vaut. It was about two years after his marriage with Sabine that Bernard resumed the journal with which we began. In the pages which he now adds he seems at first unchanged. How then as to that story of M. de Rancé, the reformer of La Trappe, finding the head of his dead mistress; an incident which the reader of Morte' will surely have taken as a "presentiment"? Aliette had so taken

La

it. "A head so charming as yours," Bernard had assured her tenderly, "does not need to be dead that it may work miracles!"-How, in the few pages that remain, will M. Feuillet justify that, and certain other delicate touches of presentiment, and at the same time justify the title of his book?

The journal is recommenced in February. On the twentieth of April Bernard writes, at Valmoutiers:

"Under pretext of certain urgently needed repairs I am come to pass a week at Valmoutiers, and get a little pure air. By my orders they have kept Aliette's room under lock and key since the day when she left it in her coffin. To-day I re-entered it for the first time. There was a vague odour of her favourite perfumes. My poor Aliette! why was I unable, as you so ardently desired, to share your gentle creed, and associate myself to the life of your dreams, the life of honesty and peace? Compared with that which is mine to-day, it seems to me like paradise. What a terrible scene it was, here in this room! What a memory! I can still see the last look she fixed on me, a look almost of terror and how quickly she died! I have taken the room for my own. But I shall not remain here long. I intend to go for a few days to Varaville. I want to see my little girl: her dear angel's face.

"VALMOUTIERS, April 22.-What a change there has been in the world since my childhood since my youth even! what a surprising change in so short a period, in the moral atmosphere we are breathing! Then we were, as it were, impregnated with the thought of God-a just God, but benevolent and fatherlike. We really lived under His eyes, as under the eyes of a parent, with respect and fear, but with confidence. We felt sustained by His invisible but undoubted presence. We spoke to Him, and it seemed that He answered. And now we feel ourselves alone-as it were abandoned in the immensity of the universe. We live in a world, hard, savage, full of hatred; whose one cruel law is the struggle for exist

ence, and in which we are no more than those natural elements, let loose to war with each other in fierce selfishness, without pity, with no appeal beyond, no hope of final justice. And above us, in place of the good God of our happy youth, nothing, any more! or worse than nothing-a deity, barbarous and ironical, who cares nothing at all about us."

The aged mother of Aliette, hitherto the guardian of his daughter, is lately dead. Bernard proposes to take the child away with him to Paris. The child's old nurse objects. On April the twenty-seventh, Bernard writes:

"For a moment-for a few moments-in that room where I have been shutting myself up with the shadow of my poor dead one, a horrible thought had come to me. I had driven it away as an insane fancy. But now, -yes! it is becoming a reality. Shall I write this? Yes! I will write it. It is my duty to do so; for from this moment the journal, begun in so much gaiety of heart, is but my last will and testament. If I should disappear from the world, the secret must not die with It must be bequeathed to the natural protectors of my child. Her interests, if not her life, are concerned therein.

me.

"Here, then, is what passed: I had not arrived in time to render my last duty to Madame de Courteheuse. The family was already dispersed. I found here only Aliette's brother. To him I communicated my plan concerning the child, and he could but approve. My intention was to bring away with Jeanne her nurse Victoire, who had brought her up, as she brought up her mother. she is old, and in feeble health, and I feared some difficulties on her part; the more as her attitude towards myself since the death of my first wife has been marked by an ill grace approaching to hostility. I took her aside while Jeanne was playing in the garden.

666

But

'My good Victoire,' I said, 'while Madame de Courteheuse was living, I considered it a duty to leave her granddaughter in her keeping. Besides, no one was better fitted to watch over her education. At present my duty is to watch over it myself. I propose therefore to take Jeanne with me to Paris; and I hope that you may be willing to accompany her, and remain in her service.' When she understood my intention, the old woman, in whose hands I had noticed a faint trembling, became suddenly very pale. She fixed her firm, grey eyes upon me: 'Monsieur le Comte will not do that!

"Pardon me, my good Victoire, that, I shall do. I appreciate your good qualities of fidelity and devotion. I shall be very grateful if you will continue to take care of my daughter, as you have done so excellently. But for the rest, I intend to be the only master in my own

"Yes! by the same hand!'

