PR 
 
 4527 
 ,P76 
 1900 
 
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 1 
 
 
 3 
 6 
 
 II 
 
 9! 
 
 A PR(WENCE 
 
 COSYCORN6R SCRIES
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 I UNIVERSITY OP 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 ;R\JF 
 
 PR 
 4521 
 
 1300
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE.
 
 Works of 
 
 Louisa de la Rame 
 
 ("Ouida") 
 
 A Dog of Flanders 
 The Niirnberg Stove 
 A Provence Rose 
 Two Little Wooden Shoes 
 
 L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 (Incorporated) 
 
 212 Summer St., Boston, Mass.
 
 "Cosy Corner Series ' 
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE 
 
 BY 
 
 LOUISA DE LA RAME 
 ("OUIDA") 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 BOSTON 
 L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 (INCORPORATED) 
 1900
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1893 
 
 UY 
 
 JOSEPH KNIUHT COMPANY
 
 "You PAINTED THIS, M. RENE CLAUDE?" Frontispiece. 
 
 "A YOING GIKI, HAD FOUND AND RESCUED ME" . 7 
 
 " IN A VERY NARROW STREET" . . . . . 13 
 
 "HE WAS A PAINTER" 22 
 
 "ONE NICHT . . . Liu CAME TO MY SIDE BY THE 
 
 OPEN LATTICE" . 28 
 
 " SHE FELL ON HER KNEES BEFORE IT " . . . 39 
 
 TAILPIECE, PART 1 42 
 
 HEADPIECE, PART II 43 
 
 TAILPIECE, PART II 75
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE 
 
 PART FIRST. 
 
 I WAS a Provence rose. 
 
 A little slender rose, with leaves of shining 
 green and blossoms of purest white, a little 
 fragile thing, but fair, they said, growing in the 
 casement in a chamber in a street. 
 
 I remember my birth-country well. A great 
 wild garden, where roses grew together by mill- 
 ions and tens of millions, all tossing our bright 
 heads in the light of a southern sun on the 
 edge of an old, old city old as Rome 
 whose ruins were clothed with the wild fig-tree 
 and the scarlet blossom of the climbing creep- 
 ers growing tall and free in our glad air of 
 France. 
 
 I remember how the ruined aqueduct went 
 like a dark shadow straight across the plains ; 
 how the green and golden lizards crept in and 
 out and about amongst the grasses; how the 
 cicala sang her song in the moist, sultry eves ;
 
 2 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 how the women from the wells came trooping 
 by, stately as monarchs, with their water-jars 
 upon their heads ; how the hot hush of the 
 burning noons would fall, and all things droop 
 and sleep except ourselves ; how swift amongst 
 us would dart the little blue-winged birds, and 
 hide their heads in our white breasts and drink 
 from our hearts the dew, and then hover above 
 us in their gratitude, with sweet, faint music of 
 their wings, till sunset came. 
 
 I remember But what is the use? I am 
 only a rose ; a thing born for a day, to bloom 
 and be gathered, and die. So you say: you 
 must know. God gave you all created things 
 for your pleasure and use. So you say. 
 
 There my birth was; there I lived in the 
 wide south, with its strong, quivering light, its 
 radiant skies, its purple plains, its fruits of 
 gourd and vine. I was young; I was happy; 
 I lived : it was enough. 
 
 One day a rough hand tore me from my 
 parent stem and took me, bleeding and droop- 
 ing, from my birthplace, with a thousand other 
 captives of my kind. They bound a score of 
 us up together, and made us a cruel substitute 
 for our cool, glad garden-home with poor 
 leaves, all wet from their own tears, and mosses
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 3 
 
 torn as we were from their birth-nests under 
 the great cedars that rose against the radiant 
 native skies. 
 
 Then we were shut in darkness for I know 
 not how long a space ; and when we saw the 
 light of day again we were lying with our dear 
 dead friends, the leaves, with many flowers of 
 various kinds, and foliage and ferns and shrubs 
 and creeping plants, in a place quite strange 
 to us, a place filled with other roses and with 
 all things that bloom and bear in the rich days 
 of midsummer, a place which I heard them 
 call the market of the Madeleine. And when 
 I heard that name I knew that I was in Paris. 
 
 For many a time, when the dread hand of 
 the reaper had descended upon us, and we had 
 beheld our fairest and most fragrant relatives 
 borne away from us to death, a shiver that was 
 not of the wind had run through all our boughs 
 and blossoms, and all the roses had murmured 
 in sadness and in terror, " Better the worm or 
 the drought, the blight or the fly, the whirl- 
 wind that scatters us as chaff, or the waterspout 
 that levels our proudest with the earth better 
 any of these than the long-lingering death by 
 famine and faintness and thirst that awaits 
 every flower which goes to the Madeleine."
 
 4 A TROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 It was an honor, no doubt, to be so chosen. 
 A rose was the purest, the sweetest, the haught- 
 iest of all her sisterhood ere she went thither. 
 But, though honor is well no doubt, yet it 
 surely is better to blow free in the breeze and 
 to live one's life out, and to be, if forgotten by 
 glory, yet also forgotten by pain. Nay, yet: 
 I have known a rose, even a rose who had but 
 one little short life of a summer day to live 
 through and to lose, perish glad and trium- 
 phant in its prime because it died on a woman's 
 breast and of a woman's kiss. You see there 
 are roses as weak as men are. 
 
 I awoke, I say, from my misery and my long 
 night of travel, with my kindred beside me in 
 exile, on a flower-stall of the Madeleine. 
 
 It was noon the pretty place was full of 
 people : it was June, and the day was brilliant. 
 A woman of Picardy sat with us on the board 
 before her, a woman with blue eyes and ear- 
 rings of silver, who bound us together in fifties 
 and hundreds into those sad gatherings of our 
 pale ghosts which in your human language you 
 have called " bouquets." The loveliest and 
 greatest amongst us suffered decapitation, as 
 your Marie Stuarts and Marie Antoinettes did, 
 and died at once to have their beautiful, bright
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 5 
 
 heads impaled a thing of death, a mere 
 mockery of a flower on slender spears of 
 wire. I, a little white and fragile thing, and 
 very young, was in no way eminent enough 
 amongst my kind to find that martyrdom which 
 as surely awaits the loveliest of our roses as it 
 awaits the highest fame of your humanity. 
 
 I was bound up amongst a score of others 
 with ropes of gardener's bass to chain me 
 amidst my fellow-prisoners, and handed over 
 by my jailer with the silver ear-rings to a youth 
 who paid for us with a piece of gold whether 
 of great or little value I know not now. None 
 of my own roses were with me : all were stran- 
 gers. You never think, of course, that a little 
 rose can care for its birthplace or its kindred ; 
 but you err. 
 
 O fool ! Shall we not care for one another ? 
 we who have so divine a life in common, 
 who together sleep beneath the stars, and to- 
 gether sport in the summer wind, and together 
 listen to the daybreak singing of the birds, 
 whilst the world is dark and deaf in slumber 
 we who know that we are all of heaven that God, 
 when He called away His angels, bade them 
 leave on the sin-stained, weary, sickly earth to 
 now and then make man remember Him !
 
 6 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 You err. We love one another well ; and if 
 we may not live in union, we crave at least 
 in union to droop and die. It is seldom that 
 we have this boon. Wild flowers can live and 
 die together ; so can the poor amongst you : 
 but we of the cultivated garden needs must 
 part and die alone. 
 
 All the captives with me were strangers: 
 haughty, scentless pelargoniums; gardenias, 
 arrogant even in their woe ; a knot of little, 
 humble forget-me-nots, ashamed in the grand 
 company of patrician prisoners ; a stephanalis, 
 virginal and pure, whose dying breath was 
 peace and sweetness ; and many sprays of myr- 
 tle born in Rome, whose classic leaves wailed 
 Tasso's lamentation as they went. 
 
 I must have been more loosely fettered than 
 the rest were, for in the rough, swift motion of 
 the youth who bore us my bonds gave way and 
 I fell through the silver transparency of our 
 prison-house, and dropped stunned upon the 
 stone pavement of a street. 
 
 There I lay long, half senseless, praying, so 
 far as I had consciousness, that some pitying 
 wind would rise and waft me on his wings away 
 to some shadow, some rest, some fresh, cool 
 place of silence.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 I was tortured with thirst ; I was choked with 
 dust ; I was parched with heat. 
 
 The sky was as brass, the stones as red-hot 
 metal ; the sun scorched 
 like flame on the glare of 
 the staring walls; the 
 heavy feet of the hurrying 
 crowd tramped past me 
 black and ponderous; 
 with every step I thought 
 my death would come 
 under the crushing weight 
 of those clanging heels. 
 
 It was five seconds, 
 five hours which I know 
 not. The torture was too 
 horrible to be measured 
 by time. I must have 
 been already dead, or at 
 the very gasp of death, 
 when a cool, soft touch 
 was laid on me ; I was 
 gently lifted, raised to 
 
 w 
 
 tender lips, and fanned 
 
 with a gentle, cooling breath, breath from the 
 
 lips that had kissed me. 
 
 A young girl had found and rescued me,
 
 8 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 a girl of the people, poor enough to deem a 
 trampled flower a treasure-trove. 
 
 She carried me very gently, carefully veiling 
 me from sun and dust as we went; and when I 
 recovered perception I was floating in a porce- 
 lain bath on the surface of cool, fresh water, 
 from which I drank eagerly as soon as my sickly 
 sense of faintness passed away. 
 
 My bath stood on the lattice-sill of a small 
 chamber ; it was, I knew afterward, but a white 
 pan of common earthenware, such as you buy 
 for two sous and put in your birdcages. But 
 no bath of ivory and pearl and silver was ever 
 more refreshing to imperial or patrician limbs 
 than was that little clean and snowy pattypan 
 to me. 
 
 Under its reviving influences I became able 
 to lift my head and raise my leaves and spread 
 myself to the sunlight, and look round me. 
 The chamber was in the roof, high above the 
 traffic of the passage-way beneath ; it was very 
 poor, very simple, furnished with few and homely 
 things. True, to all our nation of flowers it 
 matters little, when we are borne into captivity, 
 whether the prison-house which receives us be 
 palace or garret. Not to us can it signify whether 
 we perish in Sevres vase of royal blue, or in
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 9 
 
 kitchen pipkin of brown ware. Your lordliest 
 halls can seem but dark, pent, noisome dungeons 
 to creatures born to live on the wide plain, by 
 the sunlit meadow, in the hedgerow, or the forest, 
 or the green, leafy garden-way ; tossing always 
 in the joyous winds, and looking always upward 
 to the open sky. 
 
 But it is of little use to dwell on this. You 
 think that flowers, like animals, were only created 
 to be used and abused by you, and that we, 
 like your horse and dog, should be grateful 
 when you honor us by slaughter or starvation 
 at your hands. To be brief, this room was 
 very humble, a mere attic, with one smaller still 
 opening from it; but I scarcely thought of its 
 size or aspect. I looked at nothing but the 
 woman who had saved me. She was quite 
 young ; not very beautiful, perhaps, except for 
 wonderful soft azure eyes, and a mouth smiling 
 and glad, with lovely curves to the lips, and hair 
 dark as a raven's wing, which was braided and 
 bound close to her head. She was clad very 
 poorly, yet with an exquisite neatness and even 
 grace ; for she was of the people no doubt, but of 
 the people of France. Her voice was very me- 
 lodious ; she had a silver cross on her bosom ; 
 and, though her face was pale, it had health.
 
 10 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 She was my friend, I felt sure. Yes, even 
 when she held me and pierced me with steel and 
 murmured over me, " They say roses are so 
 hard to rear so, and you are such a little thing ; 
 but do grow to a tree and live with me. Surely, 
 you can if you try." 
 
