.GUIS NORBERT BY iRNON LEE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE LOUIS NORBERT \ THE WORKS OF VERNON LEE Uniform Edition. Crown Svo. ALTHEA VANITAS HAUNTINGS GENIUS LOCI POPE JACYNTH HORTUS VIT.E LAURUS NOBILIS THE SPIRIT OF ROME THE ENCHANTED WOODS THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER LIMBO AND OTHER ESSAYS THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS RENAISSANCE FANCIES AND STUDIES In Two Volumes - - - VITAL LIES Crown 8vo. WITH C. ANSTRUTHER-THOMSON BEAUTY AND UGLINESS Illustrated, Demy Svo. LOUIS NORBERT A Two-fold Romance BY VERNON LEE. LONDON : JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN MCMXIV IHE A^CHOB PWESS, LTD., TIPTKEE, ESSEX. TO ELISABETHA, LUCRESIA, AND FILIPPO CORSINI, FROM THEIR GRATEFUL GUEST VERNON LEE Christmas, 1913 DRAMATIS PERSONS PERSONAGES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Lady Venetia Hammond, a delightful siren of uncertain age. Earl of Arthington (her brother), personage who does not speak. The Old Marchese at Pisa. The Marchese's Daughter. The Young Archaeologist. Scene : Pisa and Arthington Manor, 1908-9. PERSONAGES OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Louis Norbert de Caritan. Sir Anthony Thesiger, ancestor of Lady Venetia. A Young Lord, personage who does not speak. Maria Mancini (niece of Mazarin), widow of Prince Colonna, Great Constable of Naples. A Woman disguised as a singing man. A Masked Lady. " Queen Berenice." The Abbe Manfredini, a man of learning and parts, spy and assassin in the pay of the French Court. Artemisia, a crowned poetess, afterwards abbess. An old Spanish Captain (father to Artemisia). Maskers, Spies, Bravoes, and Travellers. The Scene is in Rome and Pisa, 1683-1684. LOUIS NORBERT PROLOGUE CHAPTER I G ' OOD heavens — why, this is he," exclaimed Lady Venetia, suddenly coming to a stop before a sepulchral slab in the easternmost corner of the Campo Santo of Pisa. The young Archaeologist, thus interrupted just as his companion had seemed so enchant- ingly interested in all he was showing her, recognised, with a little chill, that the delight- ful morning was over. With the resigned disinterestedness of disappointment, his eyes followed the lady's, now fixed on a marble tablet, small, unornamented and (he added to himself with vindictive criticalness) remark- ably poorly lettered for its date, which was the end of the seventeenth century. It was let io LOUIS NORBERT into the wall, breast-high, between two of those gothic windows of the famous cloister. " Louis Norbert de Caritan " — the Archae- ologist read out loud, in a voice expressive of utter blankness of mind, shadowed over by personal disconsolateness, and added, for politeness' sake — " Who was he ? " Lady Venetia at first took no notice of the question and still less of the tone. Her very beautiful eyes (which had a delightful way of filling with tears whenever she was much amused) were fixed on that slab, as if she were looking through it and its wall to some distance beyond ; and despite the conven- tional self-control she always attempted to cultivate, it was perfectly obvious that she was moved far beyond surprise or curiosity. " Who he was ? " she answered after a silence, as if the Archaeologist's uninterested question had slowly worked into her own previous thoughts. " Who Louis Norbert de Caritan was ? Well, that is exactly what we none of us in my family have ever known and probably ever will know." LOUIS NORBERT n Then, with an effort of politeness betokening that it was no business of her companion's, she vouchsafed some further information. " This is the name : Louis Norbert de Caritan, and very nearly the same date — 1682 instead of 1684 — on a portrait hanging in my old home in what used to be called the Ghost's room." " How very interesting," answered the Archaeologist perfunctorily. He had a notion that great ladies were all addicted to some form or other of spirit-rapping. Besides, the pleasant talk they had been having was at an end, all along of this silly mystery ; and she would no longer care a button about the Life of Saint Ranieri or any of the paintings he had carefully selected to expound to her. " It isn't a bit interesting except to me," answered Lady Venetia, with icy irritation. The tone smote him. What unpardonable solecism was he being snubbed for by this woman, whose beauty, whose manner, whose very age (quite unfathomably mysterious in his youthful eyes), were already fascinating him hopelessly with mingled delight and 12 LOUIS NORBERT terror ? That — namely his own unknown offence — was the only riddle he could think of as he stood silently by her side, where she stooped her majestic person (being an Archaeologist he thought of her as Demeter, also because she was reddish blonde) over that tablet, reiterating the words of the epitaph as if learning them by heart, and attempting to pronounce the old-fashioned spelling. " To think of his having died here at Pisa, our young Frenchman, Louis Norbert ; and none of us having known anything about it. Louis Norbert de Caritan, sixteen hundred and eighty-four , and son of Pierre Norbert sieur de Caritan and Claude de Leyrac his wife of La Rochelle — just as on our own picture — of course it's he. And only twenty-four years old." Lady Venetia spoke as if to herself. She had forgotten not only the Archaeologist who was so kindly giving up his time to showing her the sights of Pisa, but the rest of her party, who must by this time be at the other end of the cloister. Indeed, the Archaeologist began wondering whether his scientific dignity did not require him to set off after the others and LOUIS NORBERT 13 leave this contemptuous and disconcerting siren to the contemplation of her certainly foolish and probably quite unauthentic mystery — in fact, assert himself in some manner he could not decide upon. But after a minute more of such silent contemplation of the epitaph, varied by raising her eyes to a ball of cloud dazzlingly white on the blue between the window tracery and the black tip of one of the cypresses of the enclosure, Lady Venetia suddenly turned to him and asked for a pencil. " I must get this inscription correct," she explained. ' Allow me to copy it for you," cried the Archaeologist, suddenly reconciled and joyful. "All right— then I'll dictate it to you." But with one of her delightful, unaccountable changes of manner (delightful at least when they were changes back to one's own poor self) she became suddenly very aware of the Archaeologist, and more particularly of his having pulled out his notebook. ' Oh no, not in that," she exclaimed. " I can't have you tearing out leaves from your notes about the Origin of Pisan Architecture i 4 LOUIS NORBERT and all those wonderful things you have been so awfully good telling me about — no, not your notes. Haven't you a card, or the entrance ticket — anything to scribble upon ? " The Archaeologist, who had retained certain foreign habits despite his English bringing up, bowed very ceremoniously and made a little speech. " I will copy out the epitaph for you as soon as I get home, and it shall remain, if you will allow it, among my pedantic dates and measurements, in remembrance of a very delightful interlude in the routine of my work." " Thank you, you really are very nice," Lady Venetia exclaimed, unconsciously imply- ing that she had just been thinking that he was not. So she fell to reading out loud, with minute, she evidently thought scientific, in- sistence on the old-fashioned and moreover faulty spelling of that French inscription engraved by seventeenth-century Italian stone masons. It was, or rather is — for you can go and read it to-morrow — as follows : " Ci-git Louis Norbert de Caritan, escuier, tils de Pierre Norbert sieur de Caritan pres de LOUIS NORBERT 15 la Rochelle et de Claude de Leyrac sa femme, decedes. Lequel Lovis, avant de passer au service de S. M. le Roy d'Angleterre voulust fair (sic) ce voyage d'ltalie et estant tombe malade a Rome pour changer d'air se porta en cette ville de Pise ou subitement il mourust et fust enterre en ce saint lieu le XV jour d'Aoust MDLXXXIV asgee (sic) de XXIV ans. Priez Dieu pour le salut de son ame. Fait par le tres cher ami de la nation et maison de France, l'Abbe Manfredini, chanoine de cette cathedrale." " Curious all this talk about this Abbe Manfredini," remarked the Archaeologist, professional instinct overcoming fear of in- trusion on Lady Venetia's mystery. " I mean all this talk of his being le Tres Cher Ami de la Nation et Maison de France, on the tombstone of another man, about whom he says so little, and who was going to enter the English King's service, not the French one's. Do you remark that he never says he was the friend of the deceased or of the deceased's family ? " ' How could he ? " interrupted Lady 16 LOUIS NORBERT Venetia ; " nobody ever knew what Louis Norbert's family was, and we have always known that Pierre, his father, and Claude, his mother, must have been faked by my great- great-great-grand — whatever you would call him — Nicholas Thesiger,who brought him up." The Archaeologist was too shy to express any surprise at this additional information, which Lady Venetia gave as if she were mentioning some well-known recent detail of her own family affairs. " All the more," he said, glad to get over that — " all the more it seems odd that this Abbe Manfredini should have thought it necessary to assure the public that he himself was a friend of the French Crown, a circum- stance which didn't concern the deceased. It almost looks as if Manfredini may have been one of the unofficial diplomatic agents that Kings and Ministers employed in those days, especially in Italy, wandering abbes, monks, barber surgeons, even opera singers, people who were paid for secret information and occasionally for something worse." Lady Venetia's eyes had settled on the LOUIS NORBERT 17 Archaeologist's face as he spoke the last words. " That explains," she burst out when he had barely done. " That explains every- thing ! I mean Louis Norbert's death here and our never having heard of it. It was this Abbe Manfredini who did it. I have always felt sure there must have been foul play. And it was by order of the French Court. They had some secret reason against him. And of course they couldn't kill him while he was living with my people in England ; so they waited till he happened to go to Italy. And then that Abbe put up the tombstone with all this talk about his friendship to the French nation and crown. It was his way of sending in his bill after he had done the murdering. Do you see ? " In saying these words Lady Venetia turned upon the Archaeologist a face so beautifully and wonderfully inspired as to deprive him of every reasonable reply. But instead of yielding to his sense of awe and admiration by holding his tongue, the ill-advised youth tried to show himself a perfect man of the world. 