for him when he was there. Here, again, was a similitude
which bound this present to the past. On the clouds of memory the
saddened face of his mother appeared to him; he saw once more her feeble
smile, he heard her gentle voice; she bowed her head and wept. The
lights in the cottage were extinguished. Etienne sang once more the
pretty canzonet, with a new expression, a new meaning. From afar
Gabrielle again replied. The young girl, too, was making her first
voyage into the charmed land of amorous ecstasy. That echoed answer
filled with joy the young man's heart; the blood flowing in his veins
gave him a strength he never yet had felt, love made him powerful.
Feeble beings alone know the voluptuous joy of that new creation
entering their life. The poor, the suffering, the ill-used, have joys
ineffable; small things to them are worlds. Etienne was bound by many
a tie to the dwellers in the City of Sorrows. His recent accession to
grandeur had caused him terror only; love now shed within him the balm
that created strength; he loved Love.

The next day Etienne rose early to hasten to his old house, where
Gabrielle, stirred by curiosity and an impatience she did not
acknowledge to herself, had already curled her hair and put on her
prettiest costume. Both were full of the eager desire to see each other
again,--mutually fearing the results of the interview. As for Etienne,
he had chosen his finest lace, his best-embroidered mantle, his
violet-velvet breeches; in short, those handsome habiliments which we
connect in all memoirs of the time with the pallid face of Louis XIII.,
a face oppressed with pain in the midst of grandeur, like that of
Etienne. Clothes were certainly not the only point of resemblance
between the king and the subject. Many other sensibilities were in
Etienne as in Louis XIII.,--chastity, melancholy, vague but real
sufferings, chivalrous timidities, the fear of not being able to express
a feeling in all its purity, the dread of too quickly approaching
happiness, which all great souls desire to delay, the sense of the
burden of power, that tendency to obedience which is found in natures
indifferent to material interests, but full of love for what a noble
religious genius has called the "astral."

Though wholly inexpert in the ways of the world, Gabrielle was conscious
that the daughter of a doctor, the humble inhabitant of Forcalier, was
cast at too great a distance from Monseigneur Etienne, Duc de Nivron