behovely, but all shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," is the refrain of page after page-and little marvel it is, for "she saw an high privity hid in God, which shall be known in heaven to us. In which knowing we shall verily see the cause why he suffered sin. In which sight we shall endlessly have joy, and all say with one voice, Lord, blessed mote thou be. For because it is thus, thus it is well."

Strange too is it, in an epoch when the physical hell of fire and torturesuch hells as that of Teresa's later vision, "with long narrow lane, low and dark and close, with mire of reptiles and contracting walls," had branded itself upon the orthodox-to read Juliana's quiet words: "To me was showed none harder hell than sin; hell was as sin to my sight;" and from sin, she gives sad assent to the inexorable law of human weakness, "we may not in this life keep us." Yet, even as she makes her concession to the inevitable, the old jubilant faith reasserts its sure basis of final victory. "In each soul that shall be safe is a goodly will, that never assenteth to sin ne never shall," and in the end "blame shall be turned into endless worship, though how and by what deed there is no creature beneath Christ that wot it." Even those to whom her gospel conveys no certificate of truth may find something to learn in that doctrine of good cheer.

This is to give but some slight sketch of those conditions of mind and body and thought belonging to the mysticism of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. To track its influence in literature, to follow its developments in the copies fiction made from life, and in those other more recent plagiarisms life is accused of having made from fiction, is a task far beyond our scope. That it left the trace of its spiritual glamour is plain enough. The German school of chivalric romance, as represented by Fouqué in his legends (misestimated in England as children's stories), or by Novalis in his unfinished LIVING AGE. VOL. XIII. 631

"Heinrich von Oftendingen," is permeated with it. Perhaps some kindred film crept over Hawthorne's pen when he wrote his tales, where, trembling on the brink of the unseen, the figures of his men and women rise in the moonlight of his creative fancy. George Sand, in her strange chronicle of spiritual inheritances "Spiridion," has caught something of its atmosphere. Its symbolism is echoed-we are tempted to say their pose approaches a parody-by many so-called "mystics" of our own time, who are fain to assume the gift of the ascetic's vision while they withhold the guarantee of the ascetic's sacrifice. Spurious mysticism there has ever been, superficial imitations and artificial emotions. Men forget that to see a vision is not to have become a mystic. To be, if one may borrow the journalists' term, an anti-naturalist, is not to have attained the ethereal kingdom that flesh and blood cannot inherit. The "Chevalier Malheur" may pierce the hand of the dreamer; "le rêve qui pleure" may visit the dead eyes of the living sinner; to the remorseful penitent "les soirs mystiques," with their vibrations of "les angélus roses et noirs," may come; the experiences of Huysmans's hero, the Parisian "mystic" of to-day, whose studied emotions and self-absorbed egoism would be less revolting as features of his sins than of his repentances, may be true to life. But the fact remains that to adopt a symbolic phraseology is not to have assimilated a spiritual temperament, although be it allowed that in days when originals are lacking the copyists themselves may be unconscious of the fraud.

And towards them, as towards all who bear by right, or have taken in good faith, the title, the world may well exercise a judgment of forbearance. Sleeping dreams there are of the brain, the recital of which in a land, were there any such, where sleep is dreamless, would read as an impostor's fable. Waking dreams there may

1 Sangesse, Paul Verlaine.

be of the soul, towards which our attitude is perforce of a like incredulity; yet, maybe, even so and to us, they have their value. Is it not perhaps true, in a wider sense than the writer intended, that "ohne die Träume würden wir gewiss früher alt"?

From The Cornhill Magazine. THE DUEL OF THE PERIOD IN FRANCE.

To fight a great many duels is, in France, the shortest road to the favor of the fair sex or the admiration of the mob. The glamour of romance about a duel and its scenic effects appeal strongly to a people, brave, sensitive, and imaginative, but vain and somewhat theatrical. There is nothing ridiculous to a Frenchman in Thackeray's French chef, who invites his master's daughter to dance and asks Pendennis for his card when the latter interferes. In France the chef and the commis-voyageur have their affairs of honor. If "Tommy Atkins" gets a rap from a comrade, a few rounds with "the raws" settle it. But if one piou-piou's cheek be grazed by the angry hand of another, he must "square" the account sword in hand, like a colonel or a duke. If an accident happens, tant pis, the survivor knows that he will not be punished. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, English ambassador to France in the seventeenth century, records the fact that in his time every Frenchman worth looking at had killed his man. Captain Gronow of the Grenadier Guards, speaking of Paris under the Restoration, says, "If you looked at a man it was enough, for without having given the slightest offence cards were exchanged and you stood a good chance of being shot or run through the body." The testimony of two such witnesses at an interval of two hundred years shows the kind of hold duelling has upon the French.

