On what ground must we suppose an elopement on the wife's part, and on the husband's the resolution, only relaxed by death, to follow and punish her seducer ? Certainly not from the letters. In the relation which they exhibit, what need could there be of flight? whence could arise the danger which we are to fancy suspended for years over the heads of the fugitive couple? We find the husband, on the contrary, only too anxious to be rid of his Angès. He presses for a divorce-a process easy and fashionable in those republican times. It is the wife who demurs-hoping, it is said, to regain her husband's love; intent, it rather appears, on a money settlement for her child. How could a woman, on the eve of eloping with her lover, desire a reconciliation with the man she was anxious to forsake? Why, if so, refuse a divorce which would leave her free to go whither and with whomsoever she liked? And why stickle on a point of money at the moment when she is wooed by a wealthy lover, ready to marry her the instant she is free? Are we to understand that this bribe was asked, solely because the mother was prepared to abandon her child, as well? Even on this monstrous inference-which, moreover, would not suit the advocate's story at all-the lady's flight, the husband's apprehended vengeance, -all the essentials of this romance, in fact, are seen to be incredible, if 'the Count's' companion was the Angès Berthelmy of the letters.

Had the husband-an officer in the French service, whom we have seen only wanting to cast off his wife -suddenly changed his mind, and never ceased to pursue her afterwards while he lived-for this is the gist of the invention-had this, I say, been the case, how easily could the rich Van der Valck have carried his prize beyond the reach of capture, instead of cowering in perpetual alarm in a place always exposed to visits from France! Would not an asylum more distant and safe have been chosen, had the sole object been the undisturbed possession of his mistress? In England, for instance, the fugitives would have been perfectly secure; and that with

out one of the privations by which security was purchased at Eishausen. Can it be believed that a man 'clear and piercing in intellect,' should have resorted to those trying precautions, when he could easily have gained many places of refuge where he might have lived, openly and without fear, in the enjoyment of all that was denied at Eishausen ?

The seraglio,' we are told, consisted of Angès and her daughter; and this is proved, first, by comparing the age which the former must have reached in 1799, with the supposed youth of the lady as seen in 1806; secondly, by the assertion of the old road-mender, that he had seen two females at different times in the carriage. This testimony, the sole evidence for the accusation, is, as I observed when reporting it, of the very slightest value; it would hardly be worth weighing, even if uncontradicted. But as to the child of Angès Berthelmy,-the only conceivable heroine of such a tragedy,-it is directly confuted by evidence at least as good as the other. The letter in the Allgemeine Zeitung affirming that the daughter was married, and still alive in Rhenish Bavaria, may fairly be allowed more credit than an odious imputation based on nothing but the casual view of a purblind old

man.

The accuracy of that letter is confirmed by its coincidence with what afterwards came out in the letter from Mans-namely, that Angès had brothers living in Zweibrücken and Kaiserslautern,--both in the region named by the writer from Heidelberg,-whither Angès, on leaving France, was bound; and where, it may be presumed, her daughter, if not herself also, found a home with those near relations.

The romance of the daughter being thus exploded, the counsel's argument on the point of age, if valid at all, goes near to extinguish the mother as well. So little was seen of the lady at Hildburghausen, that the guesses of the public cannot be much relied on; but it is certain that all who saw her there, or in the first days at Eishausen, agreed in describing her as a girl in her teens; and unless all were mistaken, this cannot have been the Angès Barthelmy, whose age, it is rightly

1859.]

inferred, must have been between twenty and thirty in 1803. So that on the whole, it may at least_be doubted whether the lady of Eishausen was not a different person altogether, and unknown to us otherwise; her identity with the writer of the love-letters from Mans being no less questionable than every other point of this curious story.

The indictment having thus failed on its two cardinal points, it need not much concern us to ask how the pleader's account of Van der Valck agrees with what we know of his habits and disposition; how it agrees with his own description of the recluse, as a man of deep feelings and warm heart,' qualities not very consistent with a story the bases of which are rank selfishness and guile, and its incidents incest and murder. To pursue such a tale as he has devised through its inevitable sequence of horrors and abominations, concealed in the inner chambers of Eishausen,' is fortunately unnecessary. The premises being proved false, the system of cruelty, baseness, and depravity raised upon them sinks at once into a mere chaos of fiction.

