'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case? Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'
'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame passion grow.'
'And the newly-come one?'
'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his flowers are dead.'
'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'
'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of itself, before it dies.'
'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.'
'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal forms?'
'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insignificance; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can be gouailleur, but we cannot be gay if we would.'
'There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devotion, death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philosophy.'
'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the shades of Brantôme.'
'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this: that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.'
'A cruel sentence, Madame!'
'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'
When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.
'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the smooth turf. 'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'
'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.
She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the network of green leaves:
'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'
'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'
'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past him.'
She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.
'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with contrition and mortification.
'That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.
As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland was a herd of cows and calves already passing away in the distance, going to their byres; far behind them, lingering willingly, were the herdsman and his love; he a comely lad in a blue blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a 'Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.'
'Lubin and Lisette,' said Béthune with a smile, 'practically illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-drawing of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer than we to the story-tellers of the Heptameron.'
The châtelaine of Amyôt looked at the two rustic lovers with a little wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.
They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the rose-glow of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they followed their cows.
'"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted. 'I suppose that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to think that love as a sentiment is the product of education. The cows know almost as much of it as your Lubin and Lisette.'
'Brandès says,' observed one of her party, 'that love as a sentiment was always unknown in a state of nature, and was only created with the first petticoat. Petticoats have invariably been responsible for a great deal. They ruined France, according to the Great Frederic; but if they have raised us from the level of the cattle they have redeemed their repute.'
'Poor cattle! They have as much poetry in their eyes as there is in the Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are Naturkinder; but when both a cow and Lisette become the property of Lubin, he will assign the higher place to the first, both in life and in death.'
'Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so apropos an instant,' she answered with, a little smile. 'Perhaps the only word of truth that has been said in the whole discussion was the quotation: "Il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants!"'
The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke opened into an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the branches meeting and interlacing overhead until the opening at the farther end looked like an arched doorway closing a cathedral aisle. The archway was filled with dim golden suffused light, and within that archway of twilight and golden haze there rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain; it was the first of the grandes eaux of the garden of Amyôt. And the sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the Princess Napraxine.
CHAPTER II.
As they entered on the smoother sward of the stately gardens a figure came out of the deep shadow of clipped walls of bay and approached them.
'Is the Court over? At what decision has it arrived?' said the master of Amyôt as he saluted the party and kissed the hand of his wife with a graceful formality of greeting.
'It will have to sit for half a century if it be compelled to come to any,' returned the châtelaine. 'We have said many pretty things about love, Béthune in especial; but we met Lubin with Lisette loitering behind their cows, and I fear the living commentary was truer to nature than all our doctrines.'
'The only issue of its resolutions is that you are to give away a cow and a maiden to the admirable lover,' said M. de Béthune. 'He crossed our path just in time to point a moral for us: we were all sadly in want of one.'
'Could you not agree then? Surely you chose a very simple subject?'
'It might be simple in the days of Philemon and Baucis. It is sufficiently complicated now. Is the sentiment which sent d'Aubiac to the scaffold, pressing a little blue velvet muff to his lips, the same thing as the unpoetic impulse which makes the femelle de l'homme sought by Tom, Dick, and Harry? You will admit that a vast field of the most various emotions separates the two kinds of passion?'
'Certainly: there is a great difference between Montrose's Farewell and Sir John Suckling's