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Guy fidgeted with his watch chain, and with a little hesitation which shewed how much he dreaded any indiscretion on his part, he asked, "Are you acquainted with any details of Miss de Maistre's life before her coming here?" With the same placid face, his companion answered, "I know everything she has had no secret from me."

It had been the fate of Alphonse de Maistre's wife to incur the inveterate displeasure of one of these persons, and on the day on which her first and only child was born, Dame Feu-Rouge, obtaining admission in disguise to the bed-side of Madame de Maistre, pronounced a fearful malediction on the sleeping form of the infant Josephine, to be realized in later years, when, to use her own words, "she would have grown up in beauty, like a fair, ripened fruit that is rotten at the core."

In the nervous unsettled state of my mind at that moment, I found it much easier to make my inventory than to make my reflections, and thereupon soon gave up all hope of thinking in Le Maistre's fanciful track or, indeed, of thinking at all. I looked about the room at the different articles of furniture, and did nothing more.

There is a certain semi-latent quality of hardness lying at the bottom of De Maistre's style, both in his letters and in his more elaborate compositions. His writings seem to recall the flavour and bouquet of some of the fortifying and stimulating wines of Burgundy, from which time and warmth have not yet drawn out a certain native roughness that lingers on the palate.

We easily see how natures of this sort, ardent, impetuous, unflinching, find themselves in the triumphant paths that lead to remorse at their close, and how they thus come to feel remorse rather than doubt as the consummate agony of the human mind. Having had this glimpse of De Maistre's character away from his books, we need not linger long over the remaining events of his life.

If anybody could rationalise the idea of supernatural intervention in human affairs, the idea of a Papal supremacy, the idea of a spiritual unity, De Maistre's acuteness and intellectual vigour, and, above all, his keen sense of the urgent social need of such a thing being done, would assuredly have enabled him to do it.

Lambert's home-sickness lasted for many months. I know no words to describe the dejection to which he was a prey. Louis has taken the glory off many a masterpiece for me. We had both played the part of the "Leper of Aosta," and had both experienced the feelings described in Monsieur de Maistre's story, before we read them as expressed by his eloquent pen.

Civilization! It is the highest and noblest aim in human destinies when it makes the man moral and true; but civilization invoked by, and in which strut traitors, slaveholders, and abettors of slavery, reminds one of De Maistre's assertion, that the devil created the red man of America as a counterfeit to man, God's creation in the Old World.

He obviously represented the Revolution, or the critical spirit, within the Catholic limits, while De Maistre's ruling idea was, in his own trenchant phrase, 'absolument tuer l'esprit du dix-huitième siècle. On all these accounts he appears to be the fittest expositor of those conceptions which the anarchy that closed the eighteenth century provoked into systematic existence.

It is a kind destiny which veils their future from mortal men. Fifteen years passed before De Maistre's exile came to a close. From 1802 to 1817 he did not quit the inhospitable latitudes of northern Russia. De Maistre's letters during this desolate period furnish a striking picture of his manner of life and his mental state. We see in them his most prominent characteristics strongly marked.