MADEMOISELLE MISS
And Other Stories
By Henry Harland
London: William Heinemann Bedford Street
MDCCCXCIII
CONTENTS
THE FUNERAL MARCH OF A MARIONNETTE
MADEMOISELLE MISS
“Mais que diable allait-elle faire en cette galère?”
Paris is the gloomiest town in Christendom to-day,—though it is a lovely day in April, and the breeze is full of softness, and the streets are gay with people,—and the Latin Quarter is quite the dullest bit of Paris: Mademoiselle Miss left last night for England.
We all know what it is like when a person who has been an absorbing interest in our lives suddenly goes away: how, apart from the immediate pang of the separation and the after-pain of more or less consciously missing the fugitive, there is a wide, complex, dim underworld of emotion, that may be compared to the thorough-bass of a sad tune, and seems in some sort to relate itself to the whole exterior universe. The sun rises as usual, but the sunlight is not the same. Other folk, apparently unconcerned, pursue the accustomed tenor of their way; but we are vaguely surprised that this should be the case,—surprised, and grieved, and a little resentful. We can’t realise without an effort how completely exempt they are from the loss that has befallen us; and we feel obscurely that their air of indifference is either sheer braggadocio, or a symptom of moral insensibility. The truth of the matter is, of course, that our departing friend has taken with him not his particular body and baggage only, but an element from the earth and the sky. and a fibre from ourselves. Everything is subtly, incommunicably altered. We wake up to a changed horizon: and our distress is none the less keen because the changeling bears a formal resemblance to the vanished original.
So! Mademoiselle Miss has gone to England; and to-day it is anew and an unfamiliar and a most dismal Paris t