Page:Leigh Hunt's London Journal (vol 2, 1835).djvu/334

 she has been unwilling to play on the instrument, which reminds her of the death of her lover.”

“But you must play us something,” said both her friends, “and that to-night. There is an harmonicon in the house—besides, the evening air will soon become too damp and cold for the garden.”

Julia promised to grant their request, and the three friends, after wandering a few times more through the garden, hastened into the parlour, which was enlivened and warmed by a blazing fire.

“No lights, no lights,” cried Meta, as the servant brought in candles—“the fire is enough, and the harmonicon sounds best in the dark.”

Upon this the two girls seated themselves on a sofa, at some distance, and pressed close to each other in the darkness, while Julia opened her instrument, and made the necessary preparations for playing.

“Optical illusions should be introduced with the sound of an harmonicon,” said Cecilia; “the very preparations before one hears a tone, make one fearful—the rustling of the sponge upon the glasses, the faint glimmer of these, if a light is reflected on them, all seems a kind of annunciation that something strange is about to enter.”

Julia struck the first tone. She made it slowly swell, and gradually united it with full harmonising tones. At this moment both the girls sprang from the sofa with a loud scream.

Julia looked round, and would have reproved them, but cousin Arnold, who had walked in lightly not to disturb her, appeased her rising anger, and both the girls, who had taken him for a ghost, were well laughed at.

“Now,” said Arnold, “they will say the same of you, fair Julia, as they do of Antonia, that your praying on the harmonicon raises spirits. Fortunately, the spirits which you charm are not of so ghostly a nature as Antonia’s.”

“Antonia’s?” repeated Julia, “what do you mean?”

“I will not vouch for it,” said Arnold, “but it is whispered that when Antonia plays on the harmonicon, a shade comes up to her and sighs.”

“Ewald’s shade, certainly!” cried Meta.

“That I do not know,” answered he; “probably no more Ewald’s than any one else’s. However, the story tells well; a power to attract spirits can be easily ascribed to the spiritual harmonicon.”

“Especially as played by Antonia,” added Julia. “Her tone is more spiritual than the mere tone of the spiritual harmonicon. It is, one may say, quite incorporeal, and seems like a sound from another world. I, at least, have heard such a tone from none but her.”

“So say all,” returned Arnold with gallantry, “who have never been so happy as to hear the fair Julia. May I entreat you?”

He pointed to the open harmonicon.

“Not this evening,” said Julia. “You have frightened me with your story of the shadow raised by Antonia’s harmonicon; and it is strange that Antonia has not been induced to play for some time past.”

“Indeed!” ejaculated Arnold. “I heard that this very evening she promised this treat to a circle of Normann’s friends.”

“Impossible!” cried Julia, “or else the unfeeling man has tormented the poor yielding creature with his wilfulness. Poor Antonia! he does not even spare her to-day, when she already feels pain enough without this.”

Arnold and the girls again conducted Julia to the harmonicon, and entreated her to play.

“You annoy me,” said she; “it is, indeed, with fear that I place myself at the instrument, as if I myself should invoke spirits; and when I think that, perhaps at this very moment, Antonia is sitting at the harmonicon with a heart full of anguish, and is in vain begging to be spared her pains, this causes a feeling to come over me that makes my hands tremble, and cramps my feet. You will be badly entertained by my playing.”

She began a serious passage with long sustained tones, which strangely echoed in the wide and empty room. She then wished to turn it into a choral song, but it seemed as if she could not hit upon the right air; for she played melodies which were indeed similar, but she could not sustain the proper one.

Cecilia reminded her of this.

“I know it well,” said Julia; “this chorus has often been played by Antonia, but to-day I feel as if afraid of the melody, though it is always sounding in my ears from the first of the morning. However, it must do for the present.”

She ended with loud notes, and then arose.

“What a beautiful sound there is in the room!” cried Cecilia.

“What is that?” asked Julia shuddering.

The glasses still trembled and gave a sound. It was as a tone raised by the breath of the wind; it swelled lightly, and melted away into whispers.

“God in Heaven!” cried Julia aloud, “Antonia’s tones, her choral song! the harmonicon is playing of itself.”

The echo dissolved itself into a light and passing melody. Julia fainted away into the arms of her friends. She maintained, when she again became conscious, that the harmonicon had of itself played Antonia’s favourite air, which had been heard by Ewald in his last moments. The others had certainly heard a strange vibration from the glasses, and even a sort of melody; but in the confusion excited by Julia’s cry, they were rendered incapable of closely distinguishing the singular tones. Arnold maintained that an Eolian harp which stood on the floor above, had given the sounds; but, on examination, they found that its strings were broken.

In an uneasy mood they went to the town. Julia, though faint and terror [sic], hastened to Antonia, found andand found [sic] that the warning had not deceived her. Antonia had been unable to resist the urgent entreaties; she had played the fatal air, which Julia so carefully shunned. At the second verse she had fallen back with a faint screemscream [sic], and no endeavours could recall her to life.

It was said that Normann, a few minutes previously, had been seen gazing at an adjacent door with eyes fixed with terror; but before the company could interrogate him, Antonia’s fate diverted their attention, and they only thought of the dying one. Afterwards he avoided all questions; but still it was supposed that the strange power which had summoned Antonia from this life, had not been unperceived by him.

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A young man, a native of Séez in Normandy, of noble parents, studied the law at Angers. He there saw Renée Corbeau, the daughter of a tradesman of the town, and under a promise of marriage seduced her. Her situation was soon such as made it necessraynecessary [sic] to acquaint her parents with her engagement; who sought for means to oblige her lover to perform those promises which had induced Renée to listen to him.

