Yet another story is swimming in our ink-stand; and with a gracious lift of the pen we shall stretch it upon our sheet.
At Viterbo, which, as every one ought to know, lies within the Italian confines, lived once a poor peasant, with a poor, but pretty daughter, whose name was Marianne. She had not the silks of our ladies, or the refinements, so called, of fashion. She wore a rough peasant robe, and watched her father’s kids as they wandered upon the olive-shaded slopes of Viterbo.
At Viterbo lived a youth whose name was Carlo. Carlo was prone to ramble; and albeit of higher family than the peasant’s daughter, he saw and loved, and wooed and won the pretty Marianne. They were betrothed in the hearing only of the drowsy tinkle of the bells that hung upon the necks of the kids, over which Marianne was shepherdess. To marry they were afraid. He feared the anger of his father; and she feared to desert the cottage of her mother.
Carlo, swearing devotion, went away to Rome and became an advocate. The revolution stirred the stolid Romans, and Carlo enlisted under Garibaldi. After a series of fights and of escapes, Carlo found himself in five years from his parting with the pretty peasantess of Viterbo, a refugee, in the Café de France, which stands behind the Palais Royal at Paris. Lamenting over his broken fortunes, and mourning for his poor Italy, he sauntered, upon a certain day, into the Garden of Plants, upon the further side of the Seine. It is a place where the neighboring world go to breathe the air of woods, and to relieve the stifling atmosphere of the city, with the openness and freedom of Nature. (In parenthesis, let us ask, when shall New York civilization reach such a kind provision for life?)
Carlo wandered, dejected, sad, musing of bitterness, when his eye fell upon a face that seemed familiar. It was the face of a lady—in Parisian costume, with a Parisian air—but very like to the pretty peasantess of Viterbo. He followed her—met her—accosted her; there was no mistaking her frighted look of recognition. She was distant and cool—for the fates had bound her fortunes to those of a Parisian bourgeois, and she was the wife of the very respectable Monsieur Bovin. Carlo was neither cool nor distant: for grief had cast him down, and now first, hope blessed him with a shadow of the joys that were gone. Madame Bovin’s distance wore off under the impassioned addresses of the poor refugee, and again and again Carlo found his way to the Jardin des Plantes.
Finally (alas for Paris virtue!) the household of the respectable Monsieur Bovin, was, upon a certain morning, deserted; only a little note of poor French told the disconsolate husband, that the pretty Marianne could no longer subdue her new kindled love for her Italian home, and had gone back to the hills of Viterbo.
The sorrowing husband, though he could not purchase content, could yet purchase the services of the police. Through them, he tracked the runaway lovers to the borders of France. Thereafter the search was vain.
But, alas, for poor Carlo, he was recognized by the myrmidons of the powers that be, thrown into a dungeon, and report tells a story of his death.
As for the pretty peasant, Marianne, she wandered forlorn to her father’s home; but the father’s home was gone; and now, for menial hire—in her peasant dress (in place of the Paris robes) and with a saddened heart—she watches the kids, upon the olive-shaded slopes of Viterbo!