📔 Francesca Carrara

The prodigal heir can only waste his own substance, and the punishment falls, as it should, upon himself; but the prince has an awful responsibility,—the welfare of others is required at his hands; his faults and his follies take a wide range, and not with him does their suffering end.

The Duchesse's boudoir was fitted up in a style of luxury utterly different from anything before familiar to the Carraras.

One day he came not: I was told, and truly, that business the most imperative required his personal attendance; yet I could not force the ghastly terror of his illness from my mind. I dared not tempt my fate by content—the agony which I suffered seemed a sort of expiation.

Francesca was soon disencumbered of her riding-hood and cloak; and the three young people, left together, became rapidly acquainted.

"Do not name it!" answered he, passionately. "God forgive me! I cannot yet bear its name. But for its ill-starred birth, Henriette might now be living. What is there in that unconscious infant to replace its mother?"

It was as if the countenance were for a brief while allowed to wear the likeness of the peaceful and spiritual world whither the soul had departed.

The mule knows the hidden pitfalls of the morass; the swallow feels the storm ere it comes upon the air, and wings to the quiet shelter of its nest—they foresee their dangers, and avoid them; while we blindly rush forward into the depths of the pit and the fury of the tempest; for we know not what evils await us. No kind foreknowledge gives us even the choice of avoidance.

Moreover, you must remember, even as children, Marie was ever more resolute than myself; and now, how little would she heed remonstrance of mine!

While from their lovely climate, the poets native to their sweet south, the old ruins hallowed with the memories of other days, the lovely paintings, the still diviner statues, which had been their constant companions—the character had imperceptibly caught a tone of romance, calculated long to resist the inroads of worldliness and deceit.

There was a tone, too, of pastoral poetry shed over the new scenes to which they were just introduced, that had a greater effect from the contrast to those, artificial and crowded, which they had just left.