As I passed, glancing up at her, the sadness of her face impressed me,
and I remember wondering how much the death of her husband had to do
with it--for his name had appeared in the evening papers under the
heading, "Killed in Action."

It was several years later before the police began to take an interest
in the Comtesse Eline de Vassart. She had withdrawn entirely from
society, had founded a non-sectarian free school in Passy, was
interested in certain charities and refuges for young working-girls,
when on a visit to England, she met Karl Marx, then a fugitive and
under sentence of death.

From that moment social questions occupied her, and her doings
interested the police, especially when she returned to Paris and took
her place once more in Royalist circles, where every baby was bred
from the cradle to renounce the Tuileries, the Emperor, and all his
works.

Serious, tender-hearted, charitable, and intensely interested in all
social reforms, she shocked the conservative society of the noble
faubourg, aroused the distrust of the government, offended the
Tuileries, and finally committed the mistake of receiving at her own
house that notorious group of malcontents headed by Henri Rochefort,
whose revolutionary newspaper, _La Marseillaise_, doubtless needed
pecuniary support.

Her dossier--for, alas! the young girl already had a dossier--was
interesting, particularly in its summing-up of her personal
character:

"To the naive ignorance of a convent pensionnaire, she adds an
innocence of mind, a purity of conduct, and a credulity which render
her an easy prey to the adroit, who play upon her sympathies. She is
dangerous only as a source of revenue for dangerous men."

It was from her salon that young Victor Noir went to his death at
Auteuil on the 10th of January; and possibly the shock of the murder
and the almost universal conviction that justice under the Empire was
hopeless drove the young Countess to seek a refuge in the country
where, at her house of La Trappe, she could quietly devote her life to
helping the desperately wretched, and where she could, in security,
hold council with those who also had chosen to give their lives to
the noblest of all works--charity and the propaganda of universal
brotherhood.

And here, at La Trappe, the young aristocrat first donned the robe of
democracy, dedicated her life and fortune to the cause, and worked
with her own delicate hands for every morsel of bread that pass