street, and stopped to inquire the cause of this assemblage, they answered in low accents : "It is Madame Catharine de Valois, queen dowager of England, who is going beyond the sea to escort to the Abbey of Westminster the body of our Lord Henry, the king-regent; and who will never more return to the realm of France, And so the unhappy princess has come hither to salute, for the last time, our Lord Charles the sixth, our sovereign and master: God help him and us.' And then they drew near to the hall. door to listen; and the belated travellers, and those who had strolled by indifferent to the scene, cast a glance in passing upon the litter, and upon the illuminated windows which threw a blaze of light upon the front of the hotel. - The moon had now risen, and its pale beams struggled with the flickering rays of a small lamp of silver suspended by a gilded chain from the low ceiling of the saloon which looked upon the Seine. On the carpeted dais of an alcove placed in the embrasure of a window, and under the massy folds of a velvet curtain richly studded with fleurs-de-lis, reclined two ladies in each other's arms, and who ever and anon exchanged words interrupted by sighs and sobs. The double light of the moon and the lamp added an indefinable expression to the sadness of their pale faces, softening and blending their features into the shadowed outline of youthful and regular beauty, so that the spectator might have imagined them both of the same age, in the full luxuriance of twenty years; and yet they were mother and daughter. The one, who sat in a chair of delicately sculptured ivory, and leaning upon the balustrade of the window, was the queen-the lovely queen of France, Isabelle of Bavaria. The other sobbing bitterly and hanging over the arms of the chair, was the gentle Catharine of Valois, her darling daughter. For a long time they remained so without uttering a syllable; the younger lady, burying her face in her mother's bosom, with her eyes swimming in tears, thoughtfully gazed upon the Seine glid ing between its banks, while its dark and star-gemmed waves were silvered by each glancing moon-beam. Sometimes she leaned her head on her daughter's cheek, and they intermingled their tears and their sighs, that voice of the heart, the undisguised language of suffering souls. To see them thus, who would have thought that they were two queens! But the younger's dream of happiness, and the ambitious schemes of the elder, were now buried in the coffin of the victor of Agincourt, the hero of his age. Henry the fifth, king of England and regent of France, son-in-law, and (by a decree of the parliament of Paris) heir of Charles the sixth, to the exclusion of the dauphin, had just breathed his last, at the castle of Vincennes, aged thirty-six years. Exhausted with weeping, Catharine raised her beautiful head, and passed her fingers over her tear-charged eyes. Her bosom still swelled with long-drawn sighs, like the choaked sobbings of an infant that has fallen into sleep in tears; while her mother, catching the expres sion of her eyes, kissed her forehead with tenderness, and with unconscious fingers smoothed the rich tresses of her clustering locks. In spite of all that she had done and suffered, there was still a rich fund of love, stored up in this woman's heart, beneath the stormy passions which ambition had ingrafted there. Although a queen, a wife, a guilty mother, mocked and deceived in her transient and fickle affections, feared by some, despised by others, and hated by all; by the engrossing influence of her passions smothering in her heart the reproaches of the past, and the dread of future retribution, and defying hatred by her own power of hating, she had, notwithstanding all these, treasured up in her woman's heart for those rare moments, when she found herself alone and able to indulge her softest recollections, her love for her daughter, which she had cherished into an antidote against remorse, and had idealized into the purest fancy of her guardian angel. The last adieus of these ladies were sorrowful and disconsolate. "Mother," said the young widow, "when I shall be far away from this lovely land of France, you will still see this sky strewed with gold, and this great river which seems to groan like the voice of those who weep, and these lofty and blackened houses, whose roofs, rising in sharp points toward the sky, I have so often loved to count when I was a little child in your arms, and you will then think of your poor Catharine who will be weeping far away, for this will be no longer my sky or my country." "And I, too, shall weep," answered Isabelle, "if, indeed, I shall not have ceased altogether; for I shall have no longer, dearest, any sky or country to Your heart was all I prized; care for. for that, or I mistake me, was the only one that loved me... It was my only happiness, and it now leaves me it is worse than death, my Catharine; in a separation we lose, for a long, lingering time that which we love; death is preferable, for we lose what we idolize at once, and no longer feel the deprivation." "Alas!" rejoined Catharine, "why was I a hero's bride?" "It is my destiny," said Isabelle bitterly, "to succeed in nothing but my hatred!" The young princess had again concealed her head on her mother's knees to weep. 46 It was a dream, mother," she repeated, "but a sweet one; for I was happy, beautiful, worshipped as a pledge of peace, and two nations united in loving me." "Catharine," murmured Isabelle of Bavaria, "oh! tell me, must not the love of their people be the blessing of a king's life!.... They love not me!" "They tell me, mother, that the Tower of London is a chill