French profiles Author:Edmund Gosse Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MADEMOISELLE AISSE Literature presents us with no more pathetic figure of a waif or stray than that of the poor little Circassian slave whom her friends calle... more »d Mademoiselle Aisse. But interesting and touching as is the romance of her history, it is surpassed by the rare distinction of her character and the delicacy of her mind. Placed in the centre of the most depraved society of modern Europe, protected from ruin by none of those common bulwarks which proved too frail to sustain the high-born virtues of the Tencins and the Paraberes, exposed by her wit and beauty to all the treachery of fashionable Paris unabashed, this little Oriental orphan preserved an exquisite refinement of nature, a conscience as sensitive as a nerve. If she had been devote, if she had retired to a nunnery, the lesson of her life would have been less wholesome than it is ; we may go further and admit that it would be less poignant than it is but for the single frailty of her conduct. She sinned once, and expiated her sin with tears ; but in an age when love was reduced to a caprice and intrigue governed by cynical maxims, Aisse's fault, her solitary abandonment to a sincere passion, almost takes the proportions of a virtue. Mr. Ruskin has somewhere recommended Swiss travellers who find themselves physically exhausted by the pomp ofAlpine landscape, to sink on their knees and concentrate their attention on the petals of a rock-rose. In comparison with the vast expanse of French literature the pretensions of Aisse are little more than those of a flower, but she has no small share of a flower's perfume and beauty. In her lifetime Mademoiselle Aiss6 associated with some of the great writers of her time. Yet if any one had told her that she would live in literature with such friends as Montesquieu and Dest...« less