nearness of the day of days —

 
"And that's the day that comes between
The Saturday and Monday"…
 

in France.

I had just finished translating my twenty lines of Virgil —

 
"Infandum, regina, jubes renovare," etc.
 

Oh, crimini, but it was hot! and how I disliked the pious Æneas! I couldn't have hated him worse if I'd been poor Dido's favorite younger brother (not mentioned by Publius Vergilius Maro, if I remember).

Palaiseau, who sat next to me, had a cold in his head, and kept sniffing in a manner that got on my nerves.

"Mouche‐toi donc, animal!" I whispered; "tu me dégoûtes, à la fin!"

Palaiseau always sniffed, whether he had a cold or not.

"Taisez‐vous, Maurice – ou je vous donne cent vers à copier!" said M. Bonzig, and his eyes quiveringly glittered through his glasses as he fixed me.

Palaiseau, in his brief triumph, sniffed louder.

"Palaiseau," said Monsieur Bonzig, "si vous vous serviez de votre mouchoir – hein? Je crois que cela ne gênerait personne!" (If you were to use your pocket‐handkerchief – eh? I don't think it would inconvenience anybody!)

At this there was a general titter all round, which was immediately suppressed, as in a court of law; and Palaiseau reluctantly and noisily did as he was told.

In front of me that dishonest little sneak Rapaud, with a tall parapet of books before him to serve as a screen, one hand shading his eyes, and an inkless pen in the other, was scratching his copy‐book with noisy earnestness, as if time were too short for all he had to write about the pious Æneas's recitative, while he surreptitiously read the Comte de Monte Cristo, which lay open in his lap – just at the part where the body, sewn up in a sack, was going to be hurled into the Mediterranean. I knew the page well. There was a splash of red ink on it.

It made my blood boil with virtuous indignation to watch him, and I coughed and hemmed again and again to attract his attention, for his back was nearly towards me. He heard me perfectly, but took no notice whatever, the deceitful little beast. He was to have given up Monte Cristo to me at half‐past two, and here it was twenty minutes to three! Besides which, it was my Monte Cristo, bought with my own small savings, and smuggled into school by me at great risk to myself.

"Maurice!" said M. Bonzig.

"Oui, m'sieur!" said I. I will translate:

"You shall conjugate and copy out for me forty times the compoundverb, 'I cough without necessity to distract the attention of my comrade Rapaud from his Latin exercise!'"

"Moi, m'sieur?" I ask, innocently.

"Oui, vous!"

"Bien, m'sieur!"

Just then there was a clatter by the fountain, and the shrill small pipe of D'Aurigny, the youngest boy in the school, exclaimed:

"Hé! Hé! Oh là là! Le Roi qui passe!"

And we all jumped up, and stood on forms, and craned our necks to see Louis Philippe I. and his Queen drive quickly by in their big blue carriage and four, with their two blue‐and‐silver liveried outriders trotting in front, on their way from St.‐Cloud to the Tuileries.

"Sponde! Sélancy! fermez les fenêtres, ou je vous mets tous au pain sec pour un mois!" thundered M. Bonzig, who did not approve of kings and queens – an appalling threat which appalled nobody, for when he forgot to forget he always relented; for instance, he quite forgot to insist on that formidable compound verb of mine.

Suddenly the door of the school‐room flew open, and the tall, portly figure of Monsieur Brossard appeared, leading by the wrist a very fair‐haired boy of thirteen or so, dressed in an Eton jacket and light blue trousers, with a white chimney‐pot silk hat, which he carried in his hand – an English boy, evidently; but of an aspect so singularly agreeable one didn't need to be English one's self to warm towards him at once.

"Monsieur Bonzig, and gentlemen!" said the head master (in French, of course). "Here is the new boy; he calls himself Bartholomiou Josselin. He is English, but he knows French as well as you. I hope you will find in him a good comrade, honorable and frank and brave, and that he will find the same in you. – Maurice!" (that was me).

"Oui, m'sieur!"

"I specially recommend Josselin to you."

"Moi, m'sieur?"

"Yes, you; he is of your age, and one of your compatriots. Don't forget."

"Bien, m'sieur."

"And now, Josselin, take that vacant desk, which will be yours henceforth. You will find the necessary books and copy‐books inside; you will be in the fifth class, under Monsieur Dumollard. You will occupy yourself with the study of Cornelius Nepos, the commentaries of Cæsar, and Xenophon's retreat of the ten thousand. Soyez diligent et attentif, mon ami; à plus tard!"

He gave the boy a friendly pat on the cheek and left the room.

Josselin walked to his desk and sat down, between d'Adhémar and Laferté, both of whom were en cinquième. He pulled a Cæsar out of his desk and tried to read it. He became an object of passionate interest to the whole school‐room, till M. Bonzig said:

"The first who lifts his eyes from his desk to stare at 'le nouveau' shall be au piquet for half an hour!" (To be au piquet is to stand with your back to a tree for part of the following play‐time; and the play‐time which was to follow would last just thirty minutes.)

Presently I looked up, in spite of piquet, and caught the new boy's eye, which was large and blue and soft, and very sad and sentimental, and looked as if he were thinking of his mammy, as I did constantly of mine during my first week at Brossard's, three years before.

Soon, however, that sad eye slowly winked at me, with an expression so droll that I all but laughed aloud.

Then its owner felt in the inner breast pocket of his Eton jacket with great care, and delicately drew forth by the tail a very fat white mouse, that seemed quite tame, and ran up his arm to his wide shirt collar, and tried to burrow there; and the boys began to interest themselves breathlessly in this engaging little quadruped.

M. Bonzig looked up again, furious; but his spectacles had grown misty from the heat and he couldn't see, and he wiped them; and meanwhile the mouse was quickly smuggled back to its former nest.

Josselin drew a large clean pocket‐handkerchief from his trousers and buried his head in his desk, and there was silence.

"La! – ré, fa! – la! – ré" —

So strummed, over and over again, poor Chardonnet in his remote parlor – he was getting tired.

I have heard "L'Invitation à la Valse" many hundreds of times since then, and in many countries, but never that bar without thinking of Josselin and his little white mouse.

"Fermez votre pupitre, Josselin," said M. Bonzig, after a few minutes.

Josselin shut his desk and beamed genially at the usher.

"What book have you got there, Josselin – Cæsar or Cornelius Nepos?"

Josselin held the book with its title‐page open for M. Bonzig to read.

"Are you dumb, Josselin? Can't you speak?"

Josselin tried to speak, but uttered no sound.

"Josselin, come here – opposite me."

Josselin came and stood opposite M. Bonzig and made a nice little bow.

"What have you got in your mouth, Josselin – chocolate? – barley‐sugar? – caoutchouc? – or an India‐rubber ball?"

Josselin shrugged his shoulders and looked pensive, but spoke never a word.

"Open quick the mouth, Josselin!"

And Monsieur Bonzig, leaning over the table, deftly put his thumb and forefinger between the boy's lips, and drew forth slowly a large white pocket‐handkerchief, which seemed never to end, and threw it on the floor with solemn dignity.

The whole school‐room was convulsed with laughter.

"Josselin – leave the room – you will be severely punished, as you deserve – you are a vulgar buffoon – a jo‐crisse – a paltoquet, a mountebank! Go, petit polisson – go!"

The polisson picked up his pocket‐handkerchief and went-quite quietly, with simple manly grace; and that's the first I ever saw of Barty Josselin – and it was some fifty years ago.

At 3.30 the bell sounded for the half‐hour's recreation, and the boys came out to play.

Josselin was sitting alone on a bench, thoughtful, with his hand in the inner breast pocket of his Eton jacket.

M. Bonzig went straight to him, buttoned up and severe – his eyes dancing, and glancing from right to left through his spectacles; and Josselin stood up very politely.

"Sit down!" said M. Bonzig; and sat beside him, and talked to him with grim austerity for ten minutes or more, and the boy seemed very penitent and sorry.

Presently he drew forth from his pocket his white mouse, and showed it to the long usher, who looked at it with great seeming interest for a long time, and finally took it into the palm of his own hand – where it stood on its hind legs – and stroked it with his little finger.

Soon Josselin produced a small box of chocolate drops, which he opened and offered to M. Bonzig, who took one and put it in his mouth, and seemed to like it. Then they got up and walked to and fro together, and the usher put his arm round the boy's shoulder, and there was peace and good‐will between them; and before they parted Josselin had intrusted his white mouse to "le grand Bonzig" – who intrusted it to Mlle. Marceline, the head lingère, a very kind and handsome person, who found for it a comfortable home in an old bonbon‐box lined with blue satin, where it had a large family and fed on the best, and lived happily ever after.

But things did not go smoothly for Josselin all that Saturday afternoon. When Bonzig left, the boys gathered round "le nouveau," large and small, and asked questions. And just before the bell sounded for French literature, I saw him defending himself with his two British fists against Dugit, a big boy with whiskers, who had him by the collar and was kicking him to rights. It seems that Dugit had called him, in would‐be English, "Pretty voman," and this had so offended him that he had hit the whiskered one straight in the eye.

Then French literature for the quatrième till six; then dinner for all – soup, boiled beef (not salt), lentils; and Gruyère cheese, quite two ounces each; then French rounders till half past seven; then lesson preparation (with Monte Cristos in one's lap, or Mysteries of Paris, or Wandering Jews) till nine.

Then, ding‐dang‐dong, and, at the sleepy usher's nod, a sleepy boy would rise and recite the perfunctory evening prayer in a dull singsong voice – beginning, "Notre Père, qui êtes aux cieux, vous dont le regard scrutateur pénêtre jusque dans les replis les plus profonds de nos cœurs," etc., etc., and ending, "au nom du Père, du Fils, et du St. Esprit, ainsi soit‐il!"

And then, bed – Josselin in my dormitory, but a long way off, between d'Adhémar and Laferté; while Palaiseau snorted and sniffed himself to sleep in the bed next mine, and Rapaud still tried to read the immortal works of the elder Dumas by the light of a little oil‐lamp six yards off, suspended from a nail in the blank wall over the chimney‐piece.

The Institution F. Brossard was a very expensive private school, just twice as expensive as the most expensive of the Parisian public schools – Ste.‐Barbe, François Premier, Louis‐le‐Grand, etc.

These great colleges, which were good enough for the sons of Louis Philippe, were not thought good enough for me by my dear mother, who was Irish, and whose only brother had been at Eton, and was now captain in an English cavalry regiment – so she had aristocratic notions. It used to be rather an Irish failing in those days.

My father, James Maurice, also English (and a little Scotch), and by no means an aristocrat, was junior partner in the great firm of Vougeot‐Conti et Cie., wine merchants, Dijon. And at Dijon I had spent much of my childhood, and been to a day school there, and led a very happy life indeed.

Then I was sent to Brossard's school, in the Avenue de St.‐Cloud, Paris, where I was again very happy, and fond of (nearly) everybody, from the splendid head master and his handsome son, Monsieur Mérovée, down to Antoine and Francisque, the men‐servants, and Père Jaurion, the concierge, and his wife, who sold croquets and pains d'épices and "blom‐boudingues," and sucre‐d'orge and nougat and pâte de guimauve; also pralines, dragées, and gray sandy cakes of chocolate a penny apiece; and gave one unlimited credit; and never dunned one, unless bribed to do so by parents, so as to impress on us small boys a proper horror of debt.

Whatever principles I have held through life on this important subject I set down to a private interview my mother had with le père et la mère Jaurion, to whom I had run in debt five francs during the horrible winter of '47‐8. They made my life a hideous burden to me for a whole summer term, and I have never owed any one a penny since.

The Institution consisted of four separate buildings, or "corps de logis."

In the middle, dominating the situation, was a Greco‐Roman pavilion, with a handsome Doric portico elevated ten or twelve feet above the ground, on a large, handsome terrace paved with asphalt and shaded by horse‐chestnut trees. Under this noble esplanade, and ventilating themselves into it, were the kitchen and offices and pantry, and also the refectory – a long room, furnished with two parallel tables, covered at the top by a greenish oil‐cloth spotted all over with small black disks; and alongside of these tables were wooden forms for the boys to sit together at meat – "la table des grands," "la table des petits," each big enough for thirty boys and three or four masters. M. Brossard and his family breakfasted and dined apart, in their own private dining‐room, close by.

In this big refectory, three times daily, at 7.30 in the morning, at noon, and at 6 P.M., boys and masters took their quotidian sustenance quite informally, without any laying of cloths or saying of grace either before or after; one ate there to live – one did not live merely to eat, at the Pension Brossard.

Breakfast consisted of a thick soup, rich in dark‐hued garden produce, and a large hunk of bread – except on Thursdays, when a pat of butter was served out to each boy instead of that Spartan broth – that "brouet noir des Lacédémoniens," as we called it.

Everybody who has lived in France knows how good French butter can often be – and French bread. We triturated each our pat with rock‐salt and made a round ball of it, and dug a hole in our hunk to put it in, and ate it in the play‐ground with clasp‐knives, making it last as long as we could.

This, and the half‐holiday in the afternoon, made Thursday a day to be marked with a white stone. When you are up at five in summer, at half past five in the winter, and have had an hour and a half or two hours' preparation before your first meal at 7.30, French bread‐and‐butter is not a bad thing to break your fast with.

Then, from eight till twelve, class – Latin, Greek, French, English, German – and mathematics and geometry – history, geography, chemistry, physics-everything that you must get to know before you can hope to obtain your degree of Bachelor of Letters or Sciences, or be admitted to the Polytechnic School, or the Normal, or the Central, or that of Mines, or that of Roads and Bridges, or the Military School of St. Cyr, or the Naval School of the Borda. All this was fifty years ago; of course names of schools may have changed, and even the sciences themselves.

Then, at twelve, the second breakfast, meat (or salt fish on Fridays), a dish of vegetables, lentils, red or white beans, salad, potatoes, etc.; a dessert, which consisted of fruit or cheese, or a French pudding. This banquet over, a master would stand up in his place and call for silence, and read out loud the list of boys who were to be kept in during the play‐hour that followed:

"À la retenue, Messieurs Maurice, Rapaud, de Villars, Jolivet, Sponde," etc. Then play till 1.30; and very good play, too; rounders, which are better and far more complicated in France than in England; "barres"; "barres traversières," as rough a game as football; fly the garter, or "la raie," etc., etc., according to the season. And then afternoon study, at the summons of that dreadful bell whose music was so sweet when it rang the hour for meals or recreation or sleep – so hideously discordant at 5.30 on a foggy December Monday morning.

Altogether eleven hours work daily and four hours play, and sleep from nine till five or half past; I find this leaves half an hour unaccounted for, so I must have made a mistake somewhere. But it all happened fifty years ago, so it's not of much consequence now.

Probably they have changed all that in France by this time, and made school life a little easier there, especially for nice little English boys – and nice little French boys too. I hope so, very much; for French boys can be as nice as any, especially at such institutions as F. Brossard's, if there are any left.

Most of my comrades, aged from seven to nineteen or twenty, were the sons of well‐to‐do fathers – soldiers, sailors, rentiers, owners of land, public officials, in professions or business or trade. A dozen or so were of aristocratic descent – three or four very great swells indeed; for instance, two marquises (one of whom spoke English, having an English mother); a count bearing a string of beautiful names a thousand years old, and even more – for they were constantly turning up in the Classe d'Histoire de France au moyen âge; a Belgian viscount of immense wealth and immense good‐nature; and several very rich Jews, who were neither very clever nor very stupid, but, as a rule, rather popular.

Then we had a few of humble station – the son of the woman who washed for us; Jules, the natural son of a brave old caporal in the trente‐septième légère (a countryman of M. Brossard's), who was not well off – so I suspect his son was taught and fed for nothing – the Brossards were very liberal; Filosel, the only child of a small retail hosier in the Rue St.‐Denis (who thought no sacrifice too great to keep his son at such a first‐rate private school), and others.

During the seven years I spent at Brossard's I never once heard paternal wealth (or the want of it) or paternal rank or position alluded to by master, pupil, or servant – especially never a word or an allusion that could have given a moment's umbrage to the most sensitive little only son of a well‐to‐do West End cheese‐monger that ever got smuggled into a private suburban boarding‐school kept "for the sons of gentlemen only," and was so chaffed and bullied there that his father had to take him away, and send him to Eton instead, where the "sons of gentlemen" have better manners, it seems; or even to France, where "the sons of gentlemen" have the best manners of all – or used to have before a certain 2d of December – as distinctly I remember; nous avons changé tout cela!

The head master was a famous republican, and after February, '48, was elected a "représentant du peuple" for the Dauphiné, and sat in the Chamber of Deputies – for a very short time, alas!

So I fancy that the titled and particled boys – "les nobles" – were of families that had drifted away from the lily and white flag of their loyal ancestors – from Rome and the Pope and the past.

Anyhow, none of our young nobles, when at home, seemed to live in the noble Faubourg across the river, and there were no clericals or ultramontanes among us, high or low – we were all red, white, and blue in equal and impartial combination. All this par parenthèse. On the asphalt terrace also, but separated from the head master's classic habitation by a small square space, was the lingerie, managed by Mlle. Marceline and her two subordinates, Constance and Félicité; and beneath this, le père et la mère Jaurion sold their cheap goodies, and jealously guarded the gates that secluded us from the wicked world outside – where women are, and merchants of tobacco, and cafés where you can sip the opalescent absinthe, and libraries where you can buy books more diverting than the Adventures of Telemachus!

On the opposite, or western, side was the gymnastic ground, enclosed in a wire fence, but free of access at all times – a place of paramount importance in all French schools, public and private.

"Ma foi, non!" says Josselin – "c'est pas pour ça!"

"Pourquoi, alors?" says Maurice (that's me).

"C'est parce qu'il a le pied bourgeois et la jambe canaille!" says Barty. (It's because he's got common legs and vulgar feet.)

And that's about the lowest and meanest thing I ever heard him say in his life.

Also, he was not always very sympathetic, as a boy, when one was sick or sorry or out of sorts, for he had never been ill in his life, never known an ache or a pain – except once the mumps, which he seemed to thoroughly enjoy – and couldn't realize suffering of any kind, except such suffering as most school‐boys all over the world are often fond of inflicting on dumb animals: this drove him frantic, and led to many a licking by bigger boys. I remember several such scenes – one especially.

One frosty morning in January, '48, just after breakfast, Jolivet trois (tertius) put a sparrow into his squirrel's cage, and the squirrel caught it in its claws, and cracked its skull like a nut and sucked its brain, while the poor bird still made a desperate struggle for life, and there was much laughter.

There was also, in consequence, a quick fight between Jolivet and Josselin; in which Barty got the worst, as usual – his foe was two years older, and quite an inch taller.

Afterwards, as the licked one sat on the edge of a small stone tank full of water and dabbed his swollen eye with a wet pocket‐handkerchief, M. Dumollard, the mathematical master, made cheap fun of Britannic sentimentality about animals, and told us how the English noblesse were privileged to beat their wives with sticks no thicker than their ankles, and sell them "au rabais" in the horse‐market of Smissfeld; and that they paid men to box each other to death on the stage of Drury Lane, and all that – deplorable things that we all know and are sorry for and ashamed, but cannot put a stop to.

The boys laughed, of course; they always did when Dumollard tried to be funny, "and many a joke had he," although his wit never degenerated into mere humor.

But they were so fond of Barty that they forgave him his insular affectation; some even helped him to dab his sore eye; among them Jolivet trois himself, who was a very good‐natured chap, and very good‐looking into the bargain; and he had received from Barty a sore eye too —gallicè, "un pochon" —scholasticè, "un œil au beurre noir!"

By‐the‐way, I fought with Jolivet once – about Æsop's fables! He said that Æsop was a lame poet of Lacedæmon – I, that Æsop was a little hunchback Armenian Jew; and I stuck to it. It was a Sunday afternoon, on the terrace by the lingerie.

He kicked as hard as he could, so I had to kick too. Mlle. Marceline ran out with Constance and Félicité and tried to separate us, and got kicked by both (unintentionally, of course). Then up came Père Jaurion and kicked me! And they all took Jolivet's part, and said I was in the wrong, because I was English! What did they know about Æsop! So we made it up, and went in Jaurion's loge and stood each other a blomboudingue on tick – and called Jaurion bad names.

"Comme c'est bête, de s'battre, hein?" said Jolivet, and I agreed with him. I don't know which of us really got the worst of it, for we hadn't disfigured each other in the least – and that's the best of kicking. Anyhow he was two years older than I, and three or four inches taller; so I'm glad, on the whole, that that small battle was interrupted.

It is really not for brag that I have lugged in this story – at least, I hope not. One never quite knows.

To go back to Barty: he was the most generous boy in the school. If I may paraphrase an old saying, he really didn't seem to know the difference betwixt tuum et meum. Everything he had, books, clothes, pocket‐money – even agate marbles, those priceless possessions to a French school‐boy – seemed to be also everybody else's who chose. I came across a very characteristic letter of his the other day, written from the Pension Brossard to his favorite aunt, Lady Caroline Grey (one of the Rohans), who adored him. It begins:

"My Dear Aunt Caroline, – Thank you so much for the magnifying‐glass, which is not only magnifying, but magnifique. Don't trouble to send any more gingerbread‐nuts, as the boys are getting rather tired of them, especially Laferté and Bussy‐Rabutin. I think we should all like some Scotch marmalade," etc., etc.

And though fond of romancing a little now and then, and embellishing a good story, he was absolutely truthful in important matters, and to be relied upon implicitly.

He seemed also to be quite without the sense of physical fear – a kind of callousness.

Such, roughly, was the boy who lived to write the Motes in a Moonbeam and La quatriéme Dimension before he was thirty; and such, roughly, he remained through life, except for one thing: he grew to be the very soul of passionate and compassionate sympathy, as who doesn't feel who has ever read a page of his work, or even had speech with him for half an hour?

Whatever weaknesses he yielded to when he grew to man's estate are such as the world only too readily condones in many a famous man less tempted than Josselin was inevitably bound to be through life. Men of the Josselin type (there are not many – he stands pretty much alone) can scarcely be expected to journey from adolescence to middle age with that impeccable decorum which I – and no doubt many of my masculine readers – have found it so easy to achieve, and find it now so pleasant to remember and get credit for. Let us think of The Footprints of Aurora, or Étoiles mortes, or Déjanire et Dalila, or even Les Trépassées de François Villon!

Then let us look at Rajon's etching of Watts's portrait of him (the original is my own to look at whenever I like, and that is pretty often). And then let us not throw too many big stones, or too hard, at Barty Josselin.

Well, the summer term of 1847 wore smoothly to its close – a happy "trimestre" during which the Institution F. Brossard reached the high‐water mark of its prosperity.

There were sixty boys to be taught, and six house‐masters to teach them, besides a few highly paid outsiders for special classes – such as the lively M. Durosier for French literature, and M. le Professeur Martineau for the higher mathematics, and so forth; and crammers and coachers for St.‐Cyr, the Polytechnic School, the École des Ponts et Chaussées.

Also fencing‐masters, gymnastic masters, a Dutch master who taught us German and Italian – an Irish master with a lovely brogue who taught us English. Shall I ever forget the blessed day when ten or twelve of us were presented with an Ivanhoe apiece as a class‐book, or how Barty and I and Bonneville (who knew English) devoured the immortal story in less than a week – to the disgust of Rapaud, who refused to believe that we could possibly know such a beastly tongue as English well enough to read an English book for mere pleasure – on our desks in play‐time, or on our laps in school, en cachette! "Quelle sacrée pose!"

He soon mislaid his own copy, did Rapaud; just as he mislaid my Monte Cristo and Jolivet's illustrated Wandering Jew– and it was always:

"Dis donc, Maurice! – prête‐moi ton Ivanhoé!" (with an accent on the e), whenever he had to construe his twenty lines of Valtére Scott – and what a hash he made of them!

Sometimes M. Brossard himself would come, smoking his big meerschaum, and help the English class during preparation, and put us up to a thing or two worth knowing.

"Rapaud, comment dit‐on 'pouvoir' en anglais?"

"Sais pas, m'sieur!"

"Comment, petit crétin, tu ne sais pas!"

And Rapaud would receive a pincée tordue– a "twisted pinch" – on the back of his arm to quicken his memory.

"Oh, là, là!" he would howl – "je n' sais pas!"

"Et toi, Maurice?"

"Ça se dit 'to be able,' m'sieur!" I would say.

"Mais non, mon ami – tu oublies ta langue natale – ça se dit, 'to can'! Maintenant, comment dirais‐tu en anglais, 'je voudrais pouvoir'?"

"Je dirais, 'I would like to be able.'"

"Comment, encore! petit cancre! allons – tu es Anglais – tu sais bien que tu dirais, 'I vould vill to can'!"

Then M. Brossard turns to Barty: "A ton tour, Josselin!"

"Moi, m'sieur?" says Barty.

"Oui, toi! – comment dirais‐tu, 'je pourrais vouloir'?"

"Je dirais 'I vould can to vill,'" says Barty, quite unabashed.

"À la bonne heure! au moins tu sais ta langue, toi!" says Père Brossard, and pats him on the cheek; while Barty winks at me, the wink of successful time‐serving hypocrisy, and Bonneville writhes with suppressed delight.

What lives most in my remembrance of that summer is the lovely weather we had, and the joy of the Passy swimming‐bath every Thursday and Sunday from two till five or six; it comes back to me even now in heavenly dreams by night. I swim with giant side‐strokes all round the Île des Cygnes between Passy and Grenelle, where the École de Natation was moored for the summer months.

Round and round the isle I go, up stream and down, and dive and float and wallow with bliss there is no telling – till the waters all dry up and disappear, and I am left wading in weeds and mud and drift and drought and desolation, and wake up shivering – and such is life.

As for Barty, he was all but amphibious, and reminded me of the seal at the Jardin des Plantes. He really seemed to spend most of the afternoon under water, coming up to breathe now and then at unexpected moments, with a stone in his mouth that he had picked up from the slimy bottom ten or twelve feet below – or a weed – or a dead mussel.

Part Second

 
"Laissons les regrets et les pleurs
À la vieillesse;
Jeunes, il faut cueillir les fleurs
De la jeunesse!" – Baïf.
 

Sometimes we spent the Sunday morning in Paris, Barty and I – in picture‐galleries and museums and wax‐figure shows, churches and cemeteries, and the Hôtel Cluny and the Baths of Julian the Apostate – or the Jardin des Plantes, or the Morgue, or the knackers' yards at Montfaucon – or lovely slums. Then a swim at the Bains Deligny. Then lunch at some restaurant on the Quai Voltaire, or in the Quartier Latin. Then to some café on the Boulevards, drinking our demi‐tasse and our chasse‐café, and smoking our cigarettes like men, and picking our teeth like gentlemen of France.

Once after lunch at Vachette's with Berquin (who was seventeen) and Bonneville (the marquis who had got an English mother), we were sitting outside the Café des Variétés, in the midst of a crowd of consommateurs, and tasting to the full the joy of being alive, when a poor woman came up with a guitar, and tried to sing "Le petit mousse noir," a song Barty knew quite well – but she couldn't sing a bit, and nobody listened.

