after such an upset; but rest satisfied, my resolution is taken."

When Madame de Lucan returned home, Pierre de Moras was awaiting her in the drawing-room. He turned pale when he saw her.

"Pierre," exclaimed she, breathlessly, "kiss me; you are my son! Respectfully, if you please, respectfully," added she, laughing, as he lifted her up and pressed her to his heart.

He repeated the performance afterwards with the Baroness de Pers, who had been hastily summoned.

"My dear friend," said she, "I am delighted,—delighted; but you are suffocating me! Yes, yes, it is all very well, my boy; but you are literally suffocating me! Reserve your forces. That dear little girl; it is charming of her, quite charming! At bottom she has a golden heart. And she has good taste; for you are very handsome, very handsome! However, I always did think that, when the time came for cutting her hair, she would reflect. Certainly she has beautiful hair, poor child!"

And the baroness burst into tears; then, addressing the count in a parenthesis between her sobs,

"You will not be unhappy either; she is a goddess."

M. de Lucan, although deeply touched by this family scene, and especially by Clotilde's joy, took this unhoped-for event with more calmness. He was always very sparing of public manifestations, and in his heart he was troubled and sad. The future prospects of this marriage seemed to him most uncertain, and his sincere friendship for the count made him anxious. A feeling of delicate reserve towards Julia had prevented him from saying all that he thought of her character. He endeavored to reject as unjust and partial the opinion he had formed; but when he remembered the dreadful child he used to know, at one moment carried off by a whirlwind, at another pensive and surrounded by sombre reserve; when he imagined her as she had been described to him since then -taller, more beautiful, ascetic-and then saw her suddenly throw her veil to the winds like one of the fantastic nuns in Robert le Diable, and return to the world with light step: then, in spite of himself, out of these various impressions he

composed a chimera and sphinx that it seemed very difficult to combine with the idea of domestic happiness.

During the whole evening the family conversation turned upon the complications that might arise from this marriage, and the means of avoiding them. M. de Lucan entered into these details with a very good grace, and declared that he would be most happy to agree to any arrangements that his stepdaughter might desire. This precaution was not entirely useless.

Clotilde went to the convent early next morning. Julia, after listening with somewhat ironical indifference to her mother's account of the delight and joy of her intended, assumed a more serious air:

"And your husband," said she; "what does he think?" "He is delighted, as we all are."

"I am going to ask you a strange question. Does he mean to be present at our wedding?"

"Just as you please."

"Listen, my dear little mother-don't make yourself miserable beforehand. I feel sure that some day or other this marriage will help to unite us all; but leave me time to accustom myself to this idea. Grant me some months for the old Julia to be forgotten, and to forget her myself. agree to 'hat, will you not?"

"Whatever you wish," said Clotilde, sighing.

You will

"I beg of you. Tell him that I beg of him also."

"I will tell him; but do you know that Pierre is here?"

"Ah, indeed! But where?"

"I have left him in the garden."

Why,

"In the garden ?-what imprudence, mother! these ladies will tear him to pieces like Orpheus; for you may fancy he is not in the odor of sanctity here."

M. de Moras was summoned. Julia began to laugh when he appeared, and this facilitated his entrance. During their interview she had several attacks of that nervous laugh which is so useful to women in difficult circumstances. Not having this resource, M. de Moras contented himself with timidly kissing his cousin's beautiful hands; but his handsome masculine features were radiant with delight, and his large blue

eyes were moist with happy tenderness. It seems that he made a favorable impression.

"I never before regarded him from that point of view," said Julia to her mother. "He is really handsome—a splendid husband!"

The wedding took place three months after. It was quite quiet, without any show. The Count de Moras and his young wife departed for Italy the same evening.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

AMONG the novelists of the Second Empire, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was the real leader. He continued the succession of Balzac, and led to Zola and De Maupassant. Balzac had treated French provincial life with notable realism and bitterness; he had also, in Valérie and Esther, portrayed the vicious female type. Flaubert followed in his footsteps in "Mme. Bovary," which caused a notable sensation on its appearance in 1856. Flaubert was arrested, put on trial, pleaded his own case, and was acquitted. "Mme. Bovary" is a pitiless, pessimistic story of a country girl of beauty, educated beyond her station, who aspires to vulgar ideals of luxury and life. Flaubert emphasizes, with suppressed irony, the suffocating banality of her provincial environment, and in M. Homais, a druggist, supplies a marked type of narrow provincialism. Emma Bovary weds a common squire, but deceives him for several lovers. Abandoned by them, and in terror of her husband whom, by forgery, she has plunged into debt, she at last commits a hideous suicide with arsenic, while he, on learning the truth, dies of a broken heart. Mme. Bovary's portrait is a masterpiece, but she herself typifies vulgarity rather than voluptuousness. The vulgarity of life, indeed, seems to have been Flaubert's constant lament and theme for exposition. "Strange," he once wrote, "that I was born with so little faith in happiness. Even as a boy, I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the smell of a nauseating kitchen escaping through a ventilating hole. One had no need to taste to know that it was sickening." The heroine of his "Salammbô," a tale of ancient Carthage,

