The Daughter of an Empress

And this day of the festival had finally come. With what joyful

impatience, with what anxious desire, had Natalie looked forward to

it--how had she importuned her friend, Count Paulo, with questions

about Cardinal Bernis, about the people she would meet there, about the

manners and usages with which she would have to conform!

"I am anxious and fearful," said she, with amiable modesty; "they will

find occasion to laugh at me, and you will be compelled to blush for me,

Paulo. But you must tell these wise men and great ladies that it is my

very first appearance in society, and that they must have consideration

for the awkwardness and ineptitude of a poor child who knows nothing of

the world, its forms, or its laws."

"For you no excuse will be necessary," responded Paulo, pressing the

delicate tips of her fingers to his lips. "Only be quite yourself,

perfectly true and open, inoffensive and cheerful! Forget that you are

in an assemblage; imagine yourself to be in our garden, under the trees

and among the flowers, and speak to people as you speak to your trees

and flowers."

"But will the people give me as true and cordial answers as my trees and

flowers?" asked Natalie, thoughtfully.

"They will say to you more beautiful and more flattering things," said

Paulo, smiling. "But now, Natalie, it is time to be thinking of your

toilet. See, the sun is already sinking behind the pines, and the

sky begins to redden! The time to go will soon arrive, and your first

triumph awaits you!"

"Oh, it will not have long to wait," said Natalie, laughing, and, light

and graceful as a gazelle, she tripped to the house.

Count Paulo gazed after her with a melancholy rapture. "And I am to

leave this angel," thought he, "to lose the brightest and noblest jewel

of my life, and drive myself out of paradise. And wherefore all this?

Perhaps to chase a phantom that will never become a reality, to follow

a chimera which may be only a meteor that dances before me and dissolves

into mist when I think to reach it? No, no, the world is not worth

so much that one should sell himself and his soul's happiness for its

splendor and its greatness. Natalie herself shall decide. Loves she me,

and is she satisfied with the quiet circumscribed existence that I

can henceforth only offer her, then away, ye vain dreams and ye proud

desires for greatness; then shall I be, if not the greatest, certainly

the happiest of human beings!"

It was a wonderfully brilliant festival that Cardinal Bernis had to-day

prepared for his guests--a festival hitherto unequalled in Rome. The

walls were decorated with garlands and festoons of flowers, the flaming

candelabras among which found their reflection in the tall Venetian

mirrors that rose in their golden frames from the floor to the ceilings;

and in the corners of the rooms were niches, here furnished with

orange-trees, and there with heavy silk curtains, behind which were

grottoes adorned with shells, in the midst of which were fountains where

splashed waters rendered fragrant by oil of roses and other essences.

And ever-new surprises, new grottoes and groves in those rich halls

offered themselves to the eyes of the beholders. Now one suddenly found

himself in a quiet boudoir lighted only by a solitary lamp, where the

most artistic engravings and the rarest drawings were spread out upon

a table; then again one entered a hall sparkling with a thousand lights

and resounding with music, where the gayly-dressed crowd undulated in

mazy waves; then again grottoes opened here and there, or one stepped

out through the open doors into the garden where one could enjoy the

balsamic coolness of the evening in walks brilliantly lighted with

colored lamps, or listen to the music of performers concealed in the

shrubbery, or, again, fleeing from the throng and the lights, seek a

resting-place upon some grassy bank or under some myrtle-bush, whether

for solitary musing or for encircling in sweet and silent familiarity

the waist of some chosen fair one who understanding the stolen glance,

had strayed here unnoticed.