[Most of our readers are familiar with “Claire d’Albe,” the work spoken of in the following pages, either in the original or as translated, and will recollect the pleasure its perusal gave them. Its author is better known in America, however, by one of her subsequent works, which has been translated into almost every written language, admired wherever it has been read, and which has been justly ranked among the first productions in that department of French literature to which it belongs. We refer to that affecting story, over which so many tears have been shed, “Elizabeth, Or The Exiles of Siberia.” In translating the following account we have been obliged, from its great length, to condense from the original—leaving out nothing, however, which was essential to the interest of the story. It will be recollected that the incidents of our tale took place in 1793, when France was convulsed by political revolutions.]
“Madam, this is beautifully written,” said an old nurse, looking up with the familiarity of an ancient and privileged servant.
The person thus addressed was a young woman, clothed in black, so small and so frail, that at first sight, without doubt, one would have taken her for a child. She was seated before a table of dark wood, drawn up in front of a good fire, upon which burned two wax candles, shining upon a heap of loose leaves, one of which she had just finished writing, and was then reading. Laughing at the admiration of her nurse, she asked,
“And do you, then, find it so beautiful?”
“Do I find it beautiful?” replied Marianne; “never since the world began have I read any thing so affecting. What an interesting creature that Claire was! and what a pity that she died! Ah, her death grieved me much; one might say that it frightened me; but that would not be astonishing in such a great lonely room as this. I hate these great rooms, I do;” added the nurse, looking cautiously around her, and gazing with a look of affright at the window the most distant from where she and her mistress were sitting.
“Oh how the curtain moves! did you not leave the shutters badly closed, madam?”
“It was not I who shut them,” tranquilly replied Madam Cottin, for it was of her old Marianne asked the question.
“Not you?” cried Marianne, in a frightened voice. “Who then could have shut them?”
“You, most probably, Marianne.”
“Me! I tell you, madam, I swear to you, as true as I am a good and sincere Christian, I swear to you, upon my soul—”