athed deceit, or still more hateful, and scarcely less
guilty, betrayal!

Aurore now found herself in the hands of a woman of the people, ennobled
for a time by beauty and a true affection, but sinking, her good
inspiration gone, into the bitterest ill-temper and most vulgar
uncharity. Detesting her superiors in rank and position, she soon
managed to cut off Aurore from all intercourse with her father's family,
and thus to frustrate every prospect of her marriage in the sphere for
which she had been so carefully educated. She was even forbidden to
visit her old friends at the convent, and was eventually placed by her
mother with a family nearly unknown to both, whose pity had been excited
by her friendless condition and unhappy countenance. Aurore's mother
seems to us, _du reste_, the perfect type of a Parisian lorette, the
sort of woman so keenly attractive with the bloom of youth and the
eloquence of passion,--but when these have passed their day, the most
detestable of mistresses, the most undesirable of companions. Men of all
ranks and ages acknowledge their attraction, endure their tyranny, and
curse the misery it inflicts. Marriage and competency had protected this
one from the deteriorations which almost inevitably await those of
her class, but they could not save her from the natural process of an
undisciplined mind, an ungoverned temper, and a caprice verging on
insanity. This self-torment of caprice could be assuaged only by
constant change of circumstance and surroundings; her only resource was
to metamorphose things about her as often and as rapidly as possible.
She changed her lodgings, her furniture, her clothes, retrimmed her
bonnets continually, always finding them worse than before. Finally, she
grew weary of her black hair, and wore a blond periwig, which disgusting
her in turn, she finished by appearing in a different head of hair every
day in the week.

Aurore's new friends proved congenial to her, and the influence of their
happy family-life dispersed, she says, her last dreams of the beatitudes
of the convent. It was in their company that she first met the man
destined to become her husband. Most of us would like to know the
impression he made upon her at first sight. We will give it in her own
words.

"We were eating ices at Tortoni's, after the theatre, when my mother
Angele [her new friend] said to her husband,--'See, there is Casimir.'

"A slender young man, rather elegant, with a gay aspec