Lady Marabout smiled, calmly and amusedly, felt no pang, and—thought of Philip.
I take it things must be very rose-colored with us when we can smile sincerely on our enemies, and defeat their stings simply because we feel them not.
A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE;
OR,
PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR.
I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued lips of all the loveliest women of the "Règne Galant," from the princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the green-room of the Comédie-Française. Painted in the days of Louis Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone—gone the beauty that inspired it—but the picture is deathless! It shows me the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'[oe]uvre of coquetry, a head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musée de Saint Quentin; and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory, all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargélie Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastel is living and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour. With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siècle, the pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargélie Dumarsais saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you—a single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.