Little deemed Leah that morning, as she handed Mary her quart of meal and the change for her hard-earned shilling, that she had spoiled her own fortunes, and that she would, ere night, be called upon to abdicate her stool behind the counter in favor of that humble customer; and yet so it was. Mr. Benjamin could not forgive her dereliction from honesty; and the more he had trusted her, the greater was the shock to his confidence. Moreover, his short-sighted views of human nature, and his incapacity for comprehending its infinite shades and varieties, caused him to extend his ill opinion further than the delinquent merited. In spite of her protestations, he could not believe that this was her first misdemeanor; but concluded that, like many other people in the world, she had only been reputed honest because she had not been found out. Leah soon found herself in the very dilemma she had deprecated, and the apprehension of which had kept her so long practically honest—without a situation, and with a damaged character.
As Mary understood book-keeping, the duties of her new office were soon learned; and the only evil attending it was, that she could not take care of her father. But determined not to lose her, Mr. Benjamin found means to reconcile the difficulty by giving them a room behind the shop, where they lived very comfortably, till Glegg, recovering some portion of health, was able to work a little at his trade.
In process of time, however, as infirmity began to disable Mr. Benjamin for the daily walk from his residence to his shop, he left the whole management of the business to the father and daughter, receiving every shilling of the profits, except the moderate salaries he gave them, which were sufficient to furnish them with all the necessaries of life, though nothing beyond. But when the old gentleman died, and his will was opened, it was found that he had left every thing he possessed to Mary Glegg; except one guinea, which, without alleging any reason, he bequeathed to Leah Leet.
A FORGOTTEN CELEBRITY.
"Time and chance," as King Solomon says, "happen to all;" and this is peculiarly the case in the matter of fame and reputation. Many who have done much, and have enjoyed a fine prospect of a name that should survive them, have scarcely earned an epitaph; while others, by a mere accident, have rolled luxuriously down to posterity, like a fly on the chariot-wheels of another's reputation. "The historic muse" is a very careless jade, and many names with which she has undertaken to march down to latest times, have been lost by the way, like the stones in the legend that fell through the devil's apron when he was carrying them to build one of his bridges. The chiffonniers of literature pick up these histories from time to time; sometimes they are valuable, sometimes only curious. Mademoiselle de Gournay's story is a curiosity.
Marie de Jars, Demoiselle de Gournay, was born at Paris in 1566. She was of a noble and ancient family; her father, at his death, left what in those days was a handsome fortune; but Mademoiselle de Gournay, his widow, had an unfortunate mania for building, which devoured it. When she took her place beside her husband in his grave, she left little but mortgages behind her.
Judging from the portraits prefixed to her works, Marie de Jars must in her youth have possessed some personal attractions, in spite of her detractors: her figure was of middle height, her face rather round than oval, but with a pleasing expression, and adorned with a pair of large black eyes and a pretty little mouth. Her own account of herself, in a copy of verses, addressed to her friend Mademoiselle de Ragny, is, that she was of a very lively and obliging disposition. That she was obliging and kind-hearted, many circumstances of her life could prove; but for liveliness, we are inclined to think that she flattered herself: nothing can be further removed from liveliness than her works—they are pompously serious.
Her father died when she was very young, leaving five children: two elder and two younger than Marie. The eldest daughter married; the son entered the army; and Marie, the eldest of the remaining three, seems to have been left pretty much to follow her own devices. From her earliest years she had a passion for reading, and showed a wonderful sagacity in the choice of books: her favorites were Amyot, Ronsard, and Montaigne; to these authors she afterward added Racan. She was so faithfully exclusive in her taste, that she never cared to read any others. It was in 1580 that Montaigne published the two first volumes of his Essays. Marie de Jars was scarcely fourteen when they fell accidentally in her way, and her admiration amounted to enthusiasm: she sent a friend to tell Montaigne, who was then in Paris, how much she admired him, and the esteem in which she held his book. This proceeding from so young a person, who was moreover "fort demoiselle," flattered Montaigne very sensibly. He went the very next day to pay a visit to Mademoiselle de Gournay: her conversation and enthusiasm won the heart of the philosopher. In their first interview Montaigne offered her the affection of a father for a daughter and Mademoiselle de Gournay proudly assumed the title of the adopted daughter of Montaigne; and in a letter addressed to him, which is still to be seen, she says, "that she feels as proud of that title as she should be to be called the mother of the Muses themselves." This friendship never failed or diminished; it was the best thing Marie ever achieved in this life, and is her chief claim on the sympathy and interest of posterity. But Marie de Jars became possessed by the demon of wishing to become a distinguished woman on her own account. To accomplish this, she set to work to learn Greek and Latin, and though she brought more zeal than method to her studies, she worked with so much perseverance as to obtain a good insight into both languages.
Montaigne, in the next edition of his Essays, added the following passage to the seventeenth chapter of the second book: "I have taken a delight to publish in many places the hopes I have of Marie de Gournay de Jars, my adopted daughter, beloved by me with more than a paternal love, and treasured up in my solitude and retirement as one of the best parts of my own being. I have no regard to any thing in this world but to her. If a man may presage from her youth, her soul will one day be capable of very great things; and, among others, of that perfection of friendship of which we do not read that any of her sex could yet arrive at; the sincerity and solidity of her manners are already sufficient for it; her affection toward me more than superabundant, and such as that there is nothing more to be wished, if not that the apprehension she has of my end from the five-and-fifty years I had reached when she knew me, might not so much afflict her.