From time to time the government has tried to check the practice. Saint Louis issued the first edict against it. Philip the Fair, his grandson, another. From the accession of Henry of Na

varre, in 1589, until 1607, six thousand French gentlemen were killed in duels, and in each case the king granted a free pardon. Louis XIII. issued a fresh edict by the advice of his minister, Cardinal Richelieu, whose favorite brother had been killed in a duel with the Marquis de Méthines, and Louis XIV. the severest of all. The first, issued in 1626, punished duellists with loss of honors and confiscation of their estates. The survivor of a fatal duel was sent to the scaffold, as were Boutteville de Montmorency and his cousin Count des Chapelles in 1627. The edict of 1679 sentenced principles and seconds to death. Servants who assisted their masters in an affair of honor were scourged and branded. The regent loved duelling, and during the regency duels took place almost daily, as was also the case under Louis XV., but in his reign the duel au premier sang was invented, by which honor was satisfied as soon as blood had been drawn. One of the first acts of the Constituent Assembly was to suspend judgments hanging over those who had taken part in duels; the reason alleged being that in the disturbed state of society men were more prone than usual to provoke one another. The roturiers appeared to envy what had been up to that time an exclusive privilege of the aristocracy. When juries dealt with duelling it was found that while there were eighteen fatal duels between the years 1837 and 1841, in every case the homicide was acquitted. Bills to fix a penalty for duellists introduced into the French Parliament in 1833 and 1845 were voted down. There is no reference to duels or duellists in the French Penal Code. When duellists are punished, it is not for duelling but for a breach of the peace.

The duel in France grew out of the old feudal method of deciding suits at law known as "wager of battle," when the stronger sword was the better plea. The last of these contests took place at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, in presence of Henri II. and his court, on July 13, 1547, between two French lords, Jarnac and La Châteigneraie. The former disabled his adversary with a secret coup known

to this day in France as "le coup de Jarnac." Under the Valois kings duels were simply murders. In an encounter between three favorites of Henri III. and three of the Guise faction, the point of the sword of Caylus, one of the favorites, caught in the hilt of his adversary, d'Entragues. As Caylus had neglected to bring a dagger, this left him at the other's mercy, and he pleaded the inequality. "We are here to fight-not to split straws," said d'Entragues, and stabbed him to death. Under Henri IV. it was no better. One dark night, in 1613, the Duke of Guise met in the Rue Saint Honoré the coach of the aged Baron de Luz, who was in possession of a secret that compromised the duke, who forced him to alight and accompany him to where a swinging lantern afforded sufficient light for his purpose. Called upon to draw, the old man, hardly believing the duke to be in earnest, stood feebly on his defence. In an instant the Guise had passed his sword through his body. On the following day the old man's son, a mere boy, wrote to the duke a touching letter entreating the grand seigneur to honor by crossing swords with him a son whom he had robbed of a father. The duke accepted-and killed him.

In marked contrast to these brutal butcheries are the French eighteenthcentury duels, not unaccompanied by a certain subtle refinement, easy grace, and gentle humor. When d'Albret, by a clever thrust, happily despatches the wretched husband of poor Madame de Sévigné, mocking Saint Mégrin says, "A bright amusing fellow this d'Albret who kills to perfection." The archetype of the d'Albret duellist is the Marshal Duke of Richelieu, a bad man, utterly unscrupulous with women (who adored him), but always ready, sword in hand, to avenge the most trifling slight to them as to himself. Before Philipsburg with the Duke of Berwick he was returning splashed with mud to his quarters from the trenches one night when the Prince of Lixen, a cousin of the Mademoiselle de Guise whom Richelieu had recently married against the wishes of her family, made an im

