Moths by Ouida — page 169: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTHS, - 165 singing-mime? She is very exquisite; but, you know, I have my pride; la probite des pauvres, et la grandeur des rois; I never risk a rebuff.” _And he said it so lightly that his friends believed him, and be- lieved that he had a fit of that reserve which very often made him haughtier and move difficult to persuade than any Roi So- leil of the lyric stage had ever been. ‘‘I am very shy,” he would say sometimes, and everybody would laugh at him. Yet, ina way, it was true: he had many sensitive fancies, and all in his temperament that was tender, spiritual, and romantic had centered itself in that innocent emo- tion which had never been love, which was as fantastic as Dante’s, and almost as baseless as Keats’, and was therefore all the more dear to him because so unlike the too easy and too ma- terial passions which had been his portion in youth. | ‘*It can do her no harm,” he would think, ‘‘ and it goes with me like the angel that the poets write of, that keeps the door of the soul,” It was a phantasy, he told himself; but then the natural food of artists was phantasies of all kinds; and so this tenderness, this regret, went with him always through the gay motley of his changeful days, as the golden curl of some lost love or some dead child may lie next the heart of a man all the while that ha laughs, and talks, and dines, and drives, and jests, and yawnsin the midst of the world. ‘*It can do her no harm,” he said; and so he never let his eyes meet hers, and she could never tell whether he ever remembered that Vera Zouroff had once been Vere Herbert. And the weeks and the months rolled on their course, and Correze was always the Roi Soleil of his time, and Vere became yet of greater beauty, as her face and form reached their full perfection. Her portraits by great painters, her busts by great sculptors, her costumes by great artists, were the themes of the public press; the streets were filled to see her go by in the pleasure-capital of the world; among her diamonds the famous jewel of tragic memories and historic repute that was called the Roc’s egg shone on her white breast as if she had plucked a planet from the skies. No day passed but fresh treasures in old jewels, old wares, old gold and silver from the sales of the Hotel Drouot were poured into her rooms with all the delicate charm about them that comes from history and tradition. Had she any whim, she could indulge it; any taste, she could gratify it; any fancy, she could execute it; and yet, one day, when she saw a picture in the Salon of a slave-girl standing with rope-bound wrists and fettered ankles amidst the lustrous stuffs and gems of the harem, surrounded by open coffers and the glittering stones and chains of gold in which her captors were about to array her nude and trembling limbs, she looked long at it, and said _to the master of Oriental art who had painted it, ‘‘ Did you need to go to the East for that?” She bought the picture, and had it hung in her bedchamber in Paris—where it looked strange and startling against the pink taffetas and_the silver embroideries of the wall. . “ (ele) comicboo cS a ~~ = # =>) a ~*~ =- es