afforded an asylum in my dwelling to Madame de la Tour, who bore
up under her calamities with incredible elevation of mind. She had
endeavoured to console Paul and Margaret till their last moments, as if
she herself had no misfortunes of her own to bear. When they were not
more, she used to talk to me every day of them as of beloved friends,
who were still living near her. She survived them however, but one
month. Far from reproaching her aunt for the afflictions she had caused,
her benign spirit prayed to God to pardon her, and to appease that
remorse which we heard began to torment her, as soon as she had sent
Virginia away with so much inhumanity.

Conscience, that certain punishment of the guilty, visited with all its
terrors the mind of this unnatural relation. So great was her torment,
that life and death became equally insupportable to her. Sometimes she
reproached herself with the untimely fate of her lovely niece, and with
the death of her mother, which had immediately followed it. At other
times she congratulated herself for having repulsed far from her two
wretched creatures, who, she said, had both dishonoured their family
by their grovelling inclinations. Sometimes, at the sight of the many
miserable objects with which Paris abounds, she would fly into a rage,
and exclaim,--"Why are not these idle people sent off to the colonies?"
As for the notions of humanity, virtue and religion, adopted by all
nations, she said, they were only the inventions of their rulers, to
serve political purposes. Then, flying all at once to the other extreme,
she abandoned herself to superstitious terrors, which filled her
with mortal fears. She would then give abundant alms to the wealthy
ecclesiastics who governed her, beseeching them to appease the wrath of
God by the sacrifice of her fortune,--as if the offering to Him of the
wealth she had withheld from the miserable could please her Heavenly
Father! In her imagination she often beheld fields of fire, with burning
mountains, wherein hideous spectres wandered about, loudly calling on
her by name. She threw herself at her confessor's feet, imagining every
description of agony and torture; for Heaven--just Heaven, always sends
to the cruel the most frightful views of religion and a future state.

Atheist, thus, and fanatic in turn, holding both life and death in equal
horror, she lived on for several years. But what completed the torments
of her miserable existence, was that v