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facts and forces of existence which we all imagine we realise and expect until we come into actual contact with them, are conquered by them, and deceive ourselves with the assurance that next time we shall resign ourselves without a struggle. Love? Marie certainly thought she understood it. She certainly thought she had intellectually mingled the modesty, bashfulness, and passion which go to its composition in the proportions due to their relative importance; and yet, like all pure-minded girls who merely speculate on this subject, she was quite incapable of realising the intellectual consequences of the passion she imagined she understood, the man's perfectly natural but essentially incorrect extension of his feelings to the woman, the imputation of them in like intensity to her, on the plea that she too is a human being.

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girl who prided herself on her purity; whom, as we see more than once, every breath of calumny throws into a fever of disgust." "Then," she says later on, "when I went down to speak to him on the eve of our departure, he saw in my action only an amorous rendezvous. When I leant on his arm, he trembled only with desire. When I looked at him serious, inspired like an ancient prophetess, he saw nothing but a woman and a rendezvous." The thought of the rendezvous tortures her; she prays with tears that she may forget it; her lips seem to have turned black since the kiss, of which he had so little understood the value. "I advise all young women to be more canailles at the bottom of their souls," she exclaims bitterly. To a sensitive girl's mind, surely no revelation could be a greater shock than the one Marie had just received!

There was, however, another, and perhaps even more important element of education in this painful affair.

"You will never love me," said Pietro, one day.

"When you are free." "When I am dead!" ejaculated Pietro, bitterly.

"I cannot at present, for I pity and despise you.

"If they told you not to love me, you would obey." "Perhaps."

"It is dreadful!"

Marie, independent, accustomed to originate and carry out her plans without encountering any obstacles worth the name, here found herself face to face, for the first time in her life, with a dependent being-and a being dependent on a mysterious force,--impassible, slow-moving, and sure. She, who treated parents and

grand-parents as her equals, who considered herself mistress of her own destinies, was suddenly confronted with the extraordinarily close organisation of an Italian family with that medieval genslike association, in which the affairs of one are the affairs of all who bear the same name, and are settled for him by his elders,with that curious union of élan and want of vigorous initiative which seems the modern outcome in Italy of centuries of youthful dependence.

This Pietro was the nephew of a well-known cardinal. His youthful excesses had produced a tension in the family. Now, at twentyfour, he had promised reform, and was trying to regain the favour of his clerical uncle, when he fell in love with Marie. Naturally the cardinal objected that the nephew, of whom he hoped to make use to increase his political weight, should marry a Russian of the Greek Church, and joined his influence to that of Pietro's father, mother, brother, and sisters to prevent the inatch. Virtually Marie was fighting against the Ronian Catholic Church, and the contest was what one might expect from such combatants: eager and nervous on the girl's part her wounded pride making her often forget the slightness of her affections; calnily victorious on the part of Pietro's family. At one time Marie finds him spirited off for seventeen days to a convent to do penance. She sees him in a cab.

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Why don't you have a car

riage?"

"My family won't give me the money."

"Follow me to Nice," she says more than once, anxious to withdraw him from these hostile influ

ences.

"I can't—I have no money; but

I will ask my mother, who will speak to my father about it."

Needless to say the money was not granted, and Marie's plan failed. Marie was helpless against this cold hostility, this paralysis of independent action. "This absolute dependence freezes me," she says; "if they forbade him to love me he would obey, I am certain.” She was right. After that meeting on the eve of her departure from Rome, she never saw him again. He wrote once or twice, despairing letters it would seem; but appears ultimately to have rendered the inevitable obedience. Marie, with an indescribable mixture of rage and wounded pride, owned herself beaten for the first time in her life.

Braced by the conflict with superior powers, deepened and widened by close contact with another human being, Marie, now sixteen years of age, faced a difficulty from which many an older person would have shrunk. This was nothing less than a journey to Russia to win the affections of the father from whom she had been separated since she was less than two; to break, alone and unknown as she was, the hostile influence exerted over him for years by his family; and to persuade him to rejoin his wife and establish himself abroad for the winter to help in the task of providing a suitable future for his daughter. He was a man of evil disposition, Marie was told; haughty, sarcastic, delighting to humiliate those with whom he came in contact. She determined, then, to fight him with his own weapons; to make him fear her wit, while she forced him to respect her character and admire her person; appealing to his vanity, by showing herself to the greatest possible advantage in the society he habitually frequent

ed. Such was the task before the girl, and which she had set herself, as she parted from her mother, for the first time in her life, to travel with her aunt to the Russian frontier, and make her solitary entry into the hostile atmosphere of her father's family.

