to her passion for her lover. At Castelnau, close to
Montpellier, she bought a small country house. There she could give full
rein to her desire. To the scandal of the occasional passerby she and
her lover would bathe in a stream that passed through the property,
and sport together on the grass. Indoors there were always books from
Vitalis' collection to stimulate their lascivious appetites. This life
of pastoral impropriety lasted until the middle of August, when Marie
Boyer came home from Lyons.

Vitalis would have concealed from the young girl as long as he could the
nature of his relations with Madame Boyer, but his mistress by her own
deliberate conduct made all concealment impossible. Whether from the
utter recklessness of her passion for Vitalis, or a desire to kill in
her daughter's heart any attachment which she may have felt towards her
lover, the mother paraded openly before her daughter the intimacy of her
relations with Vitalis, and with the help of the literature with which
the young bookseller supplied her, set about corrupting her child's mind
to her own depraved level. The effect of her extraordinary conduct was,
however, the opposite to what she had intended. The mind of the young
girl was corrupted; she was familiarised with vice. But in her heart
she did not blame Vitalis for what she saw and suffered; she pitied, she
excused him. It was her mother whom she grew to hate, with a hate all
the more determined for the cold passionless exterior beneath which it
was concealed.

Madame Boyer's deliberate display of her passion for Vitalis served only
to aggravate and intensify in Marie Boyer an unnatural jealousy that was
fast growing up between mother and daughter.

Marie did not return to the school at Lyons. In the winter of 1875,
Madame Boyer gave up the country house and, with her daughter, settled
in one of the suburbs of Montpellier. In the January of 1876 a theft
occurred in her household which obliged Madame Boyer to communicate
with the police. Spendthrift and incompetent in the management of her
affairs, she was hoarding and suspicious about money itself. Cash and
bonds she would hide away in unexpected places, such as books, dresses,
even a soup tureen. One of her most ingenious hiding places was a
portrait of her late husband, behind which she concealed some bearer
bonds in landed security, amounting to about 11,000 francs. One day in
January these bonds disappeared. She suspected a theft, an