and seductive curiosity, a dreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past life of a mistress....  But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put to them, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and we pass on.  The moths attack their canvases, but the latter are revarnished; and the pictures will smile on when we are buried and forgotten.  And others will come and gaze upon them, till the day they crumble to dust; then people will dream in the same old way before our own likenesses, and ask themselves what used to happen in our day, and whether life was not more alluring then.

I should not have spoken again of those handsome dames, if the large, full-length portrait of Madame Deshoulieres, in an elaborate white deshabille, (it was really a fine picture, and, like the much decried and seldom read efforts of the poetess, better at the second look than at the first), had not reminded me, by the expression of the mouth, which is large, full, and sensual, of the peculiar coarseness of Madame de Stael’s portrait by Gerard.  When I saw it two years ago, at Coppet, in bright sunshine, I could not help being impressed by those red, vinous lips and the wide, aspiring nostrils.  George Sand’s face offers a similar peculiarity.  In all those women who were half masculine, spirituality revealed itself only in the eyes.  All the rest remained material.

In point of amusing incidents, there is still at Chenonceaux, in Diane de Poitiers’s room, the wide canopy bedstead of the royal favourite, done in white and red.  If it belonged to me, it would be very hard for me not to use it once in a while.  To sleep in the bed of Diane de Poitiers, even though it be empty, is worth as much as sleeping in that of many more palpable realities.  Moreover, has it not been said that all the pleasure in these things was only imagination?  Then, can you conceive of the peculiar and historical voluptuousness, for one who possesses some imagination, to lay his head on the pillow that belonged to the mistress of Francis the First, and to stretch his limbs on her mattress? (Oh! how willingly I would give all the women in the world for the mummy of Cleopatra!) But I would not dare to touch, for fear of breaking them, the porcelains belonging to Catherine de Medicis, in the dining-room, nor place my foot in the stirrup of Francis the First, for fear it might remain there, nor put my lips to the mouth-piece of the huge trumpet in the fencing-room, for fear of rupturing my lungs.

CHAPTER II.

Chateau de Clisson.