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Myrrha has been often identified with La Guiccioli, and the hero's relation to his Queen Zarina compared with that of the poet to his wife; but in his portrait of the former the author's defective capacity to represent national character is manifest: Myrrha is only another Gulnare, Medora, or Zuleika.
He insisted: he begged her to listen to him for a moment away from the others. She followed him ungraciously. When they were a few yards away so that neither Myrrha nor Ernest could see them, he took her hands and begged her pardon, and knelt at her feet in the dead leaves of the wood.
Dating from that night Jean Servien spent his days in translating Myrrha bit by bit, with an infinity of pains. The task having taught him something of verse-making, he composed an ode, which he sent by post to his mistress. The poem was writ in tears of blood, yet it was as cold and insipid as a schoolboy's exercise.
Go wheresoever thou wilt, never canst thou pass across the borders of his realms, and within these realms vain it is for mortals to try to hide themselves when he would smite them. But let it comfort thee to know, young woman, that no such odious passion shall trouble thee as erstwhile was the scourge of Myrrha, Semiramis, Byblis, Canace, and Cleopatra.
Such coquetry in its almost coarseness incommoded and distressed Christophe. These two bold young women were a change from the unkindly faces he was accustomed to at home. Myrrha interested him, he guessed her to be more intelligent than Ada: but her obsequious manners and her ambiguous smile were curiously attractive and repulsive to him at the same time.
Were the character of Myrrha scanned with this reference, while nothing could be discovered to detract from the value of the composition, a great deal would be found to lessen the merit of the poet's invention.
Myrrha at last made up her mind to move. "You would be certain to lose them!... There was never any talk about the station. We were to meet here." He sat down by her side. She was amused by his eagerness. He was conscious of the irony in her gaze as she looked at him. He began to be seriously troubled to be anxious about them: he did not suspect them. He got up once more.
Alfieri, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely seen her except for a few hours at rare intervals, looked up to her less with the affection of a son than with the satisfaction of an artist who sees in the woman of whom he is born the peculiar type of features or character which he prizes most in womankind; if he, for all his conscious weaknesses, was more like his own heroes than any man of his acquaintance, if Mme. d'Albany might be judiciously got up as the Laura of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri was even more unmistakably the mother who suited his ideas, the living model of his mother of Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha.
He was a little sorry. "True," he said, "I am going a little too fast: there is no need." He slackened his pace. "But I know them," he went on. "I am sure they will run so as to be there before us." Myrrha burst out laughing. "Oh! no," she said. "Oh! no: don't you worry about that." She hung on his arm and pressed close to him.
Myrrha was dawdling by the mirror. Ada took Christophe's hand and led him along the house towards the garden into the darkness. Under a balcony from which hung a curtain of vines they hid. All about them was dense darkness. They could not even see each other. The wind stirred the tops of the pines.
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