and dreary dwelling—a mourning queen must be very wretched there! "A queen, my child, is always wretched. I weep not for myself, but for you, my daughter, too young to suffer. And yet you will leave behind you in a palace of France, a queen and a mother still more to be pitied even than you.... See you that man," she continued, pointing with her finger toward the extremity of the saloon, but without turning her head.... "Oh! he would hate me cordially now, if God had not, one day, deprived him of his reason ... There, everywhere, I see nothing but enemies! the duke of Burgundy detests me now; the Duke of Bedford has no occasion for my assistance; the English insult me; and my son .... Oh, heavens! I lose more, you see, than you; the tranquillity and splendour of my declining years; and, more than all, I lose you, the only one who has nothing to reproach against your unhappy mother!" Her voice was choaked, and she struggled for an instant with her emotions. Perhaps she paused for a word of comfort, or of hope from her daughter's mouth; but the dreadful truth pressed with its overwhelming weight upon the young woman's heart, who hid her face with her hands and spoke not. "I do not deceive myself," said Isabelle, in a grave but steady tone; "the future approaches stern and threatening to me, and it is already close at hand. "Wolf," screamed a voice which made them both start, "where's Wolf?". The speaker was a man of lofty stature, whose sickly, pale, and haggard features, and hair of almost snowy whiteness, were brought into strong relief by the reflection of the lamp, which hung exactly over his head. He stood erect, near a small ebony table, thickly covered with squares of vellum with illuminated figures, called cards, one of which he twisted in his fingers, while his dull and expressionless glance was fixed with a singular gaze upon his velvet hood, which had fallen at his feet. He wore a rich dress, of the fashion of that day; but the gold of the embroidery was faded, and the black velvet of the collar had worn yellow; and an aspect of misery pervaded the whole person of the old man, beneath the golden links of the massy chain which hung on his breast, and under the gilded ceiling of the hall of state. He seemed to be in a state of utter insensibility, except that his lips were slightly agitated, and he repeated, in gradually feebler tones, "Wolf! Wolf!" Isabelle turned her head to him. "Catharine," said she, "it is better to feel one's woes, than to vegetate in such a condition. . . . rise, my child, and farewell. Adieu! the only being I have ever deeply loved, adieu! What I have made myself I must continue, and endure to the close of my fate! But, my poor child, do you never curse your mother!" She had risen, and clasped her daughter to her bosom, and mixed her kisses and her tears with the words of parting. "My child," she added, "it is fitting that you should take leave of the king of France, and at the same time crave a father's blessing. The blessing of a father . . . . of a mother, also, is a sanctified thing." The young woman staggered slowly and with difficulty towards the palefeatured man beneath the lamp, and threw herself at his feet; then timidly and reverently, as if before the statue of a saint, she took one of his hands and pressed it between hers, and looking at him with eyes full of pity and respect, she drew him toward her. "Father," she whispered, "it is your daughter, your little Catharine, who is come to take leave of you for a long time, and who asks you to bless her before she goes." King Charles the sixth gazed with wonder at this beautiful creature, attired in deep mourning, and weeping at his feet. To judge by the working of his features, you would say that he was struggling with memory, and trying to come to a determination upon some matter, "It is true," said he at length, with a hesitating voice," you pray for pardon! ... The king grants you pardon !" "Gracious heaven!" exclaimed Catharine, "he does not recognize me! It is very sad, when fathers forget the names of their own children! My sovereign lord," repeated she in a louder tone, "it is your daugher, the queen of England." ... "Yes," rejoined the king, " queen of England, and wife of the regent of France. . . . for God has laid his finger on my brow, and many long and dark days have passed since there was no king in France and yet I am not dead!" "Oh, my father!" .. she cried with so deep and sad an expression that the poor prince started. "My daughter," said he; "yes, it is my daughter, the fair and gentle Catharine; and here too? what has happened? for the king is always alone. they know that he is unfortunate you must not tell Madame Isabelle that you have been here to see your father.... poor child, why these mourning weeds? who now is dead of the royal house of France? is it your brother, the dauphin Louis?.... Ah! it was a long time ago, and poison kills quickly; for you do not know," said he, sinking his voice to a whisper, "that Madame Isabelle kept great treasures at Blois, during the troubles of the state. It is the dauphin Jean, then? but it was a long time ago, also, since the people told me that he was dead too, and mourning does not last so long with them as it does in a father's heart Alas! a deal of misery has fallen upon our house; but not upon you, at least, my child, for he loves you; and it is a fine thing to be the wife of a hero!" "Good heaven!" she interrupted him, "do you not see that he is dead, and that I also have my part in the evil of your heritage? and the greatest, too, for a whole life without hope is long and wearisome to be borne; and then to go alone to die in a country