Arria Marcella

A Souvenir of Pompeii

Théophile Gautier

Translator: Lafcadio Hearn (1900)

Three young friends, who had under-taken an Italian tour together last year, visited the Studii Museum at Naples, where the various antique objects exhumed from the ashes of Pompeii and Herculaneum have been collected.

They scattered through the halls, inspecting the mosaics, the bronzes, the frescoes detached from the walls of the dead city, each following the promptings of his own particular taste in such matters; and whenever one of the party encountered something especially curious, he summoned his comrades with cries of delight, much to the scandal of the taciturn English visitors, and the staid bourgeois who studiously thumbed their catalogues.

But the youngest of the three, who had paused before a glass case, appeared wholly deaf to the exclamations of his comrades, so deeply had he become absorbed in contemplation. The object that he seemed to be examining with so much interest was a black mass of coagulated cinders, bearing a hollow imprint. One might easily have mistaken it for the fragment of some statue-mould, broken in the casting. The trained eye of an artist would have readily therein recognized the impression of a perfect bosom and a flank as faultless in its outlines as a Greek statue. It is well known, indeed the commonest traveller's guide will tell you, that this lava, in cooling about the body of a woman, preserved its charming contours. Thanks to the caprice of the eruption that destroyed four cities, that noble form, though crumbled to dust nearly two thousand years ago, has come down to us; the rounded loveliness of a throat has lived through the centuries in which so many empires perished without even leaving the traces of their existence; chance-imprinted upon the volcanic scoriæ, that seal of beauty remains unobliterated.

Finding that he still remained absorbed in contemplation, Octavian's friends returned to where he stood; and Max, touching his shoulder, caused him to start like one surprised in a secret. Evidently Octavian had not been aware of the approach of Max or Fabio.

"Come, Octavian," exclaimed Max, "do not stay lingering whole hours before every cabinet, else we shall get late for the train and miss seeing Pompeii to-day."

"What is our comrade looking at?" asked Fabio, drawing near. "Ah, the imprint found in the house of Arrius Diomedes!" And he turned a peculiar, quick glance upon Octavian.

Octavian slightly blushed, took Max's arm, and the visit terminated without further incident. On leaving the Studii Museum, the three friends entered a corricolo, and were driven to the railway station. The corricolo, with its great red wheels, its tracket seat studded with brass nails, and its thin, spirited horse harnessed like a Spanish mule, and galloping at full speed over the great slabs of lava pavement, is too familiar to need description here, especially as we are not recording impressions of a trip to Naples, but the simple narrative of an adventure which, although true, may seem both fantastic and incredible in the extreme.

The railroad by which Pompeii is reached runs for almost its entire length by the sea, whose long volutes of foam advance to unroll themselves upon a beach of blackish sand resembling sifted charcoal. This beach has actually been formed by lava-streams and volcanic cinders, and its deep tone forms a strong contrast with the blue of the sky and the blue of the waters. The earth alone, in that sunny brightness, seems able to retain a shadow.

The villages bordered or traversed by the railway—Portici, celebrated in one of Auber's operas; Resina, Torre del Græco, Torre dell' Annunziata, whose dwellings with their arcades and terraced roofs attract the traveller's gaze—have, notwithstanding the intensity of the sunlight and the southern love for whitewashing, something of a Plutonian and ferruginous character like Birmingham or Manchester. The very dust is black there. An impalpable soot clings to everything. One feels that the mighty forge of Vesuvius is panting and smoking only a few paces off.

The three friends left the station at Pompeii, laughing among themselves at the odd commingling of antique and modern ideas suggested by the sign, "Pompeii Station"—a Græco-Roman city and a railway depot!

They crossed the cotton-field, with its fluttering white bolls, between the railway and the disinterred city, and at the inn which has been built just without the ancient rampart they took a guide, or, more correctly speaking, the guide took them, a calamity which is not easily avoided in Italy.

It was one of those delightful days so common in Naples, when the brilliancy of the sunlight and the transparency of the air cause objects to take such hues as in the North would be deemed fabulous, and appear indeed to belong to the world of dreams rather than to that of realities. The Northern visitor who has once looked upon that glow of azure and gold is apt to carry back with him into the depths of his native fogs an incurable nostalgia.

Having shaken off a corner of her cinder shroud, the resurrected city again rose with her thousand details under a dazzling day. The cone of Vesuvius, furrowed with striæ of blue, rosy, and violet-hued lavas, ruddily bronzed by the sun, towered sharply defined in the background. A thin haze, almost imperceptible in the sunlight, hooded the blunt crest of the mountain. At first sight it might have been taken for one of those clouds which shadow the brows of lofty peaks on the fairest days. Upon a nearer view, slender threads of white vapor could be perceived rising from the mountain-summit, as from the orifices of a perfuming pan, to reunite above in a light cloud. The volcano, being that day in a good humor, smoked his pipe very peacefully; and but for the example of Pompeii, buried at his feet, no one would ever have suspected him of being by nature any more ferocious than Montmartre. On the other side fair hills, with outlines voluptuously undulating like the hips of a woman, barred the horizon; and, further yet, the sea, that in other days bore biremes and triremes under the ramparts of the city, extended its azure boundary.

Of all spectacles, the sight of Pompeii is one of the most surprising. This sudden backward leap of nineteen centuries astonishes even the least comprehensive and most prosaic natures. Two paces lead you from the antique life to the life of to-day, and from Christianity to paganism. Thus, when the three friends beheld those streets wherein the forms of a vanished past are preserved yet intact, they were strangely and profoundly affected, however well prepared by the study of books and drawings they might have been. Octavian, above all, seemed stricken with stupefaction, and like a man walking in his sleep, mechanically followed the guide, without hearing the monotonous nomenclature that the varlet had learned by heart and recited like a lesson.

He gazed wildly on those ruts hollowed out in the cyclopean pavements of the streets by the chariot wheels, and which seem to be of yesterday, so fresh do they appear; those inscriptions in red letters skilfully traced upon the surfaces of the walls by rapid strokes of the brush (theatrical advertisements, notices of houses to let, votive formulas, signs, announcements of all descriptions, not less curious than a freshly discovered fragment of the walls of Paris, with advertising bills and placards attached, would prove a thousand years hence for the unknown people of the future); those houses, whose shattered roofs permit one to penetrate at a glance into all those interior mysteries, all those domestic details which historians invariably neglect, and whereof the secrets die with dying civilizations; those fountains that even now seem scarcely dried up; that forum whose restoration was interrupted by the great catastrophe, and whose architraves and columns, all ready cut and sculptured, still seem waiting in their purity of angle to be lifted into place; those temples, consecrated, in that mythologic age when atheists were yet unknown, to gods that have long ceased to be; those shops wherein the merchant only is missing; that public tavern where may still be seen the circular stain of the drinking cups upon the marble; that barracks with its ochre and minium-painted columns, on which the soldiers scratched grotesque caricatures of battle, and those juxtaposed double theatres of song and drama which might even now resume their entertainments, were not the companies who performed in them turned long since to clay, and at present occupied perchance in closing the bunghole of a cask or stopping a crevice in the wall, after the fashion of Alexander's ashes or Cæsar's dust, according to the melancholy reflections of Hamlet!

