isolation from
the world have been in my fate strangely combined. They married me"----

"What! are you a married woman and so young?" exclaimed the lady who was
addressed.

"I have been; I am now a widow. It is for my husband that I wear this
mourning. They took me from the convent where I was educated, and
married me to a man whom I was permitted to see only once before the
alliance was concluded. As I had been brought up with the idea that my
father was to choose a husband for me, and as the Count D---- was both
handsome and of agreeable manners, the only qualities on which I was
supposed to have an opinion, there was no room for objection on my part.
The marriage was speedily celebrated. My husband was wealthy. Of that my
father had taken care to satisfy himself; perhaps it was the only point
on which he was very solicitous. For I should tell you that my father,
the only parent I have surviving, is one of those restless unquiet men
who have no permanent abode, who delight in travelling from place to
place, and who regard their children, if they have any, in the light
only of cares and encumbrances. There is not a capital in Europe in
which he has not resided, and scarcely a spot of any celebrity which he
has not visited. It was therefore at the house of a maiden aunt--to whom
I am now about to return--that I was married.

"I spent the first years of my marriage, as young brides I believe
generally do, in a sort of trouble of felicity. I did not know how to be
sufficiently thankful to Heaven for the treasure I found myself the
possessor of; such a sweetness of temper and such a tenderness of
affection did my husband continually manifest towards me. After a short
season of festivity, spent at the house of my aunt, we travelled
together without any other companion towards Paris, where the Count had
a residence elegantly fitted up to receive us. The journey itself was a
new source of delight to one who had been hitherto shut up, with her
instructress, in a convent. Never shall I forget the hilarity, the
almost insupportable joy, with which the first part of this journey was
performed. The sun shone out upon a beautiful landscape, and there was
I, travelling alone with the one individual who had suddenly awoke and
possessed himself of all my affections--travelling, too, with gay
anticipations to the glorious city of Paris, of which I had heard so
much, and in which I was to appear with all the envied advantages of
weal