where one is a stranger, and in one day to lose father, mother, friends, everything that one loves my child, too, (they have taken him from me), is the son of England, for there is no mother for a king." "Catharine," said he, "it must be a great affliction for a daughter of France to sit upon the throne of the lilies as queen, while she has a brother a dauphin, wandering in exile and proscribed !" "Pity! oh, pity! my lord!" cried the young queen, wringing her hands, "what you say is very cruel-I thought your mind would be touched by miseries, if by nothing else! But look upon me now; is the woman in mourning, who weeps at your feet, indeed a queen? Oh, no! it is your poor Catharine, whom you so loved in by-gone days. But recognise me now, for you will never see me again. I ask my father for one kind word, although it be the last, to console me in my exile. Time flies, and tomorrow I go! Oh, now recall your senses, and preserve some remembrance of your child, and bless me before heaven; my father, call back your reason!" My reason," murmured Charles the sixth, slowly;" oh, I take your meaning now. You want me to tell you a very piteous story, a story that will draw tears for ages to come, whenever it is told. Listen: there was once a king who wished to govern, because heaven had created him king of France, and they gave him the poison that kills; but he did not die, because the skill of man cured his body; and he governed with glory and honour! . And after him there rose another king, who, when the time came, wished to govern like his father. They gave him the poison which kills reason, and he did not die bodily; but reason is the lamp of God, and science cannot relight it when it is once extinguished. So misfortune is fallen upon this realm of France, for this king alone loved his people know how this king was called? The Well-Beloved? No: it was a long time ago, and a long course of misery wears out the people, and then they look upward, and curse. Kings are very much to be pitied when they are driven to crave pardon for their misfortunes, as if they were crimes. Do you understand me now? There will be two to answer for these things before God. ... Remember, I do not say that one of them will be ... Do you Louis of Orleans, for one night they rolled him in his blood upon the stones of the street Barbette, and God only judges the dead, and it is not for man to accuse at his tribunal .... and never say, that the other is Madame Isabelle of Bavaria, for she is queen of France !". Tremblingly did the young woman listen to these dreadful revelations of madness, while the queen, her head fallen upon her bosom, stood mute and motionless in the shadow caused by the overhanging curtains. A long silence ensued, then some hurried leaps were heard upon the floor, and an over- grown black hound rushing against the folds of Catharine's drapery, threw himself between the king's feet. The princess pushed him gently back, and kept pos session of the hand, which, with a slight degree of impatience, her sire endeavoured to withdraw from her hold; she still wished to address him; but looking upon her with an artless expression of pleasure and confidence, made up of the smile of an infant that has just recovered a valuable toy, and perhaps of the feelings of a man who has just caught a glimpse of a friend not seen for many years, he stopped her words, saying "My child, it is Wolf!" They parted there. Isabelle of Bavaria raised her daughter from her lowly attitude before the king; and, taking her arm, traversed the spacious gallery. Like two phantoms the two queens appeared in the hall; a loud voice shout ing, "Our lady the queen," roused up pages, careless and light-haired youths, who had fallen asleep close to their extinguished torches. Catharine trembled as she met the gaze of an armed knight, standing by the door, whose crimson scarf and plume waved in the night breeze. Isabelle understood the trembling, the look, and the slight colour which rushed to her daughter's cheeks. "Sir knight," demanded she, "who are you?" "Owen Tudor, of the country of Wales," he answered on his bended knee; "and I have the honour of commanding the men-at-arms of our lady, the queen of England!" "My daughter," said Isabelle, stopping, "have you ever heard the story of the chevalier Louis de Bois-Bourdon? he was in his life a loyal soldier and a gallant heart." "I never did," murmured Catharine. "Listen to me, then, queen of England; it is said to be a crime for a brave but lowly knight to dare to lift his eyes to a queen.... The Seine has some. times rolled bodies down its stream by night, and when the fishermen chance to find one entangled in their nets, they fling it back into the river, because upon the drowned man's neck there is inscribed, Let the king's justice pass!" Charles the sixth had remained alone for a few minutes, during which he appeared to be disturbed by the solitude, although it was habitual, of his vast apartments; he appeared to search for some one with his eye; he passed and re-passed his hands over his forehead, as if to collect his ideas. It came upon him at once. The feeble organs of this unhappy prince were always crushed and kept down by the pressure of his present misery; he could not at first distinguish it from a dream or a recollection; he required time to comprehend, and then by slow reflection to discriminate the last impression — the most recent image from the crowd that remained behind, blended and confused in his brain-and at length, by the aid of memory, he succeeded in producing a blended result of patience and reflection. Each time it was like the labour of a child's understanding, striving