Juana | Page 7

so express it, a woman, and divining her shape by
inductions both rapid and sagacious, he beheld one of those
masterpieces of Nature whose creation appears to demand as its right
all the happiness of love. Here was a fair young face, on which the sun
of Spain had cast faint tones of bistre which added to its expression of
seraphic calmness a passionate pride, like a flash of light infused
beneath that diaphanous complexion,-- due, perhaps, to the Moorish
blood which vivified and colored it. Her hair, raised to the top of her
head, fell thence with black reflections round the delicate transparent
ears and defined the outlines of a blue-veined throat. These luxuriant
locks brought into strong relief the dazzling eyes and the scarlet lips of
a well-arched mouth. The bodice of the country set off the lines of a
figure that swayed as easily as a branch of willow. She was not the
Virgin of Italy, but the Virgin of Spain, of Murillo, the only artist
daring enough to have painted the Mother of God intoxicated with the
joy of conceiving the Christ,--the glowing imagination of the boldest
and also the warmest of painters.
In this young girl three things were united, a single one of which would
have sufficed for the glory of a woman: the purity of the pearl in the
depths of ocean; the sublime exaltation of the Spanish Saint Teresa;
and a passion of love which was ignorant of itself. The presence of
such a woman has the virtue of a talisman. Montefiore no longer felt
worn and jaded. That young girl brought back his youthful freshness.
But, though the apparition was delightful, it did not last. The girl was
taken back to the secret chamber, where the servant-woman carried to
her openly both light and food.
"You do right to hide her," said Montefiore in Italian. "I will keep your
secret. The devil! we have generals in our army who are capable of
abducting her."
Montefiore's infatuation went so far as to suggest to him the idea of
marrying her. He accordingly asked her history, and Perez very
willingly told him the circumstances under which she had become his
ward. The prudent Spaniard was led to make this confidence because
he had heard of Montefiore in Italy, and knowing his reputation was

desirous to let him see how strong were the barriers which protected the
young girl from the possibility of seduction. Though the good-man was
gifted with a certain patriarchal eloquence, in keeping with his simple
life and customs, his tale will be improved by abridgment.
At the period when the French Revolution changed the manners and
morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a street
prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of its fall.
The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic adventures and
strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other woman of her
class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great lords struck with
her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged with gold and jewels
and all the delights of excessive wealth,-- flowers, carriages, pages,
maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like those of Catherine II.); in short,
the life of a queen, despotic in her caprices and obeyed, often beyond
her own imaginings. Then, without herself, or any one, chemist,
physician, or man of science, being able to discover how her gold
evaporated, she would find herself back in the streets, poor, denuded of
everything, preserving nothing but her all-powerful beauty, yet living
on without thought or care of the past, the present, or the future. Cast,
in her poverty, into the hands of some poor gambling officer, she
attached herself to him as a dog to its master, sharing the discomforts of
the military life, which indeed she comforted, as content under the roof
of a garret as beneath the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and
Spanish both, she fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion, and
more than once she had said to love:--
"Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God."
But this slime permeated with gold and perfumes, this careless
indifference to all things, these unbridled passions, these religious
beliefs cast into that heart like diamonds into mire, this life begun, and
ended, in a hospital, these gambling chances transferred to the soul, to
the very existence,--in short, this great alchemy, for which vice lit the
fire beneath the crucible in which fortunes were melted up and the gold
of ancestors and the honor of great names evaporated, proceeded from
a CAUSE, a particular heredity, faithfully transmitted from mother to

daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman was La
Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the