Mademoiselle de Maupin

XI

“Many things are tiresome. It is tiresome to pay back the money you have borrowed and become accustomed to look on as your own; it is tiresome to fondle to-day the woman you loved yesterday; it is tiresome to go to a house at the dinner-hour and find that the owners left for the country a month ago; it is tiresome to write a novel, and more tiresome to read one; it is tiresome to have a pimple on your nose and cracked lips on the day that you visit the idol of your heart; it is tiresome to wear facetious boots which smile on the pavement from every seam, and above all, to harbor a vacuum behind the cobwebs in your pocket; it is tiresome to be a door-porter; it is tiresome to be an emperor; it is tiresome to be yourself, and even to be some one else; it is tiresome to go on foot because it hurts your corns, on horseback because it skins the antithesis of the front, in a coach because a big man infallibly makes a pillow of your shoulder, on the packet because you are seasick and vomit your entire self; it is tiresome to have winter because you shiver, and summer because you perspire; but the most tiresome thing on earth, in hell, or in heaven is assuredly a tragedy, unless it be a drama or a comedy.

“It really makes my heart ache. What could be more silly and stupid? Are not the great tyrants with voices like bulls, who stride across the stage from one wing to the other, making their hairy arms go like the wings of a windmill, and imprisoned in flesh-colored stockings, but sorry counterfeits of Bluebeard or Bogey! Their rodomontades might make any one who could keep awake burst out laughing.

“Women who are unfortunate in love are no less ridiculous. It is diverting to see them advance, clad in black or white, with their hair weeping on their shoulders, sleeves weeping on their hands, and their bodies ready to leap from the corset like a fruit-stone pressed between the fingers; looking as if they were dragging the floor by the sole of their satin slippers, and, in their great impulses of passion, spurning their trains backward with a little kick from their heel. The dialogue, composed exclusively of Oh! and Ah! which they cluck as they display their feathers, is truly agreeable food and easy of digestion. Their princes are also very charming; they are only somewhat dark and melancholy, which does not, however, prevent them from being the best companions in the world or elsewhere.

“As to comedy which is to correct manners, and which fortunately acquits itself badly enough of its task, the sermons of fathers and iterations of uncles are, to my mind, as wearisome on the stage as in real life. I am not of opinion that the number of fools should be doubled by the representation of them; there are quite enough of them as it is, thank heaven, and the race is not likely to come to an end. Where is the necessity of portraying somebody who has a pig's snout or ox's muzzle, and of gathering together the trash of a clown whom you would throw out of the window if he came into your house? The image of a pedant is no more interesting than the pedant himself, and his reflection in a mirror does not make him the less a pedant. An actor who succeeded in imitating the attitudes and manners of cobblers to perfection would not amuse me more than a real cobbler.

“But there is a theatre which I love, a fantastic, extravagant, impossible theatre, in which the worthy public would pitilessly hiss from the first scene, for want of understanding a single word.

“It is a singular theatre. Glow-worms take the place of Argand lamps, and a scarabaeus, beating time with his antennae, is placed at the desk. The cricket takes his part; the nightingale is first flute; little sylphs issuing from the pea-blossom hold basses of citron-peel between their pretty legs which are whiter than ivory and with mighty power of arm move their bows, made with a hair from Titania's eyelash, over strings of spiders' thread; the little wig with its three hammers, which the scarabaeus conductor wears, quivers with pleasure and diffuses about it a luminous dust, so sweet is the harmony and so well executed the overture!

“A curtain of butterflies' wings, more delicate than the interior pellicle of an egg, rises slowly after the three indispensable raps. The house is full of the souls of poets seated in stalls of mother-of-pearl, and watching the performance through dewdrops set on the golden pistils of lilies. These are their opera-glasses.

“The scenery is not like any known scenery; the country which it represents is as strange as was America before its discovery. The palette of the richest painter has not half the tones with which it is diapered. All is painted in odd and singular colors. The verditer, the blue-ash, the ultramine, and the red and yellow lake are in profusion.

“The sky, which is of a greenish-blue, is striped zebra-wise with broad flaxen and tawny bands; in the middle distance spare and slender trees wave their scanty foliage the color of dried roses; the distance, instead of being drowned in its azure-tinted vapor, is of the most beautiful apple-green, and here and there escape spirals of golden smoke. A wandering ray hangs on the portal of a ruined temple or the spire of a tower. Towns full of bell-turrets, pyramids, domes, arcades, and ramps, are seated on the hills and reflected in crystal lakes; large trees with broad leaves, deeply carved by the chisels of the fairies, inextricably entwine their trunks and branches to form the wings. Over their heads the clouds of heaven collect like snow-flakes, through their interstices the eyes of dwarfs and gnomes are seen to sparkle, and their tortuous roots sink into the soil like the finger of a giant-hand. The woodpecker keeps time as he taps them with his horny beak, and emerald lizards bask in the sun on the moss at their foot.

“The mushroom looks on at the comedy with his hat on his head, like the insolent fellow that he is. The dainty violet stands up on her little tiptoes between two blades of grass, and opens her blue eyes wide to see the hero pass.

“The bullfinch and the linnet lean down at the end of the boughs to prompt the actors in their parts.

“Through the tall grasses, the lofty purple thistles and the velvet-leaved burdocks, wind, like silver snakes, brooks that are formed with the tears of stags at bay. At wide intervals anemones are seen shining on the turf like drops of blood, and daisies, like veritable duchesses, carrying high their heads laden with crowns of pearls.

“The characters are of no time or country; they come and go without our knowing why or how; they neither eat nor drink, they dwell nowhere and have no occupation; they possess neither lands, nor incomes, nor houses; only sometimes they carry under their arm a little box full of diamonds as big as pigeons' eggs; as they walk they do not shake a single drop of rain from the heads of the flowers nor raise a single grain of the dust on the roads.

“Their dress is the most extravagant and fantastical in the world. Pointed steeple-shaped hats with brims as broad as a Chinese parasol and immoderate plumes plucked from the tails of the bird of paradise and the phoenix; cloaks striped with brilliant colors, doublets of velvet and brocade, letting the satin or silver-cloth lining be seen through their gold-laced slashings; hose puffed and swollen like balloons; scarlet stockings, with embroidered clocks, shoes with high heels and large rosettes; little slender swords, with the point in the air and the hilt depressed, covered with cords and ribbons-so for the men.

“The women are no less curiously accoutered.

“The drawings of Delia Bella and Romain de Hooge might serve to represent the character of their attire. There are stuffed, undulating robes with great folds, whose colors play like those on the necks of turtle-doves, and reflect all the changing tints of the iris, large sleeves whence other sleeves emerge, ruffs of open-slashed lace rising higher than the head which they serve to frame, corsets laden with knots of embroideries, aiglets, strange jewels, crests of heron plumes, necklaces of big pearls, fans formed from the peacock's tail with mirrors in the centre, little slippers and pattens, garlands of artificial flowers, spangles, wire-worked gauzes, paint, patches, and everything that can add flavor and piquancy to a theatrical toilette.

“It is a style which is not precisely English, nor German, nor French, nor Turkish, nor Spanish, nor Tartar, though it partakes somewhat of all these, and is one which has adopted what is most graceful and characteristic from every country. Actors dressed in this manner may say what they will without doing violence to probability. Fancy may rove in all directions, style may at its ease unroll its diapered rings like a snake basking in the sun; the most exotic conceits may fearlessly spread their singular flower-cups and diffuse around them their perfume of amber and musk. Nothing hinders it, — neither places, nor names, nor customs.

“How amusing and charming are their utterances! They are not such actors as contort their mouths and make their eyes start out of their heads in order to despatch their tirade with effect, like our dramatic howlers; they, at least, have not the appearance of workmen at their task, or of oxen yoked to the action and hastening to get done with it; they are not plastered with chalk and rouge half an inch thick; they do not carry tin daggers nor keep a pig's bladder filled with chickens' blood in reserve beneath their cloaks; they do not trail the same oil-stained rags through entire acts.

