y, and take
him to the Bois de Boulogne. She would let him ride a donkey all day
long, urging the beast on with a broken branch, and crying: "Get up!"
And then, after a good dinner at Borne's, she would take him back to
school, and, under the porte-cochere, as she kissed him she would slip a
big hundred-sou piece into his hand.

Strange old maid. The bitter experiences of her whole existence, the
struggle to live, the never-ending physical suffering, the
long-continued bodily and mental torture had, as it were, cut her loose
from life and placed her above it. Her education, the things she had
seen, the spectacle of what seemed the end of everything, the
Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her to disdain human
suffering. And this old woman, who had nothing left of life save breath,
had risen to a serene philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical
stoicism. Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that
seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would
suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face
would at once become calm. She was cheerful with the cheerfulness of a
deep, bubbling spring, the cheerfulness of devoted hearts that have seen
everything, of the old soldier or the old hospital nurse. Kind-hearted
to admiration she was, and yet something was lacking in her kindness of
heart: forgiveness. Hitherto, she had never succeeded in moving or
bending her character. A slight, an unkind action, a trifle, if it
touched her heart, wounded her forever. She forgot nothing. Time, death
itself, did not disarm her memory.

Of religion, she had none. Born at a period when women did without it,
she had grown to womanhood at a time when there were no churches. Mass
did not exist when she was a young maid. There had been nothing to
accustom her to the thought of God or to make her feel the need of Him,
and she had retained a sort of shrinking hatred for priests, which must
have been connected with some family secret of which she never spoke.
Her faith, her strength, her piety, all consisted in the pride of her
conscience; she considered that if she retained her own esteem, she
could be sure of acting rightly and of never failing in her duty. She
was thus singularly constituted by the two epochs in which she had
lived, a compound of the two, dipped in the opposing currents of the old
regime and the Revolution. After Louis XVI. failed to take horse on the
Te