It now will be necessary to give the reasons for the extraordinary self-devotion of a good and beautiful woman; and this, in a few words, is her past history.

Three brothers, simple laboring men, named Fischer, and living in a village situated on the furthest frontier of Lorraine, were compelled by the Republican conscription to set out with the so-called army of the Rhine.

In 1799 the second brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot’s father, left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre Fischer, disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a small private venture in the military transport service, an opening he owed to the favor of Hulot d’Ervy, who was high in the commissariat.  By a very obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer family.  Adeline’s father and his younger brother were at that time contractors for forage in the province of Alsace.

Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine.  She was one of those perfect and striking beauties—­a woman like Madame Tallien, finished with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her choicest gifts—­distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance, flesh of a superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown laboratory where good luck presides.  These beautiful creatures all have something in common:  Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of Bronzino’s masterpieces; Jean Goujon’s Venus, painted from the famous Diane de Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria gallery; Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges, Madame Recamier.—­all these women who preserved their beauty in spite of years, of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have in figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain striking resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the ocean of generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is born, all daughters of the same salt wave.

Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman born a queen.  The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once seen her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer his wife as quickly as the law would permit, to the great astonishment of the Fischers, who had all been brought up in the fear of their betters.