Fabio mounted upon the thymele of the tragic theatre while Max and Octavian climbed to the upper benches; and there, with extravagant gestures, he commenced to recite whatever poetical fragments came to his memory, much to the terror of the lizards, who fled, vibrating their tails, and hid themselves in the joints of the ruined stonework. Although the brazen or earthen vessels formerly used to reverberate sounds no longer existed, Fabio's voice sounded none the less full and vibrant.

The guide then conducted them across the open fields which overlie those portions of Pompeii still buried, to the amphitheatre situated at the other end of the city. They passed under those trees whose roots plunge down through the roofs of the edifices interred, displacing tiles, cleaving ceilings asunder, and disjointing columns; and they traversed the farms where vulgar vegetables sprout above wonders of art—material images of that oblivion wherewith time covers all things.

The amphitheatre caused them little surprise. They had seen that of Verona, vaster and equally well preserved; besides, the arrangement of such antique arenas was as familiar to them as that of those in which bull-fights are held in Spain, and which they much resemble save in solidity of construction and beauty of material.

Accordingly they soon retraced their footsteps and gained the Street of Fortune by a cross-path, listening half-distractedly to the cicerone, who named each house they passed by the name which had been given it immediately upon its discovery, owing to some characteristic peculiarity—the House of the Brazen Bull, the House of the Faun, the House of the Ship, the Temple of Fortune, the House of Meleager, the Tavern of Fortune, at the angle of the Consular Road (Via Consularia), the Academy of Music, the Public Market, the Pharmacy, the Surgeon's Shop, the Custom House, the House of the Vestals, the Inn of Albinus, the Thermopolium, and so on—until they came to that gate which leads to the Street of the Tombs.

Within the interior arch of this brick-built gate, once adorned with statues which have long since disappeared, may be noticed two deep grooves designed to receive a sliding portcullis, after the style of a mediæval donjon, to which era, indeed, one might have supposed such a defence peculiar.

"Who," exclaimed Max to his friends, "could have dreamed of finding in Pompeii, the Græco-Latin city, a gate so romantically Gothic? Fancy some belated Roman knight blowing his horn before this entrance, summoning them to raise the portcullis, like a page of the fifteenth century!"

"There is nothing new under the sun," replied Fabio; "and the aphorism itself is not new, inasmuch as it was formulated by Solomon."

"Perhaps there may be something new under the moon," observed Octavian, with a smile of melancholy irony.

"My dear Octavian," cried Max, who during this little conversation had paused before an inscription traced in rubric upon the outer wall, "wilt behold the combats of the gladiators? See the advertisement! Combat and chase on the 5th day of the nones of April; the masts of the velarium will be rigged; twenty pairs of gladiators will fight during the nones; if you fear for the delicacy of your complexion, be assured that the awnings will be spread; and as you might in any case prefer to visit the amphitheatre early, these men will cut each other's throats in the morning—matutini erunt. Nothing could be more considerate."

Thus chatting, the three friends followed that sepulchre-fringed road which, according to our modern ideas, would be a lugubrious avenue for any city, but which had no sad significations for the ancients, whose tombs contained in lieu of hideous corpses only a pinch of dust—abstract idea of death! Art beautified these last resting-places, and, as Goethe says, the pagan decorated sarcophagi and funeral urns with the images of life.

It was therefore, doubtless, that Fabio and Max could visit, with a lively curiosity and a joyous sense of being, such as they could not have felt in any Christian cemetery, those funeral monuments, all gayly gilded by the sun, which, as they stood by the wayside, seemed still trying to cling to life, and inspired none of those chill feelings of repulsion, none of those fantastic terrors evoked by our modern dismal places of sepulture. They paused before the tomb of Mammia, the public priestess, near which a tree (either a cypress or a willow) is growing; they seated themselves in the hemicycle of the triclinium, where the funeral feasts were held, laughing like fortunate heirs; they read with mock solemnity the epitaphs of Navoleia, Labeon, and the Arria family, silently followed by Octavian, who seemed more deeply touched than his careless companions by the fate of those dead of two thousand years ago.

Thus they came to the villa of Arrius Diomedes, one of the finest residences in Pompeii. It is approached by a flight of brick steps, and after entering the door-way, which is flanked by two small lateral columns, one finds himself in a court resembling the patio which occupies the centre of Spanish and Moorish dwellings, and which the ancients termed impluvium or cavædium. Fourteen columns of brick, overlaid with stucco, once supported on four sides a portico or covered peristyle, not unlike a convent cloister, and beneath which one could walk secure from the rain. This courtyard is paved in mosaic with brick and white marble, which presents a subdued and pleasing effect of color. In its centre a quadrilateral marble basin, which still exists, formerly caught the rain-water that dripped from the roof of the portico. It was a strange experience, entering thus into the life of the antique world, and treading with well-blacked boots upon the marbles worn smooth by the sandals and buskins of the contemporaries of Augustus and Tiberius.

The cicerone led them through the exedra or summer parlor, which opened to the sea, to receive its cooling breezes. It was there that the family received company, and took their siesta during those burning hours when prevailed the mighty zephyr of Africa, laden with languors and storms. He brought them into the basilica, a long open gallery which lighted the various apartments, and in which clients and visitors erst awaited the call of the Nomenclator. Then he conducted them to the white marble terrace, whence extended a broad view of verdant gardens and blue sea. Then he showed them the Nymphæum, or Hall of Baths, with its yellow-painted walls, its stucco columns, its mosaic pavement, and its marble bathing-basin which had contained so many of the lovely bodies that have long since passed away like shadows; the cubiculum, where flitted so many dreams from the Ivory Gate, and whose alcoves contrived in the wall were once closed by a conopeum or curtain, of which the bronze rings still lie upon the floor; the tetrastyle, or Hall of Recreation; the Chapel of the Lares; the Cabinet of Archives; the Library; the Museum of Paintings; the gynæceum or women's apartment, comprising a suite of small chambers, now half fallen into ruin, but whose walls yet bear traces of paintings and arabesques, like fair cheeks from which the rouge has been but half wiped off.

Having fully inspected all these, they descended to the lower floor, for the ground is much lower on the garden side than it is on the side of the Street of the Tombs. They traversed eight halls painted in antique red, whereof one has its walls hollowed with architectural niches, after that style of which we have to-day a good example in the vestibule of the Hall of the Ambassadors at the Alhambra, and finally they came to a sort of cave or cellar, whose purpose was clearly indicated by eight earthen amphoræ propped up against the wall, and once perfumed, doubtless, like the odes of Horace with the wines of Crete, Falernia, or Massica.

One solitary bright ray of sunshine streamed through a narrow aperture above, half choked by nettles, whose light-traversed leaves it transformed into emeralds and topazes, and this gay natural detail seemed to smile opportunely through the sadness of the place.