'What I see/ 1 he answered with heavy B 18 LOUIS NORBERT airiness, " is that your imagination not only gallops but flies." And by way of making matters worse, he even added : " Why, it is you, not I, who ought to have been an archaeologist." " I could not possibly have disliked any- thing more," was her reply. Then, drawing herself together, till she loomed goddess-like, and casting an indifferent glance at the neighbouring frescoes — " By the way," she added, " the rest of them must be getting impatient for lunch." Whereupon she walked silently towards the exit. But, despite the woman of the world's dignity (mysteriously terrifying and fascinat- ing to the Archaeologist) Lady Venetia was in reality remarkably impulsive. So, by the time they had got to the gate of the cloister, she was already remorseful at having shown so much exasperation with this exasperating young pedant, just as she had previously been self-reproachful for taking him so much into her confidence. " You will come home and have lunch with LOUIS NORBERT 19 us, of course, Professor ? " she said, using that title to which he had no sort of right, and avoiding looking at him. But the Archaeologist had understood. Or at all events he had smarted. So he pre- tended that he had an archaeological meeting which would spread over all that day. It would also, he suddenly remembered, prevent his having the honour of dining with Lady Venetia and her friends. He felt of ice and also of steel, let alone tingling (which neither of these calm substances would do) with self- defensive indignation. But when he had accompanied Lady Venetia to the steps of the Campo Santo and helped her into one of the cabs which were prowling round in the wintry sunshine, something seemed suddenly to give way inside him, the steel and the ice turned into an aching void. And, at the very moment that the lady drove off to overtake her party, he suddenly exclaimed : ' Oh, I had forgotten the inscription. I will copy it out and bring it this evening, if you will allow me to call for a few minutes after dinner to take leave of you " 20 LOUIS NORBERT CHAPTER II WHEN the Archaeologist turned up at the hotel that evening, with a facsimile of the epitaph, whose artistic elaboration must have taken much of the time of the supposed archaeological meeting, he found Lady Venetia and her companions on that belated motoring tour wrapped up in furs and bent upon a walk in the moonlight. Of course they all said the Professor (for so they called him in their innocence of what professorship means) must show them their way. And of course, despite his resolutions, the " Professor " did so with alacrity. They left the semicircle of white lights of the Arno quays, with tall white houses asleep above the wavering reflections in the river. They walked silently through the hushed emptiness of the wide Pisan streets, and LOUIS NORBERT 21 naturally in the direction of the cathedral and Campo Santo. The moon was full and high ; and the church and tower and baptistery stood clear as at noon, every tiny pillar and mould- ing drawn as in Indian ink, the pale yellow of their marble nowise bleached by that pure white radiance. Only, under the blue, luminous sky (where a single star pierced throbbing and a cirrus spread across like an ostrich feather) all things had a stillness, a solemnity and aloofness far beyond that of day, even in this solitary and venerable corner. They walked — they were the Archaeologist, Lady Venetia, her cousin the ambassador on leave of absence and his two uninteresting daughters — round and round and up and down for quite a long while, silent, and aware of the silence only the more when one of them made a remark in an undertone. The windless night was icy. But it was not merely the moon and the biting cold which made the diplomatic personage, walking ahead with his two girls, turn round comparing the wide, shining cathedral platform with the terrace in Hamlet. The long wall of the Campo 22 LOUIS NORBERT Santo, with its flat buttresses, was in full moonlight, and the side of the cathedral nearest it was in its own shadow, lying deep, broad, and black upon the grass. But as they paced this shadowy side, there met them as they came forward (seeming to steal round till it stood fully revealed) the great circular whiteness of the baptistery, with the moon- light searching all its openwork, and the buttons along its cupola-ribs black against the bright and moon-blue sky. On the other side stretched the long, low belfried wall of the old hospital, and the stone posts closing the grassy precincts glared white. And among the crenellated walls on the other hand there loomed half visible that deep, closed gate, unopened doubtless for centuries, with the archaic lion among the bushes on its battlements : that gate which always made the young Archaeologist, who, after all, was secretly a poet, think most unscientifically of the East, of Saladin and Cceur de Lion, and at the same time, more unscientifically still, of primaeval Greece, Mycenae or Argos. That familiar haunting thought freed him LOUIS NORBERT 23 from whatever self-conscious shyness the solemn moonlight had not blotted out already. And, with the eloquence of those shy people who can talk easily only on deep or poetic subjects, he described this impression to Lady Venetia. " Then you are not a pedant and afraid of seeming one," she remarked with meditative frankness. : You thought me a pedant — and I did feel afraid of seeming one," he answered quite honestly, " because I didn't know what manner to put on, and put on the wrong one, of course — this morning when you began talking about that . . . and his epitaph." Somehow he was afraid of saying the name. ' Exactly. You did not know what to make of my romancing, as you thought it. You were wondering whether I was an amateur novelist or a planchette and crystal reader. And in the doubt you thought it extremely proper that I should be snubbed by a scientific mind." It was so absurdly like the truth and at the 24 LOUIS NORBERT same time so far from what he felt it to have been, that the Archaeologist, having become quite natural, began to laugh. Lady Venetia laughed also, and there was something enchanting in her laugh, first because it was often accompanied by tears, and secondly because it was nearly always more at her own expense than at others. " There is nothing to laugh about," she protested in the midst of her laughter — " it was very, very painful. And I have never regretted anything so much in my life as having let myself talk about Louis Norbert de Caritan to a pedant I had mistaken for a sympathetic friend." " It wasn't the poor pedant's fault though, was it, dear Lady Venetia ? Heaven knows he was innocent of any attempt to be sympa- thetic, worse luck to him." " People don't seem sympathetic because they try to," she answered. " You ought to know that, even at your youthful age. You had been awfully nice and kind to all of us ; not minding our being dunces, and having faith in our being able to see beautiful things LOUIS NORBERT 25 if somebody else was kind enough to open our eyes to them. And you had said nice things, without knowing it, about yourself. Just hinting at them in your matter-of-fact way. That Abbess, who had been a fashionable poetess and musician, that you showed us the portrait of yesterday, and whom you seemed to be rather in love with ; by the way, you never told me her name ? " ' She was of Spanish extraction, or rather of Moorish, de Valor y Cordoba — her name was Artemisia." Lady Venetia looked up in the moonlight. ' Really ? " she remarked. " Artemisia is a name that exists in my family." " It is a name one meets with in Italy in the seventeenth century, when she lived," he answered, little guessing that she had been on the point of adding " and it is one of my own names." 1 The seventeenth century she lived in ? " resumed Lady Venetia. " Louis Norbcrt de Caritan also lived in the seventeenth century, and died in Pisa. Perhaps they may have met ? " 26 LOUIS NORBERT " Just as likely not," replied the Archaeolo- gist, with historical dryness. It was like looking the other way. And he felt obliged to look the other way. For as they loitered on far behind their companions, and she walked by his side tall and vague in her furs, he somehow knew that her fine, kind face, more beautiful and bewitching than when she had been young, was tilted upwards in that characteristic manner, gazing up as if the moonlight was full of unseen things. And, just because he knew what her face looked like at that moment, he naturally could not look at it. " You see," suddenly resumed Lady Venetia, " you had happened to surprise, by the chance of our finding the epitaph, one of the few bits of childish romance that exist, that I cherish secretly in my remarkably prosaic, elderly heart. . . . Sixteen hundred and eighty-four — that is the date, isn't it ? " " And the fifteenth of August," chimed in the Archaeologist, with an extra dose of scientific dryness. With that easy cordiality which already LOUIS NORBERT 27 made him occasionally jealous of all the other people to whom slie must evidently show it, the lady had passed her long-furred sleeve through his arm, and he felt the weight of her slow, graceful, rather heavy step as she walked. " The portrait of him hangs," she went on after a long silence, " or rather it used to hang — for heaven knows all the changes my late sister-in-law may have made ! — in what was called the Ghost's room at Arthington. No one had ever seen or heard a ghost in that particular room, so far as I know ; and there are ghosts enough to be seen and heard (I don't care for ghosts, do you ? such prosaic twaddle it seems to me !) in other parts of the old place. But that room has always been called the Ghost's room, and has always been shut up, except when there were hunt balls and that sort of thing and people had to be crammed everywhere ; Arthington is ten times too big for us nowadays ! Well, about the Ghost's room. We children were afraid of it, at least the others were afraid and didn't like being in it. / was afraid and did like 28 LOUIS NORBERT being in it perhaps all the more. It's not at all in the oldest part of the house, but in the wing added early in the Restoration by Anthony Thesiger, the one who helped to turn out James II. and who was made the first Lord Arthington (we have always been Whigs — Cromwellians first — and as to me of course I 'm a Socialist) . There are no mullions, or low ceilings. I suppose you'd call it imitation Italian ; I often think of that part of the place in certain villas here in Italy. The room has a bed with faded sort of tulip stripes, red and yellow, on the curtains and coverlet, and a canopy with four of those cut velvet plumes or vases we saw in your friend's palace the day before yesterday. And there is an ebony inlaid cabinet, with mirrors inside when you open it ; and the walls are hung with all manner of black blurred pictures : boar hunts, and smoky battles and flower- pieces like faded chintz ; you have seen the sort of thing ten thousand times in Italy ; I suppose it's all the refuse of what generations of Thesigers carted home from the Grand Tour. The portrait of Louis Norbert is the LOUIS NORBERT 29 only one in the room. It's rather black too, but in a different way : he has black clothes which you can't see quite plainly, and long black hair ; and his face and hands and collar stand out from all that black. I don't know whether the picture is any good as a picture. I haven't seen it since I got married, and that's more than twenty years ago. But I see it quite clearly in my mind ; I mean I see him, for it never struck