After several tragic weeks in which, from instinct,
he made a desperate fight, on the 1st of January,
1892, he felt he was hopelessly vanquished, and in
a moment of supreme clearness of intellect, like Gerard
de Nerval, he attempted suicide. Less fortunate
than the author of Sylvia, he was unsuccessful.
But his mind, henceforth “indifferent to all
unhappiness,” had entered into eternal darkness.
He was taken back to Paris and placed in Dr. Meuriot’s
sanatorium, where, after eighteen months of mechanical
existence, the “meteor” quietly passed
away.
* * * *
*
OR, THE HISTORY OF A HEART
THE HOME BY THE SEA
The weather was most distressing. It had rained
all night. The roaring of the overflowing gutters
filled the deserted streets, in which the houses,
like sponges, absorbed the humidity, which penetrating
to the interior, made the walls sweat from cellar
to garret. Jeanne had left the convent the day
before, free for all time, ready to seize all the
joys of life, of which she had dreamed so long.
She was afraid her father would not set out for the
new home in bad weather, and for the hundredth time
since daybreak she examined the horizon. Then
she noticed that she had omitted to put her calendar
in her travelling bag. She took from the wall
the little card which bore in golden figures the date
of the current year, 1819. Then she marked with
a pencil the first four columns, drawing a line through
the name of each saint up to the 2d of May, the day
that she left the convent. A voice outside the
door called “Jeannette.” Jeanne replied,
“Come in, papa.” And her father entered.
Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman
of the last century, eccentric and good. An enthusiastic
disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he had the tenderness
of a lover for nature, in the fields, in the woods
and in the animals. Of aristocratic birth, he
hated instinctively the year 1793, but being a philosopher
by temperament and liberal by education, he execrated
tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory hatred.
His great strength and his great weakness was his
kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress,
to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that
gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness
of inertia that became almost a vice. A man of
theory, he thought out a plan of education for his
daughter, to the end that she might become happy,
good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home
until the age of twelve, when, despite the tears of
her mother, she was placed in the Convent of the Sacred
Heart. He had kept her severely secluded, cloistered,
in ignorance of the secrets of life. He wished
the Sisters to restore her to him pure at seventeen
years of age, so that he might imbue her mind with
