walking four times to and fro between the place Royale and
Saint-Paul's church (for her mother made her practise the precepts and
the duties of religion), her parents took her to the pavement in front
of the Cafe Ture, where they sat on chairs placed between a railing and
the wall. The Saillards always made haste to reach the place early so
as to choose the best seats, and found much entertainment in watching
the passers-by. In those days the Cafe Ture was the rendezvous of the
fashionable society of the Marais, the faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the
circumjacent regions.

Elisabeth never wore anything but cotton gowns in summer and merino in
the winter, which she made herself. Her mother gave her twenty francs
a month for her expenses, but her father, who was very fond of her,
mitigated this rigorous treatment with a few presents. She never read
what the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's and the family director,
called profane books. This discipline had borne fruit. Forced to
employ her feelings on some passion or other, Elisabeth became eager
after gain. Though she was not lacking in sense or perspicacity,
religious theories, and her complete ignorance of higher emotions had
encircled all her faculties with an iron hand; they were exercised
solely on the commonest things of life; spent in a few directions they
were able to concentrate themselves on a matter in hand. Repressed by
religious devotion, her natural intelligence exercised itself within
the limits marked out by cases of conscience, which form a mine of
subtleties among which self-interest selects its subterfuges. Like
those saintly personages in whom religion does not stifle ambition,
Elisabeth was capable of requiring others to do a blamable action that
she might reap the fruits; and she would have been, like them again,
implacable as to her dues and dissembling in her actions. Once
offended, she watched her adversaries with the perfidious patience of