her good looks and she had the figure and the appearance of an old maid,
when her father suddenly died, just as he was going to sit down to
dinner; and when the lawyer, who was summoned immediately, had ransacked
the cupboards and drawers, discovered a mass of securities, of
bank-notes, and of gold, which Count d'Etchegorry, who was eaten up
with avarice, had amassed eagerly, and hidden away, it was found that
Mademoiselle Marie-des-Anges, who was his sole heiress, possessed an
income of fifty thousand francs.

She received the news without any emotion, for of what use was such a
fortune to her now, and what should she do with it? Her eyes, alas! had
been too much opened by all the tears that had fallen from them for her
to delude herself with visionary hopes, and her heart had been too
cruelly wounded to warm itself by lying illusions, and she was seized by
melancholy when she thought that in future she would be coveted, she who
had been kept at arm's length, as if she had been a leper; that men would
come after her money with odious impatience, that now that she was worn
out and ugly, tired of everything and everybody, she would most certainly
have plenty of suitors to refuse, and that perhaps he would come back to
her, attracted by that amount of money, like a hawk hovering over its
prey, that he would try to re-kindle the dead cinders, to revive some
spark in them and to obtain pardon for his cowardice.

Oh! With what bitter pleasure she could have thrown those millions into
the road to the ragged beggars, or scattered them about like manna to all
who were suffering and dying of hunger, and who had neither roof nor
hearth! She naturally soon became the target at which everyone aimed, the
goal for which all those who had formerly disdained her most, now eagerly
tried.