"Allons, Josselin, chante‐nous ça!" said Berquin.

And Bonneville jumped up, and took the woman's guitar from her, and forced it into Josselin's hands, while the crowd became much interested and began to applaud.

Thus encouraged, Barty, who never in all his life knew what it is to be shy, stood up and piped away like a bird; and when he had finished the story of the little black cabin‐boy who sings in the maintop halliards, the applause was so tremendous that he had to stand up on a chair and sing another, and yet another.

"Écoute‐moi bien, ma Fleurette!" and "Amis, la matinée est belle!" (from La Muette de Portici), while the pavement outside the Variétés was rendered quite impassable by the crowd that had gathered round to look and listen – and who all joined in the chorus:

 
"Conduis ta barque avec prudence,
Pêcheur! parle bas!
Jette tes filets en silence
Pêcheur! parle bas!
Et le roi des mers ne nous échappera pas!" (bis).
 

and the applause was deafening.

Meanwhile Bonneville and Berquin went round with the hat and gathered quite a considerable sum, in which there seemed to be almost as much silver as copper – and actually two five‐franc pieces and an English half‐sovereign! The poor woman wept with gratitude at coming into such a fortune, and insisted on kissing Barty's hand. Indeed it was a quite wonderful ovation, considering how unmistakably British was Barty's appearance, and how unpopular we were in France just then!

He had his new shiny black silk chimney‐pot hat on, and his Eton jacket, with the wide shirt collar. Berquin, in a tightly fitting double‐breasted brown cloth swallow‐tailed coat with brass buttons, yellow nankin bell‐mouthed trousers strapped over varnished boots, butter‐colored gloves, a blue satin stock, and a very tall hairy hat with a wide curly brim, looked such an out‐and‐out young gentleman of France that we were all proud of being seen in his company – especially young de Bonneville, who was still in mourning for his father and wore a crape band round his arm, and a common cloth cap with a leather peak, and thick blucher boots; though he was quite sixteen, and already had a little black mustache like an eyebrow, and inhaled the smoke of his cigarette without coughing and quite naturally, and ordered the waiters about just as if he already wore the uniform of the École St.‐Cyr, for which he destined himself (and was not disappointed. He should be a marshal of France by now – perhaps he is).

Then we went to the Café Mulhouse on the Boulevard des Italiens (on the "Boul. des It.," as we called it, to be in the fashion) – that we might gaze at Señor Joaquin Eliezegui, the Spanish giant, who was eight feet high and a trifle over (or under – I forget which): he told us himself. Barty had a passion for gazing at very tall men; like Frederic the Great (or was it his Majesty's royal father?).

Then we went to the Boulevard Bonne‐Nouvelle, where, in a painted wooden shed, a most beautiful Circassian slave, miraculously rescued from some abominable seraglio in Constantinople, sold pen'orths of "galette du gymnase." On her raven hair she wore a silk turban all over sequins, silver and gold, with a yashmak that fell down behind, leaving her adorable face exposed: she had an amber vest of silk, embroidered with pearls as big as walnuts, and Turkish pantalettes – what her slippers were we couldn't see, but they must have been lovely, like all the rest of her. Barty had a passion for gazing at very beautiful female faces – like his father before him.

There was a regular queue of postulants to see this heavenly Eastern houri and buy her confection, which is very like Scotch butter‐cake, but not so digestible; and even more filling at the price. And three of us sat on a bench, while three times running Barty took his place in that procession – soldiers, sailors, workmen, chiffonniers, people of all sorts, women as many as men – all of them hungry for galette, but hungrier still for a good humanizing stare at a beautiful female face; and he made the slow and toilsome journey to the little wooden booth three times – and brought us each a pen'orth on each return journey; and the third time, Katidjah (such was her sweet Oriental name) leaned forward over her counter and kissed him on both cheeks, and whispered in his ear (in English – and with the accent of Stratford‐atte‐Bowe):

"You little duck! your name is Brown, I know!"

And he came away, his face pale with conflicting emotions, and told us!

How excited we were! Bonneville (who spoke English quite well) went for a pen'orth on his own account, and said: "My name's Brown too, Miss Katidjah!" But he didn't get a kiss.

(She soon after married a Mr. – , of – , the well‐known – of – shire, in – land. She may be alive now.)

Then to the Palais Royal, to dine at the "Dîner Européen" with M. Berquin père, a famous engineer; and finally to stalls at the "Français" to see the two first acts of Le Cid; and this was rather an anticlimax – for we had too much "Cid" at the Institution F. Brossard already!

And then, at last, to the omnibus station in the Rue de Rivoli, whence the "Accélérées" (en correspondence avec les Constantines) started for Passy every ten minutes; and thus, up the gas‐lighted Champs‐Élysées, and by the Arc de Triomphe, to the Rond‐point de l'Avenue de St.‐Cloud; tired out, but happy – happy – happy comme on ne l'est plus!

Before the school broke up for the holidays there were very severe examinations – but no "distribution de prix"; we were above that kind of thing at Brossard's, just as we were above wearing a uniform or taking in day boarders.

Barty didn't come off very well in this competition; but he came off anyhow much better than I, who had failed to be "diligent and attentive" – too much Monte Cristo, I'm afraid.

At all events Barty got five marks for English History, because he remembered a good deal about Richard Cœur de Lion, and John, and Friar Tuck, and Robin Hood, and especially one Cedric the Saxon, a historical personage of whom the examiner (a decorated gentleman from the Collège de France) had never even heard!

And then (to the tune of "Au clair de la lune"):

 
"Vivent les vacances —
Denique tandèm;
Et les pénitences —
Habebunt finèm!
Les pions intraitables,
Vultu Barbarò,
S'en iront aux diables,
Gaudio nostrò."
 

N.B. – The accent is always on the last syllable in French Latin – and pion means an usher.

Barty went to Yorkshire with the Rohans, and I spent most of my holidays with my mother and sister (and the beautiful Miss – ) at Mademoiselle Jalabert's, next door – coming back to school for most of my meals, and at night to sleep, with a whole dormitory to myself, and no dreadful bell at five in the morning; and so much time to spare that I never found any leisure for my holiday task, that skeleton at the feast; no more did Jules, the sergeant's son; no more did Caillard, who spent his vacation at Brossard's because his parents lived in Russia, and his "correspondant" in Paris was ill.

The only master who remained behind was Bonzig, who passed his time painting ships and sailors, in oil‐colors; it was a passion with him: corvettes, brigantines, British whalers, fishing‐smacks, revenue‐cutters, feluccas, caïques, even Chinese junks – all was fish that came to his net. He got them all from La France Maritime, an illustrated periodical much in vogue at Brossard's; and also his storms and his calms, his rocks and piers and light‐houses – for he had never seen the sea he was so fond of. He took us every morning to the Passy swimming‐baths, and in the afternoon for long walks in Paris, and all about and around, and especially to the Musée de Marine at the Louvre, that we might gaze with him at the beautiful models of three‐deckers.

He evidently pitied our forlorn condition, and told us delightful stories about seafaring life, like Mr. Clark Russell's; and how he, some day, hoped to see the ocean for himself before he died – and with his own eyes.

I really don't know how Jules and Caillard would have got through the hideous ennui of that idle September without him. Even I, with my mother and sister and the beautiful Miss – within such easy reach, found time hang heavily at times. One can't be always reading, even Alexandre Dumas; nor always loafing about, even in Paris, by one's self (Jules and Caillard were not allowed outside the gates without Bonzig); and beautiful English girls of eighteen, like Miss – s, don't always want a small boy dangling after them, and show it sometimes; which I thought very hard.

It was almost a relief when school began again in October, and the boys came back with their wonderful stories of the good time they had all had (especially some of the big boys, who were "en rhétorique et en philosophie") – and all the game that had fallen to their guns – wild‐boars, roebucks, cerfs‐dix‐cors, and what not; of perilous swims in stormy seas – tremendous adventures in fishing‐smacks on moonlight nights (it seemed that the moon had been at the full all through those wonderful six weeks); rides ventre à terre on mettlesome Arab steeds through gloomy wolf‐haunted forests with charming female cousins; flirtations and "good fortunes" with beautiful but not happily married women in old mediæval castle keeps. Toujours au clair de la lune! They didn't believe each other in the least, these gay young romancers – nor expect to be believed themselves; but it was very exciting all the same; and they listened, and were listened to in turn, without a gesture of incredulity – nor even a smile! And we small boys held our tongues in reverence and awe.

When Josselin came back he had wondrous things to tell too – but so preposterous that they disbelieved him quite openly, and told him so. How in London he had seen a poor woman so tipsy in the street that she had to be carried away by two policemen on a stretcher. How he had seen brewers' dray‐horses nearly six feet high at the shoulder – and one or two of them with a heavy cavalry mustache drooping from its upper lip.

How he had been presented to the Lord Mayor of London, and even shaken hands with him, in Leadenhall Market, and that his Lordship was quite plainly dressed; and how English Lord Mayors were not necessarily "hommes du monde," nor always hand in glove with Queen Victoria!

Splendide mendax!

But they forgave him all his mendacity for the sake of a new accomplishment he had brought back with him, and which beat all his others. He could actually turn a somersault backwards with all the ease and finish of a professional acrobat. How he got to do this I don't know. It must have been natural to him and he never found it out before; he was always good at gymnastics – and all things that required grace and agility more than absolute strength.

Also he brought back with him (from Leadenhall Market, no doubt) a gigantic horned owl, fairly tame – and with eyes that reminded us of le grand Bonzig's.

School began, and with it the long evenings with an hour's play by lamp‐light in the warm salle d'études; and the cold lamp‐lit ninety minutes' preparation on an empty stomach, after the short perfunctory morning prayer – which didn't differ much from the evening one.

Barty was still en cinquième, at the top! and I at the tail of the class immediately above – so near and yet so far! so I did not have many chances of improving my acquaintance with him that term; for he still stuck to Laferté and Bussy‐Rabutin – they were inseparable, those three.

At mid‐day play‐time the weather was too cold for anything but games, which were endless in their variety and excitement; it would take a chapter to describe them.

It is a mistake to think that French school‐boys are (or were) worse off than ours in this. I will not say that any one French game is quite so good as cricket or football for a permanency. But I remember a great many that are very nearly so.

Indeed, French rounders (la balle au camp) seems to me the best game that ever was – on account of the quick rush and struggle of the fielders to get home when an inside boy is hit between the bases, lest he should pick the ball up in time to hit one of them with it before the camp is reached; in which case there is a most exciting scrimmage for the ball, etc., etc.

Barty was good at all games, especially la balle au camp. I used to envy the graceful, easy way he threw the ball – so quick and straight it seemed to have no curve at all in its trajectory: and how it bounded off the boy it nearly always hit between the shoulders!

At evening, play in the school‐room, besides draughts and chess and backgammon; M. Bonzig, when de service, would tell us thrilling stories, with "la suite au prochain numéro" when the bell rang at 7.30; a long series that lasted through the winter of '47‐'48. Le Tueur de Daims, Le Lac Ontario, Le Dernier des Mohicans, Les Pionniers, La Prairie– by one Fénimore Coupère; all of which he had read in M. Defauconpret's admirable translations. I have read some of them in their native American since then, myself. I loved them always – but they seemed to lack some of the terror, the freshness, and the charm his fluent utterance and solemn nasal voice put into them as he sat and smoked his endless cigarettes with his back against the big stone stove, and his eyes dancing sideways through his glasses. Never did that "ding‐dang‐dong" sound more hateful than when le grand Bonzig was telling the tale of Bas‐de‐cuir's doings, from his innocent youth to his noble and pathetic death by sunset, with his ever‐faithful and still‐serviceable but no longer deadly rifle (the friend of sixty years) lying across his knees. I quote from memory; what a gun that was!

Then on Thursdays, long walks, two by two, in Paris, with Bonzig or Dumollard; or else in the Bois to play rounders or prisoners' base in a clearing, or skate on the Mare aux Biches, which was always so hard to find in the dense thicket … poor Lord Runswick! He found it once too often!

La Mare d'Auteuil was too deep, and too popular with "la flotte de Passy," as we called the Passy voyous, big and small, who came there in their hundreds – to slide and pick up quarrels with well‐dressed and respectable school‐boys. Liberté – égalité – fraternité! ou la mort! Vive la république! (This, by‐the‐way, applies to the winter that came next.)

So time wore on with us gently; through the short vacation at New‐year's day till the 23d or 24th of February, when the Revolution broke out, and Louis Philippe premier had to fly for his life. It was a very troublous time, and the school for a whole week was in a state of quite heavenly demoralization! Ten times a day, or in the dead of night, the drum would beat le rappel or la générale. A warm wet wind was blowing – the most violent wind I can remember that was not an absolute gale. It didn't rain, but the clouds hurried across the sky all day long, and the tops of the trees tried to bend themselves in two; and their leafless boughs and black broken twigs littered the deserted playground – for we all sat on the parapet of the terrace by the lingerie; boys and servants, le père et la mère Jaurion, Mlle. Marceline and the rest, looking towards Paris – all feeling bound to each other by a common danger, like wild beasts in a flood. Dear me! I'm out of breath from sheer pleasure in the remembrance.

One night we had to sleep on the floor for fear of stray bullets; and that was a fearful joy never to be forgotten – it almost kept us awake! Peering out of the school‐room windows at dusk, we saw great fires, three or four at a time. Suburban retreats of the over‐wealthy, in full conflagration; and all day the rattle of distant musketry and the boom of cannon a long way off, near Montmartre and Montfaucon, kept us alive.

Most of the boys went home, and some of them never came back – and from that day the school began to slowly decline. Père Brossard – an ancient "Brigand de la Loire," as the republicans of his youth were called – was elected a representative of his native town at the Chamber of Deputies; and possibly that did the school more harm than good – ne sutor ultra crepidam! as he was so fond of impressing on us!

However, we went on pretty much as usual through spring and summer – with occasional alarms (which we loved), and beatings of le rappel– till the July insurrection broke out.

My mother and sister had left Mlle. Jalabert's, and now lived with my father near the Boulevard Montmartre. And when the fighting was at its height they came to fetch me home, and invited Barty, for the Rohans were away from Paris. So home we walked, quite leisurely, on a lovely peaceful summer evening, while the muskets rattled and the cannons roared round us, but at a proper distance; women picking linen for lint and chatting genially the while at shop doors and porter's lodge‐gates; and a piquet of soldiers at the corner of every street, who felt us all over for hidden cartridges before they let us through; it was all entrancing! The subtle scent of gunpowder was in the air – the most suggestive smell there can be. Even now, here in England, the night of the fifth of November never comes round but I am pleasantly reminded of the days when I was "en pleine révolution" in the streets of Paris with my father and mother, and Barty and my little sister – and genial piou‐pious made such a conscientious examination of our garments. Nothing brings back the past like a sound or a smell – even those of a penny squib!

Every now and then a litter borne by soldiers came by, on which lay a dead or wounded officer. And then one's laugh died suddenly out, and one felt one's self face to face with the horrors that were going on.

Barty shared my bed, and we lay awake talking half the night; dreadful as it all was, one couldn't help being jolly! Every ten minutes the sentinel on duty in the court‐yard below would sententiously intone:

"Sentinelles, prenez‐garde à vous!" And other sentinels would repeat the cry till it died away in the distance, like an echo.

And all next day, or the day after – or else the day after that, when the long rattle of the musketry had left off – we heard at intervals the "feu de peloton" in a field behind the church of St.‐Vincent de Paul, and knew that at every discharge a dozen poor devils of insurgents, caught red‐handed, fell dead in a pool of blood!

I need hardly say that before three days were over the irrepressible Barty had made a complete conquest of my small family. My sister (I hasten to say this) has loved him as a brother ever since; and as long as my parents lived, and wherever they made their home, that home has ever been his – and he has been their son – almost their eldest born, though he was younger than I by seven months.

Things have been reversed, however, for now thirty years and more; and his has ever been the home for me, and his people have been my people, and ever will be – and the God of his worship mine!

What children and grandchildren of my own could ever be to me as these of Barty Josselin's?

"Ce sacré Josselin – il avait tous les talents!"

And the happiest of these gifts, and not the least important, was the gift he had of imparting to his offspring all that was most brilliant and amiable and attractive in himself, and leaving in them unimpaired all that was strongest and best in the woman I loved as well as he did, and have loved as long – and have grown to look upon as belonging to the highest female type that can be; for doubtless the Creator, in His infinite wisdom, might have created a better and a nicer woman than Mrs. Barty Josselin that was to be, had He thought fit to do so; but doubtless also He never did.

"Ainsi soit‐il!" said M. le Curé, and the little group broke up, and Miss – walked quietly indoors with her arm around Madame Pélisson's waist, and without even wishing me good‐night – and my hand was being squeezed worse than ever.

"Ah ha! Lequel de nous deux est volé, petit coquin?" hissed an angry male voice in my ear – (which of us two is sold, you little rascal?).

And I found my hand in that of Monsieur Pélisson, whose name was something else – and I couldn't make it out, nor why he was so angry. It has dawned upon me since that each of us took the other's hand by mistake for that of the English governess!

All this is beastly and cynical and French, and I apologize for it – but it's true.

October!

It was a black Monday for me when school began again after that ideal vacation. The skies they were ashen and sober, and the leaves they were crisped and sere. But anyhow I was still en quatrième, and Barty was in it too – and we sat next to each other in "L'étude des grands."

There was only one étude now; only half the boys came back, and the pavillon des petits was shut up, study, class‐rooms, dormitories, and all – except that two masters slept there still.

Eight or ten small boys were put in a small school-room in the same house as ours, and had a small dormitory to themselves, with M. Bonzig to superintend them.

I made up my mind that I would no longer be a cancre and a crétin, but work hard and do my little best, so that I might keep up with Barty and pass into the troisième with him, and then into Rhétorique (seconde), and then into Philosophie (première) – that we might do our humanities and take our degree together – our "Bachot," which is short for Baccalauréat‐ès‐lettres. Most especially did I love Monsieur Durosier's class of French Literature – for which Mérovée always rang the bell himself.

My mother and sister were still at Ste.‐Adresse, Hâvre, with my father; so I spent my first Sunday that term at the Archibald Rohans', in the Rue du Bac.

I had often seen them at Brossard's, when they came to see Barty, but had never been at their house before.

They were very charming people.

Lord Archibald was dressing when we got there that Sunday morning, and we sat with him while he shaved – in an immense dressing‐room where there were half a dozen towel‐horses with about thirty pairs of newly ironed trousers on them instead of towels, and quite thirty pairs of shiny boots on trees were ranged along the wall. James, an impeccable English valet, waited on "his lordship," and never spoke unless spoken to.

"Hullo, Barty! Who's your friend?"

"Bob Maurice, Uncle Archie."

And Uncle Archie shook hands with me most cordially.

"And how's the north pole this morning?"

"Nicely, thanks, Uncle Archie."

Lord Archibald was a very tall and handsome man, about fifty – very droll and full of anecdote; he had stories to tell about everything in the room.

For instance, how Major Welsh of the 10th Hussars had given him that pair of Wellingtons, which fitted him better than any boots Hoby ever made him to measure; they were too tight for poor Welsh, who was a head shorter than himself.

How Kerlewis made him that frock‐coat fifteen years ago, and it wasn't threadbare yet, and fitted him as well as ever – for he hadn't changed his weight for thirty years, etc.

How that pair of braces had been made by "my lady" out of a pair of garters she wore on the day they were married.

And then he told us how to keep trousers from bagging at the knees, and how cloth coats should be ironed, and how often – and how to fold an umbrella.

It suddenly occurs to me that perhaps these little anecdotes may not be so amusing to the general reader as they were to me when he told them, so I won't tell any more. Indeed, I have often noticed that things look sometimes rather dull in print that were so surprisingly witty when said in spontaneous talk a great many years ago!

Then we went to breakfast with my lady and Daphne, their charming little daughter – Barty's sister, as he called her – "m'amour" – and who spoke both French and English equally well.

But we didn't breakfast at once, ravenous as we boys were, for Lady Archibald took a sudden dislike to Lord A.'s cravat, which, it seems, he had never worn before. It was in brown satin, and Lady A. declared that Loulou (so she called him) never looked "en beauté" with a brown cravat; and there was quite a little quarrel between husband and wife on the subject – so that he had to go back to his dressing‐room and put on a blue one.

At breakfast he talked about French soldiers of the line, and their marching kit (as it would be called now), quite earnestly, and, as it seemed to me, very sensibly – though he went through little mimicries that made his wife scream with laughter, and me too; and in the middle of breakfast Barty sang "Le Chant du Départ" as well as he could for laughing:

 
"La victoire en chantant nous ouvre la carrière!
La liberté‐é gui‐i‐de nos pas" …
 

while Lord A. went through an expressive pantomime of an overladen foot‐soldier up and down the room, in time to the music. The only person who didn't laugh was James – which I thought ungenial.

Then Lady A. had her innings, and sang "Rule Britannia, Britannia rule de vaves" – and declared it was far more ridiculous really than the "Chant du Départ," and she made it seem so, for she went through a pantomime too. She was a most delightful person, and spoke English quite well when she chose; and seemed as fond of Barty as if he were her own and only son – and so did Lord Archibald. She would say:

"Quel dommage qu'on ne peut pas avoir des crompettes [crumpets]! Barty les aime tant! n'est‐ce pas, mon chou, tu aimes bien les crompettes? voici venir du buttered toast – c'est toujours ça!"

And, "Mon Dieu, comme il a bonne mine, ce cher Barty – n'est‐ce pas, mon amour, que tu as bonne mine? regarde‐toi dans la glace."

And, "Si nous allions à l'Hippodrôme cette après‐midi voir la belle écuyère Madame Richard? Barty adore les jolies femmes, comme son oncle! n'est‐ce pas, méchant petit Barty, que tu adores les jolies femmes? et tu n'as jamais vu Madame Richard? Tu m'en diras des nouvelles! et vous, mon ami [this to me], est‐ce que vous adorez aussi les jolies femmes?"

"Ô oui," says Daphne, "allons voir M'ame Richard; it'll be such fun! oh, bully!"

So after breakfast we went for a walk, and to a café on the Quai d'Orsay, and then to the HippodrÔme, and saw the beautiful écuyère in graceful feats of la haute école, and lost our hearts – especially Lord Archibald, though him she knew; for she kissed her hand to him, and he his to her.

Then we dined at the Palais Royal, and afterwards went to the Café des Aveugles, an underground coffee‐house near the Café de la Rotonde, and where blind men made instrumental music; and we had a capital evening.

I have met in my time more intellectual people, perhaps, than the Archibald Rohans – but never people more amiable, or with kinder, simpler manners, or who made one feel more quickly and thoroughly at home – and the more I got to know them, the more I grew to like them; and their fondness for each other and Daphne, and for Barty too, was quite touching; as was his for them. So the winter sped happily till February, when a sad thing happened.

I had spent Sunday with my mother and sister, who now lived on the ground‐floor of 108 Champs Élysées.

I slept there that Sunday night, and walked back to school next morning. To my surprise, as I got to a large field through which a diagonal footpath led to Père Jaurion's loge, I saw five or six boys sitting on the terrace parapet with their legs dangling outside. They should have been in class, by rights. They watched me cross the field, but made no sign.

"What on earth can be the matter?" thought I.

The cordon was pulled, and I came on a group of boys all stiff and silent.

"Qu'est‐ce que vous avez donc, tous?" I asked.

"Le Père Brossard est mort!" said De Villars.

Poor M. Brossard had died of apoplexy on the previous afternoon. He had run to catch the Passy omnibus directly after lunch, and had fallen down in a fit and died immediately.

"Il est tombé du haut mal" – as they expressed it.

His son Mérovée and his daughter Madame Germain were distracted. The whole of that day was spent by the boys in a strange, unnatural state of désœuvrement and suppressed excitement for which no outlet was possible. The meals, especially, were all but unbearable. One was ashamed of having an appetite, and yet one had – almost keener than usual, if I may judge by myself – and for some undiscovered reason the food was better than on other Mondays!

Next morning we all went up in sorrowful procession to kiss our poor dear head‐master's cold forehead as he lay dead in his bed, with sprigs of boxwood on his pillow, and above his head a jar of holy water with which we sprinkled him. He looked very serene and majestic, but it was a harrowing ceremony. Mérovée stood by with swollen eyes and deathly pale – incarnate grief.

On Wednesday afternoon M. Brossard was buried in the Cimetière de Passy, a tremendous crowd following the hearse; the boys and masters just behind Mérovée and M. Germain, the chief male mourners. The women walked in another separate procession behind.

Béranger and Alphonse Karr were present among the notabilities, and speeches were made over his open grave, for he was a very distinguished man.

And, tragical to relate, that evening in the study Barty and I fell out, and it led to a stand‐up fight next day.

There was no preparation that evening; he and I sat side by side reading out of a book by Châteaubriand – either Atala, or René or Les Natchez, I forget which. I have never seen either since.

The study was hushed; M. Dumollard was de service as maître d'études, although there was no attempt to do anything but sadly read improving books.

If I remember aright, René, a very sentimental young Frenchman, who had loved the wrong person not wisely, but too well (a very wrong person indeed, in his case), emigrated to North America, and there he met a beautiful Indian maiden, one Atala, of the Natchez tribe, who had rosy heels and was charming, and whose entire skin was probably a warm dark red, although this is not insisted upon. She also had a brother, whose name was Outogamiz.

Well, René loved Atala, Atala loved René, and they were married; and Outogamiz went through some ceremony besides, which made him blood brother and bosom friend to René – a bond which involved certain obligatory rites and duties and self‐sacrifices.

Atala died and was buried. René died and was buried also; and every day, as in duty bound, poor Outogamiz went and pricked a vein and bled over Rene's tomb, till he died himself of exhaustion before he was many weeks older. I quote entirely from memory.

This simple story was told in very touching and beautiful language, by no means telegraphese, and Barty and I were deeply affected by it.

"I say, Bob!" Barty whispered to me, with a break in his voice, "some day I'll marry your sister, and we'll all go off to America together, and she'll die, and I'll die, and you shall bleed yourself to death on my tomb!"

"No," said I, after a moment's thought. "No – look here! I'll marry your sister, and I'll die, and you shall bleed over my tomb!"

Then, after a pause:

"I haven't got a sister, as you know quite well – and if I had she wouldn't be for you!" says Barty.

"Why not?"

"Because you're not good‐looking enough!" says Barty.

At this, just for fun, I gave him a nudge in the wind with my elbow – and he gave me a "twisted pinch" on the arm – and I kicked him on the ankle, but so much harder than I intended that it hurt him, and he gave me a tremendous box on the ear, and we set to fighting like a couple of wild‐cats, without even getting up, to the scandal of the whole study and the indignant disgust of M. Dumollard, who separated us, and read us a pretty lecture:

"Voilà bien les Anglais! – rien n'est sacré pour eux, pas même la mort! rien que les chiens et les chevaux." (Nothing, not even death, is sacred to Englishmen – nothing but dogs and horses.)

