Moths by Ouida — page 255: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MOTE) Oe ey he ae a r~ CHAPTER XXIL A BREW weeks ‘ater they were at Svir. Svir was one of the grandest summer palaces of the many pal- 3) aces of the Princes Zoarotf, It had been built by a French arch- itect in the time of the great Catherine’s love of French art, and tS appanages were less an estate than a province or principality that stretched far away to the horizon on every side save one, where the Baltic spread its ice-plains in the winter, and its blue waters to the brief summer sunshine. It was a very grand place; it had acres of palm-houses and glass-houses; it had vast stables full of horses; it had a theater, with a stage as large as the Folies Marigny’s; it had vast forests in which the bear and the boar and the wolf were hunted with the splendor and bar- barity of the royal hunts that Snyders painted; it was a Musco- vite Versailles, with hundreds of halls and chambers, and a staircase up which fifty men might have walked abreast; it had many treasures, too, of the arts, and precious marbles, Greek and Roman: yet there was no place on earth which Vere hated as she hated Svir. | To her it was a symbol of despotism, of brutal power, of soul- less magnificence; and the cruelties of the sport that filled all the days, and the oppression of the peasantry by the elders and patriarchs which she was impotent to redress, weighed on her with continual pain. She had been taught in her girlhood to think; she knew too much to accept the surface gloss of things as their truth; she could not be content witha life which was a perpetual pageantry without any other aim than that of killing time. So much did the life at Svir displease her, and so indifferent was she to her own position in it, that she never observed that she was less mistress of it than was the Duchesse de Sonnaz, who was there with the Duc Paul, a placid, sweet-tempered man, who was devoted to entomology and other harmless sciences, It was not Vere, but Madame Jeanne, who directed the amuse- ments of each day and night. It was Madame Jeanne who scolded the manager of the operetta troupe, who selected the pieces to be performed in the theater, who organized the hunt- ing-parties and the cotillons, and the sailing, and the riding. It was Madame Jeanne who, with her pistols in her belt, and her gold-tipped ivory hunting-horn, ander green tunic and trousers, and her general franc-tireur aspect, went out with Sergius Zou- roff to see the bear’s death-struggle, and give the last stroke in the wolf’s throat. : Vere—to whom the moonlit curee in the great court was a hor- rible sight, and who, though she had never blenched when the wolves had bayed after the sledge, would have turned sick and blind at sight of the dying beasts with the hunters’ knives in their necks—was only glad that there was any one who should take the task off their hands of amusing the large house-party and the gaorose humors of her husband. The words of Correze had failed io awaken any suspicion in her mind, Pe hd comicboo ‘S 7 Ad A hr - - _F Ai phy ‘.