In the parting with her mother and grandfather, we catch the first note of the softened strain which makes itself heard more and more decidedly as life advances. She begins to realise something of the value of that fathomless devotion which she has hitherto accepted as her right.

"Mamma has been weeping my future absence for the last three days; I have been sweet and tender with her therefore. The affections of husbands, lovers, friends, children, go and come, for all these may exist twice. But there is only one mother, and a mother is the only being whose love is disinterested. devoted, and eternal. I felt all that for the

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first time, perhaps, as I said good-bye to her. And how I laughed at the loves of H., L., A., P., and what small matters they seemed to me! Nothings. Grandpapa was moved to tears. Besides, there is something solemn in an old man's good-bye. He blessed me, and gave me an image of the Holy Virgin. I adopted, as usual, my most joyful manner at parting, nevertheless, I was truly sad.

Mam

ma did not cry, but I felt she was so unhappy that a flood of regrets came over me, as I felt how hard I had often been with her."

It is the first touch of chastened feeling, rendered possible, we may well believe, by the education of the last few months.

Through Paris she reaches Eydtkühnen, and leaves her aunt, to launch forth into the unknown. The parting is characteristic.

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gave the signal. and for the first time in my life I found myself alone! I began to cry aloud: but if you think I drew no profit from my tears! ... I made a study from Nature of the art of weeping."

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No traces of weakness could be discovered, however, when she met her uncle at Wirballen, nor when, at Poltawa, she first saw her father. She had taken her stand from the first; had been served like a prinThe report of her beauty, wit, gaiety, and exactingness had already reached her father, who was in a state of much excitement between desire to see her, fear that and nervousness as to the result of she would refuse to go to his house, the first interview. The meeting, as Marie describes it, sets the man at once clearly before us.

arrived at Poltawa. No one at the "This morning at six o'clock we station. On reaching the hotel, I write the following letter; brusquerie often succeeds-:

"I reach Poltawa and find not even a carriage. Come immediately, I expect you at mid-day. Truly this is no fitting reception.

'MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF.'

The letter had hardly been sent when I threw myself into his arms with a my father rushed into the room, and noble slowness. He was visibly satisfied with my appearance, for his first care was to examine me in a kind of hurry.

"How big you are! I did not expect it; and pretty: yes, yes, very good, really.'

"This is how I am received; without even a carriage! Have you had my letter?'

"No; but I have just received the telegram, and rushed here. I hoped to arrive for the train. I am covered with dust. To come quicker I got into E.'s troika.'

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And I wrote you a charming

letter.'

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""You are used to have people run after you like little dogs.'

"And I must be run after; without that, nothing.'

"Ah, no! you won't get on with me in that way.'

"You can take me or leave me.'

"But why treat me as "father" I am a bon vivant, a young man, there. "Perfect, and so much the better."" "My father," she says two days afterwards, "is a hard man, irritated and crushed from infancy by the terrible general his father. Scarcely was he free and rich than he launched out and half ruined himself. All puffed (boufi) up with vanity and puerile pride, he prefers appearing a monster to showing what he feels, especially if anything moves him;

and in that he is like me."

It was just this fundamental resemblance between Marie and her father which enabled her to treat him successfully. For her plan answered perfectly; his fatherly vanity was roused; his intelligence pleased; his respect ensured by the fearlessness of her opposition to his attacks on her mother's family. The first quarrel on this head ended in a victory for Marie, and was an earnest of the future. Little by little relations between father and daughter grew more intimate; there are even one or two touching scenes of such expansion as was possible between

two such natures.

"We were hardly in the fields,", says Marie, describing one such scene, "when my father suddenly asked me, 'Well, are we going to quarrel to-day too?'

"As much as you like.'

