SCENES OF THE 29TH OF NOVEMBER, 1830. 633 



smiled, and thought proper to season his base conduct by the most 

 loathsome language. This was too much ; I clasped with a convul- 

 sive feeling the hand of a man seated at my side. He started, and 

 my hand fell chilled with a deadly terror. I recognized in him 

 a noted Russian spy. A person at the same time quitted his 

 place in another corner of the room. I rushed in haste to occupy 

 it to leave that where I endured all the torments of a silent and 

 stifled rage. I began to breathe again : on my left sat a full-grown 

 child, with joyful looks and smiling countenance on my right, 

 a venerable old man, with a lofty brow furrowed by cares, and 

 shaded by long silvery hair, the luxury of which expanded over his 

 shoulders. 



My mind was too much excited to allow me to recover at once 

 from the shock I had just received. Wearied with exertion and 

 seeking for repose, my ideas gradually quitted the loathsome reali- 

 ties, and travelled into the visionary world. The music, as if conge- 

 nial with my moral state, began to play one of those mournful tunes of 

 the Ukraine, which no one can listen to without paying the tribute of 

 a tear. But when, in starts from my wandering, I fixed my eyes on 

 the venerable old man, he seemed to me to have assumed the figure 

 of a hero. His face glowed, with a martial air, his silver locks were 

 retained by a red Polish cap, and his body attired in the ancient na- 

 tional dress, girdled by a golden Persian shawl, from which hung down 

 a costly karabella. I fancied him one of those confederates of Bar 

 who, seeing their country on the edge of a precipice, wished to pre- 

 vent its ruin by throwing their lives and their fortunes in the chasm. 

 I fancied him a follower of Kosciuszko, a hero of Maccijowice, a so- 

 litary prisoner of the dungeons of St. Petersburg, a pining soldier of 

 the ungrateful emperor of the French, and, at last, a home-returning, 

 worn-out, and disappointed patriot. When my imagination had sated 

 itself on the past, I thought of the future ; I turned my eyes upon 

 the beautiful child, and straightway in my mind's eye he became 

 a man ; his lofty head prepared to don the helmet^ and his hand 

 ready to grasp the deadly lance of his country. And I was seated there, 

 between the glorious past and the bright future changing, uncertain 

 stung and crushed in mind the very personification of the present, 

 with all its torments and its doubts. My sight grew dim, and when 

 I again began to see clearly, my eyes met those of a young beauty. 

 This was she whom the Russian officer had so cruelly insulted. The 

 fascinating and melancholy expression of her face was in harmony 

 with all the hidden workings of her mind. 



"I am convinced," says an intelligent German writer, "that Eve 

 must have been a Pole !" But this heavenly creature appeared to me 

 more than those terrestrial shapes, whom beauty has chosen for its 

 favourites and how often for its victims ! I saw in her the Polish 

 mother, who brings up her son in the hatred of the enemies of her 

 country sends him when grown up, with a blessing and a single 

 wish, to the deadly struggle with them nurses and glories in him 

 when, maimed and covered with wounds, he returns again to her 

 bosom. The orchestra struck now the first notes of the overture to 



M. M. No. 102. 4 M 



