scenes, the groves, the flowery meadows around Guerande. Her soul was
struggling to endure a horrible inward anguish.

No sooner did Calyste see the vanes of the two gables shooting up
beyond the furze of the roadside and the distorted heads of the pines,
than the air seemed lighter; Guerande was a prison to him; his life
was at Les Touches. Who will not understand the attraction it
presented to a youth in his position. A love like that of Cherubin,
had flung him at the feet of a person who was a great and grand thing
to him before he thought of her as a woman, and it had survived the
repeated and inexplicable refusals of Felicite. This sentiment, which
was more the need of loving than love itself, had not escaped the
terrible power of Camille for analysis; hence, possibly, her
rejection,--a generosity unperceived, of course, by Calyste.

At Les Touches were displayed to the ravished eyes of the ignorant
young countryman, the riches of a new world; he heard, as it were,
another language, hitherto unknown to him and sonorous. He listened to
the poetic sounds of the finest music, that surpassing music of the
nineteenth century, in which melody and harmony blend or struggle on
equal terms,--a music in which song and instrumentation have reached a
hitherto unknown perfection. He saw before his eyes the works of
modern painters, those of the French school, to-day the heir of Italy,
Spain, and Flanders, in which talent has become so common that hearts,
weary of talent, are calling aloud for genius. He read there those
works of imagination, those amazing creations of modern literature
which produced their full effect upon his unused heart. In short, the
great Nineteenth Century appeared to him, in all its collective
magnificence, its criticising spirit, its desires for renovation in
all directions, and its vast efforts, nearly all of them on the scale