nds of some poor gambling officer, she
attached herself to him as a dog to its master, sharing the discomforts
of the military life, which indeed she comforted, as content under the
roof of a garret as beneath the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and
Spanish both, she fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion,
and more than once she had said to love:--

"Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God."

But this slime permeated with gold and perfumes, this careless
indifference to all things, these unbridled passions, these religious
beliefs cast into that heart like diamonds into mire, this life begun,
and ended, in a hospital, these gambling chances transferred to the
soul, to the very existence,--in short, this great alchemy, for which
vice lit the fire beneath the crucible in which fortunes were melted
up and the gold of ancestors and the honor of great names evaporated,
proceeded from a _cause_, a particular heredity, faithfully transmitted
from mother to daughter since the middle ages. The name of this woman
was La Marana. In her family, existing solely in the female line, the
idea, person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown
since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a
name of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the constant
heredity of the same office devolving on the family.

Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which united
and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served to
express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of that
sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day can
give an idea. Ninon de l'Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone played,
in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas who, in
preceding centuries, gathered around them the cassock, gown, and
sword. An Imperia built I forget which church in Rome in a frenzy of
repentance, as Rhodope built, in earlier times, a pyramid in Egypt. The
name Marana, inflicted at first as a disgrace upon the singular family
with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its veritable
name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.

One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this event
was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it