Charlotte M. Yonge - "Two Penniless Princesses"

Oscar Wilde - "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

Milton Goldsmith - "Rabbi and Priest"

Honore De Balzac - "Grosse und Kleine Welt"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The International Monthly Magazine Volume V to No II

V >> Various >> The International Monthly Magazine Volume V to No II




"One morning," she resumed, "Monsieur de Marteille awoke me
early--'Farewell!' he said, pale and trembling.--'What are you saying?'
cried I with affright.--'Alas,' replied he, embracing me, I did not wish to
tell you before, but for a fortnight I have had orders to leave.
Hostilities are to be resumed in the Low Countries; I have no longer a
single hour either for you or for me; I have over forty leagues to travel
to-day.'--'Oh, my God, what will become of me?' said I weeping. 'I will
follow you.'--'But, my dear Marianne, I shall return.'--'You will return in
an age! Go, cruel one, I shall be dead when you return.'

"An hour was spent in taking leave and in tears; he was obliged to go; he
went.

"I returned to weep in that retreat, that was so delightful the evening
before. Two days after his departure, he wrote me a very tender letter, in
which he told me that on the next day, he would have the consolation of
engaging in battle. 'I hope,' added he, 'that the campaign will not be a
long one; some days of hard fighting, and then I return to your feet.'
What more shall I tell you? He wrote me once again."

Mademoiselle de Camargo unfolded slowly the torn letter. "Here is the
second letter:--


Oct 17.

"'No, I shall not return, my dear, I am going to die, but without
fear, without reproach. Oh! if you were here, Marianne! What
madness! in a hospital where, all of us, all, be we what we may,
are disfigured with wounds, and dying! What an idea to dash ahead
in the fight, when I only thought of seeing you again. As soon as
I was wounded, I asked the surgeon if I should live long enough to
reach Paris: "You have but an hour," he answered me pitilessly...
They brought me here with the others. In a word, we should learn
to resign ourselves to what comes from Heaven. I die content with
having loved you; console yourself; return to the opera. I am not
jealous of those who shall succeed me, for will they love you as I
have done? Farewell, Marianne, death approaches, and death never
waits; I thank it for having left me sufficient time to bid you
farewell. Now, it will be I who will wait for you.

"'Farewell, farewell, I press you to my heart, which ceases to
beat.'"


After having wiped her eyes, Mademoiselle de Camargo continued as follows:
"Shall I describe to you all my sorrows, all my tears, all my anguish!
Alas! as he had said, I returned to the opera. I did not forget Monsieur
de Marteille, in the tempest of my folly. Others have loved me. I have
loved no one but Monsieur de Marteille; his memory has beamed upon my life
like a blessing from heaven. When I reappeared at the opera, I was seen
attending mass; I was laughed at for my devotion. They did not understand,
philosophers as they were, that I prayed to God, in consequence of those
words of Monsieur de Martielle: 'Now it will be I who will wait for you.'

"When I left the chateau, I plucked a bouquet in the park, thinking that I
was plucking the flowers that had bloomed for him; I brought away this
bouquet, along with the portrait that you see there. I had vowed, in
leaving our dear retreat, to go every year, at the same season, to gather
a bouquet in the park. Will you believe it? I never went there again!"

Mademoiselle de Camargo thus finished her history. "Well, my dear
philosopher," said Helvetius to Duclos, in descending the steps, "you have
just read a book that is somewhat curious."--"A bad book," answered Duclos,
"but such books are always interesting."

In April, 1770, the news spread that Mademoiselle de Camargo had just died
a good catholic. "This created a great surprise," says a journal of the
day, "in the republic of letters, for she was supposed to have been dead
twenty years." Her last admirer and her last friend, to whom she had
bequeathed her dogs and her cats, had caused her body to be interred with
a magnificence unexampled at the opera. "All the world," says Grimm,
"admired that white pall, the symbol of chastity, that all unmarried
persons are entitled to in their funeral ceremony."





