In the music class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but

little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;-mild

compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity

of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria

of sentimental realities. Some of her companions brought "keepsakes"

given them as new year's gifts to the convent. These had to be hidden;

it was quite an undertaking; they were read in the dormitory. Delicately

handling the beautiful satin bindings, Emma looked with dazzled eyes at

the names of the unknown authors, who had signed their verses for the

most part as counts or viscounts.

She trembled as she blew back the tissue paper over the engraving and

saw it folded in two and fall gently against the page. Here behind the

balustrade of a balcony was a young man in a short cloak, holding in his

arms a young girl in a white dress wearing an alms-bag at her belt; or

there were nameless portraits of English ladies with fair curls, who

looked at you from under their round straw hats with their large clear

eyes. Some there were lounging in their carriages, gliding through

parks, a greyhound bounding along in front of the equipage driven at

a trot by two midget postilions in white breeches. Others, dreaming on

sofas with an open letter, gazed at the moon through a slightly open

window half draped by a black curtain. The naive ones, a tear on their

cheeks, were kissing doves through the bars of a Gothic cage, or,

smiling, their heads on one side, were plucking the leaves of a

marguerite with their taper fingers, that curved at the tips like peaked

shoes. And you, too, were there, Sultans with long pipes reclining

beneath arbours in the arms of Bayaderes; Djiaours, Turkish sabres,

Greek caps; and you especially, pale landscapes of dithyrambic lands,

that often show us at once palm trees and firs, tigers on the right, a

lion to the left, Tartar minarets on the horizon; the whole framed by

a very neat virgin forest, and with a great perpendicular sunbeam

trembling in the water, where, standing out in relief like white

excoriations on a steel-grey ground, swans are swimming about.

And the shade of the argand lamp fastened to the wall above Emma's head

lighted up all these pictures of the world, that passed before her one

by one in the silence of the dormitory, and to the distant noise of some

belated carriage rolling over the Boulevards.

When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a

funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter

sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be

buried later on in the same grave. The goodman thought she must be ill,

and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at

a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre

hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened

to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of

the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of

the Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not

confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel

herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her

brow.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024