"It was here," observed the cicerone, in his customary indifferent tone, "that among seventeen others was found the skeleton of the lady whose mould is exhibited at the Naples Museum. She wore gold rings, and the shreds of her fine tunic still clung to the mass of cinders which have preserved her shape."

The guide's commonplace phrases deeply affected Octavian. He made the man point out to him the exact spot where the precious remains had been discovered, and had it not been for the restraining presence of his friends, he would have abandoned himself to some extravagant lyrism. His chest heaved, his eyes glistened with a furtive moisture. Though blotted out by twenty centuries of oblivion, that catastrophe touched him like a recent misfortune. Not even the death of a mistress or a friend could have affected him more profoundly; and while Max and Fabio had their backs turned, a tear, two thousand years late, fell upon the spot where that woman, with whom he felt he had fallen retrospectively in love, had perished, suffocated by the hot cinders of the volcano.

"Enough of this archæology," cried Fabio. "We do not propose to write dissertations upon an ancient jug or a tile of the age of Julius Cæsar in order to obtain memberships in some provincial academy. These classic souvenirs give me the stomachache. Let us go to dinner—if such a thing be possible—in that picturesque hostelry, where I fear we shall be served with fossil beefsteaks and fresh eggs laid prior to the death of Pliny."

"I will not exclaim with Boileau:

'Un sot, quelquefois, ouvre un avis important,'"

exclaimed Max, with a laugh. "That would be ill-mannered, but your idea is a good one. Still, I think it would have been pleasant to banquet here, on some triclinium, reclining after the antique fashion, and waited upon by slaves according to the style of Lucullus or Trimalchio. It is true that I see no oysters from Lake Lucrinus, the turbots and mullets from the Adriatic are wanting, the Apuleian boar cannot be had in market, and the loaves and honey-cakes on exhibition in the Naples Museum lie, hard as stones, beside their green-gray moulds. Even raw macaroni sprinkled with cacciacavallo, detestable as it may be, is certainly better than nothing. What does friend Octavian think about it?"

Octavian, who was deeply regretting that he had not happened to be in Pompeii on the day of the eruption, so that he might have saved the lady of the gold rings, and thereby merited her love, had not heard a syllable of this gastronomic conversation. Only the last two words uttered by Max had fallen upon his ears, and feeling no desire to broach a discussion, he gave a random nod of assent, upon which the amicable party retraced the road along the ramparts to the inn.

The table was placed under a sort of open porch which served as a vestibule to the hostelry, whose rough cast walls were decorated with various daubs that the host entitled "Salvator Rosa," "Espagnolet," "Cavalier Massimo," and other celebrated names of the Neapolitan School, which he deemed himself bound to extol.

"Venerable host," cried Fabio, "do not waste your eloquence to no purpose. We are not Englishmen, and we prefer young women to old canvases. Better send us your wine-list by that handsome brunette with the velvety eyes whom I just now perceived on the stairway."

Finding that his guests did not belong to the mystifiable class of Philistines and bourgeois, the palforio ceased to vaunt his gallery in order to glorify his cellar. To begin with, he had all the best vintages: Château Margaux, Grand Lafitte which had been twice to the Indies, Sillery de Moët, Hochmeyer, scarlet wine, port and porter, ale and ginger beer, white and red Lachryma-Christi, Caprian, and Falernian.

"What, you have Falernian wine, animal! And put it at the end of your list! And you dare to subject us to an unendurable œnological litany!" cried Max, leaping at the inn-keeper's throat with burlesque fury. "Why, you have no sentiment of local color. You are unworthy to live in this antique neighborhood. Is it even good, this Falernian wine of yours? Was it put in amphoræ under the Consul Plancus—Consule Planco?"

"I know nothing about the Consul Plancus, and my wine is not put in amphoræ, but it is good, and worth ten carlins a bottle," answered the inn-keeper.

Day had faded away and the night came, a serene, transparent night, clearer, assuredly, than full midday in London. The earth had tints of azure, and the sky silvery reflections of inconceivable sweetness. The air was so still that the flames of the candles on the table did not oscillate.

A young boy, playing a flute, approached the table, and standing there, with his eyes fixed upon the three guests, performed upon his sweet and melodious instrument, one of those popular airs in a minor key which have a penetrating charm.

Perhaps that lad was a direct descendant of the flute-player who marched before Duilius.

"Our repast is assuming quite an antique aspect. We only need some Gaditanian dancing women and ivy garlands," exclaimed Max, as he helped himself to a great bumper of Falernian wine.

"I feel myself in the humor for making Latin quotations like a feuilleton in the Débats. Stanzas of odes come back to my memory," added Max.

"Keep them to yourself!" cried Fabio and Octavian, justly alarmed. "Nothing is so indigestible as Latin at dinner."

Among young men with cigars in their mouths and elbows on the table, who find themselves contemplating a certain number of empty flagons, especially when the wine has been capitally good, conversation never fails to turn upon women. Each explained his own system, whereof the following is a fair summary:

Fabio cared only for youth and beauty. Voluptuous and positive, he found no pleasure in illusions, and had no preferences in love. A peasant girl would have pleased his fancy as well as a princess, provided she were beautiful. The body rather than its apparel attracted him. He laughed much at certain of his friends who were enamored of so many yards of lace and silk, and he declared it were more rational to fall in love with the stock of a fashionable marchand des nouveautés. These opinions, which were rational enough in the main, and which he made no attempt to conceal, caused him to pass for an eccentric.

Max, less of an artist than Fabio, cared only for difficult undertakings, complicated intrigues. He sought resistances to vanquish, virtues to seduce, and played at love as at a game of chess, with long-premeditated moves, reserved ambuscades, and stratagems worthy of Polybius. In a drawing-room he would always choose the woman who seemed least in sympathy with him for the object of attack. To make her pass by skilful transition from aversion to love afforded him delicious pleasure. To impose himself upon characters which strove to repel him, and master wills that rebelled against his influence, seemed to him the sweetest of all triumphs. Like those hunters who, through rain, sunshine, or snow, through fields and woods, and over plains, pursue with excessive fatigue and unconquerable ardor some miserable quarry which in three cases out of four they would not deign to eat, so Max, having once captured his prey, troubled himself no further about it, and at once started off on another chase.