But even had the libellous part been spared, and the Epicurean view only of the retreat at Eishausen displayed, one might have asked if a theory of that kind were credible? Let the indulgences, such as they were, be heightened to the utmost, and weighed against the terrible loss of liberty, speech, and society, can any one imagine the prevailing result such as a voluptuary would choose? Had Van der Valck been the selfish Sybarite of this caricature, would his constancy to a single object of passion have induced him to bear all this for her sake, not for days, but for years? Would an Epicurean, if willing to remain a prisoner on such terms in his seraglio,' have sought no change of company there during half a lifetime?-never have betrayed the slightest wandering of fancy in a direction where, of all others, the caprice of self-indulgence is most fickle and fastidious? I will not dwell on other parts of his domestic life, his early hours, his restless industry, and love of intellectual labour; on the stubborn

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force of his resolution, on the flowing vein of his bounties-all irreconcileable with the character of a mere voluptuary. It is sufficient to point to the fact that his connexion with the lady, of whatever nature it was-and even this is uncertain-that his friendship, love, or self-devotion to a single object through years of entire seclusion, only ended with her life,-as decisive against the Epicurean view of the question.

What was he, then ?-what was the nature of his secret, the motive of his extraordinary resolution, the occasion of his still more extraordinary persistence in it? These questions may be repeated at the end, as they were raised at the beginning of the inquiry. They have found as yet no intelligible answer. The disclosures which seemed to promise something have merely given new names to the actors in a dim scene, with some shreds of an earlier date loosely hanging to them; but the moral of the mystery in which they have been engaged these forty years the development, material or mental, of its origin and progress;-nay, even the mere description in terms of the enigma which it involves, so far as any distinct or coherent representation goes, is yet to be sought. This alone, independently of many minor features in themselves curious and problematical, gives the story, as I have said, a tone of the marvellous, probably without a parallel in any other, comprising so long a series of incidents, subject for years to the inquisition of modern society. The facts, some of them plain and tangible, others half-seen and mysterious, lie interspersed with the common things of to-day: their meaning, in whatever way we take them up, is as fast locked as an enchanted castle in a middle-age legend. It seems strange that the key should be lost; yet that any of those hitherto tried should be found the right one, would be hardly less surprising.

I have so far confined myself to a summary of the details of which evidence exists, and to the analysis of what may be suggested to account for them. In concluding, some opinion of my own may be looked

for; and this would be given without reserve, had any of the various conjectures that have occurred to me during the process brought conviction to my own mind.

But here, as with the attempts of others, I have found that however apt a given version may be to one set of traits or incidents, it proves unfit or absurd when applied to the rest. If an opening which seems to throw light on some features of the case only left the others in darkness, it would be of no real service. But the peculiarity of this subject is, that whatever explanation you try is not only limited as to the number of incidents it will suit, but directly at variance with others of equal weight. So that all efforts made to untie the knot merely leave it more intricate than before.

As to matters of fact, even, our information is doubtful on most of the cardinal points. There is perhaps but one which we are nearly sure of-namely, that the Vavel de Versay of Eishausen was the Van der Valck of the Embassy in Paris. That his companion was the Angès Berthelmy of the love-letters, is much less certain; although the balance of probability inclines that way. The precise relation in which they stood to each other is unknown. But on the whole, it seems probable that it was of the most intimate kind; although much might be urged to the contrary. It must

not be forgotten that, throughout the lady's seclusion, she had no attendant in her chamber but Van der Valck. This rejecting the idea of a cynical rudeness, which everything else contradictsseems conclusive as to the nature of their connexion. That it was, on both sides, the fruit of a passion no less deep and engrossing in its essence than strange in its effects, can hardly be doubted, if we admit the previous supposition.

Beyond these bare outlines, themselves rather probable than positive, all, so far as I can see-in acts no less than in motives-is ambiguous, incoherent, unaccountable, or

contradictory; as if the actors were indeed of the stuff that dreams are made of.'

The evidence taken in the case was collected and published seven years since, under the sanction of the well-known historian Bülau, in whose Anthology of curious anecdotes it must have been widely circulated. The compiler then indulged the natural hope that by this means further information would be elicited, and a clue found to unravel the mystery. I too, have waited for some time, not without expectation of new light on the matter, before committing it to writing. Of Van der Valck's contemporaries some who knew him before he left the world might still survive, and be induced to contribute notices of his early career. The busy correspondence which he kept up, for many years at least, in his retreat, must have left traces of a later period, which public curiosity might yet recover. But, so far as I can learn, nothing of either kind has transpired; and unless chance should hereafter open an unexpected vein, the evidence in the case seems to be closed.

