“Ah, here comes Minerva.  Hail, beautiful Minerva!  Put down your helmet and let us have a chat.”

But this familiar, almost fraternal, tone convinced the young man that he would make no further advance into that feminine comradeship in which tenderness was wanting, and that he lost each day something of his charm—­the charm of the unforeseen—­in the eyes of that woman born weary, who seemed to have already lived her life and found in all that she heard or saw the insipidity of a repetition.  Felicia was bored.  Her art alone could distract her, carry her away, transport her into a dazzling fairyland, whence she would fall back worn out, surprised each time by this awakening like a physical fall.  She used to draw a comparison between herself and those jelly-fish whose transparent brilliancy, so much alive in the cool movements of the waves, drift to their death on the shore in little gelatinous pools.  During those times devoid of inspiration, when the artist’s hand was heavy on his instrument, Felicia, deprived of the one moral support of her intellectual being, became unsociable, unapproachable, a tormenting mocker—­the revenge taken of human weakness on the tired brains of genius.  After having brought tears to the eyes of every one who cared for her, raking up painful recollections or enervating anxieties, she reached the lowest depths of her fatigue, and as there was always some fun in her, even in her ennui in a kind of caged wild-beast’s howl, which she called “the cry of the jackal in the desert,” and which used to make the good Crenmitz turn pale.

Poor Felicia!  That life of hers was indeed a frightful desert when art did not beguile it with its illusions; a desert mournful and flat, where everything was lost, reduced to one level, beneath the same monotonous immensity, the naive love of a child of twenty, a passionate duke’s caprice, in which all was overwhelmed by an arid sand driven by blasting fates.  Paul was conscious of that void, desired to escape it; but something held him back, like a weight which unrolls a chain, and in spite of the calumnies he heard, and notwithstanding the odd whims of the strange creature, he dallied deliciously after her, at the price of bearing away with him from this long lover’s contemplation only the despair of a believer reduced to the adoring of images alone.

The refuge lay down there, in that remote quarter of the town where the wind blew so hard, yet without preventing the flame from mounting white and straight—­it was the family circle presided over by Bonne Maman.  Oh! she at least was not bored, she never uttered the cry of the “jackal in the desert.”  Her life was far too full; the father to encourage, to sustain, the children to teach, all the material cares of a home where the mother’s hand is wanting, those preoccupations that awake with the dawn and are put to sleep by the evening, unless indeed it bring them back in dream, one of those devotions, tireless