with four teachers, eight masters, six servants,
and three children, managing at the same time to perfection the pupils'
parents and friends; and that without apparent effort; without bustle,
fatigue, fever, or any symptom of undue, excitement: occupied she
always was--busy, rarely. It is true that Madame had her own system for
managing and regulating this mass of machinery; and a very pretty
system it was: the reader has seen a specimen of it, in that small
affair of turning my pocket inside out, and reading my private
memoranda. "Surveillance," "espionage,"--these were her watchwords.

Still, Madame knew what honesty was, and liked it--that is, when it did
not obtrude its clumsy scruples in the way of her will and interest.
She had a respect for "Angleterre;" and as to "les Anglaises," she
would have the women of no other country about her own children, if she
could help it.

Often in the evening, after she had been plotting and counter-plotting,
spying and receiving the reports of spies all day, she would come up to
my room--a trace of real weariness on her brow--and she would sit down
and listen while the children said their little prayers to me in
English: the Lord's Prayer, and the hymn beginning "Gentle Jesus,"
these little Catholics were permitted to repeat at my knee; and, when I
had put them to bed, she would talk to me (I soon gained enough French
to be able to understand, and even answer her) about England and
Englishwomen, and the reasons for what she was pleased to term their
superior intelligence, and more real and reliable probity. Very good
sense she often showed; very sound opinions she often broached: she
seemed to know that keeping girls in distrustful restraint, in blind
ignorance, and under a surveillance that left them no moment and no
corner for retirement, was not the best way to make them grow up honest
and modest women; but she averred that ruinous consequences would ensue
if any other method were tried with continental children: they were so
accustomed to restraint, that relaxation, however guarded, would be
misunderstood and fatally presumed on. She was sick, she would declare,
of the means she had to use, but use them she must; and after
discoursing, often with dignity and delicacy, to me, she would move
away on her "souliers de silence," and glide ghost-like through the
house, watching and spying everywhere, peering through every keyhole,
listening behind every door.

After all, Madame