When we went up to bed the head‐boy of the school – a first‐rate boy called d'Orthez, and Berquin (another first‐rate boy), who had each a bedroom to himself, came into the dormitory and took up the quarrel, and discussed what should be done. Both of us were English – ergo, both of us ought to box away the insult with our fists; so "they set a combat us between, to fecht it in the dawing" – that is, just after breakfast, in the school‐room.

I went to bed very unhappy, and so, I think, did Barty.

Next morning at six, just after the morning prayer, M. Mérovée came into the school‐room and made us a most straightforward, manly, and affecting speech; in which he told us he meant to keep on the school, and thanked us, boys and masters, for our sympathy.

We were all moved to our very depths – and sat at our work solemn and sorrowful all through that lamp‐lit hour and a half; we hardly dared to cough, and never looked up from our desks.

Then 7.30 – ding‐dang‐dong and breakfast. Thursday – bread‐and‐butter morning!

I felt hungry and greedy and very sad, and disinclined to fight. Barty and I had sat turned away from each other, and made no attempt at reconciliation.

We all went to the réfectoire: it was raining fast. I made my ball of salt and butter, and put it in a hole in my hunk of bread, and ran back to the study, where I locked these treasures in my desk.

The study soon filled with boys: no masters ever came there during that half‐hour; they generally smoked and read their newspapers in the gymnastic ground, or else in their own rooms when it was wet outside.

D'Orthez and Berquin moved one or two desks and forms out of the way so as make a ring – l'arène, as they called it – with comfortable seats all round. Small boys stood on forms and window‐sills eating their bread‐and‐butter with a tremendous relish.

"Dites donc, vous autres," says Bonneville, the wit of the school, who was in very high spirits; "it's like the Roman Empire during the decadence – 'panem et circenses!'"

"What's that, circenses? what does it mean?" says Rapaud, with his mouth full.

"Why, butter, you idiot! Didn't you know that?" says Bonneville.

Barty and I stood opposite each other; at his sides as seconds were d'Orthez and Berquin; at mine, Jolivet trois (the only Jolivet now left in the school) and big du Tertre‐Jouan (the young marquis who wasn't Bonneville).

We began to spar at each other in as knowing and English a way as we knew how – keeping a very respectful distance indeed, and trying to bear ourselves as scientifically as we could, with a keen expression of the eye.

When I looked into Barty's face I felt that nothing on earth would ever make me hit such a face as that – whatever he might do to mine. My blood wasn't up; besides, I was a coarse‐grained, thick‐set, bullet‐headed little chap with no nerves to speak of, and didn't mind punishment the least bit. No more did Barty, for that matter, though he was the most highly wrought creature that ever lived.

At length they all got impatient, and d'Orthez said:

"Allez donc, godems – ce n'est pas un quadrille! Nous n'sommes pas à La Salle Valentino!"

And Barty was pushed from behind so roughly that he came at me, all his science to the winds and slogging like a French boy; and I, quite without meaning to, in the hurry, hit out just as he fell over me, and we both rolled together over Jolivet's foot – Barty on top (he was taller, though not heavier, than I); and I saw the blood flow from his nose down his lip and chin, and some of it fell on my blouse.

Says Barty to me, in English, as we lay struggling on the dusty floor:

"Look here, it's no good. I can't fight to‐day; poor Mérovée, you know. Let's make it up!"

"All right!" says I. So up we got and shook hands, Barty saying, with mock dignity:

"Messieurs, le sang a coulé; l'honneur britannique est sauf;" and the combat was over.

"Cristi! J'ai joliment faim!" says Barty, mopping his nose with his handkerchief. "I left my crust on the bench outside the réfectoire. I wish one of you fellows would get it for me."

"Rapaud finished your crust [ta miche] while you were fighting," says Jolivet. "I saw him."

Says Rapaud: "Ah, Dame, it was getting prettily wet, your crust, and I was prettily hungry too; and I thought you didn't want it, naturally."

I then produced my crust and cut it in two, butter and all, and gave Barty half, and we sat very happily side by side, and breakfasted together in peace and amity. I never felt happier or hungrier.

"Cristi, comme ils se sont bien battus," says little Vaissière to little Cormenu. "As‐tu vu? Josselin a saigné tout plein sur la blouse à Maurice." (How well they fought! Josselin bled all over Maurice's blouse!)

Then says Josselin, in French, turning to me with that delightful jolly smile that always reminded one of the sun breaking through a mist:

"I would sooner bleed on your blouse than on your tomb." (J'aime mieux saigner sur ta blouse que sur ta tombe.)

So ended the only quarrel we ever had.

Part Third

 
"Que ne puis‐je aller où s'en vont les roses,
Et n'attendre pas
Ces regrets navrants que la fin des choses
Nous garde ici‐bas!" – Anon.
 

Barty worked very hard, and so did I – for me! Horace – Homer – Æschylus – Plato – etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., and all there was to learn in that French school-boy's encyclopædia – "Le Manuel du Baccalauréat"; a very thick book in very small print. And I came to the conclusion that it is good to work hard: it makes one enjoy food and play and sleep so keenly – and Thursday afternoons.

The school was all the pleasanter for having fewer boys; we got more intimate with each other, and with the masters too. During the winter M. Bonzig told us capital stories —Modeste Mignon, by Balzac —Le Chevalier de Maison‐rouge, by A. Dumas père – etc., etc.

In the summer the Passy swimming‐bath was more delightful than ever. Both winter and summer we passionately fenced with a pupil (un prévôt) of the famous M. Bonnet, and did gymnastics with M. Louis, the gymnastic master of the Collège Charlemagne – the finest man I ever saw – a gigantic dwarf six feet high, all made up of lumps of sinew and muscles, like…

Also, we were taught equitation at the riding‐school in the Rue Duphot.

On Saturday nights Barty would draw a lovely female profile, with a beautiful big black eye, in pen and ink, and carefully shade it; especially the hair, which was always as the raven's wing! And on Sunday morning he and I used to walk together to 108 Champs Élysées and enter the rez‐de‐chaussée (where my mother and sister lived) by the window, before my mother was up. Then Barty took out his lovely female pen‐and‐ink profile to gaze at, and rolled himself a cigarette and lit it, and lay back on the sofa, and made my sister play her lightest music – "La pluie de Perles," by Osborne – and "Indiana," a beautiful valse by Marcailhou – and thus combine three or four perfect blisses in one happy quart d'heure.

Then my mother would appear, and we would have breakfast – after which Barty and I would depart by the window as we had come, and go and do our bit of Boulevard and Palais Royal. Then to the Rue du Bac for another breakfast with the Rohans; and then, "au petit bonheur"; that is, trusting to Providence for whatever turned up. The programme didn't vary very much: either I dined with him at the Rohans', or he with me at 108. Then, back to Brossard's at ten – tired and happy.

One Sunday I remember well we stayed in school, for old Josselin the fisherman came to see us there – Barty's grandfather, now a widower; and M. Mérovée asked him to lunch with us, and go to the baths in the afternoon.

Imagine old Bonzig's delight in this "vieux loup de mer," as he called him! That was a happy day for the old fisherman also; I shall never forget his surprise at M. Dumollard's telescope – and how clever he was on the subject.

He came to the baths, and admired and criticised the good swimming of the boys – especially Barty's, which was really remarkable. I don't believe he could swim a stroke himself.

Then we went and dined together at Lord Archibald's, in the Rue du Bac – "Mon Colonel," as the old fisherman always called him. He was a very humorous and intelligent person, this fisher, though nearer eighty than seventy; very big, and of a singularly picturesque appearance – for he had not endimanché himself in the least; and very clean. A splendid old man; oddly enough, somewhat Semitic of aspect – as though he had just come from a miraculous draught of fishes in the Sea of Galilee, out of a cartoon by Raphael!

I recollect admiring how easily and pleasantly everything went during dinner, and all through the perfection of this ancient sea‐toiler's breeding in all essentials.

Of course the poor all over the world are less nice in their habits than the rich, and less correct in their grammar and accent, and narrower in their views of life; but in every other respect there seemed little to choose between Josselins and Rohans and Lonlay‐Savignacs; and indeed, according to Lord Archibald, the best manners were to be found at these two opposite poles – or even wider still. He would have it that Royalty and chimney‐sweeps were the best‐bred people all over the world – because there was no possible mistake about their social status.

I felt a little indignant – after all, Lady Archibald was built out of chocolate, for all her Lonlay and her Savignac! just as I was built out of Beaune and Chambertin.

I'm afraid I shall be looked upon as a snob and a traitor to my class if I say that I have at last come to be of the same opinion myself. That is, if absolute simplicity, and the absence of all possible temptation to try and seem an inch higher up than we really are – But there! this is a very delicate question, about which I don't care a straw; and there are such exceptions, and so many, to confirm any such rule!

Anyhow, I saw how Barty couldn't help having the manners we all so loved him for. After dinner Lady Archibald showed old Josselin some of Barty's lovely female profiles – a sight that affected him strangely. He would have it that they were all exact portraits of his beloved Antoinette, Barty's mother.

They were certainly singularly like each other, these little chefs‐d'œuvre of Barty's, and singularly handsome – an ideal type of his own; and the old grandfather was allowed his choice, and touchingly grateful at being presented with such treasures.

The scene made a great impression on me.

So spent itself that year – a happy year that had no history – except for one little incident that I will tell because it concerns Barty, and illustrates him.

One beautiful Sunday morning the yellow omnibus was waiting for some of us as we dawdled about in the school‐room, titivating; the masters nowhere, as usual on a Sunday morning; and some of the boys began to sing in chorus a not very edifying chanson, which they did not "Bowdlerize," about a holy Capuchin friar; it began (if I remember rightly):

 
"C'était un Capucin, oui bien, un père Capucin,
Qui confessait trois filles —
Itou, itou, itou, là là là!
Qui confessait trois filles
Au fond de son jardin —
Oui bien —
Au fond de son jardin!
Il dit à la plus jeune —
 
 
Itou, itou, itou, là là là!
Il dit à la plus jeune…
'Vous reviendrez demain!'"
Etc, etc., etc.
 

I have quite forgotten the rest.

Now this little song, which begins so innocently, like a sweet old idyl of mediæval France – "un écho du temps passé" – seems to have been a somewhat Rabelaisian ditty; by no means proper singing for a Sunday morning in a boys' school. But boys will be boys, even in France; and the famous "esprit Gaulois" was somewhat precocious in the forties, I suppose. Perhaps it is now, if it still exists (which I doubt – the dirt remains, but all the fun seems to have evaporated).

Suddenly M. Dumollard bursts into the room in his violent sneaky way, pale with rage, and says:

"Je vais gifler tous ceux qui ont chanté" (I'll box the ears of every boy who sang).

So he puts all in a row and begins:

"Rubinel, sur votre parole d'honneur, avez‐vous chanté?"

"Non, m'sieur!"

"Caillard, avez‐vous chanté?"

"Non, m'sieur!"

"Lipmann, avez‐vous chanté?"

"Non, m'sieur!"

"Maurice, avez‐vous chanté?"

"Non, m'sieur" (which, for a wonder, was true, for I happened not to know either the words or the tune).

"Josselin, avez‐vous chanté?"

"Oui, m'sieur!"

And down went Barty his full length on the floor, from a tremendous open‐handed box on the ear. Dumollard was a very Herculean person – though by no means gigantic.

Barty got up and made Dumollard a polite little bow, and walked out of the room.

"Vous êtes tous consignés!" says M. Dumollard – and the omnibus went away empty, and we spent all that Sunday morning as best we might.

In the afternoon we went out walking in the Bois. Dumollard had recovered his serenity and came with us; for he was de service that day.

Says Lipmann to him:

"Josselin drapes himself in his English dignity – he sulks like Achilles and walks by himself."

"Josselin is at least a man," says Dumollard. "He tells the truth, and doesn't know fear – and I'm sorry he's English!"

And later, at the Mare d'Auteuil, he put out his hand to Barty and said:

"Let's make it up, Josselin – au moins vous avez du cœur, vous. Promettez‐moi que vous ne chanterez plus cette sale histoire de Capucin!"

Josselin took the usher's hand, and smiled his open, toothy smile, and said:

"Pas le dimanche matin toujours – quand c'est vous qui serez de service, M. Dumollard!" (Anyhow not Sunday morning when you're on duty, Mr. D.)

And Mr. D. left off running down the English in public after that – except to say that they couldn't be simple and natural if they tried; and that they affected a ridiculous accent when they spoke French – not Josselin and Maurice, but all the others he had ever met. As if plain French, which had been good enough for William the Conqueror, wasn't good enough for the subjects of her Britannic Majesty to‐day!

The only event of any importance in Barty's life that year was his first communion, which he took with several others of about his own age. An event that did not seem to make much impression on him – nothing seemed to make much impression on Barty Josselin when he was very young. He was just a lively, irresponsible, irrepressible human animal – always in perfect health and exuberant spirits, with an immense appetite for food and fun and frolic; like a squirrel, a collie pup, or a kitten.

Père Bonamy, the priest who confirmed him, was fonder of the boy than of any one, boy or girl, that he had ever prepared for communion, and could hardly speak of him with decent gravity, on account of his extraordinary confessions – all of which were concocted in the depths of Barty's imagination for the sole purpose of making the kind old curé laugh; and the kind old curé was just as fond of laughing as was Barty of playing the fool, in and out of season. I wonder if he always thought himself bound to respect the secrets of the confessional in Barty's case!

And Barty would sing to him – even in the confessional:

 
"Stabat mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lachrymose
Dum pendebat fllius" …
 

in a voice so sweet and innocent and pathetic that it would almost bring the tears to the good old curé's eyelash.

"Ah! ma chère Mamzelle Marceline!" he would say – "au moins s'ils étaient tous comme ce petit Josselin! çà irait comme sur des roulettes! Il est innocent comme un jeune veau, ce mioche anglais! Il a le bon Dieu dans le cœur!"

"Et une boussole dans l'estomac!" said Mlle. Marceline.

I don't think he was quite so innocent as all that, perhaps – but no young beast of the field was ever more harmless.

That year the examinations were good all round; even I did not disgrace myself, and Barty was brilliant. But there were no delightful holidays for me to record. Barty went to Yorkshire, and I remained in Paris with my mother.

There is only one thing more worth mentioning that year.

My father had inherited from his father a system of shorthand, which he called Blaze– I don't know why! His father had learnt it of a Dutch Jew.

It is, I think, the best kind of cipher ever invented (I have taken interest in these things and studied them). It is very difficult to learn, but I learnt it as a child – and it was of immense use to me at lectures we used to attend at the Sorbonne and Collège de France.

Barty was very anxious to know it, and after some trouble I obtained my father's permission to impart this calligraphic crypt to Barty, on condition he should swear on his honor never to reveal it: and this he did.

With his extraordinary quickness and the perseverance he always had when he wished a thing very much, he made himself a complete master of this occult science before he left school, two or three years later: it took me seven years – beginning when I was four! It does equally well for French or English, and it played an important part in Barty's career. My sister knew it, but imperfectly; my mother not at all – for all she tried so hard and was so persevering; it must be learnt young. As far as I am aware, no one else knows it in England or France – or even the world – although it is such a useful invention; quite a marvel of simple ingenuity when one has mastered the symbols, which certainly take a long time and a deal of hard work.

Barty and I got to talk it on our fingers as rapidly as ordinary speech and with the slightest possible gestures: this was his improvement.

Barty came back from his holidays full of Whitby, and its sailors and whalers, and fishermen and cobles and cliffs – all of which had evidently had an immense attraction for him. He was always fond of that class; possibly also some vague atavistic sympathy for the toilers of the sea lay dormant in his blood like an inherited memory.

And he brought back many tokens of these good people's regard – two formidable clasp‐knives (for each of which he had to pay the giver one farthing in current coin of the realm); spirit‐flasks, leather bottles, jet ornaments; woollen jerseys and comforters knitted for him by their wives and daughters; fossil ammonites and coprolites; a couple of young sea‐gulls to add to his menagerie; and many old English marine ditties, which he had to sing to M. Bonzig with his now cracked voice, and then translate into French. Indeed, Bonzig and Barty became inseparable companions during the Thursday promenade, on the strength of their common interest in ships and the sea; and Barty never wearied of describing the place he loved, nor Bonzig of listening and commenting.

Part Fourth

 
"La cigale ayant chanté
Tout l'été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue."…
 

– Lafontaine.

Sometimes I went to see Lord and Lady Archibald, who lived in Clarges Street; and Lady Archibald was kind enough to call on my mother, who was charmed with her, and returned her call in due time.

Also, at about this period (1853) my uncle Charles (Captain Blake, late 17th Lancers), who had been Lord Runswick's crony twenty years before, patched up some feud he had with my father, and came to see us in Brunswick Square.

He had just married a charming girl, young enough to be his daughter.

I took him to see Barty, and they became fast friends. My uncle Charles was a very accomplished man, and spoke French as well as any of us; and Barty liked him, and it ended, oddly enough, in Uncle Charles becoming Lord Whitby's land‐agent and living in St. Hilda's Terrace, Whitby.

He was a very good fellow and a thorough man of the world, and was of great service to Barty in many ways. But, alas and alas! he was not able to prevent or make up the disastrous quarrel that happened between Barty and Lord Archibald, with such terrible results to my friend – to both.

It is all difficult even to hint at – but some of it must be more than hinted at.

Lord Archibald, like his nephew, was a very passionate admirer of lovely woman. He had been for many years a faithful and devoted husband to the excellent Frenchwoman who brought him wealth – and such affection! Then a terrible temptation came in his way. He fell in love with a very beautiful and fascinating lady, whose birth and principles and antecedents were alike very unfortunate, and Barty was mixed up in all this: it's the saddest thing I ever heard.

The beautiful lady conceived for Barty one of those frantic passions that must lead to somebody's ruin; it led to his; but he was never to blame, except for the careless indiscretion which allowed of his being concerned in the miserable business at all, and to this frantic passion he did not respond.

"Spretæ injuria formæ."

So at least she fancied; it was not so. Barty was no laggard in love; but he dearly loved his uncle Archie, and was loyal to him all through.

 
"His honor rooted in dishonor stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true."
 

Where he was unfaithful was to his beloved and adoring Lady Archibald – his second mother – at miserable cost of undying remorse to himself for ever having sunk to become Lord Archibald's confidant and love‐messenger, and bearer of nosegays and billets doux, and singer of little French songs. He was only twenty, and thought of such things as jokes; he had lived among some of the pleasantest, best‐bred, and most corrupt people in London.

The beautiful frail lady told the most infamous lies, and stuck to them through thick and thin. The story is not new; it's as old as the Pharaohs. And Barty and his uncle quarrelled beyond recall. The boy was too proud even to defend himself, beyond one simple denial.

Then another thing happened. Lady Archibald died, quite suddenly, of peritonitis – fortunately in ignorance of what was happening, and with her husband and daughter and Barty round her bedside at the end. She died deceived and happy.

Lord Archibald was beside himself with grief; but in six months he married the beautiful lady, and went to the bad altogether – went under, in fact; and Daphne, his daughter of fourteen or fifteen, was taken by the Whitbys.

So now Barty, thoroughly sick of smart society, found himself in an unexpected position – without an allowance, in a crack regiment, and never a penny to look forward to!

For old Lord Whitby, who loved him, was a poor man with a large family; and every penny of Lady Archibald's fortune that didn't go to her husband and daughter went back to her own family of Lonlay‐Savignac. She had made no will – no provision for her beloved, her adopted son!

So Barty never went to the Crimea, after all, but sold out, and found himself the possessor of seven or eight hundred pounds – most of which he owed – and with the world before him; but I am going too fast.

In the winter of 1853, just before Christmas, my father fitted up for me a chemical laboratory at the top of the fine old house in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, where his wine business was carried on, a splendid mansion, with panelled rooms and a carved‐oak staircase – once the abode of some Dick Whittington, no doubt a Lord Mayor of London; and I began my professional career, which consisted in analyzing anything I could get to analyze for hire, from a sample of gold or copper ore to a poisoned stomach.

Lord Whitby very kindly sent me different samples of soil from different fields on his estate, and I analyzed them carefully and found them singularly like each other. I don't think the estate benefited much by my scientific investigation. It was my first job, and brought me twenty pounds (out of which I bought two beautiful fans – one for my sister, the other for Leah Gibson – and got a new evening suit for myself at Barty's tailor's).

When this job of mine was finished I had a good deal of time on my hands, and read many novels and smoked many pipes, as I sat by my chemical stove and distilled water, and dried chlorate of potash to keep the damp out of my scales, and toasted cheese, and fried sausages, and mulled Burgundy, and brewed nice drinks, hot or cold – a specialty of mine.

I also made my laboratory a very pleasant place. My father wouldn't permit a piano, nor could I afford one; but I smuggled in a guitar (for Barty), and also a concertina, which I could play a little myself. Barty often came with friends of his, of whom my father did not approve – mostly Guardsmen; also friends of my own – medical students, and one or two fellow‐chemists, who were serious, and pleased my father. We often had a capital time: chemical experiments and explosions, and fearful stinks, and poisoned waters of enchanting hue; also oysters, lobsters, dressed crab for lunch – and my Burgundy was good, I promise you, whether white or red!

We also had songs and music of every description. Barty's taste had improved. He could sing Beethoven's "Adelaida" in English, German, and Italian, and Schubert's "Serenade" in French – quite charmingly, to his own ingenious accompaniment on the guitar.

We had another vocalist, a little Hebrew art‐student, with a heavenly tenor (I've forgotten his name); and Ticklets, the bass; and a Guardsman who could yodel and imitate a woman's voice – one Pepys, whom Barty loved because he was a giant, and, according to Barty, "the handsomest chap in London."

These debauches generally happened when my father was abroad – always, in fact. I'm greatly ashamed of it all now; even then my heart smote me heavily at times when I thought of the pride and pleasure he took in all my scientific appliances, and the money they cost him – twenty guineas for a pair of scales! Poor dear old man! he loved to weigh things in them – a feather, a minute crumb of cork, an infinitesimal wisp of cotton wool!..

However, I've made it all up to him since in many ways; and he has told me that I have been a good son, after all! And that is good to think of now that I am older than he was when he died!

One fine morning, before going to business, I escorted my sister to Bedford Square, calling for Leah Gibson on the way; as we walked up Great Russell Street (that being the longest way round I could think of), we met Barty, looking as fresh as a school‐boy, and resplendent as usual. I remember he had on a long blue frock‐coat, check trousers, an elaborate waistcoat and scarf, and white hat – as was the fashion – and that he looked singularly out of place (and uncommonly agreeable to the eye) in such an austere and learned neighborhood.

He was coming to call for me in Brunswick Square.

My sister introduced him to her friend, and he looked down at Leah with a surprised glance of delicate fatherly admiration – he might have been fifty.

Then we left the young ladies and went off together citywards; my father was abroad.

"By Jove, what a stunner that girl is! I'm blest if I don't marry her some day – you see if I don't!"

"That's just what I mean to do," said I. And we had a good laugh at the idea of two such desperadoes, as we thought ourselves, talking like this about a little school-girl.

"We'll toss up," says Barty; and we did, and he won.

This, I remember, was before his quarrel with Lord Archibald. She was then about fourteen, and her subtle and singular beauty was just beginning to make itself felt.

I never knew till long after how deep had been the impression produced by this glimpse of a mere child on a fast young man about town – or I should not have been amused. For there were times when I myself thought quite seriously of Leah Gibson, and what she might be in the long future! She looked a year or two older than she really was, being very tall and extremely sedate.

Also, both my father and mother had conceived such a liking for her that they constantly talked of the possibility of our falling in love with each other some day. Castles in Spain!

As for me, my admiration for the child was immense, and my respect for her character unbounded; and I felt myself such a base unworthy brute that I couldn't bear to think of myself in such a connection – until I had cleansed myself heart and soul (which would take time)! And as for showing by my manner to her that such an idea had ever crossed my mind, the thought never entered my head.

She was just my dear sister's devoted friend; her petticoat hem was still some inches from the ground, and her hair in a plait all down her back…

Girlish innocence and purity incarnate – that is what she seemed; and what she was. "La plus forte des forces est un cœur innocent," said Victor Hugo – and if you translate this literally into English, it comes to exactly the same, both in rhythm and sense.

When Barty sold out, he first thought he would like to go on the stage, but it turned out that he was too tall to play anything but serious footmen.

Then he thought he would be a singer. We used to go to the opera at Drury Lane, where they gave in English a different Italian opera every night; – and this was always followed by Acis and Galatea.

We got our seats in the stalls every evening for a couple of weeks, through the kindness of Mr. Hamilton Braham, whom Barty knew, and who played Polyphemus in Handel's famous serenata.

I remember our first night; they gave Masaniello, which I had never seen; and when the tenor sang, "Behold how brightly breaks the morning," it came on us both as a delicious surprise – it was such a favorite song at Brossard's – "amis! la matinée est belle…" Indeed, it was one of the songs Barty sang on the boulevard for the poor woman, six or seven years back.

The tenor, Mr. Elliot Galer, had a lovely voice; and that was a moment never to be forgotten.

Then came Acis and Galatea, which was so odd and old‐fashioned we could scarcely sit it out.

Next night, Lucia– charming; then again Acis and Galatea, because we had nowhere else to go.

"Tiens, tiens!" says Barty, as the lovers sang "the flocks shall leave the mountains"; "c'est diantrement joli, ça! – écoute!"

Next night, La Sonnambula– then again Acis and Galatea.

"Mais, nom d'une pipe – elle est divine, cette musique‐là!" says Barty.

And the nights after we could scarcely sit out the Italian opera that preceded what we have looked upon ever since as among the divinest music in the world.

So one must not judge music at a first hearing; nor poetry; nor pictures at first sight; unless one be poet or painter or musician one's self – not even then! I may live to love thee yet, oh Tannhäuser!

Lucy Escott, Fanny Huddart, Elliot Galer, and Hamilton Braham – that was the cast; I hear their voices now…

One morning Hamilton Braham tried Barty's voice on the empty stage at St. James's Theatre – made him sing "When other lips."

"Sing out, man – sing out!" said the big bass. And Barty shouted his loudest – a method which did not suit him. I sat in the pit, with half a dozen Guardsmen, who were deeply interested in Barty's operatic aspirations.

It turned out that Barty was neither tenor nor barytone; and that his light voice, so charming in a room, would never do for the operatic stage; although his figure, in spite of his great height, would have suited heroic parts so admirably.

Besides, three or four years' training in Italy were needed – a different production altogether.

So Barty gave up this idea and made up his mind to be an artist. He got permission to work in the British Museum, and drew the "Discobolus," and sent his drawing to the Royal Academy, in the hope of being admitted there as a student. He was not.

Then an immense overwhelming homesickness for Paris came over him, and he felt he must go and study art there, and succeed or perish.

My father talked to him like a father, my mother like a mother; we all hung about him and entreated. He was as obdurate as Tennyson's sailor‐boy whom the mermaiden forewarned so fiercely!

He was even offered a handsome appointment in the London house of Vougeot‐Conti & Co.

