SALAMMBO AND HER LOVER. BY GUSTAVE FLAUBERT. [GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, leading French novelist, noted for minute "realism" and highly elaborated style, was born at Rouen, December 12, 1821; died May 8, 1880. His first two novels, "Madame Bovary" and "The Temptation of St. Anthony," were published serially in 1857; he was prosecuted for immorality on account of the former, but acquitted. "Salammbo" (scene laid about B.C. 240) appeared in 1862, after a visit to the site of ancient Carthage; "Sentimental Education, a Young Man's Romance," in 1869; "Three Tales" in 1877. He wrote also unsuccessful plays. Posthumously were published "Bouvard and Pécuchet," "Letters to George Sand," and others.] MATHO was bound on the elephant's back, his four limbs crosswise, and all the unwounded escorted him, hurrying with a great commotion back to Carthage. The water-clock of Khamoûn marked the fifth hour of the night when they reached Malqua. Here Mâtho reopened his eyes. There were such vast numbers of lights on the houses that the city seemed to be all in flames. A mighty clamor came confusedly to him, and lying on his back he gazed at the stars. Then a door closed upon him, and darkness enveloped him. . . . 2 There were rejoicings at Carthage- rejoicings deep, universal, extravagant, frantic; the holes of the ruins had been stopped up, the statues of the Gods had been repainted, the streets were strewn with myrtle branches, incense smoked at the corners of the crossways, and the throng on the terraces looked, in their variagated garments, like heaps of flowers blooming in the air. The people accosted one another, and embraced one another with tears; the Tyrian towns were taken, the Nomads dispersed, and all the Barbarians annihilated. The Acropolis 39 was hidden beneath colored velaria; the beaks of the triremes, drawn up in line outside the mole, shone like a dike of diamonds; everywhere there was a sense of the restoration of order, the beginning of a new existence, and the diffusion of vast happiness: it was the day of Salammbô's marriage with the king of the Numidians. On the terrace of the temple of Khamon there were three long tables laden with gigantic plates, at which the Priests, Ancients, and Rich were going to sit, and there was a fourth and higher one for Hamilcar, Narr' Havas, and Salammbô; for as she had saved her country by the restoration of the zaïmph, the people turned her wedding into a national rejoicing, and were waiting in the square below till she should appear. But their impatience was excited by another and more acrid longing: Matho's death had been promised for the ceremony. It had been proposed at first to flay him alive, to pour lead into his entrails, to kill him with hunger; he should be tied to a tree, and an ape behind him should strike him on the head with a stone; he had offended Tanith, and the cynocephaluses of Tanith should avenge her. Others were of opinion that he should be led about on a dromedary after linen wicks, dipped in oil, had been inserted in his body in several places - and they took pleasure in the thought of the large animal wandering through the streets with this man writhing beneath the fires like a candelabrum blown about by the wind. But what citizens should be charged with his torture, and why disappoint the rest? They would have liked a kind of death in which the whole town might take part, in which every hand, every weapon, everything Carthaginian, to the very paving stones in the streets and the waves in the gulf, could rend him, and crush him, and annihilate him. Accordingly the Ancients decided that he should go from his prison to the square of Khamon without any escort, and with his arms fastened to his back; it was forbidden to strike him to the heart, in order that he might live the longer; to put out his eyes, so that he might see his torture through; to hurl anything against his person, or to lay more than three fingers upon him at a time. Although he was not to appear until the end of the day, the people sometimes fancied that he could be seen, and the crowd would rush toward the Acropolis, and empty the streets, to return with lengthened murmurings. Some people had remained standing in the same place since the day before, and |