ill ten o'clock with Mdlle. de Cardoville, re
entered her bedchamber, locked the door after her, and finding herself at
length free and unrestrained, threw herself on her knees before a chair,
and burst into tears. She wept long--very long. When her tears at length
ceased to flow, she dried her eyes, approached the writing-desk, drew out
one of the boxes from the pigeonhole, and, taking from this hiding-place
the manuscript which Florine had so rapidly glanced over the evening
before, she wrote in it during a portion of the night.

CHAPTER XLVI.

MOTHER BUNCH'S DIARY.

We have said that the hunchback wrote during a portion of the night, in
the book discovered the previous evening by Florine, who had not ventured
to take it away, until she had informed the persons who employed her of
its contents, and until she had received their final orders on the
subject. Let us explain the existence of this manuscript, before opening
it to the reader. The day on which Mother Bunch first became aware of her
love for Agricola, the first word of this manuscript had been written.
Endowed with an essentially trusting character, yet always feeling
herself restrained by the dread of ridicule--a dread which, in its
painful exaggeration, was the workgirl's only weakness--to whom could the
unfortunate creature have confided the secret of that fatal passion, if
not to paper--that mute confidant of timid and suffering souls, that
patient friend, silent and cold, who, if it makes no reply to heart
rending complaints, at least always listens, and never forgets?

When her heart was overflowing with emotion, sometimes mild and sad,
sometimes harsh and bitter, the poor workgirl, finding a melancholy charm
in these dumb and solitary outpourings of the soul, now clothed in the
form of simple and touching poetry, and now in unaffected prose, had
accustomed herself by degrees not to confine her confidences to what
immediately related to Agricola, for though he might be mixed up with all
her thoughts, for reflections, which the sight of beauty, of happy love,
of maternity, of wealth, of misfortune, called up within her, were so
impressed with the influence of her unfortunate personal position, that
she would not even have dared to communicate them to him. Such, then, was
this journal of a poor daughter of the people, weak, deformed, and
miserable, but endowed with an angelic soul, and a fine intellect,
improved by reading, meditation, and solitud