But his mind was made up, and to my sorrow, and the sorrow of all who knew him, he fixed the date of his departure for the 2d of May (1856), – this being the day after a party at the Gibsons' – a young dance in honor of Leah's fifteenth birthday, on the 1st – and to which my sister had procured him an invitation.

He had never been to the Gibsons' before. They belonged to a world so different to anything he had been accustomed to – indeed, to a class that he then so much disliked and despised (both as ex‐Guardsman and as the descendant of French toilers of the sea, who hate and scorn the bourgeois) – that I was curious to see how he would bear himself there; and rather nervous, for it would have grieved me that he should look down on people of whom I was getting very fond. It was his theory that all successful business people were pompous and purse‐proud and vulgar.

I admit that in the fifties we very often were.

There may perhaps be a few survivals of that period: old nouveaux riches, who are still modestly jocose on the subject of each other's millions when they meet, and indulge in pompous little pleasantries about their pet economics, and drop a pompous little h now and then, and pretend they only did it for fun. But, dear me, there are other things to be vulgar about in this world besides money and uncertain aspirates.

If to be pompous and pretentious and insincere is to be vulgar, I really think the vulgar of our time are not these old plutocrats – not even their grandsons, who hunt and shoot and yacht and swagger with the best – but those solemn little prigs who have done well at school or college, and become radicals and agnostics before they've even had time to find out what men and women are made of, or what sex they belong to themselves (if any), and loathe all fun and sport and athletics, and rave about pictures and books and music they don't understand, and would pretend to despise if they did – things that were not even meant to be understood. It doesn't take three generations to make a prig – worse luck!

At the Gibsons' there was neither pompousness nor insincerity nor pretension of any kind, and therefore no real vulgarity. It is true they were a little bit noisy there sometimes, but only in fun.

When we arrived at that most hospitable house the two pretty drawing‐rooms were already crammed with young people, and the dancing was in full swing.

I presented Barty to Mrs. Gibson, who received him with her usual easy cordiality, just as she would have received one of her husband's clerks, or the Prime Minister; or the Prince Consort himself, for that matter. But she looked up into his face with such frank unabashed admiration that I couldn't help laughing – nor could he!

She presented him to Mr. Gibson, who drew himself back and folded his arms and frowned; then suddenly, striking a beautiful stage attitude of surprised emotion, with his hand on his heart, he exclaimed:

"Oh! Monsewer! Esker‐voo ker jer dwaw lah vee? – ah! kel bonnure!"

And this so tickled Barty that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary – that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; for she was my informant.

I'm afraid Barty was not so immediately popular with the young cavaliers of the party – but all came right in due time. For after supper, which was early, Barty played the fool with Mr. Gibson, and taught him how to do a mechanical wax figure, of which he himself was the showman; and the laughter, both baritone and soprano, might have been heard in Russell Square. Then they sang an extempore Italian duet together which was screamingly droll – and so forth.

Leah distinguished herself as usual by being attentive to the material wants of the company: comfortable seats, ices, syrups, footstools for mammas, and wraps; safety from thorough draughts for grandpapas – the inherited hospitality of the clan of Gibson took this form with the sole daughter of their house and home; she had no "parlor tricks."

We remained the latest. It was a full moon, or nearly so – as usual on a balcony; for I remember standing on the balcony with Leah.

A belated Italian organ‐grinder stopped beneath us and played a tune from I Lombardi, called "La mia letizia." Leah's hair was done up for the first time – in two heavy black bands that hid her little ears and framed her narrow chinny face – with a yellow bow plastered on behind. Such was the fashion then, a hideous fashion enough – but we knew no better. To me she looked so lovely in her long white frock – long for the first time – that Tavistock Square became a broad Venetian moonlit lagoon, and the dome of University College an old Italian church, and "La mia letizia" the song of Adria's gondolier.

I asked her what she thought of Barty.

"I really don't know," she said. "He's not a bit romantic, is he?"

"No; but he's very handsome. Don't you think so?"

"Oh yes, indeed – much too handsome for a man. It seems such waste. Why, I now remember seeing him when I was quite a little girl, three or four years ago, at the Duke of Wellington's funeral. He had his bearskin on. Papa pointed him out to us, and said he looked like such a pretty girl! And we all wondered who he could be! And so sad he looked! I suppose it was for the Duke.

"I couldn't think where I'd seen him before, and now I remember – and there's a photograph of him in a stall at the Crystal Palace. Have you seen it? Not that he looks like a girl now! Not a bit! I suppose you're very fond of him? Ida is! She talks as much about Mr. Josselin as she does about you! Barty, she calls him."

"Yes, indeed; he's like our brother. We were boys at school together in France. My sister calls him thee and thou; in French, you know."

"And was he always like that – funny and jolly and good‐natured?"

"Always; he hasn't changed a bit."

"And is he very sincere?"

Just then Barty came on to the balcony: it was time to go. My sister had been fetched away already (in her gondola).

So Barty made his farewells, and bent his gallant, irresistible look of mirthful chivalry and delicate middle‐aged admiration on Leah's upturned face, and her eyes looked up more piercing and blacker than ever; and in each of them a little high light shone like a point of interrogation – the reflection of some white window‐curtain, I suppose; and I felt cold all down my back.

(Barty's daughter, Mary Trevor, often sings a little song of De Musset's. It is quite lovely, and begins:

 
"Beau chevalier qui partez pour la guerre,
Qu'allez‐vous faire
Si loin d'ici?
 
 
Voyez‐vous pas que la nuit est profonde,
Et que le monde
N'est que souci?"
 

It is called "La Chanson de Barberine," and I never hear it but I think of that sweet little white virginal point d'interrogation, and Barty going away to France.)

Then he thanked Mrs. Gibson and said pretty things, and finally called Mr. Gibson dreadful French fancy‐names: "Cascamèche – moutardier du pape, tromblon‐bolivard, vieux coquelicot"; to each of which the delighted Mr. G. answered:

"Voos ayt oon ôter – voos ayt oon ôter!"

And then Barty whisked himself away in a silver cloud of glory. A good exit!

Outside was a hansom waiting, with a carpet‐bag on the top, and we got into it and drove up to Hampstead Heath, to some little inn called the Bull and Bush, near North‐end.

Barty lit his pipe, and said:

"What capital people! Hanged if they're not the nicest people I ever met!"

"Yes," said I.

And that's all that was said during that long drive.

At North‐end we found two or three other hansoms, and Pepys and Ticklets and the little Hebrew tenor art student whose name I've forgotten, and several others.

We had another supper, and made a night of it. There was a piano in a small room opening on to a kind of little terrace, with geraniums, over a bow‐window. We had music and singing of all sorts. Even I sang – "The Standard‐bearer" – and rather well. My sister had coached me; but I did not obtain an encore.

The next day dawned, and Barty had a wash and changed his clothes, and we walked all over Hampstead Heath, and saw London lying in a dun mist, with the dome and gilded cross of St. Paul's rising into the pale blue dawn; and I thought what a beastly place London would be without Barty – ‐but that Leah was there still, safe and sound asleep in Tavistock Square!

Then back to the inn for breakfast. Barty, as usual, fresh as paint. Happy Barty, off to Paris!

And then we all drove down to London Bridge to see him safe into the Boulogne steamer. All his luggage was on board. His late soldier‐servant was there – a splendid fellow, chosen for his length and breadth as well as his fidelity; also the Snowdrop, who was lachrymose and in great grief. It was a most affectionate farewell all round.

"Good‐bye, Bob. I won that toss —didn't I?"

Oddly enough, I was thinking of that, and didn't like it.

"What rot! it's only a joke, old fellow!" said Barty.

All this about an innocent little girl just fifteen, the daughter of a low‐comedy John Gilpin: a still somewhat gaunt little girl, whose budding charms of color, shape, and surface were already such that it didn't matter whether she were good or bad, gentle or simple, rich or poor, sensible or an utter fool.

C'est toujours comme ça!

We watched the steamer pick its sunny way down the Thames, with Barty waving his hat by the man at the wheel; and I walked westward with the little Hebrew artist, who was so affected at parting with his hero that he had tears in his lovely voice. It was not till I had complimented him on his wonderful B‐flat that he got consoled; and he talked about himself, and his B‐flat, and his middle G, and his physical strength, and his eye for color, all the way from the Mansion House to the Foundling Hospital; when we parted, and he went straight to his drawing‐board at the British Museum – an anticlimax!

I found my mother and sister at their late breakfast, and was scolded; and I told them Barty had got off, and wouldn't come back for long – it might not be for years!

"Thank Heaven!" said my dear mother, and I was not pleased.

Says my sister:

"Do you know, he's actually stolen Leah's photograph, that she gave me for my birthday. He asked me for it and I wouldn't give it him – and it's gone!"

Then I washed and put on my work‐a‐day clothes, and went straight to Barge Yard, Bucklersbury, and made myself a bed on the floor with my great‐coat, and slept all day.

Oh heavens! what a dull book this would be, and how dismally it would drag its weary length along, if it weren't all about the author of Sardonyx!

But is there a lost corner anywhere in this planet where English is spoken (or French) in which The Martian won't be bought and treasured and spelt over and over again like a novel by Dickens or Scott (or Dumas) – for Josselin's dear sake! What a fortune my publishers would make if I were not a man of business and they were not the best and most generous publishers in the world! And all Josselin's publishers – French, English, German, and what not – down to modern Sanscrit! What millionaires – if it hadn't been for this little busy bee of a Bob Maurice!

Poor Barty! I am here! à bon chat, bon rat!

And what on earth do I want a fortune for? Barty's dead, and I've got so much more than I need, who am of a frugal mind – and what I've got is all going to little Josselins, who have already got so much more than they need, what with their late father and me; and my sister, who is a widow and childless, and "riche à millions" too! and cares for nobody in all this wide world but little Josselins, who don't care for money in the least, and would sooner work for their living – even break stones on the road – anything sooner than loaf and laze and loll through life. We all have to give most of it away – not that I need proclaim it from the house‐tops! It is but a dull and futile hobby, giving away to those who deserve; they soon leave off deserving.

How fortunate that so much money is really wanted by people who don't deserve it any more than I do; and who, besides, are so weak and stupid and lazy and honest – or so incurably dishonest – that they can't make it for themselves! I have to look after a good many of these people. Barty was fond of them, honest or not. They are so incurably prolific; and so was he, poor dear boy! but, oh, the difference! Grapes don't grow on thorns, nor figs on thistles!

I'm a thorn, alas! in my own side, more often than not – and a thistle in the sides of a good many donkeys, whom I feed because they're too stupid or too lazy to feed themselves! But at least I know my place, and the knowledge is more bother to me than all my money, and the race of Maurice will soon be extinct.

When Barty went to foreign parts, on the 2d of May, 1856, I didn't trouble myself about such questions as these.

Life was so horribly stale in London without Barty that I became a quite exemplary young man when I woke up from that long nap on the floor of my laboratory in Barge Yard, Bucklersbury; a reformed character: from sheer grief, I really believe!

I thought of many things – ugly things – very ugly things indeed – and meant to have done with them. I thought of some very handsome things too – a pair of beautiful crown‐jewels, each rare as the black tulip – and in each of them a bright little sign like this:?

I don't believe I ever gave my father another bad quarter of an hour from that moment. I even went to church on Sunday mornings quite regularly; not his own somewhat severe place of worship, it is true! But the Foundling Hospital. There, in the gallery, would I sit with my sister, and listen to Miss Dolby and Miss Louisa Pyne and Mr. Lawler the bass – and a tenor and alto whose names I cannot recall; and I thought they sang as they ought to have sung, and was deeply moved and comforted – more than by any preachments in the world; and just in the opposite gallery sat Leah with her mother; and I grew fond of nice clean little boys and girls who sing pretty hymns in unison; and afterwards I watched them eat their roast beef, small mites of three and four or five, some of them, and thought how touching it all was – I don't know why! Love or grief? or that touch of nature that makes the whole world kin at about 1 P.M. on Sunday?

One would think that Barty had exerted a bad influence on me, since he seems to have kept me out of all this that was so sweet and new and fresh and wholesome!

He would have been just as susceptible to such impressions as I; even more so, if the same chance had arisen for him – for he was singularly fond of children, the smaller and the poorer the better, even gutter children! and their poor mothers loved him, he was so jolly and generous and kind.

Sometimes I got a letter from him in Blaze, my father's shorthand cipher; it was always brief and bright and hopeful, and full of jokes and funny sketches. And I answered him in Blaze that was long and probably dull.

All that I will tell of him now is not taken from his Blaze letters, but from what he has told me later, by word of mouth – for he was as fond of talking of himself as I of listening – since he was droll and sincere and without guile or vanity; and would have been just as sympathetic a listener as I, if I had cared to talk about Mr. Robert Maurice, of Barge Yard, Bucklersbury. Besides, I am good at hearing between the words and reading between the lines, and all that – and love to exercise this faculty.

Well, he reached Paris in due time, and took a small bedroom on a third floor in the Rue du Faubourg Poissonnière – over a cheap hatter's – opposite the Conservatoire de Musique.

On the first night he was awoke by a terrible invasion – such malodorous swarms of all sizes, from a tiny brown speck to a full‐grown lentil, that they darkened his bed; and he slept on the tiled floor after making an island of himself by pouring cold water all round him as a kind of moat; and so he slept for a week of nights, until he had managed to poison off most of these invaders with poudre insecticide … "mort aux punaises!"

In the daytime he first of all went for a swim at the Passy baths – an immense joy, full of the ghosts of by‐gone times; then he would spend the rest of his day revisiting old haunts – often sitting on the edge of the stone fountain in the rond‐point of the Avenue du Prince Impérial, or de l'Impératrice, or whatever it was – to gaze comfortably at the outside of the old school, which was now a pensionnat de demoiselles: soon to be pulled down and make room for a new house altogether. He did not attempt to invade these precincts of maiden innocence; but gazed and gazed, and remembered and realized and dreamt: it all gave him unspeakable excitement, and a strange tender wistful melancholy delight for which there is no name. Je connais ça! I also, ghostlike, have paced round the haunts of my childhood.

Next day Tescheles came up to an English student called Fox and said:

"Well, old stick‐in‐the‐mud, how are you getting on?"

"Why, you don't mean to say you're an Englishman?" says Barty to Tescheles.

"Good heavens! you don't mean to say you are! fancy your calling poor old Walters Vàltères!"

And after that they became very intimate, and that was a good thing for Barty.

The polyglot Tescheles was of a famous musical family, of mixed German and Russian origin, naturalized in England and domiciled in France – a true cosmopolite and a wonderful linguist, besides being also a cultivated musician and excellent painter; and all the musicians, famous or otherwise, that passed through Antwerp made his rooms a favorite resort and house of call. And Barty was introduced into a world as delightful to him as it was new – and to music that ravished his soul with a novel enchantment: Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Schumann – and he found that Schubert had written a few other songs besides the famous "Serenade"!

One evening he was even asked if he could make music himself, and actually volunteered to sing – and sang that famous ballad of Balfe's which seems destined to become immortal in this country – "When other lips" … alias, "Then you'll remember me!"

Strange to say, it was absolutely new to this high musical circle, but they went quite mad over it; and the beautiful melody got naturalized from that moment in Belgium and beyond, and Barty was proclaimed the primo tenore of Antwerp – although he was only a barytone!

A fortnight after this Barty heard "When other lips" played by the "Guides" band in the park at Brussels. Its first appearance out of England – and all through him.

Then he belonged to the Antwerp "Cercle Artistique," where he made many friends and was very popular, as I can well imagine.

Thus he was happier than he had ever been in his life; but for one thing that plagued him now and again: his oft‐recurring desire to be conscious once more of the north, which he had not felt for four or five years.

The want of this sensation at certain periods – especially at night – would send a chill thrill of desolation through him like a wave; a wild panic, a quick agony, as though the true meaning of absolute loneliness were suddenly realized by a lightning flash of insight, and it were to last for ever and ever.

This would pass away in a second or two, but left a haunting recollection behind for many hours. And then all was again sunshine, and the world was made of many friends – and solitude was impossible evermore.

One memorable morning this happiness received a check and a great horror befell him. It was towards the end of summer – just before the vacation.

With a dozen others, he was painting the head of an old man from the life, when he became quite suddenly conscious of something strange in his sight. First he shut his left eye and saw with his right quite perfectly; then he shut the right, and lo! whatever he looked at with the left dwindled to a vanishing point and became invisible. No rubbing or bathing of his eye would alter the terrible fact, and he knew what great fear really means, for the first time.

Much kind concern was expressed, and Van Lerius told him to go at once to a Monsieur Noiret, a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain, who had attended him for the eyes, and had the reputation of being the first oculist in Belgium.

Barty wrote immediately and an appointment was made, and in three days he saw the great man, half professor, half priest, who took him into a dark chamber lighted by a lamp, and dilated his pupil with atropine, and looked into his eye with the newly discovered "ophthalmoscope."

Professor Noiret told him it was merely a congestion of the retina – for which no cause could be assigned; and that he would be cured in less than a month. That he was to have a seton let into the back of his neck, dry‐cup himself on the chest and thighs night and morning, and take a preparation of mercury three times a day. Also that he must go to the seaside immediately – and he recommended Ostend.

Barty told him that he was an impecunious art student, and that Ostend was a very expensive place.

Noiret considerately recommended Blankenberghe, which was cheap; asked for and took his full fee, and said, with a courtly priestly bow:

"If you are not cured, come back in a month. Au revoir!"

So poor Barty had the seton put in by a kind of barber‐surgeon, and was told how to dress it night and morning; got his medicines and his dry‐cupping apparatus, and went off to Blankenberghe quite hopeful.

And there things happened to him which I really think are worth telling; in the first place, because, even if they did not concern Barty Josselin, they should be amusing for their own sake – that is, if I could only tell them as he told me afterwards; and I will do my best!

And then he was nearing the end of the time when he was to remain as other mortals are. His new life was soon to open, the great change to which we owe the Barty Josselin who had changed the world for us!"

Besides, this is a biography – not a novel – not literature! So what does it matter how it's written, so long as it's all true!

Part Fifth

 
"Ô céleste haine,
Comment t'assouvir?
Ô souffrance humaine,
Qui te peut guérir?
Si lourde est ma peine
J'en voudrais mourir —
Tel est mon désir!
 
 
"Navré de comprendre,
Las de compatir,
Pour ne plus entendre,
Ni voir, ni sentir,
Je suis prêt à render
Mon dernier soupir —
Et c'est mon désir!
 
 
"Ne plus rien connaître,
Ni me souvenir —
Ne jamais renaître,
Ni me rendormir —
Ne plus jamais être,
Mais en bien finir —
Voilà mon désir!" – Anon.
 

Barty went third class to Bruges, and saw all over it, and slept at the "Fleur de Blé," and heard new chimes, and remembered his Longfellow.

Next morning, a very fine one, as he was hopefully smoking his centime cigar with immense relish near the little three‐horsed wagonette that was to bear him to Blankenberghe, he saw that he was to have three fellow‐passengers, with a considerable amount of very interesting luggage, and rejoiced.

First, a tall man about thirty, in a very smart white summer suit, surmounted by a jaunty little straw hat with a yellow ribbon. He was strikingly handsome, and wore immense black whiskers but no mustache, and had a most magnificent double row of white, pearly teeth, which he showed very much when he smiled, and he smiled very often. He was evidently a personage of importance and very well off, for he gave himself great airs and ordered people about and chaffed them, and it made them laugh instead of making them angry; and he was obeyed with wonderful alacrity. He spoke French fluently, but with a marked Italian accent.

Next, a very blond lady of about the same age, not beautiful, but rather overdressed, and whose accent, when she spoke French, was very German, and who looked as if she might be easily moved to wrath. Now and then she spoke to the gentleman in a very audible Italian aside, and Barty was able to gather that her Italian was about as rudimentary as his own.

Last and least, a pale, plain, pathetic little girl of six or eight, with a nose rather swollen, and a black plait down her back, and large black eyes, something like Leah Gibson's; and she never took these eyes off Barty's face.

Their luggage consisted of two big trunks, a guitar and violin (in their cases), and music‐books bound together by a rope.

"Vous allez à Blankenberghe, mossié?" said the Italian, with a winning smile.

Barty answered in the affirmative, and the Italian smiled ecstatic delight.

"Jé souis bienn content – nous férons route ensiemblé…" I will translate: "I call myself Carlo Veronese – first barytone of the theatre of La Scala, Milan. The signora is my second wife; she is prima donna assoluta of the grand opera, Naples. The little ragazza is my daughter by my first wife. She is the greatest violinist of her age now living – un' prodige, mossié – un' fenomeno!"

Barty, charmed with his new acquaintance, gave the signore his card, and Carlo Veronese invited him graciously to take a seat in the wagonette, as if it were his own private carriage. Barty, who was the most easily impressed person that ever lived, accepted with as much sincere gratitude as if he hadn't already paid for his place, and they started on their sunny drive of eight miles along the dusty straight Belgian chaussée, bordered with poplars on either side, and paved with flagstones all the way to Blankenberghe.

Signor Veronese informed Barty that on their holiday travels they always managed to combine profit with pleasure, and that he proposed giving a grand concert at the Café on the Plage, or the Kursaal, next day; that he was going to sing Figaro's great song in the Barbiere, and the signora would give "Roberto, toua qué z'aime" in French (or, rather, "Ropert, doi que ch'aime," as she called it, correcting his accent), and the fenomeno, whose name was Marianina, would play an arrangement of the "Carnival of Venice" by Paganini.

"Ma vous aussi, vous êtes mousicien – jé vois ça par la votre figoure!"

Barty modestly disclaimed all pretensions, and said he was only an art student – a painter.

"All the arts are brothers," said the signore, and the little signorina stole her hand into Barty's and left it there.

"Listen," said the signore; "why not arrange to live together, you and we? I hate throwing away money on mere pomposity and grandiosity and show. We always take a little furnished apartment, elle et moi. Then I go and buy provisions, bon marché – and she cooks them – and we have our meals better than at the hotel and at half the price! Join us, unless you like to throw your money by the window!"

The Signorina Marianina's little brown hand gave Barty's a little warm squeeze, and Barty was only too delighted to accept an arrangement that promised to be so agreeable and so practically wise.

They arrived at Blankenberghe, and, leaving their luggage at the wagonette station, went in search of lodgings. These were soon found in a large attic at the top of a house, over a bakery. One little mansarde, with a truckle‐bed and wash‐hand stand, did for the family of Veronese; another, smaller still, for Barty.

Other mansardes also opened on to the large attic, or grenier, where there were sacks of grain and of flour, and a sweet smell of cleanliness. Barty wondered that such economical arrangements could suit his new friends, but was well pleased; a weight was taken off his mind. He feared a style of living he could not have afforded to share, and here were all difficulties smoothed away without any trouble whatever.

They got in their luggage, and Barty went with the signore in search of bread and meat and wine and ground coffee. When they got back, a little stove was ready lighted in the Veronese garret; they cooked the food in a frying‐pan, opening the window wide and closing the door, as the signore thought it useless to inform the world by the sense of smell that they did their cooking en famille; and Barty enjoyed the meal immensely, and almost forgot his trouble, but for the pain of his seton.

After lunch the signore produced his placards, already printed by hand, and made some paste in an iron pot, and the signora made coffee. And Veronese tuned his guitar and said:

"Jé vais vous canter couelquécose – una piccola cosa da niente! – vous comprenez l'Italien?"

"Oh yes," said Barty: he had picked up a deal of Italian and many pretty Italian canzonets from his friend old Pergolese, who kept the Italian eating‐house in Rupert Street. "Sing me a stornella – je les adore."

And he set himself to listen, with his heart in his mouth from sheer pleasurable anticipation.

The signore sang a pretty little song, by Gordigiani, called "Il vero amore." Barty knew it well.

 
"E lo mio amor è andato a soggiornare
A Lucca bella – e diventar signore…"
 

Alas for lost illusions! The signore's voice was a coarse, unsympathetic, strident buffo bass, not always quite in the middle of the note; nor, in spite of his native liveliness of accent and expression, did he make the song interesting or pretty in the least.

Poor Barty had fallen from the skies; but he did his best not to show his disenchantment, and this, from a kind and amiable way he always had and a constant wish to please, was not difficult.

Then the signora sang "Ô mon Fernand!" from the Favorita, in French, but with a hideous German accent and a screech as of some Teutonic peacock, and without a single sympathetic note; though otherwise well in tune, and with a certain professional knowledge of what she was about.

And then poor Marianina was made to stand up on six music‐books, opposite a small music‐easel, and play her "Carnival of Venice" on the violin. Every time she made a false note in the difficult variations, her father, with his long, thick, hairy middle finger, gave her a fierce fillip on the nose, and she had to swallow her tears and play on. Barty was almost wild with angry pity, but dissembled, for fear of making her worse enemies in her father and stepmother.

Not that the poor little thing played badly; indeed, she played surprisingly well for her age, and Barty was sincere in his warm commendation of her talent.

"Et vous ne cantez pas du tout – du tout?" said Veronese.

"Oh, si, quelquefois!"

"Cantez couelquécoze – zé vous accompagnerai sous la guitare! – n'ayez pas paoure – nous sommes indoulgents, elle et moi – "

"Oh – je m'accompagnerai bien moi‐même comme je pourrai – " said Barty, and took the guitar, and sang a little French Tyrolienne called "Fleur des Alpes," which he could always sing quite beautifully; and the effect was droll indeed.

Marianina wept; the signore went down on his knees in a theatrical manner to him, and called him "maestro" and other big Italian names; the Frau signora, with tears in her eyes, asked permission to kiss his hand, which his modesty refused – he kissed hers instead.

"He was a great genius, a bird of God, who had amused himself by making fools of poor, innocent, humble, wandering minstrels. Oh, would he not be generous as he was great and be one of them for a few days, and take half the profits – more – whatever he liked?" etc.

And indeed they immediately saw the business side of the question, and were, to do them justice, immensely liberal in their conditions of partnership – and also most distressingly persistent, with adulations that got more and more fulsome the more he held back.

There was a long discussion. Barty had to be quite brutal at the end – told them he was not a musician, but a painter, and that nothing on earth should induce him to join them in their concert.

And finally, much crestfallen and somewhat huffed, the pair went out to post their placards all over the town, and Barty went for a bath and a long walk – suddenly feeling sad again and horribly one‐eyed and maimed, and more wofully northless and homeless and friendless than ever.

Blankenberghe was already very full, and when he got back he saw the famous placards everywhere. And found his friends cooking their dinner, and was pressed to join them; and did so – producing a magnificent pasty and some hot‐house grapes and two bottles of wine as a peace‐offering – and was forgiven.

And after dinner they all sat on grain‐sacks together in the large granary, and made music – with lady's‐maids and valets and servants of the house for a most genial and appreciative audience – and had a very pleasant evening; and Barty came to the conclusion that he had mistaken his trade – that he sang devilish well, in fact; and so he did.

