A merry voice is heard; and the young, light-hearted girl comes all unconscious to the scene of the tragedy.  The curtain falls before she has entered upon it.

The betrayal of the lady, the transaction of which she becomes the subject, and her consequent suicide, are taken from an episode in English high life, which occurred in the present century.

“THE TWO POETS OF CROISIC” is an extract from the history of two writers of verse, whose respective works obtained from circumstances a brilliant but short-lived renown.  It forms part of a reminiscence, supposed to be conjured up by a wood fire near which the narrator, with his wife, is sitting.  The fire, as he describes it, is made of ship-wood:  for it burns in all the beautiful colours which denote the presence of metallic substances and salts; and as his fancy reconstructs the ship, it also raises the vision of a distant coast well known to his companion and to himself.  He sees Le Croisic—­the little town it is—­the poor village it was[81]—­with its storm-tossed sea—­its sandy strip of land, good only for the production of salt—­its solitary Menhir, which recalls, and in some degree perpetuates, the wild life and the barbarous Druid worship of old Breton times.[82] And in the bright-hued flames, which leap up and vanish before his bodily eyes, he sees also the two ephemeral reputations which flashed forth and expired there.

Rene Gentilhomme, born 1610, was a rhymer, as his father had been before him.  He became page to the Prince of Conde, and occupied his spare time by writing complimentary verse.  One day, as he was hammering at an ode, a violent storm broke out; and the lightning shattered a ducal crown in marble which stood on a pedestal in the room in which he sat.  Conde was regarded as future King of France:  for Louis XIII. was childless, and his brother Gaston believed to be so; in consideration of this fact, men called him “Duke.”  Rene took the incident as an omen, and turned his ode into a prophecy which he delivered to his master as the utterance of God.  “The Prince’s hopes were at an end:  a Dauphin would be born in the ensuing year.”  A Dauphin was born; and Rene, who had at first been terrified at his own boldness, received the title of Royal Poet, and the honours due to a seer.  But he wrote little or no more; and he and the tiny volume which composed his works soon disappeared from sight.

The narrator, however, judges that this oblivion may not have been unsought, since one who had believed himself the object of a direct message from God, would have little taste for intercourse with his fellow men; and he suspends his story for a moment to ask himself how such a one would bear the weight of his experience; and how far the knowledge conveyed by it might be true.  He decides (as we should expect) that a direct Revelation is forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our “simulated thunder-claps,” all our “counterfeited truths,” all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind:  darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence.  And so Rene Gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher than rhyming and its rewards.