“‘She has lied! she lies!’ cried my mother.  ’A bigot, a philosophailleuse.’  She is lying and defrauding herself.’

“‘Oh, as to that,’ said the lawyer, laughing, ’she has the right to do it, since she robs only herself.’

“‘I will take her with her Deschartres before the justice of the peace,’ said my mother.  ‘I will make her take oath by Christ, by the Gospel!’

“‘No, Madame,’ said the lawyer, ’you will go no further in this matter; and as for you, Mademoiselle, I beg your pardon for the annoyance I have given you.  Charged with your interests, I felt obliged to do so.’”

Eternal shame to those who make use of any authority to force the secrets of a generous heart, cutting off from it every alternative but that of a loathed deceit, or still more hateful, and scarcely less guilty, betrayal!

Aurore now found herself in the hands of a woman of the people, ennobled for a time by beauty and a true affection, but sinking, her good inspiration gone, into the bitterest ill-temper and most vulgar uncharity.  Detesting her superiors in rank and position, she soon managed to cut off Aurore from all intercourse with her father’s family, and thus to frustrate every prospect of her marriage in the sphere for which she had been so carefully educated.  She was even forbidden to visit her old friends at the convent, and was eventually placed by her mother with a family nearly unknown to both, whose pity had been excited by her friendless condition and unhappy countenance.  Aurore’s mother seems to us, du reste, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the eloquence of passion,—­but when these have passed their day, the most detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions.  Men of all ranks and ages acknowledge their attraction, endure their tyranny, and curse the misery it inflicts.  Marriage and competency had protected this one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on insanity.  This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible.  She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed her bonnets continually, always finding them worse than before.  Finally, she grew weary of her black hair, and wore a blond periwig, which disgusting her in turn, she finished by appearing in a different head of hair every day in the week.

Aurore’s new friends proved congenial to her, and the influence of their happy family-life dispersed, she says, her last dreams of the beatitudes of the convent.  It was in their company that she first met the man destined to become her husband.  Most of us would like to know the impression he made upon her at first sight.  We will give it in her own words.