own caste when she visited her property in former years, she now felt
it advisable to open her house to the principle bourgeois of the town,
and to the new governmental authorities; trying to make them pleased
at obtaining her society, without arousing either hatred or jealousy.
Gracious and kind, gifted by nature with that inexpressible charm
which can please without having recourse to subserviency or to making
overtures, she succeeded in winning general esteem by an exquisite
tact; the sensitive warnings of which enabled her to follow the
delicate line along which she might satisfy the exactions of this
mixed society, without humiliating the touchy pride of the parvenus,
or shocking that of her own friends.

Then about thirty-eight years of age, she still preserved, not the
fresh plump beauty which distinguishes the daughters of Lower
Normandy, but a fragile and, so to speak, aristocratic beauty. Her
features were delicate and refined, her figure supple and easy. When
she spoke, her pale face lighted and seemed to acquire fresh life. Her
large dark eyes were full of affability and kindness, and yet their
calm, religious expression seemed to say that the springs of her
existence were no longer in her.

Married in the flower of her age to an old and jealous soldier, the
falseness of her position in the midst of a court noted for its
gallantry contributed much, no doubt, to draw a veil of melancholy
over a face where the charms and the vivacity of love must have shone
in earlier days. Obliged to repress the naive impulses and emotions of
a woman when she simply feels them instead of reflecting about them,
passion was still virgin in the depths of her heart. Her principal
attraction came, in fact, from this innate youth, which sometimes,
however, played her false, and gave to her ideas an innocent