"You have heard of Mr. Thorne ley being found dead, sir?" Yes-my clerk has just told me. What did he die of?" "He was poisoned, Mr. Kavanagh." I felt the man's eyes were fixed on me as if he could read in my soul and see the fearful dread therein. I could have hurled him from the window. "Who is suspected?" I asked as calmly as my parched tougue would let me speak. The man did not answer my question. "You were with him last evening, sir, were you nɔt?" "Good heavens!" I exclaimed, completely thrown off my guard; "they surely don't suspect me!" "Not that I'm aware of, sir; but your evidence is necessary, since you were one of the last persons who saw him alive." "But not the last," I said, still blind to the fact pointed at. "Mr. Atherton, his nephew, was with him after I left. I met him going there at the corner of Vere street." There was a peculiar look on the man's countenance-of compassion for me, I had almost said. "Mr. Kavanagh, sir, I had rather have cut off my right hand than that you should have told me that, for you've both been kind gentlemen to me and mine. Mr. Atherton is arrested on suspicion of having administered the poison to his uncle. When you remember where you met him, you can guess what your evidence will be against him. HereMr. Hardy! Help!" I remember nothing more, for I had fallen back insensible. TO BE CONTINUED. [ORIGINAL.] PEACE. "Not as the world giveth give I unto you."-ST. JOHN 14th. BREAK not its sleep, the faithful grief, still tender; Stir not the air with one sweet, lingering cadence From life's fair prime of love and hope and song; Serener airs, from martyr hosts celestial, To that high trance of conquered peace belong. Hush mortal joy or wail, hush mortal pæans; Ye cannot reach that Thabor height sublime Where God's eternal joy, in tranquil vision, Seems nearer than the sights and sounds of time. [ORIGINAL.] TWO PICTURES OF LIFE IN FRANCE BEFORE 1848. I. THE HOME OF THE GUERINS. THOSE who are familiar with the journal of Eugénie de Guérin, know that in Languedoc, near the towns or villages of Andillac and Gaillac, and not far from Toulouse, there is an ancient estate called Le Cayla; but they know little more than this of the place where Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin passed their youth in the quaint and beautiful simplicity that stamped their genius with so marked an individuality. The peasantry of that region are wedded to old habits and traditions, and the ancient families are imbedded like rocks in the land, says Lamartine, (from whose "Entretiens" many of these local details are taken), and are nobles by common consent, because the château is merely the largest ruin in the village, and every one goes there as to a home to get whatever he needs in the way of advice, agricultural tools, medicine or food. Let us in imagination visit the Château of Le Cayla, as it was in the year 1837, for we must make our first acquaintance with it when it is graced by the exquisite presence of those two, whose names are fast becoming household words on both sides of the Atlantic-Maurice and Eugénie de Guérin. It is not like one's dream of an ancient castel, this spreading, rectangular house, built of brick and stone after a fashion of Henry the Fourth's time, and perched on the summit of a sharp declivity. There is little to distinguish it from the great farms of the country round, but a half-ruined portico, projecting over the flight of stone steps, a pointed turret, and the grooves of a drawbridge, over which the ruthless hand of 1793 has effaced the ancient arms of the Guérins. The great flagstones of the court-yard were loosened and uprooted long ago by the drainage from the stables, and in the angles of the wall grow holly and elder bushes, not too aristocratic to take root in such a soil. These gates stand open always, admitting wayfarers who may wish for a cup of water from the bucket hanging behind the door, or for a plate of soup to eat, sitting in the sunshine on the broad steps that lead down into the court-yard from the kitchen, an important department in this venerable homestead. Within doors blazes a goodly fire on the hearth, a whole tree, standing on end, sending its smoke up a great chimney through which daylight is visible, and ready to give a comfortable greeting to Jean, or Gilles, or Romignières, when they come to talk of corn or sheep with the master, they sitting on the stone settles, built into the wall, he on one of those walnut arm-chairs standing between the kitchen table and the fireplace. See the great copper boilers standing round the wall, and those immense soup-tureens, ornamented with coarse painting, and the big dishes for the fish that they catch in the mill-pond once in three years. There we have looked looked long enough; pass through this long smokedried corridor to the dining-room, where masters and servants take their meals together, excepting on state occasions, the menials standing or sitting at the lower end of the unbleached cloth. Now down this little flight of steps to the salon, which is all white, with a large sofa, some straw chairs, and a table with books upon it. Yes-here we pause-here are the objects of our search. In a faded tapestry arm-chair sits Maurice reading and Eugénie is near him. He looks but shadowy still, having just recovered from a fever, but the outline of his face is beautiful as he bends slightly over the book, the refined mouth, the expressive, drooping eyelids, the noble brow declaring him the worthy descendant of a long line of knights