MY NOVEL:


OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE.(7)


BY PISISTRATUS CAXTON.




BOOK IX.--INITIAL CHAPTER.


Now that I am fairly in the heart of my story, these preliminary chapters
must shrink into comparatively small dimensions, and not encroach upon the
space required by the various personages whose acquaintance I have picked
up here and there, and who are now all crowding upon me like poor
relations to whom one has unadvisedly given a general invitation, and who
descend upon one simultaneously about Christmas time. Where they are to be
stowed, and what is to become of them all, heaven knows; in the meanwhile,
the reader will have already observed that the Caxton family themselves
are turned out of their own rooms, sent a-packing, in order to make way
for the new comers.

And now that I refer to that respected family, I shall take occasion
(dropping all metaphor) to intimate a doubt, whether, should these papers
be collected and republished, I shall not wholly recast the Initial
Chapters in which the Caxtons have been permitted to reappear. They assure
me, themselves, that they feel a bashful apprehension lest they may be
accused of having thrust irrelevant noses into affairs which by no means
belong to them--an impertinence which, being a peculiarly shy race, they
have carefully shunned in the previous course of their innocent and
segregated existence. Indeed, there is some cause for that alarm, seeing
that not long since, in a journal professing to be critical, this _My
Novel, or Varieties in English Life_, was misnomed and insulted as "a
Continuation of _The Caxtons_," with which biographical work it has no
more to do (save in the aforesaid introductions to previous Books in the
present diversified and compendious narrative) than I with Hecuba, or
Hecuba with me. Reserving the doubt herein suggested for maturer
deliberation, I proceed with my new Initial Chapter. And I shall stint the
matter therein contained to a brief comment upon PUBLIC LIFE.

Were you ever in public life, my dear reader? I don't mean by that
question, to ask whether you were ever Lord Chancellor, Prime Minister,
Leader of the Opposition, or even a member of the House of Commons. An
author hopes to find readers far beyond that very egregious but very
limited segment of the Great Circle. Were you ever a busy man in your
vestry, active in a municipal corporation, one of a committee for
furthering the interests of an enlightened candidate for your native
burgh, town, or shire?--in a word, did you ever resign your private
comforts as men in order to share the public troubles of mankind? If ever
you have so far departed from the Lucretian philosophy, just look back--was
it life at all that you lived?--were you an individual distinct existence--a
passenger in the railway?--or were you merely an indistinct portion of that
common flame which heated the boiler and generated the steam that set off
the monster train?--very hot, very active, very useful, no doubt; but all
your identity fused in flame, and all your forces vanishing in gas.

And you think the people in the railway carriages care for you?--do you
think that the gentleman in the worsted wrapper is saying to his neighbor
with the striped rug on his comfortable knees, "How grateful we ought to
be for that fiery particle which is crackling and hissing under the
boiler! It helps us on the fraction of an inch from Vauxhall to Putney?"
Not a bit of it. Ten to one but he is saying--"Not sixteen miles an hour!
What the deuce is the matter with the stoker?"

Look at our friend Audley Egerton. You have just had a glimpse of the real
being that struggles under the huge copper;--you have heard the hollow
sound of the rich man's coffers under the tap of Baron Levy's friendly
knuckle--heard the strong man's heart give out its dull warning sound to
the scientific ear of Dr. F vanishes the separate existence, lost again in
the flame that heats the boiler, and the smoke that curls into air from
the grimy furnace.

