ho sign this
epistle in a body, to remind you of them.

Nathan, Florine, Bixiou, Finot, Mariette,

Florentine, Giroudeau, Tullia

The letter shook in the trembling hands of Madame Rouget, and betrayed
the terror of her mind and body. The aunt dared not look at the nephew,
who fixed his eyes upon her with terrible meaning.

"I trust you," he said, "as you see; but I expect some return. I have
made you my aunt intending to marry you some day. You are worth more to
me than Esther in managing my uncle. In a year from now, we must be in
Paris; the only place where beauty really lives. You will amuse yourself
much better there than here; it is a perpetual carnival. I shall return
to the army, and become a general, and you will be a great lady. There's
our future; now work for it. But I must have a pledge to bind this
agreement. You are to give me, within a month from now, a power
of attorney from my uncle, which you must obtain under pretence of
relieving him of the fatigues of business. Also, a month later, I must
have a special power of attorney to transfer the income in the Funds.
When that stands in my name, you and I have an equal interest in
marrying each other. There it all is, my beautiful aunt, as plain as
day. Between you and me there must be no ambiguity. I can marry my aunt
at the end of a year's widowhood; but I could not marry a disgraced
girl."

He left the room without waiting for an answer. When Vedie came in,
fifteen minutes later, to clear the table, she found her mistress pale
and moist with perspiration, in spite of the season. Flore felt like
a woman who had fallen to the bottom of a precipice; the future loomed
black before her; and on its blackness, in the far distance, were shapes
of monstrous things, indistinctly perceptible, and terrifying. She felt
the damp chill of vaults, instinctive fear of the man crushed her;
and yet a voice cried in her ear that she deserved to have him for her
master. She was helpless against her fate. Flore Brazier had had a room
of her own in Rouget's house; but Madame Rouget belonged to her husband,
and was now deprived of the free-will of a servant-mistress. In the
horrible situation in which she now found herself, the hope of having a
child came into her mind; but she soon recognized its impossibility. The
marriage was to Jean-Jacques what the second marriage of Louis XII. was
to that king. The incessant watchfulness of a man like Philippe, who had
nothing