Nor man nor woman could withstand him.
From this hour he delivered himself up to a sublime selfishness. With
all his passions and all his profusion, a callousness crept over his
heart. His sympathy for those he believed his inferiors and his vassals
was slight. Where we do not respect we soon cease to love; when we
cease to love, virtue weeps and flies. His soul wandered in dreams of
omnipotence.
This picture perhaps excites your dislike; perchance your contempt.
Pause! Pity him! Pity his fatal youth!
CHAPTER XI.
_Love at a Bazaar_
THE Lady Aphrodite at first refused to sit in the Duke's pavilion. Was
she, then, in the _habit_ of refusing? Let us not forget our Venus of
the Waters. Shall we whisper where the young Duke first dared to hope?
No, you shall guess. _Je vous le donne en trois_. The Gardens? The
opera? The tea-room? No! no! no! You are conceiving a locality much more
romantic. Already you have created the bower of a Parisina, where the
waterfall is even more musical than the birds, more lulling than the
evening winds; where all is pale, except the stars; all hushed, except
their beating pulses! Will this do? No! What think you, then, of a
_Bazaar_?
O thou wonderful nineteenth century! thou that believest in no miracles
and doest so many, hast thou brought this, too, about, that ladies'
hearts should be won, and gentlemen's also, not in courts of tourney or
halls of revel, but over a counter and behind a stall? We are, indeed, a
nation of shopkeepers!
The king of Otaheite, though a despot, was a reformer.
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