pertinent remark about his muddy coat. The duke at once compelled him to dismount and draw, and in a few moments had passed his sword through his body. Not only did the duke fight for the beaux yeux of the fair, but the latter sometimes fought for the beaux yeux of the duke; as Madame de Polignac and Madame de Neste, when a pistol bullet clipped the tip of the latter's ear. Many French ladies indulged in such follies. Madame de Saint-Belmont was "out" scores of times both with women and with men. Pretty actresses, like La Beaupré and des Urlis, rivals for the heart of a young gentleman of the court, fought on the stage with swords. Des Urlis received a dangerous wound in the neck. Madame Château Gay de Murat fought a duel with her faithless lover, M. de Cadières. She attacked him like a fury, but, a clever swordsman, he kept her at bay until she fell exhausted at his feet, when lifting her tenderly she fell sobbing on his breast and forgave him.

Few duels were fought during the First Republic and the Empire. Republicans and Bonapartists, actively engaged in defending their country against invasion, had no time for them; the émigrés, united by the bond of a common misfortune, no inclination. But the royalists returned with their king to find Paris swarming with Bonapartist officers, driven from the army, and burning to vent their despair in duels with officers of the king or of the allied armies. Paris was divided into two great camps. Duels were an every-day occurrence. Chief of the Bonapartists was General Fournier, who had slain a number of promising young royalist officers. He met his match in Fayot, an eccentric royalist. who wounded him severely in a sword duel, and so terrified him that he fled before him from one French city to another, while the avenger on his track swore to have the blood of one he al

ways called "the assassin." That the hero of so many duels should show the white feather is not so strange. It takes but little courage to fight a duel, and that courage vanity supplies. Face

to face with certain death this artificial valor fails. Captain Stewart, a Scottish officer quartered in Jamaica, having had the misfortune to kill a brother officer in a duel, nad resolved never to fight another and refused the cartel of a noted Creole duellist. The latter, however, so insulted Stewart that a meeting could no longer be avoided. Stewart stipulated that they should stand in an open grave deep enough to hold them both, and then, taking the ends of a handkerchief, fire across it. When the Creole saw these dreadful preparations, his heart gave way and he fell in a swoon at the reet of his adversary.

The most terrible duel fought at that time in Paris was the one between Colonel D -, an old Bonapartist officer, and M. de G, of the Gardes du Corps, a mere youth but of herculean strength. The two men, lashed together so as to leave their right arms free, were armed with short knives, placed in a hackney coach, and driven at a tearing gallop around the Place de la Concorde. They were taken out of the coach dead. The colonel had eighteen stabs; the youth only four, but one of these had pierced his heart.

The famous "generation of 1830" was a fighting one. Old General (afterwards Marshal) Bugeaud, the soldier's idol, le père Bugeaud," fought a duel with a brother deputy, M. Dulong, with regard to words spoken in debate, and shot him through the head. The most prosaic, the most bourgeois of all eminent French statesmen and historians, the late M. Adolphe Thiers, fought a duel when a young man with the irate father of a pretty girl whom Thiers, while anxious to marry, did not wed, because he was too poor to support her. Shots were exchanged without result, and the combatants embraced. The famous journalist and littérateur, M. Emile de Girardin, editor of La Presse, fought four duels in 1834 with the editors of other Parisian journals because, the annual subscription to French daily newspapers being at that time eighty francs, he had reduced the price of La Presse by one half, with the result that the circulation of his paper was enor

mously increased. In the last of these duels he had the misfortune to kill Armand Carrel, a man of talent and a popular idol. Girardin, who was shot in the hip, had lingered between life and death for weeks before he recovered from his wound, and never, in spite of repeated provocations, could be induced to fight another duel. "Duelling," he said, "is a fault of our education against which our intelligence protests." But in France you must have killed your man to be able to say that.

The Beauvallon duel, in 1845, was a most disgraceful affair. Beauvallon, a young Creole, a brother-in-law of M. Granier de Cassagnac, wrote the chronique for the Globe. Dujarier, his antagonist, a wild, reckless fellow, was an editor of La Presse. A supper party at the Trois Frères Provençaux, at which that prince of "shady" Bohemians, Roger de Beauvoir, was also present, ended with a game of lansquenet, and Dujarier quarrelled with de Beauvoir and with Beauvallon over the stakes. The latter sent his seconds to Dujarier the next day. The duel was fought with pistols near Madrid, the café in the Bois de Boulogne, at eleven o'clock in the morning. Dujarier was shot through the head. One of his seconds asserted that on the ground, before the d el, he had introduced his little finger into the barrel of one of the pistols and had withdrawn it black with powder. As it was understood that the pistols used were to be strange to both parties. this looked like foul play. Beauvallon had supplied the pistols, and he and his second, d'Ecquevillez, were placed upon their trial for murder.

