invent anything as direful as that.  Ordinarily, according to the little that I know of literature, a drama is a suite of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a catastrophe; but what I speak of was a catastrophe in action.  It was an avalanche fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to fall again the next day.  I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived.  I, poor little thing that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing nothing of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed the goodwill and harmony of our family.  The birth of my poor boy, who is all me—­you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, my eyes, the shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth!—­well, his birth was a relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the first joys of maternity from my husband, who gave me no pleasure and did nothing for me that was kind or amiable; those joys were all the keener because I knew no others.  It had been so often rung into my ears that a mother should respect herself.  Besides, a young girl loves to play the mother.  I was so proud of my flower—­for Georges was beautiful, a miracle, I thought!  I saw and thought of nothing but my son, I lived with my son.  I never let his nurse dress or undress him.  Such cares, so wearing to mothers who have a regiment of children, were all my pleasure.  But after three or four years, as I was not an actual fool, light came to my eyes in spite of the pains taken to blindfold me.  Can you see me at that final awakening, in 1819?  The drama of ’The Brothers at enmity’ is a rose-water tragedy beside that of a mother and daughter placed as we then were.  But I braved them all, my mother, my husband, the world, by public coquetries which society talked of, —­and heaven knows how it talked!  You can see, my friend, how the men with whom I was accused of folly were to me the dagger with which to stab my enemies.  Thinking only of my vengeance, I did not see or feel the wounds I was inflicting on myself.  Innocent as a child, I was thought a wicked woman, the worst of women, and I knew nothing of it!  The world is very foolish, very blind, very ignorant; it can penetrate no secrets but those which amuse it and serve its malice:  noble things, great things, it puts its hand before its eyes to avoid seeing.  But, as I look back, it seems to me that I had an attitude and aspect of indignant innocence, with movements of pride, which a great painter would have recognized.  I must have enlivened many a ball with my tempests of anger and disdain.  Lost poesy! such sublime poems are only made in the glowing indignation which seizes us at twenty.  Later, we are wrathful no longer, we are too weary, vice no longer amazes us, we are cowards, we fear.  But then—­oh!  I kept a great pace!  For all that I played the silliest personage in the world; I was charged with crimes by which I never benefited.  But I had such