watered by tears; nor could
I see those stars on which I so much doated, and from which I had
learned a wisdom so profound. The politics, too, were rendering our
family unpleasant; the cote droit was becoming supercilious--it had
always been illogical; while the cote gauche was just beginning to
discover that it had made a revolution for other people. Then it was
happiness itself to be with Adrienne, and when I felt the dear girl
pressing me to her heart, by an act of volition of which
pocket-handkerchiefs are little suspected, I threw up a fold of my
gossamer-like texture, as if the air wafted me, and brushed the first
tear of happiness from her eye that she had shed in months.

{revolution for other people = as he suggests frequently in this story,
Cooper believed that the promise of the July Revolution was betrayed,
and that the new government of King Louis Philippe proved little better
than the old reactionary one of King Charles X; in this he shared the
views of his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, the hero of the American
Revolution, who as head of the French National Guard had been one of
the leaders of the July Revolution in Paris}

The reader may be certain that my imagination was all alive to
conjecture the circumstances which had brought Adrienne de la
Rocheaimard to Paris, and why she had been so assiduous in searching me
out, in particular. Could it be that the grateful girl still intended
to make her offering to the Duchesse de d'Angouleme? Ah! no--that
princess was in exile; while her sister was forming weak plots in
behalf of her son, which a double treachery was about to defeat. I have
already hinted that pocket-handkerchiefs do not receive and communicate
ideas, by means of the organs in use among human beings. They possess a
clairvoyance that is always available under favorable circumstances. In
their case the mesmeritic trance may be said to be ever in existence,
while in the performance of their proper functions. It is only while
crowded into bales, or thrust into drawers for the vulgar purposes of
trade, that this instinct is dormant, a beneficent nature scorning to
exercise her benevolence for any but legitimate objects. I now mean
legitimacy as connected with cause and effect, and nothing political or
dynastic.

{Duchesse d'Angouleme = Marie Therese Charlotte, the Dauphine,
Adrienne's patron; her sister = her sister-in-law Marie Caroline,
Duchesse de Berry, who led an unsuccessful revolt agai