me to think of him as a portrait ! " It all began by my eldest brother one day locking me into the Ghost's room for a lark. He thought I should be frightened — I was quite a small girl — and so I was at first, because I'd never been in the Ghost's room, except when the housekeeper showed people round. Of course I wouldn't scream or howl, or bang at the door, or do any of the things my brother and the other boys expected a girl to do. I remember sitting for a long time half paralysed with terror and not daring to lift my eyes. The shutters were closed and a ray of light came between them, making the dark things on the wall and that dreadful bed 30 LOUIS NORBERT with the hearse-plumes just barely visible ; and the light ended off in a horrid white spot in a looking glass. I steeled myself to look round ; then I felt ashamed and slowly crawled (feeling the whole time as if someone or some dreadful piece of furniture would claw me) to the window, and got on to a chair and contrived to unbolt the shutters. There were big trees close in front and it was getting on for evening, so that the light wasn't much use, if anything making all those black things on the wall and the bed and that dreadful mirror only more alarming. But in the light I first became aware of him — I mean of Louis Norbert. I ought by rights to have been only more frightened when I turned round and found his white face confronting me ; and I daresay I did think he was the room's ghost. But somehow I stopped being frightened as soon as I saw him. He was so awfully kind and sad, as if he wanted to help me, and at the same time (and that was more to the point) he wanted me to help him. I dragged a chair up, and stood on it and looked at him and spelt out his name : LOUIS NORBERT 31 Louis Norbert dc Caritan. And I remained sitting there, and dozed off and dreamed all sorts of lovely things ; I'm not sure he didn't want to marry me at the end, anyhow I remember I helped him in some mysterious way. When my brother, who had forgotten me, unlocked the door, late in the evening, he was horribly frightened by finding me quite numb and cold in that arm-chair ; and I had to be put to bed, and the nurse made sure I should have brain fever, just to punish poor Arthington. Gracious, when I think what he's turned into now, sitting boxed up in two rooms, poor dear, thinking only of draughts ! Well — after that I used to steal back to the Ghost's room and spend a good deal of my time there. Of course no one guessed I should choose it for my secret place, after it had given me a fright and made me half ill. And if the housekeeper ever missed the key, she certainly never suspected me of abstracting it ; but we were a happy-go-lucky set, and most often she had the key all right, but the door wasn't locked. " So, for years, I lived all my secret time — for 32 LOUIS NORBERT every child who isn't an only child must have secret times and secret places unless they're mere driven cattle — in the presence of Louis Norbert. At first it may have been a matter of convenience, just as I had previously spent my secret time, carried the books I wanted to read alone and my especial doll and pet stones and general fetishes, under a bridge on a dried-up stream in the park. Then, as I grew older, it began to be distinctly for the sake of Louis Norbert. Of course I'd always been fond of him ever since that first time, and grateful, and I liked to tell him stories and invent them about him. But later I became acutely aware of his being there, and no longer felt so much at my ease, and no longer brought anything except books of poetry — which I didn't read, but thought fine — or very romantic novels — I remember Mrs. Henry Wood's — it does seem funny ! It was the time when I discarded dolls and took to practising the piano furiously. I began to stay less at a time in the Ghost's room, but to go there in a funny, formal way, always with my hair tidy and my dress fairly straight. LOUIS NORBERT 33 Once I even put on my best hat and a pair of my mother's long gloves. It was something like going to church (not of course the church one really did go to) and also like being in love. And in fact when I was in love I forgot all about the Ghost's room. But — isn't it odd ? I spent one of my last hours in my old home in that room, the day before I was married. I suddenly felt awfully unhappy — women some- times do when about to be married — and all alone in the world. And I took a very absurd leave of Louis Norbert, standing on a chair, the same arm-chair my brother had found me asleep in when I was small. Since then I've not seen him, though I have been time after time at Arthington ; he had dropped out of my life ... I don't know " — suddenly con- cluded Lady Venetia, addressing the Archae- ologist and no longer, so to speak, her own self- ' I don't know why I tell you all this nonsense. I suppose that when one's old enougli to be a grandmother one begins to harp upon one's childhood ; it's a beginning of senility. And tln-n In w you never remarked it ? (but perl laps you are still too young) — 34 LOUIS NORBERT there are things one can talk about to strangers just because they are strangers. Why, where are the others gone ? " And Lady Venetia, disengaging her arm from the Archaeologist's, looked up and down in that empty, icy moonlight, whence those great marble things shone disembodied in their pallor. " They must have lost patience and gone back to the hotel," she added. " Which is the way ? Good gracious, I fear I've kept you here till midnight with my silly stories, and that you must be half dead of cold. Let's walk a little briskly, if you don't mind." " I was afraid — I felt sure," murmured the Archaeologist half to himself, " that you would suddenly feel chilly after so long a time in the moonlight." " Chilly and grown old, as Browning says," answered the lady. LOUIS NORBERT 35 CHAPTER III THEY talked only of indifferent things as they walked quickly towards the riverside : of the probabilities of finishing that motoring tour or whether it would not be necessary to ship the car by rail to Rome ; did the " Professor " think the roads would be impassable after this early frost ? Was there any likelihood of a north wind to dry them ? Also about the Archae- ologist's work on the Byzantine Origins of Pisan Architecture ; would it keep him there long ? About the difference between foreign and English Universities. Had he liked his three — or was it six ? — years at Oxford ? (He had been a Rhodes scholar, hadn't he ?) But of course he couldn't have seen it with a really foreign eye,sincc his mother was English. ' If you weren't so ceremonious," said Lady 36 LOUIS NORBERT Venetia, " I shouldn't have known you from an Englishman. No accent at all." " You mean that I don't eat with my knife," he answered grimly. Lady Venetia's excessively sympathetic heart smote her. Was it possible that she could have sounded patronising ? She was always rushing into extremes with strangers, being too familiar and then freezing up and hurting their feelings. It was dreadful ! A happy thought struck her. " Look ! " she exclaimed, ignoring the Archaeologist's last remark, " isn't this exactly the square with the Commander's statue ? And that house, can't you imagine Donna Anna rushing out of it after Don Giovanni ? " They were crossing a small square, bluey- white in the moonlight, and Lady Venetia pointed across its smooth wide flags to a close-shuttered house, whose escutcheon and curved double flight of stairs were carved out in black shadows under the overhanging eaves. LOUIS NORBERT 37 " Do you not think," answered the Archae- ologist, " that in this house and in this square Louis Norbert de Caritan may have lived and died in August 1684 ? " " I may have given you a right to laugh at me, but you are a prig, after all, to do it." But as she turned her indignant eyes on her companion she was surprised to find that he was perfectly serious and deeply moved. ' I didn't mean it literally, you know," she murmured. " And I did," he answered curtly ; and they proceeded in silence. But when they had warmed themselves by the fire of olive logs in the hotel sitting-room, and answered the remarks and questions of the rest of the party whom they found sitting round it, Lady Venetia opened the yellow hotel piano, and having drawn from its chattering strings the great opening chords of the Overture of Don Giovanni, she broke suddenly into the music of the Duel, the rushing and lunging little scale passages, the death wail of the Commander and the lamentation of his daughfr 1 . 38 LOUIS NORBERT " I suppose I'm dreadfully old-fashioned," she said, " and of course I don't deny that Strauss would have made one's flesh creep and given one bad dreams for six weeks with such a subject ; but this music is my idea of romance ; you know what I mean ? The sort of thing that square with the statue in the moonlight means, and then that phrase of Ottavio's immediately afterwards, trying to console Anna ; one connects it — well, not with the horrid sort of thing people call tragedy — but with all sorts of things sad and mysterious and yet very consoling in a way, death and misfortune, but which didn't make people horrid. I daresay," she wound up with a radiant smile to the whole party, as she pushed in the desk and pressed down the lid, " I daresay I'm talking awful rubbish ! " But when the Archaeologist rose to take his leave and wish them a good journey — " Don't forget us," she said, stretching out her hand ; " and " — holding his for an im- perceptible instant in hers — " don't forget Louis Norbert de Caritan, in case you can find out anything about him here at Pisa." LOUIS NORBERT 39 " I promise to find out something about Louis Norbert de Caritan," answered the Archaeologist, " since you will allow me to take an interest in him," and he kissed Lady Venetia's hand in the foreign fashion, and bade them all " good-bye." 4 o LOUIS NORBERT LETTER I From the ArchcBologist to the Lady Venetia Hammond Pisa, December 6, 1908 Dear Lady Venetia, In obedience to your desire, I went to the town archives the day following your departure, but learned, to my great disap- pointment, that the seventeenth century records (I had intended looking more par- ticularly through the police reports as well as those of the Misericordia and other funeral confraternities) are at this moment in process of removal to a new wing, and consequently inaccessible for the next weeks to all students, even privileged ones like your humble servant. I have therefore been unable to obtain any information about the stay in Pisa and the death there of the personage in whom you LOUIS NORBERT 41 take an interest. But curious coincidence has given me, so to speak, a glimpse of that Abbe Manfredini who put up the epitaph in the Campo Santo, and whom, through some sympathetic clairvoyance, you judged in an unfavourable light, but one which, as you will see, seems in a certain way justified. (By way of parenthesis : if there were no odd coincidences there would be no archaeology, no archaeologists, and perhaps no human beings at all.) This information was obtained in con- sequence of a perfectly idle interest in a certain palace, which you may remember pointing out to me (saying it made you think of the Duel in Don Giovanni, do you