of a relapse.
And your mother said to her--I heard the words: ''Tis not for his bodily
health I could dare to ask you to stay, when every man who can afford
it is sending away his wife, sisters, daughters. As for that, I should
suffice to tend him; but if you go, I resign all hope for the health of
his mind and his soul.' I think at Paris there may be female poets and
artists whom that sort of argument would not have much influenced. But
it so happens that Isaura is not a Parisienne. She believes in those old
myths which you think fatal to sympathies with yourself; and those old
myths also lead her to believe that where a woman has promised she will
devote her life to a man, she cannot forsake him when told by his mother
that she is necessary to the health of his mind and his soul. Stay.
Before you interrupt me, let me finish what I have to say. It appears
that, so soon as your bodily health was improved, you felt that your
mind and your soul could take care of themselves; and certainly it seems
to me that Isaura Cicogna is no longer of the smallest use to either."

Rameau was evidently much disconcerted by this speech. He saw what
Savarin was driving at--the renunciation of all bond between Isaura and
himself. He was not prepared for such renunciation. He still felt for
the Italian as much of love as he could feel for any woman who did not
kneel at his feet, as at those of Apollo condescending to the homage of
Arcadian maids. But on the one hand, he felt that many circumstances had
occurred since the disaster at Sedan to render Isaura a very much less
desirable partie than she had been when he had first wrung from her
the pledge of betrothal. In the palmy times of a Government in which
literature and art commanded station and insured fortune, Isaura,
whether as authoress or singer, was a brilliant marriage for Gustave
Rameau. She had also then an assured and competent, if modest, income.
But when times change, people change with them. As the income for
the moment (and Heaven only can say how long that moment might last),
Isaura's income had disappeared. It will be recollected that Louvier
had invested her whole fortune in the houses to be built in the street
called after his name. No houses, even when built, paid any rent now.
Louvier had quitted Paris; and Isaura could only be subsisting upon such
small sum as she might have had in hand before the siege commenced. All
career in such literature and art as Isaura adorned