“Never leaving her little room in the rue de la Corderie du Temple, except to buy provisions or to fetch her work, Madame de la Chanterie contrived to get along, thanks to a hundred francs which her father-in-law, touched by her goodness, sent to her once a month.  Nevertheless, foreseeing that that resource might fail her, the poor young woman had taken up the hard and toilsome work of corset-making in the service of a celebrated dressmaker.  This precaution proved a wise one.  The father died, and his property was obtained by the son (the old monarchical laws of entail being then overthrown) and speedily dissipated by him.  The former Master of petitions was now one of the most ferocious presidents of the Revolutionary tribunals of that period; he became the terror of Normandy, and was able to satisfy all his passions.  Imprisoned in his turn after the fall of Robespierre, the hatred of his department doomed him to certain death.

“Madame de la Chanterie heard of this through a letter of farewell which her husband wrote to her.  Instantly, giving her little girl to the care of a neighbor, she went to the town where that wretch was imprisoned, taking with her the few louis which were all that she owned.  These louis enabled her to make her way into the prison.  She succeeded in saving her husband by dressing him in her own clothes, under circumstances almost identical with those which, sometime later, were so serviceable to Madame de la Valette.  She was condemned to death, but the government was ashamed to carry out the sentence; and the Revolutionary tribunal (the one over which her husband had formerly presided) connived at her escape.  She returned to Paris on foot, without means, sleeping in farm buildings and fed by charity.”

“Good God!” cried Godefroid.

“Ah! wait,” said Monsieur Alain; “that is nothing.  In eight years the poor woman saw her husband three times.  The first time he stayed twenty-four hours in the humble lodging of his wife, and carried away with him all her money; having showered her with marks of tenderness and made her believe in his complete conversion.  ‘I could not,’ she said, ’refuse a husband for whom I prayed daily and of whom I thought exclusively.’  On the second occasion, Monsieur de la Chanterie arrived almost dying, and with what an illness!  She nursed him and saved his life.  Then she tried to bring him to better sentiments and a decent life.  After promising all that angel asked, the jacobin plunged back into frightful profligacy, and finally escaped the hands of justice only by again taking refuge with his wife, in whose care he died in safety.

“Oh! but that is nothing!” cried the goodman, seeing the pain on Godefroid’s face.  “No one, in the world in which he lived, had known he was a married man.  Two years after his death Madame de la Chanterie discovered that a second Madame de la Chanterie existed, widowed like herself, and, like her, ruined.  That bigamist had found two angels incapable of discarding him.