Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source:http://www.archive.org/details/blanchemaidof00schuiala
BLANCHE: THE MAID OF LILLE
tête de cire.
BLANCHE:
The Maid of Lille
Translated from the German of
Ossip Schubin
by
SARAH H. ADAMS
PRIVATELY PRINTED
BOSTON
MCMII
Copyright, 1902, by
Sarah H. Adams
Colonial Press
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, Mass., U. S. A.
INTRODUCTION
A few years since we chose to spend the summer in a châlet among theDolomites of South Tyrol. Weird, fantastic, inaccessible, mysterious,grotesque, and yet often wearing a jewelled crown of eternal ice, thesepeaks soared into the ether above and around us. "Nothing," says arecent traveller, "can surpass the majesty and beauty of the towers andramparts, the battlemented walls, impregnable castles, and gracefullypinnacled cathedrals into the forms of which their summits are builtup. Their colouring is another striking characteristic; many of themrivet the eye with the richness of the tints,--deep reds, brightyellows, silvery whites, and the dark blues and blacks of the rocks.But all these colours are modified and softened by a peculiar grayishwhite tint. The mountains look as if powdered over with some substanceless hard and cold than newly fallen snow."
Although within a day's drive of Pieve di Cadore,--Titian'sbirthplace--and not far from Cortina, we could hardly have found a moreisolated spot. It was a hermitage, and we knew literally no one withinhundreds of miles.
Ossip Schubin, the popular German novelist at that time, had sent us avolume of stories, with the request that we would translate them. Weselected the story now offered as being most in sympathy with ourromantic surroundings.
A learned Englishman has said, "If histories were written as historiesshould be, boys and girls would cry to read them." But alas! how is thespirit, the tone, of a dead century to be made to breathe again andreport itself? The landscape alone is permanent; new figures constantlyfill the foreground. Poetry, legend, myths, help us to divine some ofthe strange chords in the human chant, which, heavily burdened withsorrow, come down to us through the ages.
In this twentieth century no one sentiment or emotion is allowed so farto dominate as to crush out all others. But how was it in the days ofthe Crusaders, of the Minnesingers, of the Troubadours? If we wouldrealise the seclusion, the loneliness of many lives centuries ago, wehave only to enter either "The Wartburg" or the castle of SolmesBrauenfels in the Rhine valley, which dates back a thousand years. Lookinto the gloomy keeps; hear the shrieking of the bars in the heavyportcullis; gaze down into the damp, ugly moats; or listen to thesoughing of the stormy winds in the branches of