mind were surer guarantees of happiness than those offered by
money. Her features were of the purest type of Jewish beauty; the oval
lines, so noble and maidenly, have an indescribable stamp of the ideal,
and seem to speak of the joys of the East, its unchangeably blue sky,
the glories of its lands, and the fabulous riches of life there. She had
fine eyes, shaded by deep eyelids, fringed with thick, curled lashes.
Biblical innocence sat on her brow. Her complexion was of the
pure whiteness of the Levite's robe. She was habitually silent and
thoughtful, but her movements and gestures betrayed a quiet grace, as
her speech bore witness to a woman's sweet and loving nature. She had
not, indeed, the rosy freshness, the fruit-like bloom which blush on a
girl's cheek during her careless years. Darker shadows, with here
and there a redder vein, took the place of color, symptomatic of an
energetic temper and nervous irritability, such as many men do not like
to meet with in a wife, while to others they are an indication of the
most sensitive chastity and passion mingled with pride.

As soon as Louis saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix, he discerned the angel
within. The richest powers of his soul, and his tendency to ecstatic
reverie, every faculty within him was at once concentrated in boundless
love, the first love of a young man, a passion which is strong indeed in
all, but which in him was raised to incalculable power by the perennial
ardor of his senses, the character of his ideas, and the manner in which
he lived. This passion became a gulf, into which the hapless fellow
threw everything; a gulf whither the mind dare not venture, since his,
flexible and firm as it was, was lost there. There all was mysterious,
for everything went on in that moral world, closed to most men, whose
laws were revealed to him--perhaps to his sorrow.

When an accident threw me in the way of his uncle, the good man showed
me into the room which Lambert had at that time lived in. I wanted to
find some vestiges of his writings, if he should have left any. There
among his papers, untouched by the old man from that fine instinct of
grief that characterized the aged, I found a number of letters, too
illegible ever to have been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix. My
familiarity with Lambert's writing enabled me in time to decipher the
hieroglyphics of this shorthand, the result of impatience and a frenzy
of passion. Carried away by his feelings, he had writte