Whatever his technical shortcomings might be, he could make any tune sound pretty when he sang it. He had the native gift of ease, pathos, rhythm, humor, and charm – and a delightful sympathetic twang in his voice. His mother must have sung something like that; and all Paris went mad about her. No technical teaching in the world can ever match a genuine inheritance; and that's a fact.

Next morning they all bathed together, and Barty unheroically and quite obscurely saved a life.

The signore and his fat white signora went dancing out into the sunny waves and right away seawards.

Then came Barty with an all‐round shirt‐collar round his neck and a white tie on, to conceal his seton, and a pair of blue spectacles for the glare. And behind him Marianina, hopping on and following as best she might. He turned round to encourage her, and she had suddenly disappeared; half uneasy, he went back a step or two, and saw her little pale‐brown face gasping just beneath the surface – she had just got out of her depth.

He snatched her out, and she clung to him like a small monkey and cried dreadfully, and was sick all over him and herself. He managed to get her back on shore and washed and dried and consoled her before her people came back – and had the tact not to mention this adventure, guessing what fillips she would catch on her poor little pink nose for her stupidity. She looked her gratitude for this reticence of his in the most touching way, with her big black eyes – and had a cunning smile of delight at their common tacit understanding. Her rescuer from a watery grave did not apply for the "médaille de sauvetage"!

Barty took an immense walk that day to avoid the common repast; he was getting very tired of the two senior Veroneses.

The concert in the evening was a tremendous success. The blatant signore sang his Figaro song very well indeed – it suited him better than little feminine love‐ditties. The signora was loud and passionate and dramatic in "Roberto"; and Belgians make more allowance for a German accent in French than Parisians; besides, it was not quite their own language that was being murdered before, them. It may be, some day! I sincerely hope so. Je leur veux du bien.

Poor little Marianina stood on her six music‐books and played with immense care and earnestness, just like a frightened but well‐trained poodle walking on its hind‐legs – one eye on her music and the tail of the other on her father, who accompanied her with his guitar. She got an encore, to Barty's great relief; and to hers too, no doubt – if she hadn't, fillips on the nose for supper that night! Then there were more solos and duets, with obbligatos for the violin.

Next day Veronese and his wife were in high feather at the Kursaal, where they had sung the night before.

A very distinguished military foreigner, in attendance on some august personage from Spain or Portugal (and later from Ostend), warmly and publicly complimented the signore on "his admirable rendering of 'Largo al factotum' – which, as his dear old friend Rossini had once told him (the General), he (Rossini) had always modestly looked upon as the one thing he had ever written with which he was almost pleased!"

Marianina also received warm commendation from this agreeable old soldier, while quite a fashionable crowd was listening; and Veronese arranged for another concert that evening, and placarded the town accordingly.

Barty managed to escape any more meals in the Casa Veronese, but took Marianina for one or two pleasant walks, and told her stories and sang to her in the grenier, while she improvised for him clever little obbligatos on her fiddle.

He found a cheap eating‐house and picked up a companion or two to chat with. He also killed time with his seton-dressing and self dry‐cupping – and hired French novels and read them as much as he dared with his remaining eye, about which he was morbidly nervous; he always fancied it would get its retina congested like the other, in which no improvement manifested itself whatever – and this depressed him very much. He was a most impatient patient.

To return. The second concert was as conspicuous a failure as the first had been a success: the attendance was small and less distinguished, and there was no enthusiasm. The Frau signora slipped a note and lost her temper in the middle of "Roberto," and sang out of tune and with careless, open contempt of her audience, and this the audience seemed to understand and openly resent. Poor Marianina was frightened, and played very wrong notes under the furious gaze of her papa, and finally broke down and cried, and there were some hisses for him, as well as kind and encouraging applause for the child. Then up jumps Barty and gets on the platform and takes the signore's guitar and twangs it, and smiles all round benignly – immense applause!

Then he pats Marianina's thin pale cheek and wipes her eyes and gives her a kiss. Frantic applause! Then "Fleur des Alpes!"

Ovation! encore! bis! ter!

And for a third encore he sings a very pretty little Flemish ballad about the rose without a thorn – "Het Roosje uit de Dorne." It is the only Flemish song he knows, and I hope I have spelt it right! And the audience goes quite crazy with enthusiasm, and everybody goes home happy, even the Veroneses – and Marianina does not get filliped that night.

After this the Veroneses tried humbler spheres for the display of their talents, and in less than a week exhausted every pothouse and beer‐tavern and low drinking‐shop in Blankenberghe! and at last they took to performing for casual coppers in the open street, and went very rapidly down hill. The signore lost his jauntiness and grew sordid and soiled and shabby and humble; the signora looked like a sulky, dirty, draggle‐tailed fury, ready to break out into violence on the slightest provocation; poor Marianina got paler and thinner, and Barty was very unhappy about her. The only things left rosy about her were her bruised nose, and her fingers, that always seemed stiff with cold; indeed, they were blue rather than rosy – and anything but clean.

One evening he bought her a little warm gray cloak that took his fancy; when he went home after dinner to give it her he found the three birds of song had taken flight – sans tambour ni trompette, and leaving no message for him. The baker‐landlord had turned them adrift – sent them about their business, sacrificing some of his rent to get rid of them; not a heavy loss, I fancy.

Barty went after them all over the little town, but did not find them; he heard they were last seen marching off with guitar and fiddle in a southerly direction along the coast, and found that their luggage was to be sent to Ostend.

He felt very sorry for Marianina and missed her – and gave the cloak to some poor child in the town, and was very lonely.

One morning as he loafed about dejectedly with his hands in his pockets, he found his way to the little Hôtel de Ville, whence issued sounds of music. He went in. It was like a kind of reading‐room and concert‐room combined; there was a piano there, and a young lady practising, with her mother knitting by her side; and two or three other people, friends of theirs, lounging about and looking at the papers.

The mamma was a very handsome person of aristocratic appearance. The pretty daughter was practising the soprano part in a duet by Campana, which Barty knew well; it was "Una sera d' amore." The tenor had apparently not kept his appointment, and madame expressed some irritation at this; first to a friend, in French, but with a slight English accent – then in English to her daughter; and Barty grew interested.

After a little while, catching the mamma's eye (which was not difficult, as she very frankly and persistently gazed at him, and with a singularly tender and wistful expression of face), he got up and asked in English if he could be of any use – seeing that he knew the music well and had often sung it. The lady was delighted, and Barty and mademoiselle sang the duet in capital style to the mamma's accompaniment: "guarda che bianca luna," etc.

"What a lovely voice you've got! May I ask your name?" says the mamma.

"Josselin."

"English, of course?"

"Upon my word I hardly know whether I'm English or French!" said Barty, and he and the lady fell into conversation.

It turned out that she was Irish, and married to a Belgian soldier, le Général Comte de Clèves (who was a tremendous swell, it seems – but just then in Brussels).

Barty told Madame de Clèves the story of his eye – he was always very communicative about his eye; and she suddenly buried her face in her hands and wept; and mademoiselle told him in a whisper that her eldest brother had gone blind and died three or four years ago, and that he was extraordinarily like Barty both in face and figure.

Presently another son of Madame de Clèves came in – an officer of dragoons in undress uniform, a splendid youth. He was the missing tenor, and made his excuses for being late, and sang very well indeed.

And Barty became the intimate friend of these good people, who made Blankenberghe a different place to him – and conceived for him a violent liking, and introduced him to all their smart Belgian friends; they were quite a set – bathing together, making music and dancing, taking excursions, and so forth. And before a fortnight was over Barty had become the most popular young man in the town, the gayest of the gay, the young guardsman once more, throwing dull care to the winds; and in spite of his impecuniosity (of which he made no secret whatever) the boute‐en‐train of the company. And this led to many droll adventures – of which I will tell one as a sample.

A certain Belgian viscount, who had a very pretty French wife, took a dislike to Barty. He had the reputation of being a tremendous fire‐eater. His wife, a light‐hearted little flirt (but with not much harm in her), took a great fancy to him, on the contrary.

One day she asked him for a wax impression of the seal‐ring he wore on his finger, and the following morning he sealed an empty envelope and stamped it with his ring, and handed it to her on the Plage. She snatched it with a quick gesture and slipped it into her pocket with quite a guilty little coquettish look of mutual understanding.

Monsieur Jean (as the viscount was called) noticed this, and jostled rudely against Josselin, who jostled back again and laughed.

Then the whole party walked off to the "tir," or shooting‐gallery on the Plage; some wager was on, I believe, and when they got there they all began to shoot – at different distances, ladies and gentlemen; all but Barty; it was a kind of handicap.

Monsieur Jean, after a fierce and significant look at Barty, slowly raised his pistol, took a deliberate aim at the small target, and fired – hitting it just half an inch over the bull's‐eye; a capital shot. Barty couldn't have done better himself. Then taking another loaded pistol, he presented it to my friend by the butt and said, with a solemn bow:

"À vous, monsieur de la garde."

"Messieurs de la garde doivent toujours tirer les premiers!" said Barty, laughing; and carelessly let off his pistol in the direction of the target without even taking aim. A little bell rang, and there was a shout of applause; and Barty was conscious that by an extraordinary fluke he had hit the bull's‐eye in the middle, and saw the situation at once.

Suddenly looking very grave and very sad, he threw the pistol away, and said:

"Je ne tire plus – j'ai trop peur d'avoir la main malheureuse un jour!" and smiled benignly at M. Jean.

A moment's silence fell on the party and M. Jean turned very pale.

Barty went up to Madame Jean:

"Will you forgive me for giving you with my seal an empty envelope? I couldn't think of anything pretty enough to write you – so I gave it up. Tear it and forgive me. I'll do better next time!"

The lady blushed and pulled the letter out of her pocket and held it up to the light, and it was, as Barty said, merely an empty envelope and a red seal. She then held it out to her husband and exclaimed:

"Le cachet de Monsieur Josselin, que je lui avais demandé…!"

So bloodshed was perhaps avoided, and Monsieur Jean took care not to jostle Josselin any more. Indeed, they became great friends.

For next day Barty strolled into the Salle d'Armes, Rue des Dunes – and there he found Monsieur Jean fencing with young de Clèves, the dragoon. Both were good fencers, but Barty was the finest fencer I ever met in my life, and always kept it up; and remembering his adventure of the previous day, it amused him to affect a careless nonchalance about such trivial things – "des enfantillages!"

"You take a turn with Jean, Josselin!" said the dragoon.

"Oh! I'm out of practice – and I've only got one eye…"

"Je vous en prie, monsieur de la garde!" said the viscount.

"Cette fois, alors, nous allons tirer ensemble!" says Barty, and languidly dons the mask with an affected air, and makes a fuss about the glove not suiting him; and then, in spite of his defective sight, which seems to make no difference, he lightly and gracefully gives M. Jean such a dressing as that gentleman had never got in his life – not even from his maître d'armes: and afterwards to young de Clèves the same. Well I knew his way of doing this kind of thing!

So Barty and M. and Madame Jean became quite intimate – and with his usual indiscretion Barty told them how he fluked that bull's‐eye, and they were charmed!

"Vous êtes impayable, savez‐vous, mon cher!" says M. Jean – "vous avez tous les talents, et un million dans le gosier par‐dessus le marché! Si jamais je puis vous être de service, savez‐vous, comptez sur moi pour la vie …" said the impulsive viscount when they bade each other good‐bye at the end.

"Et plus jamais d'enveloppes vides, quand vous m'écrirez!" says madame.

So frivolous time wore on, and Barty found it pleasant to frivol in such pleasant company – very pleasant indeed! But when alone in his garret, with his seton‐dressing and dry‐cuppings, it was not so gay. He had to confess to himself that his eye was getting slowly worse instead of better; darkening day by day; and a little more retina had been taken in by the strange disease – "la peau de chagrin," as he nicknamed this wretched retina of his, after Balzac's famous story. He could still see with the left of it and at the bottom, but a veil had come over the middle and all the rest; by daylight he could see through this veil, but every object he saw was discolored and distorted and deformed – it was worse than darkness itself; and this was so distressing, and so interfered with the sight of the other eye, that when the sun went down, the total darkness in the ruined portion of his left retina came as a positive relief. He took all this very desperately to heart and had very terrible forebodings. For he had never known an ache or a pain, and had innocently gloried all his life in the singular perfection of his five wits.

Then the good Mozart would say:

"Lieber Barty – I'm so stupid about earthly things that I could never even say Boh to a goose, so I can't give you any good advice; all my heart overflowed into my brain when I was quite a little boy and made music for grown‐up people to hear; from the day of my birth to my fifth birthday I had gone on remembering everything, but learning nothing new – remembering all that music!

"And I went on remembering more and more till I was thirty‐five; and even then there was such a lot more of it where that came from that it tired me to try and remember so much – and I went back thither. And thither back shall you go too, Barty – when you are some thirty years older!

"And you already know from me how pleasant life is there – how sunny and genial and gay; and how graceful and innocent and amiable and well‐bred the natives – and what beautiful prayers we sing, and what lovely gavottes and minuets we dance – and how tenderly we make love – and what funny tricks we play! and how handsome and well dressed and kind we all are – and the likes of you, how welcome! Thirty years is soon over, Barty, Barty! Bel Mazetto! Ha, ha! good!"

Then says the good Schubert:

"I'm a loud, rollicking, beer‐drinking Kerl, I am! Ich bin ein lustiger Student, mein Pardy; and full of droll practical jokes; worse than even you, when you were a young scapegrace in the Guards, and wrenched off knockers, and ran away with a poor policeman's hat! But I don't put my practical jokes into my music; if I did, I shouldn't be the poor devil I am! I'm very hungry when I go to bed, and when I wake up in the morning I have Katzenjammer (from an empty stomach) and a headache, and a heartache, and penitence and shame and remorse; and know there is nothing in this world or beyond it worth a moment's care but Love, Love, Love! Liebe, Liebe! The good love that knows neither concealment nor shame – from the love of the brave man for the pure maiden whom he weds, to the young nun's love of the Lord! and all the other good loves lie between these two, and are inside them, or come out of them, … and that's the love I put into my music. Indeed, my music is the only love I know, since I am not beautiful to the eye, and can only care for tunes!..

"But you, Pardy, are handsome and gallant and gay, and have always been well beloved by man and woman and child, and always will be; and know how to love back again – even a dog! however blind you go, you will always have that, the loving heart – and as long as you can hear and sing, you will always have my tunes to fall back upon…"

"And mine!" says Chopin. "If there's one thing sweeter than love, it's the sadness that it can't last; she loved me once – and now she loves tout le monde! and that's a little sweet melodic sadness of mine that will never fail you, as long as there's a piano within your reach, and a friend who knows how to play me on it for you to hear. You shall revel in my sadness till you forget your own. Oh, the sorrow of my sweet pipings! Whatever becomes of your eyes, keep your two ears for my sake; and for your sake too! You don't know what exquisite ears you've got. You are like me – you and I are made of silk, Barty – as other men are made of sackcloth; and their love, of ashes; and their joys, of dust!

"Even the good priest who plays me to you so glibly doesn't understand what I am talking about half so well as you do, who can't read a word I write! He had to learn my language note by note from the best music‐master in Brussels. It's your mother‐tongue! You learned it as you sucked at your sweet young mother's breast, my poor love‐child! And all through her, your ears, like your remaining eye, are worth a hatful of the common kind – and some day it will be the same with your heart and brain…"

"Yes" – continues Schumann – "but you'll have to suffer first – like me, who will have to kill myself very soon; because I am going mad – and that's worse than any blindness! and like Beethoven who went deaf, poor demigod! and like all the rest of us who've been singing to you to‐night; that's why our songs never pall – because we are acquainted with grief, and have good memories, and are quite sincere. The older you get, the more you will love us and our songs: other songs may come and go in the ear; but ours go ringing in the heart forever!"

In some such fashion did the great masters of tune and tone discourse to Barty through Father Louis's well‐trained finger‐tips. They always discourse to you a little about yourself, these great masters, always; and always in a manner pleasing to your self‐love! The finger‐tips (whosesoever's finger‐tips they be) have only to be intelligent and well trained, and play just what's put before them in a true, reverent spirit. Anything beyond may be unpardonable impertinence, both to the great masters and yourself.

Musicians will tell you that all this is nonsense from beginning to end; you mustn't believe musicians about music, nor wine‐merchants about wine – but vice versa!

When Father Louis got up from the music‐stool, the Abbé would say to Barty, in his delightful, pure French:

"And now, mon ami – just for me, you know – a little song of autrefois."

"All right, M. l'Abbé – I will sing you the 'Adelaïde,' of Beethoven … if Father Louis will play for me."

"Oh, non, mon ami, do not throw away such a beautiful organ as yours on such really beautiful music, which doesn't want it; it would be sinful waste; it's not so much the tune that I want to hear as the fresh young voice; sing me something French, something light, something amiable and droll; that I may forget the song, and only remember the singer."

"All right, M. l'Abbé," and Barty sings a delightful little song by Gustave Nadaud, called "Petit bonhomme vit encore."

And the good Abbé is in the seventh heaven, and quite forgets to forget the song.

And so, cakes and wine, and good‐night – and M. l'Abbé goes humming all the way home…

 
"Hé, quoi! pour des peccadilles
Gronder ces pauvres amours?
Les femmes sont si gentilles,
Et l'on n'aime pas toujours!
C'est bonhomme
Qu'on me nomme…
Ma gaîté, c'est mon trésor!
Et bonhomme vit encor' —
Et bonhomme vit encor'!"
 

An extraordinary susceptibility to musical sound was growing in Barty since his trouble had overtaken him, and with it an extraordinary sensitiveness to the troubles of other people, their partings and bereavements and wants, and aches and pains, even those of people he didn't know; and especially the woes of children, and dogs and cats and horses, and aged folk – and all the live things that have to be driven to market and killed for our eating – or shot at for our fun!

All his old loathing of sport had come back, and he was getting his old dislike of meat once more, and to sicken at the sight of a butcher's shop; and the sight of a blind man stirred him to the depths … even when he learnt how happy a blind man can be!

These unhappy things that can't be helped preoccupied him as if he had been twenty, thirty, fifty years older; and the world seemed to him a shocking place, a gray, bleak, melancholy hell where there was nothing but sadness, and badness, and madness.

And bit by bit, but very soon, all his old trust in an all‐merciful, all‐powerful ruler of the universe fell from him; he shed it like an old skin; it sloughed itself away; and with it all his old conceit of himself as a very fine fellow, taller, handsomer, cleverer than anybody else, "bar two or three"! Such darling beliefs are the best stays we can have; and he found life hard to face without them.

And he got as careful of his aunt Caroline, and as anxious about her little fads and fancies and ailments, as if he'd been an old woman himself.

Imagine how she grew to dote on him!

And he quite lost his old liability to sudden freaks and fits of noisy fractiousness about trifles – when he would stamp and rave and curse and swear, and be quite pacified in a moment: "Soupe‐au‐lait," as he was nicknamed in Troplong's studio!

Besides his seton and his cuppings, dry and wet, and his blisters on his arms and back, and his mustard poultices on his feet and legs, and his doses of mercury and alteratives, he had also to deplete himself of blood three times a week by a dozen or twenty leeches behind his left ear and on his temple. All this softens and relaxes the heart towards others, as a good tonic will harden it.

So that he looked a mere shadow of his former self when I went over to spend my Christmas with him.

And his eye was getting worse instead of better; at night he couldn't sleep for the fireworks it let off in the dark. By day the trouble was even worse, as it so interfered with the sight of the other eye – even if he wore a patch, which he hated. He never knew peace but when his aunt was reading to him in the dimly lighted room, and he forgot himself in listening.

Yet he was as lively and droll as ever, with a wan face as eloquent of grief as any face I ever saw; he had it in his head that the right eye would go the same way as the left. He could no longer see the satellites of Jupiter with it: hardly Jupiter itself, except as a luminous blur; indeed, it was getting quite near‐sighted, and full of spots and specks and little movable clouds —muscæ volitantes, as I believe they are called by the faculty. He was always on the lookout for new symptoms, and never in vain; and his burden was as much as he could bear.

He would half sincerely long for death, of which he yet had such a horror that he was often tempted to kill himself to get the bother of it well over at once. The idea of death in the dark, however remote – an idea that constantly haunted him as his own most probable end – so appalled him that it would stir the roots of his hair!

Lady Caroline confided to me her terrible anxiety, which she managed to hide from him. She herself had been to see M. Noiret, who was no longer so confident and cocksure about recovery.

I went to see him too, without letting Barty know. I did not like the man – he was stealthy in look and manner, and priestly and feline and sleek: but he seemed very intelligent, and managed to persuade me that no other treatment was even to be thought of.

I inquired about him in Brussels, and found his reputation was of the highest. What could I do? I knew nothing of such things! And what a responsibility for me to volunteer advice!

I could see that my deep affection for Barty was a source of immense comfort to Lady Caroline, for whom I conceived a great and warm regard, besides being very much charmed with her.

She was one of those gentle, genial, kindly, intelligent women of the world, absolutely natural and sincere, in whom it is impossible not to confide and trust.

When I left off talking about Barty, because there was really nothing more to say, I fell into talking about myself: it was irresistible – she made one! I even showed her Leah's last photograph, and told her of my secret aspirations; and she was so warmly sympathetic and said such beautiful things to me about Leah's face and aspect and all they promised of good that I have never forgotten them, and never shall – they showed such a prophetic insight! they fanned a flame that needed no fanning, good heavens! and rang in my ears and my heart all the way to Barge Yard, Bucklersbury – while my eyes were full of Barty's figure as he again watched me depart by the Baron Osy from the Quai de la Place Verte in Antwerp; a sight that wrung me, when I remembered what a magnificent figure of a youth he looked as he left the wharf at London Bridge on the Boulogne steamer, hardly more than two short years ago.

When I got back to London, after spending my Christmas holiday with Barty, I found the beginning of a little trouble of my own.

My father was abroad; my mother and sister were staying with some friends in Chiselhurst, and after having settled all business matters in Barge Yard I called at the Gibsons', in Tavistock Square, just after dusk. Mrs. Gibson and Leah were at home, and three or four young men were there, also calling. There had been a party on Christmas‐eve.

I'm afraid I did not think much, as a rule, of the young men I met at the Gibsons'. They were mostly in business, like myself; and why I should have felt at all supercilious I can't quite see! But I did. Was it because I was very tall, and dressed by Barty's tailor, in Jermyn Street? Was it because I knew French? Was it because I was a friend of Barty the Guardsman, who had never been supercilious towards anybody in his life? Or was it those maternally ancestral Irish Blakes of Derrydown stirring within me?

The simplest excuse I can make for myself is that I was a young snob, and couldn't help it. Many fellows are at that age. Some grow out of it, and some don't. And the Gibsons were by way of spoiling me, because I was Leah's bosom friend's brother, and I gave myself airs in consequence.

As I sat perfectly content, telling Leah all about poor Barty, another visitor was announced – a Mr. Scatcherd, whom I didn't know; but I saw at a glance that it would not do to be supercilious with Mr. Scatcherd. He was quite as tall as I, for one thing, if not taller. His tailor might have been Poole himself; and he was extremely good‐looking, and had all the appearance and manners of a man of the world. He might have been a Guardsman. He was not that, it seemed – only a barrister.

He had been at Eton, had taken his degree at Cambridge, and ignored me just as frankly as I ignored Tom, Dick, and Harry – whoever they were; and I didn't like it at all. He ignored everybody but Leah and her mamma: her papa was not there. It turned out that he was the only son of the great wholesale furrier in Ludgate Hill, the largest house of the kind in the world, with a branch in New York and another in Quebec or Montreal. He had been called to the bar to please a whim of his father's.

He had been at the Gibson party on Christmas‐eve, and had paid Leah much attention there; and came to tell them that his mother hoped to call on Mrs. Gibson on the following day. I was savagely glad that he did not succeed in monopolizing Leah; not even I could do that. She was kind to us all round, and never made any differences in her own house.

Mr. Scatcherd soon took his departure, and it was then that I heard all about him.

There was no doubt that Mr. and Mrs. Gibson were immensely flattered by the civilities of this very important and somewhat consequential young man, and those of his mother, which were to follow; for within a week the Gibsons and Leah dined with Mr. and Mrs. Scatcherd in Portland Place.

On this occasion Mr. Gibson was, as usual, very funny, it seems. Whether his fun was appreciated I doubt, for he confided to me that Mr. Scatcherd, senior, was a pompous and stuck‐up old ass. People have such different notions of what is funny. Nobody roared at Mr. Gibson's funniments more than I did; but he was Leah's papa.

 
"Let him joke his bellyful;
I'll bear it all for Sally!"
 

Young Scatcherd was fond of his joke too – a kind of supersubtly satirical Cambridgy banter that was not to my taste at all; for I am no Cantab, and the wit of the London Stock Exchange is subtle enough for me. His father did not joke. Indeed he was full of useful information, and only too fond of imparting it, and he always made use of the choicest language in doing so; and Mrs. Scatcherd was immensely genteel.

Young Scatcherd became the plague of my life. The worst of it is that he grew quite civil – seemed to take a liking. His hobby was to become a good French scholar, and he practised his French – which was uncommonly good of its English kind – on me. And I am bound to say that his manners were so agreeable (when he wasn't joking), and he was such a thoroughly good fellow, that it was impossible to snub him; besides, he wouldn't have cared if I had.

Once or twice he actually asked me to dine with him at his club, and I actually did; and actually he with me, at mine! And we spoke French all through dinner, and I taught him a lot of French school‐boy slang, with which he was delighted. Then he came to see me in Barge Yard, and I even introduced him to my mother and sister, who couldn't help being charmed with him. He was fond of the best music only (he had no ear whatever, and didn't know a note), and only cared for old pictures – the National Gallery, and all that; and read no novels but French – Balzac and George Sand – and that only for practice for he was a singularly pure young man, the purest in all Cambridge, and in those days I thought him a quite unforgivable prig.

So Scatcherd was in my thoughts all day and in my dreams all night – a kind of incubus; and my mother made herself very unhappy about him, on Leah's account and mine; except that now and then she would fancy it was Ida he was thinking of. And that would have pleased my mother very much; and me too!

His mother called on mine, who returned the call – but there was no invitation for us to dine in Portland Place.

Nothing of all this interrupted for a moment the bosom‐friendship between my sister and Leah; nothing ever altered the genial sweetness of Leah's manners to me, nor indeed the cordiality of her parents: Mr. Gibson could not get on without that big guffaw of mine, at whatever he looked or said or did; no Scatcherd could laugh as loudly and as readily as I! But I was very wretched indeed, and poured out my woes to Barty in long letters of poetical Blaze, and he would bid me hope and be of good cheer in his droll way; and a Blaze letter from him would hearten me up wonderfully – till I was told of Leah's going to the theatre with Mrs. Scatcherd and her son, or saw his horses and groom parading up and down Tavistock Square while he was at the Gibsons', or heard of his dining there without Ida or me!

Then one fine day in April (the first, I verily believe) young Scatcherd proposed to Leah – and was refused – unconditionally refused – to the deep distress and dismay of her father and mother, who had thoroughly set their hearts on this match; and no wonder!

