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Relevé des occurences dans The Scarlet Letter (19)

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Writing / Reading

Citadel

A Flood of Sunshine

It may be watched and guarded; so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even, in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and, near it, the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph.
prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart

Irony

The Prison-Door

by a strange chance

The Market-Place

wedging their not unsubstantial persons

The Recognition

“The learned man,” observed the stranger, with another smile, “should come himself to look into the mystery.”
They were, doubtless, good men, just, and sage. But
Knowing your natural temper better than I
the responsibility of this woman’s soul lies greatly with you
It is of moment to her soul, and therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is
dark passage-way of the interior

The Interview

His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth
profession to which he announced himself as belonging
The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed,
said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named

Hester at Her Needle

then, as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp
skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold.
Here, indeed, in the sable simplicity that generally characterized the Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.
sombre, but yet a studied magnificence
readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order.
Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in aid to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigor with which society frowned upon her sin.
Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle.
alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtile poison from ordinary trifles
perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

The Governor’s Hall

these good people
It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little ludicrous
At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest
The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin’s palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler.
as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool

The Elf-Child and the Minister

The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his gray beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger.

The Leech

Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtile faculties of such men were materialized, and that they lost the spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself.
This learned stranger was exemplary, as regarded at least the outward forms of a religious life
however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people
Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew
So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician
warm himself only at another’s fireside
very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had done all this

The Leech and His Patient

It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.

The Minister’s Vigil

Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itself!
old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view, with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James’s ruff fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson, too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale’s church, and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms; which, now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold.

Another View of Hester

The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favored with, or, perchance, than she deserved.
Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years.
It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.
Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.

A Forest Walk

with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere [ó puritan society?]

A Flood of Sunshine

for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage that it is hard to distinguish between his moods

The Minister in a Maze

to hold nothing back from the reader
thought this exemplary man [Dimmesdale]
Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character.
a maiden newly won—and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil
,—we blush to tell it

The New England Holiday

grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state
We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.

The Procession

It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now
The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both.
or insanity, as we should term it—led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on; to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter, in public.
(which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life)
their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel

The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter

though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers

Conclusion

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators
According to these highly respectable witnesses
only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character; when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
- we put only this into a sentence:—“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

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Reading

The Prison-Door

present it to the reader
to read the human soul

The Interview

lest he should read the secret there at once.
I shall read it on his heart

The Governor’s Hall

which we read of in old books
folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table

The Elf-Child and the Minister

whom the reader may remember
Black Man’s book

The Leech

books
library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves

The Leech and His Patient

Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ
large black-letter volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature.

The Interior of a Heart

among their books
big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity

The Minister’s Vigil

ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet
We men of study, whose heads are in our books
how they trouble the brain,—these books!—these books!

Hester and Pearl

among his books
horn-book

A Forest Walk

carries a book with him,—a big, heavy book, with iron clasps
offers his book and an iron pen to every body that meets him
his big book

The Pastor and His Parishioner

She now read his heart more accurately

The Child at the Brook-Side

had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame!

The Minister in a Maze

sign it
Whether the witch had read the minister’s thoughts, or no
books
Bible, in its rich old Hebrew

The New England Holiday

unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart,

Conclusion

The reader may choose among these theories.
the reader

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Snake

The Recognition

A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight.

Hester at Her Needle

she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole

The Procession

snake-like black eyes

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Writing

The Prison-Door

door
oaken door
on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold
as there is fair authority for believing
prison-door
we shall not take upon us to determine
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than
darkening close of a tale

The Market-Place

iron-clamped oaken door
when our story begins its course
frame
prison-door
that would startle us at the present day
the lock is turning in the prison-door
door of the jail being flung open from within
threshold of the prison-door
prison-door
framework
portal

The Recognition

hard experience written in his wrinkles
iron-clamped portal
little frame
ushering him into

Hester at Her Needle

Her prison-door was thrown open
threshold
prison-door
the scene of […], and here should be the scene of
cottage-window, or standing in the door-way, or laboring in her little garden, or coming - forth along the pathway that led townward
whose doors she entered
If she entered a church
had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves,—had the summer breeze murmured about it,—had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud!
The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

Pearl

frame
on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds
whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world

The Governor’s Hall

The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story
framework

The Elf-Child and the Minister

scene now going forward
as we described him at the scene of
save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of childish preference
if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable

