Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVI., December, 1880.

"Let me look at it," said Hermione. At this they led us into an outhouse, where she assisted me to make a careful inspection. I might have rejected the old trap at once, but she offered a few suggestions, which she told me in an aside were the fruit of her experiences in Maryland and Virginia, and the cart was pronounced safe enough to be driven slowly with a light load.

A half-grown son of the house was put in charge of it. Hermione suggested he should bring the family clothes-line in case of a breakdown, and prevailed upon the farmer's wife to put in plenty of fresh straw, a blanket and a pillow. She made a bargain, less extravagant than I expected, with the peasant proprietor, promising, however, a very handsome pourboire to his son in the event of our good fortune. The farmer stipulated, in his turn, that cart, horse and lad were not to pass the barrier, that the boy should walk at the horse's head, and that the cart was to contain only two women and little Claribel.

It was harnessed up immediately. Hermione and I followed it on foot back to the little band of travellers waiting beside the railway.

"Can we not get some of your trunks out?" I said to her.

"No," she answered: "leave them to their fate. I dare not overload the cart, and I doubt whether those men with hungry eyes would let us take them. Mamma," she whispered, "has her diamonds."

"You will get into the cart, Miss Leare?" I said as I saw her motioning to the old colored woman to take the place beside her mother.

"No indeed," she replied: "our contract stipulated only for mamma, Mammy and Clary: Mammy is crippled with rheumatism. If you have no objection I will walk with you."

"Objection? No. But it is ten miles."

"A long stretch," she said with a half sigh, "but I am young, strong, and excitement counts for something: besides, there is no remedy. We must consider them."

There had been about fifteen other persons on the train. A dozen of these, finding we were going to walk back to Paris, proposed to join us. The night was growing dark, and we pushed on. There was no woman afoot but Hermione. "Madame" they called her, evidently taking her for my wife, but by no word or smile did she notice the blunder. After a while she accepted my arm, drawing up her skirts by means of loops or pins. We had one lantern among us, and from time to time its glare permitted me to see her dainty feet growing heavy with mud and travel.

It was not what could be called a lovers' walk, tramping in the dark through mud and water, on a French country road, at a cart's tail, and hardly a word was exchanged between us; yet had it not been for fears about her safety it would have been the most delightful expedition I had ever known.

From time to time Mrs. Leare and the old nurse in the cart complained of their bones. Hermione was always ready with encouragement, but she said little else to any one. She appeared to be reserving all her energies to assist her physical endurance and to strengthen her for her task of taking care of the others.

I had always seen my sisters and other girls protected, sheltered, cared for: it gave me a sharp pang to see this beautiful and dainty creature totally unthought of by those dependent on her. Nor did Mrs. Leare seem to feel any anxiety about my comradeship with her daughter. I could fully appreciate Hermione's remark about her chaperonage being very unsatisfactory.

Every now and then we passed through villages along whose straggling streets the population was aswarm, eager for news and wondering at our muddy procession. In one of the villages I suggested stopping, but Mrs. Leare was now as frantic to get home again as she had been to get away. She said, and truly, that it had been a wild plan to start from Paris—that if she had seen me and had heard that I thought the émeute was at an end and that the report about the English was untrue, she should never have left her apartment. She had been frightened out of her senses by some men en blouse who had made their way into her rooms and had carried off her pistol and a little Turkish dagger. Victor's theft of his own wages had upset her. She had insisted upon setting out. Hermione had got post-horses somehow: Hermione ought never to have let her come away.

About three in the morning we reached a larger village than we had hitherto passed. The inhabitants had been apprised of the events in the Rue Neuve des Capucines before the ministry of the Affaires Étrangères, and the revolutionary element had increased in audacity. A crowd of turbulent-looking working-men dressed in blouses, armed with muskets, old sabres and all kinds of miscellaneous weapons, stopped our way. Some seized the head of the old horse, some gathered round the cart and lifted lanterns into the faces of the ladies. The French workman is a much more athletic man than the French soldier. I own to a sensation of deadly terror for a moment when I saw the ladies in the midst of a lawless rabble whose brawny arms were bared as if prepared for butchery of any kind. Far off, too, a low rattle of distant musketry warned us that the tumult in Paris was renewed.

