The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton — Part 1Wharton, Edith
General
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton — Part 1
Wharton, Edith
Fiction; Short stories, American
So ends her story. As for that of Herve de Lanrivain, I had only to
apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details. The
evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his family
influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and left soon
afterward for Paris. He was probably in no mood for a worldly life, and
he appears to have come almost immediately under the influence of the
famous M. Arnauld d’Andilly and the gentlemen of Port Royal. A year or
two later he was received into their Order, and without achieving any
particular distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his
death some twenty years later. Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by
a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a
narrow brow. Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as
I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the
Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate. After all, in the
course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved
romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal...
The End
MRS. MANSTEY’S VIEW
As first published in Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1891
The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her
at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the
back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-house, in a street
where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the
pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius. She was the widow of a
clerk in a large wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for
her only daughter had married in California, and could not afford the
long journey to New York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might
have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many
years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other’s
society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of
a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter,
and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing
stiff with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter’s
companionship, Mrs. Manstey’s increasing infirmity, which caused her to
dread the three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would
have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey; and
without perhaps, formulating these reasons she had long since accepted
as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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