is "a monomaniac, a kind of St. Theresa, nailed to a fixed idea."

Flaubert is now known to have been an epileptic, and being a surgeon's son, was brought up amid the nauseating scenes of hospital life. In his despair, he turned to art from the misery of life, as he viewed it; and yet he made minute studies and accumulated huge notes for his romances. After "Mme. Bovary," however, he made no more studies of the evolution of a soul. In his "Salammbo" he evoked a sombre-spirited and yet gorgeously-descriptive fantasy of the revolt of the rude barbarian soldiers against Carthage, and of the heroine's weird self-sacrifice for her native city. In the "Temptation of St. Anthony" in the desert of Thebaid, an allegory, the Egyptian hermit sees in a vision a mad procession of all the deities, religions, heresies, and philosophies of the world. It is a terrible picture of humanity from the cradle, in all its blood and filth, error and woe. In "A Sentimental Education "-pronounced by many admirers to be his real masterpiece-Flaubert shows us again the immoral, dishonest French society of Balzac's "Human Comedy," but brought his chief character to failure and disillusionment instead of worldly success. His pessimism is a deadly poison, despite the formal beauty, the concise thought, and the precise phrase of his highly imaginative style.

SALAMMBO AND THE SERPENT.

SALAMMBO was the sister of the Carthaginian Hannibal. When the Numidian Mâtho was a prisoner at her father Hamilcar's house, he stole for her from the temple of Tanit (the Moon) the sacred veil, but when freed afterwards he took it away with him. Disasters fell upon Carthage. Her tributaries rebelled and under Mâtho threatened the city. The priests attributed the dangers to the anger of the goddess for the loss of the sacred veil. Schahabarim, who has been the tutor of Salammbô, persuades her that it is her duty to go secretly to Mâtho's tent and by his favor recover the veil.

The eunuch priest made her kneel and keeping her left hand raised and her right one extended, he swore on her behalf to bring back to Carthage the veil of Tanit. With fearful imprecations, she consecrated herself to the Gods, and

each time that Schahabarim pronounced a word she faintingly repeated it.

He indicated to her all the purifications and fasts she ought to perform, and what paths to pursue, in order to reach Mâtho's tent; besides, he told her that a servitor familiar with the roads should accompany her.

She felt herself freed. She dreamed of naught but the happiness of seeing the Zaïmph [the veil] again; and now she blessed Schahabarim for his exhortations.

It was the season when the doves of Carthage migrated to the mountain of Eryx in Sicily, there nesting about the temple of Venus. Previous to their departure, during many days, they sought each other, and cooed to reunite themselves; finally one evening they flew, driven by the wind, and this large, white cloud glided in the heaven very high above the sea. The horizon was crimson. They seemed gradually to descend to the waves, then disappear as though swallowed up and falling, of their own accord, into the jaws of the sun. Salammbô, who watched them disappear, lowered her head. Taanach, believing that she surmised her mistress's grief, tenderly said:

"But, mistress, they will return.”

"Yes! I know it."

"And you will see them again."

"Perhaps!" said Salammbô, as she sighed.

She had not confided to any one her resolution, and for its discreet accomplishment she sent Taanach to purchase, in the suburbs of Kinisdo, all the articles she should need: vermilion, aromatics, a linen girdle, and new garments. The old slave was amazed by these preparations, without daring to ask any questions; and so the day arrived fixed by Schahabarim when Salammbô must depart.

Towards the twelfth hour, she perceived at the end of the sycamores an old blind man, whose hand rested on the shoulder of a child who walked before him, and in the other hand he held, against his hip, a species of cithara made of black wood. The eunuchs, the slaves, the women had been scrupulously sent away; no one could possibly know the mystery that was being prepared.