Thanks to the eloquence of their advocate, the famous Berryer, they were acquitted. But through the indiscretion of a young Parisian viveur, a M. Meynard, a friend of Beauvallon's, it leaked out that the latter had come to his house early on the morning of the duel, and they had gone to the villa in Chaillot of d'Ecquevillez, and that behind the house, in the garden, Beauvallon had practised at a mark with the pistols afterwards used in the duel, sending bullet after bullet into the

centre of the target. He and his second were rearrested and tried, this time for perjury. Found guilty, they were sentenced, the second to eight years' and Beauvallon to seven years' imprisonment. Among the witnesses at this famous trial were Alexander Dumas the elder, Roger de Beauvoir, and the afterwards notorious Lola Montez, the mistress of Dujarier, at that time a girl of twenty and an obscure Spanish dancer at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin.

Many duels were fought in France during the Second Empire, especially in the years preceding its fall, which I passed in Paris. The most famous duellists of the day were the Duke of Gramont-Caderousse, the Marquis de Gallifet, Prince Achille Murat, M. Henri Rochefort, M. Alfonso, Count Maurice d'Irison d'Hérissem and his brother Georges, the fiery Hanoverian Baron de Malorti, and M. Gaston Jolivet. In 1862 a duel took place at Saint Germain between the duke and a young Irishman, a Mr. Dillon, who wrote the racing articles for Le Sport. The duke took offence at a paragraph in one of them, and commented so severely on it that Dillon called him out. The result of the duel showed the folly of a novice measuring his strength with an accomplished fencer. Dillon, at a word, rushed madly upon the duke, who withdrew a step and presented the point of his sword, upon which poor Dillon impaled himself, and was killed on the spot. It was all over in a few seconds.

A year or two afterwards the duke and Count Georges d'Irison d'Hérissem, of the French Foreign Office, were engaged one afternoon in playing for high stakes with some friends at the Jockey Club. When the clock struck eight, the count, who was a large winner, remarked that he had promised to take two ladies to the opera, and would have to take his leave, although he preferred to remain. The duke was the principal loser, and to the count's explanation simply replied, "Of course - bosh! D'Irison again expressed his regret at having to leave, and again the duke's only comment was, "Of course-bosh!"

D'Irison, very angry, deliberately tore the numerous I.O.U.'s of the duke's the hazard of the game had placed in his possession into small pieces and strewed them under the table. As the last piece fluttered to the floor, the duke calmly repeated, "Oh, yes-bosh!" In the duel that followed d'Irison gave him a sword-wound in the side that brought on consumption and caused his death.

Then came the famous de Pène duel. Henri de Pène, editor of the Gaulois, the Orleanist organ, published an article in his newspaper in which, describing a ball at the Tuileries, he spoke of "the eternal sub-lieutenant who ploughs up with his spurs the lace on the women's

ounces." The next morning there were twenty-seven challenges on his dressing-table. A duel was arranged for him with a sub-lieutenant in the Ninth Chasseurs à Cheval. It took place at Le Vésinet, near Paris, and a great many officers, including the Marquis de Gallifet, were on the ground. In a few moments the sub-lieutenant was disabled by a sword-thrust in the arm. Another officer came forward and said, "It is now my turn." De Pène and his seconds urged the unfairness of a man being called upon to fight two duels in rapid succession. The officer came closer, and snapping his fingers in De Pène's face said, "Monsieur, you are a scamp" (un drôle). De Pène, in spite of the protest of his seconds, insisted on immediate satisfaction. Almost as soon as the duellists were engaged the officer, who had formerly been fencing master of a regiment, passed his sword with lightning-like rapidity twice through De Pène's body, perforating the liver. The poor fellow lingered for months between life and death, but ultimately recovered. I saw him at the opera with his wife about a year afterwards.