could not even obtain
permission to dine out: the old man would no longer sanction such a long
absence and kept her almost constantly beside him, repeating again and
again that he was well aware that it was not amusing to take care of an
infirm old man like himself, but that she would soon be rid of him. He
died in 1818, and, before his death, could find no words but these for
her who had been his daughter nearly forty years: "I know that you never
loved me!"

Two years before her father's death, Sempronie's brother had returned
from America. He brought with him a colored woman who had nursed him
through the yellow fever, and two girls, already grown up, whom he had
had by the woman before marrying her. Although she was imbued with the
ideas of the old regime as to the blacks, and although she looked upon
that ignorant creature, with her negro jargon, her grin like a wild
beast's and her skin that left grease stains upon her clothing, as no
better than a monkey, Mademoiselle de Varandeuil combated her father's
horror and unwillingness to receive his daughter-in-law; and she it was
who induced him, in the last days of his life, to allow her brother to
present his wife to him. When her father was dead she reflected that
her brother's household was all that remained of the family.

Monsieur de Varandeuil, to whom the Comte d'Artois had caused the
arrears of salary of his office to be paid at the return of the
Bourbons, left about ten thousand francs a year to his children. The
brother had, before that inheritance, only a pension of fifteen hundred
francs from the United States. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil considered
that five or six thousand francs a year would hardly suffice for the
comfortable support of that family, in which there were two children,
and it at once occurred to her to add to it her share in the
inheritance. She suggested this contribution in the most natural and
simple way imaginable. Her brother accepted it, and she went with him to
live in a pretty little apartment at the upper end of Rue de Clichy, on
the fourth floor of one of the first houses built in that neighborhood,
then hardly known, where the fresh country air blew briskly through the
framework of the white buildings. She continued there her modest life,
her humble manner of dressing, her economical habits, content with the
least desirable room in the suite, and spending upon herself no more
than eighteen hundred to two thousand francs a year.