e not one of the charmers,
who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return
comparatively so little?

Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections,
unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul
as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love
with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugenie went to him in
Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was
brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair.
After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal,
"My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this
marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us
more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you
than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old
built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked
forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a
great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge
in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your
sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue
for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has
the power of loving."

Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of
a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife
and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the
last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his
wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he
to dying." The shock came upon Eugenie with crushing severity. Ever
after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face,"
"his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day
I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that
beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling,
eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you
have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so
short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at
him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he
lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were
asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other
again on earth?"

Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugenie had begun a
journal, which she forwa