isit at the chateaux. For her, there was
no pleasure, no diversion, which was not made wretched and poisoned by
her father's eccentricities and fretful humor. He tore up the flowers
that she planted secretly in the garden. He would have nothing there but
vegetables and he cultivated them himself, putting forth grand
utilitarian theories, arguments which might have induced the Convention
to convert the Tuileries into a potato field. Her only enjoyment was
when her father, at very long intervals, allowed her to entertain one of
her two young friends for a week--a week which would have been seven
days of paradise to Sempronie, had not her father embittered its joys,
its diversions, its fetes, with his always threatening outbreaks, his
ill-humor always armed and alert, and his constant fault-finding about
trifles--a bottle of eau de Cologne that Sempronie asked for to place in
her friend's room, a dish for her dinner, or a place to which she wished
to take her.

At L'Isle-Adam Monsieur de Varandeuil had hired a servant, who almost
immediately became his mistress. A child was born of this connection,
and the father, in his cynical indifference, was shameless enough to
have it brought up under his daughter's eyes. As the years rolled on the
woman acquired a firm foothold in the house. She ended by ruling the
household, father and daughter alike. The day came when Monsieur de
Varandeuil chose to have her sit at his table and be served by
Sempronie. That was too much. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil rebelled under
the insult, and drew herself up to the full height of her indignation.
Secretly, silently, in misery and isolation, harshly treated by the
people and the things about her, the girl had built up a resolute,
straightforward character; tears had tempered instead of softening it.
Beneath filial docility and humility, beneath passive obedience, beneath
apparent gentleness of disposition, she concealed a character of iron, a
man's strength of will, one of those hearts which nothing bends and
which never bend themselves. When her father demanded that she lower
herself to that extent, she reminded him that she was his daughter, she
reviewed her whole life, cast, in a flood of words, the shame and the
reproach of it in his face, and concluded by informing him that if that
woman did not leave the house that very evening, she would leave it, and
that she should have no difficulty in living, thank God! wherever she
might go, with the