 She had wounded me sharply and thrust me 
 into a tomb of baked red clay filled with black 
 and heavy mould. But I knew that I was 
 pierced to the heart that I might though only 
 a little offshoot gathered to die in a day strike 
 root of my own and be strong, and carry a 
 crown of fresh blossoms. For she but dealt 
 with me as your world deals with you, when 
 your heart aches and your brain burns, and 
 Fate stabs you, and says in your ear, " O fool ! 
 to be great you must suffer." You to your fate 
 are thankless, being human ; but I, a rose, was 
 not. 
 
 I tried to feel not utterly wretched in that 
 little, dull clay cell ; I tried to forget my sweet, 
 glad southern birthplace, and not to sicken and 
 swoon in the noxious gases of the city air. I 
 did my best not to shudder in the vapor of the 
 stove, and not to grow pale in the clammy heats 
 of the street, and not to die of useless lamenta- 
 tion for all that I had lost for the noble tawny
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. I I 
 
 sunsets, and the sapphire blue skies, and the 
 winds all fragrant with the almond-tree flowers, 
 and the sunlight in which the yellow orioles 
 flashed like gold. 
 
 I did my best to be content and show my 
 gratitude all through a parching autumn and 
 a hateful winter ; and with the spring a wander- 
 ing wind came and wooed me with low, amorous 
 whispers came from the south, he said; and 
 I learned that even in exile in an attic window 
 love may find us out and make for us a country 
 and a home. 
 
 So I lived and grew and was happy there 
 against the small, dim garret panes, and my 
 lover from the south came, still faithful, year by 
 year ; and all the voices round me said that I was 
 fair pale indeed, and fragile of strength, as a 
 creature torn from its own land and all its friends 
 must be, but contented and glad, and grateful 
 to the God who made me, because I had not 
 lived in vain, but often saw sad eyes, half 
 blinded with toil and tears, smile at me when 
 they had no other cause for smiles. 
 
 " It is bitter to be mewed in a city," said 
 once to me an old, old vine who had been 
 thrust into the stones below and had climbed 
 the house wall, Heaven knew how, and had lived
 
 12 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 for half a century jammed between buildings, 
 catching a gleam of sunshine on his dusty 
 leaves once perhaps in a whole summer. "It 
 is bitter for us. I would rather have had the 
 axe at my root and been burned. But perhaps 
 without us the poorest of people would never 
 remember the look of the fields. When they 
 see a green leaf they laugh a little, and then 
 weep some of them. We, the trees and the 
 flowers, live in the cities as those souls amongst 
 them whom they call poets live in the world, 
 exiled from heaven that by them the world may 
 now and then bethink itself of God." 
 
 And I believe that the vine spoke truly. 
 Surely, he who plants a green tree in a city way 
 plants a thought of God in many a human heart 
 arid with the dust of travail and clogged with 
 the greeds of gold. So, with my lover the 
 wind and my neighbor the vine, I was content 
 and patient, and gave many hours of pleasure 
 to many hard lives, and brought forth many a 
 blossom of sweetness in that little nook under 
 the roof. 
 
 Had my brothers and sisters done better, I 
 wonder, living in gilded balconies or dying in 
 jewelled hands? 
 
 I cannot say : I can only tell of myself.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 The attic in which 
 I found it my fate to 
 dwell was very high 
 in the air, set in one 
 of the peaked roofs 
 of the quarter of the 
 Luxembourg, in a 
 very narrow street, 
 populous, and full of 
 noise, in which people 
 of all classes, except 
 the rich, were to be 
 found in a medley 
 of artists, students, 
 fruit-sellers, workers 
 in bronze and ivory, 
 seamstresses, obscure 
 actresses, and all the 
 creators, male and 
 female, of the thou- 
 sand and one airy arts 
 of elegant nothing- 
 ness \vhich a world 
 of pleasure demands 
 as imperatively as a 
 world of labor de- 
 mands its bread.
 
 14 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 It would have been a street horrible and hid- 
 eous in any city save Rome or Paris : in Rome 
 it would have been saved by color and antiq- 
 uity; in Paris it was saved by color and 
 grace. Just a flash of a bright drapery, just 
 a gleam of a gay hue, just some tender pink 
 head of a hydrangea, just some quaint curl of 
 some gilded woodwork, just the green glimmer 
 of my friend the vine, just the snowy sparkle 
 of his neighbor the waterspout, just these, so 
 little and yet so much, made the crooked pas- 
 sage a bearable home, and gave it a kinship 
 with the glimpse of the blue sky above its pent 
 roofs. 
 
 O wise and true wisdom ! to redeem poverty 
 with the charms of outline and of color, with the 
 green bough and the song of running water, 
 and the artistic harmony which is as possible to 
 the rough-hewn pine-wood as in the polished 
 ebony. "It is of no use!" you cry. O fools! 
 Which gives you perfume we, the roses, 
 whose rich hues and matchless grace no human 
 artist can imitate, or the rose-tremiere, which 
 mocks us, standing stiff and gaudy and scentless 
 and erect? Grace and pure color and cleanli- 
 ness are the divinities that redeem the foulness 
 and the ignorance and the slavery of your
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 15 
 
 crushed, coarse lives when you have sight 
 enough to see that they are divine. 
 
 In my little attic, in whose window I have 
 passed my life, they were known gods and hon- 
 ored ; so that, despite "the stovepipe, and the 
 poverty, and the little ill-smelling candle, and 
 the close staircase without, with the rancid oil in 
 its lamps and its fetid faint odors, and the ref- 
 use, and the gutters, and the gas in the street 
 below, it was possible for me, though a rose of 
 Provence and a rose of the open air freeborn, 
 to draw my breath in it and to bear my blos- 
 soms, and to smile when my lover the wind 
 roused me from sleep with each spring, and 
 said in my ear," " Arise ! for a new year is 
 come." Now, to greet a new year with a smile, 
 and not a sigh, one must be tranquil, at least, 
 if not happy. 
 
 Well, I and the lattice, and a few homely 
 plants of saxafrage and musk and balsam who 
 bloomed there with me, and a canary who hung 
 in a cage amongst us, and a rustic creeper who 
 clung to a few strands of strained string and 
 climbed to the roof and there talked all day to 
 the pigeons we all belonged to the girl with 
 the candid, sweet eyes, and by name she was 
 called Lili Kerrouel, and for her bread she
 
 1 6 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 gilded and colored those little cheap boxes for 
 sweetmeats that they sell in the wooden booths 
 at the fairs on the boulevards, while the mirli- 
 tons whirl in their giddy go-rounds and the 
 merry horns of the charlatans challenge the 
 populace. She was a girl of the people : she 
 could read, but I doubt if she could write. She 
 had been born of peasant parents in a Breton 
 hamlet, and they had come to Paris to seek 
 work, and had found it for a while and pros- 
 pered, and then had fallen sick and lost it, 
 and struggled for a while, and then died, run- 
 ning the common course of so many lives 
 amongst you. They had left Lili alone at six- 
 teen, or rather worse than alone with an old 
 grandam, deaf and quite blind, who could do 
 nothing for her own support, but sat all day in 
 a wicker chair by the lattice or the stove, ac- 
 cording as the season was hot or cold, and 
 mumbled a little inarticulately over her worn 
 wooden beads. 
 
 Her employers allowed Lili to bring these 
 boxes to decorate at home, and she painted at 
 them almost from dawn to night. She swept, 
 she washed, she stewed, she fried, she dusted ; 
 she did all the housework of her two little 
 rooms ; she tended the old woman in all ways ;
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. I/ 
 
 and she did all these things with such cleanliness 
 and deftness that the attics were wholesome as 
 a palace ; and though her pay was very small, 
 she yet found means and time to have her linen 
 spotless and make her pots and pans shine like 
 silver and gold, and to give a grace to all the 
 place, with the song of a happy bird and the 
 fragrance of flowers that blossomed their best 
 and their sweetest for her sake, when they would 
 fain have withered to the root and died in their 
 vain longing for the pure breath of the fields and 
 the cool of a green woodland world. 
 
 It was a little, simple, hard life, no doubt, 
 a life one would have said scarce worth all the 
 trouble it took to get bread enough to keep it 
 going, a hard life, coloring always the same 
 eternal little prints all day long, no matter how 
 sweet the summer day might be, or how hot 
 the tired eyes. 
 
 A hard life, with all the wondrous, glorious, 
 wasteful, splendid life of the beautiful city 
 around it in so terrible a contrast ; with the roll 
 of the carriages day and ntght on the stones 
 beneath, and the pattering of the innumerable 
 feet below, all hurrying to some pleasure, and 
 every moment some burst of music or some 
 chime of bells or some ripple of laughter on
 
 1 8 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 the air. A hard life, sitting one's self in a little 
 dusky garret in the roof, and straining one's 
 sight for two sous an hour, and listening to an 
 old woman's childish mutterings and reproaches, 
 and having always to shake the head in refusal 
 of the neighbors' invitations to a day in the 
 woods or a sail on the river. A hard life, no 
 doubt, when one is young and a woman, and 
 has soft, shining eyes and a red, curling mouth. 
 
 And yet Lili was content. 
 
 Content, because she was a French girl ; be- 
 cause she had always been poor, and thought 
 two sous an hour riches ; because she loved 
 the helpless old creature whose senses had all 
 died while her body lived on ; because she was 
 an artist at heart, and saw beautiful things 
 round her even when she scoured her brasses 
 and washed down her bare floor. 
 
 Content, because with it all she managed to 
 gather a certain "sweetness and light" into her 
 
 o 
 
 youth of toil ; and when she could give herself 
 a few hours' holiday, and could go beyond the 
 barriers, and roam a little in the wooded places, 
 and come home with a knot of primroses or a 
 plume of lilac in her hands, she was glad and 
 grateful as though she had been given gold and 
 gems.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 19 
 
 Ah ! In the lives of you who have wealth 
 and leisure we, the flowers, are but one thing 
 among many : we have a thousand rivals in 
 your porcelains, your jewels, your luxuries, 
 your intaglios, your mosaics, all your treasures 
 of art, all your baubles of fancy. But in the 
 lives of the poor we are alone : we are all the 
 art, all the treasure, all the grace, all the beauty 
 of outline, all the purity of hue, that they pos- 
 sess: often we are all their innocence and all 
 their religion too. 
 
 Why do you not set yourselves to make us 
 more abundant in those joyless homes, in those 
 sunless windows? 
 
 Now this street of hers was very narrow : it 
 was full of old houses, that nodded their heads 
 close together as they talked, like your old 
 crones over their fireside gossip. 
 
 I could, from my place in the window, see 
 right into the opposite garret window. It had 
 nothing of my nation in it, save a poor colorless 
 stone-wort, who got a dismal living in the gutter 
 of the roof, yet who too, in his humble way, 
 did good and had his friends, and paid the sun 
 and the dew for calling him into being. For 
 on that rainpipe the little dusty, thirsty spar- 
 rows would rest and bathe and plume them-
 
 2O A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 selves, and bury their beaks in the pale stone- 
 crop, and twitter with one another joyfully, and 
 make believe that they were in some green and 
 amber meadow in the country in the cowslip 
 time. 
 
 I did not care much for the stone-crop or the 
 sparrows ; but in the third summer of my cap- 
 tivity there with Lili the garret casement oppo- 
 site stood always open, as ours did, and I could 
 watch its tenant night and day as I chose. 
 
 He had an interest for me. 
 
 He was handsome, and about thirty years 
 old ; with a sad and noble face, and dark eyes 
 full of dreams, and cheeks terribly hollow, and 
 clothes terribly threadbare. 
 
 He thought no eyes were on him when my 
 lattice looked dark, for his garret, like ours, 
 was so high that no glance from the street ever 
 went to it. Indeed, when does a crowd ever 
 pause to look at a garret, unless by chance a 
 man have hanged himself out of its window? 
 That in thousands of garrets men may be dying 
 by inches for lack of bread, lack of hope, lack 
 of justice, is not enough to draw any eyes up- 
 ward to them from the pavement. 
 
