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I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly distinguish. While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre's delightful little book, "Voyage autour de ma Chambre," occurred to me.
I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly distinguish. While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre's delightful little book, "Voyage autour de ma Chambre," occurred to me.
Fortunately for Guy, some rough sycophant expressed himself interested in the allusion, and asked a question or two, which succeeded in bringing out for about the sixtieth time from the doctor's lips the whole story of Josephine de Maistre's rescue. Guy strained his ears as he leaned sideways to hear the interesting details.
This slender resource grew less day by day, and when that was exhausted the prospect was a blank. The student of De Maistre's philosophy may see in what crushing personal anguish some of its most sinister growths had their roots. When the cares of beggary come suddenly upon a man in middle life, they burn very deep.
But after all it is time woman learned better sense, it is her privilege to accept or reject this life of uncertainty, and yet, like Fifine, she looks lovingly, admiringly on the pictures bright side only, and fancies "Life's enchanted cup sparkling" all the way down. The words of consent had passed the threshold of Josephine de Maistre's lips.
Then Fifine who longed to be alone, kissed her father good-night and retired to her own little room, after telling the servant to light a lamp and take her father to his chamber. The story of Fifine de Maistre's life, from the time of her adventure in the wood, until six months after, would be to the unsympathetic, the most monotonous series of details imaginable.
Even if Christianity, itself renewed, could successfully encounter the achievement of renewing society, De Maistre's ideal of a spiritual power controlling the temporal power, and conciliating peoples with their rulers by persuasion and a coercion only moral, appears to have little chance of being realised.
The grip of beggary leaves a mark on such a character as De Maistre's which no prosperity of after days effaces. The seeming inhumanity of his theory of life, which is so revolting to comfortable people like M. Villemain, was in truth the only explanation of his own cruel sufferings in which he could find any solace.
To say nothing of his immensely superior natural capacity, De Maistre's extensive reading in the literature of his foes was a source of strength, which might indeed have been thought indispensable, if only other persons had not attacked the same people as he did, without knowing much or anything at all at first-hand about them.
It is very important to remember this constant solicitude for ideas that should work well, in connection with that book of De Maistre's which has had most influence in Europe, by supplying a base for the theories of ultramontanism.
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