ghter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the
perspective of the workshop. He gave her an education of the highest
degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated
destinies. We need not say what dreams, misery, and misfortunes men with
such characters invariably bring upon their honest families.

The young girl grew up in this atmosphere of luxuriant imagination and
actual wretchedness. Endowed with a premature judgment, she early
detected these domestic miseries, and took refuge in the good sense of
her mother from the illusions of her father and her own presentiments of
the future.

Marguerite Bimont (her mother's name) had brought her husband a calm
beauty, and a mind very superior to her destiny, but angelic piety and
resignation armed her equally against ambition and despair. The mother
of seven children, who had all died in the birth, she concentrated in
her only child all the love of her soul. Yet this very love guarded her
from any weakness in the education of her daughter. She preserved the
nice balance of her heart and her mind; of her imagination and her
reason. The mould in which she formed this youthful mind was graceful;
but it was of brass. It might have been said that she foresaw the
destinies of her child, and infused into the mind of the young girl that
masculine spirit which forms heroes and inspires martyrs.

Nature lent herself admirably to the task, and had endowed her pupil
with an understanding even superior to her dazzling beauty. This beauty
of her earlier years, of which she has herself traced the principal
features with infinite ingenuousness in the more sprightly pages of her
memoirs, was far from having gained the energy, the melancholy, and the
majesty which she subsequently acquired from repressed love, high
thought, and misfortune.

A tall and supple figure, flat shoulders, a prominent bust, raised by a
free and strong respiration, a modest and most becoming demeanour, that
carriage of the neck which bespeaks intrepidity, black and soft hair,
blue eyes, which appeared brown in the depth of their reflection, a look
which like her soul passed rapidly from tenderness to energy, the nose
of a Grecian statue, a rather large mouth, opened by a smile as well as
speech, splendid teeth, a turned and well rounded chin gave to the oval
of her features that voluptuous and feminine grace without which even
beauty does not elicit love, a skin marbled with the