GAULLE Charles de. Autograph manuscript, [circa 1910]; 4 pages in-8, with erasures and corrections. Unpublished short story from his youth. "The Russian general S., who has been retired for nearly ten years, despite his advanced age, insists on spending a month each year in Paris, where he has a few friends and a host of acquaintances"... He tells the narrator about an adventure that took place in 1858 during a campaign in the Caucasus. After two sentries disappeared during the night, he decided to stand guard himself; he heard a woman's song, "very sweet" and strange, "of immense melancholy", and he developed "the bitter, nagging, irresistible desire to see the angel or the woman who was singing". Soon "a vague, imprecise, fairy-like shape" appears, and he sets out to follow this apparition, which leads him to a cave, the refuge of Cherkess. Thanks to an old sergeant, he escaped death; it was his baptism of fire. Enclosed is a fragment of a scene involving a mayor, the beadle's family and the fire brigade (half a page in-4); - and the draft of another short story about the visit of a new suitor for the hand of a difficult-to-marry girl, which ends with "a 25th disillusionment" (5 pages and a quarter in-4).