On telling their mother what they had done, she, to punish them for the unnatural action, condemned Melusine to become every Saturday a serpent, from the waist downwards, till she should meet a man who would marry her under the condition of never seeing her on a Saturday, and should keep his promise. She inflicted other judgments on her two sisters, less severe in proportion to their guilt. Melusine now went rambling through the world in search of the man who was to deliver her. She passed through the Black Forest, and that of Ardennes, and at last she arrived in the forest of Colombiers, in Poitou, where all the Fays of the neighbourhood came before her, telling her they waited for her to reign in that place. Raymond having accidentally killed the count, his uncle, by the glancing aside of his boar-spear, was wandering by night in the forest of Colombiers. He arrived at a fountain that rose at the foot of a high rock. This fountain was called by the people the Fountain of Thirst, or the Fountain of the Fays *, on account of the many marvellous things that had happened at it. It is at this day (1698) corruptly called La Font de Séc ; and every year in the month of May a fair is held in the neighbouring mead, where the pastry-cooks sell figures of women, bien coiffées, called Merlusines.-French Author's Note. At the time, when Raymond arrived at the fountain, three ladies were diverting themselves there by the light of the moon, the principal of whom was Melusine. Her beauty and her amiable manners quickly won his love: she soothed him, concealed the deed he had done, and married him, he promising on his oath never to desire to see her on a Saturday. She assured him that a breach of his oath would for ever deprive him of her whom he so much loved, and be followed by the unhappiness of both for life. Out of her great wealth, she built for him, in the neighbourhood of the Fountain of Thirst, where he first saw her, the castle of Lusignan. She also built Larochelle, Cloitre Malliers, Mersent, and other places. But destiny, that would have Melusine single, was incensed against her. The marriage was made unhappy by the deformity of the children born of one that was enchanted; but still Raymond's love for the beauty that ravished both heart and eyes remained unshaken. Destiny now renewed her attacks. Raymond's cousin had excited him to jealousy and to secret concealment, by malicious suggestions of the purport of the Saturday retirement of the countess. He hid himself; and then saw how the lovely form of Melusine ended below in a snake, gray and sky-blue, mixed with white. But it was not horror that seized him at the sight, it was infinite anguish at the reflection that through his breach of faith he might lose his lovely wife for ever. Yet this misfortune had not speedily come on him, were it not that his son, Geoffroi with the tooth*, had burned his brother Freimund, who would stay in the abbey of Malliers, with the abbot and a hundred monks. At which the afflicted father, count Raymond, when his wife Melusine was entering his closet to comfort him, broke out into these words against her, before all the courtiers who attended her :-"Out of my sight, thou pernicious snake and odious serpent! thou contaminator of my race!" Melusine's former anxiety was now verified, and the evil that had lain so long in ambush had now fearfully sprung on him and her. At these reproaches she fainted away; and when at length she revived, full of the profoundest grief, she declared to him that she must now depart from him, and, in obedience to a decree of destiny, fleet about the earth in pain and suffering, as a spectre, until the day of doom; and that only when one of her race was to die at Lusignan would she become visible. * A boar's tusk projected from his mouth. According to Brantome, a figure of him, cut in stone, stood at the portal of the Melusine tower, which was destroyed in 1574. Her words at parting were these: “But one thing will I say unto thee before I part, that thou, and those who for more than a hundred years shall succeed thee, shall know that whenever I am seen to hover over the fair castle of Lusignan, then will it be certain that in that very year the castle will get a new lord; and though people may not perceive me in the air, yet they will see me by the Fountain of Thirst; and thus shall it be so long as the castle stands in honour and flourishing-especially on the Friday before the lord of the castle shall die.” She immediately, with wailing and loud lamentation, left the castle of Lusignan *, and has ever since existed as a spectre of the night. Raymond died as a hermit on Monserrat. The president de Boissieu says †, that she chose for her retreat one of the mountains of Sassenage, near Grenoble, on account of certain vats that are there, and to which she communicated a virtue which makes them, at this day, one of the seven wonders of Dauphiné. They are two in At her departure she left the mark of her foot on the stone of one of the windows, where it remained till the castle was destroyed. In his poem of Melusina, dedicated to Christina of Sweden. number, of great beauty, and so admirably cut in the rock, that it is easy to see they are not the work of unaided nature. Melusine having chosen this place for her abode, and these vats for her baths, gave them the virtue of announcing, by the water they contain, the abundance or scantiness of the crops. When there is to be an abundant harvest, it rises over the edges, and overflows; in middling years, the vats are but half full; and when the crops are to fail, they are quite dry. One of these vats is consecrated to corn, the other to wine *. The popular belief was strong in France, that she used to appear on what was called the tower of Melusine as often as any of the lords of the race of Lusignan was to die; and that when the family was extinct, and the castle had fallen to the crown, she was seen whenever a king of France was to depart this life. Mezeray informs us, that he Lusincanæos postquam Melusina penates Hæc ait quæsitum præbebunt antra recessum, VOL. II. X |