Look to it, O Public Man, whoever thou art, and whatsoever thy degree--see
if thou canst not compound matters, so as to keep a little nook apart for
thy private life; that is, for _thyself_! Let the great Popkins Question
not absorb wholly the individual soul of thee, as Smith or Johnson. Don't
so entirely consume thyself under that insatiable boiler, that when thy
poor little monad rushes out from the sooty furnace, and arrives at the
stars, thou mayest find no vocation for thee there, and feel as if thou
hadst nothing to do amidst the still splendors of the Infinite. I don't
deny to thee the uses of "Public Life;" I grant that it is much to have
helped to carry that great Popkins Question; but Private Life, my friend,
is the life of thy Private soul; and there may be matters concerned with
that which, on consideration, thou mayest allow, cannot be wholly mixed up
with the great Popkins Question--and were not finally settled when thou
didst exclaim--"I have not lived in vain--the Popkins Question is carried at
last!" O immortal soul, for one quarter of an hour _per diem_--de-Popkinise
thine immortality!




CHAPTER II.


It had not been without much persuasion on the part of Jackeymo, that
Riccabocca had consented to settle himself in the house which Randal had
recommended to him. Not that the exile conceived any suspicion of the
young man beyond that which he might have shared with Jackeymo, viz., that
Randal's interest in the father was increased by a very natural and
excusable admiration of the daughter. But the Italian had the pride common
to misfortune,--he did not like to be indebted to others, and he shrank
from the pity of those to whom it was known that he had held a higher
station in his own land. These scruples gave way to the strength of his
affection for his daughter and his dread of his foe. Good men, however
able and brave, who have suffered from the wicked, are apt to form
exaggerated notions of the power that has prevailed against them. Jackeymo
had conceived a superstitious terror of Peschiera, and Riccabocca, though
by no means addicted to superstition, still had a certain creep of the
flesh whenever he thought of his foe.

But Riccabocca--than whom no man was more physically brave, and no man, in
some respects, more morally timid--feared the Count less as a foe than as a
gallant. He remembered his kinsman's surpassing beauty--the power he had
obtained over women. He knew him versed in every art that corrupts, and
void of all the conscience that deters. And Riccabocca had unhappily
nursed himself into so poor an estimate of the female character, that even
the pure and lofty nature of Violante did not seem to him a sufficient
safeguard against the craft and determination of a practised and
remorseless intriguer. But of all the precautions he could take, none
appeared more likely to conduce to safety, than his establishing a
friendly communication with one who professed to be able to get at all the
Count's plans and movements, and who could apprise Riccabocca at once
should his retreat be discovered. "Forewarned is forearmed," said he to
himself, in one of the proverbs common to all nations. However, as with
his usual sagacity he came to reflect upon the alarming intelligence
conveyed to him by Randal, viz., that the Count sought his daughter's
hand, he divined that there was some strong personal interest under such
ambition; and what could be that interest save the probability of
Riccabocca's ultimate admission to the Imperial grace, and the Count's
desire to assure himself of the heritage to an estate that he might be
permitted to retain no more? Riccabocca was not indeed aware of the
condition (not according to usual customs in Austria) on which the Count
held the forfeited domains. He knew not that they had been granted merely
on pleasure; but he was too well aware of Peschiera's nature to suppose
that he would woo a bride without a dower, or be moved by remorse in any
overture of reconciliation. He felt assured, too--and this increased all
his fears--that Peschiera would never venture to seek an interview himself;
all the Count's designs on Violante would be dark, secret, and
clandestine. He was perplexed and tormented by the doubt, whether or not
to express openly to Violante his apprehensions of the nature of the
danger to be apprehended. He had told her vaguely that it was for her sake
that he desired secrecy and concealment. But that might mean any thing:
what danger to himself would not menace her? Yet to say more was so
contrary to a man of his Italian notions and Machiavellian maxims! To say
to a young girl, "There is a man come over to England on purpose to woo
and win you. For heaven's sake take care of him; he is diabolically
handsome; he never fails where he sets his heart." "Cospetto!" cried the
doctor aloud, as these admonitions shaped themselves to speech in the
camera-obscura of his brain; "such a warning would have undone a Cornelia
while she was yet an innocent spinster." No, he resolved to say nothing to
Violante of the Count's intention, only to keep guard, and make himself
and Jackeymo all eyes and all ears.