remem- ber ?) on the evening when I had, for the last time, the honour of escorting you to your hotel. It may amuse you to hear how it all came about. Having heard, the morning of your depar- ture, that you had decided not to continue the journey in your motor, but to take the Roman express, I hastened to the station in case I might be of any service to you 42 LOUIS NORBERT and your cousins — perhaps, I thought, in sending off the car. But I was a little late, and though the Roman train had not yet left, there was, alas ! (really that Pisa station is the most disgracefully mismanaged, as well as one of the most antipathetic and gloomy of stations) another interminable train block- ing the platform, so that, by the time I could run round to the further line, your train had just begun moving away, to my infinite regret. I was on the point of leaving that place of disappointment (for I had hoped you might have remembered some commission or some other enquiry to entrust me with) — well, I was about to leave, feeling also rather ridiculous by reason of the bunches of violets in my hands, when I was stopped by old Marchese Viscardi, whose palace I had had the honour of showing you, and whose acquaint- ance I shall always regret that you did not make, for he is the most exquisite and, alas ! the last example of one of the most character- istic and enchanting of Italian types : the provincial nobleman who is at once a farmer, a sportsman, a scholar, and a man of great LOUIS NORBERT 43 artistic taste. And, what happened to be even more to my purpose, a passionate antiquarian who seems to have inherited from his many illustrious ancestors every minutest historical tradition of his native town. He had just come from boar-hunting in the Maremma ; his clothes seemed still to carry the smell (perhaps it was only my fancy) of the thickets of myrtle and lentisk in which he had been reducing them to raggedness. He was going to see his grandchildren near Lucca and consequently to have his midday meal at the station while waiting for a train, instead of going to his house. I adore this old man, not only for his learning and kindness, but also for his look of stepping out of a Van Dyke picture. So I asked leave to join in his very frugal repast. When he had told me all about the boars that had been shot (the mere names of those woodland hills with their views of Etruscan capes and islands are like music to me) and also the measurements of a certain church-cornice I had once admired in his company, I watched for my opportunity. You who know every stone in Pisa by 44 LOUIS NORBERT heart, Marchese," I said, " will, of course, know all about a slab in the easternmost wall of the Campo Santo, to the memory of a young Frenchman who died in Pisa late in the seventeenth century." " Louis de Caritan — let me see, there's another name too (I have entirely lost my memory with advancing years !) — yes ! Louis Norbert de Caritan — of course ! Not quite the easternmost as you say, but rather, I venture to correct, north-eastern by north, since it is near the figures treading the grapes and about twenty metres from the famous sarcophagus with the Amazons. Yes, Louis Norbert de Caritan, escuier, fils de Pierre," etc. — and the marvellous old gentleman repeated the whole inscription with scarcely any hesitation and only one mistake. I had to make an effort not to interrupt him, I can assure you. " Then, Marchese," I exclaimed, before the last words were fairly out of his mouth, " then you will be able to tell me all about this Frenchman." But with a courteous regret (and yet he couldn't have guessed my dis- LOUIS NORBERT 45 appointment !) the Marchese answered that he knew nothing about the personage I alluded to. " You see," he added, "lam not a real savant like you ; my scanty knowledge of local history is confined, I am ashamed to say, to my own family records, and so I am ignorant (I often feel it with shame) about the many interesting foreigners (your poet Shelley, I believe, among others) who used to come to Pisa for their health and of whom several died here ; you remember in the Campo Santo the monument to Count Zamoyski, and another to Prince Ratibor and " " Yes, yes, but that doesn't bear on my point." I had scarcely said it before I felt horribly shocked at my rudeness, particularly when the adorable old gentleman merely answered with courteous dignity : " I regret my ignorance particularly when, as in your case, it prevents my satisfying the curiosity of my learned friends." What a brute my disappointment had made me ! So, wishing to atone a little by giving his know) an opportunity of displaying itself, I bethought me of thai house which had 46 LOUIS NORBERT struck your fancy during our walk in the moon- light, and I asked him what he knew about it. He knew half an hour's worth of detail : who had built that house, who had built every preceding house on the same site, ever since Pisa had existed, the alterations from the original plan, the number of the windows, the thickness of the walls, the orders of the architecture, let alone all the people who had ever leased any part of it. He was forgetting his train. " For an archaeologist like you," he at last said, " the house in question has moreover another interest, as having once contained (and more precisely, between 1679 and 1693) one of the most celebrated private collections of antique gems existing at that epoch, that of a certain Abbate Manfredini, sometime canon of the cathedral." " The Abbe Manfredini ! " I exclaimed, " indeed ! Why, of course I have heard of him." I didn't mention where or in what connection, for fear of returning to the sore subject of his ignorance about the epitaph. " Do tell me about him." LOUIS NORBERT 47 My request was unnecessary. " His collection," went on the Marchese, " contained, as you doubtless know, some of the finest antiques now existing in foreign museums, for instance, a sardonyx by Pasiteles which is one of the glories of the cabinet of gems of St. Petersburg ; and a celebrated hunt of the Caledonian boar (that has remained in my poor memory because of our own boar-hunts, in which I trust you will again partake) — a Caledonian Hunt, I was saying, supposed to be after a fresco by Polygnotus. Besides this collection of gems Canon Manfredini possessed also a torso of a faun which was bought by the Elector of Saxony on the disposal of his property in consequence of the painful conclusion of his career." " What painful conclusion to his career ? " I asked, trying not to be too much interested (that the Marchese had dated as 1693 and the epitaph was of 1684 — no, there could be no connection I). 1 The Abbate Manfredini," resumed the Marchese, ' was a man of very great parts 48 LOUIS NORBERT and most cultivated taste, thanks to both of which he had risen to a condition much above his birth, for he is said to have been the son of Prince Ludovisi's cook. He was a very fine Latinist, even in a time when Latinists were more plentiful than they are, alas ! nowadays. Some of his odes (one, I remem- ber, is on the raising to the purple of my great-great-grand-uncle Cardinal Spini) have been printed in Bachofen's Florilegium ; and some of his epigrams have recently been re-edited to celebrate the marriage of my cousin Lanfreducci. He was also well versed in natural science and made some interesting discoveries in chemistry, as I am assured by my old friend Professor Bimboni, for I have no competence in such things, unfortunately. He was one of the many persons of that time (you will remember the notorious Cavalier Borri) who dabbled in the transmutation of metals ; unfortunately also, so at least it was asserted, his studies extended to the pre- paration of poisons ; those were the days, as you remember, of so-called Acqua Tofana and the Poudre de Succession of Brinvilliers LOUIS NORBERT 49 and Exili. Be this as it may, he fell into ill repute with the Grand Ducal Government, and more particularly awakened suspicion under Pope Innocent XII. , and was confined, on a charge of atheism, in the castle of St. Leo in Romagna, where he died in the pontifi- cate of Clement XL, to whose family my grand- mother, I am proud to say, belonged. But I am forgetting my train in the pleasure of convers- ing with you — and my little grand-daughters had promised to meet me with the carriage." I snatched his bag and guncase and ran with them to the Lucca train, which he was just in time to catch. But as the guard shouted Partenza and tootled the horn of this operatic country, the old man leant out of the window and said quickly : " As regards that Canon Manfredini, I have found in a letter of Cardinal Azzolino, a relation of my wife's, and also, as you know, Queen Christina of Sweden's testamentary executor, a reference to him, to the effect that this Queen always averred that this same Manfredini was a dangerous man who pos- sessed the secret of the so-called Iron Mask and D 50 LOUIS NORBERT many others, and would some day have to be suppressed by the Court of France, on whose blackmail he subsisted, eking out what he got by spying for various potentates by turns." So you see, dear Lady Venetia, that you were quite right in guessing that the Abbe Manfredini was a villain, and thinking of that house in connection with romance and violence (you remember the Don Giovanni music ?). But /, therefore, was right in saying (though you took the remark, if I may speak and live, rather ungraciously) that you, rather than I, ought to have been an archaeologist. I am, dear Lady Venetia, Yours, etc. LETTER II From Lady Venetia to the Archceologist Arthington Manor, Burton Saxon, February 16, 1909 My dear Professor, Do not think me ungrateful for your LOUIS NORBERT 51 long and delightful letter. The very circum- stances which prevented my answering only made it more welcome, for I read it (two months late !) in the midst of very sad solitude and dreariness, when one was thankful to be reminded that such a thing as romance had ever existed ! But I ought to explain, in case you should not have heard it, that I had scarcely been in Rome three days after we left Pisa (what a time ago it now seems — that wonderful moonlight walk ! and all about Louis Nor- bert !) before I was sent for to look after my eldest brother (my sister-in-law died about a year ago) who had had a stroke and was despaired of. He is now out of danger, unless another stroke comes, but crippled, and likes me to stay on. But for six weeks the danger was continual. That's why your letter has remained unanswered so long, and now I'm answering it from my old home. Don't think I wasn't grateful for your letter. When Artliington was once out of danger it gave me a lot of pleasure (I couldn't read books, somehow, or newspapers) and something to 52 LOUIS NORBERT think of — I mean all about Louis Norbert. It's odd that it was different while the danger was there. Have you remarked (no, you're too young probably) how one can live one's life in the constant face of death ? I suppose one braces oneself and makes the best of all small mercies, and when the danger is over one just plops down. During those weeks — seven, I think — one either sat up all night or went to sleep ready to be called to hear that the worst had come ; but it ends by becoming in a dreadful way natural, as