Copyright, 1898, by The Current Literature Publishing Company.

"I—I have lost Madame Forestier's necklace!"

Translated by R. W. Howes, 3d.

Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.

'Way at the farther end of a court they lived, in a modest little suite, the
mother, the daughter, and a maternal parent already quite aged—their aunt and
great-aunt—whom they had come to shelter.

The daughter was still very young, in the fleeting freshness of her eighteen years,
when they were compelled, after a reverse of fortune, to withdraw there into the
most secluded corner of their ancestral mansion. The rest of the familiar home, all
the bright side that looked out on to the street, it had become necessary to let to
some profane strangers, who changed there the aspect of things ancient and
obliterated the cherished associations.

A judicial sale had stripped them of the most luxurious furniture of other days,
and they had arranged their new little salon of recluses with objects a little
incongruous: relics of ancestors, old things brought to light from the garret, the
reserves of the house. But they fell in love with it at once, this salon so humble,
which must now for years to come, on winter evenings, reunite all three around the
same fire and around the same lamp. One found it comfortable there; it had an air
cozy and intimate. One felt a little cloistered there, it is true, but without
melancholy, for the windows, draped with simple muslin curtains, looked out on to a
sunny court, whose walls, 'way at this farther end, were adorned with honeysuckle
and roses.

And already were they forgetting the comfort, the luxury of other times, happy in
their modest salon, when one day a communication was brought to them which left
them in mournful consternation: the neighbor was about to raise his apartment two
stories; a wall was going to rise there, in front of their windows, to steal away
the air, to hide the sun.

And no means, alas! to turn aside that misfortune, more intimately cruel to their
spirits than all the preceding disasters of fortune. To buy that house from their
neighbor, a thing that had been easy at the time of their past affluence, was no
longer to be dreamed of! Nothing to do, in their poverty, but to bow their heads.

And so the stories began to mount, line upon line; with anxiety they watched them
grow; a silence of grief reigned among them, in the little salon, the depth of
their melancholy measured day by day by the height of that obscuring object. And to
think that that thing there, higher and still higher, would soon replace the
background of blue sky or golden clouds, against which in days gone by the wall of
their court trailed off in its network of branches!

In one month the masons had achieved their work: it was a glazed surface in
freestone, which was next painted a grayish white, resembling almost a twilight sky
of November, perpetually opaque, unchangeable and dead; and in the summers
following the rose trees, the bushes of the court, took on their green again more
palely in its shadow.

Into the salon the warm suns of June and July still penetrated, but more laggardly
in the morning, fleeing more hurriedly in the evening; the twilights of autumn fell
one hour earlier, bringing abruptly down the dull, chill melancholy.

And the times, the months, the seasons, passed. Between daylight and darkness, at
the undecided hours of evening, when the three women left off one after the other
their work of embroidery or sewing before lighting the evening lamp, the young
daughter—who would soon be no longer young—lifted her eyes ever toward the wall,
set up there in place of her sky of yesterday; often, even, in a sort of melancholy
childishness that constantly returned to her like the sick fancy of a prisoner, she
amused herself in watching from a certain place the branches of the rose trees, the
tops of the bushes detach themselves in relief against the grayish background of
the painted stones, and sought to give herself the illusion that the background
there was a sky, a sky lower and nearer than the real one—after the manner of those
who at night hang upon the deformed visions of dreams.

They had in expectation a heritage of which they often spoke around their lamp and
their work-table, as of a day-dream, as of a fairy tale, so far away it seemed.

But, as soon as they possess it, that accession from America, at no matter what
price, the house of the neighbor shall be bought in order to pull down all that new
part, to reestablish things as in times past, and to restore to their court, to
restore to their cherished rose bushes of the high walls, the sun of other times.
To throw it down, that wall, this had become their sole earthly desire, their
continual obsession.

And the old aunt was accustomed to say at such times:

"My dear daughters, may God grant that I live long enough, even I, to see that
happy day!"

It tarried long in coming, that heritage.

The rains, and time, had traced on that glazed surface a sort of blackish stripes,
melancholy, melancholy to look at, formed like a V, or like the trembling
silhouette of a hovering bird. And the young girl contemplated that wearily every
day, every day.

Once, in a very warm springtime, which, in spite of the shadow of the wall, made
the roses more advanced than usual, and more spreading, a young man appeared at the
farther end of that court, took his place for several evenings at the table of the
three ladies without fortune. Passing through the village, he had been recommended
by some friends in common, not without arrière-pensée of marriage. He was handsome,
with a high-spirited face, browned by the great blowings of the seas.

But he judged it too chimerical, that heritage; he found her too poor, the young
girl, in whom, besides, the color began to fade for lack of sunlight.

