in silence, and in another minute
vanished from the room, persuading himself that he felt not one pang of
jealousy in leaving Gustave Rameau by the side of Isaura. "Her dearest
friend Madame de Grantmesnil!" he muttered.

A word now on Isaura's chief correspondent. Madame de Grantmesnil was
a woman of noble birth and ample fortune. She had separated from her
husband in the second year after marriage. She was a singularly eloquent
writer, surpassed among contemporaries of her sex in popularity and
renown only by Georges Sand.

At least as fearless as that great novelist in the frank exposition
of her views, she had commenced her career in letters by a work of
astonishing power and pathos, directed against the institution of
marriage as regulated in Roman Catholic communities. I do not know that
it said more on this delicate subject than the English Milton has said;
but then Milton did not write for a Roman Catholic community, nor adopt
a style likely to captivate the working classes. Madame de Grantmesnil's
first book was deemed an attack on the religion of the country, and
captivated those among the working classes who had already abjured that
religion. This work was followed up by others more or less in defiance
of "received opinions,"--some with political, some with social
revolutionary aim and tendency, but always with a singular purity of
style. Search all her books, and however you might revolt from her
doctrine, you could not find a hazardous expression. The novels of
English young ladies are naughty in comparison. Of late years, whatever
might be hard or audacious in her political or social doctrines softened
itself into charm amid the golden haze of romance. Her writings had
grown more and more purely artistic,--poetizing what is good and
beautiful in the realities of life rather than creating a false ideal
out of what is vicious and deformed. Such a woman, separated young
from her husband, could not enunciate such opinions and lead a life so
independent and uncontrolled as Madame de Grantmesnil had done, without
scandal, without calumny. Nothing, however, in her actual life had ever
been so proved against her as to lower the high position she occupied in
right of birth, fortune, renown. Wherever she went she was fetee, as
in England foreign princes, and in America foreign authors, are fetes.
Those who knew her well concurred in praise of her lofty, generous,
lovable qualities. Madame de Grantmesnil had known