if there could be nothing else (men have told me it was like that with soldiers in the trenches or in a besieged town). And the odd thing, and which makes one hot with shame sometimes, is that one isn't miserable the whole time. I hated myself for it, but during that dreadful stress one seemed at times so keenly aware of some things being so good and so interesting, one's breakfast, for instance, after a bad night, or dawn with the bare trees against it as one came downstairs. For a great many days — weeks, in fact — I never dared leave the house for more than half an hour LOUIS NORBERT 53 every day, and then always leaving word where I could be signalled to ; and do you know, in those hurried runs, I seem to have discovered, for the first time in my life, how beautiful this old place is : the red brick (it really is like oranges and geranium) where it has got a little chipped, against the white stone-coping, and the courses of black (you know the sort of thing) gave me a sort of stitch of pleasure. Also there seemed some- thing inexpressibly harmonious and at the same time romantic in the round niches with Roman busts, and in the terraced balustrade, looking down the green walk between the old, old pines, which are almost like cedars. I really seemed never to have seen any of it before. Now my brother is better, the doctor out of the house, only one nurse remaining (who will, I fear, be permanent). He is beginning to be able to speak again, in a way that wrings one's heart. And he, who used to be the most gruffly unsentimental of men, now likes to look at the trees with me holding his hand, also to listen to music, which he used to hate. 54 LOUIS NORBERT How tragic, tragic the way that illness and old age sometimes make people spiritual, susceptible of things they never felt before. It's as heartrending, don't you think, as the transfiguration of dead people's faces ? but I daresay you are too young to have much experience of such matters. Of course it's i" who have to make the music, a very little at a time ; but when he's a bit stronger I shall send for a nice little hump-backed fiddler who is starving in a slum at present. For poor Arthington likes to look over a lot of old instruments, really almost a collection and some quite good, which have accumulated in the house. They are brought in, spinets and harpsichords and all manner of fiddles, one every day ; and he puts a finger on the keys or pulls a string and looks pleased in a way that makes me want to cry. Well ! I have told you all this to explain why your letter remained unopened under a constantly increasing pile, and why, since I have been able to read it, it has been a great pleasure and in a way company. I like to think of Louis Norbert, though I haven't had LOUIS NORBERT 55 the energy to go and see his portrait again. I am utterly at a loose end now — I can't read, except the advertisements in the Times or a page of poetry now and then (funny, I read the Penseroso — fancy, it must have been quite "recent verse " in Louis Norbert's day, or at least like Browning to us). You see, my mind still runs on " our mysterious young Frenchman," as my father used to call him. So I do want you, as soon as those archives are open again, to go and see whether you can't find out something about him. Or, if you can't find out anything, make it up ! After all, aren't you archaeologists ever- lastingly inventing ? I am, dear Professor, Yours, etc. PS. — You don't mind my continuing to call you Professor, although you explained you couldn't possibly be one ? There's something comfortable in it, better than plain " dear Mister So-and-so." And then it's nice you should know such a lot and be so young. Why, you could be my grandchild, if I had married very early, like people in the Sandwich Islands. 56 LOUIS NORBERT LETTER III From Lady Venetia to the Archceologist Arthington : March i, 1909 My dear Professor, I wonder whether you have got a long letter explaining my silence and all that has happened ? I sent it to Pisa. I am now writing to ask you to be very kind and order for me a collection of old Italian music (not Parisotti, which I have) you once mentioned at Pisa. I find that the only thing my poor brother (I told you how dread- fully ill he has been) cares for now are the old instruments which have accumulated in this house. He isn't really musical, you know, and it bores him hearing the same thing over again often, so we are getting rather to an end of our supply ; and as the instruments are princi- pally seventeenth-century harpsichords and LOUIS NORBERT 57 violins and thereabouts, what he likes is hearing the sort of music written for them. It's no good telling him you can play Brahms on a Strad (not that we have a real Strad !) — he wants nothing later than Corelli. And one must humour him, poor dear. So be very kind and tell them to send me that collection you mentioned. Any news of Louis Norbert, I wonder ? Yours, etc. LETTER IV From the Archceologist to Lady Venetia Pisa : March 5, 1909 Dear Lady Venetia, I found both your letters yesterday on return from a walking tour in the Abbruzzi. You will know, without my fumbling to tell you, how deeply I sympathise in your recent trouble, and how sincerely I hope that Lord 58 LOUIS NORBERT Arthington's recovery may not be liable to the dangers which are still giving you anxiety. I hope you will receive even before this the collection of old Italian music you asked me about. I telegraphed to the publisher at Leipzig to send it you direct. I am now adding a volume which I picked up last year at a bookstall. As I am not capable of coping with figured basses and all the various old clefs, I had got a friend of mine (the rather odious youth who bored you so about his book on Gluck) to transpose it all into intelligible characters, and this I send you, but also the rather jolly old printed copy of which I beg your acceptance. The youthful music-historian in question con- descended to bestow on these compositions the adjective which, I remember, made you so indignant (and really the attitude of us professional critics is insupportable), calling them, as I think he did the baptistery of Pisa, " amusant." But I want very particularly to know whether you like them, because they happen to be by a certain seventeenth-century LOUIS NORBERT 59 Abbess, who in her worldly days was a " tenth Muse and fourth Grace " of Italy (she was even crowned in the Capitol, like Mme. de Stael's Corinne) and in whom I take a faint, romantic interest, as I think I mentioned (but of course you wouldn't remember) when you first did me the honour of telling me about the young Frenchman of the Campo Santo epitaph. The name of the Abbess and crowned poetess-composer (her father was originally a Spaniard) was Artemisia de Valor y Cordoba, called in Italian Artemisia del Valore, which makes rather a pretty name, don't you think, for a heroine and a genius ? So far I have had the pleasure of executing your musical commission. But alas ! not the one about Louis Norbert de Caritan, for the archives are still closed to students. But has it not struck you that your own family archives might possibly yield some information about a personage who, after all, seems to have spent the greater part of his life under your roof ? Or have you reasons for knowing that such researches have already been made 60 LOUIS NORBERT and have led to nothing ? If, as you suggested, he had been murdered in Italy, would his English protectors not have made some enquiry about his untimely end ? Please command me in anything wherein I can hope to serve you, and believe me, Yours, etc. PS. — I notice that you say, " if you can find out nothing, couldn't you make it up ? " Ah, dear Lady Venetia, you little know with what a dreadful temptation you are besetting a hitherto innocent student of history ! LETTER V From Lady Venetia to the Archczologist Arthington : March 8, 1909 My dear Professor, Thanks for the music, which will probably turn up to-morrow. And thank you above all for your friendly interest in my poor LOUIS NORBERT 61 friend Louis Norbert. Your letter has just come, and excited me quite awfully ; as soon as I can get a few hours' freedom I shall make straight for our Muniment Room. Now doesn't it show what silly idiots we frivolous vokels are ! It had never struck me that J there might be something — must be some- thing — about Louis Norbert among our family papers. Yet of course I knew — I always have known that there is a Muniment Room and exactly where — up three steps from the middle landing of the north staircase which creaks so awfully and where Lady Bridget is said to walk (there is a round window which frames the white deer in the park rather nicely). The room has a square door studded with nails like a safe, as if anybody wanted to get in, bless your heart ! and it has a mullioned window over the big cedar. I have only been there once in my life, when some Americans who had been civil to my sister-in-law insisted, after coffee and chartreuse, upon being shown letters of eye-witnesses of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots or some other horrid stuffy Yellow Starch and Star 62 LOUIS NORBERT Chamber sort of tragedy, the worst about which always strikes me (but I have no historical mind !) was the want of air and the people having gone about (at least so their portraits show them) always in furs, even in midsummer landscapes. I have always associated the contents of the Muniment Room with those Americans who said, ' ' My ! ain't it just cunning ! " or words to that effect, and also with some dreadful Psychical Researchers whom Arthington had to show the door because they tried to spirit-rap among our family papers. (I'm sure I would have let them so long as they didn't bore us about it all.) By the way, I have a notion you took me for a psychical researcher when I first told you about L. N. that evening in Pisa, and that's what riled me so dreadfully. I can tell you now you've been so kind and we're such good friends. But it never once occurred to me to associate the Muniment Room with dear Louis Norbert. Of course I've always known he was brought up at Arthington ; indeed, it's just all I do know about him, and that my father called him " our mysterious young LOUIS NORBERT 63 Frenchman," which always struck me as a bit pompous. But it had never occurred to me to put two and two together. That's what comes of being brought up by the stud groom, as we all were ! I remember you said at Pisa (I thought you so sententious, but how true it was !) that frivolous people (you didn't say " frivolous," because you're too polite, but you implied it) — well, that frivolous people like me divide the world's contents into things they like and things that bore them, and never suspect there may be any other order in the universe. I fear I can't get a free hour until a cousin comes to relieve guard with my brother early next week, for the poor man hates being left alone. But then ! then I will fly up Lady Bridget's Ghost's staircase and revel in the Muniment Room — though I can't help feel- ing that dear Louis Norbert can't possibly have any connection with all those stuffy horrors, and belongs to a totally different world from the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots and Thomas