asked to "see what it was like" (with the
Abbe Gaudron's permission, be it understood), Monsieur Baudoyer took
her--for the glory of the thing, and to show her the finest that was to
be seen--to the Opera, where they were playing "The Chinese Laborer."
Elisabeth thought "the comedy" as wearisome as the plague of flies, and
never wished to see another. On Sundays, after walking four times to
and fro between the place Royale and Saint-Paul's church (for her mother
made her practise the precepts and the duties of religion), her parents
took her to the pavement in front of the Cafe Ture, where they sat on
chairs placed between a railing and the wall. The Saillards always made
haste to reach the place early so as to choose the best seats, and found
much entertainment in watching the passers-by. In those days the Cafe
Ture was the rendezvous of the fashionable society of the Marais, the
faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the circumjacent regions.

Elisabeth never wore anything but cotton gowns in summer and merino in
the winter, which she made herself. Her mother gave her twenty francs
a month for her expenses, but her father, who was very fond of her,
mitigated this rigorous treatment with a few presents. She never read
what the Abbe Gaudron, vicar of Saint-Paul's and the family director,
called profane books. This discipline had borne fruit. Forced to employ
her feelings on some passion or other, Elisabeth became eager after
gain. Though she was not lacking in sense or perspicacity, religious
theories, and her complete ignorance of higher emotions had encircled
all her faculties with an iron hand; they were exercised solely on the
commonest things of life; spent in a few directions they were able
to concentrate themselves on a matter in hand. Repressed by religious
devotion, her natural intelligence exercised itself within the limits
marked out by cases of conscience, which form a mine of subtleties
among which self-interest selects its subterfuges. Like those saintly
personages in whom religion does not stifle ambition, Elisabeth was
capable of requiring others to do a blamable action that she might reap
the fruits; and she would have been, like them again, implacable as to
her dues and dissembling in her actions. Once offended, she watched her
adversaries with the perfidious patience of a cat, and was capable of
bringing about some cold and complete vengeance, and then laying it to
the account of God. Until her marriage the Saill