In the spring of one of the brightest years of the Restoration, a lady
with her housekeeper and her two children (the oldest a boy thirteen
years old, the youngest apparently about eight) came to Tours to look
for a house. She saw La Grenadiere and took it. Perhaps the distance
from the town was an inducement to live there.

She made a bedroom of the drawing-room, gave the children the two
rooms above, and the housekeeper slept in a closet behind the kitchen.
The dining-room was sitting-room and drawing-room all in one for the
little family. The house was furnished very simply but tastefully;
there was nothing superfluous in it, and no trace of luxury. The
walnut-wood furniture chosen by the stranger lady was perfectly plain,
and the whole charm of the house consisted in its neatness and harmony
with its surroundings.

It was rather difficult, therefore, to say whether the strange lady
(Mme. Willemsens, as she styled herself) belonged to the upper middle
or higher classes, or to an equivocal, unclassified feminine species.
Her plain dress gave rise to the most contradictory suppositions, but
her manners might be held to confirm those favorable to her. She had
not lived at Saint-Cyr, moreover, for very long before her reserve
excited the curiosity of idle people, who always, and especially in
the country, watch anybody or anything that promises to bring some
interest into their narrow lives.

Mme. Willemsens was rather tall; she was thin and slender, but
delicately shaped. She had pretty feet, more remarkable for the grace
of her instep and ankle than for the more ordinary merit of
slenderness; her gloved hands, too, were shapely. There were flitting
patches of deep red in a pale face, which must have been fresh and