During these nine years Flore obtained in the long run, insensibly and without aiming for it, an absolute control over her master.  From the first, she treated him very familiarly; then, without failing him in proper respect, she so far surpassed him in superiority of mind and force of character that he became in fact the servant of his servant.  Elderly child that he was, he met this mastery half-way by letting Flore take such care of him that she treated him more as a mother would a son; and he himself ended by clinging to her with the feeling of a child dependent on a mother’s protection.  But there were other ties between them not less tightly knotted.  In the first place, Flore kept the house and managed all its business.  Jean-Jacques left everything to the crab-girl so completely that life without her would have seemed to him not only difficult, but impossible.  In every way, this woman had become the one need of his existence; she indulged all his fancies, for she knew them well.  He loved to see her bright face always smiling at him,—­the only face that had ever smiled upon him, the only one to which he could look for a smile.  This happiness, a purely material happiness, expressed in the homely words which come readiest to the tongue in a Berrichon household, and visible on the fine countenance of the young woman, was like a reflection of his own inward content.  The state into which Jean-Jacques was thrown when Flore’s brightness was clouded over by some passing annoyance revealed to the girl her power over him, and, to make sure of it, she sometimes liked to use it.  Using such power means, with women of her class, abusing it.  The Rabouilleuse, no doubt, made her master play some of those scenes buried in the mysteries of private life, of which Otway gives a specimen in the tragedy of “Venice Preserved,” where the scene between the senator and Aquilina is the realization of the magnificently horrible.  Flore felt so secure of her power that, unfortunately for her, and for the bachelor himself, it did not occur to her to make him marry her.

Towards the close of 1815, Flore, who was then twenty-seven, had reached the perfect development of her beauty.  Plump and fresh, and white as a Norman countrywoman, she was the ideal of what our ancestors used to call “a buxom housewife.”  Her beauty, always that of a handsome barmaid, though higher in type and better kept, gave her a likeness to Mademoiselle George in her palmy days, setting aside the latter’s imperial dignity.  Flore had the dazzling white round arms, the ample modelling, the satiny textures of the skin, the alluring though less rigidly correct outlines of the great actress.  Her expression was one of sweetness and tenderness; but her glance commanded less respect than that of the noblest Agrippina that ever trod the French stage since the days of Racine:  on the contrary, it evoked a vulgar joy.  In 1816 the Rabouilleuse saw Maxence Gilet, and fell in love with him at first sight.  Her heart was cleft by the mythological arrow,—­admirable description of an effect of nature which the Greeks, unable to conceive the chivalric, ideal, and melancholy love begotten of Christianity, could represent in no other way.  Flore was too handsome to be disdained, and Max accepted his conquest.