So he departed, without return, he who had represented there for a time the sun,
energy, and life. And she who already looked upon herself as his fiancée received
from that departure a dumb and secret feeling as of death.

And the monotonous years continued their march, like the impassive rivers; there
passed five; there passed ten, fifteen, even twenty. The freshness of the young
girl without fortune finished little by little by fading away, useless and
disdained; the mother took on some gray hairs; the old aunt became infirm, shaking
her head, octogenarian in a faded armchair, forever seated at the same place, near
the darkened window, her venerable profile cut out against the foliage of the court
below that background of glazed wall where the blackish marbling accentuated itself
in the form of a bird, traced by the sluggish gutters.

In the presence of the wall, of the inexorable wall, they grew old all three. And
the rose bushes, the shrubs, grew old, too, with the less ominous age of plants,
with their airs of rejuvenation at each return of spring.
"Oh! my daughters, my poor daughters," said the aunt continually in her broken
voice that no longer finished the phrase, "provided I live long enough, even I."

And her bony hand, with a movement of menace, indicated that oppressive thing of
stone.

She had been dead a twelvemonth, leaving a dreadful void in that little salon of
recluses, and they had wept over her as the most cherished of grandmothers, when at
last the inheritance came, very upsetting, one day when they had ceased longer to
think of it.

The aged daughter—forty years struck now—found herself quite young in her joy at
entering into possession of the returned fortune.

They drove out the lodgers, you may be sure, they reestablished themselves as
before; but by preference they kept themselves ordinarily in the little salon of
the days of moderate means: in the first place it was now full of souvenirs, and
then besides it was again taking on a sunny cheerfulness, since they were to throw
down that imprisoning wall which was to-day no more than a vain scarecrow, so easy
to destroy by touch of louis d'or.

It took place at last, that downfall of brick and mortar, longed for during twenty
gloomy years. It took place in April, at the moment of the first balmy airs of the
first long evenings. Very quickly it was accomplished, in the midst of the noise of
falling stones, of singing workmen, in a cloud of plaster and of ancient dust.

And at twilight of the second day, when the work was finished, the workmen gone,
silence returned, they found themselves once more sitting at their table, the
mother and the daughter, bewildered at seeing so clearly, at having need no longer
of the lamp to begin their evening meal. Like a formal visit from familiar days
gone by, they contemplated the rose bushes of their court spread out once more
against the sky. But instead of the joy they had looked forward to there was at
first an indefinable uneasiness: too much light all at once in their little salon,
a sort of melancholy splendor, and the feeling of an unaccustomed void out of
doors, of limitless change. No words there came to them in presence of the
accomplishment of their dream; rapt, the one and the other, held by an ever-
increasing melancholy, they remained there without talking, without touching the
waiting meal. And little by little, their two hearts pressing still closer, that
grew to be a kind of grief, like one of those regrets, dull and without hope, which
the dead leave us.

When the mother, at length, perceived that the eyes of her daughter began to grow
faded with crying, divining the unexpressed thoughts which must so perfectly
resemble her own: "It can be built up again," she says. "It seems to me they can
try, can they not, to make it the same again?"

"I, too, thought of that," replied the daughter. "But no, don't you see: it would
never be the same!"

Mon Dieu! was it possible that such a thing could be; it was she, the very same,
who had decreed it, the annihilation of that background of a familiar picture,
below which, during one springtime, she had seen in high relief a certain fine face
of a young man, and during so many winters the venerable profile of an old aunt
dead.

And all at once, at recollection of that vague design in the form of the shadow of
a bird, traced there by patient gutters, and which she would see again never,
never, never, her heart was suddenly torn in a manner most pitiable; she wept the
most melancholy tears of her life before the irreparable destruction of that wall.

THE ANCESTOR

BY CHARLES JOSEPH PAUL BOURGET

sto12ilo

Paul Bourget presents the greatest possible contrast to Anatole France. His style
is involved, sentence is fitted into sentence, clothed like Henry James, and
altogether un-French. Bourget's psychology, though penetrating, seems rather to
clothe his characters than to create them, consequently his novels are long
psychological treatises. It was a delight, therefore, to come upon this tale of
Bourget's, in which the story is as absorbing as the psychology.

Bourget was born at Amiens in 1852, and began his literary career, as usual, by
writing verses, etc. Besides "Outre Mer," which he published in 1891 after his
visit to America, his work consists chiefly of novels, "Mensonges," "Crime
d'Amour," "Le Disciple," "Cosmopolis," etc. He was elected a member of the French
Academy in 1894.
au12ilo

THE ANCESTOR

BY PAUL BOURGET

Translated by V. Quiroga.
Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Coll