to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte had one of
those natures which, under the hammer of persecution, gather themselves
together, become compact and powerfully resistant, not to say
inflexible. Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof from the life
of the household; choosing to make herself the sole arbiter of her own
fate. At fourteen years of age, she went to live alone in a garret, not
far from the ministry of finance, which was then in the rue Vivienne,
and also not far from the Bank of France, then, and now, in the rue de
la Vrilliere. There she bravely gave herself up to a form of industry
little known and the perquisite of a few persons, which she obtained,
thanks to the patrons of her father. It consisted in making bags to hold
coin for the Bank, the Treasury, and the great financial houses. At the
end of three years she employed two workwomen. By investing her savings
on the Grand-Livre, she found herself, in 1814, the mistress of three
thousand six hundred francs a year, earned in fifteen years. As she
spent little, and dined with her father as long as he lived, and, as
government securities were very low during the last convulsions of the
Empire, this result, which seems at first sight exaggerated, explains
itself.

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being
twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence. Brother
and sister were bound together by an extreme affection. If Jerome, then
at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister, clothed
in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with which she
sewed her bags, would give him a few louis. In Brigitte's eyes Jerome
was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole French Empire. To
keep house for this cherished brother, to be initiated into the
secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his handmaiden, his spaniel,
was Brigitte's dream. She immolated herself lovingly to an idol
whose selfishness, always great, was enormously increased by her
self-sacrifice. She sold her business to her fore-woman for fifteen
thousand francs and came to live with Thuillier in the rue d'Argenteuil,
where she made herself the mother, protectress, and servant of this
spoiled child of women. Brigitte, with the natural caution of a girl who
owed everything to her own discretion and her own labor, concealed the
amount of her savings from Jerome,--fearing, no doubt, the extravagance
of a man of gallan