relationship makes me a descendant of
General Delcambre, one of the heroes of the retreat from Russia. His
granddaughter married Count Durrieu of the _Academie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres_. My great-aunt was born in the provinces in 1781, but
she was adopted by a childless aunt and uncle who made their home in
Paris. He was a wealthy lawyer and they lived magnificently.

My great-aunt was a precocious child--she walked at nine months--and
she became a woman of keen intellect and brilliant attainments. She
remembered perfectly the customs of the _Ancien Regime_, and she enjoyed
telling about them, as well as about the Revolution, the Reign of
Terror, and the times that followed. Her family was ruined by the
Revolution and the slight, frail, young girl undertook to earn her
living by giving lessons in French, on the pianoforte--the instrument
was a novelty then--in singing, painting, embroidery, in fact in
everything she knew and in much that she did not. If she did not know,
she learned then and there so that she could teach. Afterwards, she
married one of her cousins. As she had no children of her own, she
brought one of her nieces from Champagne and adopted her. This niece was
my mother, Clemence Collin. The Massons were about to retire from
business with a comfortable fortune, when they lost practically
everything within two weeks, in a panic, saving just enough to live
decently. Shortly after this my mother married my father, a minor
official in the Department of the Interior. My great-uncle died of a
broken heart some months before my birth on October 9, 1835. My father
died of consumption on the thirty-first of the following December, just
a year to a day after his marriage.

Thus the two women were both left widows, poorly provided for, weighed
down by sad memories, and with the care of a delicate child. In fact I
was so delicate that the doctors held out little hope of my living, and
on their advice I was left in the country with my nurse until I was two
years old.

While my aunt had had a remarkable education, my mother had not been so
widely taught. But she made up for any lack by the display of an
imagination and an eager power of assimilation which bordered on the
miraculous. She often told me about an uncle who was very fond of
her--he had been ruined in the cause of Philippe Egalite. This uncle was
an artist, but he was, nevertheless, passionately fond of music. He had
even built with his own hand