“She has just recovered from severe illness.  In the winter, you know, it was thought she would not live from hour to hour.”

“And she has hardly recovered from that disease, before she seems threatened with a worse one; namely, a hopeless passion.  However, people do not die of love now-a-days.”

“Seldom, perhaps,” said Flemming.  “And yet it is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion.  Such wounds always leave a scar.  There are faces I can never look upon without emotion.  There are names I can never hear spoken without almost starting!”

“But whom have we here?”

“That is the French poet Quinet, with his sweet German wife; one of the most interesting women I ever knew.  He is the author of a very wild Mystery, or dramatic prose-poem, in which the Ocean, Mont-Blanc, and the Cathedral of Strassburg have parts to play; and the saints on the stained windows of the minster speak, and the statues and dead kings enact the Dance of Death.  It is entitled Ahasuerus, or the Wandering Jew.”

“Or, as the Danes would translate it, the Shoemaker of Jerusalem.  That would be a still more fantastic title for his fantastic book.  You know I am no great admirer of the modern French school of writers.  The tales of Paul de Kock, who is, I believe, the most popular of all, seem to me like obscene stories told at dinner-tables, after the ladies have retired.  It has been well said of him, that he is not only populaire but populacier; and equally well said of George Sand and Victor Hugo, that their works stand like fortifications, well built and well supplied with warlike munitions; but ineffectual against the Grand Army of God, which marches onward, as if nothing had happened.  In surveying a national literature, the point you must start from, is national character.  That lets you into many a secret; as, for example, Paul de Kock’s popularity.  The most prominent trait in the French character, is love of amusement, and excitement; and—­”

“I should say, rather, the fear of ennui,” interrupted Flemming.  “One of their own writers has said with a great deal of truth, that the gentry of France rush into Paris to escape from ennui, as, in the noble days of chivalry, the defenceless inhabitants of the champaign fled into the castles, at theapproach of some plundering knight, or lawless Baron; forsaking the inspired twilight of their native groves, for the luxurious shades of the royal gardens.  What do you think of that?”

The Baron replied with a smile;

“There is only one Paris; and out of Paris there is no salvation for decent people.”

Thus conversing of many things, sat the two friends under the linden-trees on the Rent Tower, till gradually the crowd disappeared from the garden, and the objects around them grew indistinct, in the fading twilight.  Between them and the amber-colored western sky, the dense foliage of the trees looked heavy and hard, as if cast in bronze; and already the evening stars hung like silver lamps in the towering branches of that Tree of Life, brought more than two centuries ago from its primeval Paradise in America, to beautify the gardens of the Palatinate.