Should this conclusion be final, the recluse will have virtually maintained his post, whatever its purpose may have been, against the attacks of all comers. For the present he stalks from the field with his visor down; retiring to the shadow of the tomb, preceded by the silent lady whose veil no living hand has been suffered to raise. In this postureuntil his secret can be challenged on some new ground-he disappears from the province of criticism; what may be seen of him in this dim sketch being, meanwhile, simply commended to lovers of the marvellous, as a veritable apparition of the wonderful in the dress of our own day; attested by material evidence, opposed to every moral probability. -a prodigy, in short, made up of ordinary things, which it is all but impossible either to doubt or to believe.

I. R. C.

since then; lastly, you have at the end of the salon the bazaar for the sale of 'objets d'intérêt en bois,' where you may kill time by purchasing, to your future discomfort, a model châlet, not a bit like any original, a ehamois of the wry-necked species peculiar to such localities, or, if of a more practical turn, a paper-knife or a salad spoon-and-fork, any of which objects will yield on the slightest pressure, and go to pieces with perfect complaisance. At such a moment let but the archtempter Bradshaw appear, attended by those seductive spectres, his skeleton routes, and whisper in your ear that the railway is open from Como to the Adriatic; that if it so please you, in less than eight and forty hours from that instant, having done (if it must be so) the Duomo and Saint Ambrogio at Milan, you may be speeding over the fair, fat plains of Lombardy, with the distant snows of Monte Rosa for a background: through fields of juicy maize; and vineyards roofed with purple grapes; and soldierly files of well-drilled poplars; past little villages with tall flat-capped belfries, whence jovial bells ring out a cheer as the train shoots by; past Bergamo on its pedestal of rock; and the Lake of Garda, running up like a blue wedge into the mountains of the Tyrol; and Verona, where Punch makes his jokes in the old Roman amphitheatre, and where Juliet sleeps a sleep, profitable to the local cicerone, beneath a promoted wash-trough; past Montebello, and Vicenza, and Padua, and many another a and o, on to a city where there are shady canals, and sunny piazzas, and bright waters, with gondolas skimming them like black dragon-flies; where every other house is a palace and every fruitstall a picture; where sunsets, and moonlights, and Titians, and ices, and coffees, all of a superior quality, are to be had; in short, to Beautiful Venice, the bride of the sea. Should the Continental Guide insinuate all this, and at a crisis like that above described, Mln. dep. * If

Why should

10.37. Ven. arr. 8.52.' will mean no less, there are many greater improbabilities, than your exclaiming, with the poet, Bless railroads everywhere, in Italy, Ireland, France!' and acting upon the suggestion forthwith.

It was an anachronism just now to speak of Venice as the bride of the sea. Sir Cresswell Cresswell could not have dissolved that marriage more completely than the railway has done. In olden time the traveller was compelled to recognise it; and in a gondola from Mestre made a proper and respect. ful entry into the city. Now he merely gives up his ticket there. If he has no fear of dust or cinders in his eyes, he may, by craning out of the carriage window, perceive the apparition of a floating city, or a huge raft covered with houses, right ahead; but otherwise the sensation is that of being carried out to sea by an insane locomotive. The Lagoon stretches away for miles on both sides, with nothing to break its surface except a few ghostly-looking piles, and here and there a little island so completely built over that it looks like a fishing village that has broken its moorings and gone adrift. But the train evidently knows what it is about, and sweeps on in a contemptuous manner, as if it had been bred to the sea, and did not mind the puny little waves that are lapping fretfully against the buttresses of the bridge; until at the end of some ten minutes there is a halt, and on descending and looking about you find yourself in the anomalous position of standing on a railway platform in the Adriatic, two miles from shore, and under no obligation to gondola or galley. Venice is no longer insular; the right of the sea to interfere between her and her visitors has been totally ignored. There has been in fact a judicial separation, and perhaps it is just as well for him, poor fellow, that it should be so; for the union, though it may have been a splendid could not have been a happy one.* Some meddling prophet of the