“They speak without hurry or clamor, like well-bred people who attach no great importance to what they are doing; the lover makes his declaration with the easiest air in the world; he taps his thigh with the tip of his white glove, or adjusts the leg of his trousers while he is speaking; the lady carelessly shakes the dew from her bouquet and exchange witticisms with her attendant; the lover takes very little trouble to soften his cruel fair; his principal business is to drop clusters of pearls and bunches of roses from his lips, and to scatter poetic gems like a true spendthrift; often he effaces himself entirely, and lets the author court his mistress in his stead. Jealousy is no fault of his, and he is of the most accommodating disposition. With his eyes raised to the flies and friezes of the theatre, he complacently waits until the poet has finished saying what has taken his fancy, to resume his part and place himself again upon his knees.

“All is woven and unwoven with admirable carelessness; effects have no causes, and causes no effects; the most witty character is he who says most absurdities; the most foolish says the wittiest things; young girls talk in a way that would make courtesans blush, and courtesans utter maxims of morality. The most unheard-of adventures follow one after another without any explanation; the noble father arrives from China in a bamboo junk expressly to recognize a little girl who has been carped off; gods and fairies do nothing but ascend and descend in their machines. The action plunges into the sea beneath the topaz dome of the waves, transversing the bottom of the ocean through forests of coral and madrepore, or rises to heaven on the wings of lark and griffin.

“The dialogue is most universal: the lion contributes a vigorously uttered oh! oh! — the wall speaks through its chinks, and provided that he has a witticism, rebus, or pun to interpose, any one is free to interrupt the most interesting scene; the ass's head of Bottom is as welcome as the golden head of Ariel; the author's mind may be discerned beneath every form, and all these contradictions are like so many facets which reflect its different aspects while imparting to it the colors of the prism.

“This apparent pell-mell and disorder succeeds after all in representing real life with more exactness in its fantastic presentations than the most minutely studied drama of manners. Every man comprises the whole of humanity within himself, and by writing what comes into his head, he succeeds better than by copying through a magnifying glass objects which are external to him.

“What a glorious family! young romantic lovers, roaming damsels, serviceable attendants, caustic buffoons, artless valets and peasants, gracious kings, whose names and kingdoms are unknown to historian and geographer; motley graciosos, clowns with sharp repartees and miraculous capers; O you who give utterance to free caprice through your smiling lips, I love you and adore you among and above all others: Perdita, Rosalind, Celia, Pandarus, Parolles, Silvio, Leander, and the rest, all those charming types, so false and so true, who, in the checkered wings of folly soar above gross reality, and in whom the poet personifies his joy, his melancholy, his love, and his most intimate dream beneath the most frivolous and flippant appearances.

“Among these plays which were written for the fairies, and should be performed by the light of the moon, there is one piece which principally delights me-a piece so wondering, so vagrant, with so vaporous a plot and such singular characters, that the author himself, not knowing what title to give it, has called it 'As You Like It,' an elastic name which satisfies every requirement.

“When reading this strange piece, you feel that you are transported into an unknown world, of which, however, you have some vague recollection: you can no longer tell whether you are dead or alive, dreaming or awake; pleasant faces smile sweetly on you, and give as they pass you a kindly good-day; you feel moved and troubled at the sight of them, as though at the turn of a road you had suddenly met with your ideal, or the forgotten phantom of your first mistress had suddenly stood before you. Springs flow murmuring half-subdued complaints; the wind stirs the old trees of the ancient forest over the head of the aged exiled duke with compassionate sighs; and, when the melancholy Jacques gives his philosophic griefs to the stream with the leaves of the willow, it seems to you as though you were yourself the speaker, and the most obscure and secret thoughts of your heart were illumined and revealed.

“O young son of the brave knight Rowland des Bois, so ill-used by fate! I cannot but be jealous of thee; thou hast still a faithful servant, the good Adam, whose old age is so green beneath the snow of his hair. Thou art banished, but not at least until thou hast wrestled and triumphed; thy wicked brother robs thee of all thine estate, but Rosalind gives thee the chain from her neck; thou art poor, but thou art loved; thou lea vest thy country, but the daughter of thy persecutor follows thee beyond the seas.

“The dark Ardennes open their great arms of foliage to receive thee and conceal thee; the good forest, in the depths of its grottos, heaps its most silky moss to form thy couch; it stoops its arches above thy brow to protect thee from rain and sun; it pities thee with the tears of its springs and the sighs of its belling fawns and deer; it makes of its rocks kindly desks for thy amorous epistles; it lends thee thorns from its bushes wherewith to hang them, and commands the satin bark of its aspen trees to yield to the point of thy stiletto when thou wouldst grave thereon the character of Rosalind.

“If only it were possible, young Orlando, to have like thee a great and shady forest that one might retire and be alone in his pain, and, at the turning of a walk meet the sough t-f or she, recognizable though disguised! But alas! the world of the soul has no verdant Ardennes, and only in the garden of poetry bloom the wild, capricious little flowers whose perfume gives complete forgetfulness. In vain do we shed tears: they form not those fair silvery cascades; in vain do we sigh; no kindly echo troubles to return us our complaints graced with assonances and conceits. Vainly do we hang sonnets on the prickles of every bramble: Rosalind never gathers them, and it is for nothing that we gash the bark of the trees with amorous characters.

“Birds of the sky lend me each a feather, swallow no less than eagle, and humming bird than roc, that I may make me a pair of wings to fly high and fast through regions unknown, where I may find nothing to bring back to my recollection the city of the living, where I may forget that I am myself, and live a life strange and new, farther than America, than Africa, than Asia, than the last island of the world, through the ocean of ice, beyond the pole where trembles the aurora borealis, in the impalpable kingdom whither the divine creations of the poets and the types of supreme beauty take their flight.

“How is it possible to sustain ordinary conversations in clubs and drawing-rooms after hearing thee speak, sparkling Mercutio, whose every phrase bursts in gold and silver rain like a firework shell beneath a star-strewn sky? Pale Desdemona, what pleasure wouldst thou have us take in any terrestrial music after the romance of the Willow? What women seem not ugly beside your Venuses, ancient sculptors, poets in marble strophes?

“Ah! despite the furious embrace with which I wished to clasp the material world for lack of the other, I feel that I have an evil nature, that life was not made for me, and that it repulses me; I cannot concern myself with anything: whatever road I follow I go astray; the smooth alley and the stony path alike lead me to the abyss. If I wish to take my flight the air condenses about me, and I am caught with my wings spread and unable to close them. I can neither walk nor fly; the sky attracts me when I am on earth, and the earth when I am in the sky; above, the north wind tears away my plumes; below, the pebbles wound my feet. My soles are too tender to walk upon the broken glass of reality; my wings of too short a span to soar above things, and rise from circle to circle into the azure depths of mysticism, even to the inaccessible summits of eternal love; I am the most unfortunate hippogriff, the most wretched heap of heterogeneous pieces that ever existed, since ocean first loved the moon and man was deceived by woman: the monstrous Chimera slain by Bellerophon, with its maiden's head, lion's paws, goat's body, and dragon's tail, was an animal of simple composition in comparison with me.

“In my frail breast dwell together the violet-strewn dreamings of the chaste young girl and the mad burnings of revelling courtesans: my desires go, like lions, sharpening their claws in the shade and seeking for something to devour; my thoughts, more feverish and restless than goats, cling to the most menacing crests; my hatred, poison-puffed, twists its scaly folds in inextricable knots, and drags itself at length through ruts and ravines.

“A strange land is my soul, a land flourishing and splendid in appearance, but more saturated with putrid and deleterious nuisances than the land of Batavia: the least ray of sunshine on the slime causes reptiles to hatch and mosquitoes to swarm; the large yellow tulips, the nagassaris and the angsoka flowers pompously veil unclean carrion. The amorous rose opens her scarlet lips, and smiling shows her little dewdrop teeth to the wooing nightingales who repeat madrigals and sonnets to her: nothing could be more charming; but the odds are a hundred to one that there is a dropsical toad in the grass beneath the bushes, crawling on limping feet and silvering his path with his slime.

“There are springs more limpid and clear than the purest diamond; but it would be better for you to draw the stagnant water of the marsh beneath its cloak of rotten rushes and drowned dogs than to dip your cup in such a wave. A serpent is hidden at the bottom, and wheels round with frightful quickness as he discharges his venom.

“You planted wheat, and there springs up asphodel, henbane, darnel, and pale hemlock with verdigris branches. Instead of the root which you had buried, you are astonished to see emerging from the earth the hairy twisted limbs of the dark mandragora.

