THE WOOLLEN DRESS BY HENRY BORDEAUX AUTHOR OF “THE PARTING OF THE WAYS” TRANSLATED BY RUTH HELEN DAVIS NEW YORK DUFFIELD & COMPANY 1912 Copyright, 1911, by PLON-NOURRIT & CO. Copyright, 1912, by DUFFIELD & COMPANY TO PIERRE LOTI In dedicating to you this story of “The Woollen Dress,” I discharge a very old debt, a debt of my youth, when enthusiasm for your works--your poems, I ought rather to call them--flushed and exalted me as the first misty moments of the dawn suffuse the surface of the earth. With what magic did you not gild our adolescent years! We were at the spoiled age of twenty, at the threshold of life’s work, when one arms one’s self against love, and indulges in yearnings for universal things which only later, alike with him who has lived too much and him who has not lived at all, accept their limitations and disenchantments;--we were twenty, and we found in you that melancholy which at twenty it is so sweet to breathe. This book is the story of a quite simple young girl crushed by the cruelties of our modern life. When I hear children singing that old round, which I am sure you loved as well as I, “We were ten girls in a field All waiting to be married,” I picture Claudine, Suzanne, Dumaine and their companions as a graceful chorus in which the voices of old France still sound. I call them by name and they come to me from all the provinces,--Sylvia from Valois and Marie from Brittany, the little Fadette from Berry, humble Genevieve from Dauphiné, and from Aunis that little Madeleine, whose feet tread the same crooked path where later Dominique must pass, drawn back by sorrow to his native land, “like an animal wounded and bleeding who yet knows his way home.” Here, too, are Mireille and Nerte, glowing with the sun of Provence, Gracieuse from Basque, and Colette from Metz. In the field they were only ten. Can they not take by the hand a little sister who has such need of their protection, this Raymonde, that I have gathered from Savoy, who would like so much to join their game if she could do so without intrusion? H. B. CHALET DU MAUPAS, September 20, 1910. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE SLEEPING WOODS II AND EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES III THE FACE OF THIS WORLD CHANGES THE WOOLLEN DRESS PART I THE SLEEPING WOODS AMAZED, enraptured, I gazed about me. This, surely, was the very forest of the Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Suddenly, at a turn of the road, her castle loomed up among the trees, huge and mysterious.