Behind these laughing groups came Herminie, the expression of her dark blue eye floating in space, and, like the flight of the swallow, resting on nothing. Onward she slowly stepped, idly pushing before her the first faded leaves of autumn, withered by the hoar frost; and, instead of the intoxicating grape, she carried in her hand a _bouquet_ of the arbutus and the _alize_, fruits without perfume, like her own heart, now without hope or love. Night came: every eye weary with toil was closed,--the chimes alone telling the hours of the night vibrated on the air. Towards morning a startling cry of horror was heard from a cottage on the banks of the Cure--Herminie was dead! that is to say, her face was paler than usual in her sleep; but she awoke no more! I shall ever remember that beautiful face, for I had never till then contemplated the countenance of one whose spirit had taken its way to that country from which no traveller returns. A few days, and the withered rose-leaves which the poor girl had pulled at the cottage door were scattered by the wind; a few more, and the poor old father followed his favourite child; and his surviving daughters, half-crazed with grief and sorrow, left the neighbourhood. As to him who was the original cause of this domestic tragedy,--rich, happy, perhaps a deputy and making laws himself,--he lives, and is probably respected. We call ourselves a civilized people; we throw into prison a man who strikes another,--and we do not punish, we do not cast from society, we do not even reproach the base hypocrite, who, with a smile on his lips, and for the infamous gratification of his bad, ungovernable, selfish passions, becomes the murderer of a whole family. Bad and rotten are the laws which permit such infamous practices. Unworthy of trust are the legislators who dream not--who never think of preventing these impure and festering diseases of our social system. My friends, who had listened attentively to the sad tale, turned from me to inspect more closely the white cottage by the Cure, and no longer expressed any astonishment at the severe countenances of the peasants. But how does it happen, will the reader say, that so delightful a province of France as that of Le Morvan should have remained for nineteen centuries unknown to England,--that nation of travellers who are to be found in every corner of the globe inhabitable and uninhabitable? How is it that such a pearl,--a sporting country too,--should have remained buried for so long a period as it were under the dark mantle of indifference? And is it to be credited that in a district in which are to be found simultaneously wolves and health, wild boar and simplicity, the best wines in the world, and all the theological virtues, should have remained up to this day hidden--lost in the deep shadows of its woods and the solitude of its mountains?