Madame Marigny, the exchange of name and papers, her confinement in the
neighbourhood of Aix, the child left to the care of the nurse, the
journey to Munich to find the false Louise Duval was no more. The
documents obtained through the agency of her easy-tempered kinsman, the
late Marquis de Rochebriant, and her subsequent domestication in the
house of the von Rudesheims,--all this it is needless to do more here
than briefly recapitulate. The letter then went on: "While thus kindly
treated by the family with whom nominally a governess, I was on the terms
of a friend with Signor Ludovico Cicogna, an Italian of noble birth. He
was the only man I ever cared for. I loved him with frail human passion.
I could not tell him, my true history. I could not tell him that I had a
child; such intelligence would have made him renounce me at once. He had
a daughter, still but an infant, by a former marriage, then brought up in
France. He wished to take her to his house, and his second wife to
supply the place of her mother. What was I to do with the child I had
left near Aix? While doubtful and distracted, I read an advertisement in
the journals to the effect that a French lady, then staying in Coblentz,
wished to adopt a female child not exceeding the age of six: the child to
be wholly resigned to her by the parents, she undertaking to rear and
provide for it as her own. I resolved to go to Coblentz at once. I did
so. I saw this lady. She seemed in affluent circumstances, yet young,
but a confirmed invalid, confined the greater part of the day to her sofa
by some malady of the spine. She told me very frankly her story. She
had been a professional dancer on the stage, had married respectably,
quitted the stage, become a widow, and shortly afterwards been seized
with the complaint that would probably for life keep her a secluded
prisoner in her room. Thus afflicted, and without tie, interest, or
object in the world, she conceived the idea of adopting a child that she
might bring up to tend and cherish her as a daughter. In this, the
imperative condition was that the child should never be sought by the