 He thought himself unseen, and I watched 
 him many a long hour of the summer night
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 21 
 
 when I sighed at my square open pane in the 
 hot, sulphurous mists of the street, and tried to 
 see the stars and could not. For, between me 
 and the one small breadth of sky which alone 
 the innumerable roofs left visible, a vintner had 
 hung out a huge gilded imperial crown as 
 a sign on his roof-tree ; and the crown, with its 
 sham gold turning black in the shadow, hung 
 between me and the planets. 
 
 I knew that there must be many human souls 
 in a like plight with myself, with the light of 
 heaven blocked from them by a gilded tyranny ; 
 and yet I sighed and sighed and sighed, think- 
 ing of the white, pure stars of Provence throbb- 
 ing in her violet skies. 
 
 A rose is hardly wiser than a poet, you see ; 
 neither rose nor poet will be comforted, and be 
 content to dwell in darkness because a crown 
 of tinsel swings on high. 
 
 Well, not seeing the stars as I strove to do, 
 I took refuge in sorrow for my neighbor. It 
 is well for your poet when he turns to a like 
 resource. Too often I hear he takes, instead, 
 to the wine-cellar which yawns under the crown 
 that he curses. 
 
 My neighbor, I soon saw, was poorer even 
 than we were. He was a painter, and he painted
 
 22 
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 beautiful things. But his canvases and the nec- 
 essaries of his art were nearly all that his empty 
 
 attic had in it; and when, after working many 
 hours with a wretched glimmer of oil, he would'
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 23 
 
 come to his lattice and lean out, and try, as I 
 had tried, to see the stars, and fail, as I had 
 failed, I saw that he was haggard, pallid, and 
 weary unto death with two dire diseases, hun- 
 ger and ambition. 
 
 He could not see the stars because of the 
 crown, but in time, in those long midsummer 
 nights, he came to see a little glowworm amongst 
 my blossoms, which in a manner, perhaps, did 
 nearly as well. 
 
 He came to notice Lili at her work. Often 
 she had to sit up half the night to get enough 
 coloring done to make up the due amount of 
 labor ; and she sat at her little deal table, with 
 her little feeble lamp, with her beautiful hair 
 coiled up in a great knot and her pretty head 
 drooping so wearily as we do in the long 
 days of drought but never once looking off, 
 nor giving way to rebellion or fatigue, though 
 from the whole city without there came one 
 ceaseless sound, like the sound of an endless 
 sea; which truly it was the sea of pleasure. 
 
 Not for want of coaxings, not for want of 
 tempters, various and subtle, and dangers often 
 and perilously sweet, did Lili sit there in her 
 solitude earning two sous an hour with strain- 
 ing sight and aching nerves that the old
 
 24 A TROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 paralytic creature within might have bed and 
 board without alms. Lili had been sore beset 
 in a thousand ways, for she was very fair to 
 see ; but she was proud and she was innocent, 
 and she kept her courage and her honor ; yea, 
 though you smile though she dwelt under 
 an attic roof, and that roof a roof of Paris. 
 
 My neighbor, in the old gabled window over 
 the way, leaning above his stone-wort, saw her 
 one night thus at work by her lamp, with the 
 silver ear-rings, that were her sole heirloom and 
 her sole wealth, drooped against the soft hues 
 and curves of her graceful throat. 
 
 And when he had looked once, he looked 
 every night, and found her there ; and I, who 
 could see straight into his chamber, saw that he 
 went and made a picture of it all of me, and 
 the bird in the cage, and the little old dusky 
 lamp, and Lili with her silver ear-rings and her 
 pretty, drooping head. 
 
 Every day he worked at the picture, and 
 every night he put his light out and came and 
 sat in the dark square of his lattice, and gazed 
 across the street through my leaves and my 
 blossoms at my mistress. Lili knew nothing of 
 this watch which he kept on her ; she had put 
 up a little blind of white network, and she
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 2$ 
 
 fancied that it kept out every eye when it was 
 up ; and often she took even that away, because 
 she had not the heart to deprive me of the few 
 faint breezes which the sultry weather gave us. 
 
 She never saw him in his dark hole in the 
 old gable there, and I never betrayed him 
 not I. Roses have been the flowers of silence 
 ever since the world began. Are we not the 
 flowers of love? 
 
 "Who is he?" I asked of my gossip the vine. 
 The vine had lived fifty years in the street, and 
 knew the stories and sorrows of all the human 
 bees in the hive. 
 
 " He is called Rene Claude," said the vine. 
 "He is a man of genius. He is very poor." 
 
 " You use synonyms," murmured the old 
 balsam, who heard. 
 
 " He is an artist," the vine continued. "He 
 is young. He comes from the south. His 
 people are guides in the Pyrenees. He is a 
 dreamer of dreams. He has taught himself 
 many things. He has eloquence too. There 
 is a little club at the back of the house which 
 I climb over. I throw a tendril or two in 
 at the crevices and listen. The shutters are 
 closed. It is forbidden by law for men to 
 meet so. There Rene speaks by the hour,
 
 26 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 superbly. Such a rush of words, such a glance, 
 such a voice, like the roll of musketry in anger, 
 like the sigh of music in sadness ! Though 
 I am old, it makes the little sap there is left in 
 me thrill and grow warm. He paints beautiful 
 things too ; so the two swallows say who build 
 under his eaves ; but I suppose it is not of 
 much use : no one believes in him, and he al- 
 most starves. He is young yet, and feels the 
 strength in him, and still strives to do great 
 things for the world that does not care a jot 
 whether he lives or dies. He will go on so a 
 little longer. Then he will end like me. I used 
 to try and bring forth the best grapes I could, 
 though they had shut me away from any sun to 
 ripen them and any dews to cleanse the dust 
 from them. But no one cared. No one gave 
 me a drop of water to still my thirst, nor pushed 
 away a brick to give me a ray more of light. 
 So I ceased to try and produce for their good ; 
 and I only took just so much trouble as would 
 keep life in me myself. It will be the same 
 with this man." 
 
 I, being young and a rose, the flower loved 
 of the poets, thought the vine was a cynic, as 
 many of you human creatures grow to be in the 
 years of your age when the leaves of your life
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 2 7 
 
 fall sere. I watched Rene long and often. He 
 was handsome, he suffered much ; and when 
 the night was far spent he would come to his 
 hole in the gable and gaze with tender, dream- 
 ing eyes past my pale foliage to the face of 
 Lili. I grew to care for him, and I disbelieved 
 the prophecy of the vine ; and I promised my- 
 self that one summer or another, near or far, 
 the swallows, when they came from the tawny 
 African world to build in the eaves of the city, 
 would find their old friend flown and living no 
 more in a garret, but in some art-palace where 
 men knew his fame. 
 
 So I dreamed I, a little white rose, exiled 
 in the passage of a city, seeing the pale moon- 
 light reflected on the gray walls and the dark 
 windows, and trying to cheat myself by a thou- 
 sand fancies into the faith that I once more 
 blossomed in the old, sweet, leafy garden-ways 
 in Provence. 
 
 One night the hottest night of the year 
 Lili came to my side by the open lattice. It 
 was very late ; her work was done for the night. 
 She stood a moment, with her lips rested softly 
 on me, looking down on the pavement that 
 glistened like silver in the sleeping rays of the 
 moon.
 
 28 
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 29 
 
 For the first time she saw the painter Rene 
 watching her from his niche in the gable, with 
 eyes that glowed and yet were dim. 
 
 I think women foresee with certain prescience 
 when they will be loved. She drew the lattice 
 quickly to, and blew the lamp out : she kissed 
 me in the darkness. Because her heart was 
 glad or sorry? Both, perhaps. 
 
 Love makes one selfish. For the first time 
 she left my lattice closed all through the op- 
 pressive hours until daybreak. 
 
 "Whenever a woman sees anything out of 
 her window that makes her eager to look again, 
 she always shuts the shutter. Why, I wonder? " 
 said the balsam to me. 
 
 " That she may peep unsuspected through 
 a chink," said the vine round the corner, who 
 could overhear. 
 
 It was profane of the vine, and in regard to 
 Lili untrue. She did not know very well, I 
 dare say, why she withdrew herself on that sud- 
 den impulse, as the pimpernel shuts itself up 
 at the touch of a raindrop. 
 
 But she did not stay to look through a crev- 
 ice ; she went straight to her little narrow bed, 
 and told her beads and prayed, and slept till the
 
 3O A P-ROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 cock crew in a stable near and the summer day- 
 break came. 
 
 She might have been in a chamber all mirror 
 and velvet and azure and gold in any one of the 
 ten thousand places of pleasure, and been lean- 
 ing over gilded balconies under the lime leaves, 
 tossing up little paper balloons in the air for 
 gay wagers of love and wine and jewels. Pleas- 
 ure had asked her more than once to come 
 down from her attic and go with its crowds ; 
 for she was fair of feature and lithe of limb, 
 though only a work-girl of Paris. And she 
 would not, but slept here under the eaves, as 
 the swallows did. 
 
 "We have not seen enough, little rose, you 
 and I," she would say to me with a smile and a 
 sigh. " But it is better to be a little pale, and 
 live a little in the dark, and be a little cramped 
 in a garret window, than to live grand in the 
 sun for a moment, and the next to be tossed 
 away in a gutter. And one can be so happy 
 anyhow almost anyhow !-- when one is 
 young. If I could only see a very little piece 
 more of the sky, and get every Sunday out to 
 the dear woods, and live one floor lower, so 
 that the winters were riot quite so cold and the 
 summers not quite so hot, and find a little more
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 31 
 
 time to go to mass in the cathedral, and be abk 
 to buy a pretty blue-and-white home of por- 
 celain for you, I should ask nothing more of the 
 blessed Mary nothing more upon earth." 
 
 She had had the same simple bead-roll of in- 
 nocent wishes ever since the first hour that she 
 had raised me from the dust of the street ; and 
 it would, I doubt not, have remained her only 
 one all the years of her life, till she should have 
 glided down into a serene and cheerful old age 
 of poverty and labor under that very same roof, 
 without the blessed Mary ever deigning to 
 harken or answer. Would have done so if the 
 painter Rene could have seen the stars, and 
 so had not been driven to look instead at the 
 glow-worm through my leaves. 
 
 But after that night on which she shut to the 
 lattice so suddenly, I think the bead-roll length- 
 ened lengthened, though for some time the 
 addition to it was written on her heart in a 
 mystical language which she did not try to 
 translate even to herself I suppose fearing its 
 meaning. 
 
 Rene made approaches to his neighbor's 
 friendship soon after that night. He was but 
 an art student, the son of a poor mountaineer, 
 and with scarce a thing he could call his own
 
 32 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 except an easel of deal, a few plaster casts, and 
 a bed of straw. She was but a working-girl, 
 born of Breton peasants, and owning as her sole 
 treasures two silver ear-rings and a \vhite rose. 
 
 But for all that, no courtship could have been 
 more reverential on the one side or fuller of 
 modest grace on the other if the scene of it had 
 been a palace of princes or a chateau of the 
 nobles. 
 
 He spoke very little. 
 
 The vine had said that at the club round the 
 corner he was very eloquent, with all the im- 
 passioned and fierce eloquence common to men 
 of the south. But with Lili he was almost 
 mute. The vine, who knew human nature well 
 as vines always do, since their juices unlock 
 the secret thoughts of men and bring to day- 
 light their darkest passions the vine said that 
 such silence in one by nature eloquent showed 
 the force of his love and its delicacy. 
 
 This may be so : I hardly know. My lover 
 the wind, when he is amorous, is loud ; but then 
 it is true his loves are not often very constant. 
 