The Leech

the reader will remember
It has been related, how
human frame
His first entry on the scene
and, however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people
setting him down at the door
Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition
framework
physical frame
let us call it intuition
fair woman of the scene
as we have intimated
it must now be said
the narrator of the story had now forgotten

The Leech and His Patient

Bunyan’s awful door-way in the hill-side
unbarred the door
weak frame of mine
bodily frame
crossed the threshold.
not long after the scene above recorded

The Interior of a Heart

AFTER the incident last described
texture
There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species.
frame
subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!
which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne to picture forth

The Minister’s Vigil

creep into his frame
to speak more accurately
in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds
picture
have taken his measure for a robe
noontide [= middle of day => middle of life?]
to-morrow noontide
The wooden houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined with green on either side;—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever borne before.
We doubt whether
awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon.
our forefathers
But what shall we say
on the same vast sheet of record!
until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate.
We impute it, therefore
marked out in lines of dull red light
another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.
to-morrow noontide
it is said

Another View of Hester

in which we beheld her
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
brought regularly to his door
or, we may rather say,
Her shadow had faded across the threshold
The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice, when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.
or, perchance, than she deserved.
iron framework of reasoning
Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years.
Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether
It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle.
our forefathers
It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.
Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then, she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of the Puritan establishment
A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down, and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified, before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms, until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.
to speak more accurately

Hester and the Physician

In a word,
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features.
There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!”

Hester and Pearl

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice.
At first, as already told,

A Forest Walk

she had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors.
they are to write their names with their own blood
had written in his book
when the minister wrote his name in the book
over his frame
—nay, why should we not speak it?—

The Pastor and His Parishioner

will show no vestige
Write!

A Flood of Sunshine

framework of his order
And be the stern and sad truth spoken
need not be described. Let it suffice, that
Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.
,—for a squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage that it is hard to distinguish between his moods,
it is said,—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable,—
The truth seems to be, however, that

The Child at the Brook-Side

trace whose child she is
living hieroglyphic
all written in this symbol,—all plainly manifest
So it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom.
trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

The Minister in a Maze

some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading
he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure.
one of those unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character.
Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate, we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless,—to hold nothing back from the reader,—it was because,
Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease, that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
, in short,
For instance,
Again, another incident of the same nature.
Again, a third instance.
or—shall we not rather say?—
,—which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work-bag,—
It was,—we blush to tell it,—it was to
The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it!
Here he had studied and written
unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before.
written thus far into the Election Sermon!
A bitter kind of knowledge that!
So much being known, it would appear natural that a part of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a time often passes before words embody things; and with what security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it.
in my present frame of body
flinging the already written pages of the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired
he drove his task onward, with earnest haste and ecstasy
pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!

The New England Holiday

Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester’s mind
must be indeed
Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them; always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind, in domestic circumstances;
—as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries—
But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. […] ,—we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor’s show,— might be traced in customs which our forefathers […]
impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.
Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James;—no rude shows of a theatrical kind; […]
—what attracted most interest of all—on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages,
It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day,) that they would compare favorably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.
It remarkably characterized the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a license was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavorable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.

The Procession

of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye
—which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honorable fame—
had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.
It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. […]
comes under the general definition of respectability
his frame
it might be questioned whether
But where was his mind?
feeble frame
—or insanity, as we should term it—
(which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life)
and, as we might say,
prison-door
The sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the market-place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!

The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter

Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay before him
—as to most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognized until they see it far behind them—
issuing from the church-door
—though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers—
- How fared it with him then? […]
—or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up […]
if that movement could be so described
Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore, to be present at its closing scene.
But it were irreverent to describe that revelation.
The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part

Conclusion

foregoing scene
imprinted in the flesh
As regarded its origin, there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. […]
The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.
Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character; when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.
The authority which we have chiefly followed—a manuscript of old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary witnesses—fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. […]
we put only this into a sentence
But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances,—as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions,—we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.
Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate to the reader.

The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend.

kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died [=> là où il est mort, plus comme là où elle montrait sa honte]
cottage-door [ …]
On the threshold she paused,—turned partly round,
the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale
there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—
“On a field, sable, the letter A, gules”
THE END.

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Dernière mise à jour le mardi 22 août, 2006 7:21