“If you leave a souvenir, and should come to take it again some time afterwards, you will find it greener with moss and more abounding with woodlice and disgusting insects than a stone placed on the dank floor of a cave.

“Seek not to cross its dark forests; they are more impracticable than the virgin forests of America or the jungles of Java. Creepers, strong as cables, run from one tree to another; plants bristling and pointed like spearheads obstruct every passage; the grass itself is covered with a scorching down like that of the nettle. To the arches of foliage gigantic bate of the vampire kind cling by their claws; scarabees of enormous size shake their threatening horns and lash the air with their quadruple wings; monstrous and fantastic animals, such as are seen passing in nightmares, advance painfully breaking the reeds before them. There are troops of elephants crushing the flies between the wrinkles of their dried skin or rubbing their flanks along the stones and trees, rhinoceroses with rugose carapace, hippopotami with swollen muzzle and bristling hair, which, as they go, knead the mud and detritus of the forest with their broad feet

“In the glades, yonder where the sun thrusts in a luminous ray like a wedge of gold, across the dank humidity, at the place where you would have wished to seat yourself, you will always find some family of tigers carelessly couched, breathing the air through their nostrils, winking their sea-green eyes and glossing their velvety fur with their blood-red, papillae-covered tongues; or, it may be, a knot of boa serpents half asleep and digesting the bull they swallowed last.

“Dread everything-grass, fruit, water, air, shadow, sun, everything is mortal.

“Close your ear to the chatter of the little paroquets, with golden beak and emerald neck, which descend from the trees and come and perch on your finger with throbbing wings; for the little emerald-necked paroquets will finish by prettily putting out your eyes with their golden beaks at the moment that you are bending down to kiss them. So it is!

“The world will have none of me; it repulses me as a spectre escaped from the tombs, and I am nearly as pale as one. My blood refuses to believe that I am alive, and will not color my skin; it creeps slowly through my veins like stagnant water in obstructed canals. My heart beats for nothing which causes the heart of man to beat. My griefs and joys are not those of my fellow-creatures. I have vehemently desired what nobody desires; I have scorned things which are madly longed for. I have loved women when they did not love me, and I have been loved when I would fain have been hated. Always too soon or too late, more or less, on this side or on that; never what ought to have been; either I have not arrived, or I have been too far. I have flung my life through the windows, or concentrated it upon a single point, and from the restless activity of the ardelio I have come to the dull somnolence of the teriaki and the stylite on his column.

“What I do has always the appearance of a dream; my actions seem to be the result rather of somnambulism than of a free-will; there is something within me which I feel vaguely at a great depth, and which causes me to act without my own participation and always independently of general laws; the simple and natural side of things is never revealed to me until after all the others, and at first I always fasten upon what is eccentric and odd. However slightly the line may slant I soon make it into a spiral more twisted than a serpent; outlines, if they are not fixed in the most precise manner, become confused and distorted. Faces assume a supernatural air, and look at you with frightful eyes.

“Thus, by a species of instinctive reaction, I have always clung desperately to matter, to the external silhouette of things, and in art have always given a very important place to the plastic. I understand a statue perfectly, while I cannot understand a man; where life begins, I stop and shrink back affrighted, as though I had seen Medusa's head. The phenomenon of life causes me an astonishment which I cannot overcome. No doubt I shall make an excellent dead man, for I am a very poor living one, and the sense of my existence completely escapes me. The sound of my voice surprises me to an unimaginable degree, and I might be tempted sometimes to take it for the voice of another. When I wish to stretch forth my arm, and my arm obeys me, the fact seems quite a prodigious one to me, and I sink into the profoundest stupefaction.

“On the other hand, Silvio, I have a perfect comprehension of the unintelligible; the most extravagant notions seem quite natural to me, and I enter into them with singular facility. I can find with ease the connection of the most capricious and disordered nightmare. This is the reason why the kind of pieces I was just speaking to you about pleases me beyond all others.

“We have great discussions on this subject with Theodore and Rosette. Rosette has little liking for my system, she is for the true truth; Theodore gives more latitude to the poet, and admits a conventional and optical truth; for my part, I maintain that the author must have a clear stage and that fancy should reign supreme.

“Many of the company grounded their arguments chiefly on the fact that such pieces were, as a general rule, independent of theatrical conditions and could not be performed; I replied that this was true in one sense and false in another, like nearly everything that is said, and that the ideas entertained respecting scenic possibilities and impossibilities appeared to me to be wanting in exactness, and to be the result rather of prejudices than of reason. Among other things, I said that the piece 'As You Like It' was assuredly most presentable, especially for people in society who were not practiced in other parts.

“This suggested the idea of performing it. The season is advancing, and we have exhausted every description of amusement; we are tired of hunting, and of parties on horseback, or on the water; the chances of boston, varied as they are, have not piquancy enough to fill up an evening, and the proposal was received with universal enthusiasm.

“A young man who knew how to paint volunteered to make the scenery; he is working at it now with much ardor, and in a few days it will be finished. The stage is erected in the orangery, which is the largest hall in the mansion, and I think that everything will turn out well. I am taking the part of Orlando, and Rosette was to have played Rosalind, — which was a most proper arrangement. As my mistress, and the mistress of the house, the part fell to her of right; but owing to a caprice singular enough in her, prudery not being one of her faults, she would not disguise herself as a man. Had I not been sure of the contrary, I should have believed that her legs were badly shaped. Actually none of the ladies of the party would show herself less scrupulous than Rosette, and this nearly caused the failure of the piece; but Theodore, who had taken the part of the melancholy Jacques, offered to replace her, seeing that Rosalind is a cavalier nearly the whole time, except in the first act where she is a woman, and that with paint, corset, and dress, he will be able to effect the illusion sufficiently well, having as yet no beard, and being of a very slight figure.

“We are engaged in learning our parts, and it is something curious to see us. In every solitary nook in the park you are sure to find some one, paper in hand, muttering phrases in a whisper, raising his eyes to heaven, suddenly casting them down, and repeating the same gesture seven or eight times. If it were not known that we are to perform a comedy, we should assuredly be taken for a houseful of lunatics or poets (which is almost a pleonasm).

“I think that we shall soon know enough to have a rehearsal. I am expecting something very singular. Perhaps I am wrong. I was afraid for a moment that instead of playing by inspiration our actors would endeavor to reproduce the attitudes and voice-inflections of some fashionable performer; but fortunately they have not watched the stage with sufficient accuracy to fall into this inconvenience, and it is to be expected that, through the awkwardness of people who have never trod the boards, they will display precious flashes of nature and that charming ingenuousness which the most consummate talent cannot reproduce.

“Our young painter has truly wrought wonders. It would be impossible to give a stranger shape to the old trunks of trees and the ivy which entwines them; he has taken pattern by those in the park, accentuating and exaggerating them as is necessary for the stage. Everything is expressed with admirable boldness and caprice; stones, rocks, clouds, are of a mysteriously grimacing form; mirrow-like reflections play on the trembling waters which are less stable than quicksilver, and the ordinary coldness of the foliage is marvellously relieved by saffron tints dashed in by the brush of autumn; the forest varies from emerald green to cornelian purple; the warmest and the freshest tones show harmoniously together, and the sky itself passes from the softest blue to the most burning colon.

“He has designed all the costumes after my instructions, and they are of the handsomest description. At first the performers cried that they could not be produced in silk or velvet nor in any known material, and I nearly saw the moment when troubadour costume was to be generally adopted. The ladies said that such glaring colors would eclipse their eyes. To which we replied that their eyes were stars which were perfectly inextinguishable, and that on the contrary it was their eyes that would eclipse the colore, and even, if need were, the Argand lamps, the lustre, and the sun. They had no reply to this; but there were other objections which kept springing up in a bristling crowd like the Lernean hydra; no sooner was the head of one cut off than another more obstinate and more stupid would arise.

“'How do you think this will keep together?'-'It is all very well on paper, but it is another matter when on one's back; I shall never be able to get into that!'-'My petticoat is at least four fingerlengths too short; I shall never dare to show myself in that disguise!'-'This ruff is too high; I look as if I were a hunchback and had no neck.-'This headdress makes me look intolerably old.