Thesiger, Knight and Privy Councillor of Queen Elizabeth, who witnessed 64 LOUIS NORBERT it and wears a little fur-lined motoring bonnet and a grey beard and a ruff. I fear that I have utterly disgraced myself in your wise young historical eyes and that you will cease to take any interest in this foolish, frivolous old woman and her seventeenth- century friends. But the doctor has to-day told me that my brother is at last quite out of danger, and so I am rioting in the mirth of my second childhood. I am, dear Professor, Yours nevertheless very truly, Venetia Hammond. LETTER VI From Lady Venetia to the Archczologist Arthington : April 2, 1909 My dear Professor, Do you know they are quite beautiful, those compositions of your seventeenth- LOUIS NORBERT 65 century Abbess ? Odd, isn't it, that we should each of us have a friend in the seven- teenth century, in the selfsame town too ; and that these two friendly ghosts should probably never have met in their mortal life, but only in the idle fancy of us two modern friends ! Thank you awfully for giving me that beautiful volume, "Ricercari et Inventioni — della Nobil donzella Artemisia del Valore — accademica filarmonica et Alfea " — I do love that old book so much, with the fine volutes wasting so much space, and the abbreviations saving so very little. You oughtn't to have given me anything so valuable ! As to the compositions themselves, all of them are interesting and some really very fine. Of course I am only a frivolous dunce about music, as everything else, and I have no doubt that odious youth (who was not amnsant himself, was he ?) would say they were nothing but imitation, as was natural with afernme du monde (do you remember how he withered all my musical likings with that word ?). Of course 1 , I am, as I've said, only 66 LOUIS NORBERT a frivolous dunce (which is what he meant) about music, but I do know what I like. And I do like some of Artemisia's work quite tremendously. By the way, I never told you one of my own names is Artemisia (so much nicer than the silly geographical one I am called by in honour of Venetia Stanley in Charles I.'s time), and perhaps that's one reason why I like her music ! But seriously, I am rather less a dunce about music than other things, and at this moment particularly about old Italian music. You see, my poor brother wants to hear things appropriate to his old instruments, so the domestic fiddler and I have been playing a good deal of Corelli and Vivaldi and such like, and I have taken heart of grace and even sung a little to please poor Arthington, things of Carissimi and Scarlatti and Stradella, etc. And I assure you that in this company the Nobil Donzella Artemisia holds her own. The music of that time has still something a bit awkward in modulation and phrasing (the Italians got, if anything, too glib later) ; and in the midst of a great deal of learning and LOUIS NORBERT 67 even of pedantry (but then / am ashamed to say Bach sometimes bores me to tears with his science !) something pathetically helpless — do you know what I mean ? Like babes in the wood who have run away from their lessons, or the look in the eyes of puppies, dreadfully sad without knowing why and just because they don't know why ; as if, in the midst of all their inventing and ricercare'ing (I am speaking of seventeenth-century com- posers and especially Artemisia, not about pups !) and their perpetual helping themselves out with counterpoint, they were trying to catch hold of melodies which they may have heard from the reaped fields as they sat at noon behind closed villa-shutters, or in the moonlight, thrummed along the paved lanes between their garden walls in town. Good heavens ! how eloquent I have become — it comes of consorting with the Ghost of a learned poetess and lady composer ! But you know what I mean if I seem to talk nonsense, that's what's so comfortable about a learned man. Well ! Artemisia has all that, perhaps more, because she was a bit of an 68 LOUIS NORBERT amateur — and it goes to my heart, like certain scents of burning wood that meet one in Italy on fine cold days. Her poetry, poor dear (for I see the words are also hers where there are any), is rather funny. So crammed with mythology, one never knows who or why or what among all those Almanachs de Gotha of Olympus and all the attributes and chronique galante of gods and goddesses. Now do explain to me, you who are a learned man, how it came about that the same people, in this case the same woman, should have endured and I suppose liked all that " Smith's classical dictionary " and all the pedantic, far-fetched conceits about the Spear of Achilles which Heals the Wounds it makes (why on earth did it ?) and so forth, and who were able to appreciate and to compose just this sort of music, with its little bitter (not sour like Wagner's) modu- lations and melancholy dances and its scraps of recitative which are something between a lyric ode and crying passion. Anyhow, I am tremendously pleased to have Artemisia's music. And- Artemisia is LOUIS NORBERT 69 reconciling me to learning to manage our Dutch harpsichord with stops and pedals and manuals, and a sound something between a crazy old clock and a divine unknown kind of violin. And so you can imagine us — supposing you have time to imagine us at all ! — with the old pines swaying outside the windows, or the pale river fogs creeping along the terraces and round the dripping leaden statues — imagine us in the music-room my poor brother has made himself (and most uncommonly bad it is for sound, with its low stuccoed ceiling and tapestry, but very good for listening, one's eye going along those twistings and starrings overhead to where they meet the faint watery green of the windows) ; my brother (he has become so handsome, diaphanous, and aqui- line, poor dear, since his illness) propped in his chair, and the sister of charity (he wouldn't have an ordinary nurse) and the domestic fiddler, who is a pathetic hump-backed person with lovely eyes — and me, seated round the harpsichord and playing those sad, sad ditties which perhaps once sounded gay. 70 LOUIS NORBERT Have you ever thought that people may have actually danced to some of those Sara- bands of Bach, which seem full of all the resigned mournf ulness of man and the dignified indifference of God ! Well — well — I have written you a screed about your Abbess. To-morrow or the day after I shall attack the Muniment Room, and who knows ? perhaps write you some- thing about Louis Norbert. How dreadfully exciting ! Yours, etc. LETTER VII From Lady Venetia to the Archczologist Arthington : April 10, 1909 My dear Professor, My cousin has not yet come to relieve guard with Arthington, so I have not yet been able to attack the Muniment Room. But I LOUIS NORBERT 71 have not wasted my time, as you shall hear ! Having told my brother about the grave of Louis Norbert, he remembered that there was something about him in the inventory of the Arthington pictures. I got it out at once. It was made in the middle of the eighteenth century by the Reverend Rupert Thesiger " at the desire of his present Lordship." It would amuse your archaeologist's mind ! Of course we really have one or two fairly good pictures at Arthington and some quite good ones in the London house. But the Rev. Rupert is content with no less than five Raphaels, ten Leonardos, a Michelangelo, and twelve Giorgiones (" a rare master," he never- theless remarks), let alone " some of the greatest masterpieces of the divine Guido Rent and the Carracches." Well, of course, I didn't read all that at first, but went straight to the portraits, and, sure enough, between the Van Dyke of Sir Nicholas Thesiger, Bart., and Dame Priscilla, his wife, and the Lely of the first Lord Arthington and his two wives, there was Louis Norbert. 72 LOUIS NORBERT " 310. — Portrait of Louis Norbert de Caritan, usually called ' Sir Nicholas' young French- man ' ; half length, painter unknown. "Louis Norbert was of noble Huguenot family, oi La Rochelle near Bourdeaux ; his family having been ruined, and his father and mother having perished in the siege of that place during Cardinal Mazarin's persecution of the Pro- testants" (my brother and the Encyclopaedia Britannica say it was Richelieu who besieged La Rochelle and that Mazarin didn't persecute them ; is that true ?) "the orphan was adopted by Sir Nicholas Thesiger, at one time Am- bassador of Oliver Cromwell to Cardinal Mazarino, and by him educated along with his son Anthony, afterwards Viscount, then first Earl of, Arthington. " Louis Norbert accompanied his noble friend to the University of Oxford and on his travels abroad, and died young and much regretted by the family of his Benefactor and particu- larly by Dame Priscilla, widow of Sir Nicholas, having distinguished himself by his studious and pious disposition and by his hatred of the Popish superstition." LOUIS NORBERT 73 There ! I read this entry to my brother, and he remarked that the Rev. Rupert was drawing the long bow about La Rochelle and the persecutions, as the siege of that place by Richelieu took place in 1627, so that if L. N.'s parents had perished there he would have been born at least twenty years after their death, since he was twenty-four in 1684. And I am sorry to say that Arthington went so far as to take away the reputation of our austere Cromwellian ancestor by adding that " the fellow " (i.e., Louis Norbert) " was probably some son of the old boy's, the effect of the Paris Embassy on an English Puritan, and that all this romancing about perishing Protestants and La Rochelle was probably invented for Dame Priscilla's benefit, who hadn't got the Ency- clopaedia Britannica " (not even the old edition which he had let himself be swindled into buy- ing cheap!) "to consult about points of history." I told Arthington that was just his horrid, modern club way of viewing things, and that in L. N.'s time people were far more romantic ; but he only said, " Oh, gammon " — and per- haps he was right. 