 Rene chiefly wooed her by gentle service. 
 He brought her little lovely wild flowers, for 
 which he ransacked the woods of St. Germains 
 and Meudon. He carried the billets of her fire-
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 33 
 
 wood up the seven long, twisting, dirty flights 
 of stairs. He fought for her with the wicked 
 old porteress at the door downstairs. He 
 played to her in the gray of the evening on a 
 quaint, simple flute, a relic of his boyhood, the 
 sad, wild, touching airs of his own southern 
 mountains played at his open window while 
 the lamps burned through the dusk, till the 
 people listened at their doors and casements 
 and gathered in groups in the passage below, 
 and said to one another, "How clever he is ! 
 and he starves." 
 
 He did starve very often, or at least he had 
 to teach himself to keep down hunger with a 
 morsel of black chaff-bread and a stray roll of 
 tobacco. And yet I could see that he had be- 
 come happy. 
 
 Lili never asked him within her door. All 
 the words they exchanged were from their open 
 lattices, with the space of the roadway between 
 them. 
 
 I heard every syllable they spoke, and they 
 were on the one side most innocent and on the 
 other most reverential. Ay, though you may 
 not believe it you who know the people of 
 Paris from the travesties of theatres and the 
 slanders of salons.
 
 34 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 And all this time secretly he worked on at 
 her portrait. He worked out of my sight and 
 hers, in the inner part of his garret, but the 
 swallows saw and told me. There are never 
 any secrets between birds and flowers. 
 
 We used to live in Paradise together, and we 
 love one another as exiles do ; and we hold in 
 our cups the raindrops to slake the thirst of the 
 birds, and the birds in return bring to us from 
 many lands and over many waters tidings of 
 those lost ones who have been torn from us to 
 strike the roots of our race in far-off soils and 
 under distant suns. 
 
 Late in the summer of the year, one won- 
 derful fete-day, Lili did for once get out to 
 the woods, the old kindly green woods of Vin- 
 cennes. 
 
 A neighbor on a lower floor, a woman who 
 made poor, scentless, senseless, miserable imita- 
 tions of all my race in paper, sat with the old 
 bedridden grandmother while Lili took her 
 holiday so rare in her life, though she was 
 one of the motes in the bright champagne of the 
 dancing air of Paris. I missed her sorely on 
 each of those few sparse days of her absence, 
 but for her I rejoiced. 
 
 " Je reste: tu 'fen vas," says the rose to the
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 35 
 
 butterfly in the poem ; and I said so in my 
 thoughts to her. 
 
 She went to the broad level grass, to the 
 golden fields of the sunshine, to the sound of 
 the bees murmuring over the wild purple 
 thyme, to the sight of the great snowy clouds 
 slowly sailing over the sweet blue freedom of 
 heaven to all the things of my birthright 
 and my deathless remembrance all that no 
 woman can love as a rose can love them. 
 
 But I was not jealous ; nay, not though she 
 had cramped me in a little earth-bound cell of 
 clay. I envied wistfully indeed, as I envied the 
 swallows their wings which cleft the air, asking 
 no man's leave for their liberty. But I would 
 not have maimed a swallow's pinion had I had 
 the power, and I would not have abridged an 
 hour of Lili's freedom. Flowers are like your 
 poets: they give ungrudgingly, and, like all 
 lavish givers, are seldom recompensed in kind. 
 
 We cast all our world of blossom, all our 
 treasury of fragrance, at the feet of the one we 
 love ; and then, having spent ourselves in that 
 too abundant sacrifice, you cry, " A yellow, 
 faded thing! to the dust-hole with it! " and 
 root us up violently and fling us to rot with the 
 refuse and offal ; not remembering the days
 
 36 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 when our burden of beauty made sunlight in 
 your darkest places, and brought the odors of a 
 lost paradise to breathe over your bed of fever. 
 
 Well, there is one consolation. Just so like- 
 wise do you deal with your human wonder- 
 flower of genius. 
 
 Lili went for her day in the green midsummer 
 world she and a little blithe, happy-hearted 
 group of young work-people and I stayed in 
 the garret window, hot and thirsty, and droop- 
 ing and pale, choked by the dust that drifted 
 up from the pavement, and hearing little all 
 day long save the quarrels of the sparrows and 
 the whir of the engine wheels in a baking- 
 house close at hand. 
 
 For it was some great day or other, when all 
 Paris was out en fete, and every one was away 
 from his or her home, except such people as 
 the old bedridden woman and the cripple who 
 watched her. So, at least, the white roof- 
 pigeons told me, who flew where they listed, 
 and saw the whole splendid city beneath them 
 saw all its glistening of arms and its sheen 
 of palace roofs, all its gilded domes and its 
 white, wide squares, all its crowds, many-hued 
 as a field of tulips, and its flashing eagles golden 
 as the sun.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 37 
 
 When I had been alone two hours, and whilst 
 the old building was silent and empty, there 
 came across the street from his own dwelling- 
 place the artist Rene, with a parcel beneath his 
 arm. 
 
 He came up the stairs with a light, noiseless 
 step, and pushed open the door of our attic. 
 He paused on the threshold a moment, with the 
 sort of reverent, hushed look on his face that 
 I had seen on the faces of one or two swarthy, 
 bearded, scarred soldiers as they paused before 
 the picinas at the door of the little chapel which 
 stood in my sight on the other side of our 
 street. 
 
 Then he entered, placed that which he carried 
 on a wooden chair fronting the light, uncovered 
 it, and went quietly out again, without the 
 women in the inner closet hearing him. 
 
 What he had brought was the canvas I had 
 seen grow under his hand, the painting of me 
 and the lamp and Lili. I do not doubt how he 
 had done it ; it was surely the little attic win- 
 dow, homely and true in likeness, and yet he had 
 glorified us all, and so framed in my leaves and 
 my white flowers, the low oil flame and the fair 
 head of my mistress, that there was that in the 
 little picture which made me tremble and yet
 
 38 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 be glad. On a slender slip of paper attached 
 to it there was written, " // ;/'j/ a pas de nuit 
 sans etoile." 
 
 Of him I saw no more. The picture kept 
 me silent confpany all the day. 
 
 At evening Lili came. It was late. She 
 brought with her a sweet, cool perfume of dewy 
 mosses and fresh leaves and strawberry plants 
 sweet as honey. She came in with a dark, 
 dreamy brilliance in her eyes and long coils of 
 foliage in her hands. 
 
 She brought to the canary chickweed and a 
 leaf of lettuce. She kissed me and laid wet 
 mosses on my parching roots, and fanned me 
 with the breath of her fresh lips. She took to 
 the old women within a huge cabbage leaf full 
 of cherries, having, I doubt not, gone herself 
 without in order to bring the ruddy fruit to 
 them. 
 
 She had been happy, but she was very quiet. 
 To those who love the country as she and I 
 did, and, thus loving it, have to dwell in cities, 
 there is as much of pain, perhaps, as of pleasure 
 in a fleeting glimpse of the lost heaven. 
 
 She was tired, and sat for a while, and did 
 not see the painting, for it was dusk. She only 
 saw it when she rose and turned to light
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 39 
 
 the lamp ; then, with a little shrill cry, she 
 fell on her knees before it in her wonder and 
 her awe, and laughed and sobbed a little, and 
 then was still again, looking at this likeness of 
 herself. 
 
 The written words took her long to spell out, 
 for she could scarcely read, but when she had 
 
 mastered them, her head sank on her breast 
 with a flush and a smile, like the glow of the 
 dawn over Provence, I thought. 
 
 She knew whence it came, no doubt, though
 
 40 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 there were many artists and students of art in 
 that street. 
 
 But then there was only one who had watched 
 her night after night as men watched the stars 
 of old to read their fates in the heavens. 
 
 Lili was only a young ouvriere, she was only 
 a girl of the people : she had quick emotions 
 and innocent impulses ; she had led her life 
 straightly because it was her nature, as it is 
 of the lilies her namesakes, my cousins to 
 grow straight to the light, pure and spotless. 
 But she was of the populace ; she was frank, 
 fearless, and strong, despite all her dreams. She 
 was glad, and she sought not to hide it. With 
 a gracious impulse of gratitude she turned to 
 the lattice and leaned past me, and looked for 
 my neighbor. 
 
 He was there in the gloom ; he strove not 
 to be seen, but a stray ray from a lamp at the 
 vintner's gleamed on his handsome dark face, 
 lean and pallid and yearning and sad, but full 
 of force and of soul like a head of Rembrandt's. 
 Lili stretched her hands to him with a noble, 
 candid gesture and a sweet, tremulous laugh : 
 " What you have given me ! it is you ? it 
 is you ? " 
 
 "Mademoiselle forgives?" he murmured,
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 4! 
 
 leaning as far out as the gable would per- 
 mit. The street was still deserted, and very 
 quiet. The theatres were all open to the 
 people that night free, and bursts of music 
 from many quarters rolled in through the sultry 
 darkness. 
 
 Lili colored over all her fair, pale face, even 
 as I have seen my sisters' white breasts glow to 
 a wondrous, wavering warmth as the sun of the 
 west kissed them. She drew her breath with a 
 quick sigh. She did not answer him in words, 
 but with a sudden movement of exquisite elo- 
 quence she broke from me my fairest and my 
 last-born blossom and threw it from her lattice 
 into his. 
 
 Then, as he caught it, she closed the lattice 
 with a swift, trembling hand, and left the cham- 
 ber dark, and fled to the little sleeping-closet 
 where her crucifix and her mother's rosary hung 
 together above her bed. 
 
 As for me, I was left bereaved and bleeding. 
 The dew which waters the growth of your 
 human love is usually the tears or blood of 
 some martyred life. 
 
 I loved Lili. 
 
 I prayed, as my torn stem quivered and my 
 fairest begotten sank to her death in the night
 
 42 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 and the silence, that I might be the first and 
 the last to suffer from the human love born that 
 night. 
 
 I, a rose Love's flower.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 43 
 
 PART SECOND. 
 
 Now, before that summer was gone, these 
 two were betrothed to one another, and my 
 little fair dead daughter, all faded and scentless 
 though her half-opened leaves were, remained 
 always on Rene's heart as a tender and treas- 
 ured relic. 
 
 They were betrothed, I say not wedded, 
 for they were so terribly poor. 
 
 Many a day he, I think, had not so much as 
 a crust to eat ; and there passed many weeks 
 when the works on his canvas stood unfinished 
 because he had not wherewithal to buy the oils 
 and the colors to finish them.
 
 44 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 Rene was frightfully poor, indeed ; but then, 
 being an artist and a poet, and the lover of 
 a fair and noble woman, and a dreamer of 
 dreams, and a man God-gifted, he was no 
 longer wretched. For the life of a painter is 
 beautiful when he is still young, and loves truly, 
 and has a genius in him stronger than all ca- 
 lamity, and hears a voice in which he believes 
 say always in his ear: "Fear nothing. Men 
 must believe as I do in thee, one day. And 
 meanwhile we can wait ! " And a painter in 
 Paris, even though he starve on a few sous a 
 day, can have so much that is lovely and full 
 of picturesque charm in his daily pursuits : the 
 long, wondrous galleries full of the arts he 
 adores; the " realite de rideal" around him in 
 that perfect world ; the slow, sweet, studious 
 hours in the calm wherein all that is great 
 in humanity alone survives; the trance half 
 adoration, half aspiration, at once desire and 
 despair before the face of the Mona Lisa; 
 then, without, the streets so glad and so gay in 
 the sweet, living sunshine ; the quiver of green 
 leaves among gilded balconies ; the groups at 
 every turn about the doors ; the glow of color in 
 market-place and peopled square ; the quaint 
 gray piles in old historic ways ; the stones, from
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 45 
 
 every one of which some voice from the imper- 
 ishable Past cries out; the green, silent woods, 
 the little leafy villages, the winding waters 
 garden-girt; the forest heights, with the city 
 gleaming and golden in the plain; all these 
 are his. With these and youth who shall 
 dare say he is not rich ay, though his board 
 be empty and his cup be dry? 
 