“With starch, pins, and goodwill, everything will hold.' — 'You are joking! a waist like yours, more frail than a wasp's, and one which would go through the ring on my little finger! I will wager twenty-five louis to a kiss that it will be necessary to take in this bodice!'-'Your petticoat is very far from being too short, and if you knew what an adorable leg you have, you would most certainly be of my opinion.'-' On the contrary, your neck stands out and is admirably set off by its aureola of lace.'-'This headdress does not make you look old in the least, and, even if you appear to be a few years older, you are so extremely young that this ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to you; indeed, you would give us grounds for strange suspicions if we did not know where the pieces of your last doll are '-etc.

“You cannot imagine what a prodigious quantity of madrigals we were obliged to dispense in order to compel our ladies to put on charming costumes which were most becoming to them.

“We found it equally troublesome to induce them to place their patches in an appropriate manner. What a devil of a taste women have! and what Titanic obstinacy possesses a vaporish, foppish woman who believes that glazed straw-yellow suits her better than jonquil or bright rose-color. I am sure that if I had devoted to public affairs half the artifices and intrigues that I have employed in order to have a red feather placed on the left and not on the right, I should be a minister of state or emperor at the least

“What a pandemonium! what an enormous and inextricable rout must a real theatre be!

“From the time that the performance of a comedy was first spoken of, everything here has been in the most complete disorder. All the drawers are opened, all the wardrobes emptied; it is genuine pillage. Tables, easy-chairs, consoles, everything is littered, and a person does not know where to set his foot. Trailing about the house are prodigious quantities of dresses, mantelets, veils, petticoats, cloaks, caps, and hats; and when you think that all these are to arranged on the bodies of seven or eight persons, you involuntary think of those mountebanks at the fair who wear eight or ten coats one over another, and you find it impossible to conceive that the whole of this heap will only furnish one costume for each.

“The servants are constantly coming and going; there are always two or three on the road from the mansion to the town, and if this continues all the horses will become broken-winded.

“A theatrical manager has no time to be melancholy, and I have seldom been so for some time past. I am so deafened and overwhelmed that I am beginning to lose all understanding of the piece. As I support the character of impresario as well as that of Orlando, my task is a twofold one. When any difficulty arises recourse is had to me, and as my decisions are not always listened to as oracles, they degenerate into interminable discussions.

“If what is called living is to be always on one's legs, to be equal to twenty persons, to go up and down stairs and not to think for a minute during the day, I have never lived so much as during this week. Nevertheless, I have a smaller share in this animation than might be believed. The agitation is very shallow, and the stagnant, inflowing water might be found a few fathoms below; life does not penetrate me so readily as that, and my vitality is even the smallest when I seem to be working and engaging in what is going on. Action dulls and fatigues me to an extent which is inconceivable; when I am not employed actively, I think or at least dream, and this is a sort of existence, but I lose it as soon as I emerge from my porcelain-image repose.

“Up to the present I have done nothing, and I do not know whether I shall ever do anything. I cannot check my brain, which is all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius; it is an endless boiling, wave urging wave; I cannot master this species of internal jet which rises from my heart to my head, and, for want of outlets, drowns all my thoughts. I can produce nothing, owing not to sterility, but to superabundance; my ideas spring up so thickset and close that they are stifled and cannot ripen. Never will execution, however rapid and impetuous it may be, attain to such velocity. When I write a phrase, the thought which it represents is already as far distant from me as though a century had elapsed instead of a second, and it often happens that in spite of myself I mingle with it something of the thought which has taken its place in my head.

“This is why I cannot live, whether as a poet or as a lover. I can only give out the ideas which have left me; I have women only when I have forgotten them, and am loving others;-a man, how can I bring forth my wish to the light since, hasten as I may, I lose the consciousness of what I do, and act only in accordance with a feeble reminiscence?

“To come upon a thought in a vein of your brain, to take it out rude at first like a block of marble as it is got from the quarry, to set it before you and, with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, to knock, cut, and scrape from morning till evening, and then carry off at night a pinch of dust to throw upon your writing-that is what I shall never be able to do.

“In idea I can separate the slender form from the coarse block very well, and have a very clear vision of it; but there are so many angles to knock away, so many splinters to make fly, so many strokes of rasp and hammer to be given in order to come near to the shape and lay hold on the just sinuosity of the contour, that my hands become blistered, and I let my chisel fall to the ground.

“If I persevere, the fatigue reaches such a degree of intensity that my inmost sight is totally darkened, and I can no longer distinguish through the cloud of marble the fair divinity which is concealed within its thickness. Then I pursue her at random and in groping fashion; I bite too deeply into one place, and do not go far enough into another; I take away what ought to have been a leg or an arm, and leave a compact mass where there ought to have been a void; instead of a goddess I make a grotesque, and sometimes even less, and the magnificent block drawn at so great expense and with so much toil from the entrails of the earth, hammered, cut, and hollowed out in all directions, looks more as if it had been gnawed and perforated by polyps to make a hive than fashioned by a statuary after a settled design.

“How dost thou contrive, Michael Angelo, to cut the marble in slices as a child carves a chestnut? of what steel were thine unconquered chisels formed? and what sturdy aides sustained you, all ye fertile artists and workers, whom no matter can resist, and who can cause your dream to flow entire into color and bronze?

“It is in a fashion an innocent and permissible vanity, after the cruel things that I have just told you of myself, and you will not be one to blame me for it, O Silvio! — but, though the universe be destined to know nothing of it, and my name be beforehand devoted to oblivion, I am a poet and a painter! I have had as beautiful ideas as any poet in the world; I have created types as pure and as divine as those that are most admired in the masters. I see them there before me as clear and as distinct as though they were really depicted, and were I able to open up a hole in my head, and place a glass in it to be looked through, there would be the most marvellous picture gallery that was ever seen. No earthly king can boast the possession of such a one. There are Rubenses as flaming and bright as the purest at Antwerp; my Raphaels are in the best state of preservation, and his Madonnas have no more gracious smiles; Buonarotti cannot contort a muscle in bolder and more terrible fashion; the sun of Venice shines upon this canvas as though it were signed 'Paulus Cagliari;' the Shadows of Rembrandt himself are heaped in the background of that frame where in the distance there trembles a pale star of light; the pictures wrought in the manner peculiar to myself would assuredly be scorned by none.

“I am quite aware that it looks strange for me to say this, and that I shall appear giddy with the coarse intoxication of the most foolish pride; but it is so, and nothing will shake my conviction of it. No one doubtless will share it; what then? Every one is born marked with a black or a white seal. Mine apparently is black.

“Sometimes, even, I have difficulty in covering up my thought sufficiently in this respect; it often happens that I speak too familiarly of these lofty geniuses whose footsteps should be adored, and whose statues should be contemplated from afar and on the knees. Once I forgot myself so far as to say 'We.' Happily it was before a person who did not notice it, else I should infallibly have been taken for the most enormous coxcomb that ever lived.

“I am a poet and a painter, Silvio; am I not?

“It is a mistake to believe that all those who have passed for having genius were really greater men than others. It is unknown how much was contributed to Raphael's reputation by the pupils and obscure painters whom he employed in his works; he gave his signature to the soul and talents of many-that is all.

“A great painter or a great writer occupies and fills by himself a whole century; his only care is to invade all styles at once, so that if a rival should start up he may accuse him at the very outset of plagiarism and check him at the first step in his career. These are well-known tactics, and though not new, succeed none the less every day.

“It may happen that a man who is already celebrated has precisely the same sort of talent that you would have had. Under penalty of being thought to copy him, you are obliged to turn aside your natural inspiration and cause it to take a different direction. You were born to blow full-mouthed on the heroic clarion or to evoke the wan phantoms of times that are no more, and you are obliged to play your fingers on the seven-holed flute or to make knots on a sofa in the recesses of some boudoir, simply because your father did not take the trouble to cast you in a mould eight or ten years sooner, and the world does not understand that two men may cultivate the same field.

“It is in this way that many noble intellects have been forced to take wittingly a path which is not theirs, and to keep for ever along the borders of their own domain from which they have been banished, happy still to cast a glance by stealth over the hedge, and to see on the other side blooming in the sun the beautiful variegated flowers which they possess as seeds but cannot sow for lack of soil.

“As regards myself, I do not know whether, — apart from the greater or less opportuneness of circumstances, the greater or less amount of air and sun, the door which has remained closed and which ought to have been opened, the meeting lost, the somebody whom I ought to have known and whom I have not known, — I should have ever attained to anything.

