p to her room where, under
the protection of bolts and bars, she would again contemplate the work
of time on her ripe beauty, now beginning to wither, and recognize with
despair the gradual progress of the process which no one else had as yet
seemed to perceive, but of which she, herself, was well aware. She
knows where to seek the most serious, the gravest traces of age. And the
mirror, the little round hand-glass in its carved silver frame, tells
her horrible things; for it speaks, it seems to laugh, it jeers and
tells her all that is going to occur, all the physical discomforts and
the atrocious mental anguish she will suffer until the day of her death,
which will be the day of her deliverance.

Did she weep, distractedly, on her knees, her forehead to the ground,
and pray, pray, pray to Him who thus slays his creatures and gives them
youth only that he may render old age more unendurable, and lends them
beauty only that he may withdraw it almost immediately? Did she pray to
Him, imploring Him to do for her what He has never yet done for any one,
to let her retain until her last day her charm, her freshness and her
gracefulness? Then, finding that she was imploring in vain an inflexible
Unknown who drives on the years, one after another, did she roll on the
carpet in her room, knocking her head against the furniture and stifling
in her throat shrieks of despair?

Doubtless she suffered these tortures, for this is what occurred:

One day (she was then thirty-five) her son aged fifteen, fell ill.

He took to his bed without any one being able to determine the cause or
nature of his illness.

His tutor, a priest, watched beside him and hardly ever left him, while
Mme. Hermet came morning and evening to inquire how he was.

She would come into the room in the morning in her night wrapper,
smiling, all powdered and perfumed, and would ask as she entered the
door:

"Well, George, are you better?"

The big boy, his face red, swollen and showing the ravages of fever,
would reply:

"Yes, little mother, a little better."

She would stay in the room a few seconds, look at the bottles of
medicine, and purse her lips as if she were saying "phew," and then
would suddenly exclaim: "Oh, I forgot something very important," and
would run out of the room leaving behind her a fragrance of choice
toilet perfumes.

In the evening she would appear in a decollete dress, in a still greater
hurry, for she was always late, and sh