Moths by Ouida — page 34: what you’re looking at

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

35 MOTHS. . ihe gaze of multitudes in burning nights of enthusiasm rrun: - Neva to Tagus, from Danube to Seine. _ Vere looked at him and did notspeak. Theface of Correze had a magic for all women, and she vaguely felt that magic as she met those eyes that were the eyes of Romeo and of Faust. “What a lovely life it must be, your life!’ she said, timidly. ‘¢ Tt must be like a perpetual poem, I think.” : Correze smiled. \ ‘¢ An artist’s life is far off what you fancy it, I fear; but yet at the least it is full of color and of change. JI am in the snows of Russia one day, in the suns of Madrid another. I know the life of the palaces, I have known the life of the poor. When I for- get the latter, may Heaven forget me! Some day when we are older friends, Mademoiselle Herbert, I will tell you my story.” - “Tell me now,” said Vere, softly, with her gaze beginning to grow intent and eager under the halo of her hair, and letting her cherries lie unheeded on her lap. Correz laughed. ‘¢Oh, you will be disappointed. I have not much of one, and it is nosecret. I am Raphael de Correze; Iam the Marquis de Correze, if it were of any use to beso; but I prefer to be Cor- reze the singer. It is much simpler, and yet much more uncom- mon. There are so many marquises, so few tenors. My race was great among the old noblesse de Savoie, but it was beggared in the Terror, and their lands were confiscated, and most of their lives were taken. Iwas born in a cabin; my grandfather had been born in a castle; it did not matter. He was a philosopher and a scholar, and he had taken to the mountains and loved them. My father married a peasant-girl, and lived as simply as a shepherd. My mother died early. I ran about barefoot and saw to the goats. Wewere on the French side of the Pennine Alps. I used to drive the goats up higher, higher, higher, as the summer drew on and the grass was eaten down. In the winter an oid priest who lived with us, and my father, when he had leisure, taught me. We were very poor, and often hungry, but they were happy times. I think of them when I go across the Alps, wrapped up in my black sables that the Empress of Russia has given me. I think I was warmer in the old days with the snow ten feet deep all around! Can you understand that snow may be warmer than sables? Yes? Well, there is little to tell. One day, when it was summer, and travelers were coming up into the Pennine valleys, some one heard me sing, and said my voice wasa fortune. I was singing to myself and the goats among the gentian, the beautiful blue genitian—you know it? No, you do not know it, unless you have roamed the Alps in May. Other persons came after him, and said the same thing, and wanted me to go with them; but I would not leave my father. Who could stack wood for him, and cut paths through the snow, and rake up the chestnuts and store them? I did all that. I would not go. When I was fifteen he died. ‘ Do not forget you are the last Marquis de Correze,’ he said to me with his last Saige He had never forgotten it, and he had lived and died in shadow of the Alps an honest man and agentleman in hig ) (E(0) aal G 00: ESS (ee)