mother went upstairs in the evenings to their daughter's apartment,
where Veronique would read to them, by the light of a lamp placed
behind a glass globe full of water, the "Vie des Saints," the "Lettres
Edifiantes," and other books lent by the vicar. Madame Sauviat knitted
stockings, feeling that she thus recouped herself for the cost of oil.
The neighbors could see through the window the old couple seated
motionless in their armchairs, like Chinese images, listening to their
daughter, and admiring her with all the powers of their contracted
minds, obtuse to everything that was not business or religious faith.



II

VERONIQUE

There are, no doubt, many young girls in the world as pure as
Veronique, but none purer or more modest. Her confessions might have
surprised the angels and rejoiced the Blessed Virgin.

At sixteen years of age she was fully developed, and appeared the
woman she was eventually to become. She was of medium height, neither
her father nor her mother being tall; but her figure was charming in
its graceful suppleness, and in the serpentine curves laboriously
sought by painters and sculptors,--curves which Nature herself draws
so delicately with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists
in spite of swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves,
inevitably, upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set
these beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly
free from affectation. She brought out her "full and complete effect,"