worst members of the National Guard by the severity of his discipline; and had he been caught by the mob the same day as Clement Thomas, who committed the same offence, would have certainly shared the fate of that general. Though elected a député, he remained at Paris a few days after Thiers & Co. left it, in the hope of persuading the party of Order, including then no small portion of the National Guards, to take prompt and vigorous measures to defend the city against the Communists. Indignant at their pusillanimity, he then escaped to Versailles. There he more than confirmed the high reputation he had acquired during the siege, and impressed the ablest public men with the belief that he was destined to take a very leading part in the strife of party. When the Versailles troops entered Paris, he was, of course, among them in command of a battalion. "He escaped safe through that horrible war of barricades, though no man more courted danger. He inspired his men with his own courage. It was not till the revolt was quenched on the evening of the 28th May that he met his death. The Versailles soldiers, naturally exasperated, were very prompt in seizing and shooting at once every passenger who looked like a foe. Some men under De Mauléon had seized upon one of these victims, and were hurrying him into the next street for execution, when, catching sight of the Vicomte, he screamed out, Lebeau, save me!' "At that cry De Mauléon rushed forward, arrested his soldiers, cried, "This man is innocent-a harmless physician. I answer for him.' As he thus spoke, a wounded Communist, lying in the gutter amidst a heap of the slain, dragged himself up, reeled toward De Mauléon, plunged a knife between his shoulders, and dropped down dead. "The Vicomte was carried into a neighbouring house, from all the windows of which the tricolor was suspended; and the Médecin whom he had just saved from summary execution examined and dressed his wound. The Vicomte lingered for more than an hour, but expired in the effort to utter some words, the sense of which those about him endeavoured in vain to seize. "It was from the Médecin that the name of the assassin and the motive for the crime were ascertained. The miscreant was a Red Republican and Socialist named Armand Monnier. He had been a very skilful workman, and earning, as such, high wages. But he thought fit to become an active revolutionary politician, first led into schemes for upsetting the world by the existing laws of marriage, which had inflicted on him one woman who ran away from him, but being still legally his wife forbade him to marry another woman with whom he lived, and to whom he seems to have been passionately attached. "These schemes, however, he did not put into any positive practice till he fell in with a certain Jean Lebeau, who exercised great influence over him, and by whom he was admitted into one of the secret revolutionary societies which had for their object the overthrow of the Empire. After that time his head became turned. The fall of the Empire put an end to the society he had joined: Lebeau dissolved it. During the siege Monnier was a sort of leader among the ouvriers; but as it advanced and famine commenced, he contracted the habit of intoxication. His children died of cold and hunger. The woman he lived with followed them to the grave. Then he seems to have be come a ferocious madman, and to have been implicated in the worst crimes of the Communists. He cherished a wild desire of revenge against this Jean Lebeau, to whom he attributed all his calamities, and by whom, he said, his brother had been shot in the sortie of December. "Here comes the strange part of the story. This Jean Lebeau is alleged to have been one and the same person with Victor de Mauléon. The Médecin I have named, and who is well known in Belleville and Montmartre as the Médecin des Pauvres, confesses that he belonged to the secret society organised by Lebeau; that the disguise the Vicomte assumed was so complete, that he should not have recognised his identity with the conspirator but for an accident. During the later time of the bombardment, he, the Médecin des Pauvres, was on the eastern ramparts, and his attention was suddenly called to a man mortally wounded by the splinter of a shell. While examining the nature of the wound, De Mauléon, who was also on the ramparts, came to the spot. The dying man said: 'M. le Vicomte, you owe me a service. My name is Marc le Roux. I was on the police before the war. When M. de Mauléon reassumed his station, and was making himself obnoxious to the Emperor, I might have denounced him as Jean Lebeau, the conspirator. I did not. The siege has reduced me to want. I have a child at home-a pet. Don't let her starve.' 