At length one day, three weeks after our marriage, Joseph came to tell me
that he had secured passage on a vessel, and that we must sail together
under the name of Citoyen and Citoyenne Carpentier. I was truly sorry to
leave my adopted parents and foster-brother, yet at the bottom of my heart
I was rejoiced that I was going to find my mother.

But alas! when I arrived in London, at the address that she had given me,
I found there only her old friend the Chevalier d'Ivoy, who told me that
my mother was dead, and that what was left of her money, with her jewels
and chests, was deposited in the Bank of England. I was more dead than
alive; all these things paralyzed me. But my good Joseph took upon himself
to do everything for me. He went and drew what had been deposited in the
bank. Indeed of money there remained but twelve thousand francs; but
there were plate, jewels, pictures, and many vanities in the form of gowns
and every sort of attire.

Joseph rented a little house in a suburb of London, engaged an old
Frenchwoman to attend me, and he, after all my husband, made himself my
servant, my gardener, my factotum. He ate in the kitchen with the maid,
waited upon me at table, and slept in the garret on a pallet.

"Am I not very wicked?" said I to myself every day, especially when I saw
his pallor and profound sadness. They had taught me in the convent that
the ties of marriage were a sacred thing and that one could not break
them, no matter how they might have been made; and when my patrician pride
revolted at the thought of this union with the son of my nurse
my heart pleaded
and pleaded
hard the cause