friend nor servant spoke to
her. She describes naturally enough this lonely, uncomforted condition,
in which, more than ever, she meditated upon the wished-for return to
her mother, and the beginning with her of a new life of industry and
privation. Summoned at last to her grandmother's bedside, and kneeling
to ask for reconciliation, she is forced to stay there, and to listen
to the most cruel and literal account of her mother's life, its early
errors, and their inevitable consequences.

"All that she narrated was true in point of fact, and attested by
circumstances whose detail admitted of no doubt. But this terrible
history might have been unveiled to me without injury to my respect
and love for my mother, and, thus told, it would have been much more
probable and more true. It would have sufficed to tell all the causes of
her misfortunes,--loneliness and poverty from the age of fourteen years,
the corruption of the rich, who are there to lie in wait for hunger and
to blight the flower of innocence, the pitiless rigorism of opinion,
which allows no return and accepts no expiation. They should also have
told me how my mother had redeemed the past, how faithfully she had
loved my father, how, since his death, she had lived humble, sad, and
retired. Finally, my poor grandmother let fall the fatal word. My mother
was a lost woman, and I a blind child rushing towards a precipice."

The horror of this disclosure did not work the miracle anticipated.
Aurore submitted indeed outwardly, but a spell of hardness and
hopelessness was drawn around her young heart, which neither tears nor
tenderness could break. The blow struck at the very roots of life and
hope in her. Self-respect was wounded in its core. If the mother who
bore her was vile, then she was vile also. All object in life seemed
gone. She tried to live from day to day without interest, without hope.
From her dark thoughts she found refuge only in extravagant gayety,
which brought physical weariness, but no repose of mind. She, who
had been on the whole a docile, manageable child, became so riotous,
unreasonable, and insupportable, that the only alternative of utter
waste of character seemed to be the discipline and seclusion of
the convent. She was accordingly taken to Paris, and received as a
_pensionnaire_ in the Convent des Anglaises, which had been, in the
Revolution, her grandmother's prison. To Aurore it was rather a place of
refuge than a place of detention.