'I will see to her,' said the Vicomte. Before we could get the man into the ambulance-cart he expired. "The Médecin who told this story I had the curiosity to see myself, and cross-question. I own I believe his statement. Whether De Mauléon did or did not conspire against a fallen dynasty, to which VOL. CXV.NO. DCXCIX. he owed no allegiance, can little if at all injure the reputation he has left behind of a very remarkable man-of great courage and great ability-who might have had a splendid career if he had survived. But, as Savarin says truly, the first bodies which the car of revolution crushes down are those which first harness themselves to it. "Among De Mauléon's papers is the programme of a constitution fitted for France. How it got into Savarin's hands I know not. De Mauléon left no will, and no relations came forward to claim his papers. I asked Savarin to give me the heads of the plan, which he did. They are as follows:— 666 1st, No The American republic is the sole one worth studying, for it has lasted. The causes of its duration are in the checks to democratic fickleness and disorder. law affecting the Constitution can be altered without the consent of two-thirds of Congress. 2d, To counteract the impulses natural to a popular Assembly chosen by universal suffrage, the greater legislative powers, especially in foreign affairs, are vested in the Senate, which has even executive as well as legislative functions. 3d, The chief of the State, having elected his government, can maintain it independent of hostile majorities in either Assembly. "These three principles of safety to form the basis of any new constitution for France. "For France it is essential that the chief magistrate, under whatever title he assume, should be as irresponsible as an English sovereign. Therefore he should not preside at his councils; he should not lead his armies. The day for personal government is gone, even in Prussia. The safety for order in a State is, that when things go wrong, the Ministry changes, the C State remains the same. In Europe, republican institutions are safer where the chief magistrate is hereditary than where elective.' "Savarin says these axioms are carried out at length, and argued with great ability. "I am very grateful for your proffered hospitalities in England. Some day I shall accept themviz., whenever I decide on domestic life, and the calm of the conjugal foyer. I have a penchant for an English Mees, and am not exacting as to the dot. Thirty thousand livres sterling would satisfy me-a trifle, I believe, to you rich islanders. Meanwhile, I am naturally compelled to make up for the miseries of that horrible siege. Certain moralising journals tell us that, sobered by misfortunes, the Parisians are going to turn over a new leaf, become studious and reflective, despise pleasure and luxury, and live like German professors. Don't believe a word of it. My conviction is that, whatever may be said as to our frivolity, extravagance, &c., under the Empire, we shall be just the same under any form of government-the bravest, the most timid, the most ferocious, the kindest-hearted, the most irrational, the most intelligent, the most contradictory, the most consistent people whom Jove, taking counsel of Venus and the Graces, Mars and the Furies, ever created for the de [Jan. light and terror of the world;-in dévoué, FREDERIC LEMERCIER." a word, the Parisians.-Votre tout Sorrento, towards the close of the It is a lovely noon on the bay of autumn of 1871: upon the part of the craggy shore, to the left of the town, on which her first perusal romance of Christian heroism has of the loveliest poem in which the ever combined elevation of thought had charmed her childhood, rewith silvery delicacies of speech, clined the young bride of Graham Vane. They were in the first month of their marriage. Isaura had not yet recovered from the effects of all that had preyed upon her life, from the hour in which she had deemed that in her pursuit of fame she had lost the love that had dreams, to that in which coloured her genius and inspired her in insisting on her passing the The physicians consulted agreed winter in a southern climate; and after their wedding, which took place in Florence, they thus came to Sorrento. smoothed rocklet, Graham reclines As Isaura is seated on the small at her feet, his face upturned to anxiety in his impassioned tenderhers with an inexpressible wistful better and stronger since we have ness. "You are sure you feel been here?" THE STORY OF VALENTINE; AND HIS BROTHER. PART I.-CHAPTER J. Two ladies were seated in a great dim room, partially illuminated by fits and starts with gleams of firelight. The large windows showed a pale dark sky, in which twilight was giving place to night, and across which the brown branches of the trees, rough with the buds of March, tossed wildly in a hurricane of wind, burdened with intermittent blasts of rain — rain that dashed fiercely against the windows a handful at a time, then ceased till some new cloud was ready to discharge its angry shower. Something fiercely personal and furious was in the storm. It looked and felt like something not addressed to the world in general, but aimed individually by some angry spirit of the elements at the people who lived here high up above the brawling Esk amid the brown wintry woods at Rosscraig House. The drawing-room was large, lofty, and full of old-fashioned furniture which would have enchanted a connossieur. The two ladies, who were its only occupants, were scarcely discernible at first, though the firelight, gleaming about among the still