elder did not marry at all.

At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are
relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of
the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible
to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate family, no one
had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand,
the elder.

In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given points
to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.
She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld
her garter.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was
never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She
multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in
proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.

Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of
innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.

In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we
have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a
demi-vice.

To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged
to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred
heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar
in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful,
and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and
through great rays of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named
Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom
Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond
the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of
anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle
Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a
single spot of intelligence.

Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than
lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had
never been malicious, which is relative kind