us. He
broke the glass that contained the medicine, and pursuing the girl to
the further end of the room, seemed on the point of wreaking his fury
upon her. He restrained himself, however, and having demanded the vial
repeatedly in vain, went to his own room. The next day the physician did
not attend, and in the dead of night the house was entered by thieves,
some valuables were stolen, and Mademoiselle Marie Guadin was found
murdered in her bed in the morning.

The occurrence made a great _eclat_, and suspicions, from the taint of
which he had never quite recovered, began to environ Monsieur Le Prun.
His unhappy wife was now put under the severest restraint--from which,
and, as was supposed, the partial effects of the poison, she became
subject to temporary fits of insanity. By sheer terror, Le Prun extorted
from her a written declaration, to the effect that she lived with him
merely as his mistress, and that no marriage ceremony, or any contract
of marriage, had ever been performed between them. It was about three
months after these terrible occurrences that she gave birth to a male
child. This child, it appeared, was removed after a few weeks from its
mother, and placed in the care of a poor woman in the village of
Charrebourg, where, under the name of Gabriel, he, as we know, lived
unrecognized, and himself unsuspecting his origin.

His mother had been a heartless, as she was a vicious and a miserable
woman. Instead of the yearnings of maternal love, she regarded her
innocent child merely as the offspring of that monster, whom she
execrated and feared with a preternatural hate. If she looked upon him
with any feeling more lively than that of indifference, it was with one
of positive malice and antipathy.

Among his other employments of a delicate kind, Blassemare had charge of
all arrangements affecting this person, of whom, for every reason, Le
Prun hated even to hear. He paid, therefore, whatever was demanded on
this account, with the sole proviso that her name should never be
mentioned. On her removal, about a year since, from the country-house
where she had been for so long a scarcely unwilling prisoner, to the
vast and melancholy Hotel St. Maurice, which had lately fallen into the
hands of M. Le Prun, an accident to the carriage obliged them to arrest
their progress for an hour at the village of Charrebourg. She was
brought into the park meanwhile, and there met with Gabriel, and
subsequently, as the reader