“I have not the necessary degree of stupidity to become what is absolutely called a genius, nor the enormous obstinacy which is afterwards deified under the fine name of 'will,' when the great man has arrived at the radiant mountain-top, and which is indispensable for reaching the latter; I am too well acquainted with the hollowness of all things and the rottenness that is in them, to cling for very long to any one of them and pursue it eagerly and solely through thick and thin.

“Men of genius are very narrow-minded, and it is on this account that they are men of genius. The want of intelligence prevents them from perceiving the obstacles which separate them from the object which they desire to reach; they go, and in two or three strides devour the intermediate spaces. As their minds are obstinately closed to certain courses, and they notice only such things as are the most immediately connected with their projects, they make a much smaller outlay of thought and action. Nothing distracts them, nothing turns them aside, they act rather by instinct than otherwise, and many when taken out of their special groove are mere ciphers in a way that it is difficult to understand.

“The making of good verses is assuredly a rare and charming gift; few people take more pleasure than I do in matters of poetry; but yet I cannot limit and circumscribe my life within the twelve feet of an Alexandrine; there are a thousand things which disquiet me as much as a hemistich. It is not the condition of society and the reforms that should be made; I care little enough whether the peasants know how to read or not, and whether men eat bread or browse on grass; but a hundred thousand visions pass through my head in an hour which have not the least connection with caesura or rhyme, and it is this which causes me to execute so little, although I have more ideas than certain poets who might be burnt with their own works.

“I worship beauty and feel it; I can express it as well as the most amorous statuaries can comprehend it, and yet I sculpture nothing. The ugliness and imperfection of the rough sketch revolt me; I cannot wait until, by dint of polishing and repolishing, the work finally succeeds; if I could make up my mind to leave certain things in my work alone, whether in verse or in painting, I might perhaps in the end produce a poem or a picture that would make me famous, and those who love me (if there is anyone in the world who takes the trouble to do so) would not be obliged to believe in me on trust, and would have a triumphant reply to the sardonic sneerings of the detractors of that great but unknown genius-myself.

“I see many men who will take palette and pencils and cover their canvas without any great anxiety concerning what caprice is producing at the extremity of their brush, and others who will write a hundred verses one after another without making an erasure or once raising their eyes to the ceiling. I always admire themselves, even if I sometimes fail to admire their productions; from my heart I envy the charming intrepidity and happy blindness which prevent them from seeing even their most palpable faults. As soon as I have drawn anything wrong I see it at once, and am pre-occupied with it beyond measure; and as I am far more accomplished in theory than in practice, it very often happens that I am unable to correct a mistake of which I am conscious. In that event I turn the canvas with its face to the wall and never go back to it again.

“The idea of perfection is so present with me, that I am instantly seized with distaste for my work and prevented from carrying it on.

“Ah! when I compare its ugly pout on canvas or paper with the soft smiles of my thought, when I see a frightful bat passing in place of the beautiful dream that spread its long wings of light upon the bosom of my nights, when I see a thistle springing up from the idea of a rose, and hear an ass's bray where I looked for the sweetest melodies of the nightingale, I am so horribly disappointed, so angry with myself, so furious at my own impotence that I resolve never again to write or speak a single word of my life rather than thus commit crimes of high treason against my thoughts.

“I cannot even succeed in writing such a letter as I should wish. I often say something quite different; some portions are excessively developed, others dwindle away so as to become imperceptible, while frequently the idea which I intended to express is absent, or present only in a postscript.

“When commencing to write to you I had certainly no intention of telling you one-half of what I have said. I was merely going to inform you that we were about to act a play; but a word leads to a phrase; parentheses are big with other tittle parentheses which again contain others ready to be brought forth. There is no reason why such writing should come to an end, and should not extend to two hundred folio volumes, — which would assuredly be too much.

“As soon as I take up my pen a buzzing and a rustling of wings begin in my brain as though multitudes of cockchafers were set free within it. There is a knocking against the sides of my skull, a turning, ascending and descending with horrible noise; it is my thoughts which are fain to fly away, and are seeking for an outlet; they all endeavor to come forth at once; more than one breaks its legs and tears the crape of its wing in the attempt; sometimes the door is so blocked up that not one can cross the threshold and reach the paper.

“Such is my nature. Not an excellent one doubtless, but what can I do? The fault rests with the gods and not with me, poor helpless devil that I am. I have no need to entreat your indulgence, my dear Silvio; I have it beforehand, and you are so kind as to read my illegible scrawlings, my headless and tailless dreamings, through to the end. However unconnected and absurd they may be they have always interest for you because they come from me, and anything that is myself, even if it be not good, is not altogether without value in your eyes.

“I may let you see what is most revolting to the generality of men-sincere pride. But a truce for a while to all these fine things, and since I am writing to you about the piece that we are to perform, let us return to it and say something about it.

“The rehearsal took place to-day. I was never so confused in my life, not owing to the embarrassment inseparable from reciting anything before so many people, but from another cause. We were in costume and ready to begin; Theodore alone had not yet arrived. A message was sent to his room to know what was keeping him; he replied that he was just ready and was coming down.

“He came in fact I heard his step in the corridor long before he appeared, and yet no one in the world has a lighter step than Theodore; but the sympathy which I feel with him is so powerful that I can in a measure divine his movements through the walls, and, when I knew that he was about to lay his hand on the handle of the door, I was seized with a kind of trembling, and my heart beat with horrible violence. It seemed to me that something of importance in my life was about to be decided, and that I had reached a solemn and long-expected moment.

“The door opened slowly and closed in the same way.

“There was a general cry of admiration. The men applauded, and the women grew scarlet. Rosette alone became extremely pale and leaned against the wall, as though a sudden revelation were passing through her brain. She made, in a contrary direction, the same movement as I did. I always suspected her of loving Theodore.

“No doubt she at that moment believed as I did that the pretended Rosalind was really nothing less than a young and beautiful woman, and the frail card-castle of her hope all at once gave way, while mine rose upon its ruins; at least this is what I thought: I may, perhaps, be mistaken, for I was scarcely in a condition to make accurate observations.

“There were three or four pretty women present, without counting Rosette; they appeared to be revoltingly ugly. By the side of this sun the star of their beauty was suddenly eclipsed, and everyone was asking how it had been possible to think them even passable. Men who previously would have esteemed themselves most fortunate to have them as mistresses, would scarcely have been willing to take them as servants.

“The image which, till then, had shown itself only feebly and with vague outlines, the phantom that I had worshipped and vainly pursued was there before my eyes, living, palpable, no longer in twilight and vapor, but bathed in floods of white light; not in a vain disguise, but in its real costume; no longer in the derisive form of a young man, but with the features of the most charming woman.

“I experienced a sensation of enormous comfort, as though a mountain or two had been lifted off my breast. I felt my self-horror vanishing, and was released from the pain of regarding myself as a monster. I came again to conceive quite a pastoral opinion of myself, and all the violets of spring bloomed once more in my heart.

“He, or rather she (for I wish henceforth to forget that I had the stupidity to take her for a man) remained motionless for a minute on the threshold of the room, as though to give the gathering time to utter its first exclamation. A bright ray lit her up from head to foot, and on the dark back-ground of the corridor which receded far into the distance behind, the carved door case serving her as a frame, she shone as though the light had emanated from her instead of being merely reflected, and she might rather have been taken for a marvellous production of the brush than for a human creature made of flesh and bone.

“Her long brown hair, intermingled with strings of great pearls, fell in natural ringlets along her lovely cheeks! her shoulders and breast were uncovered, and I had never seen any in the world so beautiful; the sublimest marble cannot come near to such exquisite perfection. To see the life coursing beneath the clouded transparency! how white and yet so ruddy the flesh! how happily the harmonious golden tints effect the transition from skin to hair! what entrancing poems in the soft undulations of these outlines, more supple and velvety than the neck of a swan! Were there words to express what I feel I would give you a description fifty pages long; but languages were made by some scoundrels or other who had never gazed attentively on a woman's back or bosom, and we do not possess half of the most indispensable terms.

“I decidedly believe that I must become a sculptor, for to see such beauty and to be unable to express it in one way or another is sufficient to make a man furious and mad. I have made twenty sonnets to these shoulders but that is not enough: I should like something which I could touch with my finger and which would be exactly like; verses express only the phantom of beauty and not beauty itself. The painter attains to a more accurate semblance, but it is only a semblance. Sculpture has all the reality that anything completely false can possess; it has a multiple aspect, casts a shadow and may be touched. Your sculptured differs from your veritable mistress only in this that she is a little harder and does not speak-two very trifling defects!