As for Octavian, he confessed that reality itself had little charm for him, not because he indulged in student-dreams, all moulded of lilies and roses like one of Demoustier's madrigals, but because there were too many prosaic and repulsive details surrounding all beauty, too many doting and decorated fathers, coquettish mothers who wore natural flowers in false hair, ruddy-faced cousins meditating proposals, ridiculous aunts in love with little dogs. An acquatinta engraving after Horace Vernet or Delaroche, hung up in a woman's room, would have been sufficient to check a growing passion within him. More poetical even than amorous, he wanted a terrace on Isola-Bella, in Lake Maggiore, under the light of a full moon to frame a rendezvous. He would have wished to elevate his love above the midst of common life, and transport its scenes to the stars. Thus he had by turns fallen fruitlessly and madly in love with all the grand feminine types preserved by history or art. Like Faust, he had loved Helen, and would have wished that the undulations of the ages might bear to him one of those sublime personifications of human desires and dreams, whose forms, to mortal eyes invisible, live immortally beyond Space and Time. He had created for himself an ideal seraglio, with Semiramis, Aspasia, Cleopatra, Diana of Poitiers, Jane of Arragon. At times also he had fallen in love with statues, and one day, passing before the Venus of Milo in the Museum, he cried out passionately: "Oh, who will restore thy arms that thou may'st crush me upon thy marble bosom!" At Rome, the sight of a matted mass of long thick human hair, exhumed from an antique tomb, had thrown him into a fantastic delirium. He had attempted, through the medium of a few of those hairs, obtained by a golden bribe from the custodian, and placed in the hands of a clairvoyant of great power, to evoke the shade and form of the dead; but the conducting fluid—the subtle odyle—had evaporated during the lapse of so many years, and the apparition could no more come forth out of the eternal night.

As Fabio had divined before the glass cabinet in the Studii Museum, the imprint discovered in the cellar at the villa of Arrius Diomedes had excited in Octavian wild impulses toward a retrospective ideal. He longed to soar beyond Life and Time and transport himself in spirit to the age of Titus.

Max and Fabio retired to their room, and being somewhat heavy-headed from the classic fumes of the Falernian, were soon sound asleep. Octavian, who had more than once suffered the full glass to remain before him untasted, not wishing to disturb by a grosser intoxication the poetic drunkenness which boiled in his brain, felt from the agitation of his nerves that sleep would not come to him, and left the hostelry on tiptoe that he might cool his brow and calm his thoughts in the night air.

His feet bore him unawares to the entrance which leads into the dead city. He removed the wooden bar that closed it, and wandered into the ruins beyond.

The moon illuminated the pale houses with her white beams, dividing the streets into double-edged lines of silvery white and bluish shadow. This nocturnal day, with its subdued tints, disguised the degradation of the buildings. The mutilated columns, the façades streaked with fugitive lizards, the roofs crumbled in by the eruption, were less noticeable than when beheld under the clear, raw light of the sun. The lost parts were completed by the half-tint of shadow, and here and there one brusque beam of light, like a touch of sentiment in a picture-sketch, marked where a whole edifice had crumbled away. The silent genii of the night seemed to have repaired the fossil city for some representation of fantastic life.

At times Octavian fancied that he saw vague human forms in the shadow, but they vanished the moment they approached the edge of the lighted portion of the street. A low whispering, an indefinite hum, floated through the silence. Our promenader at first attributed them to a fluttering in his eyes, to a buzzing in his ears; it might even, he thought, be merely an optical delusion, coupled with the sighing of the sea-breezes, or the flight of some snake or lizard through the nettles, for in nature all things live, even death; all things make themselves heard, even silence. Nevertheless he felt a kind of involuntary terror, a slight trembling, that might have been caused by the cold night air, but which made his flesh creep. Could it be that his comrades, actuated by the same impulses as himself, were seeking him among the ruins? Those dimly seen forms and those indistinct sounds of footsteps! Might it not have been only Max and Fabio walking and chatting together, who had just disappeared round the corner of a cross-road? But Octavian felt to his dismay that this very natural explanation could not be true, and the arguments which he made to himself in favor of it were the reverse of convincing. The solitude and the shadow were peopled with invisible beings whom he was disturbing. He had fallen into the midst of a mystery, and it seemed that they were awaiting his departure in order to commence again. Such were the extravagant ideas that floated through his brain, and obtained no little verisimilitude from the hour, the place, and the thousand alarming details which those can well understand who have ever found themselves alone by night in the midst of some vast ruin.

Passing before a house which he had attentively observed during the day, and which the moon shone fully upon, he beheld in perfect integrity a certain portico whereof he had vainly attempted to restore the design in fancy. Four Ionic columns—fluted for half their height and their shafts purple-robed with minium tints—sustained a cymatium adorned with polychromatic ornaments that the artist seemed only to have completed the day before. Upon one side wall of the entrance a Laconian molossus, painted in encaustic, and accompanied by the warning inscription "Cave canem" barked at the moon and the visitor with pictured fury. On the mosaic threshold the word HAVE, in Oscan and Latin characters, saluted the guest with its friendly syllables. The outer surfaces of the walls, tinted with ochre and rubric, were unmarred by a single crack. The house had grown a story higher; and the tiled roof, now surmounted by a bronze acroterium, projected an intact outline against the light blue of the sky, where a few stars were growing pale.

This strange restoration effected between afternoon and evening by some unknown architect greatly puzzled Octavian, who felt certain of having the same day seen that very house in a lamentable state of ruin. The mysterious reconstructor had labored with great despatch, for all the neighboring dwellings had the same fresh, new look; all the pillars were coiffed with their capitals; not a single stone, a brick, a pellicle of stucco or a scale of paint was wanting upon the shining surfaces of the façades; and through the intervals of the peristyles surrounding the marble basin of the cavædium one could catch glimpses of white laurels and bayroses, myrtles and pomegranates. Surely all the historians were mistaken; the eruption had never taken place, or else the needle of Time had moved backward twenty secular hours upon the dial of Eternity!

In the climax of his astonishment, Octavian commenced to wonder whether he might not actually be sleeping upon his feet, and walking in a dream. He even seriously asked himself whether madness might not be parading its hallucinations before his eyes; but he soon felt himself compelled to admit that he was neither asleep nor mad.

A singular change had taken place in the atmosphere. Vague rose-tints were blending through brightening shades of violet with the faintly azure tints of moonlight; the sky commenced to glow brightly along its borders; daylight seemed about to dawn. Octavian took out his watch: it marked the hour of midnight. Fearing that it might have stopped, he pressed the spring of the repeating mechanism. It struck twelve times. It was midnight beyond a doubt, and yet the brightness ever increased. The moon sank through the azure which became momentarily more and more luminous. The sun rose!

Then Octavian, to whom all ideas of time had become hopelessly confused, was able to convince himself that he was walking, not through a dead Pompeii, the chill corpse of a city half-shrouded, but through a living, youthful, intact Pompeii over which the torrents of burning mud from Vesuvius had never flowed.

An inconceivable prodigy had transported him, a Frenchman of the nineteenth century, back to the age of Titus, not in spirit only, but in reality; or else had called up before him from the depths of the past a desolated city with its vanished inhabitants, for a man clothed in the antique fashion had just passed out of a neighboring house.

This man wore his hair short, and his face was closely shaven; he was dressed in a brown tunic and a grayish mantle, the ends of which were well tucked up so as not to impede his movements. He walked at a rapid gait, bordering upon a run, and passed by Octavian without perceiving him. He carried on his arm a basket made of Spanish broom, and proceeded toward the Forum Nundinarium. He was evidently a slave, some Davus, going to market beyond a doubt.

