n should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved
him have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have
to study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if
it was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
the systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place
of abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes
of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature
out of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story
tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is
there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are
real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world
by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine
events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read
us no such furrowing lesson in life.

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

CHAPTER I

An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in
her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn
a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour,
eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her
native land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime
counting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable,
though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known
as aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the
contrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for
the imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming
countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her
choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing
instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of
pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little
so is the starved damsel of the sequestered