“Her dress was made of a stuff of varying color, azure in the light, and golden in the shade; a well and close fitting boot was on a foot which, apart from this, was excessively small, and stockings of scarlet silk wound amorously round a most shapely and enticing leg; her arms which were bare to the elbows and emerged from a cluster of lace, were round, plump, and white, as splendid as polished silver, and with unimaginably delicate lineaments; her hands, which were laden with jewelery, were softly swaying a large fan of singularly variegated feathers, which looked like a little pocket rainbow.

“She advanced into the room, her cheeks slightly kindled with a red which was not paint, and everyone was in raptures, crying out and asking whether it was really possible that it could be he, Theodore de Serannes, the daring rider, the demon duellist, the determined hunter, and whether he was perfectly sure that it was not his twin sister.

“But you would think that he had never worn any other costume in his life! His movements are not in the least embarrassed, he walks very well, and does not get entangled in his train; he ogles and flirts with his fan in a ravishing manner! and his waist is so slender! you might enclose it with your fingers! It is extraordinary, inconceivable! The illusion is as complete as it can be: you would almost think, that he had a bosom, his breast is so developed and well filled, and then not a hair on his face, got a single one; and his voice so sweet! Oh! the beautiful Rosalind! and who would not wish to be her Orlando?

“Yes, who would not wish to be the Orlando of such a Rosalind, even at the cost of the torments I have suffered? To love as I did with a monstrous love which could not be confessed and yet which could not be uprooted from your heart; to be condemned to keep the profoundest silence, and to shrink from indulging in what the most discreet and respectful lover might fearlessly say to the most prudish and severe of women; to feel yourself devoured by insane longings without excuse even in the eyes of the most abandoned libertines; what are ordinary passions to such a one as that, a passion ashamed of itself and hopeless, whose improbable success would be a crime and would cause you to die of shame? To be reduced to wish for failure, to dread favorable chances and opportunities, and to avoid them as another would seek them-such was my fate.

“The deepest discouragement had taken possession of me; I looked upon myself with horror, mingled with surprise and curiosity. What was most revolting to me was the thought that I had never loved before, and that this was my first effervescence of youth, the first Easter-daisy in the spring-tide of my love.

“This monstrosity took the place with me of the fresh and chaste illusions of early years; my fondly cherished dreams of tenderness at evening on the skirts of the woods, down the little reddening paths, or along the white marble terraces, near the sheet of water in the park, were then to be metamorphosed into this perfidious sphinx with doubtful smile and ambiguous voice, and before which I stood without venturing to undertake the solution of the enigma! To interpret it wrongly would have caused my death; for, alas! it is the only tie which unites me to the world; when it is broken, all will be over. Take from me this spark and I shall be more gloomy and inanimate than the band-swathed mummy of the most ancient Pharaoh.

“On the occasions when I felt myself most forcibly drawn towards Theodore, I would throw myself back with dismay into the arms of Rosette, although she was infinitely displeasing to me; I tried to interpose her like a barrier and shield between myself and him, and I felt a secret satisfaction when lying beside her in thinking that she had been proved to be a woman, and that although I had ceased to love, I was still loved by her sufficiently well to prevent our union from degenerating into intrigue and debauch.

“Nevertheless, at the bottom of my heart, I felt through all this a kind of regret at being thus faithless to the idea of my impossible passion; I felt resentful against myself for, as it were, an act of treason, and, though I well knew that I should never possess the object of my love, I was discontented with myself, and resumed my coldness towards Rosette.

“The rehearsal was much better than I had hoped for; Theodore especially proved admirable; it was also considered that I acted uncommonly well. This, however, was not because I possess the qualities necessary to make a good actor, and it would be a great mistake to suppose me capable of taking other parts in the same fashion; but, through rather a singular chance, the words which I had to utter agreed with my situation so well, that they seemed to me to have been invented by myself rather than learnt by heart from a book. Had my memory failed me at certain passages, I should certainly not have hesitated for a minute before supplying the void with an improvised phrase. Orlando was I, at least, as much as I was Orlando; it would be impossible to meet with a more wonderful coincidence.

“In the wrestling scene, when Theodore unfastened the chain from his neck and presented it to me, in accordance with his part, he cast upon me so sweetly languorous and promising a look, and uttered the sentence:

'Gentleman,

Wear this for me, one out of suits with fortune

That could give more but that her hand lacks means.' with such grace and nobility, that I was really troubled by it and could scarcely go on:

'What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?

I cannot speak to her, yet she urged conference.

O poor Orlando!'

“In the third act Rosalind, dressed like a man and tinder the name of Ganymede, reappears with her cousin, Celia, who has changed her name to Aliena.

“This made a disagreeable impression upon me. I had already become so well accustomed to the feminine costume which indulged my desires with some hopes, and kept me in a perfidious but seducing error! We very soon come to look upon our wishes as realities on the testimony of. the most fleeting appearances, and I became quite gloomy when Theodore reappeared in his man's dress, more gloomy than I had been before; for joy only serves to make us feel grief more keenly: the sun strives only to give us a better understanding of the horror of darkness, and the gaiety of white is only intended to give relief to all the sadness of black.

“His coat was the most gallant and coquettish in the world, of an elegant and capricious cut, all adorned with trimmings and ribbons, nearly in the style of the wits of the court of Louis XIII.; a pointed felt hat with a long curled feather shaded the ringlets of his beautiful hair, and the lower part of his travelling cloak was raised by a long damascened sword.

“Yet he was dressed in such a way as to give one a presentiment that these manly clothes had a feminine lining; a breadth of hip, a fulness of bosom, and a sort of undulation never seen in cloth on the body of a man, left but slight doubts respecting the person's sex.

“He had a half deliberate, half timid manner which was most diverting, and with infinite art, he assumed as embarrassed an appearance in a costume which was his usual one, as he had seemed to be at his ease in garments which) were not his own.

“My serenity returned to some extent, and I persuaded myself afresh that it was really a woman. I recovered sufficient composure to play my part in a fitting manner.

“Do you know this piece? Perhaps not. For the last fortnight I have done nothing but read it and declaim it, I know it entirely by heart, and I cannot imagine that everybody is not as conversant with its knot and plot as I am myself. I fall commonly enough into the error of believing that when I am drunk all creation is fuddled and incapable, and if I knew Hebrew I would to a certainty ask my servant in Hebrew for my dressing-gown and slippers, and be very much astonished that he did not understand me. You will read it if you wish; I shall assume that you have read it and only touch upon such passages as have some bearing upon my situation.

“Rosalind, when walking in the forest with her cousin, is greatly astonished to find that instead of blackberries and sloes the bushes bear madrigals in her praise: strange fruits which fortunately do not grow on brambles as a rule; for when you are thirsty it is better to find good blackberries on the branches than bad sonnets. She is very anxious to know who has spoiled the bark of the young trees in this way by cutting the letters of her name upon it. Celia, who has already encountered Orlando, tells her, after many entreaties, that the rhymer is none other than the young man who vanquished the Duke's athlete Charles in the wrestling match.

“Soon Orlando himself appears, and Rosalind enters into conversation with him by asking him what o'clock it is. Certes, this opening is simple in the extreme; nothing in the world could be more homely. But be not afraid: from this commonplace and vulgar phrase you will see gathered in a harvest of unexpected conceits, full of flowers and whimsical comparisons as from the most vigorous and best manured soil.

“After some lines of sparkling dialogue, whose every word, falling on the phrase, causes millions of sportive spangles to fly right and left like a hammer on a red-hot iron bar, Rosalind asks Orlando whether peradventure he may know the man who hangs odes on hawthorns and elegies on brambles, and who seems to have the quotidian of love upon him, an ill which she is quite able to cure. Orlando confesses that it is he that is tormented by love, and asks her to do him the favor of showing him a remedy for this sickness, seeing that she has boasted of having several infallible ones for its cure. 'You in love?' replies Rosalind; 'you have none of the marks whereby a lover may be known; you have neither a lean cheek nor a blue and sunken eye; your hose is not ungartered, nor your sleeve unbuttoned, and your shoe is most gracefully tied; if you are in love with anyone it is assuredly with yourself, and you need not my remedies.

