Graham doubted, and replied coldly, as he bent over the print,—
“I once stayed there a few days, but my recollection of it is not sufficiently lively to enable me to recognize its features in this design.”
“That is the house, at least so they say, of Tasso’s father; of course you visited that?”
“Yes, it was a hotel in my time; I lodged there.”
“And I too. There I first read ‘The Gerusalemine.’” The last words were said in Italian, with a low measured tone, inwardly and dreamily.
A somewhat sharp and incisive voice speaking in French here struck in and prevented Graham’s rejoinder: “Quel joli dessin! What is it, Mademoiselle?”
Graham recoiled; the speaker was Gustave Rameau, who had, unobserved, first watched Isaura, then rejoined her side.
“A view of Sorrento, Monsieur, but it does not do justice to the place. I was pointing out the house which belonged to Tasso’s father.”
“Tasso! Hein! and which is the fair Eleonora’s?”
“Monsieur,” answered Isaura, rather startled at that question, from a professed homme de lettres, “Eleonora did not live at Sorrento.”
“Tant pis pour Sorrente,” said the homme de lettres, carelessly. “No one would care for Tasso if it were not for Eleonora.”
“I should rather have thought,” said Graham, “that no one would have cared for Eleonora if it were not for Tasso.”
Rameau glanced at the Englishman superciliously. “Pardon, Monsieur, in every age a love-story keeps its interest; but who cares nowadays for le clinquant du Tasse?”
“Le clinquant du Tasse!” exclaimed Isaura, indignantly.
“The expression is Boileau’s, Mademoiselle, in ridicule of the ‘Sot de qualite,’ who prefers—
“‘Le clinquant du Tasse a tout l’or de Virgile.’
“But for my part I have as little faith in the last as the first.”
“I do not know Latin, and have therefore not read Virgil,” said Isaura.
“Possibly,” remarked Graham, “Monsieur does not know Italian, and has therefore not read Tasso.”
“If that be meant in sarcasm,” retorted Rameau, “I construe it as a compliment. A Frenchman who is contented to study the masterpieces of modern literature need learn no language and read no authors but his own.”
Isaura laughed her pleasant silvery laugh. “I should admire the frankness of that boast, Monsieur, if in our talk just now you had not spoken as contemptuously of what we are accustomed to consider French masterpieces as you have done of Virgil and Tasso.”
“Ah, Mademoiselle! it is not my fault if you have had teachers of taste so rococo as to bid you find masterpieces in the tiresome stilted tragedies of Corneille and Racine. Poetry of a court, not of a people, one simple novel, one simple stanza that probes the hidden recesses of the human heart, reveals the sores of this wretched social state, denounces the evils of superstition, kingcraft, and priestcraft, is worth a library of the rubbish which pedagogues call ‘the classics.’ We agree, at least, in one thing, Mademoiselle; we both do homage to the genius of your friend Madame de Grantmesnil.”
“Your friend, Signorina!” cried Graham, incredulously; “is Madame de Grantmesnil your friend?”
“The dearest I have in the world.”
Graham’s face darkened; he turned away in silence, and in another minute vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. “Her dearest friend Madame de Grantmesnil!” he muttered.
A word now on Isaura’s chief correspondent. Madame de Grantmesnil was a woman of noble birth and ample fortune. She had separated from her husband in the second year after marriage. She was a singularly eloquent writer, surpassed among contemporaries of her sex in popularity and renown only by Georges Sand.
At least as fearless as that great novelist in the frank exposition of her views, she had commenced her career in letters by a work of astonishing power and pathos, directed against the institution of marriage as regulated in Roman Catholic communities. I do not know that it said more on this delicate subject than the English Milton has said; but then Milton did not write for a Roman Catholic community, nor adopt a style likely to captivate the working classes. Madame de Grantmesnil’s first book was deemed an attack on the religion of the country, and captivated those among the working classes who had already abjured that religion. This work was followed up by others more or less in defiance of “received opinions,”—some with political, some with social revolutionary aim and tendency, but always with a singular purity of style. Search all her books, and however you might revolt from her doctrine, you could not find a hazardous expression. The novels of English young ladies are naughty in comparison. Of late years, whatever might be hard or audacious in her political or social doctrines softened itself into charm amid the golden haze of romance. Her writings had grown more and more purely artistic,—poetizing what is good and beautiful in the realities of life rather than creating a false ideal out of what is vicious and deformed. Such a woman, separated young from her husband, could not enunciate such opinions and lead a life so independent and uncontrolled as Madame de Grantmesnil had done, without scandal, without calumny. Nothing, however, in her actual life had ever been so proved against her as to lower the high position she occupied in right of birth, fortune, renown. Wherever she went she was fetee, as in England foreign princes, and in America foreign authors, are fetes. Those who knew her well concurred in praise of her lofty, generous, lovable qualities. Madame de Grantmesnil had known Mr. Selby; and when, at his death, Isaura, in the innocent age between childhood and youth, had been left the most sorrowful and most lonely creature on the face of the earth, this famous woman, worshipped by the rich for her intellect, adored by the poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan’s friendless side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for the first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim self-consciousness of a soul between sleep and waking.
But, my dear Englishman, put yourself in Graham’s place, and suppose that you were beginning to fall in love with a girl whom for many good reasons you ought not to marry; suppose that in the same hour in which you were angrily conscious of jealousy on account of a man whom it wounds your self-esteem to consider a rival, the girl tells you that her dearest friend is a woman who is famed for her hostility to the institution of marriage!
CHAPTER IV
On the same day in which Graham dined with the Savarins, M. Louvier assembled round his table the elite of the young Parisians who constituted the oligarchy of fashion, to meet whom he had invited his new friend the Marquis de Rochebriant. Most of them belonged to the Legitimist party, the noblesse of the faubourg; those who did not, belonged to no political party at all,—indifferent to the cares of mortal States as the gods of Epicurus. Foremost among this Jeunesse doree were Alain’s kinsmen, Raoul and Enguerrand de Vandemar. To these Louvier introduced him with a burly parental bonhomie, as if he were the head of the family. “I need not bid you, young folks, to make friends with each other. A Vandemar and a Rochebriant are not made friends,—they are born friends.” So saying he turned to his other guests.
Almost in an instant Alain felt his constraint melt away in the cordial warmth with which his cousins greeted him. These young men had a striking family likeness to each other, and yet in feature, colouring, and expression, in all save that strange family likeness, they were contrasts. Raoul was tall, and, though inclined to be slender, with sufficient breadth of shoulder to indicate no inconsiderable strength of frame. His