and gentlemen. One of these ancestors, Guérin de Montaigu, Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, looks down upon us from the wall as we stand behind Maurice's chair, glancing, by the way, over his shoulder at the page he is reading, one of Barbey d'Aurevilly's brilliant articles. And now he reads aloud a striking passage, and Eugénie lifts her eyes and lets the work drop on her lap. What earnest, dovelike, eyes they are! See how softly the hair parts on her forehead, passing over the pretty ear and falling in little curls at the back of her neck. The dress looks old-fashioned to us now, with its half-high, baby waist, and belt, and tucker, and her hair is dressed too high to be becoming; but there is the air of a refined lady in everything about her, and her face is like the face of a sweet, good little child. The reading has stopped and their talk turns upon private matters, something about Caroline, and hopes and fears for the future. We will leave them to their conversation, and pass out through yonder door, pausing for an instant to admire that picture of the Madonna and child, presented to the family by the queen, and to look through the glass doors and arched window at the terrace, all green and blossoming with roses and acacias. Here we are in M. de Guérin's room, with its table and chairs loaded with books and with dust! That priè-Dieu was embroidered by Mme. de Guérin, whose pensive face looks out from the pictures, hanging between the fireplace and the bed, There is the cross presented by Christine Rognier, and the holy water vase, and the picture of Calvary be fore which Eugénie used to kneel and pour out her childish woes. One day she prayed that some spots might disappear from her frock, and they disappeared-and again she begged that her doll might have a soul, but that never came to pass. No doubt it was in this great state bed that Madame de Guérin died at midnight on the second of April, 1819. Eugénie had fallen asleep at her mother's feet, and as the spirit passed away from the long suffering body, M. de Guérin waked the little girl. My God! I hear the priest, I see the lighted candles and a pale face bathed in tears," she wrote sixteen years afterwards. Poor little soul! she awoke to the double responsibility of child and parent, for the little eight-year-old Maurice was her mother's legacy to her. 66 Now a dark spiral staircase in the turret leads to the large hall on the first story, and then winds on with several landing-places to the upper part of the house where the servants sleep. This hall is the grand receptionroom for guests of distinction, and has more an air of grandeur than the rest of the château. This ornamented ceiling and deep wainscoting of carved wood, these paintings set in the panels, and that huge chimmeypiece supported on stone caryatides, call up to our fancy the days when stately dames and gentle courtiers visited Le Cayla for the hunting season. But there is a golden renown in store for this shattered, time-worn house, more precious than that shed upon it by any Guérin of the seventeenth century. Suites of small rooms lead from the hall-here is the room that Eugénie shares with her younger sister Marie. and near by is the chambrette where Maurice sleeps when he is at home. In his absence it is her nest where she reads, writes, prays, or leans on the window-sill to listen to the brook rippling below the terrace, to doves, and nightingales and all the lovely out-door sounds; or to look over the corn-fields, groves, chestnut trees, and vineyards in the valley, far away to the mountains where her friend, Louise de Bayne, lives in a white château with a linden tree walk, in a country of ravines and waterfalls; but we have indulged long enough in this summer dream of Le Cayla, and must turn to a picture full of sober tints and shadows. LA CHENAIE. the banishment of tyranny and suffering from the earth. At the time Maurice de Guérin * joined the little circle at La Chênaie, Lamennais had reached the turning point in his career. After preaching in his journal, with the assurance of a prophet, the public union of Catholicity and democracy, he had suffered the mortification of finding himself obliged to suspend the publication of L'Avenir. A visit to Rome, where he was treated with the greatest personal consideration, convinced him that there was no prospect of support from the Holy See, and he returned home oppressed with disappointment, and though ap In Brittany, within a few hours, drive from Rennes, was the old family place of the Lamennais, where about the year 1830 Hugues Filicité de La-parently submissive to the decision of mennais drew around him several of the most promising intellects of France, with the view of establishing a new religious order, that should meet all the demands of that most grasping of centuries, the nineteenth. Montalembert, Gerbert, Sainte-Beuve, Lacordaire, Rohrbacher, Combalot, and many others of more or less distinction, were inmates or frequent visitors in the old white house with its peaked French roof, surrounded on every side by thick woods that were full of beauty and song in summer, but in winter pressed about it in dusky-brown monotony, while overhead hung the grey, heavy Breton sky. Here Lamennais passed through many of the struggles of his giant nature, slow in its action, but never pausing until it had reached the extreme result of any course of thought or feeling. Here, at fifteen years of age, he took refuge with his brother, Jean de Lamennais, to think out the