“It was not without genuine emotion that I replied textually as follows:

“'Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.'

“This answer so unexpected and strange, which is led up to by nothing, and had seemingly been written expressly for me as though by a species of provision on the part of the poet, greatly affected me as I uttered it standing before Theodore, whose divine lips were still slightly swelled with the ironic expression of the phrase that he had just spoken, while his eyes smiled with inexpressible sweetness, and a bright ray of kindness gilded all the loftiness of his young and beautiful countenance.

“'Me believe it! You may as soon make her that you love believe it; which I warrant she is apter to do, than to confess she does; that is one of the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs these fair praises of Rosalind on the trees, and have you truly need of a remedy for your madness?”

“When she is quite satisfied that it is he, Orlando, and none other, who has rhymed these admirable verses going on so many feet, beautiful Rosalind consents to tell him her recipe. Its composition was as follows: She pretended to be the beloved of the love-sick suitor, who was obliged to woo her as though she had been his very mistress, and to cure him of his passion she indulged in the most extravagant caprices; would now weep and then smile; one day entertain him, another foreswear him; would scratch him and spit in his face, and not for a single moment be like herself; fantastical, inconstant, prudish, and languishing, she was all these in turns and the poor wretch had to endure or execute all the unruly fancies engendered by weariness, vapors, and the blues in the hollow head of a frivolous woman. A goblin, an ape, and an attorney all in one had not devised more maliciousness. This miraculous treatment had not failed to produce its effect; the sick one was driven from his mad humor of love into a living humor of madness-which was to foreswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook truly monastic; a most satisfactory result, and one, too, which might easily be expected.

“Orlando, as may well be believed, is not very anxious to recover his health by such means; but Rosalind insists and is desirous of undertaking the cure. She uttered the sentence: 'I would cure you if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo me,' with so marked and visible an intention, and casting on me so strange a look, that I found it impossible not to give it a wider meaning than belongs to the words, nor see in it an indirect admonition to declare my true feelings. And when Orlando replies: 'With all my heart, good youth,' it was in a still more significant manner, and with a sort of spite at failing to make herself understood, that she uttered the reply: 'Nay, you must call me Rosalind.'

“Perhaps I was mistaken and thought I saw what had really no existence, but it seemed to me that Theodore had perceived my love, though I had most certainly never spoken a word of it to him, and that he was alluding, through the veil of these borrowed expressions, beneath this theatrical mask and in these hermaphrodite words to his real sex and to our mutual situation. It is quite impossible that so spiritual and refined a woman as she is should not have distinguished, from the very beginning, what was passing in my soul. In the absence of my words, my eyes and troubled air spoke plainly enough, and the veil of ardent friendship which I had cast over my love, was not so impenetrable that it could not be easily pierced by an attentive and interested observer. The most innocent and inexperienced girl would not have been checked by it for a moment.

“Some important reason, and one that I cannot discover, doubtless compels the fair one to this cursed disguise, which has been the cause of all my torments and was nearly making a strange lover of me: but for this, everything would have gone evenly and easily like a carriage with well greased wheels on a level and finely sanded road; I might have abandoned myself with sweet security to the most amorously vagrant dreamings, and taken in my hands the little white silky hand of my divinity without shuddering with horror, or shrinking twenty paces back as though I had touched a red-hot iron, or felt the claws of Beelzebub in person.

“Instead of being in despair and as agitated as a real maniac, of doing my utmost to feel remorse and of grieving because I failed, I should have said to myself every morning, stretching my arms with a sense of duty done and conscience at rest: 'I am in love,' a sentence as agreeable to say to yourself in the morning with your head on a soft pillow, and warm bed-clothes covering you, as any other imaginable sentence of four words, — always excepting this one: 'I have money.'

“After rising I should have placed myself before my glass, and there, looking at myself with a sort of respect, have waxed tender, as I combed my hair, over my poetic paleness, resolving at the same time to turn it to good account and duly make the most of it, for nothing can be viler than to make love with a scarlet phiz; and when you are so unfortunate as to be ruddy and in love, circumstances which may come together, I am of opinion that you should flour your physiognomy daily or renounce refinement and stick to the Margots and Toinons.

“I should then have breakfasted with compunction and gravity in order to nourish this dear body, this precious box of passion, to compose sound, amorous chyle and quick, hot blood for it from the juice of meat and game, and keep it in a condition to afford pleasure to charitable souls.

“Breakfast finished, and while picking my teeth, I should have woven a few heteroclite rhymes after the manner of a sonnet, and all in honor of my mistress; I should have found out a thousand little comparisons, each more unusual than another, and infinitely gallant. In the first quatrain there would have been a dance of suns, and in the second a minuet of theological virtues; the two tercets would not have been of an inferior style; Helen would have been treated like an inn-servant, and Paris like an idiot; the East would have had nothing to be envied for in the magnificence of metaphor; the last line, especially, would have been particularly admirable, and would have contained at least two conceits in a syllable; for a scorpion's venom is in its tail, and the merit of a sonnet is in the last line.

“The sonnet completed and well and duly transcribed on glazed and perfumed paper, I should have left the house a hundred cubits tall, bending my head lest I should knock against the sky and be caught in the clouds (a wise precaution), and should have gone and recited my new production to all my friends and enemies, then to infants at the breast of their nurses, then to the horses and donkeys, then to the walls and trees, just to know the opinion of creation respecting the last product of my vein.

“In social circles I should have spoken with women in a doctoral manner, and maintained sentimental theses in a grave and measured tone of voice, like a man who knows much more than he cares to say concerning the subject in hand, and has not acquired his knowledge from books;-a style which never fails to produce a prodigious effect, and causes all the women in the company who have ceased to mention their age, and the few little girls not invited to dance to turn up the whites of their eyes.

“I might have led the happiest life in the world, treading on the pug-dog's tail without its mistress making too great an outcry, upsetting tables laden with china, and eating the choicest morsel at table without leaving any for the rest of the party. All this would have been excused out of consideration for the well-known absent-mindedness of lovers; and as they saw me swallowing up everything with a wild look, everyone would have clasped his hands and said,' Poor fellow!'

“And then the dreamy, doleful air, the dishevelled hair, the untidy stockings, the slack cravat, the great hanging arms that I should have had! how I should have hastened through the avenues in the park, now swiftly, now slowly, after the fashion of a man whose reason is completely gone! How I should have stared at the moon and made rings in the water with profound tranquillity!

“But the gods have ordained it otherwise.

“I am smitten with a beauty in doublet and boots, with a proud Bradamant who scorns the garments of her sex, and leaves you at times wavering amid the most disquieting perplexities; her features and body are indeed the features and body of a woman, but her mind is unquestionably that of a man.

“My mistress is most proficient with the sword, and might teach the most experienced fencing master's assistant; she has had I do not know how many duels, and has killed or wounded three or four persons; she clears ditches ten feet wide on horseback, and hunts like an old country squire-singular qualities for a mistress! such things never happen except with me.

“I laugh, but have certainly no cause for doing so, for I never suffered so much, and the last two months seemed to me like two years or rather two centuries. There was an ebb and flow of uncertainties in my head sufficient to stupefy the strongest brain; I was so violently agitated and pulled in all directions, I had such furious transports, such dull atonies, such extravagant hopes and such deep despairs, that I really do not know how it was that I did not die from the pain of it. This idea so occupied and possessed me that I was astonished that it was not seen clearly through my body like a candle in a lantern, and I was in mortal terror lest somebody should chance to discover the object of my insane love.

“However, Rosette, being the person most interested in watching the movements of my heart, appeared to perceive nothing; I believe that she was too much engaged in loving Theodore to pay attention to my cooling towards her; otherwise I must be a master of the art of dissimulation, and I am not so conceited as to have this belief. Theodore himself up to that day never showed that he had the faintest suspicion of the condition of my soul, and always spoke to me in a familiar and friendly fashion, as a well-bred young fellow speaks to another of his own age- nothing more. His conversation with me used to turn on all sorts of subjects, arts, poetry, and other similar matters, but never on anything of an intimate and exact nature having reference to himself or to me.

“It may be that the motives compelling him to this disguise have ceased to exist, and that he will soon resume the dress that is suitable for him. This I do not know; the fact remains that Rosalind tittered certain words with peculiar inflections, and in a very marked manner emphasized all the passages in her part which had an ambiguous meaning and might point in a particular direction.

