Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I was about to penetrate into a mysterious garden. Therein the three marriageable princesses awaited the long unseen, almost unknown friend, the somewhat contemporary to whom they were bound by certain remembrances of childhood and of youth, the only heir of a name not less ancient nor less worthy than their own. Thus he became to them an equal, a comer-back from magnificent cities, the messenger of a breath of that great life which they had re nounced. And each perhaps, in her secret heart, awaited a possible lover. The anxiety of that expectation appears forcibly to me when I think of the bare and bleak solitude in which they had languished, until that day, with their beautiful hands overflowing with the wealth of youth, and in the presence of incomprehensible images, likenesses of almost royal life and pomp, created by the maternal madness to people the emptiness of vast mirrors. From the infinite distances of those pale dominions, like twilight marshes, where the mother's mad soul was submerged raving, had not each seen the young, ardent form of the lover appear who would deliver her from the gloomy consummation, and ex- halt her suddenly with a whirlwind of joyousness ? Thus each in her enclosed garden awaited with in chapter{Section 4quietude, him who was to know her only to beguile her, and see her perish without possessing her. Ah, which of us will be chosen ? This was their secret thought, and never, perhaps, had their beautiful slumberous eyes been more attentive than in that hour?weary, melancholy eyes in which long habit of uniform glances had abolished the mobility of investigation; mutely devout pitiful eyes where the forms of familiar beings were reflected without mystery and without change, firm in the lines and color of inert life. And ...
