one morning, brought mysteriously, "fresh azuretinted flowers, with fantastic pistils and of unknown kinds": for the spiritualists say that souls repeat the miracle of St. Dorothea, who gave heavenly blossoms to her executioners. At last we have the dead woman seizing the living man's hand, and making him write at her dictation, "It is indeed I, Thérèse, who am here. I will never leave you . . I love you and you alone." Agénor had piously remained a widower, and his bereavement had all the sweetness of his betrothal. He knew, continually, "angel's caresses," "slender hands that suddenly took shape between his own." Chimeras, illusions, say you? What does it matter! Agénor has conquered death. Thérèse is near him. One night he sees her again close to his bed, beautiful, strange, with mournful eyes, once more alive. He calls her.

"Soon he is aware that a loving body has slipped in close beside his own, burning, palpitating, surrendering itself. Then a moment of perfect unfathomable oblivion, as though the dead woman, seized by pity, had at last allowed herself to be corrupted." But this time he has sinned against the Ideal. He has misinterpreted the law of the mystery, the noli me tangere. He is punished; the phantom vanishes, leaving him overwhelmed with shame and remorse. It is all over; she will never return. He feels that he has lost her through his own fault. In his posthumous widowerhood he asks himself in vain :" In what planet, far beyond the limits of vision, dwells that sweet woman without a stain, my blessed wife, my angel, my love!" She does return,

She will return no more.

she has forgiven. Again she manifests herself; but gravely, solemnly, to help the living to overcome the first degree of initiation. She dictates these words:

"As the time is near when you will have the task of knowing me under another form, and with other features, I am anxious to lead you away from error, to reveal you certain things, so that you may preserve and re-read them, nothing doubting, for you will see them written as by my hand."

She communicates to him a childish and very sweet little catechism, in which the neo-Christian ideas of a universal Providence are mixed up with the dogma of metempsychosis.

Shortly before this the daughter whom she had left upon earth, and to whom Agénor could not attach himself, had married a M. de Prahecq. A year after the marriage, as the widower was walking one bright winter's morning in the snow-covered park, on the white page stretched at his feet his stick unconsciously wrote the words: "A daughter will be born to Berthe. I belong no longer to myself."

With the birth of this daughter, little Laure, M. Hennique's book assumes a charming fragrance; it is adorned by a mournful, delicious delicacy, clothed with the sweetest tints of tenderness. Were it not that these pages are marred in a few places by a too capricious seeking after art they would be truly adorable. The love of the grandfather for his exquisite little granddaughter, proud and tender like himself, and who will not live, has inspired M. Hennique to write some enchanting passages. The child has Thérèse's eyes, the same brown velvety eyes, the same gaze, the same colour."

Agénor, struck by the resemblance, thinks over the strange words with which the dead woman bade him farewell, and he concludes that "Laure can only be a reincarnation of Thérèse." Otherwise, whence comes "that unforgotten brown gaze which Berthe never had? Laure will die a child, but what does it matter? The old man lives with mind; for a second time his love will have conquered death. Into one being he has poured all he loved in this world, and this ideal will live as long as he himself, since it is within him.

That, in its spirit and essence, is M. Hennique's book. It is assuredly not the work of a vulgar mind; it is also a fact worth noting that one of M. Zola's disciples, one of the story-tellers of the Soirées de Médan, has celebrated with a sympathetic enthusiasm the triumph of the most exalted idealism.

THE POET OF LA BRESSE

GABRIEL VICAIRE

Its

HE axe has cleared the thick forests of La Bresse, where once upon a time there lived the wolf, the wild cat, and the boar. But the old chestnut trees still stand in the hedges which divide the fields. The forest has degenerated into thickets. rugged monotony is not lacking in beauty. One feels a mournful affection for the ponds covered with floating king - cups, bordered by ranks of walnut-trees, and surrounded by melancholy clumps of birches. Those born amid the fogs of the moist flat Dombes cherish a great affection for the land that nourished them; they are honest folk, drinkers and quarrelsome, like the heroes of antiquity, hard workers, slow, cold, and resolute.

Not in all places has the earth the breath and bosom of a lover, but everywhere she has for her sons the beauty of a mother. M. Gabriel Vicaire, descended from an old family of La Bresse, has lovingly sung of his native land. He has done well. Provincial patriotism is a fine thing. Thus must France, so varied in her indivisible unity, be * Émaux bressans, nouvelle édition.-La Légende de Saint Nicolas.

celebrated for her mountains and valleys, her rivers, woods, and shores. The religion of the country would be incomplete if it did not mingle with its sacred dogmas the charming superstitions that give life and grace to all worship. Abstract patriotism would appear cold to some minds, who, sensitive to form and colour, cherish especially all that their gaze can embrace of their native land. I recall, on this subject, a truly beautiful and sincere passage which M. Jules Lemaître wrote three or four years

ago:

"When I hear people proclaiming their love of their country," said our friend, "I remain cold; I jealously wrap up my love within myself to shield it from the commonplaces which would make of it something false, empty and correct. But when I see, in some curve of the bank, the outspread Loire, blue as a lake, with its meadows, its poplars, its little tawny islands, its clumps of bluish willows, its light sky; when I breathe the sweetness infused into the air, and behold, not far away, in the country beloved of our ancient Kings, some château, chiselled like a jewel, which recalls the France of old, and what she has been in the world; at such times I feel overcome by an infinite affection for this land, where I have everywhere roots that are so fragile and so strong."

How I should like to have said that, and said it just so! I have at least strongly experienced the feeling. That is why my patriotism, in sympathy with my literary sense, is far more satisfied with M. Gabriel Vicaire's Emaux bressans, than with M. Paul Deroulède's Chants du soldat. M. Vicaire sees the Saône, as M. Lemaître saw the Loire.