The house Randal had selected pleased Riccabocca at first glance. It stood
alone, upon a little eminence; its upper windows commanded the high road.
It had been a school, and was surrounded by high walls, which contained a
garden and lawn sufficiently large for exercise. The garden doors were
thick, fortified by strong bolts, and had a little wicket lattice, shut
and opened at pleasure, from which Jackeymo could inspect all visitors
before he permitted them to enter.

An old female servant from the neighborhood was cautiously hired;
Riccabocca renounced his Italian name, and abjured his origin. He spoke
English sufficiently well to think he could pass as an Englishman. He
called himself Mr. Richmouth (a liberal translation of Riccabocca). He
bought a blunderbuss, two pair of pistols, and a huge house-dog. Thus
provided for, he allowed Jackeymo to write a line to Randal and
communicate his arrival.

Randal lost no time in calling. With his usual adaptability and his powers
of dissimulation, he contrived easily to please Mrs. Riccabocca, and to
increase the good opinion the exile was disposed to form of him. He
engaged Violante in conversation on Italy and its poets. He promised to
buy her books. He began, though more distantly than he could have
desired--for her sweet stateliness awed him in spite of himself--the
preliminaries of courtship. He established himself at once as a familiar
guest, riding down daily in the dusk of evening, after the toils of
office, and retiring at night. In four or five days he thought he had made
great progress with all. Riccabocca watched him narrowly, and grew
absorbed in thought after every visit. At length one night, when he and
Mrs. Riccabocca were alone in the drawing-room, Violante having retired to
rest, he thus spoke as he filled his pipe:--

"Happy is the man who has no children! Thrice happy he who has no girls."

"My dear Alphonso!" said the wife, looking up from the wristband to which
she was attaching a neat mother-o'-pearl button. She said no more; it was
the sharpest rebuke she was in the custom of administering to her
husband's cynical and odious observations. Riccabocca lighted his pipe
with a thread paper, gave three great puffs, and resumed:

"One blunderbuss, four pistols, and a house-dog called Pompey, who would
have made mince-meat of Julius Caesar!"

"He certainly eats a great deal, does Pompey!" said Mrs. Riccabocca,
simply. "But if he relieves your mind!"

"He does not relieve it in the least, ma'am," groaned Riccabocca; "and
that is the point I was coming to. This is a most harassing life, and a
most undignified life. And I who have only asked from Heaven dignity and
repose! But, if Violante were once married, I should want neither
blunderbuss, pistol, nor Pompey. And it is that which would relieve my
mind, _cara mia_;--Pompey only relieves my larder!"

Now Riccabocca had been more communicative to Jemima than he had been to
Violante. Having once trusted her with one secret, he had every motive to
trust her with another; and he had accordingly spoken out his fears of the
Count di Peschiera. Therefore she answered, laying down the work, and
taking her husband's hand tenderly--

"Indeed, my love, since you dread so much (though I own that I must think
unreasonably) this wicked, dangerous man, it would be the happiest thing
in the world to see dear Violante well married; because, you see, if she
is married to one person, she cannot be married to another; and all fear
of this Count, as you say, would be at an end."

"You cannot express yourself better. It is a great comfort to unbosom
one's self to a wife, after all!" quoth Riccabocca.

"But," said the wife, after a grateful kiss--"but where and how can we find
a husband suitable to the rank of your daughter?"

"There--there--there," cried Riccabocca, pushing back his chair to the
farther end of the room--"that comes of unbosoming one's self! Out flies
one's secret; it is opening the lid of Pandora's box; one is betrayed,
ruined, undone!"

"Why, there's not a soul that can hear us!" said Mrs. Riccabocca,
soothingly.