Doubting that he would, if possible, evade them, the parents thought it might be necessary to employ artifice. They, therefore, pretended to take a journey; and as soon as they believed the lovers were together, returned suddenly upon them, and, reproaching the young man with having seduced their daughter, insisted instantly on his making the only reparation in his power by signing a contract of marriage, with which a notary was prepared, who was ready in the house. The young man signed the deed; but feeling himself unworthily treated, in being thus surprised into an engagement which he had never refused to perform, he went immediately to his father, to whom he related all that had happened. The father, yet more enraged than the son, persuaded him to take priest’s orders, as the only way to avoid completing a marriage so dishonourable, and so contrary to his interest; and this advice he hastily embraced. The unfortunate girl, thus abandoned by her faithless lover, commenced, together with her parents, a suit against him for seduction. He was in consequence arrested, and the affair was brought before the parliament at Paris.

The sentence, after long pleading on both sides, was that the young man should either marry Renée Corbeau or be beheaded: as his being a priest made the former impossible, he was to suffer death.

He was delivered to the executioner; the fatal moment was at hand, and the priest attended to perform the last duties—when Renée Corbeau flew to the place where his judges were yet sitting, and, making her way through the crowd, besought permission to speak, and a moment’s suspension of the dreadful punishment about to be inflicted on her lover.

The judges, struck with her beauty and distress, consented to hear her—and with the simple and affecting eloquence of nature, she pleaded for his life. She represented, that they undoubtedly thought her more unhappy than guilty, since they punished with death him who was supposed to have betrayed her; but that such a sentence, far from repairing her misfortune, would render it irreparable, by taking from her the only person who could restore her honour; and, instead of doing her justice, would condemn her to tears and remorse for the rest of her life; and would leave her to endless regret, when she reflected, that her fatal love had been the occasion of his death, for whom only she wished to live.

She besought those among her judges, who had ever been sensible of the force of love, to put themselves for a moment in her situation, and to reflect what they would themselves suffer, wherewere [sic] they to be deprived of the object of their affection, by a cruel death, and to know themselves the occasion of it;—“For it is,” said she, “I who have armed the iron hand of law against him—’tis I who am his executioner—and ’tis I who, infinitely more unhappy than he is, am condemned to exist under infamy, and to carry with me to the grave the dreadful reflection of having murdered him by the excess of my attachment.”

Though the holy orders into which he had entered prevented his marrying her, she represented that they had been compulsive, and made only through fear of a violent and imperious father: but that a dispensation might be obtained to dissolve them. She, therefore, implored the judges to suspend the execution of the sentence for a time, that her lover might take measures to annul his religious vows, and become her husband.

The court, affected by her tears and despair, were induced to grant a respite for six months; and as a legate from the Pope was expected in France, she flattered herself she would obtain from him permission for her lover to renounce the ecclesiastical habit and marry her.

But the Cardinal de Medicis, who was the legate that soon after arrived, was so irritated against the young man, for having sacrilegiously embraced holy orders, only to evade an engagement which his honour and his conscience, as well as every human law, urged him to fulfil, that he absolutely refused to grant the dispensation; and the unhappy Renée Corbeau was again driven to despair. Henry the Fourth, that excellent monarch, was then on the throne; his ears were ever open to the complaints of his subjects; and when youth and beauty pleaded, there was little doubt of redress from his compassion, though his justice was silent. Renée Corbeau threw herself at the King’s feet, and the king, interested by her figure and situation, very soon suffered himself to be prevailed upon. He ordered that a dispensation might be granted; it was immediately expedited, and the lover, thus snatched from impending destruction, was married to his mistress. They lived together many years in the most perfect union; the husband always remembering, with the tenderest gratitude, that he owed his life, and the honour of his family, to the affection and attachment of his wife.

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The husband smiled in delight upon his wife; and when she had retired and left the friends together, it seemed to Arthur that the star of evening was quenched, and Wilmot could not refrain from talking of her for an hour. Shifting fancies and wild emotions had all been assimilated by his love and wedlock, into a steady and integral portion of his nature; as the vague sand-bank, weltering at the will of gales and waters, and on which nothing of more stable reality can rest, than some bright storm-vision, may be fixed into a cape of solid earth, supported by rocks of coral, and covered with gardens and forests, peopled with the creatures of paradise.—Arthur Coningsby.

Professor Rafiensque denounces the use of saltpetre in brine, intended for the preservation of flesh to be kept for food. That part of the saltpetre which is absorbed by the meat, he says, is nitric acid, or aquafortis—a deadly poison. Animal flesh, previous to the addition of pickle, consists of gelatinous and fibrous substances, the former only possessing a nutricious virtue. This gelatin is destroyed by the chymical action of salt and saltpetre; and, as the professor remarks, the meat becomes as different a substance from what it should be, as leather is from the raw hide before it is subjected to the process of tanning. He ascribed to the pernicious effects of the chymical change, all the diseases which are common to mariners and others, who subsist principally on salted meat, such as scurvy, sore gums, decayed teeth, ulcers, &c., and advises a total abandonment of the use of saltpetre in the making of pickle for beef, pork, &c.; the best substitute for which, he says, is sugar, a small quantity rendering the meat sweeter, more wholesome, and equally as durable. This statement ought to be made known to all, and recommended to farmers, butchers, packers of sea provisions, and all the people who, owing to their residence from towns and villages, or from other causes, are in the habit of curing their own meat. 