 I had not loved Paris I, a little imprisoned 
 rose, caged in a clay pot, and seeing nothing 
 but the sky-line of the roofs. But I grew to 
 love it, hearing from Rene and from Lili of all 
 the poetry and gladness that Paris made pos- 
 sible in their young and burdened lives, and 
 which could have been thus possible in, no 
 other city of the earth. 
 
 City of Pleasure you have called her, and 
 with truth ; but why not also City of the 
 Poor? for that city, like herself, has remem- 
 bered the poor in her pleasure, and given to 
 them, no less than to the richest, the treasure of 
 her laughing sunlight, of her melodious music, 
 of her gracious hues, of her million flowers, of 
 her shady leaves, of her divine ideals. 
 
 O world ! when you let Paris die you will let 
 your last youth die with her ! Your rich will 
 mourn a paradise deserted, but your poor will
 
 46 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 have need to weep with tears of blood for the 
 ruin of the sole Eden whose sunlight sought 
 them in their shadow, whose music found them 
 in their loneliness, whose glad green ways were 
 open to their tired feet, whose radiance smiled 
 the sorrow from their aching eyes, and in whose 
 wildest errors and whose vainest dreams their 
 woes and needs were unforgotten. 
 
 Well, this little, humble love-idyl, which 
 grew into being in an attic, had a tender grace 
 of its own ; and I watched it with tenderness, 
 and it seemed to me fresh as the dews of the 
 morning in the midst of the hot, stifling world. 
 
 They could not marry : he had nothing but 
 famine for his wedding-gift, and all the little 
 that she made was taken for the food and wine 
 of the bedridden old grandam in that religious 
 execution of a filial duty which is so habitual 
 in the French family-life that no one dreams 
 counting it as a virtue. 
 
 But they spent their leisure time together: 
 they passed their rare holiday hours in each 
 other's society in the woods which they both 
 loved or in the public galleries of art; and 
 when the autumn came on apace, and they 
 could no longer sit at their open casements, he 
 still watched the gleam of her pale lamp as a
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 47 
 
 pilgrim the light of a shrine, and she, ere she 
 went to her rest, would push ajar the closed 
 shutter and put her pretty fair head into the 
 darkling night, and waft him a gentle good- 
 night, and then go and kneel down by her bed 
 and pray for him and his future before the 
 cross which had been her dead mother's. 
 
 On that bright summer a hard winter fol- 
 lowed. The poor suffered very much ; and I 
 in the closed lattice knew scarcely which was 
 the worse the icy, shivering chills of the 
 snow-burdened air, or the close, noxious suf- 
 focation of the stove. 
 
 I was very sickly and ill, and cared little for 
 my life during that bitter cold weather, when 
 the panes of the lattice were all blocked from 
 week's end to week's end with the solid, silvery 
 foliage of the frost. 
 
 Rene and Lili both suffered greatly: he 
 could only keep warmth in his veins by the 
 stoves of the public libraries, and she lost her 
 work in the box trade after the New Year fairs, 
 and had to eke out as best she might the few 
 francs she had been able to lay back in the 
 old brown pipkin in the closet. She had, more- 
 over, to sell most of the little things in her gar- 
 ret; her own mattress went, though she kept
 
 48 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 the bed under her grandmother. But there 
 were two things she would not sell, though for 
 both was she offered money; they were her 
 mother's reliques and myself. 
 
 She would not, I am sure, have sold the pic- 
 ture, either. But for that no one offered her a 
 centime. 
 
 One day, as the last of the winter solstice was 
 passing away, the old woman died. 
 
 Lili wept for her sincere and tender tears, 
 though never in my time, nor in any other, I 
 believe, had the poor old querulous, paralytic 
 sufferer rewarded her with anything except 
 lamentation and peevish discontent. 
 
 "Now you will come to me? " murmured her 
 lover, when they had returned from laying the 
 old dead peasant in the quarter of the poor. 
 
 Lili drooped her head softly upon his breast. 
 
 " If you wish it ! " she whispered, with a whis- 
 per as soft as the first low breath of summer. 
 
 If he wished it ! 
 
 A gleam of pale gold sunshine shone through 
 the dulled panes upon my feeble branches; 
 a little timid fly crept out and spread its wings ; 
 the bells of the church rang an angelus; a child 
 laughed in the street below; there came a smile 
 of greenness spreading over the boughs of leaf-
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 49 
 
 less trees ; my lover, the wind, returned from 
 the south, fresh from desert and ocean, with the 
 scent of the spice groves and palm aisles of the 
 East in his breath, and, softly unclosing my lat- 
 tice, murmured to me : " Didst thou think I was 
 faithless? See, I come with the spring! " 
 
 So, though I was captive and they two were 
 poor, yet we three were all happy ; for love 
 and a new year of promise were with us. 
 
 I bore a little snowy blossom (sister to the 
 one which slept lifeless on Rene's heart) that 
 spring, whilst yet the swallows were not back 
 from the African gardens, and the first violets 
 were carried in millions through the streets 
 the only innocent imperialists that the world 
 has ever seen. 
 
 That little winter-begotten darling of mine was 
 to be Lili's nuptial-flower. She took it so ten- 
 derly from me that it hardly seemed like its death. 
 
 " My little dear rose, who blossoms for me, 
 though I can only cage her in clay, and only 
 let her see the sun's rays between the stacks of 
 the chimneys ! " she said softly over me as she 
 kissed me ; and when she said that, could I any 
 more grieve for Provence? 
 
 " What do they wed upon, those two? " said 
 the old vine to me.
 
 5O A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 And I answered him, " Hope and dreams." 
 
 "Will those bake bread and feed babes?" 
 said the vine, as he shook his wrinkled tendrils 
 despondently in the March air. 
 
 We did not ask in the attic. 
 
 Summer was nigh at hand, and we loved one 
 another. 
 
 Rene had come to us we had not gone to 
 him. For our garret was on the sunny, his on 
 the dark, side of the street, and Lili feared the 
 gloom for me and the bird ; and she could not 
 bring herself to leave that old red-leaved 
 creeper who had wound himself so close about 
 the rainpipe and the roof, and who could not 
 have been dislodged without being slain. 
 
 With the Mardi Gras her trade had returned 
 to her. Rene, unable to prosecute his grand 
 works, took many of the little boxes in his own 
 hands, and wrought on them with all the name- 
 less mystical charm and the exquisite grace of 
 touch which belong to the man who is by 
 nature a great artist. The little trade could 
 not at its best price bring much, but it brought 
 bread ; and we were happy. 
 
 While he worked at the box lids she had 
 leisure for her household labors ; when these 
 were done she would draw out her mother's old
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 51 
 
 Breton distaff, and would sit and spin. When 
 twilight fell they would go forth together to 
 dream under the dewy avenues and the glisten- 
 ing stars, or as often would wait within whilst 
 he played on his mountain flute to the people 
 at the doorways in the street below. 
 
 "Is it better to go out and see the stars and 
 the leaves ourselves, or to stay indoors and make 
 all these forget the misfortune of not seeing 
 them?" said Lili on one of those evenings when 
 the warmth and the sunset almost allured her to 
 draw the flute from her husband's hands and give 
 him his hat instead ; and then she looked down 
 into the narrow road, at the opposite houses, at 
 the sewing-girls stitching by their little win- 
 dows, at the pale students studying their sickly 
 lore with scalpel and with skeleton, at the hot, 
 dusty little children at play on the asphalt 
 sidewalk, at the sorrowful, darkened casements 
 behind which she knew beds of sickness or of 
 paralyzed old age were hidden looked at all 
 this from behind my blossoms, and then gave 
 up the open air and the evening stroll that 
 were so dear a pastime to her, and whispered 
 to Rene, " Play, or they will be disappointed." 
 
 And he played, instead of going to the de- 
 bating-club in the room round the corner.
 
 52 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 " He has ceased to be a patriot," grumbled 
 the old vine. " It is always so with every man 
 when once he has loved a woman ! " 
 
 Myself, I could not see that there was less 
 patriotism in breathing the poetry of sound 
 into the ears of his neighbors than in rousing 
 the passions of hell in the breasts of his 
 brethren. 
 
 But perhaps this was my ignorance : I be- 
 lieve that of late years people have grown to 
 hold that the only pure patriotism is, and ought 
 to be, evinced in the most intense and the most 
 brutalized form of one passion, "Envy, eldest- 
 born of hell." 
 
 So these two did some good, and were happy, 
 though more than once it chanced to them to 
 have to go a whole day without tasting food of 
 any sort. 
 
 I have said that Rene had genius, a gen- 
 ius bold, true, impassioned, masterful, such a 
 genius as colors the smallest trifles that it 
 touches. Rene could no more help putting an 
 ideal grace into those little sweetmeat boxes 
 which sold at their very highest, in the booths 
 of the fairs, at fifty centimes apiece than we, 
 the roses, can help being fragrant and fair. 
 
 Genius has a way of casting its pearls in the
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 53 
 
 dust as we scatter our fragrance to every breeze 
 that blows. Now and then the pearl is caught 
 and treasured, as now and then some solitary 
 creature pauses to smell the sweetness of the 
 air in which we grow, and thanks the God who 
 made us. 
 
 But as ninety-nine roses bloom unthanked 
 for one that is thus remembered, so ninety-nine 
 of the pearls of genius are trodden to pieces 
 for one that is set on high and crowned with 
 honor. 
 
 In the twilight of a dull day a little, feeble, 
 brown old man climbed the staircase and en- 
 tered our attic with shambling step. 
 
 We had no strangers to visit us : who visits 
 the poor? We thought he was an enemy: the 
 poor always do think so, being so little used to 
 strangers. 
 
 Rene drew himself erect, and strove to hide 
 the poverty of his garments, standing by his 
 easel. Lili came to me and played with my 
 leaves in her tender, caressing fashion. 
 
 "You painted this, M. Rene Claude?" asked 
 the little brown old man. He held in his hand 
 one of the bonbon boxes, the prettiest of them 
 all, with a tambourine-girl dancing in a wreath 
 of Provence roses. Rene had copied me with
 
 54 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 loving fidelity in the flowers, and with a sigh 
 had murmured as he cast the box aside when 
 finished : " That ought to fetch at least a 
 franc ! " But he got no more than the usual 
 two sous for it. 
 
 The little man sat down on the chair which 
 Lili placed for him. 
 
 " So they told me where I bought this. It 
 was at a booth at St. Cloud. Do you know 
 that it is charming? " 
 
 Rene smiled a little sadly ; Lili flushed with 
 joy. It was the first praise which she had ever 
 heard given to him. 
 
 " You have a great talent," pursued the little 
 man. 
 
 Rene bowed his handsome, haggard face 
 his mouth quivered a very little : for the first 
 time Hope entered into him. 
 
 "Genius, indeed," said the stranger; and he 
 sauntered a little about and looked at the can- 
 vases, and wondered and praised, and said not 
 very much, but said that little so well and so 
 judiciously that it was easy to see he was no 
 mean judge of art, and possibly no slender 
 patron of it. 
 
 As Lili stood by me I saw her color come 
 and go and her breast heave. I too trembled
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 55 
 
 in all my leaves : were recognition and the 
 world's homage coming to Rene at last? 
 
 " And I have been so afraid always that I 
 had injured, burdened him, clogged his strength 
 in that endless strife ! " she murmured below 
 her breath. " O dear little rose ! if only the 
 world can but know his greatness ! " 
 
 Meanwhile the old man looked through the 
 sketches and studies with which the room was 
 strewed. "You do not finish your things? " he 
 said abruptly. 
 
 Rene flushed darkly. " Oil pictures cost 
 money," he said briefly, " and I am very 
 poor." 
 
