The Tragic Comedians | Page 2

love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters
into the systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and
gnomes of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal
nature out of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their
story tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is
there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are real
creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a
lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine events
and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no
such furrowing lesson in life.

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
CHAPTER I
An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the

pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in
her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a
lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes,
and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native
land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting
among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though
sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as
aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary
very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing
of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming
countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for
her choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from
choosing instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a
buffet of pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy:
and little so is the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one
object of the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his
for a nod. But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to
taste to try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to
deliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that.
And as it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your
taste will frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the
young coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to
escape drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks
or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a
knowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.
The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future
days, the more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.
Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites.
She was not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the
mother resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of
that unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory.
Vigilant foresight is not so much practised where the world is less
accurately comprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world

everywhere, and the young women of it especially, are troubled by an
idea drawn from what they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life
surrounding them, that the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this
world's elect, getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return
for a little dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct;
they sin, but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but
they have had the world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is
common during youth: and one would think the French mother worthy
of the crown of wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in
excluding love from the calculations on behalf of her girl.
Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar
trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the
Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at
all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating
threads. A stranger to the Baths,