according to Saillard, no one could equal Elisabeth in hashing the remains of a leg of mutton with onions.  “You might eat your boots with those onions and not know it,” he remarked.  As soon as Elisabeth knew how to hold a needle, her mother had her mend the household linen and her father’s coats.  Always at work, like a servant, she never went out alone.  Though living close by the boulevard du Temple, where Franconi, La Gaite, and l’Ambigu-Comique were within a stone’s throw, and, further on, the Porte-Saint-Martin, Elisabeth had never seen a comedy.  When she asked to “see what it was like” (with the Abbe Gaudron’s permission, be it understood), Monsieur Baudoyer took her—­for the glory of the thing, and to show her the finest that was to be seen—­to the Opera, where they were playing “The Chinese Laborer.”  Elisabeth thought “the comedy” as wearisome as the plague of flies, and never wished to see another.  On Sundays, after walking four times to and fro between the place Royale and Saint-Paul’s church (for her mother made her practise the precepts and the duties of religion), her parents took her to the pavement in front of the Cafe Ture, where they sat on chairs placed between a railing and the wall.  The Saillards always made haste to reach the place early so as to choose the best seats, and found much entertainment in watching the passers-by.  In those days the Cafe Ture was the rendezvous of the fashionable society of the Marais, the faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the circumjacent regions.

Elisabeth never wore anything but cotton gowns in summer and merino in the winter, which she made herself.  Her mother gave her twenty francs a month for her expenses, but her father, who was very fond of her, mitigated this rigorous treatment with a few presents.  She never read what the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul’s and the family director, called profane books.  This discipline had borne fruit.  Forced to employ her feelings on some passion or other, Elisabeth became eager after gain.  Though she was not lacking in sense or perspicacity, religious theories, and her complete ignorance of higher emotions had encircled all her faculties with an iron hand; they were exercised solely on the commonest things of life; spent in a few directions they were able to concentrate themselves on a matter in hand.  Repressed by religious devotion, her natural intelligence exercised itself within the limits marked out by cases of conscience, which form a mine of subtleties among which self-interest selects its subterfuges.  Like those saintly personages in whom religion does not stifle ambition, Elisabeth was capable of requiring others to do a blamable action that she might reap the fruits; and she would have been, like them again, implacable as to her dues and dissembling in her actions.  Once offended, she watched her adversaries with the perfidious patience of a cat, and was capable of bringing about some cold and complete vengeance, and then laying it to the