"The sweat came on my forehead. I felt as it were a breathing of death upon me. But still I thrust away from me that terrible light on things.

You are Your

"Victoire!' I said, 'take care! no fool you are something worse. hatred of the woman who has taken the place of my first wife-your blind hatred-has suggested to you odious, nay! criminal words.' "Ah! Ah! Monsieur!' she cried with wild energy. 'After what I have just told you, take your daughter to live with that woman if you dare.'

"I walked up and down the room awhile to collect my senses. Then, returning to the old

woman,

Yet how can I believe you?' I asked, 'If you had had the shadow of a proof of what you give me to understand, how could you have kept silence so long? How could you have allowed me to contract that hateful marriage?'

"She seemed more confident, and her voice grew gentler. 'Monsieur, it is because Madame, before she went to God, made me take oath on the crucifix to keep that secret for ever.'

hers.

"Yet not with me, in fact,-not with me!' And I, in turn, questioned her; my eyes upon She hesitated: then stammered out, True! not with you! because she believed, poor little soul! that

"What did she believe? That I knew it? That I was an accomplice? Tell me ! Her eyes fell, and she made no answer. 'Is it possible, my God, is it possible? But come, sit by me here, and tell me all you know, all you saw. At what time was it you noticed anything-the precise moment?' For in truth she had been suffering for a long time past."

Victoire tells the miserable story of Sabine's crime-we must pardon what we think a not quite worthy addition to the imaginary world M. Feuillet has called up round about him, for the sake of fully knowing Bernard and Aliette. The old nurse had surprised her in the very act,

and did not credit her explanation. "When I surprised her," she goes

on :

"It may already have been too late-be sure it was not the first time she had been guilty-my first thought was to give you information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly. "You know very well," she said, "that my husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at his hands a hundred times over!" And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the little boudoir, She cast and brought her a glass of valerian. A few on me a terrible look and drank. minutes afterwards she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but what is absolutely true.' She paused. I could not answer her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to my forehead, and wept like a child.

66

May 10.-She died believing me guilty! I know not The thought is terrible to me. what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet. 'Yes!' she said to herself, 'my husband is a murderer; what he is giving me is poison, and he knows it.' She died with that thought in her mind-her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me that I am the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity

on me!

"Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between her and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I find it impossible! impossible!

"June.-That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never be undeceived.

"All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet in truth all is mystery,-miracle, around us, about us, within ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new birth from the womb of death-is it a mystery less comprehensible than his birth from the womb of his mother?

"Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health, for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the emotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, the exact nature of which

I.

wan

In the earliest years of the present century, when Norwich was in its ascendant and giving its intellectual supper parties; when the learned Dr. Sayers was sitting for his likeness to Opie ; when Mrs. Barbauld had retired from Palgrave to the suburbs of London; when Elizabeth Gurney and her beautiful sisters, no longer galloping about the country in their riding habits and red boots, were beginning their married lives; when little Harriet Martineau as a child was dering round Castle Hill and trembling in terror at the depths below, at the sound of the sticks falling with dull thuds upon the feather-beds which the careful housewives of Norwich were beating in their doorways-in these pre-eventful times there lived in a house, not very far from Castle Hill, a friend of Mrs. Barbauld's, a quiet lady, Mrs. John Taylor by name, whose home was the resort of many of the most cultivated men of the day, and whose delightful companionship was justly prized and valued by them. People used to say it was well worth a journey to Norwich to spend an evening with Mrs. John Taylor. She was Mackintosh's friend; she was Mrs. Barbauld's dearest friend; in after days John Austin was her son-in-law; John Mill and Charles Austin were her intimates. Her life was spent in the simplest fashion. She stayed at home, she darned with wool, she read philosophy and poetry, she spoke her mind and she thought for herself, while she stitched, and marketed, and tended her children.

