ing lessons from
"masters of all sorts of accomplishments, and of different languages."
She was a musician and played the harp, and as soon as they were settled
in Rouen her mother engaged Boieldieu as her accompanist, "to whom she
long paid six silver francs per lesson," a sum that seemed fabulous in
that period of paper-money, and territorial mandates.

Madame de Combray, besides, was much straightened. As both her sons had
emigrated, all the property that they inherited from their father was
sequestrated. Of the income of 50,000 francs possessed by the family
before the Revolution, scarcely fifty remained at her disposal, and she
had been obliged to borrow to sustain the heavy expenses of her house in
Rouen.

Besides her two daughters and the servants, she housed half a dozen nuns
and two or three Chartreux, among them a recusant friar called
Lemercier, who soon gained great influence in the household. By reason
of his refractoriness Pere Lemercier was doomed, if discovered, to
death, or at least to deportation, and it will be understood that he
sympathised but feebly with the Revolution that consigned him, against
his will, to martyrdom. He called down the vengeance of heaven on the
miscreants, and not daring to show himself, with unquenchable ardour
preached the holy crusade to the women who surrounded him.

Mme. de Combray's royalist enthusiasm did not need this inspiration; a
wise man would have counselled resignation, or at least patience, but
unhappily, she was surrounded only by those whose fanaticism encouraged
and excused her own. Enthusiastic frenzy had become the habitual state
of these people, whose overheated imaginations were nourished on
legendary tales, and foolish hopes of imminent reprisals. They welcomed
with unfailing credulity the wildest prophecies, announcing terrible
impending massacres, to which the miraculous return of the Bourbon
lilies would put an end, and as illusions of this kind are strengthened
by their own deceptions, the house in the Rue de Valasse soon heard
mysterious voices, and became the scene "of celestial apparitions,"
which, on the invitation of Pere Lemercier predicted the approaching
destruction of the blues and the restoration of the monarchy.

On a certain day in the summer of 1795, a stranger presented himself to
Pere Lemercier, armed with a password, and a very warm recommendation
from a refractory priest, who was in hiding at Caen. He was a Chouan
chief, bearing t