perplexities that clouded his faith so persistently as to prevent him from receiving his first communion until he was twenty-two years old; and hither he came to labor over the task he had proposed to himself, of procuring *The precise period at which La Chênale became the resort of these celebrated men we have been unable to ascertain. The Lamennals were a commercial family in Bordeaux, ennobled during the reign of Louis XVI. L'Abbé de Lamennais, the second son, refusing to beecme a merchant, retired to La Chênaie, and prepared himself for the priesthood. his superiors, already resolving in his mind, perhaps unconsciously, plans to crush the power that had crushed him. Those around him feared that he would die of grief. One day he said to a favorite pupil, Elie de Kertauguy, when they were sitting together under one of the Scotch pines behind the chapel, in the great spreading garden : "There is the place where I wish to rest," marking out on the grass the form of a grave with his stick: “But no tombstone over me-only a mound of earth. Oh! I shall be well off there." "If," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "he had died then, or in the following months, if his heart had snapped in its hidden struggle, what a fair, unblemished memory he would have left, what fame as a faithful believer (fidèle) a hero-almost a martyr! What a mysterious subject of meditation and revery to those who love to contemplate great destinies thwarted!" And yet even then Lamennais' sufferings must have proceeded more from wounded pride than from disappointed philanthropy, for one can hardly imagine a sterner course of tyranny than that of forcing dogmatically upon Catholic nations a theory of political freedom that would have thrown half the civilized world into a state of revolution. A striking point in M. SainteBeuve's masterly analysis of the character of his former friend is the strange contrast offered by the double nature of Lamennais, who always leaned completely to one side or the other, without any gradation, sometimes being possessed by what Buffon calls, in speaking of beasts of prey, "a soul of wrath;" and again filled with a sweetness and tenderness that drew little children to him, a truly fascinating mood; and from one humor to the other he would pass in an instant. To La Chênaie and to the influence of this wonderful being, this compound of pathetic gentleness and combative obstinacy, of magnetism and repulsion, Guérin came one afternoon early in the December of 1832. M. Féli, as Lamennais was called in his household, where ceremony was laid aside, and the most charming relations exist ed between old and young, received him very cordially in his little private: parlor, which was furnished with one chair and a chest of drawers. The master had a way of letting the person he was conversing with say everything that he had to say upon a subject without interruption (an uncomfortable method, by the way, of convincing one of the paucity of one's ideas), and then he would take up the matter himself, and speak "gravely, profoundly," luminously." But on this occasion he gave himself up freely to a chat upon all sorts of subjects calculated to draw out the general intelligence of his new, pupil-the weather in Languedoc, Maurice's travelling companions, his age, the high tides at Saint Malo, Calderon, oyster fishing, Catholic poetry, Victor Hugo, the most remarkable fishes on the coast of Brittany-all the while hurrying to and fro in the little room, presenting a singular appearance with his small, slender figure, clad in grey from head to foot, his oblong head, pale complexion, grey eyes, long nose, and brow furrowed with wrinkles. The life at La Chênaie suited Guérin's taste admirably, excepting perhaps the practice of rising at five o'clock, against which every wellregulated mind must rebel. One of his great enjoyments was the daily mass in the quiet little chapel below the terrace in the garden. "At breakfast," he wrote to Eugénie, "we have butter, and bread which we toast to make it more appetizing (toast was rather a luxury in those days on the continent), butter plays an important part in the meals. Dinner très confortable, with coffee and liqueurs when we have company, is seasoned with a rolling fire of wit, generally coming from M. Féli-whose mots charming-vivid, piercing, sparkling, and innumerable. His genius escapes in this way when he is not at work, and from sublime he becomes fascinating." arc In studies, Maurice was thrown into modern languages, Catholic philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Each pupil had a room to himself, but they all studied in a common room sitting round a good fire. Their recreations consisted in skating on a pond close by the house, or taking walks in the woods, staff in hand, M. Féli marching on ahead wearing a battered old straw hat such as great men love to shelter their illus trious heads with. They had supper at eight o'clock and then adjourned to the pleasant, quaint old parlor, where chess and backgammon greeted the master's longing eyes, smoothing his brow and putting him in genial mood. Then he would throw himself on the immense sofa that stood under his grandmother's portrait, and become absorbed into the threadbare crimson velvet, except the little head ever rolling restlessly from side to side with eyes gleaming like fire-flies. "And then he would talk, Ye gods! how he would talk !"— What treasures of wit, humor, anecdote, analysis, and broad generalization poured from that horn of plenty, |