econd brother, Andre, a widower, and Madame Hulot's father,
left his daughter to the care of his elder brother, Pierre Fischer,
disabled from service by a wound received in 1797, and made a small
private venture in the military transport service, an opening he owed to
the favor of Hulot d'Ervy, who was high in the commissariat. By a very
obvious chance Hulot, coming to Strasbourg, saw the Fischer family.
Adeline's father and his younger brother were at that time contractors
for forage in the province 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 Ar