The noise of wheels became audible, and an antique wagon, drawn by white oxen and loaded with vegetables, came along the street. Beside the team walked a peasant—with legs bare and sunburnt, and feet sandal-shod—who was clad in a sort of canvas shirt puffed out about the waist; a conical straw hat hanging at his shoulders, and depending from his neck by the chin-band, left his face exposed to view—a type of face unknown in these days—a forehead low and traversed by salient, knotty lines, hair black and curly, eyes tranquil as those of his oxen, and a neck like that of the rustic Hercules. As he gravely pricked his animals with the goad, his statuesque attitudes would have thrown Ingres into ecstasy.

The peasant perceived Octavian and appeared surprised, but he proceeded on his way without being able, doubtless, to find any explanation for the appearance of this strange-looking personage, and in his rustic simplicity willingly leaving the solution of the enigma to those wiser than himself.

Campanian peasants also appeared on the scene, driving before them asses laden with skins of wine, and ringing their brazen bells. Their physiognomies differed from those of the modern peasants as a medallion differs from a son.

Gradually the city became peopled, like one of those panoramic pictures at first desolate, but which by a sudden change of light become animated with personages previously invisible.

Octavian's feelings had undergone a change. Only a short time before, amid the deceitful shadows of the night, he had fallen a prey to that uneasiness from which the bravest are not exempt amid such disquieting and fantastic surroundings as reason cannot explain. His vague terror had ultimately yielded to a profound stupefaction. The distinctness of his perceptions forbade him to doubt the testimony of his senses, yet what he beheld seemed altogether contrary to reason. Feeling still but half convinced, he sought by the authentication of minor actual details to assure himself that he was not the victim of hallucination. Those figures which passed before his eyes could not be phantoms, for the living sun shone upon them with unmistakable reality, and their shadows, elongated in the morning light, fell upon the pavement and the walls.

Without the faintest understanding of what had befallen him, Octavian, ravished with delight to find one of his most cherished dreams realized, no longer attempted to resist the fate of his adventure. He abandoned himself to the mystery of these marvels without any further attempt to explain them; he averred to himself that since he had been permitted, by virtue of some mysterious power, to live for a few hours in a vanished age, he would not waste time in efforts to solve an incomprehensible problem, and he proceeded fearlessly gazing to right and left upon this scene at once so old and yet so new to him. But to what epoch of Pompeiian life had he been transported? An ædile inscription engraved upon a wall showed him by the names of public personages there recorded, that it was about the commencement of the reign of Titus, or in the year 79 of our own era. A sudden thought flashed across Octavian's mind. The woman whose mould he had seen in the museum at Naples must be living, inasmuch as the eruption of Vesuvius by which she had perished took place on the 24th of August in this very year: he might therefore discover her, behold her, speak to her!... The mad longing which had seized him at the sight of that mass of cinders moulded upon a divinely perfect form, was perhaps about to be fully satisfied, for surely naught could be impossible to a love which had had the strength to make Time itself recoil, and the same hour to pass twice through the sand-glass of Eternity!

While Octavian was abandoning himself to these reflections, beautiful young girls were passing by on their way to the fountains, all balancing urns upon their heads with their white finger-tips, and patricians clad in white togas bordered with purple bands were proceeding toward the Forum, each followed by an escort of clients. The buyers commenced to throng about the booths, which were all designated by sculptured or pictured signs, and recalled by reason of their shape and small dimensions the moresque booths of Algiers. Over most of them a glorious phallus of baked and painted clay, together with the inscription, Hic habitat Felicitas, testified to superstitious precautions against the evil eye. Octavian also noticed an amulet shop, whose shelves were stocked with horns, bifurcated branches of coral, and little figures of Priapus in gold, like those worn in Naples even at this day as a safeguard against the jettatura, and he thought to himself that a superstition often outlives a religion.

Following the sidewalk which borders each street in Pompeii (and deprives the English of all claim to this invention), Octavian suddenly found himself face to face with a beautiful young man of about his own age, clad in a saffron-colored tunic, and a mantle of snowy linen as supple as cashmere. The sight of Octavian in his frightful modern hat, girthed about with a scanty black frock-coat, his legs confined in pantaloons, and his feet cramped in well-polished boots, seemed to surprise the young Pompeiian in much the same way as one of us would feel astonished to meet on the Boulevard de Gand some Iowa Indian or native of Butocudo, bedecked with his feathers, necklace of bear's-claws, or whimsical tattooing. Nevertheless, being a well-bred young man, he did not burst out laughing in Octavian's face, and pitying the poor barbarian who had lost his way, no doubt, in that Græco-Roman city, he said to him in a soft, clear voice: "Advena, salve!"

Nothing could be more natural than that an inhabitant of Pompeii, in the reign of the divine, most powerful, and most august Emperor Titus, should speak Latin, yet Octavian started at hearing this dead tongue in a living mouth. It was then, indeed, that he congratulated himself on having been proficient in his college studies, and taken the honors at the annual examinations. The Latin taught him by the University served him in good stead on that unique occasion, and calling back to mind some souvenirs of his college course, he returned the salutation of the Pompeiian after the style of De viris illustribus and Selectæ e profanis, in a tolerably intelligible manner, but with a Parisian accent which forced the young man to smile despite himself.

"Perhaps it will be easier for you to converse in Greek," said the Pompeiian. "I am also acquainted with that language, for I studied at Athens."

"I am even less familiar with Greek than with Latin," replied Octavian. "I am from the land of Gaul—from Paris—from Lutetia."

"I know that country. My grandfather served under the great Julius Cæsar in the Gallic wars. But what a strange dress you wear! The Gauls whom I saw at Rome were not thus attired."

Octavian attempted to explain to the young Pompeiian that twenty centuries had rolled by since the conquest of Gaul by Julius Cæsar, and that the fashions had changed; but he forgot his Latin, and indeed, to tell the truth, he had but little to forget.

"My name is Rufus Holconius, and my house is at your service," said the young man, "unless, indeed, you prefer the freedom of the tavern. It is hard by the public-house of Albinus, near the gate of the suburb of Augustus Felix and the Inn of Sarinus, son of Publius, just at the second turn; but if you wish, I will be your guide through this city, in which you do not seem to be acquainted. Young barbarian, I like you, although you endeavored to impose upon my credulity by pretending that the Emperor Titus, who now reigns, died two thousand years ago, and that the Nazarean (whose infamous followers were plastered with pitch and burned to illuminate Nero's gardens) rules sole master of the deserted heavens whence the great gods have fallen! By Pollux!" he continued as his eyes fell upon a rubric inscription at a street-corner, "you have just come in good time. The Casina of Plautus, which has quite recently been put upon the stage, will be played to-day. It is a curious and laughable comedy which will amuse you, even if you only comprehend the pantomime of it. Come with me. It is nearly time for the play already. I will find you a place in the seat set apart for guests and strangers." And Rufus Holconius led the way toward the little comic theatre which the three friends had visited during the day.

