Yet they do belong to history, they
breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them is
written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was of a
mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern brain
which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create them,
to set it spinning.

A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was the
leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell. And why this
man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if it
was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into the
systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes of
one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out of
its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story tells of
a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is there
anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents could
never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the comic in
their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are real
creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a
lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine events
and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no
such furrowing lesson in life.

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

CHAPTER I

An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her
seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively
fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and
style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native land.
Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting among
the arts of fence, and often innoc