the men in the half-ruined cabin, grouped round a corpse and a villain,
were silent, tongue-tied with horror, and fearing lest God himself
should send a thunderbolt upon them.

CHAPTER XXIII. ABSENCE

L'absence est le plus grand des maux,
Non pas pour vous, cruelle!

LA FONTAINE.

Who has not found a charm in watching the clouds of heaven as they float
along? Who has not envied them the freedom of their journeyings through
the air, whether rolled in great masses by the wind, and colored by the
sun, they advance peacefully, like fleets of dark ships with gilt prows,
or sprinkled in light groups, they glide quickly on, airy and elongated,
like birds of passage, transparent as vast opals detached from the
treasury of the heavens, or glittering with whiteness, like snows from
the mountains carried on the wings of the winds? Man is a slow traveller
who envies those rapid journeyers; less rapid than his imagination, they
have yet seen in a single day all the places he loves, in remembrance
or in hope,--those that have witnessed his happiness or his misery,
and those so beautiful countries unknown to us, where we expect to find
everything at once. Doubtless there is not a spot on the whole earth, a
wild rock, an arid plain, over which we pass with indifference, that has
not been consecrated in the life of some man, and is not painted in
his remembrance; for, like battered vessels, before meeting inevitable
wreck, we leave some fragment of ourselves on every rock.

Whither go the dark-blue clouds of that storm of the Pyrenees? It is
the wind of Africa which drives them before it with a fiery breath.
They fly; they roll over one another, growlingly throwing out lightning
before them, as their torches, and leaving suspended behind them a long
train of rain, like a vaporous robe. Freed by an effort from the rocky
defiles that for a moment had arrested their course, they irrigate, in
Bearn, the picturesque patrimony of Henri IV; in Guienne, the conquests
of Charles VII; in Saintogne, Poitou, and Touraine, those of Charles V
and of Philip Augustus; and at last, slackening their pace above the old
domain of Hugh Capet, halt murmuring on the towers of St. Germain.

"O Madame!" exclaimed Marie de Mantua to the Queen, "do you see this
storm coming up from the south?"

"You often look in that direction, 'ma chere'," answered Anne of
Austria, leaning on the balcony.

"It is the dir