74 LOUIS NORBERT But to-morrow I really hope to attack the Muniment Room, and then we shall perhaps know everything. Just think how splendid ! What about those old archives at Pisa ? Are they never going to be opened ? Or perhaps you are too busy — how selfish and thoughtless I am ! Yours, etc. LETTER VIII (Crossed preceding) From the Archceologist to Lady Venetia Pisa : April 12, 1909 Dear Lady Venetia, At last the sixteenth and seventeenth- century town records have become accessible, and I have been able to give myself the very great pleasure of hunting for traces of your mysterious young Frenchman. Alas ! without any result. Never once have I come across LOUIS NORBERT 75 any name in the slightest degree like his. But as the police registers were removed to Florence, I will have a look when next I go there ; also there still remain some boxes of unclassified documents among which we may, eventually, find something. I trust you will have better success with your Muniment Room ; my search here is rather of the needle in the haystack kind. Oddly enough, in looking for the key of one mystery, I seem (as often happens with us historians) to have laid my hand on the walled-up door of another one, or rather of two apparently different mysteries. Indeed, I am inclined to think (after a week in these Pisa archives) that the whole life of the seventeenth century was honeycombed with mysteries, and that there were as many secret chambers as inhabited ones ! A good third of the papers I have read over appear to be the reports of spies ; and when not salaried official ones (and these of every imaginable sort, physicians, priests, entire orders of monks, astrologers, postillions, actresses, fiddlers, singers, pedlars, poets, and ladies of light conduct) — then amateur spies 76 LOUIS NORBERT in the shape of quiet persons who kept diaries for their own amusement. Well, to return to the two unexpected mysteries I have hit upon — although to do so is no consolation for the fruitlessness of my researches about your young Frenchman's death — one of them is connected with a lady, apparently a great lady, who seems to have been causing anxiety to the Grand Duke, to the Pope, and to a personage called in some code language " number 109 " and also " the Great Sophi of Hyrcania." What this lady was expected to do I cannot for the life of me make out, except that she also seems to have been bent on unravelling mysteries, neither more nor less than you and I, dear Lady Venetia ; except that she is usually described as " that madwoman," " that foolish female lunatic who has given Hyrcania and other countries so much worry for so many years " — and " who has got this new suspicion into her crazy brain." There is no further indication of her status or whereabouts, and she is sometimes called " the mad Berenice " — for everybody in these LOUIS NORBERT 77 letters has at least one code name, and often several. Well, I hope poor Berenice, who- ever she was, may have been more successful with her mystery, whatever it may have been, than I, alas, have been about Louis Norbert ! The other mystery, which is quite separate, though playing about, so to speak, in the same year, namely, that of Louis Norbert 's death, concerns a foreign royalty who haunts Italy, or at least the imagination of Italian princes and spies, about that same year 1684. He is described as a Turk, but, for that reason, is just as likely to have been something else. " The successor of Mahomet of whom you desire news has not yet arrived," writes Father Girolamo Nuti, minor observant, to some per- sonage merely described as " his Excellency." Then there is a barber, nicknamed Finoc- chio or Fennel, who says, " the person of whom you desire news is now in Rome. Be assured we shall keep an eye on him." Another and anonymous informant writes — " the dis- tinguished Mahometan arrived in Pisa two days ago, and is ill of Malaria, doubtless caught in Rome." 78 LOUIS NORBERT I shouldn't bother you with all this odd mysterious gossip of two centuries and a quarter ago, if it were not that your old enemy the Abbe Manfredini — " tres cherami de la couronne et nation de France " (rather, as you say, than of poor Louis Norbert) — is mixed up in all this, and evidently held in no higher esteem than by yourself and by old Christina of Sweden, who, perhaps you may remember, told Marchese Viscardi's great- great -grand-uncle that this Manfredini was a spy and a blackmailer, or worse. I have found a letter addressed on the back to his Excellency Monsignor Del Nero, Bailiff of the Order of St. Stephen (a Tuscan Military Order), and in it this sentence among a lot of cryptic code phrases : ' His Highness also desires that an eye be kept on the usual Abbe (il solito Abbate), who, from all we hear, appears to be up to his usual tricks {fa delle sue), for- getting that Pisa is not Baalbek (query : Rome ?), and that we will not suffer scoundrels of his kind to have a finger in the affairs of great kingdoms. His Highness has reason to know that this Manfredini is in Rome and LOUIS NORBERT 79 muddying the water, the better to fish in it. He intends to steal the Ace of Hearts and keep it up his sleeve, hoping to make a fine profit on his cards. But this His Highness is deter- mined not to suffer it. The said Abbe shall be warned to return home at once from Rome, else it will cost His Highness nothing to hear the last of him" (farla finita con esso lui). And finally : " What you advised me through the soprano singer (il musico) Sandro, that there might be risk in touching that Abbe, he being already in possession of certain facts and perhaps already selling his wares to the great merchants beyond the Alps, most certainly points to prudence. But His Highness is more and more incensed with this fellow's impudence who has long since deserved the law's rigour for illicit alchemy and worse, let alone his notorious atheism ; and if he meddles any further in the question of the mislaid crown jewel His Highness is greatly minded to suppress him altogether and with no more ado." I keep racking my brains as to who this 80 LOUIS NORBERT " ace of hearts " and " mislaid crown jewel " and " successor of Mahomet " can be. Isn't it odd that in seeking for details of the death of the obscure protege of your ancestors we should have come upon the traces of some mysterious personage about whom the various courts seem to be intriguing ? I had thought of Monmouth,Charles II. 's son,but the dates don't fit. I wonder whether this may lead to some brand new theory about that intolerable bore, the Man in the Iron Mask, and reinstate the old wives' tale of a twin brother of Louis XIV. ? But I have taken up too much of your time with matters which do not concern Louis Norbert and perhaps don't interest you ; forgive. By the way, have you no documents at Arthington concerning the date of birth and the parentage of your young Frenchman ? And if not, are there no family traditions as to his origin ? How I wish I might have the honour of assist- ing you in your Muniment Room, which will, I hope, make up for the failure of my own attempts. I am, dear Lady Venetia, Yours, etc. LOUIS NORBERT 81 LETTER IX From Lady Venetia to the Archceologist Arthington : May 10, 1909 My dear Professor, Good heavens ! What marvellous, patient creatures you historians must be ! I am beginning to appreciate you and your virtues after six mortal mornings spent in that detestable Muniment Room. For it is a sickening place. I had expected dust and cobwebs, perhaps a few broken twigs brought by rooks, like one sees in church towers ; or even (didn't I long for it as a child !) a huge magpie's nest with chicks sitting on the family's long-lost tea spoons. But I never bargained for a dull orderliness like a country solicitor's, and under that nothing but the most sordid accounts with an illegible writing and without a vestige of 82 LOUIS NORBERT spelling (even / feel sick at it !). Nothing but how much farmers paid, how much corn horses got, what was spent on repair of harness (item f or a " surcingle to her laddyship her mair," and suchlike) and making of liveries. Of course I know it's only because I am so frivolous that it all bores me to tears. I suppose you learned folk would find out all manner of interesting things. But it is a bit rough upon me, coming to a place athirst for romance and mystery. And so far not a vestige of anything of the sort have I come upon. How I do envy you all those dear spies and " successors of Mahomet " and villainous abbes, and even " Berenice with her crazy brain " in your Pisan archives ! Not a word, of course, about Louis Norbert ! Nothing but a growing conviction that how- ever poor a figure we Thesigers may be cutting nowadays (all blue Tories and dunces !) the Thesigers of the past were a set of horrible old screws, as is proved (if all they write about didn't show it) by their squalid economies of writing paper, crossing in every conceivable and inconceivable sense, abbreviating half LOUIS NORBERT 83 their words and writing on backs of letters and torn-out fly-leaves of books. They have pretty well broken my spirit, and if Louis Norbert doesn't make his appearance to- morrow morning, I shall give him up as a bad job and never set foot again in that odious Muniment Room ! Thursday. I wrote like that on Monday, and, as if he had heard me, Louis Norbert has turned up ! At least, I mean, a reference to him has. On Thursday I had what I thought was my last go at the Muniment Room, and behold ! I found a box of letters (so nice and yellow and with such lovely f 's and s's like fiddle clefs — the very look of them made my heart beat). And inside was an index (which of course wasn't an index) by the usual Rev. Rupert Thesiger, D.D., stating that in 1753 he had " put the contents in order (which wasn't a bit true) and that among it were some interesting letters of Sir Anthony Thesiger, Bart., afterwards Viscount," etc., etc., " during a journey to Paris in 1683." 84 LOUIS NORBERT 1683 ! The year before Louis Norbert's death ! And sure enough, in one of them of Sept. 16th, 1683, there was a mention of Louis Norbert ! Just think how I felt ! It was the fourth time I have seen his name (on the picture, on the epitaph, on the Rev. Rupert's inventory of portraits, and now) — that I have seen his beloved name except written by you or me. Just think of that ! But then archaeologists are accustomed to such emo- tions, digging up Troy and the Olympia Hermes and things like that. Well, Anthony Thesiger writes to his mother (the widow Dame Priscilla I told you of) from Paris. And after endless enumera- tion of all the fine folk he met at the Court of Louis XIV. (a rare young snob my ancestor was), and masses of description, which his poor old mother couldn't possibly have followed, of the palaces and gardens of Marly and Versailles, he suddenly ends off : " Your adopted Son is in no danger of being seduced to Popery (as you seem to apprehend) by the sight of all this magnificence. He looks upon these polite and delightful splendours with the LOUIS NORBERT 85 eyes of a Cato and compareth this place (Versailles) to Babel in the building and the builder thereof to Ahab and Pharaoh by reason of his cruel dealings with the Huguenots and the great lavishness of his court in the midst of much misery of the poor, whereat he noticeth justly, those accustomed to our happier country can scarce believe their senses, so ragged and starved do all the husbandmen of France appear. I have tried to soften our friend's ferocious virtue, to sacrifice, as they choicely say here, to the Graces, but so far all in vain." ' Like Babel in the building." Those are the very first words that Louis Norbert has uttered in our presence, dear Professor, and of course they are exactly what we should have expected of him, just exactly what we our- selves would have thought (for I'm a Socialist, aren't you ?), and he's a. friend, and it doesn't matter, does it, how long ago friends may have been born and died, they always know and love each other when they meet ! I always thought that if Louis Norbert had lived in our day he would have been a sort of Cunninghame 86 LOUIS NORBERT Graham (how awfully good those last stories of his are !) and held pro-Ferrer meetings in Trafalgar Square, and ridden a mustang and gone to prison for his opinions, and all the time dreadfully an aristocrat and hating publicity. And how exactly like that mean-spirited young Thesiger (I have not bothered to copy his grotesque, illiterate misspelling) to want Louis Norbert to " sacrifice to the graces " and enjoy all these " polite and delightful splen- dours " — he, I mean Thesiger, the son of a Cromwellian stalwart and " Avenge Lord thy murdered Saints " sort of person. Of course Louis Norbert just wouldn't, and merely quoted the Bible, which, after all, is a deal finer than all their Corneilles and Bossuets and the other things in the Cours de Dictees we were bored with. By the way, how did our delightful young Huguenot come to be buried in a Catholic cemetery ? Surely some part of that vil- lainous Abbe's plot ! These words of our dear Louis Norbert (I can't get over their happening to have just been his first to us !) have brought home to me LOUIS NORBERT 87 how much I have always loathed Louis XIV. and his court. It isn't really because of the Cours de Dictees and the six months I was made to spend at a school at Versailles. I've been back there time after time, and often in awfully good company (I like dining there after a hot day in Paris, don't you — much better than the Bois) ; but all the Louis XIV. part has always seemed to me utterly dull and pompous (just think of Villa d'Este at Tivoli or even the Boboli gardens !), except when autumn makes it untidy and — is it the right word ? — elegiac. And just think what it must have looked like when it was all new, tons and tons of brand new stone, and stucco like whipped cream, and trees the size of brussels sprouts, and lamentable, transplanted saplings wilting away in the gravel ! " Like Babel in the building, and the builder like Ahab or Pharaoh " — how true, and what a real friend Louis Norbert proves to be I Indeed he is far too lenient in his judgment, like all nice people (Cunninghame Graham, whom he's so like, when he writes in the Clarion against capitalists). I mean about 88 LOUIS NORBERT Louis XIV. For I rather liked Ahab in Renan's Peuple d'Israel (Jezebel was rather grande dame, don't you think ?), and as to Pharaoh, of course Louis Norbert had never been in Egypt, else he could never have been so disrespectful to those wonderful statues as to think of them in the same breath with that odious, bedizened vulgarian of a Roi Soleil. So like a magnified, vulgarised Sir Willoughby Patterne, with " he has a leg " (though I always think Meredith overdoes that leg !), perpetually posing and expecting the women to do all the love-making and the faithfulness ! Faugh ! And all those sickening grandees waiting about for him to pass (and the pompous wretch used to complain if they weren't there every day and every hour, do you remember ?) in hopes of getting a tabouret or an office or money at the end of ten or fifteen years of bowing and scraping. Don't you hate the silly way that people, particu- larly old ladies with intellectual pretensions, say to one, " My dear, you must read Mme. de Motteville — or the Cardinal de Retz " — or " Do let me lend you a volume of Saint Simon LOUIS NORBERT 89 — he is such a psychologist, my dear, and such exquisite wit," etc., etc., etc., when they ought to be ashamed of reading all that abominable gossip, like the lowest society papers and much more indecent, and all the cock and bull poisoning of people with pounded diamonds in eau de chicoree (of course pounded glass would have been too cheap for such grandees !). How I loathe it all, and how glad I am Louis Norbert loathed it also ! That brute of a Louis XIV., behaving like that to poor Mile, de La Valliere ! And how like him to end off with marrying a retired governess — so just what he would do. And then that little niece of Mazarin whom he jilted — what was her name ? She did score off him when he sent her away and she said, " Vous etes Roi, Sire, et vous pleurez et me laissez partir." I hope it's true and that he felt properly humiliated once in a way. Wasn't her name Berenice, like the lady of your Pisan spies — or why do I associate her with that ? Isn't it a play by Racine, dread- fully dull, but which one's French friends pretend to find exquis — and all exclaim go LOUIS NORBERT (you know their tone) " oh-o-o-o-oh — " about ? Write to me at once what you think of Louis Norbert's first appearance on our scene ; and whether you don't think all he says about Versailles and Louis XIV. SO true. Yours, etc. LETTER X From the Archceologist to Lady Venetia Pisa : May 18, 1909 Dear Lady Venetia, I am so glad you foresaw how en- chanted I should be at Louis Norbert not disappointing your search, and making his appearance upon (as you are kind enough to word it) our scene. And particularly with sentiments so very much in harmony with your own, in which I have the honour of quite LOUIS NORBERT 91 concurring. I am moreover quite personally obliged to your interesting and mysterious seventeenth-century friend for having, how- ever unintentionally, elicited the enchanting attack on Louis XIV. which you have done me the honour of addressing to me. I believe it to be of extraordinary historical value ; and I keep reading and re-reading it with infinite enjoyment. By a curious coincidence, I believe you have already solved, if not the riddle of your young Frenchman's end (but this will surely come out of your Muniment Room !), at all events one of the two historical mysteries I have come upon during my, unfortunately still fruitless, researches in these Pisan archives. You have discovered the identity of that enigmatic Berenice whose crazy fancies some- how exercised the Grand Duke of Tuscany's spies and diplomatists. Of course she was Marie Mancini, Mazarin's niece, and widow of the Constable Colonna. I ought to have guessed it at once, but it required your nimbler wits to put two and two together. You associated Mazarin's niece and " vous 92 LOUIS NORBERT ites Roi, Sire, et vous pleurez et me laissez partly " — with Racine's Berenice for the excellent reason that that play (on which I find you unduly severe) was suggested by Marie Mancini's treatment at Louis XIV. 's hands. Titus, who sacrifices his love for the Jewish princess to the Raison d'Etat of ancient Rome is Louis XIV. ; Berenice, who refuses to be jilted, is Marie Mancini, and so the Grand Duke and the Grand Ducal spies would naturally allude to her by that stage name. It is transparent ; only it took you to see it ! And the crazy fancy which frightened the Grand Duke was doubtless one of this lady's many schemes for forcing her way into the royal presence and attempting to reassert her former sway upon her quondam would-be bridegroom. Being, alas ! unable to send you any news of Louis Norbert (although I did send you some in my last of the Abbe you suspected of having murdered him), I shall take the liberty of posting you a rather delightful little book by Arvede Barine, which I happen to have by me (don't return it, it is of no value), LOUIS NORBERT 93 containing a most entertaining account of the Berenice in question. She is really rather a fascinating creature, the most wonderful of those wonderful Maz- arines, all with tragic or romantic adventures and splendid names : Olympe, Hortense, Laure, Soissons, Mercoeur, Mazarin, Conti, and so forth, amazons, wits, saints, astrologers or poisoneresses, driving seventeenth-century princes and ambassadors and prelates dis- tracted with their charms, their ambitions, or their crimes. Marie was the strangest of this handful of dangerous and amusing sirens, who were always scouring from one end of Europe to the other — Savoy to Spain, Rome to Brussels, sometimes dressed as men (Marie herself escaped from her Colonna husband in men's clothes and was very nearly taken by Corsairs and to the Great Turk's harem), sometimes dressed in the most genuine rags (do you re- member Madame de Sevigne's daughter lend- ing her shifts ?), now receiving the College of Cardinals in bed, now being put under lock and key in convents and fortresses ; making 94 LOUIS NORBERT verses, playing the guitar, drawing horo- scopes, and two of them, Olympe and Mari- anne, brought before the magistrates for poisoning. But I am merely spoiling Arvede Barine's little book for you with my pedantic summary. Forgive my dullness, as well as my (I trust temporary) inability to find any traces of Louis Norbert, and believe me, dear Lady Venetia, Yours, etc. PS. — Should the little book I am sending have the good fortune of interesting you in the Berenice whom you have so happily identified, there are two thick (and rather dull) volumes about her by Lucien Perrey which you will certainly be able to get from the London Library. LOUIS NORBERT 95 LETTER XI From Lady Venetia to the Archceologist Arthington : May 31 My dear Professor, I have found two more mentions of Louis Norbert in Anthony Thesiger's letters to his mother. (I must say that ancestor of mine is rather nice with the old lady, though he was a snob trying to make L. N. admire Versailles.) The first is of Oct. 21, 1683. He writes : " You need be under no apprehensions about your adopted son. These Frenchmen know not the difference between strangers. None of them guesses that Norbert is not an English name, and his French they find much less excellent than mine." (What a coxcomb!) " He consorteth only with persons of our own nation and a few learned men of Paris, and his 96 LOUIS NORBERT heresy is accounted the fault of being English. I have moreover always believed that there was but little truth in what we were told of his parents being Protestants ruined by Mazarin. I am informed that up to the rigorous measures of his present Majesty, the Pro- testants of this Kingdom have not been mal- treated although they were in Savoy already in Oliver's time. Also I am informed that the only family bearing your adopted son's name is one of very small gentry, or as they say here, hobereaux, in Gascony, and has suffered no exiles or other severities. But you well know what my dear father always thought." — (Evidently Dame Priscilla did not think what Arthington thinks about L. N.'s birth, and there must be some further mystery.) The second mention of L. N. is in a letter of Nov. 20, 1683. By the way, these letters were carried " by His Excellency's Gentleman " or by " a safe opportunity of His Lordship of Elgin returning home," not by the post. Well, it appears that a lawsuit had arisen requiring the presence of Anthony Thesiger. He therefore gives up, very unwillingly, the LOUIS NORBERT 97 remainder of his stay in France and his intended journey to Italy. He tells his mother that he will travel with all diligence to Arthington, hoping to arrive there in about ten days' time " if the sea be calm," but that her " adopted son " has already left Paris for Rome by way of Marseilles and Leghorn, with some personage who is called merely " his Lordship " and who is evidently some young gentleman with a numerous company of bear- leaders, for he adds : " Your adopted son will find himself at ease in this society, particularly by reason of his Lordship's tutor and inter- preter, the learned Mr. Humphrey Standish, who is well acquainted with the antiquities and other rarities of Italy, besides being no mean physician and a philosopher in corre- spondence with the famous Academy of the Lynxes. His Lordship is likewise followed by a good musician, Mr. Bob Lowndes, who is, in truth, in orders and serves as travelling chaplain in Popish countries." After which reassurances to the old lady's Protestantism he goes on : " Despite what I writ to y