One of our polite friends there spontaneously offered us his donkey to ride, and his services as guide, if we would attempt the summit of Monte Rotondo, 9,068 feet, "la montagne la plus haute presque du monde," as he proudly assured

us.

We declined his offer and considerately forebore to crush him under the 29,000 feet of Mt. Everest, or even bruise his patriotic pride with the height of Mt. Blanc.

Though we saw several shooting-boxes among the forests on the top of the passes, I do not think, from what I could learn, that I should advise any one to go to Corsica purely for sport.

Of course, first and foremost comes the moufflon; he is not legendary, but he is very scarce, and difficult to get at. Nor

has he long silky hair, as described in one of the guide-books, but he has a hide with close, short hair like a red deer, but lighter in color and finer in texture. A pair of massive horns curl over toward the middle of his back, and he has short legs like a goat.

You may camp out for a week in summer, when the mouflon come down from the tops, and yet not get a shot, or even see one. It is said that the hunter, moreover, does not care to take you to, or put you in, the best place for a shot, but I fancy a system of payment by results would, at all events, secure this for you. The moufflon is, I understand, more plentiful in Sardinia.

In the way of smaller game, there are hares, duck, woodcock, and snipe; the latter are snared by the natives with horsehair nooses—at least, so I was told by a sportsman who was plucking the tail of one of our horses as it stood at a wayside inn, for making filéts for the very purpose. NEW SERIES.-VOL. LI., No. 3.

Wild boars are fairly plentiful; one was brought to our hotel at Ajaccio, bought for 20 francs, and duly eaten at table d'hôte. The flesh was dark, and the flavor uninteresting. For my part, I much prefer the fat, domestic pig.

On Captain G's property, close to Ajaccio, in a cave some 600 feet above his house, and which, more than once in the last eight or ten years, has been, to the proprietor's knowledge, the shelter of bandits I saw the marks of two wild boar, which, just then, were every night ravaging Captain G's shrubberies for acorns and roots, the havoc being sadly apparent here and there.

I conclude the hunter watches for them at night in an open space, for the scrub is so thick that it would be impossible to get a shot at them in the daytime except by driving, and pig-sticking would be out of the question.

Perhaps the most lucrative sport in the island is the blackbird shooting. There are numbers of them on the hill-sides, and they feed on the arbutus berries. The bodies are boned and made into pátés de merle, and a very succulent páté I was told it is. I was unable to taste it myself, as the vendors of Ajaccio were all sold out of last season's make.

With the exception of goldfinches, siskins, and brown and green linnets, small birds were scarce. I saw a few hoopoes near the coast, and a couple of jays high up in a pine forest.

One very handsome bird I had never seen before, and though I saw a stuffed one in Bastia, the shopman could not tell me its name; indeed, he declared it was not a Corsican bird at all. It was about the size of a gray shrike, with a longish tail; on its neck and breast it was brilliant with the blue sheen of a kingfisher's back, while its own back was of the same reddish cinnamon as the kingfisher's breast. It had a thin beak, slightly curved, like a bee-eater's, and was evidently hawking gnats in the sunshine when I first saw it.

There were about six of them in a flock, and now and then one would light on the telegraph wires along the road.

Trout, from all I could hear, are fairly plentiful in many of the rivers, but of no great size. From the specimens I saw at table d'hôte, I should say that a -lb. fish would be above the average. There are,

Six years ago, when the October leaves were falling on the boulevards, a young consumptive girl passed from among us. Death found her comparatively unknown. A painter here and there had whispered her praises; a great lady had, perhaps, taken her by the hand; but outside some such small clique in l'aris the name of Marie Bashkirtseff was a name, and a name only. Like a score of other girls, she had worked at art, had been hung on the line in the Salon, and had received a tardy " mention honorable." * With this small stir, with these scant honors, the matter might have dropped-had it not been for the pathos of her ending and a bundle of manuscript in a drawer. The dead girl had left a diary. It is this journal with which the world is ringing now, and which it is hardly too much to say is likely to carry the fame of Marie Bashkirtseff over the face of the civilized globe. She speaks, in a word, to the artistic instinct of the world. The lightning strokes which lay bare a human soul in these volumes make the book one of extraordinary interest. In it we find a woman self-revealed, a woman who, almost for the first time in history, has had the courage to present us with a real woman, as distinguished from the sham women of books.

The outward events of the girl's life, as is so often the case with those who are busy with things of the inward existence, can be told in a dozen lines.

A child of the Caucasus, the little Russian spent her youth at Nice. It was there she learned to love the splendor of the south, the mysteries of the silver olivegroves, the blue of the passionate skies. A summer moon rising over the Mediterranean, the winter sun, the wind in the palm-trees, the enchantment of the sapphire sea, all these things seemed to burn themselves into the fervid heart of the girl.