She was a type of a high-bred simple race of women, perhaps more common in those days than now. some people seven children and limited

To

means might seem a serious obstacle to high mental culture, but Mrs. Taylor and her friends were of a different way of thinking; they were not ashamed of being poor, of attending to the details of life; they were only ashamed of being shabby in spirit, of mean aspirations, of threadbare slovenly interests. The seven children, reared in a wholesome and temperate, yet liberal-minded atmosphere, went their ways in after life, well prepared for the world, fully portioned with those realities and impressions which are beyond silver and gold. The two daughters, Susan and Sarah, both married. Sarah was Mrs. Austin, the translator of Ranke, of the Story Without an End, which children have not yet ceased to read, the mother of Lady Duff Gordon, whose name is also well remembered. Susan, the elder daughter, became the wife of Dr. Reeve, and the mother of Mr. Henry Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review. It is by

the kindness of this old friend that the writer has been allowed to read many of the letters from Mrs. Taylor to her early friend, to her daughters, to Dr. Reeve, her son-in-law-the faded writing flows in a still living stream of interest, solicitude, affection, anxiety, and exhortation, flowing on in even lines, and showing so much of that mingled force, of imagination and precision, which goes to make up the literary faculty.

The letters run back to the days before Mrs. Taylor's marriage, and give a vivid picture of a young lady's impressions of life a century ago; for it is more than a hundred years since Miss Susanna Cook sat down to describe what she calls a "jaunt to London," and to recapitulate all the crowding interests and delights of 1776 for the benefit of a friend, Miss Judith Dixon,

somewhat her junior in years and experience, and living tranquilly far removed from the metropolis in St. Andrew's Broad Street in Norwich.

Miss Susanna dips her pen and traces her pretty lines, and the yellow pages seem tinted still by the illumination of these these bygone youthful shining mornings and evenings, brilliant anticipations and realisations, to say nothing of the dazzling lamps of Vauxhall which Miss Cook does not fail to visit. The parcel of happy people (so she describes her party) consists of the young lady herself, of a "lively young divine" and his wife, and three sisters: nor can Miss Susanna find too much praise for the most amiable girls she ever met; for the evenings fine beyond expression; for Vauxhall itself, which she had always admired, but which appears to her more enchanting than ever. Let us hope that the young ladies, the great-great-granddaughters of Miss Cook and her companions, still write in the same spirit and find balmy sights at the Colonial Exhibition and elsewhere, as well as lively young divines to escort them. But this is perhaps hoping too much, for I am told the race no longer exists. Nothing, however, not even a jaunt to London, is absolutely perfect, either in this age, or in the last. "Pity me!" writes the young lady, "Garrick played Hamlet at Drury Lane last night, and we might as well have attempted to move St. Paul's as to get in. The crowd was inconceivable." Our youthful company are only consoled at the opera by the voice of the "Siren Leoni." Susanna steadily follows up the records of her sight-seeing: she visits Wedgwood's classic potteries, which were then the fashion, she describes the models brought over by Sir William Hamilton. Her friends also take her to the Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Paintings, where the young ladies, we are told, "divert the gentlemen by delivering opinions with all the arrogance of connoisseurs."

Some of us may know Ramberg's

delightful print of an exhibition some ten years later, in 1787, of which a fine copy is in the studio of our own President of 1886. As one looks at the picture, the century rolls off, the sleeping palace awakens, the ladies in their nodding plumes, the courtly gentlemen, with their well-dressed legs and swords, exchange greetings. We seem at home in the unpretending rooms with the familiar pictures on the walls (the dear little strawberry-girl is hanging there among the rest); the originals of those charming figures we all know so well, are depicted gazing up at their own portraits. Rules and regulations must have been less strictly measured out then than they are now, for although umbrellas did not then play that important part which belongs to them at present, sticks and swords without number seem to have been boldly introduced into the gallery, to say nothing of a little dog frisking merrily in the foreground.

The experience of each generation varies in turn, with its dress and peculiarities; ours is (as yet) exempt from certain trials which are feelingly alluded to by Miss Cook in her correspondence, and of which Madame D'Arblay, Mrs. Barbauld, and others also bitterly complain. The elegant ladies of Sir Joshua's powdering times certainly had their own trials.

We

find the young traveller warmly congratulating her friend Judith upon a marvellous escape; where other headdresses succumbed, Judith's feather had remained steady in its place. Susanna has seen many distresses occasioned by these fashionable embellishments; among the sufferers she mentions two ladies unfortunately sitting next each other at a concert, "whose heads met and becoming immediately entangled, the attempts they made to extricate themselves only increased the difficulty, until, finally, one of the fabrics was demolished." Another tragic story is that of a belle dancing in a cotillon who seems suddenly to have "lost the whole of a