"Mourir pour la Patrie" appeared to come from every throat, and many of the crowd were the worse for liquor. Indeed, these patriots had rendezvoused at a cabaret at the entrance of the village, and swarmed from its tables to intercept us. The ladies, they insisted, must alight and be examined. Mammy Chris was drawn out of the cart, looking as if her face had been rubbed in ashes: Mrs. Leare was nervously excited, Hermione went up to her, supported her and drew her bag of diamonds out of her hand. I took Claribel in my arms.

"Vos passeports," they demanded.

"Here are our American passports," said Hermione: "we are Americans."

"Yes, Americans, republicans!" cried Mrs. Leare: "we fraternize with all republicans in France."

"Aristos," said a man between his teeth, glancing at her dress and at that of Hermione.

"What does he say?" cried Mrs. Leare, who did not catch the word.

"Hush, mother!" said Hermione.

"But what did he say?" she shrieked. "Tell me at once: do not keep it from me."

Hermione replied (unwilling to use the word "aristocrat") by an American idiom: "He said we belonged to the Upper Ten."

"But we don't! Oh, Hermie, your father belongs to a good family in Maryland, but my grandfather made shoes. I was quite poor when he married me. I was only sixteen."

"What you say?" said a railroad-hand who knew a little English. "You say you are not some aristos?"

"No, sir," said I: "these ladies claim to be Americans and republicans."

"Vive la République!" cried the man.

"Vive la République!" quickly echoed Hermione.

"C'est bien! c'est bien!" cried another, raising his lantern to her blanched and beautiful face.

"You will let us all pass, monsieur?" she said persuasively: "you will even be our escort a little way. We will pay handsomely for your protection."

Before he could answer her two or three fellows, more drunk than the rest, burst out with a proposition: "She says they are not aristos, but republicans. Let her prove it. She cannot, if she be a true republican, refuse to kiss her fellow-patriots."

I started and was about to knock the rascal down with the bag of diamonds.

But Hermione laid a restraining hand upon my arm. "Gentlemen," she said in clear tones and perfect French, "it is quite true that we are Americans and republicans. We wish you well, and if it be for the good of France to be free under a republican form of government, no one can wish her prosperity more than ourselves. But in our free country, messieurs, a woman is held free to give her kiss to whom she will, and according to our custom she gives it only to her betrothed or to her husband." Here stooping she picked up a little boy who had worked himself into the forefront of the crowd, and before I knew what she was about to do she had lifted him upon the cart beside her. She looked a moment steadily at the men around her, holding the boy's hand in both her own, then turning toward him and pressing her lips upon his face, she said, "Messieurs, I kiss your representative: I cannot embrace a multitude;" and placed a piece of money in the gamin's hand.

For a moment there was some doubt what view the crowd might take of this, but her beauty, her fearlessness, and, above all, the awe inspired by her womanliness, prevailed. They shouted "Vive la République!"

"With all my heart," replied Hermione. "Now shout for me, gentlemen: Vive la République des États Unis!"

They were completely won. A French crowd is never dangerous or unmanageable till it has tasted blood, and besides it has—or at least in those days it used to have—sentiments, to which it was possible with a little tact to appeal successfully.

The opposition to our progress came to an end. Mrs. Leare and old Mammy were helped back into the cart, and a man offered them some wine. They brought some also to Hermione. I pressed her to drink it, which she did to their good health, and giving back the glass placed in it a napoleon. "Do me the favor, messieurs," she said, "to drink your next toast to our American republic."

Cheers rose for her. There was no longer any talk of detaining us: the old horse was urged forward. Hermione took my arm. We marched on, escorted by the rabble. At the end of the village-street they all gave us an unsteady cheer and turned back to their wine-tables. Hermione proceeded in silence a little farther. Then I felt her slipping from my arm, and was just in time to catch her.

Without compunction I requested Mammy Chris to get out of the cart and put her young lady in her place, pillowing her head as carefully as I could on my own coat, and proceeding in my shirtsleeves.

We were then not half a mile from the Banlieu, which we passed without adventure, much to my surprise, its inhabitants having taken advantage of the confusion to pour into Paris and infest its richer quarters.