But Leah was an obstinate young woman, it seems, and thoroughly knew her own mind, though she was so young – not seventeen.

Was I a happy man? Ah, wasn't I! I was sent to Bordeaux by my father that very week on business – and promised myself I would soon be quite as good a catch or match as Scatcherd himself. I found Bordeaux the sunniest, sweetest town I had ever been in – and the Bordelais the jolliest men on earth; and as for the beautiful Bordelaises – ma foi! they might have been monkeys, for me! There was but one woman among women – one lily among flowers – everything else was a weed!

Poor Scatcherd! when I met him, a few days later, he must have been struck by the sudden warmth of my friendship – the quick idiomatic cordiality of my French to him. This mutual friendship of ours lasted till his death in '88. And so did our mutual French!

Except Barty, I never loved a man better; two years after his refusal by Leah he married my sister – a happy marriage, though a childless one; and except myself, Barty never had a more devoted friend. And now to Barty I will return.

Part Sixth

 
"From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures, fairest lin'd,
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no fair be kept in mind,
But the fair of Rosalind.
 
 
"Thus Rosalind of many parts
By heavenly synod was devis'd,
Of many faces, eyes, and hearts,
To have the touches dearest priz'd."
 

– As You Like It.

For many months Barty and his aunt lived their usual life in the Rue des Ursulines Blanches.

He always looked back on those dreary months as on a long nightmare. Spring, summer, autumn, and another Christmas!

His eye got worse and worse, and so interfered with the sight of the other that he had no peace till it was darkened wholly. He tried another doctor – Monsieur Goyers, professor at the liberal university of Ghent – who consulted with Dr. Noiret about him one day in Brussels, and afterwards told him that Noiret of Louvain, whom he described as a miserable Jesuit, was blinding him, and that he, this Goyers of Ghent, would cure him in six weeks.

"Mettez‐vous au régime des viandes saignantes!" had said Noiret; and Barty had put himself on a diet of underdone beef and mutton.

"Mettez‐vous au lait!" said Goyers – so he metted himself at the milk, as he called it – and put himself in Goyers's hands; and in six weeks got so much worse that he went back to Noiret and the regimen of the bleeding meats, which he loathed.

Then, in his long and wretched désœuvrement, his melancholia, he drifted into an indiscreet flirtation with a beautiful lady – he (as had happened before) being more the pursued than the pursuer. And so ardent was the pursuit that one fine morning the beautiful lady found herself gravely compromised – and there was a bother and a row.

 
"Amour, amour, quand tu nous tiens,
On peut bien dire 'Adieu Prudence!'"
 

All this gave Lady Caroline great distress, and ended most unhappily – in a duel with the lady's husband, who was a Colonel of Artillery, and meant business!

They fought with swords in a little wood near Laeken. Barty, who could have run his fat antagonist through a dozen times during the five minutes they fought, allowed himself to be badly wounded in the side, just above the hip, and spent a month in bed. He had hoped to manage for himself a slighter wound, and catch his adversary's point on his elbow.

Afterwards, Lady Caroline, who had so disapproved of the flirtation, did not, strange to say, so disapprove of this bloody encounter, and thoroughly approved of the way Barty had let himself be pinked! and nursed him devotedly; no mother could have nursed him better – no sister – no wife! not even the wife of that Belgian Colonel of Artillery!

"Il s'est conduit en homme de cœur!" said the good Abbé.

"Il s'est conduit en bon gentilhomme!" said the aristocratic Father Louis, of the princely house of Aremberg.

On the other hand, young de Clèves the dragoon, and Monsieur Jean the Viscount, who had served as Barty's seconds (I was in America), were very angry with him for giving himself away in this "idiotically quixotic manner."

Besides which, Colonel Lecornu was a notorious bully, it seems; and a fool into the bargain; and belonged to a branch of the service they detested.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that Barty and Father Louis became great friends – almost inseparable during such hours as the Dominican could spare from the duties of his professorate.

It speaks volumes for all that was good in each of them that this should have been so, since they were wide apart as the poles in questions of immense moment: questions on which I will not enlarge, strongly as I feel about them myself – for this is not a novel, but a biography, and therefore no fit place for the airing of one's own opinion on matters so grave and important.

When they parted they constantly wrote to each other – an intimate correspondence that was only ended by the Father's death.

Barty also made one or two other friends in Malines, and was often in Antwerp and Brussels, but seldom, for more than a few hours, as he did not like to leave his aunt alone.

One day came, in April, on which she had to leave him.

A message arrived that her father, the old Marquis

(Barty's grandfather), was at the point of death. He was ninety-six. He had expressed a wish to see her once more, although he had long been childish.

So Barty saw her off, with her maid, by the Baron Osy. She promised to be back soon as all was over. Even this short parting was a pain – they had grown so indispensable to each other.

Tescheles was away from Antwerp, and the disconsolate Barty went back to Malines and dined by himself; and little Frau waited on him with extra care.

It turned out that her mother had cooked for him a special dish of consolation – sausage‐meat stewed inside a red cabbage, with apples and cloves, till it all gets mixed up. It is a dish not to be beaten when you are young and Flemish and hungry and happy and well (even then you mustn't take more than one helping). When you are not all this it is good to wash it down with half a bottle of the best Burgundy – and this Barty did (from Vougeot‐Conti and Co.).

Then he went out and wandered about in the dark and lost himself in a dreamy dædalus of little streets and bridges and canals and ditches. A huge comet (Encke's, I believe) was flaring all over the sky.

He suddenly came across the lighted window of a small estaminet, and went in.

It was a little beer‐shop of the humblest kind – and just started. At a little deal table, brand‐new, a middle‐aged burgher of prosperous appearance was sitting next to the barmaid, who had deserted her post at the bar – and to whom he seemed somewhat attentive; for their chairs were close together, and their arms round each other's waists, and they drank out of the same glass.

There was no one else in the room, and Barty was about to make himself scarce, but they pressed him to come in; so he sat at another little new deal table on a little new straw‐bottomed chair, and she brought him a glass of beer. She was a very handsome girl, with a tall, graceful figure and Spanish eyes. He lit a cigar, and she went back to her beau quite simply – and they all three fell into conversation about an operetta by Victor Massé, which had been performed in Malines the previous night, called Les Noces de Jeannette.

The barmaid and her monsieur were trying to remember the beautiful air Jeannette sings as she mends her angry husband's breeches:

 
"Cours, mon aiguille, dans la laine!
Ne te casse pas dans ma main;
Avec de bons baisers demain
Jean nous paîra de notre peine!"
 

So Barty sang it to them; and so beautifully that they were all but melted to tears – especially the monsieur, who was evidently very sentimental and very much in love. Besides, there was that ineffable charm of the pure French intonation, so caressing to the Belgian ear, so dear to the Belgian soul, so unattainable by Flemish lips. It was one of Barty's most successful ditties – and if I were a middle‐aged burgher of Mechelen, I shouldn't much like to have a young French Barty singing "Cours, mon aiguille" to the girl of my heart.

Then, at their desire, he went on singing things till it was time to leave, and he found he had spent quite a happy evening; nothing gave him greater pleasure than singing to people who liked it – and he went singing on his way home, dreamily staring at the rare gas‐lamps and the huge comet, and thinking of his old grandfather who lay dying or dead: "Cours, mon aiguille, it is good to live – it is good to die!"

Suddenly he discovered that when he looked at one lamp, another lamp close to it on the right was completely eclipsed – and he soon found that a portion of his right eye, not far from the centre, was totally sightless.

The shock was so great that he had to lean against a buttress of St. Rombault for support.

When he got home he tested the sight of his eye with a two‐franc piece on the green table‐cloth, and found there was no mistake – a portion of his remaining eye was stone‐blind.

He spent a miserable night, and went next day to Louvain, to see the oculist.

M. Noiret heard his story, arranged the dark room and the lamp, dilated the right pupil with atropine, and made a minute examination with the ophthalmoscope.

Then he became very thoughtful, and led the way to his library and begged Barty to sit down; and began to talk to him very seriously indeed, like a father – patting the while a small Italian greyhound that lay and shivered and whined in a little round cot by the fire.

M. Noiret began by inquiring into his circumstances, which were not nourishing, as we know – and Barty made no secret of them; then he asked him if he were fond of music, and was pleased to hear that he was, since it is such an immense resource; then he asked him if he belonged to the Roman Catholic faith, and again was pleased.

"For" – said he – "you will need all your courage and all your religion to hear and bear what it is my misfortune to have to tell you. I hope you will have more fortitude than another young patient of mine (also an artist) to whom I was obliged to make a similar communication. He blew out his brains on my door‐step!"

"I promise you I will not do that. I suppose I am going blind?"

"Hélas! mon jeune ami! I grieve to say that the fatal disease, congestion and detachment of the retina, which has so obstinately and irrevocably destroyed your left eye, has begun its terrible work on the right. We will fight for every inch of the way. But I fear I must not give you any hope, after the careful examination I have just made. It is my duty to be frank with you."

Then he said much about the will of God, and where true comfort was to be found, at the foot of the Cross; in fact, he said all he ought to have said according to his lights, as he fondled his little greyhound – and finally took Barty to the door, which he opened for him, most politely bowing with his black velvet skull‐cap; and pocketed his full fee (ten francs) with his usual grace of careless indifference, and gently shut the door on him. There was nothing else to do.

Barty stood there for some time, quite dazed; partly because his pupil was so dilated he could hardly see – partly (he thinks) because he in some way became unconscious; although when he woke from this little seeming trance, which may have lasted for more than a minute, he found himself still standing upright on his legs. What woke him was the sudden consciousness of the north, which he hadn't felt for many years; and this gave him extraordinary confidence in himself, and such a wholesome sense of power and courage that he quickly recovered his wits; and when the glad surprise of this had worn itself away he was able to think and realize the terrible thing that had happened. He was almost pleased that his aunt Caroline was away. He felt he could not have faced her with such news – it was a thing easier to write and prepare her for than to tell by word of mouth.

Part Seventh

 
"Old winter was gone
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,
And the spring came down
From the planet that hovers upon the shore
Where the sea of sunlight encroaches
On the limits of wintry night;
If the land, and the air, and the sea
Rejoice not when spring approaches,
We did not rejoice in thee, Ginevra!"
 

– Shelley.

Riffrath, besides its natives and its regular English colony of residents, had a floating population that constantly changed. And every day new faces were to be found drinking tea with Mr. Beresford Duff – and all these faces were well known in society at home, you may be sure; and Barty made capital caricatures of them all, which were treasured up and carried back to England; one or two of them turn up now and then at a sale at Christie's and fetch a great price. I got a little pen‐and‐ink outline of Captain Reece there, drawn before he came into the title. I had to give forty‐seven pounds ten for it, not only because it was a speaking likeness of the late Lord Ironsides as a young man, but on account of the little "B. J." in the corner.

And only the other evening I sat at dinner next to the Dowager Countess. Heavens! what a beautiful creature she still is, with her prematurely white hair and her long thick neck!

And after dinner we talked of Barty – she with that delightful frankness that always characterized her through life, I am told:

"Dear Barty Josselin! how desperately in love I was with that man, to be sure! Everybody was – he might have thrown the handkerchief as he pleased in Riffrath, I can tell you, Sir Robert! He was the handsomest man I ever saw, and wore a black pork‐pie hat and a little yellow Vandyck beard and mustache; just the color of Turkish tobacco, like his hair! All that sounds odd now, doesn't it? Fashions have changed – but not for the better! And what a figure! and such fun he was! and always in such good spirits, poor boy! and now he's dead, and it's one of the greatest names in all the world! Well, if he'd thrown that handkerchief at me just about then, I should have picked it up – and you're welcome to tell all the world so, Sir Robert!"

And next day I got a kind and pretty little letter:

"Dear Sir Robert, – I was quite serious last night. Barty Josselin was _mes premières amours_! Whether he ever guessed it or not, I can't say. If not, he was very obtuse! Perhaps he feared to fall, and didn't feel fain to climb in consequence. I all but proposed to him, in fact! Anyhow, I am proud my girlish fancy should have fallen on such a man!

"I told him so myself only last year, and we had a good laugh over old times; and then I told his wife, and she seemed much pleased. I can understand his preference, and am old enough to forgive it and laugh – although there is even now a tear in the laughter. You know his daughter, Julia Mainwaring, is my godchild; sometimes she sings her father's old songs to me:

 
"'Petit chagrin de notre enfance
Coûte un soupir!'
 

"Do you remember?

"Poor Ironsides knew all about it when he married me, and often declared I had amply made up to him for that and many other things – over and over again. Il avait bien raison; and made of me a very happy wife and a most unhappy widow.

"Put this in your book, if you like.

"Sincerely yours,

"Julia Ironsides."

Thus time flowed smoothly and pleasantly for Barty all through the summer. In August the Royces left, and also Captain Reece – they for Scotland, he for Algiers – and appointed to meet again in Riffrath next spring.

In October Lady Caroline took her niece to Rome, and Barty was left behind to his work, very much to her grief and Daphne's.

He wrote to them every Monday, and always got a letter back on the Saturday following.

Barty spent the winter hard at work, but with lots of play between, and was happy among his painter fellows – and sketching and caricaturing, and skating and sleighing with the English who remained in Düsseldorf, and young von this and young von that. I have many of his letters describing this genial, easy life – letters full of droll and charming sketches.

He does not mention the fair Julia much, but there is no doubt that the remembrance of her much preoccupied him, and kept him from losing his heart to any of the fair damsels, English and German, whom he skated and danced with, and sketched and sang to.

As a matter of fact, he had never yet lost his heart in his life – not even to Julia. He never said much about his love‐making with Julia to me. But his aunt did – and I listened between the words, as I always do. His four or five years' career in London as a thoroughgoing young rake had given him a very deep insight into woman's nature – an insight rare at his age, for all his perceptions were astonishingly acute, and his unconscious faculty of sympathetic observation and induction and deduction immense.

And, strange to say, if that heart had never been touched, it had never been corrupted either, and probably for that very reason – that he had never been in love with these sirens. It is only when true love fades away at last in the arms of lust that the youthful, manly heart is wrecked and ruined and befouled.

He made up his mind that art should be his sole mistress henceforward, and that the devotion of a lifetime would not be price enough to pay for her favors, if but she would one day be kind. He had to make up for so much lost time, and had begun his wooing so late! Then he was so happy with his male friends! Whatever void remained in him when his work was done for the day could be so thoroughly filled up by Henley and Bancroft and Armstrong and du Maurier and the rest that there was no room for any other and warmer passion. Work was a joy by itself; the rest from it as great a joy; and these alternations were enough to fill a life. To how many great artists had they sufficed! and what happy lives had been led, with no other distraction, and how glorious and successful! Only the divine Julia, in all the universe, was worthy to be weighed in the scales with these, and she was not for the likes of Mr. Nobody of Nowhere.

Besides, there was the faithful Martia. Punctually every evening the ever‐comforting sense of the north filled him as he jumped into bed; and he whispered his prayers audibly to this helpful spirit, or whatever it might be, that had given him a sign and saved him from a cowardly death, and filled his life and thoughts as even no Julia could.

And yet, although he loved best to forgather with those of his own sex, woman meant much for him! There must be a woman somewhere in the world – a needle in a bottle of hay – a nature that could dovetail and fit in with his own; but what a life‐long quest to find her! She must be young and beautiful, like Julia – rien que ça! – and as kind and clever and simple and well‐bred and easy to live with as Aunt Caroline, and, heavens! how many things besides, before poor Mr. Nobody of Nowhere could make her happy, and be made happy by her!

So Mr. Nobody of Nowhere gave it up, and stuck to his work, and made much progress, and was well content with things as they were.

He had begun late, and found many difficulties in spite of his great natural facility. His principal stock in trade was his keen perception of human beauty, of shape and feature and expression, male or female – of face or figure or movement; and a great love and appreciation of human limbs, especially hands and feet.

With a very few little pen‐strokes he could give the most marvellously subtle likenesses of people he knew – beautiful or ordinary or plain or hideous; and the beauty of the beautiful people, just hinted in mere outline, was so keen and true and fascinating that this extraordinary power of expressing it amounted to real genius.

It is a difficult thing, even for a master, to fully render with an ordinary steel pen and a drop of common ink (and of a size no bigger than your little finger nail) the full face of a beautiful woman, let us say; or a child, in sadness or merriment or thoughtful contemplation; and make it as easily and unmistakably recognizable as a good photograph, but with all the subtle human charm and individuality of expression delicately emphasized in a way that no photograph has ever achieved yet.

And this he could always do in a minute from sheer memory and unconscious observation; and in another few minutes he would add on the body, in movement or repose, and of a resemblance so wonderful and a grace so enchanting, or a humor so happily, naïvely droll, that one forgot to criticise the technique, which was quite that of an amateur; indeed, with all the success he achieved as an artist, he remained an amateur all his life. Yet his greatest admirers were among the most consummate and finished artists of their day, both here and abroad.

It was with his art as with his singing: both were all wrong, yet both gave extraordinary pleasure; one almost feared that regular training would mar the gift of God, so much of the charm we all so keenly felt lay in the very imperfections themselves – just as one loved him personally as much for his faults as for his virtues.

"Il a les qualités de ses défauts, le beau Josselin," said M. Taine one day.

"Mon cher," said M. Renan, "ses défauts sont ses meilleures qualités."

So he spent a tranquil happy winter, and wrote of his happiness and his tranquillity to Lady Caroline and Daphne and Ida and me; and before he knew where he was, or we, the almond‐trees blossomed again, and then the lilacs and limes and horse‐chestnuts and syringas; and the fireflies flew in and out of his bedroom at night, and the many nightingales made such music in the Hof gardens that he could scarcely sleep for them; and other nightingales came to make music for him too – most memorable music! Stockhausen, Jenny Ney, Joachim, Madame Schumann; for the triennial Musik festival was held in Düsseldorf that year (a month later than usual); and musical festivals are things they manage uncommonly well in Germany. Barty, unseen and unheard, as becomes a chorus‐singer, sang in the choruses of Gluck's Iphigenia, and heard and saw everything for nothing.

But, before this, Captain Reece came back to Riffrath, and, according to appointment, Admiral Royce and Lady Jane, and Julia, lovelier than ever; and all the sweetness she was so full of rose in her heart and gathered in her eyes as they once more looked on Barty Josselin.

He steeled and stiffened himself like a man who knew that the divine Julias of this world were for his betters – not for him! Nevertheless, as he went to bed, and thought of the melting gaze that had met his, he was deeply stirred; and actually, though the north was in him, he forgot, for the first time in all that twelvemonth, for the first time since that terrible night in Malines, to say his prayers to Martia – and next morning he found a letter by his bedside in pencil‐written blaze of his own handwriting:

"Barty my Beloved, – A crisis has come in your affairs, which are mine; and, great as the cost is to me, I must write again, at the risk of betraying what amounts to a sacred trust; a secret that I have innocently surprised, the secret of a noble woman's heart.

"One of the richest girls in England, one of the healthiest and most beautiful women in the whole world, a bride fit for an emperor, is yours for the asking. It is my passionate wish, and a matter of life and death to me, that you and Julia Royce should become man and wife; when you are, you shall both know why.

"Mr. Nobody of Nowhere – as you are so fond of calling yourself – you shall be such, some day, that the best and highest in the land will be only too proud to be your humble friends and followers; no woman is too good for you – only one good enough! and she loves you: of that I feel sure – and it is impossible you should not love her back again.

"I have known her from a baby, and her father and mother also; I have inhabited her, as I have inhabited you, although I have never been able to give her the slightest intimation of the fact. You are both, physically, the most perfect human beings I was ever in; and in heart and mind the most simply made, the most richly gifted, and the most admirably balanced; and I have inhabited many thousands, and in all parts of the globe.

"You, Barty, are the only one I have ever been able to hold communication with, or make to feel my presence; it was a strange chance, that – a happy accident; it saved your life. I am the only one, among many thousands of homeless spirits, who has ever been able to influence an earthly human being, or even make him feel the magnetic current that flows through us all, and by which we are able to exist; all the rappings and table‐turnings are mere hysterical imaginations, or worse – the cheapest form of either trickery or self‐deception that can be. Barty, your unborn children are of a moment to me beyond anything you can realize or imagine, and Julia must be their mother; Julia Royce, and no other woman in the world.

"It is in you to become so great when you are ripe that she will worship the ground you walk upon; but you can only become as great as that through her and through me, who have a message to deliver to mankind here on earth, and none but you to give it a voice – not one. But I must have my reward, and that can only come through your marriage with Julia.

"When you have read this, Barty, go straight to Riffrath, and see Julia if you can, and be to her as you have so often been to any women you wished to please, and who were not worth pleasing. Her heart is her own to give, like her fortune; she can do what she likes with them both, and will – her mother notwithstanding, and in the teeth of the whole world.

"Poor as you are, maimed as you are, irregularly born as you are, it is better for her that she should be your wife than the wife of any man living, whoever he be. "Look at yourself in the glass, and say at once,

"'Martia, I'm off to Riffrath as soon as I've swallowed my breakfast!'

"And then I'll go about my business with a light heart and an easy mind.

"Martia."

Much moved and excited, Barty looked in the glass and did as he was bid, and the north left him; and Johanna brought him his breakfast, and he started for Riffrath.

All through this winter that was so happily spent by Barty in Düsseldorf things did not go very happily in London for the Gibsons. Mr. Gibson was not meant for business; nature intended him as a rival to Keeley or Buckstone.

He was extravagant, and so was his wife; they were both given to frequent and most expensive hospitalities; and he to cards, and she to dressing herself and her daughter more beautifully than quite became their position in life. The handsome and prosperous shop in Cheapside – the "emporium," as he loved to call it – was not enough to provide for all these luxuries; so he took another in Conduit Street, and decorated it and stocked it at immense expense, and called it the "Universal Fur Company," and himself the "Head of a West End firm."

Then he speculated, and was not successful, and his affairs got into tangle.

And a day came when he found he could not keep up these two shops and his private house in Tavistock Square as well; the carriage was put down first – a great distress to Mrs. Gibson; and finally, to her intense grief, it became necessary to give up the pretty house itself.

It was decided that their home in future most be over the new emporium in Conduit Street; Mrs. Gibson had a properly constituted English shopkeeper's wife's horror of living over her husband's shop – the idea almost broke her heart; and as a little consolation, while the necessary changes were being wrought for their altered mode of life, Mr. Gibson treated her and Leah and my sister to a trip up the Rhine – and Mrs. Bletchley, the splendid old Jewess (Leah's grandmother), who suffered, or fancied she suffered, in her eyesight, took it into her head that she would like to see the famous Dr. Hasenclever in Riffrath, and elected to journey with them – at all events as far as Düsseldorf. I would have escorted them, but that my father was ill, and I had to replace him in Barge Yard; besides, I was not yet quite cured of my unhappy passion, though in an advanced stage of convalescence; and I did not wish to put myself under conditions that might retard my complete recovery, or even bring on a relapse. I wished to love Leah as a sister; in time I succeeded in doing so; she has been fortunate in her brother, though I say it who shouldn't – and, O heavens! haven't I been fortunate in my sister Leah?

My own sister Ida wrote to Barty to find rooms and meet them at the station, and fixed the day and hour of their arrival; and commissioned him to take seats for Gluck's Iphigenia.

She thought more of Iphigenia than of the Drachenfels or Ehrenbreitstein; and was overjoyed at the prospect of once more being with Barty, whom she loved as well as she loved me, if not even better. He was fortunate in his sister, too!

And the Rhine in May did very well as a background to all these delights.

So Mr. Babbage (the friend of the family) and I saw them safely on board the Baron Osy ("the Ank‐works package," as Mrs. Gamp called it), which landed them safely in the Place Verte at Antwerp; and then they took train for Düsseldorf, changing at Malines and Verviers; and looked forward eagerly, especially Ida, to the meeting with Barty at the little station by the Rhine.

Barty, as we know, started for Riffrath at Martia's written command, his head full of perplexing thoughts.

Who was Martia? What was she? "A disembodied conscience?" Whose? Not his own, which counselled the opposite course.

He had once seen a man at a show with a third rudimentary leg sticking out behind, and was told this extra limb belonged to a twin, the remaining portions of whom had not succeeded in getting themselves begotten and born. Could Martia be a frustrated and undeveloped twin sister of his own, that interested herself in his affairs, and could see with his eyes and hear with his ears, and had found the way of communicating with him during his sleep – and was yet apart from him, as phenomenal twins are apart from each other, however closely linked – and had, moreover, not managed to have any part of her body born into this world at all?

She wrote like him; her epistolary style was his very own, every turn of phrase, every little mannerism. The mystery of it overwhelmed him again, though he had grown somewhat accustomed to the idea during the last twelvemonth. Why was she so anxious he should marry Julia? Had he, situated as he was, the right to win the love of this splendid creature, in the face of the world's opposition and her family's – he, a beggar and a bastard? Would it be right and honest and fair to her?

And then, again, was he so desperately in love with her, after all, that he should give up the life of art and toil he had planned for himself and go through existence as the husband of a rich and beautiful woman belonging, first of all, to the world and society, of which she was so brilliant an ornament that her husband must needs remain in the background forever, even if he were a gartered duke or a belted earl?

What success of his own would he ever hope to achieve, handicapped as he would be by all the ease and luxury she would bring him? He had grown to love the poverty which ever lends such strenuousness to endeavor. He thought of an engraving he had once taken a fancy to in Brussels, and purchased and hung up in his bedroom. I have it now! It is after Gallait, and represents a picturesquely poor violinist and his violin in a garret, and underneath is written "Art et liberté."

Then he thought of Julia's lovely face and magnificent body – and all his manhood thrilled as he recalled the look in her eyes when they met his the day before.

This was the strongest kind of temptation by which his nature could ever be assailed – he knew himself to be weak as water when that came his way, the ten‐thousandth face (and the figure to match)! He had often prayed to Martia to deliver him from such a lure. But here was Martia on the side of the too sweet enemy!

The train stopped for a few minutes at Neanderthal, and he thought he could think better if he got out and walked in that beautiful valley an hour or two – there was no hurry; he would take another train later, in time to meet Julia at Beresford Duff's, where she was sure to be. So he walked among the rocks, the lonely rocks, and sat and pondered in the famous cave where the skull was found – that simple prehistoric cranium which could never have been so pathetically nonplussed by such a dilemma as this when it was a human head!

And the more he pondered the less he came to a conclusion. It seemed as though there were the "tug of war" between Martia and all that he felt to be best in himself – his own conscience, his independence as a man, his sense of honor. He took her letter out of his pocket to re‐read, and with it came another letter; it was from my sister, Ida Maurice. It told him when they would arrive in Düsseldorf.

He jumped up in alarm – it was that very day. He had quite forgotten!

He ran off to the station, and missed a train, and had to wait an hour for another; but he got himself to the Rhine station in Düsseldorf a few minutes before the train from Belgium arrived.

Everything was ready for the Gibson party – lodgings and tea and supper to follow – he had seen to all that before; so there he walked up and down, waiting, and still revolving over and over again in his mind the troublous question that so bewildered and oppressed him. Who was Martia? what was she – that he should take her for a guide in the most momentous business of his life; and what were her credentials?