 Though a peasant's son, he was very proud : 
 the utterance must have cost him much. 
 
 The stranger took snuff. "You are a man 
 of singular genius," he said simply. " You 
 only want to be known to get the prices of 
 Meissonier." 
 
 Meissonier ! the Rothschild of the studios, 
 the artist whose six- inch canvas would bring 
 the gold value of a Raphael or a Titian ! 
 
 Lili, breathing fast, and white as death with 
 ecstasy, made the sign of the cross on her 
 breast ; the delicate brown hand of Rene shook 
 where it leaned on his easel.
 
 56 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 They were both silent silent from the in- 
 tensity of their hope. 
 
 "Do you know who I am?" the old man 
 pursued with a cordial smile. 
 
 " I have not that honor," murmured Rene. 
 
 The stranger, taking his snuff out of a gold 
 box, named a name at which the painter started. 
 It was that of one of the greatest art dealers in 
 the whole of Europe, one who at a word 
 could make or mar an artist's reputation, one 
 whose accuracy of judgment was considered 
 infallible by all connoisseurs, and the passport 
 to whose galleries was to any unknown paint- 
 ing a certain passport also to the fame of men. 
 
 " You are a man of singular genius," repeated 
 the great purchaser, taking his snuff in the mid- 
 dle of the little bare chamber. " It is curious 
 one always finds genius either in a cellar or 
 in an attic : it never, by any chance, is to be 
 discovered midway on the stairs never in the 
 mezzo terso! But to the point. You have 
 great delicacy of touch, striking originality, a 
 wonderful purity yet bloom in your color, and 
 an exquisite finish of minutiae, without any weak- 
 ness, a combination rare, very rare. That 
 girl yonder, feeding white pigeons on the leads 
 of a roof, with an atom of blue sky, and a few
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 57 
 
 vine leaves straying over the parapet that is 
 perfectly conceived. Finished it must be. So 
 must that little study of the beggar-boy looking 
 through the gilded gates into the rose-gardens 
 it is charming, charming. Your price for 
 those?" 
 
 Rene's colorless, worn young face colored to 
 the brows. " Monsieur is too good," he mut- 
 tered brokenly. " A nameless artist has no 
 price, except 
 
 " Honor," murmured Lili as she moved for- 
 ward with throbbing heart and dim eyes. "Ah, 
 monsieur, give him a name in Paris ! We want 
 nothing else nothing else ! " 
 
 " Poor fools ! " said the dealer to his snuff-box. 
 I heard him they did not. 
 
 " Madame," he answered aloud, " Paris her- 
 self will give him that the first day his first can- 
 vas hangs in my galleries. Meanwhile, I must 
 in honesty be permitted to add something more. 
 For each of those little canvases, the girl on the 
 roof and the boy at the gate, I will give you now 
 two thousand francs, and two thousand more 
 when they shall be completed. Provided " 
 
 He paused and glanced musingly at Rene. 
 
 Lili had turned away, and was sobbing for 
 very joy at this undreamed-of deliverance.
 
 58 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 Rene stood quite still, with his hands crossed 
 on the easel and his head bent on his chest. 
 The room, I think, swam around him. 
 
 The old man sauntered again a little about 
 the place, looking here and looking there, 
 murmuring certain artistic disquisitions tech- 
 nical and scientific, leaving them time to recover 
 from the intensity of their emotion. 
 
 What a noble thing old age was, I thought, 
 living only to give hope to the young in their 
 sorrow, and to release captive talents from the 
 prison of obscurity ! We should leave the little 
 room in the roof, and dwell in some bright quar- 
 ter where it was all leaves and flowers ; and 
 Rene would be great, and go to dine with 
 princes and drive a team of belled horses, like a 
 famous painter who had dashed once with his 
 splendid equipage through our narrow passage ; 
 and we should see the sky always as much of 
 it as ever we chose ; and Lili would have a gar- 
 den of her own, all grass and foliage and falling 
 waters, in which I should live in the open air all 
 the day long, and make believe that I was in 
 Provence. 
 
 My dreams and my fancies were broken by the 
 sound of the old man's voice taking up the thread 
 of his discourse once more in front of Rene.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 59 
 
 "I will give you four thousand francs each 
 for those two little canvases," he repeated. " It 
 is a mere pinch of dust to what you will make 
 in six months' time if if you hear me? 
 your name is brought before the public of Paris 
 in my galleries and under my auspices. I sup- 
 pose you have heard something of what I can 
 do, eh ? Well, all I can do I will do for you ; 
 for you have a great talent, and without intro- 
 duction, my friend, you may as well roll up 
 your pictures and burn them in your stove to 
 save charcoal. You know that? " 
 
 Rene indeed knew none better. Lili turned 
 on the old man her sweet, frank Breton eyes, 
 smiling their radiant gratitude through ten- 
 derest tears. 
 
 "The saints will reward you, monsieur, 
 in a better world than this," she murmured 
 softly. 
 
 The old man took snuff a little nervously. 
 "There is one condition I must make," he said 
 with a trifling hesitation "one only." 
 
 " Ask of my gratitude what you will," an- 
 swered Rene quickly, while he drew a deep 
 breath of relief and freedom, the breath of 
 one who casts to the ground the weight of a 
 deadly burden.
 
 60 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 " It is, that you will bind yourself only to 
 paint for me." 
 
 "Certainly!" Rene gave the assent with 
 eagerness. Poor fellow ! it was a novelty so 
 exquisite to have any one save the rats to paint 
 for. It had never dawned upon his thoughts 
 that when he stretched his hands out with such 
 passionate desire to touch the hem of the gar- 
 ment of Fortune and catch the gleam of the 
 laurels of Fame, he might be in truth only hold- 
 ing them out to fresh fetters. 
 
 "Very well," said the old man quietly, and 
 he sat down again and looked full in Rene's 
 face, and unfolded his views for the artist's fu- 
 ture. 
 
 He used many words, and was slow and suave 
 in their utterance, and paused often and long 
 to take out his heavy gold box ; but he spoke 
 well. Little by little his meaning gleamed out 
 from the folds of verbiage in which he skilfully 
 enwrapped it. 
 
 It was this. 
 
 The little valueless drawings on the people's 
 sweetmeat boxes of gilded cardboard had a 
 grace, a color, and a beauty in them which had 
 caught, at a fair-booth in the village of St. 
 Cloud, the ever-watchful eyes of the great
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 6 I 
 
 dealer. He had bought half a dozen of the 
 boxes for a couple of francs. He had said, 
 " Here is what I want." Wanted for what? 
 Briefly, to produce Petitot enamels and Frago- 
 nard cabinets genuine eighteenth -century 
 work. There was a rage for it. Rene would 
 understand? 
 
 Rene's dark southern eyes lost a little of their 
 new lustre of happiness, and grew troubled with 
 a sort of cloud of perplexity. He did not seem 
 to understand. 
 
 The old man took more snuff, and used 
 phrases clearer still. 
 
 There were great collectors dilettanti of 
 houses imperial and royal and princely and 
 noble, of all the grades of greatness who 
 would give any sum for bonbonmeres and taba- 
 tieres of eighteenth-century work by any one of 
 the few famous masters of that time. A gen- 
 uine, incontestable sweetmeat box from the at- 
 eliers of the Louis XIV. or Louis XV. period 
 would fetch almost a fabulous sum. Then again 
 he paused, doubtfully. 
 
 Rene bowed, and his wondering glance said 
 without words, " I know this. But I have no 
 eighteenth-century work to sell you : if I had, 
 should we starve in an attic ? "
 
 62 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 His patron coughed a little, looked at Lili, 
 then proceeded to explain yet further. 
 
 In Rene's talent he had discerned the hues, 
 the grace, the delicacy yet brilliancy, the vo- 
 luptuousness and the desinvolteure of the best 
 eighteenth-century work. Rene doubtless did 
 other and higher things which pleased himself 
 far more than these airy trifles. Well, let him 
 pursue the greater line of art if he chose ; but 
 he, the old man who spoke, could assure him 
 that nothing would be so lucrative to him as 
 those bacchantes in wreaths of roses and young 
 tambourine-players gorge au vent dancing in a 
 bed of violets, and beautiful marquises, powdered 
 and jewelled, looking over their fans, which he 
 had painted for those poor little two-sous boxes 
 of the populace, and the like of which, exquis- 
 itely finished on enamel or ivory, set in gold 
 and tortoise-shell rimmed with pearls and tur- 
 quoises or opals and diamonds, would deceive 
 the finest connoisseur in Europe into receiving 
 them as whatever they might be signed and 
 dated. 
 
 If Rene would do one or two of these at dic- 
 tation in a year, not more, more would be 
 perilous, paint and sign them and produce 
 them with any touches that might be com-
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 63 
 
 manded ; never ask what became of them when 
 finished, nor recognize them if hereafter he 
 might see them in any illustrious collection 
 if Rene would bind himself to do this, he, the 
 old man who spoke, would buy his other paint- 
 ings, place them well in his famous galleries, 
 and, using all his influence, would make him in 
 a twelvemonth's time the most celebrated of 
 all the young painters of Paris. 
 
 It was a bargain? Ah, how well it was, he 
 said, to put the best of one's powers into the 
 most trifling things one did ! If that poor little 
 two-sous box had been less lavishly and grace- 
 fully decorated, it would never have arrested 
 his eyes in the bonbon-booth at St. Cloud. 
 The old man paused to take snuff and receive 
 an answer. 
 
 Rene stood motionless. 
 
 Lili had sunk into a seat, and was gazing at 
 the tempter with wide-open, puzzled, startled 
 eyes. Both were silent. 
 
 "It is a bargain?" said the old man again. 
 " Understand me, M. Rene Claude. You have 
 no risk, absolutely none, and you have the cer- 
 tainty of fair fame and fine fortune in the space 
 of a few years. You will be a great man before 
 you have a gray hair : that comes to very few.
 
 64 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 I shall not trouble you for more than two dix- 
 
 ^ -^ 
 
 huitieme siecle enamels in the year perhaps 
 for only one. You can spend ten months out 
 of the twelve on your own canvases, making 
 your own name and your own wealth as swiftly 
 as your ambition and impatience can desire. 
 Madame here," said the acute dealer with a 
 pleasant smile "Madame here can have a 
 garden sloping on the Seine and a glass house 
 of choicest flowers which I see are her grace- 
 ful weakness ere another rose-season has time 
 to come round, if you choose." 
 
 His voice lingered softly on the three last 
 words. 
 
 The dew stood on Rene's forehead, his hands 
 clenched on the easel. 
 
 " You wish me to paint forgeries of the 
 Petitot enamels?" 
 
 The old man smiled unmoved : " Chut, chut ! 
 
 V 
 
 Will you paint me little bonbonnieres on en- 
 amel instead of on cardboard? That is all 
 the question. I have said where they go, how 
 they are set : what they are called shall be my 
 affair. You know nothing. The only works of 
 yours which you will be concerned to acknowl- 
 edge will be your own canvas pictures. What 
 harm can it do any creature? You will gratify
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 65 
 
 a connoisseur or two innocently, and you will 
 meanwhile be at leisure to follow the bent of 
 your own genius, which otherwise " 
 
 He paused.: I heard the loud throbs of 
 Rene's heart under that cruel temptation. 
 
 Lili gazed at his tempter with the same star- 
 tled terror and bewilderment still dilating her 
 candid eyes with a woful pain. 
 
 " Otherwise," pursued the old man with mer- 
 ciless tranquillity, "you will never see me any 
 more, my friends. If you try to repeat any 
 story to my hindrance, no one will credit you. 
 I am rich, you are poor. You have a great 
 talent : I shall regret to see it lost, but I shall 
 "let it die so." 
 
 And he trod very gently on a little gnat that 
 crawled near his foot, and killed it. 
 
 A terrible agony gathered in the artist's face. 
 
