self-possession of a goddess. To have made her nudity a torment, ever

eluding a pursuing Tantalus, would have been an amusement to her.

The king had made her a duchess, and Jupiter a Nereid--a double

irradiation of which the strange, brightness of this creature was

composed. In admiring her you felt yourself becoming a pagan and a

lackey. Her origin had been bastardy and the ocean. She appeared to have

emerged from the foam. From the stream had risen the first jet of her

destiny; but the spring was royal. In her there was something of the

wave, of chance, of the patrician, and of the tempest. She was well read

and accomplished. Never had a passion approached her, yet she had

sounded them all. She had a disgust for realizations, and at the same

time a taste for them. If she had stabbed herself, it would, like

Lucretia, not have been until afterwards. She was a virgin stained with

every defilement in its visionary stage. She was a possible Astarte in a

real Diana. She was, in the insolence of high birth, tempting and

inaccessible. Nevertheless, she might find it amusing to plan a fall for

herself. She dwelt in a halo of glory, half wishing to descend from it,

and perhaps feeling curious to know what a fall was like. She was a

little too heavy for her cloud. To err is a diversion. Princely

unconstraint has the privilege of experiment, and what is frailty in a

plebeian is only frolic in a duchess. Josiana was in everything--in

birth, in beauty, in irony, in brilliancy--almost a queen. She had felt

a moment's enthusiasm for Louis de Bouffles, who used to break

horseshoes between his fingers. She regretted that Hercules was dead.

She lived in some undefined expectation of a voluptuous and supreme

ideal.

304

The Man Who Laughs