ONCE A WEEK 1868 EDITED BY E. S. DALLAS JULY TO DECEMBER LONDON: BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO. II, BOUVERIE STREET. CONTENTS. Owing to a mistake as to the time when Victor Hugo's novel would be published, together with the desire of the Publishers to New Series EDITED BY E. S. DALLAS. No. 27. July 4, 1868. Price 2d. came to an end, it led forth towards the open LOVE THE AVENGER. fields, over a bridge, beside which lay the By the Author of ALL FOR GREED. CHAPTER I.-ALONE IN LIFE. A LMOST in the middle of that windswept plain which lies between Blois and Chartres, and dooms to unsightly monotony the central Provinces of France, stands a small village called St. Martin. Within memory of not even the oldest inhabitant, it had been a hamlet, and its present village-state was an evidently transitory one. It was creeping slowly but steadily on to become a town. That would depend upon the precise spots chosen as stations for the railway line, when a certain branch, anxiously waited for, should be completed. For the moment, St. Martin was a village, and, as is usual in even the richest French districts, it was neither a pic-❘ turesque nor a clean one. As far as it went, the little place was possessed of all its requisites. It had a mayor with his belongings, a curé, a schoolmaster, a Garde Champêtre, and a post-mistress. It could want nothing more, and was certain of being well and sufficiently administered. The five or six hundred individuals composing the population of St. Martin inhabited a collection of stray tenements, irregularly dotted about the straight line of road which led from Blois to Tours, and which, looked at from a balloon, would have seemed a mere patch on the broad, flat garment of the plain. On the right-hand side, as you came from Blois, stood the church, a small edifice, terribly out of repair, with its traditional porch, beneath which the peasants congregate on rainy Sundays, and its traditionally crooked spire, bent, as the said peasants believe, by the inexorable north-west winds. On either side of, and opposite to, the church, extended what was called the Street, and, when what the street regarded as its shops VOL. II.-1868. pond, where washerwomen were for ever at work, and merged at length, about a mile further on, into the high-road from Tours to Chartres. Flat, flat, dreary, bare, uninteresting. That is the traveller's impression as he crosses these monotonous plains, whereon a bush is a prominent feature, and a group of trees what French people call an event. Uninteresting? Yes, to you who pass on and go your way; but to those whose way it is to abide here, full of interest, life-stirring and terrible as any that ever formed the ground-work of historic dramas. Nearly opposite the little dilapidated church, with its dumb clock, whose rusty hands eternally pointed to half-past three, and whose rusty, arrow-shaped weather-cock never swerved from N.N.W., stood a shop with barred door and closed shutters. Upon a broad stripe of dirty white, which extended all round the habitation, was inscribed in big, black letters the following legend :— WIDOW RAYNAL, GROCER AND VINTNER. The shop formed the corner of the street, inasmuch as, whilst one side of it opened upon the street, the other had its windows upon a small, open space, terminating in a narrow, muddy lane, and the door of the shop itself formed the apex of the uncouth triangle, blunted and flattened by two uneven doorsteps of grey stone. Just across the open space we have mentioned (some twenty or thirty yards square) rose a building three stories high, with a smart balcony to its firstfloor-a hotel, forsooth! not an inn, or an alehouse, or anything so rustic or unimportant— but a hotel with a bran new sign, on which was blazoned forth, in gold upon bright blue, nothing less than the words, À l'Hôtel de l'Europe. Europe! Nothing less, it seemed, would suit the magniloquence of this village hostelry, very empty and forlorn to all appearance in the NO. 27. |