The Frenchman and the citizen of Pompeii proceeded along the Street of the Fountains of Abundance and the Street of the Theatres, passing by the College, the Temple of Isis, and the Studio of the Sculptor, and entered the Odeon or Comic Theatre by a lateral vomitory. Through the recommendations of Holconius, Octavian obtained a seat near the proscenium in a part of the theatre corresponding to our private boxes which front upon the stage. All eyes were immediately turned upon him with good-natured curiosity, and a low whispering arose all through the amphitheatre.

The play had not yet commenced, and Octavian profited by the interval to examine the building. The semicircular seats, terminated at either end by a magnificent lion's paw sculptured in Vesuvian lava, receded, broadening as they rose, from an empty space corresponding to our parterre, but much narrower and paved in mosaic with Greek marble. The rows of seats widened above one another in regular gradation according to distance, and four stairways, corresponding with the vomitories, and sloping from the base to the summit of the amphitheatre, divided it into five cunei or wedge-shaped compartments, with the broad end uppermost. The spectators, all furnished with tickets consisting of little slips of ivory, upon which were indicated in numerical order the row, division, and seat, together with the name of the play and its author, took their places without confusion. The magistrates, nobility, married men, young folks, and the soldiers—who attracted attention by the gleaming of their bronze helmets—all occupied different rows of seats.

It was an admirable spectacle. Those beautiful togas and great white mantles displayed in the first row of seats, contrasting with the vari-colored garments of the women seated in the circle above, and the gray capes of the populace who were assigned to the upper benches near the columns which supported the roof, and between which were visible glimpses of a sky intensely blue as the azure background of the Panathenæa.

A fine spray aromatized with saffron fell from the friezes above in imperceptible mist, at once cooling and purifying the air. Octavian thought of the fetid emanations which vitiate the atmosphere of our modern theatres—theatres so uncomfortable that they may justly be considered places of torture rather than places of amusement, and he found that modern civilization had not, after all, made much progress.

The curtain, sustained by a transverse beam, sank into the depths of the orchestra; the musicians took their seats, and the Prologue appeared in grotesque attire, his face concealed by a frightful mask which fitted the head like a helmet.

Having saluted the audience and demanded applause, the Prologue commenced a merry argumentation. Old plays, he said, were like old wine which improves with age; and Casina, so dear to the old, should not be less so to the young: all could take pleasure in it, some because they were familiar with it, others because they were not. Moreover, the play had been carefully remounted, and should be heard with a cheerful mind, without thinking about one's debts or one's creditors, for people were not liable to be arrested at the theatre. It was a happy day, the weather was fair, and the halcyons hovered over the Forum.

Then he gave an analysis of the comedy about to be performed by the actors, with that minuteness of detail which shows how little the element of surprise entered into the theatrical pleasures of the ancient. He told how the aged Stalino, being enamored of his beautiful slave Casina, desired to marry her to his farmer Olympio, a complaisant spouse whose place he himself would fill on the nuptial night; and how Lycostrata, wife of Stalino, in order to thwart the luxury of her vicious husband, sought to unite Casina in marriage to the groom Chalinus with the further idea of favoring the amours of her son—in fine, how the deceived Stalino mistook a young slave in disguise for Casina, who, being discovered to be free, and of free birth, espouses the young master whom she loves and by whom she is beloved.

As in a reverie, the young Frenchman watched the actors with their bronze-mouthed masks, exerting themselves upon the stage; the slaves ran hither and thither, feigning great haste; the old man wagged his head and extended his trembling hand; the matron with high words and scornful mien strutted in her importance and quarrelled with her husband, to the great delight of the audience. All these personages made their entrances and exits through three doors contrived in the foundation-wall and communicating with the green-room of the actors. The house of Stalino occupied one corner of the stage, and that of his old friend Alcesimus faced it on the opposite side. These decorations, although very well painted, represented the idea of a place rather than the place itself, like most of the vague scenery of the classic theatres.

When the nuptial procession, pompously escorting the false Casina, entered upon the stage, a mighty burst of laughter, such as Homer attributes to the gods, rang through all the amphitheatre, and thunders of applause evoked the vibrating echoes of the enclosure, but Octavian heard no more and saw no more of the play.

In the circle of seats occupied by the women, he had just beheld a creature of marvellous beauty. From that moment all the other charming faces which had attracted his attention became eclipsed as the stars before the face of Phœbus—all vanished, all disappeared as in a dream; a mist clouded the circles of seats with their swarming multitudes, and the high-pitched voices of the actors seemed lost in infinite distance.

His heart received a sudden shock as of electricity, and it seemed to him that sparks flew from his breast when the eyes of that woman turned upon him.

She was dark and pale. Her locks, crisp-flowing and black as the tresses of Night, streamed backward over her temples after the fashion of the Greeks, and in her pallid face beamed soft, melancholy eyes, heavy with an indefinable expression of voluptuous sadness and passionate ennui. Her mouth, with its disdainful curves, protested by the living warmth of its burning crimson against the tranquil pallor of her cheeks, and the curves of her neck presented those pure and beautiful outlines now to be found only in statues. Her arms were naked to the shoulder, and from the peaks of her splendid bosom, which betrayed its superb curves beneath a mauve-rose tunic, fell two graceful folds of drapery that seemed to have been sculptured in marble by Phidias or Cleomenes.

The sight of that bosom, so faultless in contour, so pure in its outlines, magnetically affected Octavian. It seemed to him that those rich curves corresponded perfectly to that hollow mould in the museum at Naples which had thrown him into so ardent a reverie, and from the depths of his heart a voice cried out to him that this woman was indeed the same who had been suffocated in the villa of Arrius Diomedes by the cinders of Vesuvius. What prodigy, then, enabled him to behold her living, and witnessing the performance of the Casina of Plautus? But he forbore to seek an explanation of the problem. For that matter, how did he himself happen to be there? He accepted the fact of his presence as in dreams we never question the intervention of persons actually long dead, but who seem to act nevertheless like living people; besides, his emotion forbade him to reason. For him the Wheel of Time had left its track, and his all-conquering love had chosen its place among the ages passed away. He found himself face to face with his chimera, one of the most unattainable of all, a retrospective chimera. The cup of his whole life had in a single instant been filled to overflowing.

While gazing upon that face, at once so calm and passionate, so cold and yet so replete with warmth, so dead, yet so radiant with life, he felt that he beheld before him his first and last love, his cup of supreme intoxication; he felt all the memories of all the women whom he ever believed that he had loved, vanish like impalpable shadows, and his heart became once more virginally pure of all anterior passion. The past was dead within him.

Meanwhile the fair Pompeiian, resting her chin upon the palm of her hand, turned upon Octavian, though feigning the while to be absorbed in the performance, the velvet gaze of her nocturnal eyes, and that look fell upon him heavy and burning as a jet of molten lead. Then she turned to whisper some words in the ear of a maid seated at her side.

