me progress in Guerande, and several persons knew of the dual
form of Mademoiselle des Touches' existence. Letters came to the
post-office, directed to Camille Maupin at Les Touches. In short, the
veil was rent away. In a region so essentially Catholic, archaic, and
full of prejudice, the singular life of this illustrious woman would
of course cause rumors, some of which, as we have seen, had reached the
ears of the Abbe Grimont and alarmed him; such a life could never be
comprehended in Guerande; in fact, to every mind, it seemed unnatural
and improper.

Felicite, during her present stay, was not alone in Les Touches. She had
a guest. That guest was Claude Vignon, a scornful and powerful writer
who, though doing criticism only, has found means to give the public
and literature the impression of a certain superiority. Mademoiselle des
Touches had received this writer for the last seven years, as she had so
many other authors, journalists, artists, and men of the world. She knew
his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter penury, his indifference
and disgust for all things, and yet by the way she was now conducting
herself she seemed inclined to marry him. She explained her conduct,
incomprehensible to her friends, in various ways,--by ambition, by the
dread she felt of a lonely old age; she wanted to confide her future to
a superior man, to whom her fortune would be a stepping-stone, and thus
increase her own importance in the literary world.

With these apparent intentions she had brought Claude Vignon from Paris
to Les Touches, as an eagle bears away a kid in its talons,--to study
him, and decide upon some positive course. But, in truth, she was
misleading both Calyste and Claude; she was not even thinking of
marriage; her heart was in the throes of the most violent convulsion
that could agitate a soul as strong as hers. She found herself the
dupe of her own mind; too late she saw life lighted by the sun of love,
shining as love shines in a heart of twenty.

Let us now see Camille's convent where this was happening.

VII. LES TOUCHES

A few hundred yards from Guerande the soil of Brittany comes to an end;
the salt-marshes and the sandy dunes begin. We descend into a desert of
sand, which the sea has left for a margin between herself and earth,
by a rugged road through a ravine that has never seen a carriage. This
desert contains waste tracts, ponds of unequal size, round the shores of
which the salt is ma