on summer nights; she knew them well,
she read them easily, with their sonorous words, for she was so in the
habit of embroidering heraldic symbols. There was Jean V, who stopped
from door to door in the town ravaged by the plague, and went in to
kiss the lips of the dying, and cured them by saying, "_Si Dieu volt,
ie vueil_." And Felician III, who, forewarned that a severe illness
prevented Philippe le Bel from going to Palestine, went there in his
place, barefooted and holding a candle in his hand, and for that he had
the right of quartering the arms of Jerusalem with his own. Other and
yet other histories came to her mind, especially those of the ladies of
Hautecoeur, the "happy dead," as they were called in the Legend. In
that family the women die young, in the midst of some great happiness.
Sometimes two or three generations would be spared, then suddenly Death
would appear, smiling, as with gentle hands he carried away the daughter
or the wife of a Hautecoeur, the oldest of them being scarcely twenty
years of age, at the moment when they were at the height of earthly love
and bliss. For instance, Laurette, daughter of Raoul I, on the evening
of her betrothal to her cousin Richard, who lived in the castle, having
seated herself at her window in the Tower of David, saw him at his
window in the Tower of Charlemagne, and, thinking she heard him call
her, as at that moment a ray of moonlight seemed to throw a bridge
between them, she walked toward him. But when in the middle she made in
her haste a false step and overpassed the ray, she fell, and was crushed
at the foot of the tower. So since that day, each night when the moon is
bright and clear, she can be seen walking in the air around the Chateau,
which is bathed in white by the silent touch of her immense robe. Then
Balbine, wife of Herve VII, thought for six months that her husband had
been killed in the wars. But, unwilling to give up all hope, she watched
for him daily from the top of the donjon, and when at last she saw him
one morning on the highway, returning to his home, she ran down quickly
to meet him, but was so overcome with joy, that she fell dead at the
entrance of the castle. Even at this day, notwithstanding the ruins, as
soon as twilight falls, it is said she still descends the steps, runs
from story to story, glides through the corridors and the rooms, and
passes like a phantom through the gaping windows which open into the
desert void. All return.