Seven or eight months after the birth of the little Bartolomeo, it would have been hard to see in the mother who suckled her sickly babe the original of the beautiful portrait, the sole remaining ornament of the squalid home.  Without fire through a hard winter, the graceful outlines of Ginevra’s figure were slowly destroyed; her cheeks grew white as porcelain, and her eyes dulled as though the springs of life were drying up within her.  Watching her shrunken, discolored child, she felt no suffering but for that young misery; and Luigi had no courage to smile upon his son.

“I have wandered over Paris,” he said, one day.  “I know no one; can I ask help of strangers?  Vergniaud, my old sergeant, is concerned in a conspiracy, and they have put him in prison; besides, he has already lent me all he could spare.  As for our landlord, it is over a year since he asked me for any rent.”

“But we are not in want,” replied Ginevra, gently, affecting calmness.

“Every hour brings some new difficulty,” continued Luigi, in a tone of terror.

Another day Luigi took Ginevra’s pictures, her portrait, and the few articles of furniture which they could still exist without, and sold them for a miserable sum, which prolonged the agony of the hapless household for a time.  During these days of wretchedness Ginevra showed the sublimity of her nature and the extent of her resignation.

Stoically she bore the strokes of misery; her strong soul held her up against all woes; she worked with unfaltering hand beside her dying son, performed her household duties with marvellous activity, and sufficed for all.  She was even happy, still, when she saw on Luigi’s lips a smile of surprise at the cleanliness she produced in the one poor room where they had taken refuge.

“Dear, I kept this bit of bread for you,” she said, one evening, when he returned, worn-out.

“And you?”

“I?  I have dined, dear Luigi; I want nothing more.”

And the tender look on her beseeching face urged him more than her words to take the food of which she had deprived herself.

Luigi kissed her, with one of those kisses of despair that were given in 1793 between friends as they mounted the scaffold.  In such supreme moments two beings see each other, heart to heart.  The hapless Luigi, comprehending suddenly that his wife was starving, was seized with the fever which consumed her.  He shuddered, and went out, pretending that some business called him; for he would rather have drunk the deadliest poison than escape death by eating that last morsel of bread that was left in his home.

He wandered wildly about Paris; amid the gorgeous equipages, in the bosom of that flaunting luxury that displays itself everywhere; he hurried past the windows of the money-changers where gold was glittering; and at last he resolved to sell himself to be a substitute for military service, hoping that this sacrifice would save Ginevra, and that her father, during his absence, would take her home.