erior to the youth my father confided to
me, and from whom I was separated by the natural delicacy of our sex,--I
listened, fatally, to the promptings of the devil. I soon found myself
too much the mother of that young man to be insensible to his mute and
delicate admiration. He alone, he first, recognized my true value. But
perhaps a horrible calculation entered my mind. I thought how discreet a
youth would be who owed his all to me, and whom the chances of life
had put so far away from me, though we were born equals. I made even my
reputation for benevolence, my pious occupations, a cloak to screen my
conduct. Alas!--and this is doubtless one of my greatest sins--I hid my
passion under cover of the altar. The most virtuous of my actions--the
love I bore my mother, the acts of devotion which were sincere and true
in the midst of my wrong-doing--all, all were made to serve the ends of
a desperate passion, and were links in the chain that held me. My poor
beloved mother, who hears me now, was for a long time, ignorantly, an
accomplice in my sin. When her eyes were opened, too many dangerous
facts existed not to give her mother's heart the strength to be silent.
Silence with her has been the highest virtue. Her love for her daughter
has gone beyond her love to God. Ah! I here discharge her solemnly from
the heavy burden of secrecy which she has borne. She shall end her days
without compelling either eyes or brow to lie. Let her motherhood stand
clear of blame; let that noble, sacred old age, crowned with virtue,
shine with its natural lustre, freed of that link which bound her
indirectly to infamy!"

Tears checked the dying woman's voice for an instant; Aline gave her
salts to inhale.

"There is no one who has not been better to me than I deserve," she
went on,--"even the devoted servant who does this last service; she has
feigned ignorance of what she knew, but at least she was in the secret
of the penances by which I have destroyed the flesh that sinned. I here
beg pardon of the world for the long deception to which I have been led
by the terrible logic of society. Jean-Francois Tascheron was not as
guilty as he seemed. Ah! you who hear me, I implore you to remember his
youth, and the madness excited in him partly by the remorse that seized
upon me, partly by involuntary seductions. More than that! it was a
sense of honor, though a mistaken honor, which caused the most awful
of these evils. Neither of us could endure o