But I believe that it is hers. And they are laying a trap. Henderson was to remember the word, and it was written down for her, before she was sent with the pretty story. What do they want me to believe? That Madame means to rob her husband’s strong-box of some valuable documents in order to pay me? But, on the other hand, why should she not do it? The scheme would be a very sensible one. But that infernal scrap of paper; and why would not the girl give it me? Let me balance my convictions.”
A business which the reader will gladly leave him to perform alone.
THE HEART OF VOLTAIRE, LIVING AND DEAD.
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t sometimes happens that after a man has lived out his life in tranquil obscurity, little noticed, little known, beyond the circle of his own family, friends and acquaintances, his taking his place in the tomb assigned him, after an easy and natural death has made it his fitting abode, so stirs the ashes of other men long dead, perhaps half-forgotten, that these last become for the moment resuscitated; their names are once more pronounced by a generation born since they were buried; men speak of them as they were spoken of when their bodies were yet freshly interred (though, it may be, with greatly modified views of their natures, merits, and characters); forgotten or unknown anecdotes concerning them are recalled, repeated and listened to with interest, and the phantom thus accidentally evoked, once more frets its little hour upon the stage, till some richer or more pressing interest rises, and allows it once more to glide, silently and unseen, into the tomb where it had passed so many years in oblivion.
Not long since, in France, expired the Marquis de Villette, the owner of considerable possessions in that country. A fanatic devotion to the French Bourbons seems to have been the only remarkable characteristic of this gentleman. The language of his letters to the remaining representatives of that doomed family, and of his correspondence concerning them, far more resembled that of an impassioned lover, or the enthusiastic devotion to a saint, than the words of the adherent, however faithful, of a family which, whether taken individually or collectively, appears, to common mortals, little calculated to inspire such entire devotion; and in his will, he desired that the last epistles he had received from the Comte de Chambord and his mother, with locks of their hair, should be enclosed in a flat gold box, and securely screwed to the ribs immediately over his heart.
So far, so good. France and her government had no objection to any amount of sentimental reverence offered by M. le Marquis de Villette at the shrine of his proscribed idols. In them he worshipped “an idea,” and he who now sits on the throne of that nation has shown, too much, by his own august and ever-to-be-admired example, his respect for “an idea,” and the lengths he will go to maintain it, for those in authority under him not to hold such motives in the highest consideration.
But when M. de Villette abandoned the ground of the ideal, and came to that of solid fact, represented by so many acres of field and forest, by so much gold, silver, and precious stones, the affair was placed on an entirely new footing.
M. de Villette being childless, and conceiving that he might not have very long to live, directed, by the will which contained the sentimental dispositions already alluded to, that the bulk of his property, with all the benefits therefrom accruing, should be placed in the possession of M. de Dreux-Brézé, bishop of Moulins.
Now as M. de Dreux-Brézé was known to entertain the same feeling, though in a somewhat modified form, for the representatives of the late dynasty, as M. de Villette, it was considered by those interested in the matter of the heritage that this nominal bequest to the bishop was a mere blind, and that the real heir who was to enjoy its benefits was the last male descendant of St. Louis.
Such a destination, at least, being declared by the collaterals, who would, in the ordinary course of events, have profited by the succession, and the bequeathing of landed property in France to a political exile being forbidden by the law of the land, a trial ensued in which all the eloquence of Maîtres Marie and Berryer was called into play.
Who should possess the domains, the forests, the châteaux, the biens meubles et immeubles of the deceased? Such was the question debated between the pleaders within the court; while without, a few, mostly literary men, or elderly men of studious habits, cultivated tastes, worshippers of the French demi-god, esprit, began to moot the (to them) far more interesting question concerning a piece of property descending from the preceding Marquis de Villette to his son, just deceased.
This possession was the Heart of Voltaire, preserved in a marble urn.
What had become of the relic? Who owned—who claimed it? inquired these men. What was the precise history of it? of its preservation, its vicissitudes? asked the men—not to say women—of the later generation, who had heard, more or less vaguely, of the existence of such relic, but
