sical fall. She used to draw
a comparison between herself and those jelly-fish whose transparent
brilliancy, so much alive in the cool movements of the waves, drift to
their death on the shore in little gelatinous pools. During those
times devoid of inspiration, when the artist's hand was heavy on
his instrument, Felicia, deprived of the one moral support of her
intellectual being, became unsociable, unapproachable, a tormenting
mocker--the revenge taken of human weakness on the tired brains of
genius. After having brought tears to the eyes of every one who cared
for her, raking up painful recollections or enervating anxieties, she
reached the lowest depths of her fatigue, and as there was always some
fun in her, even in her _ennui_ in a kind of caged wild-beast's howl,
which she called "the cry of the jackal in the desert," and which used
to make the good Crenmitz turn pale.

Poor Felicia! That life of hers was indeed a frightful desert when art
did not beguile it with its illusions; a desert mournful and flat, where
everything was lost, reduced to one level, beneath the same monotonous
immensity, the naive love of a child of twenty, a passionate duke's
caprice, in which all was overwhelmed by an arid sand driven by blasting
fates. Paul was conscious of that void, desired to escape it; but
something held him back, like a weight which unrolls a chain, and in
spite of the calumnies he heard, and notwithstanding the odd whims of
the strange creature, he dallied deliciously after her, at the price
of bearing away with him from this long lover's contemplation only the
despair of a believer reduced to the adoring of images alone.

The refuge lay down there, in that remote quarter of the town where the
wind blew so hard, yet without preventing the flame from mounting white
and straight--it was the family circle presided over by Bonne Maman. Oh!
she at least was not bored, she never uttered the cry of the "jackal
in the desert." Her life was far too full; the father to encourage, to
sustain, the children to teach, all the material cares of a home where
the mother's hand is wanting, those preoccupations that awake with the
dawn and are put to sleep by the evening, unless indeed it bring them
back in dream, one of those devotions, tireless but without apparent
effort, very pleasant for poor human egotism, because they dispense from
all gratitude and hardly make themselves felt, so light is their hand.
She was not the courageous