Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

“The clock has struck, the boat is waiting; will you not come ?”’

At these words, spoken in bad French, but distinctly audible in the silence, a little noise was heard in the other top room, and the young man came down as lightly as a bird. 1

When Godefroid appeared, the lady’s face turned crimson; she trembled, started, and covered her face with her white hands.

Any woman might have shared her agitation at the sight of this youth of about twenty, of a form and stature so slender that at a first glance he might have been taken ior a mere boy, or a young girl in disguise. His black cap—lke the beret worn by the Basque people—showed a brow as white as snow, where grace and inn»cence shone with an expression of divine sweetness—the light of a soul full of faith. A poet’s fancy would have seen there the star which, in some old tale, a mother entieats the fairy godmother to set on the forehead of an infant abandoned, like Moses, to the waves. Love lurked in the thousand fair curls that fell over his shoulders. His throat, truly a swan’s throat, was white and exquisitely round. His blue eyes, bright and liquid, mirrored the sky. His features and the mold of his brow were refined and delicate enough to enchant a painter. The bloom of beauty, which in a woman’s face causes men such indescribable delight, the exquisite purity of outline, the halo of light that bathes the features we love, were here combined with a masculine complexion, and with strength as yet but half developed, in the most enchanting contrast. His was one of those melodious countenancesp. 827 which even when silent speak and attract us. And yet, on marking it attentively, the incipient blight might have been detected which comes of a great thought or a passion, the faint yellow tinge that made him seem like a young leaf opening to the sun.

No contrast could be greater or more startling than that seen in the companionship of these two men. It was like seeing a frail and graceful shrub that has grown from the hollow trunk of some gnarled willow, withered by age, blasted by lightning, standing decrepit; one of those majestic trees that painters love; the trembling sapling takes shelter there from storms. One was a god, the other was an angel; one the poet that feels, the other the poet that expresses—a prophet in sorrow, a levite in prayer.

They went out together without speaking.

‘Did you mark how he called him to him?”’ cried the sergeant of the watch when the footsteps of the couple were no longer audible on the strand. ‘‘Are not they a demon and his familiar?’’

‘*Phooh!’’ puffed Jacqueline. ‘‘I felt smothered! I never marked our two lodgers so carefully. "Tis a bad thing for us women that the Devil can wear so fair a mien!”’

‘““Ay, cast some holy water on him,”’ said Tirechair,
‘and you will see him turn into a toad.—I am off to
tell the office all about them.”’

On hearing this speech, the lady roused herself from the revery into which she had sunk, and looked at the constable, who was donning his red-and-blue jacket.

‘‘Whither are you off ta?’’ she asked.

“To tell the justices that wizards are lodging in our house very much against our will.”

The lady smiled.

p. 828