He married Jacintha, and Josephine set them up in Bigot's, (deceased) auberge.Jacintha shone as a landlady, and custom flowed in.For all that, a hankering after Beaurepaire was observable in her.Her favorite stroll was into the Beaurepaire kitchen, and on all fetes and grand occasions she was prominent in gay attire as a retainer of the house.The last specimen of her homely sagacity Ishall have the honor to lay before you is a critique upon her husband, which she vented six years after marriage.
"My Dard," said she, "is very good as far as he goes.What he has felt himself, that he can feel FOR: nobody better.You come to him with an empty belly, or a broken head, or all bleeding with a cut, or black and blue, and you shall find a friend.But if it is a sore heart, or trouble, and sorrow, and no hole in your carcass to show for it, you had better come to ME; for you might as well tell your grief to a stone wall as to my man."The baroness took her son Raynal to Paris, and there, with keen eye, selected him a wife.She proved an excellent one.It would have been hard if she had not, for the baroness with the severe sagacity of her age and ***, had set aside as naught a score of seeming angels, before she could suit herself with a daughter-in-law.At first the Raynals very properly saw little of the Dujardins; but when both had been married some years, the recollection of that fleeting and nominal connection waxed faint, while the memory of great benefits conferred on both sides remained lively as ever in hearts so great, and there was a warm, a sacred friendship between the two houses--a friendship of the ancient Greeks, not of the modern club-house.
Camille and Josephine were blessed almost beyond the lot of humanity: none can really appreciate sunshine but those who come out of the cold dark.And so with happiness.For years they could hardly be said to live like mortals: they basked in bliss.But it was a near thing; for they but just scraped clear of life-long misery, and death's cold touch grazed them both as they went.
Yet they had heroic virtues to balance White Lies in the great Judge's eye.
A wholesome lesson, therefore, and a warning may be gathered from this story: and I know many novelists who would have preached that lesson at some length in every other chapter, and interrupted the sacred narrative to do it.But when I read stories so mutilated, Ithink of a circumstance related by Mr.Joseph Miller.
"An Englishman sojourning in some part of Scotland was afflicted with many hairs in the butter, and remonstrated.He was told, in reply, that the hairs and the butter came from one source--the cow;and that the just and natural proportions hitherto observed, could not be deranged, and bald butter invented--for ONE.'So be it,'
said the Englishman; 'but let me have the butter in one plate, and the hairs in another.'"Acting on this hint, I have reserved some admirable remarks, reflections, discourses, and tirades, until the story should be ended, and the other plate be ready for the subsidiary sermon.
And now that the proper time is come, that love of intruding one's own wisdom in one's own person on the reader, which has marred so many works of art, is in my case restrained--first, by pure fatigue;secondly, because the moral of this particular story stands out so clear in the narrative, that he who runs may read it without any sermon at all.
Those who will not take the trouble to gather my moral from the living tree, would not lift it out of my dead basket: would not unlock their jaw-bones to bite it, were I to thrust it into their very mouths.
End