And what was love? Was it love he felt for this young goddess with yellow hair and light‐blue eyes so like his own, who towered in her full‐blown frolicsome splendor among the sons and daughters of men, with her moist, ripe lips so richly framed for happy love and laughter – that royal milk‐white fawn that had only lain in the roses and fed on the lilies of life?

"Oh, Mr. Nobody of Nowhere! be at least a man; let no one ever call you the basest thing an able‐bodied man can become, a fortune‐hunting adventurer!"

Then a bell rang, and the smoke of the coming train was visible – ten minutes late. The tickets were taken, and it slowed into the station and stopped. Ida's head and face were seen peering through one of the second‐class windows, on the lookout, and Barty opened the door and there was a warm and affectionate greeting between them; the meeting was joy to both.

Then he was warmly greeted by Mrs. Gibson, who introduced him to her mother; then he was conscious of somebody he had not seen yet because she stood at his blind side (indeed, he had all but forgotten her existence); namely, the presence of a very tall and most beautiful dark‐haired young lady, holding out her slender gloved hand and gazing up into his face with the most piercing and strangest and blackest eyes that ever were; yet so soft and quick and calm and large and kind and wise and gentle that their piercingness was but an added seduction; one felt they could never pierce too deep for the happiness of the heart they pronged and riddled and perforated through and through!

Involuntarily came into Barty's mind, as he shook the slender hand, a little song of Schubert's he had just learnt:

 
"Du dist die Ruh', der Friede mild!"
 

And wasn't it odd? – all his doubts and perplexities resolved themselves at once, as by some enchantment, into a lovely, unexpected chord of extreme simplicity; and Martia was gently but firmly put aside, and the divine Julia quietly relegated to the gilded throne which was her fit and proper apanage.

Barty saw to the luggage, and sent it on, and they all went on foot behind it.

The bridge of boats across the Rhine was open in the middle to let a wood‐raft go by down stream. This raft from some distant forest was so long they had to wait nearly twenty minutes; and the prow of it had all but lost itself in the western purple and gold and dun of sky and river while it was still passing the bridge.

All this was new and delightful to the Londoners, who were also delighted with the rooms Barty had taken for them in the König's Allee and the tea that awaited them there. Leah made tea, and gave a cup to Barty. That was a good cup of tea, better even than the tea Julia was making (that very moment, no doubt) at Beresford Duff's.

Then the elder ladies rested, and Barty took Leah and Ida for a walk in the Hof gardens. They were charmed with everything – especially the fire‐flies at dusk. Leah said little; she was not a very talkative person outside her immediate family circle. But Ida and Barty had much to say.

Then home to supper at the Gibsons' lodgings, and Barty sat opposite Leah, and drank in the beauty of her face, which had so wonderfully ripened and accentuated and individualized itself since he had seen her last, three years before.

As he discreetly gazed, whenever she was not looking his way, saying to himself, like Geraint: "'Here by God's rood is the one maid for me,'" he suddenly felt the north, and started with a kind of terror as he remembered Martia. He bade the company a hasty good-night, and went for a long walk by the Rhine, and had a long talk with his Egeria.

"Martia," said he, in a low but audible voice, "it's no good, I can't; c'est plus fort que moi. I can't sell myself to a woman for gold; besides, I can't fall in love with Julia; I don't know why, but I can't; I will never marry her. I don't deserve that she should care for me; perhaps she doesn't, perhaps you're quite mistaken, and if she does, it's only a young girl's fancy. What does a girl of that age really know about her own heart? and how base I should be to take advantage of her innocence and inexperience!"

And then he went on in a passionate and eager voice to explain all he had thought of during the day and still further defend his recalcitrancy.

"Give me at least your reasons, Martia; tell me, for God's sake, who you are and what! Are you me? are you the spirit of my mother? Why do you love me, as you say you do, with a love passing the love of woman? What am I to you? Why are you so bent on worldly things?"

This monologue lasted more than an hour, and he threw himself on to his bed quite worn out, and slept at once, in spite of the nightingales, who filled the starlit, breezy, balmy night with their shrill, sweet clamor.

Next morning, as he expected, he found a letter:

"Barty, you are ruining me and breaking my life, and wrecking the plans of many years – plans made before you were, born or thought of.

"Who am I, indeed? Who is this demure young black‐eyed witch that has come between us, this friend of Ida Maurice's?

"She's the cause of all my misery, I feel sure; with Ida's eyes I saw you look at her; you never yet looked at Julia like that! – never at any woman before!

"Who is she? No mate for a man like you, I feel sure. In the first place, she is not rich; I could tell that by the querulous complaints of her middle‐class mother. She's just fit to be some pious Quaker's wife, or a Sister of Charity, or a governess, or a hospital nurse, or a nun – no companion for a man destined to move the world!

"Barty, you don't know what you are; you have never thought; you have never yet looked within!

"Barty, with Julia by your side and me at your back, you will be a leader of men, and sway the destinies of your country, and raise it above all other nations, and make it the arbiter of Europe – of the whole world – and your seed will ever be first among the foremost of the earth.

"Will you give up all this for a pair of bright black eyes and a pretty white skin? Isn't Julia white enough for you?

"A painter? What a trade for a man built like you! Take the greatest of them; what have they ever really mattered? What do they matter now, except to those who want to imitate them and can't, or to those who live by buying cheap the fruits of their long labors, and selling them dear as so much wall furniture for the vulgar rich? Besides, you will never be a great painter; you've begun too late!

"Think of yourself ten years hence – a king among men, with the world at your feet, and at those of the glorious woman who will have smoothed your path to greatness and fame and power! Mistress and wife – goddess and queen in one!

"Think of the poor struggling painter, painting his poor little pictures in his obscure corner to feed half a dozen hungry children and the anxious, careworn wife, whose beauty has long faded away in the petty, sordid, hopeless domestic struggle, just as her husband's little talent has long been wasted and used up in wretched pot‐boilers for mere bread; think of poverty, debt, and degradation, and all the miserable ugliness of life – the truest, tritest, and oldest story in the world! Love soon flies out of the window when these wolves snarl at the door.

"Think of all this, Barty, and think of the despair you are bringing on one lost lonely soul who loves you as a mother loves her first‐born, and has founded such hopes on you; dismiss this pretty little middle‐class puritan from your thoughts and go back to Julia.

"I will not hurry your decision; I will come back in exactly a week from to‐night. I am at your mercy.

"Martia."

This letter made Barty very unhappy. It was a strange dilemma.

What is it that now and again makes a woman in a single moment take such a powerful grip of a man's fancy that he can never shake himself free again, and never wants to?

Tunes can be like that, sometimes. Not the pretty little tinkling tunes that please everybody at once; the pleasure of them can fade in a year, a month – even a week, a day! But those from a great mint, and whose charm will last a man his lifetime!

Many years ago a great pianist, to amuse some friends (of whom I was one), played a series of waltzes by Schubert which I had never heard before – the "Soirées de Vienne," I think they were called. They were lovely from beginning to end; but one short measure in particular was full of such extraordinary enchantment for me that it has really haunted me through life. It is as if it were made on purpose for me alone, a little intimate aside à mon intention – the gainliest, happiest thought I had ever heard expressed in music. For nobody else seemed to think those particular bars were more beautiful than all the rest; but, oh! the difference to me!

And I suppose there's hardly a great painter living, or recently dead, some of whose work is not represented on my walls, either in London, Paris, or Scotland; or at Marsfield, where so much of my time is spent; although the house is not mine, it's my real home; and thither I have always been allowed to send my best pictures, and my best bric‐à‐brac, my favorite horses and dogs, and the oldest and choicest liquors that were ever stored in the cellars of Vougeot‐Conti & Co. Old bachelor friends have their privileges, and Uncle Bob has known how to make himself at home in Marsfield.

Barty soon got better off, and moved into better lodgings in Berners Street; a sitting‐room and bedroom at No. 12B, which has now disappeared.

And there he worked all day, without haste and without rest, and at last in solitude; and found he could work twice as well with no companion but his pipe and his lay figure, from which he made most elaborate studies of drapery, in pen and ink; first in the manner of Sandys and Albert Dürer! later in the manner of Millais, Walker, and Keene.

Also he acquired the art of using the living model for his little illustrations. It had become the fashion; a new school had been founded with Once a Week and the Cornhill Magazine, it seems; besides those already named, there were Lawless, du Maurier, Poynter, not to mention Holman Hunt and F. Leighton; and a host of new draughtsmen, most industrious apprentices, whose talk and example soon weaned Barty from a mixed and somewhat rowdy crew.

And all became more or less friends of his; a very good thing, for they were admirable in industry and talent, thorough artists and very good fellows all round. Need I say they have all risen to fame and fortune – as becomes poetical justice?

He also kept in touch with his old brother officers, and that was a good thing too.

But there were others he got to know, rickety, unwholesome geniuses, whose genius (such as it was) had allied itself to madness; and who were just as conceited about the madness as about the genius, and took more pains to cultivate it. It brought them a quicker kudos, and was so much more visible to the naked eye.

At first Barty was fascinated by the madness, and took the genius on trust, I suppose. They made much of him, painted him, wrote music and verses about him, raved about his Greekness, his beauty, his yellow hair, and his voice and what not, as if he had been a woman. He even stood that, he admired them so! or rather, this genius of theirs.

He introduced me to this little clique, who called themselves a school, and each other "master": "the neo‐priapists," or something of that sort, and they worshipped the tuberose.

They disliked me at sight, and I them, and we did not dissemble!

Like Barty, I am fond of men's society; but at least I like them to be unmistakably men of my own sex, manly men, and clean; not little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions, or self‐advertising little mountebanks with enlarged and diseased vanities; creatures who would stand in a pillory sooner than not be stared at or talked about at all.

Whatever their genius might be, it almost made me sick – it almost made me kick, to see the humorous and masculine Barty prostrate in admiration before these inspired epicenes, these gifted epileptoids, these anæmic little self‐satisfied nincompoops, whose proper place, it seemed to me, was either Earlswood, or Colney Hatch, or Broadmoor. That is, if their madness was genuine, which I doubt. He and I had many a quarrel about them, till he found them out and cut them for good and all – a great relief to me; for one got a bad name by being friends with such nondescripts.

"Dis‐moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai ce que tu es!"

Need I say they all died long ago, without leaving the ghost of a name? – and nobody cared. Poetical justice again! How encouraging it is to think there are no such people now, and that the breed has been thoroughly stamped out!³

Barty never succeeded as an illustrator on wood. He got into a way of doing very slight sketches of pretty people in fancy dress and coloring them lightly, and sold them at a shop in the Strand, now no more. Then he made up little stories, which he illustrated himself, something like the picture‐books of the later Caldecott, and I found him a publisher, and he was soon able to put aside a few pounds and pay his debts.

Part Eighth

 
"And now I see with eyes serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn and comfort and command;
And yet a spirit too and bright
With something of an angel-light."
 

– Wordsworth.

When Barty had been six months in England, poor Mr. Gibson's affairs went suddenly smash. My father saved him from absolute bankruptcy, and there was lamentation and wailing for a month or so in Conduit Street; but things were so managed that Mr. Gibson was able to keep on the "West End firm," and make with it a new start.

He had long been complaining of his cashier, and had to dismiss him and look out for another; but here his daughter came in and insisted on being cashier herself – (to her mother's horror).

So she took her place at a railed-in desk at the back of the shop, and was not only cashier and bookkeeper, but overseer of all things in general, and was not above seeing any exacting and importunate customer whom the shopmen couldn't manage.

She actually liked her work, and declared she had found her real vocation, and quite ceased to regret Tavistock Square.

Her authority in the emporium was even greater than her father's, who was too fond of being funny. She awed the shopmen into a kind of affectionate servility, and they were prostrate as before a goddess, in spite of her never-failing politeness to them.

Customers soon got into a way of asking to see Miss Gibson, especially when they were accompanied by husbands or brothers or male friends; and Miss Gibson soon found she sold better than any shopman, and became one of the notables in the quarter.

All Mr. Gibson's fun came back, and he was as proud of his daughter as if she'd been proposed to by an earl. But Mrs. Gibson couldn't help shedding tears over Leah's loss of caste – Leah, on whose beauty and good breeding she had founded such hopes; it is but fair to add that she was most anxious to keep the books herself, so that her daughter might be spared this degradation; for no "gentleman," she felt sure, would ever propose to her daughter now.

But she was mistaken.

One night Barty and I dined at a little cagmag he used to frequent, where he fared well – so he said – for a shilling, which included a glass of stout. It was a disgusting little place, but he liked it, and therefore so did I.

Then we called for Mrs. Gibson and Leah, and took them to the Princess's to see Fechter in Ruy Blas, and escorted them home, and had supper with them, a very good supper – nothing ever interfered with the luxuriously hospitable instincts of the Gibsons – and a very merry one. Barty imitated Fechter to the life.

"I 'av ze garrb of a lacquais– you 'av ze sôle of wawn!"

This he said to Mr. Gibson, who was in fits of delight. Mr. Gibson had just come home from his club, and the cards had been propitious; Leah was more reserved than usual, and didn't laugh at Barty, for a wonder, but gazed at him with love in her eyes.

When we left them, Barty took my arm and walked home with me, down Oxford Street and up Southampton Row, and talked of Ruy Blas and Fechter, whom he had often seen in Paris.

Just where a little footway leads from the Row to Queen Square and Great Ormond Street, he stopped and said:

"Bob, do you remember how we tossed up for Leah Gibson at this very spot?"

"I should think I did," said I.

"Well, you had a fair field and no favor, old boy, didn't you?"

"Oh yes, I've long resigned any pretensions, as I wrote you more than a year ago; you may go in and win – si le cœur t'en dit!"

"Well, then, your congratulations, please. I asked her to marry me as we crossed Regent Circus, Oxford Street, on the way home; a hansom came by and scattered and splashed us. Then we came together again, and just opposite Peter Robinson's, she asked me if my mind was quite made up – if I was sure I wouldn't ever change. I swore by the eternal gods, and she said she would be my wife; so there we are, an engaged couple."

I must ask the reader to believe that I was equal to the occasion, and said what I ought to have said.

Mrs. Gibson was happy at last; she was satisfied that Barty was a "gentleman," in spite of the kink in his birth; and as for his prospects, money was a thing that never entered Mrs. Gibson's head, and she loved Barty as a son – was a little bit in love with him herself, I believe; she was not yet forty, and as pretty as she could be.

Besides, a week after, who should call upon her over the shop – there was a private entrance of course – but the Right Honorable Lady Caroline Grey and her niece, Miss Daphne Rohan, granddaughter of the late and niece of the present Marquis of Whitby!

And Mrs. Gibson felt as much at home with them in five minutes as if she'd known them all her life.

Leah was summoned from below, and kissed and congratulated by the two aristocratic relatives of Barty's, and relieved of her shyness in a very short time indeed.

As a matter of fact, Lady Caroline, who knew her nephew well, and thoroughly understood his position, was really well pleased; she had never forgotten her impression of Leah when she met her in the park with Ida and me a year back, and we all walked by the Serpentine together – a certain kind of beauty seems to break down all barriers of rank; and she knew Leah's character both from Barty and me, and from her own native shrewdness of observation. She had been delighted to hear from Barty of Leah's resolute participation in her father's troubles, and in his attempt – so successful through her – to rehabilitate his business. To her old-fashioned aristocratic way of looking at things, there was little to choose between a respectable West End shopkeeper and a medical practitioner or dentist or solicitor or architect – or even an artist, like Barty himself. Once outside the Church, the Army and Navy, or a Government office, what on earth did it matter who or what one was, or wasn't? The only thing she couldn't stand was that horrid form of bourgeois gentility, the pretension to seem something better than you really are. Mrs. Gibson was so naïvely honest in her little laments over her lost grandeur that she could hardly be called vulgar about it.

Mr. Gibson didn't appear; he was overawed, and distrusted himself. I doubt if Lady Caroline would have liked anything in the shape of jocose familiarity; and I fear her naturalness and simplicity and cordiality of manner, and the extreme plainness of her attire, might have put him at his ease almost a trifle too much.

Whether her ladyship would have been so sympathetic about this engagement if Barty had been a legitimate Rohan – say a son of her own – is perhaps to be doubted; but anyhow she had quite made up her mind that Leah was a quite exceptional person, both in mind and manners. She has often said as much to me, and has always had as high a regard for Barty's wife as for any woman she knows, and has still – the Rohans are a long-lived family. She has often told me she never knew a better, sincerer, nobler, or more sensible woman than Barty's wife.

Besides which, as I have been told, the ancient Yorkshire house of Rohan has always been singularly free from aristocratic hauteur; perhaps their religion may have accounted for this, and also their poverty.

This memorable visit, it must be remembered, happened nearly forty years ago, when social demarcations in England were far more rigidly defined than at present; then, the wife of a costermonger with a donkey did not visit the wife of a costermonger who had to wheel his barrow himself.

We are more sensible in these days, as all who like Mr. Chevalier's admirable coster-songs are aware. Old Europe itself has become less tolerant of distinctions of rank; even Austria is becoming so. It is only in southeastern Bulgaria – and even of this I am not absolutely sure – that the navvy who happens to be of noble birth refuses to work in the same gang with the navvy who isn't; and that's what I call real "esprit de corps," without which no aristocracy can ever hope to hold its own in these degenerate days.

Noblesse oblige!

Why, I've got a Lord Arthur in my New York agency, and two Hon'bles in Barge Yard, and another at Cape Town; and devilish good men of business they are, besides being good fellows all round. They hope to become partners some day; and, by Jove! they shall. Now I've said it, I'll stick to it.

The fact is, I'm rather fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord – he, a mere man of letters! – but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either here or abroad – even the Prussian order of Merit!

Alfred Tennyson was a lord, so what is there to make such a fuss about. Give me lords who can't help themselves, because they were born so, and the stupider the better; and the older – for the older they are the grander their manners and the manners of their womankind.

Take, for instance, that splendid old dow, Penelope, Duchess of Rumtifoozleland – I always give nicknames to my grand acquaintances; not that she's particularly old herself, but she belongs to an antiquated order of things that is passing away – for she was a Fitztartan, a daughter of the ducal house of Comtesbois (pronounced County Boyce); and she's very handsome still.

Have you ever been presented to her Grace, O reader?

If so, you must have been struck by the grace of her Grace's manner, as with a ducal gesture and a few courtly words she recognizes the value of whatever immense achievements yours must have been to have procured you such an honor as such an introduction, and expresses her surprise and regret that she has not known you before. The formula is always the same, on every possible occasion. I ought to know, for I've had the honor of being presented to her Grace seven times this year.

Now this lofty forgetting of your poor existence – or mine – is not aristocratic hauteur or patrician insolence; it is bêtise pure et simple, as they call it in France. She was a daughter of the house of Comtesbois, and the Fitztartans were not the inventors of gunpowder, nor was she.

But for a stately, magnificent Grande Dame of the ancient régime, to meet for the seventh time, and be presented to – for the seventh time – with all due ceremony in the midst of a distinguished conservative crowd – say at a ball at Buckingham Palace – give me Penelope, Dowager Duchess of Rumtifoozleland!

(This seems a somewhat uncalled-for digression. But, anyhow, it shows that when it pleases me to do so I move in the very best society – just like Barty Josselin.)

So here was Mr. Nobody of Nowhere taking unto himself a wife from among the daughters of Heth; from the class he had always disliked, the buyers cheap and the sellers dear – whose sole aim in life is the making of money, and who are proud when they succeed and ashamed when they fail – and getting actually fond of his future father and mother in law, as I was!

When I laughed to him about old Gibson – John Gilpin, as we used to call him – being a tradesman, he said:

"Yes; but what an unsuccessful tradesman, my dear fellow!" as if that in itself atoned or made amends for everything.

"Besides, he's Leah's father! And as for Mrs. Gilpin, she's a dear, although she's always on pleasure bent; at all events, she's not of a frugal mind; and she's so pretty and dresses so well – and what a foot! – and she's got such easy manners, too; she reminds me of dear Lady Archibald! that's a mother-in-law I shall get on with… I wish she didn't make such a fuss about living over the shop; I call that being above one's business in every way."

"Je suis au-dessus de mes affaires," as old Bonzig proudly said when he took a garret over the Mont de Piété, in the Rue des Averses.

Barty's courtship didn't last long – only five or six months – during which he made lots of money by sketching little full-length portraits of people in outline and filling up with tints in water-color. He thus immortalized my father and mother, and Ida Scatcherd and her husband, and the old Scatcherds, and lots of other people. It was not high art, I suppose; he was not a high artist; but it paid well, and made him more tolerant of trade than ever.

He took the upper part of a house in Southampton Row, and furnished it almost entirely with wedding-gifts; among other things, a beautiful semi-grand piano by Érard – the gift of my father. Everything was charming there and in the best taste.

Leah was better at furnishing a house than at drawing and music-making; it was an occupation she revelled in.

It is not perhaps for me to say that their cellar might hold its own with that of any beginners in their rank of life!

Well, and so they were married at Marylebone Church, and I was Barty's best man (he was to have been mine, and for that very bride). Nobody else was there but the family, and Ida, whose husband was abroad; the sun shone, though it was not yet May – and then we breakfasted; and John Gilpin made a very funny speech, though with tears in his voice; and as for poor Maman-belle-mère, as Barty called her, she was a very Niobe.

They went for a fortnight to Boulogne. I wished them joy from the bottom of my heart, and flung a charming little white satin slipper of Mrs. Gibson's; it alighted on the carriage —our carriage, by-the-way; we had just started one, and now lived at Lancaster Gate.

It was a sharp pang – almost unbearable, but, also, almost the last. The last was when she came back and I saw how radiant she looked. And as for Barty, he was like

 
"the herald Mercury,
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill!"
 

and he had shaved off his beard and mustache to please his wife.

"From George du Maurier, Esqre., A.R.W.S., Hampstead Heath,to the Right Honble. Sir Robert Maurice, Bart., M.P.:

"My Dear Maurice, – In answer to your kind letter, I shall be proud and happy to illustrate your biography of Barty Josselin; but as for editing it, vous plaisantez, mon ami; un amateur comme moi! who'll edit the editor? Quis custodiet?…

"You're mistaken about Malines. I only got back there a week or two before he left it. I remember often seeing him there, arm in arm with his aunt, Lady Caroline Grey, and being told that he was a monsieur anglais, qui avait mal aux yeux (like me); but in Düsseldorf, during the following winter, I knew him very well indeed.

"We, and the others you tell me you mention, had a capital time in Düsseldorf. I remember the beautiful Miss Royce they were all so mad about, and also Miss Gibson, whom I admired much the most of the two, although she wasn't quite so tall – you know my craze for lovely giantesses.

"Josselin and I came to London at about the same time, and there again I saw much of him, and was immensely attracted by him, of course – as we all were, in the very pleasant little artistic clique you tell me you describe; but somehow I was never very intimate with him – none of us were, except, perhaps, Charles Keene.

"He went a great deal into smart society, and a little of the guardsman still clung to him, and this was an unpardonable crime in those Bohemian days.

"He was once seen walking between two well-known earls, in the Burlington Arcade, arm in arm!

"Z – (to whom a noble lord was as a red rag to a bull) all but cut him for this, and we none of us approved of his swell friends, Guardsmen and others. How we've all changed, especially Z – , who hasn't missed a levée for twenty years, nor his wife a drawing-room!

"Josselin and I acted in a little French musical farce together at Cornelys's; he had a charming voice and sang beautifully, as you know.

"Then he married, and a year after I did the same; and though we lived near each other for a little while, we didn't meet very often, beyond dining together once or twice at each other's houses. They lived very much in the world.

"It will be very difficult to draw his wife. I really think Mrs. Josselin was the most beautiful woman I ever saw; but she used to be very reserved in those early days, and I never felt quite at my ease with her. I'm sure she was sweetness and kindness itself; she was certainly charming at her own dinner-table, where she was less shy.

"Millais's portrait of her is very good, and so is Watts's; but the best idea of her is to be got from Josselin's little outlines in 'The Discreet Princess,' and these are out of print. If you have any, please lend them to me, and I will faithfully return them. I have more than once tried to draw her in Punch, from memory, but never with success.

"I used to call her 'La belle dame sans merci.'

"I've often, however, drawn Josselin, as you must remember, and people have recognized him at once. Thanks for all his old sketches of school, etc., which will be very useful.

"I wish I had known the Josselins better. But when one lives in Hampstead one has to forego many delightful friendships; and then he grew to be such a tremendous swell! Good heavens! —Sardonyx, etc. I never could muster courage even to write and congratulate him.

"It never occurred to any of us, either in Düsseldorf or London, to think him what is called clever; he never said anything very witty or profound. But he was always funny in a good-natured, jovial manner, and made me laugh more than any one else.

"As for satire, good heavens! that seemed not in him. He was always well dressed, always in high spirits and a good temper, and very demonstrative and caressing; putting his arm round one, and slapping one on the back or lifting one up in the air; a kind of jolty, noisy, boisterous boon-companion – rather uproarious, in fact, and with no disdain for a good bottle of wine or a good bottle of beer. His artistic tastes were very catholic, for he was prostrate in admiration before Millais, Burne-Jones, Fred Walker, and Charles Keene, with the latter of whom he used to sing old English duets. Oddly enough, Charles Keene had for Josselin's little amateur pencillings the most enthusiastic admiration – probably because they were the very antipodes of his own splendid work. I believe he managed to get some little initial letters of Josselin's into Punch and Once a Week; but they weren't signed, and made no mark, and I've forgotten them.

"Josselin didn't really get his foot in the stirrup till a year or two after his marriage.

"And that was by his illustrations to his own Sardonyx, which are almost worthy of the letter-press, I think; though still somewhat lacking in freedom and looseness, and especially in the sense of tone. The feeling for beauty and character in them (especially that of women and children) is so utterly beyond anything else of the kind that has ever been attempted, that technical considerations no longer count. I think you will find all of us, in or outside the Academy, agreed upon this point.

"I saw very little of him after he bought Marsfield; but I sometimes meet his sons and daughters, de par le monde.

"And what a pleasure that is to an artist of my particular bent you can readily understand. I would go a good way to see or talk to any daughter of Josselin's; and to hear Mrs. Trevor sing, what miles! I'm told the grandchildren are splendid – chips of the old block too.

"And now, my dear Maurice, I will do my best; you may count upon that, for old-times' sake, and for Josselin's, and for that of 'La belle dame sans merci,' whom I used to admire so enthusiastically. It grieves me deeply to think of them both gone – and all so sudden!

"Sincerely yours,

"George du Maurier.

"P. S. – Very many thanks for the Château Yquem and the Steinberger Cabinet; je tâcherai de ne pas en abuser trop!

"I send you a little sketch of Graham-Reece (Lord Ironsides), taken by me on a little bridge in Düsselthal, near Düsseldorf. He stood for me there in 1860. It was thought very like at the time."

