ingers, that curved at the tips like peaked
shoes. And you too were there, Sultans with long pipes, reclining
beneath arbors in the arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabers, Greek
caps; and you especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands, that
often show us at once palm-trees and firs, tigers on the right, a lion
to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by a very
neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam trembling in
the water, where, standing out in relief like white excoriations on a
steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.

And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma's head
lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one
by one in the silence of the dormitory, to the distant noise of some
belated carriage rolling over the Boulevards.

When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a
funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter
sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be
buried some day in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill,
and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at
a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre
hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened
to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of
the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the
Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not
confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel
herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her
brow.

The good nuns, who had been so sure of her vocation, perceived with
great astonishment that Mademoiselle Rouault seemed to be slipping from
them. They had indeed been so lavish to her of prayers, retreats,
novenas, and sermons, they had so often preached the respect due to
saints and martyrs, and given so much good advice as to the modesty of
the body and the salvation of her soul, that she did as tightly reined
horses: she pulled up short and the bit slipped from her teeth. This
nature, positive in the midst of its enthusiasms, that had loved the
church for the sake of the flowers, and music for the words of the
songs, and literature for its passional stimulus, rebelled against the
mysteries of faith as it grew irritated by discipline, a thing
antipathetic to