"That's chance, ma'am! If you once contract the habit of blabbing out a
secret when nobody's by, how on earth can you resist it when you have the
pleasurable excitement of telling it to all the world? Vanity,
vanity--woman's vanity! Woman never could withstand rank--never!" The Doctor
went on railing for a quarter of an hour, and was very reluctantly
appeased by Mrs. Riccabocca's repeated and tearful assurances that she
would never even whisper to herself that her husband had ever held any
other rank than that of Doctor.--Riccabocca, with a dubious shake of the
head, renewed--

"I have done with all pomp and pretension. Besides, the young man is a
born gentleman; he seems in good circumstances; he has energy and latent
ambition; he is akin to L'Estrange's intimate friend; he seems attached to
Violante. I don't think it probable that we could do better. Nay, if
Peschiera fears that I shall be restored to my country, and I learn the
wherefore, and the ground to take, through this young man--why, gratitude
is the first virtue of the noble!"

"You speak, then, of Mr. Leslie?"

"To be sure--of whom else?"

Mrs. Riccabocca leaned her cheek on her hand thoughtfully. "Now you have
told me _that_, I will observe him with different eyes."

"_Anima mia_, I don't see how the difference of your eyes will alter the
object they look upon!" grumbled Riccabocca, shaking the ashes out of his
pipe.

"The object alters when we see it in a different point of view!" replied
Jemima, modestly. "This thread does very well when I look at it in order
to sew on a button, but I should say it would never do to tie up Pompey in
his kennel."

"Reasoning by illustration, upon my soul!" ejaculated Riccabocca, amazed.

"And," continued Jemima, "when I am to regard one who is to constitute the
happiness of that dear child, and for life, can I regard him as I would
the pleasant guest of an evening? Ah, trust me, Alphonso--I don't pretend
to be wise like you--but, when a woman considers what a man is likely to
prove to woman--his sincerity--his honor--his heart--oh, trust me, she is
wiser than the wisest man!"

Riccabocca continued to gaze on Jemima with unaffected admiration and
surprise. And, certainly, to use his phrase, since he had unbosomed
himself to his better half--since he had confided in her, consulted with
her, her sense had seemed to quicken--her whole mind to expand.

"My dear," said the sage, "I vow and declare that Machiavelli was a fool
to you. And I have been as dull as the chair I sit upon, to deny myself so
many years the comfort and counsel of such a--but _corpo di Baccho!_ forget
all about rank; and so now to bed."

"One must not holloa till one's out of the wood," muttered the ungrateful,
suspicious villain, as he lighted the chamber candle.




CHAPTER III.


Riccabocca could not confine himself to the precincts within the walls to
which he condemned Violante. Resuming his spectacles, and wrapped in his
cloak, he occasionally sallied forth upon a kind of outwatch or
reconnoitring expedition--restricting himself, however, to the immediate
neighborhood, and never going quite out of sight of his house. His
favorite walk was to the summit of a hillock overgrown with stunted
bushwood. Here he would seat himself musingly, often till the hoofs of
Randal's horse rang on the winding road, as the sun set, over fading
herbage, red and vaporous, in autumnal skies. Just below the hillock, and
not two hundred yards from his own house, was the only other habitation in
view--a charming, thoroughly English cottage, though somewhat imitated from
the Swiss--with gable ends, thatched roof, and pretty projecting casements,
opening through creepers and climbing roses. From his height he commanded
the gardens of this cottage, and his eye of artist was pleased, from the
first sight, with the beauty which some exquisite taste had given to the
ground. Even in that cheerless season of the year, the garden wore a
summer smile; the evergreens were so bright and various, and the few
flowers, still left, so hardy and so healthful. Facing the south, a
colonnade, or covered gallery, of rustic woodwork had been formed, and
creeping plants, lately set, were already beginning to clothe its columns.
Opposite to this colonnade there was a fountain which reminded Riccabocca
of his own at the deserted Casino. It was indeed singularly like it: the
same circular shape, the same girdle of flowers around it. But the jet
from it varied every day--fantastic and multiform, like the sports of a
Naiad--sometimes shooting up like a tree, sometimes shaped as a
convolvulus, sometimes tossing from its silver spray a flower of
vermilion, or a fruit of gold--as if at play with its toy like a happy
child. And near the fountain was a large aviary, large enough to inclose a
tree. The Italian could just catch a gleam of rich color from the wings of
the birds, as they glanced to and fro within the network, and could hear
their songs, contrasting the silence of the free populace of air, whom the
coming winter had already stilled.