When the Josselins came back from their honeymoon and were settled in Southampton Row many people of all kinds called on the newly married pair; invitations came pouring in, and they went very much into the world. They were considered the handsomest couple in London that year, and became quite the fashion, and were asked everywhere, and made much of, and raved about, and had a glorious time till the following season, when somebody else became the fashion, and they had grown tired of being lionized themselves, and discovered they were people of no social importance whatever, as Leah had long perceived; and it did them good.

Barty was in his element. The admiration his wife excited filled him with delight; it was a kind of reflected glory, that pleased him more than any glory he could possibly achieve for himself.

I doubt if Leah was quite so happy. The grand people, the famous people, the clever, worldly people she met made her very shy at first, as may be easily imagined.

She was rather embarrassed by the attentions many smart men paid her as to a very pretty woman, and not always pleased or edified. Her deep sense of humor was often tickled by this new position in which she found herself, and which she put down entirely to the fact that she was Barty's wife.

She never thought much of her own beauty, which had never been made much of at home, where beauty of a very different order was admired, and where she was thought too tall, too pale, too slim, and especially too quiet and sedate.

Dimpled little rosy plumpness for Mr. and Mrs. John Gilpin, and the never-ending lively chatter, and the ever-ready laugh that results from an entire lack of the real sense of humor and a laudable desire to show one's pretty teeth.

Leah's only vanity was her fondness for being very well dressed; it had become a second nature, especially her fondness for beautiful French boots and shoes, an instinct inherited from her mother.

For these, and for pretty furniture and hangings, she had the truly æsthetic eye, and was in advance of her time by at least a year.

She shone most in her own home – by her great faculty of making others at home there, too, and disinclined to leave it. Her instinct of hospitality was a true inheritance; she was good at the ordering of all such things – food, wines, flowers, waiting, every little detail of the dinner-table, and especially who should be asked to meet whom, and which particular guests should be chosen to sit by each other. All things of which Barty had no idea whatever.

I remember their first dinner-party well, and how pleasant it was. How good the fare, and how simple; and how quick the hired waiting – and the wines! how – (but I won't talk of that); and how lively we all were, and how handsome the women. Lady Caroline and Miss Daphne Rohan, Mr. and Mrs. Graham-Reece, Scatcherd and my sister; G. du Maurier (then a bachelor) and myself – that was the party, a very lively one.

After dinner du Maurier and Barty sang capital songs of the quartier latin, and told stories of the atelier, and even danced a kind of cancan together – an invention of their own – which they called "le dernier des Abencerrages." We were in fits of laughter, especially Lady Caroline and Mrs. Graham-Reece. I hope D. M. has not forgotten that scene, and will do justice to it in this book.

There was still more of the Bohemian than the Guardsman left in Barty, and his wife's natural tastes were far more in the direction of Bohemia than of fashionable West End society, as it was called by some people who were not in it, whatever it consists of; there was more of her father in her than her mother, and she was not sensitive to the world's opinion of her social status.

Sometimes Leah and Barty and I would dine together and go to the gallery of the opera, let us say, or to see Fechter and Miss Kate Terry in the Duke's Motto, or Robson in Shylock, or the Porter's Knot, or whatever was good. Then on the way home to Southampton Row Barty would buy a big lobster, and Leah would make a salad of it, with innovations of her own devising which were much appreciated; and then we would feast, and afterwards Leah would mull some claret in a silver saucepan, and then we (Barty and I) would drink and smoke and chat of pleasant things till it was very late indeed and I had to be turned out neck and crop.

And the kindness of the two dear people! Once, when my father and mother were away in the Isle of Wight and the Scatcherds in Paris, I felt so seedy I had to leave Barge Yard and go home to Lancaster Gate. I had felt pretty bad for two or three days. Like all people who are never ill, I was nervous and thought I was going to die, and sent for Barty.

In less than twenty minutes Leah drove up in a hansom. Barty was in Hampton Court for the day, sketching. When she had seen me and how ill I looked, off she went for the doctor, and brought him back with her in no time. He saw I was sickening for typhoid, and must go to bed at once and engage two nurses.

Leah insisted, on taking me straight off to Southampton Row, and the doctor came with us. There I was soon in bed and the nurses engaged, and everything done for me as if I'd been Barty himself – all this at considerable inconvenience to the Josselins.

And I had my typhoid most pleasantly. And I shall never forget the joys of convalescence, nor what an angel that woman was in a sick-room – nor what a companion when the worst was over; nor how she so bore herself through all this forced intimacy that no unruly regrets or jealousies mingled in my deep affection and admiration for her, and my passionate gratitude. She was such a person to tell all one's affairs to, even dry business affairs! such a listener, and said such sensible things, and sometimes made suggestions that were invaluable; and of a discretion! a very tomb for momentous secrets.

They are great engineers and excavators, great irrigators, great workers in delicate metal, stone, marble, and precious gems (there is no wood to speak of); great sculptors and decorators of the beautiful caves, so fancifully and so intricately connected, in which they live, and which have taken thousands of years to design and excavate and ventilate and adorn, and which they warm and light up at will in a beautiful manner by means of the tremendous magnetic current.

This richly parti-colored light is part of their mental and moral life in a way it is not in us to apprehend, and has its exact equivalent in sound – and vice versa.

They have no language of words, and do not need it, since they can only be isolated in thought from each other by a distance greater than that which any vocal sound can traverse; but their organs of voice and hearing are far more complex and perfect than ours, and their atmosphere infinitely more conductive of phonal vibrations.

It seems that everything which can be apprehended by the eye or hand is capable of absolute sonorous translation: light, color, texture, shape in its three dimensions, weight, and density. The phonal expression and comprehension of all these are acquired by the Martian baby almost as soon as it knows how to swim or dive, or move upright and erect on dry land or beneath it; and the mechanical translation of such expression by means of wind and wire and sounding texture and curved surface of extraordinary elaboration is the principal business of the Martian life – an art by which all the combined past experience and future aspirations of the race receive the fullest utterance. Here again personal magnetism plays an enormous part.

And it is by means of this long and patiently evolved and highly trained faculty that the race is still developing towards perfection with constant strain and effort – although the planet is far advanced in its decadence and within measurable distance of its unfitness for life of any kind.

All is so evenly and harmoniously balanced, whether above ground or beneath, that existence is full of joy in spite of the tremendous strain of life, in spite also of a dreariness of outlook, on barren nature, which is not to be matched by the most inhospitable regions of the earth; and death is looked upon as the crowning joy of all, although life is prolonged by all the means in their power.

For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars the better for its eternal life in the future.

But it often, on its journey sunwards, gets entangled in other beams, and finds its way to some intermediate planet – Mercury, Venus, or the Earth; and putting on flesh and blood and bone once more, and losing for a space all its knowledge of its own past, it has to undergo another mortal incarnation – a new personal experience, beginning with its new birth; a dream and a forgetting, till it awakens again after the pangs of dissolution, and finds itself a step further on the way to freedom.

Martia, it seems, came to our earth in a shower of shooting-stars a hundred years ago. She had not lived her full measure of years in Mars; she had elected to be suppressed, through some unfitness, physical or mental or moral, which rendered it inexpedient that she should become a mother of Martians, for they are very particular about that sort of thing in Mars: we shall have to be so here some day, or else we shall degenerate and become extinct; or even worse!

Many Martian souls come to our planet in this way, it seems, and hasten to incarnate themselves in as promising unborn though just begotten men and women as they find, that they may the sooner be free to hie them sunwards with all their collected memories.

According to Martia, most of the best and finest of our race have souls that have lived forgotten lives in Mars. But Martia was in no hurry; she was full of intelligent curiosity, and for ten years she went up and down the earth, revelling in the open air, lodging herself in the brains and bodies of birds, beasts, and fishes, insects, and animals of all kinds – like a hermit crab in a shell that belongs to another – but without the slightest inconvenience to the legitimate owners, who were always quite unconscious of her presence, although she made what use she could of what wits they had.

Thus she had a heavenly time on this sunlit earth of ours – now a worm, now a porpoise, now a sea-gull or a dragon-fly, now some fleet-footed, keen-eyed quadruped that did not live by slaying, for she had a horror of bloodshed.

She could only go where these creatures chose to take her, since she had no power to control their actions in the slightest degree; but she saw, heard, smelled and touched and tasted with their organs of sense, and was as conscious of their animal life as they were themselves. Her description of this phase of her earthly career is full of extraordinary interest, and sometimes extremely funny – though quite unconsciously so, no doubt. For instance, she tells how happy she once was when she inhabited a small brown Pomeranian dog called "Schnapfel," in Cologne, and belonging to a Jewish family who dealt in old clothes near the Cathedral; and how she loved them and looked up to them – how she revelled in fried fish and the smell of it – and in all the stinks in every street of the famous city – all except one, that arose from Herr Johann Maria Farina's renowned emporium in the Julichs Platz, which so offended the canine nostrils that she had to give up inhabiting that small Pomeranian dog forever, etc.

Then she took to man, and inhabited man and woman, and especially child, in all parts of the globe for many years; and, finally, for the last fifty or sixty years or so, she settled herself exclusively among the best and healthiest English she could find.

She took a great fancy to the Rohans, who are singularly well endowed in health of mind and body, and physical beauty, and happiness of temper. She became especially fond of the ill-fated but amiable Lord Runswick – Barty's father. Then through him she knew Antoinette, and loved her so well that she determined to incarnate herself at last as their child; but she had become very cautious and worldly during her wandering life on earth, and felt that she would not be quite happy either as a man or a woman in Western Europe unless she were reborn in holy wedlock – a concession she made to our British prejudices in favor of respectability; she describes herself as the only Martian Philistine and snob.

Evil communications corrupt good manners, and poor Martia, to her infinite sorrow and self-reproach, was conscious of a sad lowering of her moral tone after this long frequentation of the best earthly human beings – even the best English.

She grew to admire worldly success, rank, social distinction, the perishable beauty of outward form, the lust of the flesh and the pride of the eye – the pomps and vanities of this wicked world – and to basely long for these in her own person!

Then when Barty was born she loved to inhabit his singularly well constituted little body better than any other, and to identify herself with his happy child-life, and enjoy his singularly perfect senses, and sleep his beautiful sleep, and revel in the dreams he so completely forgot when he woke – reminiscent dreams, that she was actually able to weave out of the unconscious brain that was his: absolutely using his dormant organs of memory for purposes of her own, to remember and relive her own past pleasures and pains, so sensitively and highly organized was he; and to her immense surprise she found she could make him feel her presence even when awake by means of the magnetic sense that pervaded her strongly as it pervades all Martian souls, till they reincarnate themselves among us and forget.

And thus he was conscious of the north whenever she enjoyed the hospitality of his young body.

She stuck to him for many years, till he offended her taste by his looseness of life as a Guardsman (for she was extremely straitlaced); and she inhabited him no more for some time, though she often watched him through the eyes of others, and always loved him and lamented sorely over his faults and follies.

Then one memorable night, in the energy of her despair at his resolve to slip that splendid body of his, she was able to influence him in his sleep, and saved his life; and all her love came back tenfold.

She had never been able to impose a fraction of her will on any being, animal or human, that she had ever inhabited on earth until that memorable night in Malines, where she made him write at her dictation.

Then she conceived an immense desire that he should marry the splendid Julia, whom she had often inhabited also, that she might one day be a child of his by such a mother, and go through her earthly incarnation in the happiest conceivable circumstances; but herein she was balked by Barty's instinctive preference for Leah, and again gave him up in a huff.

But she soon took to inhabiting Leah a great deal, and found her just as much to her taste for her own future earthly mother as the divine Julia herself, and made up her mind she would make Barty great and famous by a clever management of his very extraordinary brains, of which she had discovered the hidden capacity, and influence the earth for its good – for she had grown to love the beautiful earth, in spite of its iniquities – and finally be a child of Barty and Leah, every new child of whom seemed an improvement on the last, as though practice made perfect.

Such is, roughly, the story of Martia.

There is no doubt – both Barty and Leah agreed with me in this – that it is an easy story to invent, though it is curiously convincing to read in the original shape, with all its minute details and their verisimilitude; but even then there is nothing in it that the author of Sardonyx could not have easily imagined and made more convincing still.

He declared that all through life on awaking from his night's sleep he always felt conscious of having had extraordinary dreams – even as a child – but that he forgot them in the very act of waking, in spite of strenuous efforts to recall them. But now and again on sinking into sleep the vague memory of those forgotten dreams would come back, and they were all of a strange life under new conditions – just such a life as Martia had described – where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth – revelations denied to us here, or we should be very different beings from what we most unhappily are.

He thought it quite possible that his brain in sleep had at last become so active through the exhausting and depleting medical régime that he went through in Malines that it actually was able to dictate its will to his body, and that everything might have happened to him as it did then and afterwards without any supernatural or ultranatural agency whatever – without a Martia!

He might, in short, have led a kind of dual life, and Martia might be a simple fancy or invention of his brain in an abnormal state of activity during slumber; and both Leah and I inclined to this belief (but for a strange thing which happened later, and which I will tell in due time). Indeed, it all seems so silly and far-fetched, so "out of the question," that one feels almost ashamed at bringing this Martia into a serious biography of a great man – un conte à dormir debout! But you must wait for the end.

Anyhow, the singular fact remains that in some way inexplicable to himself Barty has influenced the world in a direction which it never entered his thoughts even to conceive, so far as he remembered.

Think of all he has done.

He has robbed Death of nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he (and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance made perfect and complete after dissolution: he alone has built the golden bridge in the middle of which science and faith can shake hands over at least one common possibility – nay, one common certainty for those who have read him aright.

There is no longer despair in bereavement – all bereavement is but a half parting; there is no real parting except for those who survive, and the longest earthly life is but a span. Whatever the future may be, the past will be ours forever, and that means our punishment and our reward and reunion with those we loved. It is a happy phrase, that which closes the career of Sardonyx. It has become as universal as the Lord's Prayer!

To think that so simple and obvious a solution should have lain hidden all these æons, to turn up at last as though by chance in a little illustrated story-book! What a nugget!

Où avions-nous donc la tête et les yeux?

Physical pain and the origin of evil seem the only questions with which he has not been able to grapple. And yet if those difficulties are ever dealt with and mastered and overcome for us it can only be by some follower of Barty's methods.

It is true, no doubt, that through him suicide has become the normal way out of our troubles when these are beyond remedy. I will not express any opinion as to the ethical significance of this admitted result of his teaching, which many of us still find it so hard to reconcile with their conscience.

Then, by a dexterous manipulation of our sympathies that amounts to absolute conjuring, he has given the death-blow to all cruelty that serves for our amusement, and killed the pride and pomp and circumstance of glorious sport, and made them ridiculous with his lusty laugh; even the bull-fights in Spain are coming to an end, and all through a Spanish translation of Lifeblood. All the cruelties of the world are bound to follow in time, and this not so much because they are cruel as because they are ridiculous and mean and ugly, and would make us laugh if they didn't make us cry.

And to whom but Barty Josselin do we owe it that our race is on an average already from four to six inches taller than it was thirty years ago, men and women alike; that strength and beauty are rapidly becoming the rule among us, and weakness and ugliness the exception?

He has been hard on these; he has been cruel to be kind, and they have received notice to quit, and been generously compensated in advance, I think! Who in these days would dare to enter the holy state of wedlock unless they were pronounced physically, morally, and mentally fit – to procreate their kind – not only by their own conscience, but by the common consent of all who know them? And that beauty, health, and strength are a part of that fitness, and old age a bar to it, who would dare deny?

I'm no Adonis myself. I've got a long upper lip and an Irish kink in my nose, inherited perhaps from some maternally ancestral Blake of Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose – which should have been mine – is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.

Anyhow, I have known my place. I have not perpetuated that kink, and with it, possibly, the base and cowardly instincts of which it was meant to be the outward and visible sign – though it isn't in my case – that my fellow-men might give me a wide berth.

Leah's girlish instinct was a right one when she said me nay that afternoon by the Chelsea pier – for how could she see inside me, poor child? How could Beauty guess the Beast was a Prince in disguise? It was no fairy-tale!

Things have got mixed up; but they're all coming right, and all through Barty Josselin.

And what vulgar pride and narrownesses and meannesses and vanities and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now impossible! – and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter, with never a cynical spark or a hint of bitterness.

How he has held his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line in his own defence!

How quickly their laugh recoiled on those early laughers! and how Barty alone laughed well because he laughed the last, and taught the laughers to laugh on his side! People thought he was always laughing. It was not so.

Part Ninth

"Cara deûm soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum."

– Virgil.

The immense fame and success that Barty Josselin achieved were to him a source of constant disquiet. He could take neither pride nor pleasure in what seemed to him not his; he thought himself a fraud.

Yet only the mere skeleton of his work was built up for him by his demon; all the beauty of form and color, all the grace of movement and outer garb, are absolutely his own.

It has been noticed how few eminent men of letters were intimate with the Josselins, though the best among them – except, of course, Thomas Carlyle – have been so enthusiastic and outspoken in their love and admiration of his work.

He was never at his ease in their society, and felt himself a kind of charlatan.

The fact is, the general talk of such men was often apt to be over his head, as it would have been over mine, and often made him painfully diffident and shy. He needn't have been; he little knew the kind of feeling he inspired among the highest and best.

Why, one day at the Marathonæum, the first and foremost of them all, the champion smiter of the Philistines, the apostle of culture and sweetness and light, told me that, putting Barty's books out of the question, he always got more profit and pleasure out of Barty's society than that of any man he knew.

"It does me good to be in the same room with him; the freshness of the man, his voice, his aspect, his splendid vitality and mother‐wit, his boyish spirit, and the towering genius behind it all. I only wish to goodness I was an intimate friend of his as you are; it would be a liberal education to me!"

But Barty's reverence and admiration for true scholarship and great literary culture in others amounted to absolute awe, and filled him with self‐distrust.

There is no doubt that until he was universally accepted, the crudeness of his literary method was duly criticised with great severity by those professional literary critics who sometimes carp with such a big mouth at their betters, and occasionally kill the Keatses of this world!

In writing, as in everything else, he was an amateur, and more or less remained one for life; but the greatest of his time accepted him at once, and laughed and wept, and loved him for his obvious faults as well as for his qualities. Tous les genres sont bons, hormis le genre ennuyeux! And Barty was so delightfully the reverse of a bore!

Dear me! what matters it how faultlessly we paint or write or sing if no one will care to look or read or listen? He is all fault that hath no fault at all, and we poor outsiders all but yawn in his face for his pains.

They should only paint and write and sing for each other, these impeccables, who so despise success and revile the successful. How do they live, I wonder? Do they take in each other's washing, or review each other's books?

It edifies one to see what a lot of trouble these deriders of other people's popularity will often take to advertise themselves, and how they yearn for that popular acclaim they so scornfully denounce.

Barty was not a well‐read man by any means; his scholarship was that of an idle French boy who leaves school at seventeen, after having been plucked for a cheap French degree, and goes straightway into her Majesty's Household Brigade.

At the beginning of his literary career it would cut him to the quick to find himself alluded to as that inspired Anglo‐Gallic buffoon, the ex‐Guardsman, whose real vocation, when he wasn't twaddling about the music of the spheres, or writing moral French books, was to be Mr. Toole's understudy.

He was even impressed by the smartness of those second‐rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy – as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; those unpleasant little anthropoids with the sexless little muse and the dirty little Eros, who would ride their angry, jealous little tilt at him in the vain hope of provoking some retort which would have lifted them up to glory! Where are they now? He has improved them all away! Who ever hears of decadents nowadays?

Then there were the grubs of Grub Street, who sometimes manage to squirt a drop from their slime‐bags on to the swiftly passing boot that scorns to squash them. He had no notion of what manner of creatures they really were, these gentles! He did not meet them at any club he belonged to – it was not likely. Clubs have a way of blackballing grubs – especially grubs that are out of the common grubby; nor did he sit down to dinner with them at any dinner‐table, or come across them at any house he was by way of frequenting; but he imagined they were quite important persons because they did not sign their articles! and he quite mistook their place in the economy of creation. C'était un naïf, le beau Josselin!

Big fleas have little fleas, and they've got to put up with them! There is no "poudre insecticide" for literary vermin – and more's the pity! (Good heavens! what would the generous and delicate‐minded Barty say, if he were alive, at my delivering myself in this unworthy fashion about these long‐forgotten assailants of his, and at my age too – he who never penned a line in retaliation! He would say I was the most unseemly grub of them all, and he would be quite right; so I am just now, and ought to know better – but it amuses me.)

Then there were the melodious bardlets who imitate those who imitate those who imitate the forgotten minor poets of the olden time and log‐roll each other in quaint old English. They did not log‐roll Barty, whom they thought coarse and vulgar, and wrote to that effect in very plain English that was not old, but quite up to date.

"How splendidly they write verse!" he would say, and actually once or twice he would pick up one or two of their cheap little archaic mannerisms and proudly use them as his own, and be quite angry to find that Leah had carefully expunged them in her copy.

"A fair and gracious garden indeed!" says Leah. "I won't have you use such ridiculous words, Barty – you mean a pretty garden, and you shall say so; or even a beautiful garden if you like! – and no more 'manifolds,' and 'there‐anents,' and 'in veriest sooths,' and 'waters wan,' and 'wan waters,' and all that. I won't stand it; they don't suit your style at all!"

She and Scatcherd and I between us soon laughed him out of these innocent little literary vagaries, and he remained content with the homely words he had inherited from his barbarian ancestors in England (they speak good English, our barbarians), and the simple phrasing he had learnt from M. Durosier's classe de littérature at the Institution Brossard.

One language helps another; even the smattering of a dead language is better than no extra language at all, and that's why, at such cost of time and labor and paternal cash, we learn to smatter Greek and Latin, I suppose. "Arma virumque cano" – "Tityre tu patulæ?" – "Mæcenas atavis" – "[Greek: Mênin aeide]" – and there you are! It sticks in the memory, and it's as simple as "How d'ye do?"

Anyhow, it is pretty generally admitted, both here and in France, that for grace and ease and elegance and absolute clearness combined, Barty Josselin's literary style has never been surpassed and very seldom equalled; and whatever his other faults, when he was at his ease he had the same graceful gift in his talk, both French and English.

It might be worth while my translating here the record of an impression made by Barty and his surroundings on a very accomplished Frenchman, M. Paroly, of the Débats, who paid him a visit in the summer of 1869, at Campden Hill.

I may mention that Barty hated to be interviewed and questioned about his literary work – he declared he was afraid of being found out.

But if once the interviewer managed to evade the lynx‐eyed Leah, who had a horror of him, and get inside the studio, and make good his footing there, and were a decently pleasant fellow to boot, Barty would soon get over his aversion – utterly forget he was being interviewed – and talk as to an old friend; especially if the reviewer were a Frenchman or an American.

The interviewer is an insidious and wily person, and often presents himself to the soft‐hearted celebrity in such humble and pathetic guise that one really hasn't the courage to snub him. He has come such a long way for such a little thing! it is such a lowly function he plies at the foot of that tall tree whose top you reached at a single bound! And he is supposed to be a "gentleman," and has no other means of keeping body and soul together! Then he is so prostrate in admiration before your Immensity…

So you give way, and out comes the little note‐book, and out comes the little cross‐examination.

As a rule, you are none the worse and the world is none the better; we know all about you already – all, at least, that we want to know; we have heard it all before, over and over again. But a poor fellow‐creature has earned his crust, and goes home the happier for having talked to you about yourself and been treated like a man and a brother.

But sometimes the reviewer is very terrible indeed in his jaunty vulgarization of your distinguished personality, and you have to wince and redden, and rue the day you let him inside your house, and live down those light familiar paragraphs in which he describes you and the way you dress and how you look and what jolly things you say; and on what free and easy terms he is with you, of all people in the world!

But the most terrible of all is the pleasant gentleman from America, who has yearned to know you for so many years, and comes perhaps with a letter of introduction – or even without! – not to interview you or write about you (good heavens! he hates and scorns that modern pest, the interviewer), but to sit at your feet and worship at your shrine, and tell you of all the good you have done him and his, all the happiness you have given them all – "the debt of a lifetime!"

And you let yourself go before him, and so do your family, and so do your old friends; is he not also a friend, though not an old one? You part with him almost in sorrow, he's so nice! And in three weeks some kind person sends you from the other side such a printed account of you and yours – so abominably true, so abominably false – that the remembrance of it makes you wake up in the dead of night, and most unjustly loathe an entire continent for breeding and harboring such a shameless type of press reptile!

I feel hard‐hearted towards the interviewer, I own. I wish him, and those who employ him, a better trade; and a better taste to whoever reads what he writes. But Barty could be hard‐hearted to nobody, and always regretted having granted the interview when he saw the published outcome of it.

Fortunately, M. Paroly was decently discreet.

"I've got a Frenchman coming this afternoon – a tremendous swell," said Barty, at lunch.

Leah. "Who is he?"

Barty. "M. Paroly, of the Débats."

Leah. "What is he when he's at home?"

Barty. "A famous journalist; as you'd know if you'd read the French newspapers sometimes, which you never do."

Leah. "Haven't got the time. He's coming to interview you, I suppose, and make French newspaper copy out of you."

Barty. "Why shouldn't he come just for the pleasure of making my acquaintance?"

Leah. "And mine – I'll be there and talk to him, too!"

Barty. "My dear, he probably doesn't speak a word of English; and your French, you know! You never would learn French properly, although you've had me to practise on for so many years – not to mention Bob and Ida."

Leah. "How unkind of you, Barty! When have I had time to trouble about French? Besides, you always laugh at my French accent and mimic it – and that's not encouraging!"

Barty. "My dear, I adore your French accent; it's so unaffected! I only wish I heard it a little oftener."

Leah. "You shall hear it this afternoon. At what o'clock is he coming, your Monsieur Paroly?"

Barty. "At four‐thirty."

Leah. "Oh, Barty, don't give yourself away – don't talk to him about your writings, or about yourself, or about your family. He'll vulgarize you all over France. Surely you've not forgotten that nice 'gentleman' from America who came to see you, and who told you that he was no interviewer, not he! but came merely as a friend and admirer – a distant but constant worshipper for many years! and how you talked to him like a long‐lost brother, in consequence! 'There's nobody in the world like the best Americans,' you said. You adored them all, and wanted to be an American yourself – till a month after, when he published every word you said, and more, and what sort of cravat you had on, and how silent and cold and uncommunicative your good, motherly English wife was – you, the brilliant and talkative Barty Josselin, who should have mated with a countrywoman of his own! and how your bosom friend was a huge, overgrown everyday Briton with a broken nose! I saw what he was at, from the low cunning in his face as he listened; and felt that every single unguarded word you dropped was a dollar in his pocket! How we've all had to live down that dreadfully facetious and grotesque and familiar article he printed about us all in those twenty American newspapers that have got the largest circulation in the world! and how you stamped and raved, Barty, and swore that never another American 'gentleman' should enter your house! What names you called him: 'cad!' 'sweep!' 'low‐bred, little Yankee penny‐a‐liner!' Don't you remember? Why, he described you as a quite nice‐looking man somewhat over the middle height!"