he had given encouragement to criminal
schemes.

"If you ever want money for any of your paupers, let me be a sharer in
your good deeds," said old Grossetete, taking Veronique's hand.

"Ah!" she replied with a sigh, "it is impossible to make everybody
rich."

At the beginning of this year an event occurred which was destined
to change the whole interior life of this woman and to transform
the splendid expression of her countenance into something far more
interesting in the eyes of painters.

Becoming uneasy about his health, Graslin, to his wife's despair, no
longer desired to live on the ground-floor. He returned to the
conjugal chamber and allowed himself to be nursed. The news soon spread
throughout Limoges that Madame Graslin was pregnant. Her sadness,
mingled with joy, struck the minds of her friends, who then for the
first time perceived that in spite of her virtues she had been happy in
the fact of living separate from her husband. Perhaps she had hoped
for some better fate ever since the time when, as it was known, the
attorney-general had declined to marry the richest heiress in the place,
in order to keep his loyalty to her.

From this suggestion there grew up in the minds of the profound
politicians who played their whist at the hotel Graslin a belief
that the viscount and the young wife had based certain hopes on the
ill-health of the banker which were now frustrated. The great agitations
which marked this period of Veronique's life, the anxieties which a
first childbirth causes in every woman, and which, it is said, threatens
special danger when she is past her first youth, made her friends more
attentive than ever to her; they vied with each other in showing her
those little kindnesses which proved how warm and solid their affection
really was.

V. TASCHERON

It was in this year that Limoges witnessed a terrible event and the
singular drama of the Tascheron trial, in which the young Vicomte
de Grandville displayed the talents which afterwards made him
_procureur-general_.

An old man living in a lonely house in the suburb of Saint-Etienne was
murdered. A large fruit-garden lay between the road and the house, which
was also separated from the adjoining fields by a pleasure-garden, at
the farther end of which were several old and disused greenhouses. In
front of the house a rapid slope to the river bank gave a view of the
Vienne. The courtyard, which also sloped downward, ended at a little