e amount of some outstanding claims that were paid,
provided the family with something more than bread. They thereupon left
the eaves of the Hotel du Petit-Charolais and took a small suite in the
Marais, on Rue du Chaume.

No change took place, however, in the habits of the household. The
daughter continued to wait upon her father and brother. Monsieur de
Varandeuil had gradually become accustomed to see in her only the woman
indicated by her costume and by the work that she did. The father's eyes
did not care to recognize a daughter in that servant's garb and in her
performance of menial occupations. She was no longer a person with his
blood in her veins or who had the honor to belong to him: she was a
servant; and his selfishness confirmed him so fully in that idea and in
his harsh treatment of her, he found that filial, affectionate,
respectful service,--which cost nothing at all, by the way,--so
convenient, that it cost him a bitter pang to give it up later, when a
little more money mended the family fortunes: battles had to be fought
to induce him to take a maid to fill his child's place and to relieve
the girl from the most humiliating domestic labor.

They were without information concerning Madame de Varandeuil, who had
refused to join her husband at Paris during the early years of the
Revolution; at last they learned that she had married again in Germany,
producing, as a certificate of her husband's death, the death
certificate of his guillotined brother, the baptismal name having been
changed. The girl grew up, therefore, abandoned, without affection, with
no mother except a woman dead to her family, whom her father taught her
to despise. Her childhood was passed in constant anxiety, in the
privations that wear life away, in the fatigue resulting from labor that
exhausted the strength of a sickly child, in an expectation of death
that became, at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours
when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those
days--to open the door and rush into the street, crying: _Vive le roi!_
in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood
with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill
humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her
father, which had been hitherto somewhat curbed and restrained by the
great tempest of the time. She was still doomed to undergo the fatigues
and humiliations o