things; for it
speaks, it seems to laugh, it jeers and tells her all that is going to
occur, all the physical discomforts and the atrocious mental anguish she
will suffer until the day of her death, which will be the day of her
deliverance.

Did she weep, distractedly, on her knees, her forehead to the ground, and
pray, pray, pray to Him who thus slays his creatures and gives them youth
only that he may render old age more unendurable, and lends them beauty
only that he may withdraw it almost immediately? Did she pray to Him,
imploring Him to do for her what He has never yet done for any one, to
let her retain until her last day her charm, her freshness and her
gracefulness? Then, finding that she was imploring in vain an inflexible
Unknown who drives on the years, one after another, did she roll on the
carpet in her room, knocking her head against the furniture and stifling
in her throat shrieks of despair?

Doubtless she suffered these tortures, for this is what occurred:

One day (she was then thirty-five) her son aged fifteen, fell ill.

He took to his bed without any one being able to determine the cause or
nature of his illness.

His tutor, a priest, watched beside him and hardly ever left him, while
Mme. Hermet came morning and evening to inquire how he was.

She would come into the room in the morning in her night wrapper,
smiling, all powdered and perfumed, and would ask as she entered the
door:

"Well, George, are you better?"

The big boy, his face red, swollen and showing the ravages of fever,
would reply:

"Yes, little mother, a little better."

She would stay in the room a few seconds, look at the bottles of
medicine, and purse her lips as if she were saying "phew," and then would
suddenly exclaim: "Oh, I forgot something very important," and would run
out of the room leaving behind her a fragrance of choice toilet perfumes.

In the evening she would appear in a decollete dress, in a still greater
hurry, for she was always late, and she had just time to inquire:

"Well, what does the doctor say?"

The priest would reply:

"He has not yet given an opinion, madame."

But one evening the abbe replied: "Madame, your son has got the
small-pox."

She uttered a scream of terror and fled from the room.

When her maid came to her room the following morning she noticed at once
a strong odor of burnt sugar, and she found her mistress, with wide-open
eyes, her face pale from lack of sleep, and s