wns, who got a fine commission for themselves from clients for whom
they obtained money on such good terms, gave due notice to the old
bachelor.

During these nine years Flore obtained in the long run, insensibly and
without aiming for it, an absolute control over her master. From the
first, she treated him very familiarly; then, without failing him in
proper respect, she so far surpassed him in superiority of mind and
force of character that he became in fact the servant of his servant.
Elderly child that he was, he met this mastery half-way by letting Flore
take such care of him that she treated him more as a mother would a
son; and he himself ended by clinging to her with the feeling of a child
dependent on a mother's protection. But there were other ties between
them not less tightly knotted. In the first place, Flore kept the
house and managed all its business. Jean-Jacques left everything to the
crab-girl so completely that life without her would have seemed to him
not only difficult, but impossible. In every way, this woman had become
the one need of his existence; she indulged all his fancies, for she
knew them well. He loved to see her bright face always smiling at
him,--the only face that had ever smiled upon him, the only one to which
he could look for a smile. This happiness, a purely material happiness,
expressed in the homely words which come readiest to the tongue in a
Berrichon household, and visible on the fine countenance of the young
woman, was like a reflection of his own inward content. The state into
which Jean-Jacques was thrown when Flore's brightness was clouded over
by some passing annoyance revealed to the girl her power over him, and,
to make sure of it, she sometimes liked to use it. Using such power
means, with women of her class, abusing it. The Rabouilleuse, no doubt,
made her master play some of those scenes buried in the mysteries of
private life, of which Otway gives a specimen in the tragedy of "Venice
Preserved," where the scene between the senator and Aquilina is the
realization of the magnificently horrible. Flore felt so secure of her
power that, unfortunately for her, and for the bachelor himself, it did
not occur to her to make him marry her.

Towards the close of 1815, Flore, who was then twenty-seven, had reached
the perfect development of her beauty. Plump and fresh, and white as
a Norman countrywoman, she was the ideal of what our ancestors used to
call "a buxom housewife."