I
wasn't likely to live long. It's a fact that I was just like wax. They
put me in charge of the driver of a small wagon that went from Langres
to Paris every month, and that's how I came to Paris. I was fourteen
years old, then. I remember that I went to bed all dressed all the way,
because they made me sleep in the common room. When I arrived I was
covered with lice."

II

The old woman said nothing: she was comparing her own life with her
servant's.

* * * * *

Mademoiselle de Varandeuil was born in 1782. She first saw the light in
a mansion on Rue Royale and Mesdames de France were her sponsors in
baptism. Her father was a close friend of the Comte d'Artois, in whose
household he held an important post. He joined in all his
hunting-parties, and was one of the few familiar spirits, in whose
presence, at the mass preceding the hunt, he who was one day to be King
Charles X. used to hurry the officiating priest by saying in an
undertone: "Psit! psit! cure, swallow your _Good Lord_ quickly!"

Monsieur de Varandeuil had made one of those marriages which were
customary enough in his day: he had espoused a sort of actress, a
singer, who, although she had no great talent, had made a success at the
_Concert Spirituel_, beside Madame Todi, Madame Ponteuil and Madame
Saint-Huberty. The little girl born of this marriage in 1782 was sickly
and delicate, ugly of feature, with a nose even then large enough to be
absurd, her father's nose in a face as thin as a man's wrist. She had
nothing of what her parents' vanity would have liked her to have. After
making a fiasco on the piano at the age of five, at a concert given by
her mother in her salon, she was relegated to the society of the
servants. Except for a moment in the morning, she never went near her
mother, who always made her kiss her under the chin, so that she might
not disturb her rouge. When the Revolution arrived, Monsieur de
Varandeuil, thanks to the Comte d'Artois' patronage, was disburser of
pensions. Madame de Varandeuil was traveling in Italy, whither she had
ordered her physician to send her on the pretext of ill health, leaving
her daughter and an infant son in her husband's charge. The absorbing
anxiety of the times, the tempests threatening wealth and the families
that handled wealth--Monsieur de Varandeuil's brother was a
Farmer-General--left that very selfish and unloving father but little
leisure to attend