mily of the same name in Touraine, to which
belongs the ambassador of the Regent, even more famous to-day for his
writings than for his diplomatic talents.

Camille Maupin, one of the few celebrated women of the nineteenth
century, was long supposed to be a man, on account of the virility of
her first writings. All the world now knows the two volumes of plays,
not intended for representation on the stage, written after the manner
of Shakespeare or Lopez de Vega, published in 1822, which made a sort
of literary revolution when the great question of the classics and the
romanticists palpitated on all sides,--in the newspapers, at the clubs,
at the Academy, everywhere. Since then, Camille Maupin has written
several plays and a novel, which have not belied the success obtained by
her first publication--now, perhaps, too much forgotten. To explain by
what net-work of circumstances the masculine incarnation of a young girl
was brought about, why Felicite des Touches became a man and an author,
and why, more fortunate than Madame de Stael, she kept her freedom and
was thus more excusable for her celebrity, would be to satisfy many
curiosities and do justice to one of those abnormal beings who rise in
humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted by its rarity,--for
in twenty centuries we can count, at most, twenty famous women.
Therefore, although in these pages she stands as a secondary character,
in consideration of the fact that she plays a great part in the literary
history of our epoch, and that her influence over Calyste was great, no
one, we think, will regret being made to pause before that figure rather
longer than modern art permits.

Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches became an orphan in 1793. Her property
escaped confiscation by reason of the deaths of her father and brother.
The first was killed on the 10th of August, at the threshold of the
palace, among the defenders of the king, near whose person his rank as
major of the guards of the gate had placed him. Her brother, one of the
body-guard, was massacred at Les Carmes. Mademoiselle des Touches was
two years old when her mother died, killed by grief, a few days after
this second catastrophe. When dying, Madame des Touches confided her
daughter to her sister, a nun of Chelles. Madame de Faucombe, the nun,
prudently took the orphan to Faucombe, a good-sized estate near Nantes,
belonging to Madame des Touches, and there she settled with the little
girl and th