Like Balzac, Maric Bashkirtseff loved Nice and Naples, but more than Nice and Naples she loved Rome. Rome uplifted this strangely constituted being like no other city on earth. It was doubt

* It was after Marie Bashkirtseff's death

that her pictures were hung in the Luxem bourg.

less the city of the seven hills which gave birth to that determination which fixed her artistic career; it was the city of the seven bills which saw the miscarriage of her pathetic, because ill-placed love. The girl's amazing truthfulness, her portentous naïveté as Mr. Gladstone in his notes on Marie Bashkirtseff has it-carry us with her inch by inch on her bootless errands to her lovable, but shifty Roman scapegrace. The episode begins of course, as such things will, with a waltz, a mask, a bunch of roses; it ends again, as such things have a knack of doing, with useless reproaches, with still more useless regrets. And yet-and yet one feels in reading this woman's journals, that Rome was, and always remained, the city where she had loved. She returned again and again to it in her thoughts, the thoughts so minutely, so laboriously recorded in these pages. "L'amour fait paraître le monde tel qu'il devrait être" she exclaims in her own exalted language; in her instance no doubt it colored that particular little corner of the earth where cardinals are prone to have nephews. She wrote of Rome as a lover writes of his mistress, and as her graceless gallant assuredly never wrote to her. How she hungered after the Eternal City, hungered after it when her shifted aspirations compelled her for her very nature in this respect was a tyranny-to toil and labor under the chilly northern skies of Paris. Rome and Love, Paris and Art, these two volumes might be labelled; for the home life of Nice, her momentary return as a stranger to her native Russia, her wanderings in Spain, all these things, after all, were but as shadows thrown on a screen. One is tempted to dwell on the human side of Marie Bashkirtseff's character all the more because she does that side but scant justice in these confessions. The glitter of the dissecting knife misleads even the practised eye of Mr. Gladstone, whom we find saying: "She did not possess the finer graces which we signify by the epithet feminine, and again, referring to her character, "Wonder it will stir, but not confidence ; admiration, but not quite a loving admiraMademoiselle Bashkirtseff attracts

tion.

and repels alternately, and perhaps repels as much as she attracts ;" and yet again, "Wedlock would have been a troublesome incident; she holds it at arms' length."

The writer of these lines saw in her a much more human figure. She was ambitious, proud, restless; she was more than all this-but she was above all things a woman. Like the author of the Comédie Humaine (one is constantly reminded of Balzac in these pages by the girl's passionate admiration of him), her desire was to be celebrated and to be loved. The two volumes before us give her too short life's struggle to attain first the one and then the other. Fame she had touched ere her fatal disease closed upon her; if not actually grasped in her short lifetime, it lay infallibly buried in her stillhidden journals. But love? From her passionate outcries-outcries wrung from her when her powers were failing, when she already stood within the twilight land of death-love in the fulness and strength in which she desired it, we know eluded her to the last.

There is more than pathos in the thought. It accounts for many defects in the journal, for faults which strike even the casual reader, to whom these volumes will probably convey the notion of excessive self-will, very likely of an almost repellent self-love. Yet the egotism of the artist is a byword; the egotism of the sick and, as we all know, especially of the love sick, are common phenomena. In these volumes Marie Bashkirtseff is, in spite of her lusty protestations to the contrary, love-sick and sick in turn. When we think of this Russian girl's failings we must remember that her time was short. It was but a poor race with death which she ran, a break-neck start in which the finish was a foregone conclusion. How to achieve something in the short time which remained to her that was her absorbing thought. To read-she was a deep and omnivorous reader; to see-she was an acute and minute observer; to learn, to travel-all these things were necessities to her; but no less than such powers of absorption had she the wish, and above all the gift, of expressing herself. At first the mode varied and vacillated, as it often does with natures so handsomely endowed. As a child she must dance, as a girl sing, as a woman paint and model. Each in its urn served her mood, and ministered to

the fever which was in her for saying what she had to say; for, strangely enough, her gifts as a writer satisfied her not at all. Again and again in the journal we read her lamentations over her feeble pen. Pregnant with thought, teeming with suggestion, rich with all the complex meaning of modern life as are these pages, we yet feel, with her, that they but poorly express the extraordinary vitality of this young girl. When we think of her as egotistical, we must remember that this diary-worthy as it is of a Tolstoi-was to her little more than a human document."