Riccabocca's eye, so alive to all aspects of beauty, luxuriated in the
view of this garden. Its pleasantness had a charm that stole him from his
anxious fear and melancholy memories.

He never saw but two forms within the demesnes, and he could not
distinguish their features. One was a woman, who seemed to him of staid
manner and homely appearance: she was seen but rarely. The other a man,
often pacing to and fro the colonnade, with frequent pauses before the
playful fountain, or the birds that sang louder as he approached. This
latter form would then disappear within a room, the glass door of which
was at the extreme end of the colonnade; and if the door were left open,
Riccabocca could catch a glimpse of the figure bending over a table
covered with books.

Always, however, before the sun set, the man would step forth more
briskly, and occupy himself with the garden, often working at it with good
heart, as if at a task of delight; and then, too, the woman would come
out, and stand by as if talking to her companion. Riccabocca's curiosity
grew aroused. He bade Jemima inquire of the old maid-servant who lived at
the cottage, and heard that its owner was a Mr. Oran--a quiet gentleman,
and fond of his book.

While Riccabocca thus amused himself, Randal had not been prevented,
either by his official cares or his schemes on Violante's heart and
fortune, from furthering the project that was to unite Frank Hazeldean and
Beatrice di Negra. Indeed, as to the first, a ray of hope was sufficient
to fire the ardent and unsuspecting lover. And Randal's artful
misrepresentation of Mrs. Hazeldean's conversation with him, removed all
fear of parental displeasure from a mind always too disposed to give
itself up to the temptation of the moment. Beatrice, though her feelings
for Frank were not those of love, became more and more influenced by
Randal's arguments and representations, the more especially as her brother
grew morose, and even menacing, as days slipt on, and she could give no
clue to the retreat of those whom he sought for. Her debts, too, were
really urgent. As Randal's profound knowledge of human infirmity had
shrewdly conjectured, the scruples of honor and pride, that had made her
declare she would not bring to a husband her own incumbrances, began to
yield to the pressure of necessity. She listened already, with but faint
objections, when Randal urged her not to wait for the uncertain discovery
that was to secure her dowry, but by a private marriage with Frank escape
at once into freedom and security. While, though he had first held out to
young Hazeldean the inducement of Beatrice's dowry as reason of
self-justification in the eyes of the Squire, it was still easier to drop
that inducement, which had always rather damped than fired the high spirit
and generous heart of the poor Guardsman. And Randal could conscientiously
say, that when he had asked the Squire if he expected fortune with Frank's
bride, the Squire had replied, "I don't care." Thus encouraged by his
friend and his own heart, and the softening manner of a woman who might
have charmed many a colder, and fooled many a wiser man, Frank rapidly
yielded to the snares held out for his perdition. And though as yet he
honestly shrank from proposing to Beatrice or himself a marriage without
the consent, and even the knowledge, of his parents, yet Randal was quite
content to leave a nature, however good, so thoroughly impulsive and
undisciplined, to the influences of the first strong passion it had ever
known. Meanwhile, it was easy to dissuade Frank from even giving a hint to
the folks at home. "For," said the wily and able traitor, "though we may
be sure of Mrs. Hazeldean's consent, and her power over your father, when
the step is once taken, yet we cannot count for certain on the Squire--he
is so choleric and hasty. He might hurry to town--see Madame di Negra,
blurt out some compassionate, rude expressions which would wake her
resentment, and cause her instant rejection. And it might be too late if
he repented afterwards--as he would be sure to do."

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