vince of Alsace.

Adeline, then sixteen years of age, might be compared with the famous
Madame du Barry, like her, a daughter of Lorraine. She was one of
those perfect and striking beauties--a woman like Madame Tallien,
finished with peculiar care by Nature, who bestows on them all her
choicest gifts--distinction, dignity, grace, refinement, elegance,
flesh of a superior texture, and a complexion mingled in the unknown
laboratory where good luck presides. These beautiful creatures all
have something in common: Bianca Capella, whose portrait is one of
Bronzino's masterpieces; Jean Goujon's Venus, painted from the famous
Diane de Poitiers; Signora Olympia, whose picture adorns the Doria
gallery; Ninon, Madame du Barry, Madame Tallien, Mademoiselle Georges,
Madame Recamier.--all these women who preserved their beauty in spite
of years, of passion, and of their life of excess and pleasure, have
in figure, frame, and in the character of their beauty certain
striking resemblances, enough to make one believe that there is in the
ocean of generations an Aphrodisian current whence every such Venus is
born, all daughters of the same salt wave.

Adeline Fischer, one of the loveliest of this race of goddesses, had
the splendid type, the flowing lines, the exquisite texture of a woman
born a queen. The fair hair that our mother Eve received from the hand
of God, the form of an Empress, an air of grandeur, and an august line
of profile, with her rural modesty, made every man pause in delight as
she passed, like amateurs in front of a Raphael; in short, having once
seen her, the Commissariat officer made Mademoiselle Adeline Fischer
his wife as quickly as the law would permit, to the great astonishment
of the Fischers, who had all been brought up in the fear of their
betters.

The eldest, a soldier of 1792, severely wounded in the attack on the
lines at Wissembourg, adored the Emperor Napoleon and everything that
had to do with the _Grande Armee_. Andre and Johann spoke with respect
of Commissary Hulot, the Emperor's protege, to whom indeed they owed
their prosperity; for Hulot d'Ervy, finding them intelligent and
honest, had taken them from the army provision wagons to place them in
charge of a government contract needing despatch. The brothers Fischer
had done further service during the campaign of 1804. At the peace
Hulot had secured for them the contract for forage from Alsace, not
knowing that he would presently be sent to Str