"He took me brusquely in his arms, wrapped me in his mantle, and leant my head against his shoulder. And I shut my eyes; that is my way of being tender. We remained thus

for several minutes,

"Now,' said he, 'sit up.'

“A cloak then, for I shall be cold.' "He wrapped me in his cloak, and I began to talk of Rome."

She talked to such good purpose that it was not long before her father began seriously to entertain the idea of requesting leave of absence for the winter and establishing himself with Marie at Rome or Nice; only, he asks during a later interview, while he fidgets awkwardly with Marie's brushes and combs, will her mother-will her mother make any objection to living with him? Marie assures him that her mother will do what is best for the daughter with whom her life is bound up; and her father finishes by confessing that he is still in love with her mother, that he was beside himself when they separated her from him, and that (with much hesitation and many blushes) he was afraid she might have an unconquerable dislike to him. Marie reassures him; and from thenceforth it is an understood thing that he will, at any rate, accompany her to Paris, meet her mother, and see what arrangements can be made.

Meanwhile another side of Marie's character, had been showing itself in her diary. During the four months of her stay in Russia her object was to show herself to the greatest possible advantage and captivate all with whom she came in contact. "I am far," she says, "from regretting my thirty-one trunks. My father must be taken through his vanity; " and we have from time to time descriptions of the toilets by which she astonished

the

natives. Her wide reading, her conversational powers, displayed without a trace of pedantry, excited enthusiasm in a not overeducated Russian provincial town; her music (she played harp, violin,

mandolin, and piano) and her fine voice delighted a society where music seems to have been little known; her painting (we find her painting portraits of her brother and his friends) raised her father's admiration of her to the highest possible pitch. We see her the centre of an admiring crowd, who fête her and worship her; she is carried in a carpet when tired; she holds her court on the stairs like Goethe's Elenore. "I like stairs," she remarks in this connection, "because one ascends." Books were at a discount; society life entirely to the fore. Yet it was not the society life of an or dinary coquette, much as she delighted in coquetry at this epoch; for the character sketches she gives of her admirers show a faculty of observation, and an increased knowledge of human nature, which would not only be remarkable in any person of mature age, but which reveal the enormous strides her own character had made in development since she went to Rome in the spring of that same year. To dazzle by her toilets and accomplishments was, however, by no means sufficient for Marie's restless nature. She threw herself with energy into all the outdoor sports in which her father delighted, determined to surpass all others of her sex in Russian active life, and to conquer the timidity inherent in her nature thoroughly enjoying the novelty of the purely animal pleasure to be found in riding, fishing, or shooting. Now she successfully mounts an unbroken horse, "partly to spite my own coward ice, partly to fill up the newsbags of those dandies from Poltawa; now she rates herself for fearing a gun, and sets to work to practise shooting; now it is a huntingparty in which she walks for miles

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in man's costume (ending by shooting a crow!), or takes her place, gun in hand, alone in the damp thicket with a couple of dogs, lying in ambush for the wolves which it is the peasants' duty to beat up. Her intellectual nature needed the relief of the fatiguing reality of this bodily activity, just as her society life found rest in contact with the poorer classes. "You know j'adore m'encanailler," she says quite untranslatably; and goes on to describe how she mixes with the peasants, is within a little of dancing with them; how she dresses in the costume of a peasant maiden, and is discovered by her father sitting with her brother at the door of the village inn.

During her stay in Russia, too, we have the first exhibition of the enthusiastic interest in politics which she displayed in later years. It was the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, of the war between Turkey and Servia, and of the great pan-Slavist agitation. The Russians were clamouring for war, streaming over the frontier to serve as volunteers in the Servian army. "On the reverse of the bill for lunch," she writes immediately after entering Russia, "there is printed a despairing appeal to appeal to the Russian people and clergy, on behalf of the Slav Committee at Moscow. This heartrending appeal was put into my hand this morning. I am keeping it." She longs to subscribe to the fund; is enraged with the Czar for not declaring war; cries and shouts with the crowd at the sight of the volunteers who are leaving the station at Poltawa, and is indignant that her companions remain unmoved; hears her father addressing his peasants (on the law concerning horses, as it happens), and immediately jumps to the con

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