The ladies were obliged to get out at the barrier and to send back the cart to its proprietor. Again I had the happiness of supporting Hermione while I carried little Claribel, and Mrs. Leare and Mammy walked on ahead.

"I feel humiliated," I said, "that the whole burden of those dreadful moments should have fallen upon you."

"And to avoid that feeling you were ready to knock down a drunken blouse in English style?" she said, smiling. "No, Mr. Farquhar, nothing but the power that a woman finds in her own womanhood could have brought us through safely. Those men had all had mothers, and each man had some sort of womanly ideal. I could not have managed a crowd of poissardes, but, thank Heaven, there is yet a chord that a woman may strike in the hearts of men."

The dawn of Thursday, February 24, 1848, was breaking at the eastward when I arrived with Mrs. Leare, Hermione, the nurse and child at their own apartment. I went up stairs with them. All was cold and cheerless in the rooms. There were no servants. Mrs. Leare sat down; the old nurse bemoaned her rheumatism and her aching bones; Hermione, with the assistance of the concierge's wife, lighted a fire, made some tea and waited on her mother.

For several days afterward she was very ill. She knew nothing of passing events—of the king's flight, of the triumphal and victorious processions that passed up the Champs Élysées, of the sudden impossibility of procuring supplies of change, and of the consequent difficulty of paying household bills with billets de mille francs without gold or silver.

Each day I went several times to make inquiries, and twice I saw Mrs. Leare in bed, but Hermione was invisible.

My father, an honorable British officer of the old school, perceived how things were with me. "My son," he said one day, "there are two courses open to you. You have nothing but your profession. Your education and the premium on your admittance to the office of the great man for whom you work have been my provision for you: the little property I have to leave must support your sisters. You cannot under such circumstances address Miss Leare. You must either go back at once to your work in England and forget this episode, or you may go out to America and see her father. You can tell him you have nothing on which to support his daughter, and ask if he will give you leave to address the young lady. No son of mine, situated like yourself, shall offer himself in any other way to an heiress whose father is three thousand miles away, and who is supposed to have two millions of francs for her dowry."

I saw he was right, but, forlorn as the hope was of any appeal to Mr. Leare, I would not relinquish it. I resolved to go out to America and see him, and wrote to England to secure letters of introduction to the chief engineers in the United States and Canada. Meantime, my father proposed that we should go together and call upon Mrs. and Miss Leare.

Hermione received us in the boudoir, looking like a bruised lily: her mother came in afterward.

"We are going right straight home," she said, "the moment we can get money to get away. I have written to Mr. Leare that he must find some means to send me some."

"I am glad to hear you say this, madame," said my father. "My son has just made up his mind to go out to America and seek employment on one of your railways."

Hermione looked up with a question in her eyes: so did her mother.

"Why, Mr. Farquhar, that will suit us exactly," cried Mrs. Leare.—"Hermione, won't it be lovely if Mr. Farquhar takes care of us on the voyage?—You will engage your passage—won't you?—in the same steamer as we do?—No one was ever so good a squire of dames as your son, Captain Farquhar. Hermione and I shall never forget our obligations to him."

"No, madame," said my father; and he got up and walked to the fireplace, where in his embarrassment he laid his hand upon the ornamented box which held the cigarettes of the fast lady.

She rose up too and went hastily toward him, anxious he should not surprise her little frailty.

"The truth is, madame," whispered my father, who never could restrain his tongue from any kindly indiscretion, "the poor fellow is suffering too much from the attractions of Miss Leare. He has nothing but his profession, and I tell him he must not dare to address her in her father's absence."

"My dear captain, what does that matter? And I believe Hermione would have him too," said her mother.

"Disparity of means—" began my father.

"Oh, no matter," interrupted Mrs. Leare: "her father always told her just to please herself. Mr. Farquhar is an Englishman and of good family. He has his profession to keep him out of mischief, and Hermie will more than pay her own expenses. Indeed, I dare not go home without a gentleman to look after us on the passage: my nerves have been too shattered, and I never again shall trust a courier. Do let your son go back with us," she implored persuasively; and added, as she saw that he still hesitated, "Besides, what rich man in America knows how long he may be rich? 'Spend your money and enjoy yourself' has always been my motto."

Thus urged, what could my father do but suppose that Mrs. Leare knew Mr. Leare's views better than he did? He no longer held out on the point of honor.