 " O God ! " he cried in his torture, and his 
 eyes went to the canvases against the wall, and 
 then to the face of his wife, with an unutter- 
 able, yearning desire. 
 
 For them, for them, this sin which tempted 
 him looked virtue. 
 
 "Do you hesitate?" said the merciless old 
 man. "Pshaw! whom do you hurt? You 
 give me work as good as that which you imitate,
 
 66 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 and I call it only by a dead man's name : who 
 is injured? What harm can there be in humor- 
 ing the fanaticism of fashion? Choose I am 
 in haste." 
 
 Rene hid his face with his hands, so that he 
 should not behold those dear creations of his 
 genius which so cruelly, so innocently, assailed 
 him with a temptation beyond his strength. 
 
 " Choose for me you ! " he muttered in his 
 agony to Lili. 
 
 Lili, white as death, drew closer to him. 
 
 " My Rene, your heart has chosen," she mur- 
 mured through her dry, quivering lips. " You 
 cannot buy honor by fraud." 
 
 Rene lifted his head and looked straight in 
 the eyes of the man who held the scales of his 
 fate, and could weigh out for his whole life's 
 portion either fame and fortune, or obscurity 
 and famine. 
 
 " Sir," he said slowly, with a bitter, tranquil 
 smile about his mouth, " my garret is empty, 
 but it is clean. May I trouble you to leave it 
 as you found it? " 
 
 So they were strong to the end, these two 
 famished children of frivolous Paris. 
 
 But when the door had closed and shut their 
 tempter out, the revulsion came : they wept
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 67 
 
 those tears of blood which come from the hearts' 
 depths of those who have seen Hope mock them 
 with a smile a moment, to leave them face to 
 face with Death. 
 
 " Poor fools ! " sighed the old vine from his 
 corner in the gray, dull twilight of the late 
 autumn day. 
 
 Was the vine right? 
 
 The air which he had breathed for fifty years 
 through all his dust-choked leaves and tendrils 
 had been the air off millions of human lungs, 
 corrupted in its passage through millions of 
 human lips ; and the thoughts which he thought 
 were those of human wisdom. 
 
 The sad day died ; the night fell ; the lattice 
 was closed ; the flute lay untouched. A great 
 misery seemed to enfold us. True, we were no 
 worse off than we had been when the same day 
 dawned. But that is the especial cruelty of 
 every tempter always : he touches the innocent, 
 closed eyes of his victims with a collyrium 
 which makes the happy blindness of content 
 no longer possible. If strong to resist him, he 
 has still his vengeance, for they are never again 
 at peace as they were before that fatal hour in 
 which he showed them all that they were not, 
 all that they might be.
 
 68 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 Our stove was not more chill, our garret 
 not more empty ; our darkness not more dark 
 amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky 
 roof and looming crown that shut the sky out 
 from us not more gloomy and impenetrable 
 than they had been on all those other earlier 
 nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how 
 intensified million-fold seemed cold and loneli- 
 ness and poverty and darkness, all ! for we 
 had for the first time known what it was to think 
 of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as possi- 
 ble, and then to lose them all forever ! 
 
 I had been resigned for love's sake to dwell 
 amongst the roofs, seeing not the faces of the 
 stars, nor feeling ever the full glory of the sun ; 
 but now I had dreamed of the fair freedom 
 of garden-ways and the endless light of summer 
 suns on palace terraces, and I drooped and 
 shivered and sickened, and was twice captive 
 and twice exiled, and knew that I was a little 
 nameless, worthless, hapless thing, whose fairest 
 chaplet of blossom no hand would ever gather 
 for a crown. 
 
 As with my life, so was it likewise with theirs. 
 
 They had been so poor, but they had been 
 so happy: the poverty remained, the joy had 
 flown.
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 69 
 
 The winter was again very hard, very cold : 
 they suffered greatly. 
 
 They could scarcely keep together body and 
 soul, as your strange phrase runs ; they went 
 without food sometimes for days and days, and 
 fuel they had scarcely ever. 
 
 The bird in his cage was sold ; they would 
 not keep the little golden singing thing to starve 
 to silence like themselves. 
 
 As for me, I nearly perished of the cold ; 
 only the love I bore to Lili kept a little life in 
 my leafless branches. 
 
 All that cruel winter-time they were strong 
 still, those children of Paris. 
 
 For they sought no alms, and in their utter- 
 most extremity neither of them ever whispered 
 to the other : " Go seek the tempter ; repent, 
 be wise. Give not up our lives for a mere 
 phantasy of honor." 
 
 " When the snow is on the ground, and the 
 canvases have to burn in the stove, then you 
 will change your minds and come to me on 
 your knees," the old wicked, foul spirit had said 
 mocking them, as he had opened the door of 
 the attic and passed away creaking down the 
 dark stairs. 
 
 And I suppose he had reckoned on this ; but
 
 70 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 if he had done so, he had reckoned without his 
 host, as your phrase runs : neither Rene nor Lili 
 ever went to him, either on knees or in any 
 other wise. 
 
 When the spring came we three were still all 
 living at least their hearts still beat and their 
 lips still drew breath, as my boughs were still 
 green and my roots still clung to the soil. But 
 no more to them or to me did the coming of 
 spring bring, as of old, the real living of life, 
 which is joy. And my lover the wind wooed 
 me no more, and the birds no more brought me 
 the rose-whispers of my kindred in Provence. 
 For even the little pigeon-hole in the roof had 
 become too costly a home for us, and we dwelt 
 in a den under the stones of the streets, where 
 no light came and scarce a breath of air ever 
 strayed to us. 
 
 There the uncompleted canvases, on which 
 the painter whom Lili loved had tried to write 
 his title to the immortality of fame, were at last 
 finished finished, for the rats ate them. 
 
 All this while we lived the man whose 
 genius and misery were hell on earth ; the 
 woman whose very purity and perfectness of 
 love were her direst torture ; and I, the little 
 white flower born of the sun and the dew, of
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. Jl 
 
 fragrance and freedom, to whom every moment 
 of this blindness, this suffocation, this starvation, 
 this stench of putrid odors, this horrible roar of 
 the street above, was a moment worse than any 
 pang of death. 
 
 Away there in Provence so many a fair rose- 
 sister of mine bowed her glad, proud, innocent 
 head with anguish and shuddering terrors to the 
 sharp summons of the severing knife that cut 
 in twain her life, whilst I I, on and on was 
 forced to keep so much of life as lies in the 
 capacity to suffer and to love in vain. 
 
 So much was left to them : no more. 
 
 "Let us compel Death to remember us, since 
 even Death forgets us ! " Rene murmured once 
 in his despair to her. 
 
 But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his : 
 " Nay, dear, wait ; God will remember us even 
 yet, I think." 
 
 It was her faith. And of her faith she was 
 justified at last. 
 
 There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of 
 horror insupportable of ceaseless sound be- 
 side which the roar of the mere traffic of the 
 streets would have seemed silence a stench 
 beside which the sulphur smoke and the gas 
 fumes of a previous time would have been as
 
 72 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 some sweet, fresh woodland air a famine beside 
 which the daily hunger of the poor was remem- 
 bered as the abundance of a feast a cold 
 beside which the chillness of the scant fuel and 
 empty braziers of other winters were recalled 
 as the warmth of summer a darkness only 
 lit by the red flame of burning houses a 
 solitude only broken by the companionship of 
 woe and sickness and despair a suffocation 
 only changed by a rush of air strong with the 
 scent of blood, of putridity, of the million liv- 
 ing plague-stricken, of the million dead lying 
 unburied. 
 
 For there was war. 
 
 Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It 
 was always the same blackness as of night ; the 
 same horror of sound, of scent, of cold ; the 
 same misery ; the same torture. I suppose 
 that the sun was quenched, that the birds were 
 dumb, that the winds were stilled forever that 
 all the world was dead ; I do not know. They 
 called it War. I suppose that they meant 
 Hell! 
 
 Yet Lili lived, and I ; in that dead darkness 
 we had lost Rene we saw his face no more. 
 Yet he could not be in his grave, I knew, for 
 Lili, clasping my barren branches to her breast,
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 73 
 
 would murmur : " Whilst he still lives I will live 
 yes, yes, yes ! " 
 
 And she did live so long, so long ! on a 
 few draughts of water and a few husks of grain. 
 
 I knew that it was long, for full a hundred 
 times she muttered aloud: "Another day? O 
 God ! how long? how long? " 
 
 At last in the darkness a human hand was 
 stretched to her, once, close beside me. A foul, 
 fierce light, the light of flame, was somewhere 
 on the air about us, and that moment glowed 
 through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in the 
 bowels of the earth. I saw the hand and what 
 it held to her ; it was a stranger's, and it held 
 the little colorless dead rose, my sweetest blos- 
 som, that had lain ever upon Rene's heart. 
 
 She took it she who had given it as her 
 first love-gift. She was mute. In the glare of 
 the flame that quivered through the darkness I 
 saw her standing quite erect and very still. 
 
 The voice of a stranger thrilled through the 
 din from the world above. 
 
 "He fought as only patriots can," it said 
 softly and as through tears. " I was beside 
 him. He fell with Regnault in the sortie yes- 
 terday. He could not speak ; he had only
 
 74 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 strength to give me this for you. Be comforted ; 
 he has died for Paris." 
 
 On Lili's face there came once more the 
 radiance of a perfect peace, a glory pure and 
 endless as the glory of the sun. " Great in 
 death ! " she murmured. " My love, my love, 
 I come ! " 
 
 I lost her in the darkness. 
 
 I heard a voice above me say that life had 
 left her lips as the dead rose touched them. 
 
 What more is there for me to tell? 
 
 I live, since to breathe, and to feel pain, and 
 to desire vainly, and to suffer always, are surest 
 proofs of life. 
 
 I live, since that stranger's hand, which 
 brought my little dead blossom as the mes- 
 sage of farewell, had pity on me and brought 
 me away from that living grave. But the pity 
 was vain ; I died the only death that had any 
 power to hurt me when the human heart I loved 
 grew still forever. 
 
 The light of the full day now shines on me ; 
 the shadows are cool, the dews are welcome ; 
 they speak around me of the coming of spring, 
 and in the silence of the dawns I hear from the 
 woods without the piping of the nesting birds ; 
 but for me the summer can never more return
 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. 
 
 75 
 
 for me the sun can never again be shining 
 for me the greenest garden world is barren as a 
 desert. 
 
 For I am only a little rose, but I am in exile 
 and France is desolate.
 
 CHARMING JUVENILE STORIES 
 
 Price, Fifty Cents Each 
 
 THE FORTUNES OF THE FELLOW. By WILL ALLEN 
 DKOMGOOLE. 
 
 THE GATE OF THE GIANT SCISSORS. By ANNIE FELLOWS- 
 JOHNSTON. 
 
 THE SLEEVING BEAUTY. A Modern Version. By MARTHA 
 BAKER DUNN. 
 
 THE YOUNG ARCHER. By CHARLES E. BUIMBLECOM. 
 
 A LITTLE PURITAN REBEL. By EDITH ROBINSON. 
 
 THE FARRIER'S DOG AND HIS FELLOW. By WILL ALLEN 
 DROMGOOLE. 
 
 THE PRINCE OF THE PIN ELVES. By CHARLES LEE 
 SLEIGHT. 
 
 A DOG OF FLANDERS. By " OUIDA." 
 
 THE NURNBERG STOVE. By " OUIDA." 
 
 OLE MAMMY'S TORMENT. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
 
 THE LITTLE COLONEL. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
 
 BIG BROTHER. By ANNIE FELLOWS-JOHNSTON. 
 
 A LOYAL LITTLE MAID. By EDITH ROBINSON. 
 
 THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE. By Miss MULOCH. 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE. By Miss MULOCH. 
 
 HIS LITTLE MOTHER. By Miss MULOCH. 
 
