Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive. Transcriber's Note: 1. Page scan source: http://www.archive.org/details/blanchemaidof00schuiala 2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe]. BLANCHE: THE MAID OF LILLE [Illustration: tête de cire.] BLANCHE: The Maid of Lille Translated from the German of OSSIP SCHUBIN by SARAH H. ADAMS PRIVATELY PRINTED BOSTON MCMII _Copyright, 1902, by_ SARAH H. ADAMS Colonial Press Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. Boston, Mass., U. S. A. INTRODUCTION A few years since we chose to spend the summer in a châlet among the Dolomites of South Tyrol. Weird, fantastic, inaccessible, mysterious, grotesque, and yet often wearing a jewelled crown of eternal ice, these peaks soared into the ether above and around us. "Nothing," says a recent traveller, "can surpass the majesty and beauty of the towers and ramparts, the battlemented walls, impregnable castles, and gracefully pinnacled cathedrals into the forms of which their summits are built up. Their colouring is another striking characteristic; many of them rivet the eye with the richness of the tints,--deep reds, bright yellows, silvery whites, and the dark blues and blacks of the rocks. But all these colours are modified and softened by a peculiar grayish white tint. The mountains look as if powdered over with some substance less hard and cold than newly fallen snow." Although within a day's drive of Pieve di Cadore,--Titian's birthplace--and not far from Cortina, we could hardly have found a more isolated spot. It was a hermitage, and we knew literally no one within hundreds of miles. Ossip Schubin, the popular German novelist at that time, had sent us a volume of stories, with the request that we would translate them. We selected the story now offered as being most in sympathy with our romantic surroundings. A learned Englishman has said, "If histories were written as histories should be, boys and girls would cry to read them." But alas! how is the spirit, the tone, of a dead century to be made to breathe again and report itself? The landscape alone is permanent; new figures constantly fill the foreground. Poetry, legend, myths, help us to divine some of the strange chords in the human chant, which, heavily burdened with sorrow, come down to us through the ages.