to comprehend the purport of the object which has been just impressed upon its young imagination.. He thus at length recognised the woman in mourning who had wept at his feet; all her words rushed again to his mind, and he realized the agony of a daughter who parts from her father without carrying with her his last blessing. Pressing his hand upon his heart, as if to guard that idea there, he darted into the gallery; twice he traversed its entire length, and twice he missed the door; he hurried about mechanically, without being guided by the fixed intention of finding the exit into the hall; for the unfortunate prince knew the nature of his malady, and while in vague anguish he perceived that he was losing the time and opportunity for his pur pose, he seemed to dread lest another impression should chase away that which he so anxiously kept in his heart; so, as he hurried about, he exclaimed continually-" a blessing for my daughter!" "Wolf!" he shouted. The hound started up, looked at his master with a restless growl, and then bounded upon the great staircase, which led in a spiral ascent to the upper floor, whither Charles followed him. The dog stopped at a window whence a balcony projected, and where the king loved to stand in the evening to watch his poor people of France pass by, and listen to their earnest God bless hims. The sudden sensation of the outward air upon his face struck him; he drew his hand across his brow, and for an instant forgot the object which brought him there. Leaning upon the edge of the window, he gazed upon the stone fret-work of the palace, the grotesque cornices of the roofs, the fanciful heads of the waterspouts which hung over the streets, and whose strange outlines were silvered over by the bright beams of a cloudless moon. At this moment the glare of torches was thrown upon the opposite wall, on which a crowd of figures was reflected, while the two queens came out of the hotel, by the great gate, beneath the window where Charles the sixth was standing. It was a mournful spectacle-that vacillating and unsteady light with its red blaze, the hurried movements of the men-at-arms, whose horses reared and caracoled among the litters, the pages but half- awakened, the two women in mourning, and all this sadly and anxiously in the dead of night. And a little above, as if the presiding genius of the picture, the large pale visage of the monarch, ever and anon disclosed as the resin torches shed their flickering light, as if it were enframed in the empty obscurity of the immense window, like a dark and gloomy portrait of Rembrandt. At the moment when the litter moved onward, Catharine cast a glance of long and eternal adieu upon the palace in which the days of her infancy had glided carelessly by, amid the crimes and misfortunes of her family; her eyes met those of her father, strained fixedly upon her there was no madness in his gaze. She put her hand to her heart; the king extended his towards her. "God bless you, my child," said he, in a weak and trembling voice, but it was heard; and the litters, and the men-.at-arms disappeared rapidly in the distance, and soon the sound of their footsteps, and then the flickering blaze of the torches, as they were shaken by the wind, were lost in silence and darkness. Charles the sixth stopped long at the great window, like one of the stone sculptures on the front of the palace. Perhaps in looking upon the serene and starry sky, he caught a reminiscence of his own fair youth, and his reign, so auspiciously commenced-four years of happiness, then thirty years of misery! Life must have been a heavy burden for this hapless prince, to whom there came, ever and anon, accesses of reason to feel all his wretchedness, but never enough to repair or obviate it; and who always awoke, after an attack of delirium, with some new calamity to deplore. Perhaps he reviewed in spirit the nights of mourning, which, during his reign, had disturbed the repose of his great city; the two assassinations in the street Barbette, the treason of Perinet, the massacre of the Armagnacs, and the English in Paris-for two big tears trickled down his wasted cheek. But the night air blew freshly and coldly on his face and through his moist hair. He withdrew slowly, and as if regretfully, from the window, and walking with hasty steps, he endeavoured to remove the chill which made his knees shake, and his teeth chatter, while his brain was burning with the fever of the mind. He descended the steps of the stone staircase, and long wandered about in the great gallery, the living shadow of a king, in the midst of the deserted palace of kings. He felt the cold which chilled him; he called, and his hoarse and broken voice was repeated by the echoes of the vaulted roof, as if in mockery: nobody came. His few attendants gladly shifted upon one another the charge of administering to the wants of a monarch who had fallen in evil days. "'Tis a sad change," murmured the poor prince, "that a king of France should die of cold in his own palace, and that of all those who eat the bread of his house and table, there should not be found one who bestows a thought upon him.” MONEY. Alas what a thing is Poverty "RICHES are not happiness," say many old prosers generally "well-to-do" in the world-granted; neither is Poverty directly and absolutely misery! but if she be not, she is near akin-she is the "mother of miseries," and has, in truth, as swarming and illfavoured a progeny, of all shapes and sizes, as can well be conceived, from full-grown evils down to small petty annoyances. As it often happens, the junior portion of her offspring are the worst to be endured. They have |