CHAPTER I.
I wish I had lived in France in 1672! It was the age of romances in twenty volumes, and flowing periwigs, and high-heeled shoes, and hoops, and elegance, and wit, and rouge, and literary suppers, and gallantry, and devotion. What names are those of La Calprenède, and D'Urfé, and De Scuderi, to be the idols and tutelary deities of a circulating library!—and Sevigné, to conduct the fashionable correspondence of the Morning Post!—and Racine, to contribute to the unacted drama!—and ladies skipping up the steepest parts of Parnassus, with petticoats well tucked up, to show the beauty of their ankles, and their hands filled with artificial flowers—almost as good as natural—to show the simplicity of their tastes! I wish I had lived in France in 1672; for in that year Madame Deshoulieres, who had already been voted the tenth muse by all the freeholders of Pieria, and whose pastorals were lisped by all the fashionable shepherdesses in Paris, left the flowery banks of the Seine to rejoin her husband. Monsieur Deshoulieres was in Guyenne; Madame Deshoulieres went into Dauphiné. Matrimony seems to be rather hurtful to geographical studies, but Madame Deshoulieres was a poetess; and in spite of the thirty-eight summers that shaded the lustre of her cheek, she was beautiful, and was still in the glow of youth by her grace and her talent, and—her heart. Wherever she moved she left crowds of Corydons and Alexises; but, luckily for M. Deshoulieres, their whole conversation was about sheep.
The two Mesdemoiselles Deshoulieres, Madeleine and Bribri, were beautiful girls of seventeen or eighteen, brought up in all the innocent pastoralism of their mother. They believed in all the poetical descriptions they read in her eclogues. They expected to see shepherds playing on their pipes, and shepherdesses dancing, and naiads reclining on the shady banks of clear-running rivers. They were delighted to get out of the prosaic atmosphere of Paris, and all the three were overjoyed when they sprang from their carriage, one evening in May, at the chateau of Madame d'Urtis on the banks of the Lignon. Though there were occasional showers at that season, the mornings were splendid; and accordingly the travellers were up almost by daylight, to tread the grass still trembling 'neath the steps of Astrea—to see the fountain, that mirror where the shepherdesses wove wild-flowers into their hair—and to explore the wood, still vocal with the complaints of Celadon. In one of their first excursions, Madeleine Deshoulieres, impatient to see some of the scenes so gracefully described by her mother, asked if they were really not to encounter a single shepherd on the banks of the Lignon? Madame Deshoulieres perceived, at no great distance, a herdsman and cow-girl playing at chuckfarthing; and, after a pause, replied—
"Behold upon the verdant grass so sweet,
The shepherdess is at her shepherd's feet!
Her arms are bare, her foot is small and white,
The very oxen wonder at the sight;
Her locks half bound, half floating in the air,
And gown as light as those that satyrs wear."
While these lines were given in Madame Deshoulieres' inimitable recitative, the party had come close to the rustic pair. "People may well say," muttered Madeleine, "that the pictures of Nature are always best at a distance. Can it be possible that this is a shepherdess—a shepherdess of Lignon?" The shepherdess was in reality a poor little peasant girl, unkempt, unshorn, with hands of prodigious size, a miraculous squint, and a mouth which probably had a beginning, but of which it was impossible to say where it might end. The shepherd was worthy of his companion; and yet there was something in the extravagant stupidity of his fat and florid countenance that was interesting to a Parisian eye. Madame Deshoulieres, who was too much occupied with the verses of the great D'Urfé to attend to what was before her, continued her description—
"The birds all round her praises ever sing,
And 'neath her steps the flowers incessant spring."
"Your occupation here is delightful, isn't it?" said Madeleine to the peasant girl.
"No, 'tain't, miss—that it ain't. I gets nothink for all I does, and when I goes hoam at night I gets a good licking to the bargain."
"And you?" enquired Madeleine, turning to the herdsman, who was slinking off.
"I'm a little b-b-b-etter off nor hur," said the man, stuttering, "for I gets board and lodging—dasht if I doesn't—but I gets bread like a stone, and s-s-sleeps below a hedge—dasht if I doesn't."
"But where are your sheep, shepherd?" said Bribri.
"Hain't a got none," stuttered the man again, "dasht if I has."
"What!" exclaimed Madeleine in despair, "am I not to see the lovely lambkins bleating and skipping in the meadows on the banks of the Lignon, O Celadon?"
But Madame Deshoulieres was too much of a poetess to hear or see what was going on. She thought of nothing but the loves of Astrea, and heard nothing but the imaginary songs of contending Damons.
On their return to the chateau, Madeleine and Bribri complained that they had seen neither flock nor shepherdess.
"And are you anxious to see them?" enquired Madame D'Urtis, with a smile.
"Oh, very," exclaimed Bribri; "we expected to live like shepherdesses when we came here. I have brought every thing a rustic wants."
"And so have I," continued Madeleine; "I have brought twenty yards of rose-coloured ribands, and twenty yards of blue, to ornament my crook and the handsomest of my ewes."
"Well then," said the Duchess d'Urtis, good-naturedly, "there are a dozen of sheep feeding at the end of the park. Take the key of the gate, and drive them into the meadows beyond."
Madeleine and Bribri were wild with joy, while their mother was labouring in search of a rhyme, and did not attend to the real eclogue which was about to be commenced. They scarcely took time to breakfast.—"They dressed themselves coquettishly"—so Madame Deshoulieres wrote to Mascaron—"they cut with their own hands a crook a-piece in the park—they beautified them with ribands. Madeleine was for the blue ribands, Bribri for the rose colour. Oh, the gentle shepherdesses! they spent a whole hour in finding a name they liked. At last, Madeleine fixed on Amaranthe, Bribri on Daphnè. I have just seen them gliding among the trees that overshadow the lovely stream.—Poor shepherdesses! be on your guard against the wolves."
At noon that very day Madeleine and Bribri, or rather Amaranthe and Daphnè, in grey silk petticoats and satin bodies, with their beautiful hair in a state of most careful disorder, and with their crooks in hand, conducted the twelve sheep out of the park into the meadows. The flock, which seemed to be very hungry, were rather troublesome and disobedient. The shepherdesses did all they could to keep them in the proper path. It was a delicious mixture of bleatings, and laughter, and baaings, and pastoral songs. The happy girls inhaled the soul of nature, as their poetical mamma expressed it. They ran—they threw themselves on the blooming grass—they looked at themselves in the limpid waters of the Lignon—they gathered lapfulls of primroses. The flock made the best use of their time; and every now and then a sheep of more observation than the rest, perceiving they were guarded by such extraordinary shepherdesses, took half an hour's diversion among the fresh-springing corn.
"That's one of yours," said Amaranthe.
"No; 'tis yours," replied Daphnè; but, by way of having no difficulties in future, they resolved to divide the flock, and ornament one-half with blue collars, and the other with rose-colour. And they gave a name also to each of the members of their flock, such as Meliboeus, and Jeannot, and Robin, and Blanchette. Twelve more poetical sheep were never fed on grass before. When the sun began to sink, the shepherdesses brought back their flocks. Madame Deshoulieres cried with joy. "Oh, my dear girls!" she said, kissing their fair foreheads; "it is you that have composed an eclogue, and not I."
"Nothing is wanting to the picture," said the Duchess, seating herself under the willows of the watering-place, and admiring the graceful girls.
"I think we want a dog," said Daphnè.
"No; we are rather in want of a wolf," whispered the beautiful
Amaranthe—and blushed.