East and West, or, Once upon a Time

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 33 CHAPTER III. Some three years after the occurrences already detailed in this history, ?and to speak with nearer approach to precision as to dates than has been hitherto thought necessary, it was in the month of February of the memorable year 1848, ? two ladies stood upon the terrace of the garden of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 33 CHAPTER III. Some three years after the occurrences already detailed in this history, ?and to speak with nearer approach to precision as to dates than has been hitherto thought necessary, it was in the month of February of the memorable year 1848, ? two ladies stood upon the terrace of the garden of Versailles, enjoying the fresh evening breeze, and the sunset, which the sheet of water westward, called the Canal d'ffor- tense, rendered beautifully effective. It was fine weather for the season, bright, and even balmy, a sort of anticipation of the spring, such as not unfrequently happens in the month of February. How difficult it would be, said the younger lady, who was English, for a painter to represent the colours upon that VOL. III. D water ? those of the sky seem not impossible, notwithstanding their amazingly swift gradations, so delicately soft withal ? but the water seems to have a life of its own, and a transmuting power of its own. I am no flatterer, Celestine, but it is like your own vivid dark eye at this moment, when you are thinking of more absorbing things in your own impassioned way. The lady so addressed, whose tournure was unmistakably French, looked more blandly at her companion than might have been thought possible for her quick, proud, impetuous but highly intellectual features to assume, as she answered? I know what you are thinking of too, my dear. You believe that a French woman cannot have the same sensibility to natural beauties of landscape, that accord so well with your less artificial nature. Believe me that you will, after you have been here as long as I have been, learn to do justice to the land of art. In clipping these plants into foolish fantastic shapes, beehives, and urns, andlopping away the free, graceful...