blindfold; one had to turn round by the Place de Jaude and take the Rue
des Gras; but more than that she could not tell him; the rest of the
town was an entanglement, a maze of sloping lanes and boulevards; a town
of black lava ever dipping downward, where the rain of the thunderstorms
swept by torrentially amidst formidable flashes of lightning. Oh! those
storms; she still shuddered to think of them. Just opposite her room,
above the roofs, the lightning conductor of the museum was always on
fire. In the sitting-room she had her own window--a deep recess as big
as a room itself--where her work-table and personal nick-nacks stood.
It was there that her mother had taught her to read; it was there that,
later on, she had fallen asleep while listening to her masters, so
greatly did the fatigue of learning daze her. And now she made fun of
her own ignorance; she was a well-educated young lady, and no mistake,
unable even to repeat the names of the Kings of France, with the dates
of their accessions; a famous musician too, who had never got further
than that elementary pianoforte exercise, 'The little boats'; a prodigy
in water-colour painting, who scamped her trees because foliage was too
difficult to imitate. Then she skipped, without any transition, to the
fifteen months she had spent at the Convent of the Visitation after
her mother's death--a large convent, outside the town, with magnificent
gardens. There was no end to her stories about the good sisters, their
jealousies, their foolish doings, their simplicity, that made one start.
She was to have taken the veil, but she felt stifled the moment she
entered a church. It had seemed to be all over with her, when the
Superior, by whom she was treated with great affection, diverted her
from the cloister by procuring her that situation at Madame Vanzade's.
She had not yet got over the surprise. How had Mother des Saints Anges
been able to read her mind so clearly? For, in fact, since she had
been living in Paris she had dropped into complete indifference about
religion.

When all the reminiscences of Clermont were exhausted, Claude wanted
to hear about her life at Madame Vanzade's, and each week she gave him
fresh particulars. The life led in the little house at Passy, silent
and shut off from the outer world, was a very regular one, with no more
noise about it than the faint tic-tac of an old-fashioned timepiece.
Two antiquated domestics, a cook and a manservant, who had be