In twenty-four hours Hermione and I were engaged to be married.

During the voyage to New York I learned to understand her father's character, and when he met us on the wharf I was no longer afraid of him.

Hermione's choice in marriage seemed to be wholly left to herself. Mr. Leare told me, when I had that formidable talk with him dreaded by all aspirants to the hand of a man's daughter, that Hermione had too much good sense, self-respect and womanliness to give herself away to a man unworthy of her. "That she can love you, sir," he said, "is sufficient recommendation."

That it might be sufficient in my case I hoped with all my soul, but felt, as Hermione had expressed it early in our acquaintance, that society in America must be founded upon very different opinions than our own in regard to the relations of men and women.

E.W. LATIMER.

THE AUTHORS OF "FROUFROU."

No doubt it will surprise some theatre-goers who are not special students of the stage to be told that the authors of Froufrou are the authors also of the Grande Duchesse de Gérolstein and of La Belle Hélène, of Carmen and of Le Petit Duc. There are a few, I know, who think that Froufrou was written by the fertile and ingenious M. Victorien Sardou, and who, without thinking, credit M. Jacques Offenbach with the composition of the words as well as the music of the Grande Duchesse; and as for Carmen, is it not an Italian opera, and is not the book, like the music, the work of some Italian? As a matter of fact, all these plays, unlike as they are to each other, and not only these, but many more—not a few of them fairly well known to the American play-goer—are due to the collaboration of M. Henri Meilhac and M. Ludovic Halévy.

Born in 1832, M. Henri Meilhac, like M. Émile Zola, dealt in books before he began to make them. He soon gave up trade for journalism, and contributed with pen and pencil to the comic Journal pour Rire. He began as a dramatist in 1855 with a two-act play at the Palais Royal Theatre: like the first pieces of Scribe and of M. Sardou, and of so many more who have afterward abundantly succeeded on the stage, this play of M. Meilhac's was a failure; and so also was his next, likewise in two acts. But in 1856 the Sarabande du Cardinal, a delightful little comedy in one act, met with favor at the Gymnase. It was followed by two or three other comediettas equally clever. In 1859, M. Meilhac made his first attempt at a comedy in five acts, but the Petit fils de Mascarille had not the good fortune of his ancestor. In 1860, for the first time, he was assisted by M. Ludovic Halévy, and in the twenty years since then their names have been linked together on the title-pages of two score or more plays of all kinds—drama, comedy, farce, opera, operetta and ballet. M. Meilhac's new partner was the nephew of the Halévy who is best known out of France as the composer of the Jewess, and he was the son of M. Léon Halévy, poet, philosopher and playwright. Two years younger than M. Henri Meilhac, M. Ludovic Halévy held a place in the French civil service until 1858, when he resigned to devote his whole time, instead of his spare time, to the theatre. As the son of a dramatist and the nephew of a popular composer, he had easy access to the stage. He began as the librettist-in-ordinary to M. Offenbach, for whom he wrote Ba-ta-clan in 1855, and later the Chanson de Fortunio, the Pont des Soupirs and Orphée aux Enfers. The first very successful play which MM. Meilhac and Halévy wrote together was a book for M. Offenbach; and it was possibly the good fortune of this operetta which finally affirmed the partnership. Before the triumph of the Belle Hélène in 1864 the collaboration had been tentative, as it were: after that it was as though the articles had been definitely ratified—not that either of the parties has not now and then indulged in outside speculations, trying a play alone or with an outsider, but this was without prejudice to the permanent partnership.

This kind of literary union, the long-continued conjunction of two kindred spirits, is better understood amongst us than the indiscriminate collaboration which marks the dramatic career of M. Eugène Labiche, for instance. Both kinds were usual enough on the English stage in the days of Elizabeth, but we can recall the ever-memorable example of Beaumont and Fletcher, while we forget the chance associations of Marston, Dekker, Chapman and Ben Jonson. And in contemporary literature we have before us the French tales of MM. Erckmann-Chatrian and the English novels of Messrs. Besant and Rice. The fact that such a union endures is proof that it is advantageous. A long-lasting collaboration like this of MM. Meilhac and Halévy must needs be the result of a strong sympathy and a sharp contrast of character, as well as of the possession by one of literary qualities which supplement those of the other.