“In the trysting scene, from the moment when she reproaches Orlando for not coming two hours too soon as would befit a genuine lover instead of two hours too late, until the sorrowful sigh which, fearful at the extent of her passion, she heaves as she throws herself into Aliena's arms: 'O coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathoms deep I am in love!' she displayed miraculous talent. It was an irresistible blending of tenderness, melancholy, and love; there was a trembling and agitation in her voice, and behind the laugh might be felt the most violent love ready to burst forth; add to this all the piquancy and singularity of the transposition and the novelty of seeing a young man woo a mistress whom he takes for a man, and who has all the appearance of one.

“Expressions which in other situations would have appeared ordinary and common-place, were in ours thrown into peculiar relief, and all the small change of amorous comparisons and protestations in vogue on the stage seemed struck with quite a new stamp; besides, had the thoughts, instead of being rare and charming as they are, been more worn than a judge's robe or the crupper of a hired donkey, the style in which they were delivered would have caused them to be apparently characterized by the moot marvelous refinement and best taste in the world.

“I forgot to tell you that Rosette, after declining the part of Rosalind, compliantly undertook the secondary part of Phoebe. Phoebe is a shepherdess in the forest of Arden, loved to distraction by the shepherd Silvius, whom she cannot endure, and whom she overwhelms with consistent harshness. Phoebe is as cold as the moon whose name she bears; she has a heart of snow which is not to be melted by the fire of the most burning sighs, but whose icy crust constantly thickens and hardens like diamond; but scarcely has she seen Rosalind in the dress of the handsome page Ganymede, than all this ice dissolves to tears, and the diamond becomes softer than wax.

“The haughty Phoebe who laughed at love is herself in love, and now suffers the torments which she formerly made others endure. Her pride is humbled so far as to make every advance; she sends poor Silvius to Rosalind with an ardent letter containing the avowal of her passion in most humble and supplicating terms. Rosalind, touched with pity for Silvius, and having, moreover, most excellent reasons for not responding to Phoebe's love, subjects her to the harshest treatment, and mocks her with unparalleled cruelty and animosity. Nevertheless, Phoebe prefers these outrages to the most delicate and impassioned madrigals from her hapless shepherd; she follows the handsome stranger everywhere, and, by dint of her importunities, extracts the promise, — the most favorable she can obtain, — that if he ever marries a woman, he will most certainly marry her; meanwhile he binds her to treat Silvius welly and not to nurse too flattering a hope.

“Rosette acquitted herself of her part with a sad, fond grace and a tone of mournful resignation which went to the heart; and when Rosalind said to her,' I would love you if I could,' the tears were on the point of overflowing her eyes, and she found it difficult to restrain them, for Phoebe's history is here, just as Orlando's is mine, with the difference that everything turns out happily for Orlando, while Phoebe, deceived in her love, is reduced to marrying Silvius, instead of the charming ideal she would fain embrace. Life is ordered thus: that which makes the happiness of one makes of necessity the misfortune of another. It is very fortunate for me that Theodore is a woman; it is very unfortunate for Rosette that he is not a man; and she now finds herself amid the amorous impossibilities in which I was lately lost.

“At the end of the piece Rosalind lays aside the doublet of the page Ganymede for the garments of her sex, and makes herself known to the duke as his daughter, and to Orlando as his mistress. The god Hymen then arrives with his saffron livery and lawful torches. Three marriages take place-Orlando weds Rosalind, Phoebe Silvius, and the facetious Touchstone the artless Audrey. Then comes the salutation of the epilogue, and the curtain falls.

“We have been very greatly interested and occupied with all this. It was in some measure a play within a play, an invisible drama unknown to the audience, which we acted for ourselves alone, and which, in symbolical words, summed up our entire life, and expressed our most hidden desires. Without Rosalind's singular recipe, I should have become more sick than ever, without even the hope of a distant cure, and should have continued to wander sadly through the crooked paths of the dark forest.

“Nevertheless, I have only a moral certainty; I am without proofs, and I cannot remain any longer in this state of uncertainty; I really must speak to Theodore in a more definite manner. I have gone up to him twenty times with a sentence prepared, and could not manage to utter it I dare not; I have many opportunities of speaking to him alone, either in the park or in my room, or in his own, for he visits me and I him, but I let them slip without availing myself of them, although the next moment I feel mortal regret, and fall into horrible passions with myself. I open my mouth, and, in spite of myself, other words take the place of those that I would utter; instead of declaring my love, I enlarge upon the rain or the fine weather, or some other similar stupidity. Yet the season is drawing to a close, and we shall soon return to town; the facilities which here are opened up favorably to my desires will never be met with again. We shall perhaps lose sight of each other, and opposite currents will no doubt carry us away.

“Country freedom is so charming and convenient a thing! the trees, even when they have lost some of their leaves in autumn, afford such delicious shades to the dreamings of incipient love! it is difficult to resist amid the surroundings of beautiful nature! the birds have such languorous songs, the flowers such intoxicating scents, the backs of the hills such golden and silky turf! Solitude inspires you with a thousand voluptuous thoughts, which the whirlwind of the world would have scattered or have caused to fly hither and thither, and the instinctive movement of two beings listening to the beating of their hearts in the silence of the deserted country is to entwine the arms more closely and enfold each other, as though they were indeed the only living creatures in the world.

“I was out walking this morning, the weather was mild and damp, and though the sky gave no glimpse of the smallest lozenge of azure, it was neither dark nor lowering. Two or three tones of pearl-grey, harmoniously blended, bathed it from end to end, and across this vaporous background cottony clouds, like large pieces of wool, passed slowly along; they there being driven by the dying breath of a little breeze, scarcely strong enough to shake the summits of the most restless aspens; flakes of mist were rising among the tall chestnut trees and marking the course of the river in the distance.. When the breeze took breath again, parched and reddened leaves would scatter in agitation and hasten along the path before me like swarms of timid sparrows; then the breath ceasing, they would sink down a few paces further on-a true image of those natures which seem to be birds flying freely with their wings, but which after all are only leaves withered by the morning frost, and toy and sport of the slightest passing breeze.

“The distance was stumped with vapor and the fringes of the horizon ravelled on the border in such a manner that it was scarcely possible to determine the exact point at which the earth ended and the sky began: a grey which was somewhat more opaque, and a mist which was somewhat more dense, vaguely indicating the separation and the difference of the planes. Through this curtain the willows, with their ashen tops, looked like spectral rather than real trees and the curves of the hills, had a greater resemblance to the undulations of an accumulation of clouds than to the bearings of solid ground. The outlines of objects wavered to the eye, and a species of grey weft of unspeakable fineness, like a spider's web, stretched between the foreground of the landscape and the retreating depths behind; in shaded places the hatchings were much more clearly drawn, displaying the meshes of the network; in the brighter parts this misty thread was imperceptible and became lost in a diffused light. In the air there was something drowsy, damply warm, and sweetly dull, which strangely predisposed to melancholy.

“As I went along I thought that with me too autumn was come and the radiant summer vanished never to return; the tree of my soul was perhaps stripped even barer than the trees of the forests; only, on the loftiest bough a single green little leaf remained, swaying and quivering, and full of sadness to see its sisters leave it one by one.

“Remain on the tree, O little leaf the color of hope, cling to the bough with all the strength of thy ribs and fibres; let not thyself be dismayed by the whistlings of the wind, O good little leaf! for, when thou art gone, who will mark whether I be a dead or living tree, and who will restrain the woodman that he cut not my foot with blows of his axe nor make faggots of my boughs? It is not yet the time when trees are bare of leaves, and the sun may yet rid himself of the misty swaddling-clothes which are about him.

“This sight of the dying season impressed me greatly. I thought that time was flying fast, and that I might die without clasping my ideal to my heart.

“As I returned home I formed a resolution. Since I could not make up my mind to speak, I wrote all my destiny on a sheet of paper. Perhaps it is ridiculous to write to some one living in the same house with you, and whom you may see any day at any hour; but I am no longer one to consider what is ridiculous or not.

“I sealed my letter not without trembling and changing color; then, choosing a time when Theodore was out, I placed it on the middle of his table, and fled with as much agitation as though I had performed the most abominable action in the world.”

Rosette's Infatuation