nt at the end of a year's widowhood; but I could not marry
a disgraced girl."

He left the room without waiting for an answer. When Vedie came in,
fifteen minutes later, to clear the table, she found her mistress pale
and moist with perspiration, in spite of the season. Flore felt like a
woman who had fallen to the bottom of a precipice; the future loomed
black before her; and on its blackness, in the far distance, were
shapes of monstrous things, indistinctly perceptible, and terrifying.
She felt the damp chill of vaults, instinctive fear of the man crushed
her; and yet a voice cried in her ear that she deserved to have him
for her master. She was helpless against her fate. Flore Brazier had
had a room of her own in Rouget's house; but Madame Rouget belonged to
her husband, and was now deprived of the free-will of a
servant-mistress. In the horrible situation in which she now found
herself, the hope of having a child came into her mind; but she soon
recognized its impossibility. The marriage was to Jean-Jacques what
the second marriage of Louis XII. was to that king. The incessant
watchfulness of a man like Philippe, who had nothing to do and never
quitted his post of observation, made any form of vengeance impossible.
Benjamin was his innocent and devoted spy. The Vedie trembled before
him. Flore felt herself deserted and utterly helpless. She began to
fear death. Without knowing how Philippe might manage to kill her, she
felt certain that whenever he suspected her of pregnancy her doom would
be sealed. The sound of that voice, the veiled glitter of that
gambler's eye, the slightest movement of the soldier, who treated her
with a brutality that was still polite, made her shudder. As to the
power of attorney demanded by the ferocious colonel, who in the eyes of
all Issoudun was a hero, he had it as soon as he wanted it; for Flore
fell under the man's dominion as France had fallen under that of
Napoleon.

Like a butterfly whose feet are caught in the incandescent wax of a
taper, Rouget rapidly dissipated his remaining strength. In presence
of that decay, the nephew remained as cold and impassible as the
diplomatists of 1814 during the convulsions of imperial France.

Philippe, who did not believe in Napoleon II., now wrote the following
letter to the minister of war, which Mariette made the Duc de
Maufrigneuse convey to that functionary:--

Monseigneur,--Napoleon is no more. I desired to remain faithful to
him