Had my first experience of surf bathing to-day, at Easthampton. Apart from spraining my wrist, being grazed all over, stunned by a breaker, and finally swept several miles out to sea, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
MONDAY
Met Mr. Liveright—what a dear!
JULIE DE POOPINAC
JULIE DE POOPINAC
From a Miniature
For several years all France rang with the name of Julie de Poopinac—or to give her her full title, Angélique Yvonne Mathilde Clémentine Virginie Céleste Julie, Vicomtesse de Poopinac. As the most peerless of all the beauties at Court during the last years of a desperately tottering throne, she has been hailed and heralded (and is still in some outlying villages in Old Provence and Old Normandy) as almost an enchantress, so great was her beauty and her wit. Born in a stately château in Old Picardy, she was brought up in comparative seclusion; her father, the Duc de Potache,[1] spent his time at Court, so that her radiant loveliness was left to mature and develop unnoticed. Her childhood was uneventful, but at the age of seventeen this ravishing creature was wedded by proxy to Gustave de Poopinac, a dashing young officer in the Garde du Corps,[2] and at twenty-five she came to Court in order to see her husband; but alas! Fate, seated securely in Destiny's irreproachable turret, willed it that her journey should be in vain. She left Old Picardy a merry, laughing married woman—and arrived at Versailles a widow. Gustave, the husband whose love she would never know, perished at an early hour on the morning of her arrival, at an adversary's sword-point behind a potting-shed near the Petit Trianon. Rumour whispered that it was on account of a woman that he fought and lost, but this last blow of Providence's hatchet was spared his girl bride, innocent, secure in her supreme purity and innate virginity. If evil tongues had even mentioned the word "woman" to her, she would not have known what they meant.
Gradually the pain of her loss grew less. She commenced to enter into Court life with a certain amount of zest. Ben-Hepple tells us that it was during a masked carnival in the Park of Versailles that she first attracted the attention of the amorous King. He had dropped behind Du Barry for a moment to tie up his bootlace, and Julie, running girlishly along the moonlit path, bumped violently into his arched back. With a muttered exclamation he straightened himself and tore off her mask. Ben-Hepple goes on to say that his Majesty went from scarlet to white, from white to green, and then back again to scarlet before he made his world-famed remark, "Mon Dieu! Quel visage!" At this moment Du Barry appeared, furious at being left, and dragged her royal paramour away. But the mischief was done. The wheel of circumstance had turned once more—and a few days later Julie changed her appartements for some on a higher landing.
What vice! What intrigue! What corruption! Versailles seemed but a vast conservatory sheltering the vile soil from which sprang the lilies of France—La Belle France, as Edgar Sheepmeadow so eloquently puts it. Did any single bloom escape the blight of ineffable depravity? No—not one! Occasionally some fresh young thing would appear at Court—appealing and innocent. Then the atmosphere would begin to take effect: some one would whisper something to her—she would leer almost unconsciously; a few days later she would be discovered carrying on anyhow!
Julie de Poopinac, beautiful, accomplished and incredibly witty, queened it in this mêlée of appalling degeneracy; she was not at heart wicked, but her environment closed in upon her pinched and wasted heart, crushing the youth and sweetness from it.