The performance closed. The crowd poured out of the theatre through the vomitories, and Octavian, disdaining the kindly offices of his friend Holconius, rushed to the nearest door-way. He had scarcely reached the entrance when a hand was lightly laid upon his arm, and a feminine voice exclaimed in tones at once low yet so distinct that not a syllable escaped him:

"I am Tyche Novaleia, entrusted with the pleasures of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes. My mistress loves you. Follow me."

Arria Marcella had just entered her litter, borne by four strong Syrian slaves, naked to the waist, whose bronze torsos shone under the sunlight. The curtain of the litter was drawn aside, and a pale hand, starred with brilliant rings, waved a friendly signal to Octavian, as though in confirmation of the attendant's words. Then the purple folds of the curtain fell again, and the litter was borne away to the rhythmical sound of the footsteps of the slaves.

Tyche conducted Octavian along winding byways, tripping lightly across the streets over the stepping-stones which connected the foot-paths, and between which the wheels of the chariots rolled, wending her way through the labyrinth with that certainty which bears witness to thorough familiarity with a city. Octavian noticed that he was traversing portions of Pompeii which had never been excavated, and which were in consequence totally unknown to him. Among so many other equally strange circumstances, this caused him no astonishment. He had made up his mind to be astonished at nothing. Amid all this archaic phantasmagory, which would have driven an antiquarian mad with joy, he no longer saw anything save the dark, deep eyes of Arria Marcella, and that superb bosom which had vanquished even Time, and which Destruction itself had sought to preserve.

They arrived at last before a private gate which opened to admit them, and closed again as soon as they had entered, and Octavian found himself in a court surrounded by Ionic columns of Greek marble, painted bright yellow for half their height and crowned with capitals relieved with blue and red ornaments. A wreath of aristolochia suspended its great green heart-shaped leaves from the projections of the architecture like a natural arabesque, and near a marble basin framed in plants one flaming rose towered on a single stalk—a plume-flower in the midst of natural flowers. The walls were adorned with panelled fresco-work, representing fanciful architecture or imaginary landscape views.

Octavian obtained only a hurried glance at all these details, for Tyche immediately placed him in the hands of the slaves who had charge of the bath, and who subjected him, notwithstanding his impatience, to all the refinements of the antique thermæ. After having submitted to the several necessary degrees of vapor-heat, endured the scraper of the strigillarius, and felt cosmetics and perfumed oils poured over him in streams, he was reclothed with a white tunic, and again met Tyche at the opposite door, who took him by the hand and conducted him into another apartment gorgeously decorated.

Upon the ceiling were painted, with a purity of design, brilliancy of color, and freedom of touch which bespoke the hand of a great master rather than of the mere ordinary decorator, Mars, Venus, and Love. A frieze composed of deer, hares, and birds, disporting themselves amid rich foliage, ran around the apartment above a wainscoting of cipollino marble; the mosaic pavement, a marvellous work from the hand, perhaps, of Sosimus of Pergamos, represented banquet-scenes in relief, with a perfection of art which deluded the eye.

At the further end of the hall, upon a biclinium, or double couch, reclined Arria Marcella in an attitude which recalled the reclining woman of Phidias, upon the pediment of the Parthenon. Her pearl-embroidered shoes lay at the foot of the couch, and her beautiful bare foot, purer and whiter than marble, extended from beneath the light covering of byssus which had been thrown over her.

Two earrings, fashioned in the form of balance-scales, and bearing pearls in either scale, trembled in the light against her pale cheeks. A necklace of golden balls, with pear-shaped pendants attached, hung down upon her bosom, which the negligent folds of a straw-colored peplum, with a Greek border in black lines, had left half uncovered; a gold and black fillet passed and glittered here and there through her ebon tresses, for she had changed her dress upon returning from the theatre, and around her arm, like the asp about the arm of Cleopatra, a golden serpent with jewelled eyes entwined itself in many folds and sought to bite its own tail.

Close by the double couch had been placed a little table, supported upon griffins' paws, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and freighted with different viands served upon dishes of silver and gold, or of earthenware enamelled with costly paintings. A Phasian bird, cooked in its plumage, was visible, and also various fruits which are seldom seen together in any one season.

Everything seemed to indicate that a guest was expected. The floor had been strewn with fresh flowers, and the amphoræ of wine were plunged into urns filled with snow.

Arria Marcella made a sign to Octavian to lie down upon the biclinium beside her and share her repast. Half-maddened with astonishment and love, the young man took at random a few mouthfuls from the plates extended to him by little curly-haired Asiatic slaves, who wore short tunics. Arria did not eat, but she frequently raised to her lips an opal-tinted myrrhine vase filled with a wine darkly purple like thickened blood. As she drank an imperceptible rosy vapor mounted to her cheeks from her heart, the heart that had never throbbed for so many centuries; nevertheless, her bare arm, which Octavian lightly touched in the act of raising his cup, was cold as the skin of a serpent or the marble of a tomb.

"Ah, when you paused in the Studii Museum to contemplate the mass of hardened clay which still preserves my form," exclaimed Arria Marcella, turning her long, liquid eyes upon Octavian, "and your thoughts were ardently directed to me, my spirit felt it in that world where I float, invisible to vulgar eyes. Faith makes God, and love makes woman. One is truly dead only when one is no longer loved. Your desire has restored life to me. The mighty invocation of your heart overcame the dim distances that separated us."

The idea of amorous invocation which the young woman spoke of entered into the philosophic beliefs of Octavian, beliefs which we ourselves are not far from sharing.

In effect, nothing dies; all things are eternal. No power can annihilate that which once had being. Every action, every word, every thought which has fallen into the universal ocean of being, therein creates circles which travel, and increase in travelling, even to the confines of eternity. To vulgar eyes only do natural forms disappear, and the spectres which have thence detached themselves people Infinity. Paris, in some unknown region of space, continues to carry off Helen. The galley of Cleopatra still floats down with swelling sails of silk upon the azure current of an ideal Cydnus. A few passionate and powerful minds have been able to recall before them ages apparently long passed away, and to restore to life personages dead to all the world beside. Faust has had for his mistress the daughter of Tyndarus, and conducted her to his Gothic castle in the depths of the mysterious abysses of Hades. Octavian had been able to live a day under the reign of Titus, and to make himself beloved of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, she who was at that moment lying upon an antique couch beside him in a city destroyed for all the rest of the world.

"From my disgust with other women," replied Octavian, "from the unconquerable reverie which attracted me toward its radiant shapes as to stars that lure on, I knew that I could never love save beyond the confines of Time and Space. It was you that I awaited; and that frail vestige of your being, preserved by the curiosity of men, has by its secret magnetism placed me in communication with your spirit. I know not if you be a dream or a reality, a phantom or a woman; if, like Ixion, I press but a cloud to my cheated breast; if I am only the victim of some vile spell of sorcery—but what I do truly know is that you will be my first and my last love."