One of the first things noticed by an American student of French dramatic literature is that the chief Parisian critics generally refer to the joint work of these two writers as the plays of M. Meilhac, leaving M. Halévy altogether in the shade. At first this seems a curious injustice, but the reason is not far to seek. It is not that M. Halévy is some two years the junior of M. Meilhac: it lies in the quality of their respective abilities. M. Meilhac has the more masculine style, and so the literary progeny of the couple bear rather his name than his associate's. M. Meilhac has the strength of marked individuality, he has a style of his own, one can tell his touch; while M. Halévy is merely a clever French dramatist of the more conventional pattern. This we detect by considering the plays which each has put forth alone and unaided by the other. In reading one of M. Meilhac's works we should feel no doubt as to the author, while M. Halévy's clever pictures of Parisian society, wanting in personal distinctiveness, would impress us simply as a product of the "Modern French School."

Before finally joining with M. Halévy, M. Meilhac wrote two comedies in five acts of high aim and skilful execution, and two other five-act pieces have been written by MM. Meilhac and Halévy together. The Vertu de Célimène and the Petit fils de Mascarille are by the elder partner—Fanny Lear and Froufrou are the work of the firm. Yet in these last two it is difficult to see any trace of M. Halévy's handiwork. Allowing for the growth of M. Meilhac's intellect during the eight or ten years which intervened between the work alone and the work with his associate, and allowing for the improvement in the mechanism of play-making, I see no reason why M. Meilhac might not have written Fanny Lear and Froufrou substantially as they are had he never met M. Halévy. But it is inconceivable that M. Halévy alone could have attained so high an elevation or have gained so full a comic force. Perhaps, however, M. Halévy deserves credit for the better technical construction of the later plays: merely in their mechanism the first three acts of Froufrou are marvellously skilful. And perhaps, also, his is a certain softening humor, which is the cause that the two later plays, written by both partners, are not so hard in their brilliance as the two earlier comedies, the work of M. Meilhac alone.

It may seem something like a discussion of infinitesimals, but I think M. Halévy's co-operation has given M. Meilhac's plays a fuller ethical richness. To the younger writer is due a simple but direct irony, as well as a lightsome and laughing desire to point a moral when occasion serves. Certainly, I shall not hold up a play written to please the public of the Palais Royal, or even of the Gymnase, as a model of all the virtues. Nor need it be, on the other hand, an embodiment of all the cardinal sins. The frequenters of the Palais Royal Theatre are not babes; young people of either sex are not taken there; only the emancipated gain admittance; and to the seasoned sinners who haunt theatres of this type these plays by MM. Meilhac and Halévy are harmless. Indeed, I do not recall any play of theirs which could hurt any one capable of understanding it. Most of their plays are not to be recommended to ignorant innocence or to fragile virtue. They are not meant for young men and maidens. They are not wholly free from the taint which is to be detected in nearly all French fiction. The mark of the beast is set on not a little of the work done by the strongest men in France. M. Meilhac is too clean and too clever ever to delve in indecency from mere wantonness: he has no liking for vice, but his virtue sits easily on him, and though he is sound on the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halévy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in Fanny Lear, for instance, the moral is pointed explicitly—and even where there is no moral tagged to the fable, he who has eyes to see and ears to hear can find "a terrible example" in almost any of these plays, even the lightest. For the congregation to which it was delivered there is a sermon in Toto chez Tata, perhaps the piece in which, above all others, the Muse seems Gallic and égrillarde. That is a touch of real truth, and so of a true morality, where Tata, the fashionable courtesan, leaning over her stairs as Toto the school-boy bears off her elderly lover, and laughing at him, cries out, "Toi, mon petit homme, je te repincerai dans quatre ou cinq ans!" And a cold and cutting stroke it is a little earlier in the same little comedy where Toto, left alone in Tata's parlor, negligently turns over her basket of visiting-cards and sees "names which he knew because he had learnt them by heart in his history of France." Still, in spite of this truth and morality, I do not advise the reading of Toto chez Tata in young ladies' seminaries. Young ladies in Paris do not go to hear Madame Chaumont, for whom Toto was written, nor is the Variétés, where it was played, a place where a girl can take her mother.