 WEE DOROTHY'S TRUE VALENTINE. By LAURA UPDE- 
 
 GRAFF. 
 
 LA BELLE NIVERNAISE. The Story of an Old Boat and Her 
 
 Crew. By ALPHONSE DAUDET. 
 
 A GREAT EMERGENCY. By JULIANA HORATIA EWING. 
 THE TRINITY FLOWER. By JULIANA HORATIA EWING. 
 STORY OF A SHORT LIFE. By JULIANA HORATIA EWING. 
 JACKANAPES. BY JULIANA HORATIA EWING. 
 RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. By DR. JOHN BROWN. 
 THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER. A Legend of Stiria. 
 
 By JOHN RUSKIN. 
 THE YOUNG KING. THE STAR CHILD. Two Tales. 
 
 Published by L. C PAGE AND COMPANY 
 212 Summer Street- Boston
 
 COSY CORNER SERIES. Continued. 
 
 THE LITTLE COLONEL'S NEIGHBORS. By ANNIE FELLOWS- 
 JOHNSTON. 
 
 A LITTLE DAUGHTER OF LIBERTY. By EDITH ROBINSON. 
 LITTLE KING DAVIE. By NELLIE HELLIS. 
 LITTLE PETERKIN VANDIKE. By CHARLES STUART PKATT. 
 THE MAKING OF ZIMRI BUNKER. By W J. LONG. 
 
 COSY CORNER SERIES 
 
 FOR 
 
 OLDER READERS 
 
 A Series of Short Original Stories, or Reprints of Well-knowiv 
 Favorites, Sketches of Travel, Essays and Poems. 
 
 The books of this series answer a long-felt need for a half -hour's 
 entertaining reading, while in the railway car, during the summer 
 outing in the country or at the seaside, or by the evening lamp at 
 home. They are particularly adapted for reading aloud, contain- 
 ing nothing but the best from a literary standpoint, and are un- 
 excepti-nable in every way. They are printed from good type, 
 illustrated with original sketches by good artists, and neatly 
 bound in cloth. The size is a 16mo, not too large for the pocket. 
 
 Price, Fifty Cents Each 
 
 MEMORIES OF THE MANSE. GLIMPSES o* SCOTTISH LIFE 
 
 AND CHARACTER. By ANNE BREADALBANE. 
 CHRISTMAS AT YHOMPSON HALL. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE 
 A PROVENCE ROSE. By LOUISA DE LA RAME (OuiDA). 
 IN DISTANCE AND IN DREAM. By M. F. SWEETSER. 
 WILL O' THE MILL. By ROBERT Louis STEVENSON. 
 
 Published by L. C PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 212 Summer Street, Boston
 
 GIFT BOOK SERIES FOR BOYS 
 AND GIRLS 
 
 Tall 12mo, 1 Volume, Price, $1.00 Each 
 
 A series of well-written, popular copyright books, by well-known 
 authors. Each story has been carefully selected with a view to 
 making a series of clean, wholesome, and interesting books, es- 
 pecially suitable as presents for boys and girls from eight to 
 sixteen. Each book is profusely illustrated with full-page and 
 text illustrations, the type is clear and good, the binding rich 
 and attractive, and each volume has a separate cover design. 
 LITTLE BERMUDA. By MARIA LOUISE POOL, author of 
 
 " Dally," " A Redbridge Neighborhood," " In a Dike Shanty," 
 
 " Friendship and Folly," etc. 
 THE WILD RUTHVENS. A HOME STORY. By CURTIS YORK. 
 
 Illustrated by E. F. Manning. 
 
 A capital tale of a lot of lovable, romping children. The story 
 has achieved a great success in England, where it has reached its 
 60,000. It is very similar in style and interest to Miss Alcott's 
 " Little Men" and " Little Women." 
 
 KING PIPPIN. A STORY FOR CHILDREN. By MRS. GERARD 
 FORD, author of " Pixie." With forty illustrations by Flor- 
 ence N. Cooper. 
 
 One of the most delightful books for young folks which has 
 been issued for some time. The reader, young' or old, whatever 
 his temperament, will be arrested, benefited, and absorbed. 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF A SIBERIAN CUB. Translated from 
 the Russian of Slibitski by LEOX GOLSCHMANN. With twenty- 
 four illustrations by Winifred Foster. 
 
 This is indeed a book which will be hailed with delight, espe- 
 cially by children who love to read about animals. 
 
 fHE WOODRANGER. By G. W. BROWN. 
 
 The first of a series of five volumes entitled " The Woodranger 
 rales." Although each book is complete in itself, the same char- 
 acters will be continued throughout the series. This series, like 
 the " Pathfinder Tales " of J. Fenimore Cooper, will combine his- 
 torical information relating to early pioneer days in America with 
 interesting adventures in the backwoods. 
 
 Published by L. C PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 212 Summer Street, Boston
 
 GIFT BOOK SERIES FOR BOYS AND GIRLS. -.Continued, 
 
 THREE LITTLE CRACKERS. By WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE, 
 author of " The Farrier's Dog," etc., with fifty text and full- 
 page illustrations. 
 
 A fascinating story for boys and girls. The adventures of a 
 family of Alabama children who move to Florida und grow up in 
 the South are described, with the combined humor and pathos 
 which give this gifted young Southern author so high a place in 
 the ranks of American writers. 
 
 THREE CHILDREN OF GALILEE. A LIFE OF CHRIST FOB 
 THE YOUNG. By JOHN GORDON. Beautifully illustrated with 
 more than one hundred text and full-page illustrations of 
 Holy Land scenery. 
 
 There has long been a need for a Life of Christ for the young, 
 and this book has been written in answer to this demand. That 
 it will meet with great favor is beyond question, for parents have 
 recognized that their boys and girls want something more than a 
 Bible Story, a dry statement of facts, and that, in order to hold 
 the attention of the youthful readers, a book on this subject 
 should have life and movement as well as scrupulous accuracy 
 and religious sentiment. 
 
 MISS GRAY'S GIRLS; OR, SUMMER DAYS IN THE SCOTTISH 
 HIGHLANDS. By JEANNETTE A. GRANT. With about sixty 
 illustrations in half-tone and pen-and-ink sketches of Scot- 
 tish scenery. 
 A delightfully told story of a summer trip through Scotland, 
 
 somewhat out of the beaten track. 
 
 THE FAIRY FOLK OF BLUE HILL. A STORY OF FOLK- 
 LORE. By LILY F. WESSELHOEFT, author of " Sparrow the 
 Tramp," etc., with fifty-five illustrations from original draw- 
 ings by Alfred C. Eastman. 
 A new volume by Mrs. Wesselhoeft, well known as one of our 
 
 best writers for the' young, and who has made a host of friends 
 
 among the young people who have read her delightful books. 
 
 This book ought to interest and appeal to every child who has 
 
 read her earlier works. 
 
 Published by L. C. PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 2J2 Summer Street, Boston
 
 (SIFT BOOK SERIES FOli JiO YS AND GIRLS, Continued. 
 
 FEATS ON THE FIORD. A TALE OF NORWEGIAN LIFE. By 
 HAKRIET MARTINEAU. With about sixty original illustra- 
 tions and a colored frontispiece. 
 
 This admirable book, read and enjoyed by so many young 
 people, deserves to be brought to the attention of parents in 
 search of wholesome reading for their children to-day. It is 
 something more than a juvenile book, being really one of the 
 most instructive books about Norway and Norwegian life and 
 manners ever written, well deserving liberal illustration and the 
 luxury of good paper now given to it. 
 
 SONGS AND RHYMES FOR THE LITTLE ONES. Compiled 
 by MARY WHITNEY MORRISON (Jenny Wallis). New edition, 
 with an introduction by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, and eight 
 illustrations. 
 
 No better description of this admirable book can be given 
 than Mrs. Whitney's happy introduction. 
 
 " One might almost as well offer June roses with the assur- 
 ance of their sweetness, as to present this lovely little gathering 
 of verse which announces itself, like them, by its own delicious- 
 ness. . . . The most bewitching book of songs for little people 
 that we have ever known." 
 
 THE YOUNG PEARL DIVERS. A STORY OF AUSTRALIAN 
 ADVENTURE BY LAND AND BY SEA. By LIEUT. H. PHELPS 
 WHITMARSH, author of "The Mysterious Voyage of the 
 
 Daphne," etc. Illustrated with twelve full-page half-tones, by 
 
 H. Burgess, whose drawings have exactly caught the spirited tone 
 
 of the narrative. 
 
 This is a splendid story for boys, by an author who writes in 
 
 vigorous and interesting language, of scenes and adventures with 
 
 which he is personally acquainted. 
 
 TIMOTHY DOLE. By JUNIATA SALSBITRY. With twenty-five or 
 thirty illustrations from drawings and pen-and-ink sketches. 
 The title gives no clue to the character of the book, but the 
 reader who begins the first chapter will not stop until he has 
 finished the whole. The youthful hero, and a genuine hero he 
 proves to be, starts from home, loses his way, meets with startling 
 adventures, finds friends, kind and many, grows to be a manly 
 man, and is able to devote himself to bettering the condition of 
 the poor in the mining region of Pennsylvania, the scene of his 
 early life and adventures. 
 
 Published by L. C PAGE AND COMPANY 
 212 Summer Street, Boston
 
 OTHER NEW JUVENILES 
 
 OLD FATHER GANDER. A BOOK OF RHYMES AND PICTURES 
 FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. By WALTER SCOTT HOWARD. 
 1 vol., oblong quarto, cloth, decorative .... $2.00 
 The illustrations are so striking and fascinating that the book 
 
 will appeal to young people aside from the fact even of the charm 
 
 and humor of the songs and rhymes. 
 
 THE CROCK OF GOLD. A NEW BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. By 
 8. BARING GOULD, author of " Mehalah," " Old Country Life," 
 "Old English Fairy Tales," etc. With twenty-five full-page 
 illustrations by F. D. Bedford. 
 1 vol., tall 12mo, cloth, decorative, gilt top . . . $1.50 
 
 THE VOYAGE OF THE AVENGER. IN THE DAYS OF THE 
 DASHING DRAKE. By HENRY ST. JOHN, author of " A Middy 
 of Nelson's Day," etc. With twenty-five full-page illustrations 
 by Paul Hardy. 
 
 1 vol., tall 12mo, cloth, decorative, gilt top, 400 pages $1.50 
 A boy's book of adventure, the scene of which is laid in tha; 
 
 stirring period of colonial extension when England's famous 
 
 naval heroes encountered the ships of Spain, both at home and in 
 
 the West Indies. 
 
 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF SPAIN. By LEONARD WILLIAMS, 
 author of " Ballads and Songs of Spain," etc. 
 1 vol., small 12mo, with frontispiece, cloth, gilt top . $0.75 
 The author describes in familiar language the reconquest of 
 
 Spain from the Moors, and her subsequent nistory down to the 
 
 E resent year, and the peace concluded in 1898 with the United 
 tates of America. Throughout the work the narrative and dra- 
 matic is aimed at, rather than the merely statistical, but Mr. 
 Williams's ideal may be best summed up by a quotation from his 
 preface. He says : " It seems to me that there is little to gain 
 and much to confuse, by insisting too minutely on the dry dates 
 relating to the Christian and Moorish sovereigns who succeed one 
 another, often with bewildering rapidity, in Aragon, Castile, 
 Navarre, and Moslem Spain. 
 
 " Now and again, however, a great fighting king stands forth, 
 head and shoulders above the rest, a landmark, so to speak, amid 
 the wilderness. Him I have endeavored to throw into relief, so 
 that even a child may be able to point to him and exclaim, ' Here, 
 at least, I find a substantial fact and figure.' " 
 
 Published by L. C PAGE AND COMPANY 
 
 212 Summer Street, Boston
 
 A 001036259