life, caught here a green reflection from a wonderful cabinet of rarest Verni-Martin, and there entangled itself in the bevelled sides of a strange old mirror, used to reflecting wizards. It was more easy to make out these accessories of existence than it was to identify the two voices which occupied and reigned over this still and darkling chamber. They were in one corner of the room near the fire; one, the prevailing voice, was soft but strong, with the vigour in it of mature life, just roughened here and there by a touch of age, which gave it an aigre doux of distinct character-and came from an ample dark shadow in a great chair, turned towards the fire. The other, which gave forth only monosyllabic sounds of assent or wonder, sweet and tender, but feeble, belonged to a smaller person near the first, and facing her-whose countenance, turned towards the window, showed like a pale whiteness in the dark. This was the central light, the highest tone in the picture, except the pale gleaming of the sky from the windows, and the fitful red flash from the fire. "Richard's story," said the stronger voice, 66 cannot be supposed to be very interesting to any but ourselves. If it is for mere curiosity, Mary Curiosity!"-there was a tone of reproach in the soft repetition— a reproach and an appeal. "That was unkind. I did not mean it. I meant interest, friendship; but Mary, Mary, friendship is weak, and interest a poor bit feeble echo of feeling to them that are all bound up in one life as I have been in my son." Here there was a little pause, and then the younger voice answered, faltering, "I have known him all my life. I have seen few men but him This was preliminary to the story which old Lady Eskside had begun to tell when I opened to you, gentle reader, the door of this great dim room. She was deep in it by that for Richard's wife? I thought she was some shopkeeper's daughter -some scheming, dressing, half-bred woman that had made her scheme to marry him because his father was Lord Eskside-though, heaven knows, it's a poor enough lordship when all's said. Perhaps we women are too apt to take this view; naturally, when such a thing happens, we think it the woman's fault What she the woman's doing. But, Mary, the time we shadows entered, among the shadows, to listen. And most of us can figure to ourselves what a mother would be likely to say of her only child-the child not of her youth even, which puts a kind of equality between mother and son, and brings them together, as it were, upon one table-land of life, sooner or later-but the child of her mature age, and therefore always a child to her. What she said of him I need not repeat. The reader will make acquaintance with the man for himself, a different creature from the man as seen through his mother's eyes. "Perhaps it is not a thing to remark to you," said the old lady, who was old enough not only to retain a Scotch accent, but to use occasionally a word peculiar to the north," but, Mary, you are not a bit girlie unacquainted with the world. You will recognise Richard in this that he married the woman. -God forgive me! I'm sorely tempted to think sometimes that vice is less deadly for this world than virtue. You know what most men would have done-they would have taken the girl as they would have gathered a flower, and neither she nor one belonging to her knew better, nor expected better; but my Richard, God bless him! was a fool, Mary, he was a fool! His father says so, and what can I say different? He has always been a fool in that way, thank God! He married the woman; and then he sent to me when it was all over and nothing could be mended, to come and see, for God's sake, what was to be done." "And you went ?" "I went after a struggle; I could not thole the creature,-the very name of her was odious to me. It was a ridiculous name -a playactor's name. They called her Altamira. What do you think of Mary, when I saw the girl "You freed her," said the other, with a sighing sound in her low voice, "from the blame?" "The blame!" cried the old lady, with some impatience; then, sinking her voice low, she said hurriedly "the girl was no shopkeeper's daughter, not even a cottage lass, nor out of a ploughman's house, or a weaver's house, or the lowest you can think. She was out of no house at all-she was a tramp. Mary, do you know what that means?-a creature hanging about the roads and fields, at fairs and races, wherever the roughest, and the wildest, and the most miserable congregate that was Richard's wife-- "Oh, Lady Eskside !" "You may well say, Oh! As for me, if I had ever fainted in my life I would have fainted then. She was a beautiful creature; but the sight of her brought a sickness to my very heart. She was like a wild hunted thing, frightened to death for me and everything that was civilised-looking out of her wild black eyes to see how she could escape-shrinking back not to be touched as if she thought I would give her a blow. Blame! you might as well blame a deer that it let itself be taken, poor, bonnie, panting, senseless thing! I blamed nobody, Mary; I was just appalled, neither more nor less, at the man's folly that had done it. Think of a |