"May Eros, son of Aphrodite, hear your promise," returned Arria Marcella, dropping her head upon the shoulder of her lover, who lifted her in a passionate embrace. "Oh, press me to your young breast! Envelop me with your warm breath. I am cold through having remained so long without love." And against his heart Octavian felt that beautiful bosom rise and fall, whose mould he had that very morning admired through the glass of a cabinet in the museum. The coolness of that beautiful flesh penetrated him through his tunic and made him burn. The gold and black fillet had become detached from Arria's head, passionately thrown back, and her hair streamed like a black river over the purple pillow.

The slaves had removed the table. A confused sound of sighs and kisses was alone audible. The pet quails, indifferent to this amorous scene, plundered the crumbs of the banquet upon the mosaic pavement, uttering sharp little cries.

Suddenly the brazen rings of the curtain which closed the entrance to the apartment slided back upon the curtain-rod, and an aged man of stern demeanor and wrapped in a great brown mantle appeared upon the threshold. His gray beard was divided into two points after the manner of the Nazareans. His face seemed furrowed by the suffering of ascetic mortifications, and a little cross of black wood was suspended from his neck, leaving no doubt as to his faith. He belonged to the sect, then new, of the Disciples of Christ.

On perceiving him, Arria Marcella, overwhelmed with confusion, hid her face in the folds of her mantle, like a bird which puts its head under its wing at the approach of an enemy from whom it cannot escape, to save itself at least from the horror of seeing him, while Octavian, rising on his elbow, stared fixedly at the provoking being who had thus abruptly interrupted his happiness.

"Arria, Arria!" exclaimed the austere personage in a voice of reproach, "did not your lifetime suffice for your misconduct, and must your infamous amours encroach upon centuries to which they do not belong? Can you not leave the living in their sphere? Have not your ashes cooled since the day when you perished unrepentant beneath the rain of volcanic fire? So, then, even two thousand years have not sufficed to calm your passion, and your voracious arms still draw to your heartless breast of marble the poor mad-men whom your philters have intoxicated!"

"Arrius, father, mercy! Do not crush me in the name of that morose religion which was never mine! I believed in our ancient gods, who loved life and youth and beauty and pleasure. Do not hurl me back into pale nothingness! Let me enjoy this life that love has given back to me!"

"Silence, impious woman! Speak not to me of your gods, which are demons. Let this man, whom you have fettered with your impure seductions, depart hence. Draw him no more beyond the circle of that life which God measured out for him. Return to the Limbo of paganism with your Asiatic, Roman, or Greek lovers. Young Christian, forsake that larva, who would seem to you more hideous than Empousa or Phorkyas, could you but see her as she is!"

Pale and frozen with horror, Octavian tried to speak, but his voice clung to his throat, according to the expression of Virgil.

"Will you obey me, Arria?" imperiously cried the tall old man.

"No, never!" responded Arria, with flashing eyes, dilated nostrils, and passion-trembling lips, as she suddenly encircled the body of Octavian with her beautiful statuesque arms, cold, hard, and rigid as marble. Her furious beauty, enhanced by the struggle, shone forth at that supreme moment with supernatural brightness, as though to leave its imperishable souvenir with her young lover.

"Then, unhappy woman," exclaimed the old man, "I must needs employ extreme measures, and render your nothingness palpable and visible to this fascinated child." And in a voice of command he pronounced a formula of exorcism that banished from Arria's cheeks the purple tints with which the black wine from the myrrhine vase had suffused them.

At the same moment the distant bell of one of those hamlets which border the sea-coast, or lie hidden in the mountain hollows, rang out the first peal of the angelus.

A sob of agony burst from the broken heart of the young woman at that sound. Octavian felt her encircling arms untwine, the draperies which covered her sank fold on fold, as though the contours which sustained them had suddenly given way, and the wretched night-walker beheld on the banquet-couch beside him only a handful of cinders mingled with a few fragments of calcined bones, among which gold bracelets and jewelry glittered, together with such other shapeless remains as were found in excavating the villa of Arrius Diomedes.

He uttered one fearful cry and became insensible.

The old man had disappeared, the sun rose, and the hall, so brilliantly decorated but a short time before, became only a dismantled ruin.

After a heavy slumber, inspired by the libations of the previous evening, Max and Fabio started from their sleep, and at once called their comrade, whose room adjoined their own, with one of those burlesque rallying cries which are so commonly made use of by travellers. Octavian, for the best of reasons, returned no answer. Fabio and Max, hearing no response, entered their friend's chamber and perceived that the bed had not been disturbed.

"He must have fallen asleep in some chair," said Fabio, "without being able to get to bed, for our good Octavian cannot bear much liquor; and most likely he is taking an early walk to dissipate the fumes of the wine in the fresh morning air."

"But he did not drink much," returned Max, in a thoughtful manner. "All this seems very strange to me. Let us go and find him!"

Accompanied by the cicerone, the two friends searched all the streets, squares, cross-roads, and alleys of Pompeii, entering every curious building where they thought Octavian might be occupied in copying a painting or taking down an inscription, and finally discovered him lying insensible upon the disjointed mosaic pavement of a small ruined chamber. They had much difficulty in restoring him to consciousness, and on reviving, his only explanation of the circumstance was that he had taken a fancy to see Pompeii by moonlight, and had been seized with a sudden faintness, which would doubtless result in nothing serious.

The little party returned by rail to Naples, as they had come, and the same evening, from their private box at the San Carlo, Max and Fabio watched through their opera glasses a troupe of nymphs dancing in a ballet, under the leadership of Amalia Ferraris, the danseuse then in vogue, all wearing under their gauzy skirts frightful green drawers, which made them look like so many frogs stung by a tarantula. Pale, with woful eyes, and the general air of one crushed by suffering, Octavian seemed to doubt the reality of what transpired upon the stage, so difficult did he find it to resume the sentiments of real life after the marvellous adventures of the night.

From the time of that visit to Pompeii Octavian fell into a dismal melancholy, which the good-humored pleasantry of his companions rather aggravated than soothed. The image of Arria Marcella haunted him incessantly, and the sad termination of his fantastic good fortune had never destroyed its charm.

Unable to contain his misery, he returned secretly to Pompeii, and once again wandered among the ruins by moonlight as before, his heart palpitating with maddening hope; but the hallucination never returned. He saw only the lizards fleeing over the stones, he heard only the screams of the startled night-birds. He met his friend Rufus Holconius no more, Tyche came not to lay her supple hand upon his arm, Arria Marcella obstinately slumbered in her dust.

Abandoning all hope, Octavian finally married a charming young English girl, who is madly in love with him. He is perfectly well behaved to his wife, yet Ellen, with that subtle instinct of the heart which nothing can deceive, feels that her husband is enamored of another. But of whom? That is a mystery which the most unflagging watchfulness cannot enable her to unravel. Octavian never entertains actresses. In society he addresses to women only the most commonplace gallantries. He even returned with the greatest coldness the marked advances of a certain Russian princess celebrated for her beauty and her coquetry. A secret drawer, opened during her husband's absence, afforded no confirmation of infidelity to Ellen's suspicions. But how could she permit herself to be jealous of Arria Marcella, daughter of Arrius Diomedes, the freedman of Tiberius?