A

This modesty of the autobiographer was also strikingly apparent in the woman. This musician-for Marie Bashkirtseff could hold a room spellbound with her phrasing of Chopin-this musician, sculptor, painter, writer had none of the airs and graces of a merely clever woman. simplicity, mingled with a quaint, a delightful whimsicality, were markedly hers. In her presence, it is true, one was conscious of being face to face with a personality, but it was not the uncomfortable sort of personality which mounts a pedestal, but rather the kind with whom we desire to sit down and chat by the fire. She was womanish in her wit, her refinement, her coquetry; womanish in her pruderies, in her audacities, her chatter, her silences. in her gayety, and, more than all, in her still more abundant sadness. Slightly above the medium height-above the height of the average Frenchwoman I should say, for they do not yet grow female gendarmes over the Channel-Marie Bashkirtseff bore that something ethereal and spiritual in her face which seems the birthright of those who die young. exquisitely moulded figure, the arm and hand of a statue, the foot of a Spaniard, the blond hair and penetrating eye of the Northerner, all these things did not constitute in Marie Bashkirtseff what is called in every-day parlance, "a pretty woman." I doubt if the ordinary waltzer would have pressed to be introduced to her at a ball. That she had a bewitching pallor-an opaqueness of skin-tone peculiar to the North; a grace, a distinction, a fascination, a power which was felt in her very gentleness, all these things must be admitted by those who had the privilege of knowing her. Her shapeliness, her graciousness, were peculiarly hers, much more hers than the cherry lips, the rounded

An

cheek of the "pretty" girl of drawingrooms. I have spoken of her graciousness, of her more than approachableness, yet in her very sociability there was a kind of aloofness, of detachment, which had little to do with the malady she so constantly deplored. At the age of twenty Marie Bashkirtseff was already slightly deaf. And this was her crowning grief. She could bear to die-to leave a world that held so much for her; but to become deaf-that was another matter. To hear imperfectly for this ardent creature meant to become dull, and stupid, and old. The woman in her revolted at the thought, and, as I have already said, there was a great deal of the woman in this Russian girl. The supremacy of sex proclaimed itself in her voice, which was ever soft and gentle, though the spoken word was incisive.

Half the charm of her individuality lay in this very femininity. It endeared her, perhaps, to her every-day companions in the Passage des Panoramas, more than all her splendid talents. Her very freaks and moods brought with them the air of another and more delicate world. A gala night at the opera; a vision of a Grenze toilette; a panier filled with roses -all these evanescent Parisian joys had their charm for the hard-worked Bohemian of the studios. Yet the girl was far from boasting or prating. Indeed, if any envy existed between Mlle. Marie," as we called her in the studio, and her comrades, it lay on the side of the spoiled young Russian for the simpler lives, the more artistic milieu which she imagined was theirs. It has been said that we are never so good or so bad, so happy or so unhappy, as we paint ourselves, and this tendency to overstate the case I find in Marie Bashkirtseff's journals. The colors are lurid and graphic, the light and shade Rembrandtesque, but in this vivid picture of a human soul I miss many of the subtler half-tints. The grays are often wanting. The woman was so much more human than the portrait. With a fine scorn, in real life, for bourgeois pretensions and middle-class prejudices, she could be kind, helpful, almost tender with the ignorant and ill-advised. I have seen her aiding the least promising new-comer*

The visiting master, the Adonis of the studio, M. Tony Robert Fleury (already a middle-aged Adonis in 1880), was sometimes unnecessarily severe with beginners. The initial drubbing of one student -a foreigner who

in the atelier Julien, giving her time, when she had already begun to guess that her working days were numbered. And how she worked! To labor was a passion with her; to toil at whatever she took in hand, a kind of ferocious joy.

At the present day I am told Monsieur Julien's students are a thousand strong. The ateliers have been moved to an airy, even an aristocratic quarter, and overcrowding and bad ventilation are a thing of the past. Marie Bashkirtseff's experiences in the Passage des Panoramas were of a different kind. It was not a bed of roses that this petted and idolized young Russian girl made for herself during the last seven or eight years of her life. From the teeming, tearing outer boulevard a passage, resembling a down-at-heel Burlington Arcade, and which was remarkable only for its emporiums of sham jewelry, and the unctuous, greasy smell of its frequent eating-houses, gave on to a tortuous flight of steps. This dark, winding, and evilsmelling stairway was the entrance of the atelier Julien. A fitting entrance, perhaps, it was, for it prepared the visitor for the stuffiness, the grime, the ill-odors of the building above. It was here, in a room partly partitioned off so as to form an ante-chamber and an office for the master, that from thirty to fifty students congregated every day. Closed windows, a fierce charcoal stove, the indescribable smells of oil paints, turpentine, rags, and, at luncheon-time, of scraps of eatables, could hardly have conduced to the health of the strongest; yet I cannot recall one word of complaint that ever fell from Marie Bashkirtseff. She was a spoiled child -that is to say, an adult the least wellequipped to stand the knocks and rubs of the world; and yet the inconveniences, the hardships of the studio routine seemed to affect her not at all. Her eyes were, perhaps, elsewhere. The artist in her, at any rate, enabled her to see what was good and ignore what was evil in this haphazard Bohemian life.

Indeed, one would but poorly understand this elastic and versatile temperament

has since found success in another walk in life -gives an example of Marie Bashkirtseff's ready tact and discernment. Crossing to the dejected artist's easel, she gave one of her swift, penetrating glances at the stranger's face, and tapping the unsatisfactory canvas exclaimed: "Oh, no! you are much cleverer than that!"