"Well, I can't do much," she said, "but I'll run a needle through him, if he means mischief."
And the offensive and defensive alliance thus ratified, we parted, each the richer for a new friend.
In my letters to Claude I gave very full particulars of my conversations with Madeleine, and of the practical result of my visit; in fact it is from these letters, now in my hands, that I have been largely quoting. More than a twelvemonth was to elapse before we met again, for I had left Paris to pursue my studies under Kaulbach in Munich. The numerous letters Claude wrote to me during the interval, mostly treat of the two subjects uppermost in his mind, art and love. As I once more read them over after many years, I am aware that the history of his loves really offers no very remarkable features, and I approach the subject with some diffidence on that account. But on the other hand I remember that we all like the old story that always assumes a new shape; we like it perhaps, because, in this wicked world of ours, hatred and evil influences so constantly cross our path, that we are always glad to turn aside when the opportunity offers, and to listen to tales of love and devotion. And there were gold and silver threads that ran through Claude's life, as they do through most people's.
He was very impressionable, but he never treated love lightly; he often would see beauty where I, for the life of me, saw no more than ordinary good looks; in fact his artistic temperament would lead him to evolve a perfect Venus or a paragon of virtue from very slender materials. But he was too honest, and too much of an idealist, to indulge in the popular pastime of flirtation. Love skirmishes he might be drawn into, but they were not of his seeking, and he usually remained on the defensive. The Venuses and Paragons might rule supreme for a while, but when—as would soon happen—they were found wanting in some of the perfections his imagination had endowed them with, his idol had to step off its pedestal. Nor was he particularly humbled when he had to acknowledge his mistake. He would often say that it was quite a different thing to be "amoureux d'une femme," and to "aimer une femme"—to be in love with, or to love a woman. And then, dear old mystic that he was at the bottom of his heart, he would conjure up a "Vision of Love," as he called it, a vision to be "divined, not defined." Was he ever to marry and be happy? I often wondered.
When I arrived in Paris, I found Claude at the station, and we embraced in true continental fashion. I had been invited to stay with him and his father, and I was soon established under their hospitable roof.
The first twenty-four hours we slept little and talked much. I knew all about the picture and all about a new star in his horizon, Mademoiselle Jeanne, but what is all when it is crammed into the few pages of a letter? Very little as compared with what can be made of it in conversation.
Of the picture later on; first about the girl. Mademoiselle Jeanne was the daughter of the grand Roule; so we had called her father, for no better reason than that his charming residence was in the Faubourg du Roule.
He was one of the leading physicians in Paris, more particularly known by his writings, which treated of some pathological speciality, I forget which. Her mother was an Englishwoman. During a twenty years' residence in Paris she had added to the sterling qualities of her race the graceful attributes of a Parisian. She was not only a charming hostess, but a woman of great literary attainments, and indeed she must have been more than that, an erudite scholar, if, as the world said, some of the best pages in the doctor's books came from her pen. He gave colour to the assertion, for by word and deed he showed that he held her and her judgment in the highest esteem. It was quite a pleasure to see this united couple together, a pleasure I often enjoyed, for during my first long stay in Paris I had been made quite at home in their house.
Jeanne, or, as her mother persisted in calling her, Jane, was about sixteen when I first knew her. She was reserved and diffident; happiest when allowed to remain unnoticed in the background, positively distressed when dragged into broad daylight, or obliged to take her share in gaieties. I soon discovered the cause of her shyness. She suffered from the consciousness that she had red hair; in fact that consciousness seemed to have sunk deep into her heart and mind, and to have made her morbidly sensitive.
In those days red hair evoked nothing but a pointed reference to carrots—that from the ill-natured; the good-natured would feel compassion for the poor girls who were thus afflicted. I wonder sometimes whether the red of those days was the same we admire now, whether those carrots of my youth can have been transformed into the lusciously lustrous locks of to-day. Were they formerly only under a cloud and crushed under the weight of unanimous condemnation? Could the molten gold have been hidden away, and the deep-toned brass notes silenced, and were they only waiting to be combed and coaxed to the front?—Well, the trials of the sandy-hair phase are over, and I, for one, am grateful to live in the Renaissance period, and to witness the triumph of woman's loveliest crown.