worth a few millions cleverly
squandered along the path of glory which the Nabob was treading like a
child, all unconscious of the fate that lay waiting to devour him at its
end? And in these external joys, these honours, this consideration so
dearly bought, was there not a compensation for all the troubles of this
Oriental won back to European life, who desired a home and possessed
only a caravansary, looked for a wife and found only a Levantine?

THE BETHLEHEM SOCIETY

BETHLEHEM! Why did it give one such a chill to see written in letters
of gold over the iron gate that historic name, sweet and warm like the
straw of the miraculous stable! Perhaps it was partly to be accounted
for by the melancholy of the landscape, that immense gloomy plain which
stretches from Nanterre to Saint Cloud, broken only by a few clumps
of trees or the smoke of factory chimneys. Possibly also by the
disproportion that existed between the humble little straggling village
which you expected to find and the grandiose establishment, this country
mansion in the style of Louis XIII, an agglomeration of mortar looking
pink through the branches of its leafless park, ornamented with wide
pieces of water thick with green weeds. What is certain is that as you
passed this place your heart was conscious of an oppression. When you
entered it was still worse. A heavy inexplicable silence weighed on the
house, and the faces you might see at the windows had a mournful air
behind the little, old-fashioned greenish panes. The goats scattered
along the paths nibbled languidly at the new spring grass, with "baas"
at the woman who was tending them, and looked bored, as she followed the
visitors with a lack-lustre eye. A mournfulness was over the place, like
the terror of a contagion. Yet it had been a cheerful house, and one
where even recently there had been high junketings. Replanted with
timber for the famous singer who had sold it to Jenkins, it revealed
clearly the kind of imagination which is characteristic of the
opera-house in a bridge flung over the miniature lake, with its
broken punt half filled with mouldy leaves, and in its pavilion all
of rockery-work, garlanded by ivy. It had witnessed gay scenes, this
pavilion, in the singer's time; now it looked on sad ones, for the
infirmary was installed in it.

To tell the truth, the whole establishment was one vast infirmary. The
children had hardly arrived when they fell ill, languished, and ended