ribing, in a sober style and with a virile impartiality, the
superficial aspects of action and intrigue.

* * * * *

UNE VIE

(A WOMAN'S LIFE)

I

Jeanne, having finished her packing, went to the window, but it had not
stopped raining.

All night long the downpour had pattered against the roofs and the
window-panes. The low, heavy clouds seemed as though they had burst, and
were emptying themselves on the world, to reduce it to a pulp and melt
it as though it were a sugar-loaf. A hot wind swept by in gusts; the
murmur of the overflowing gutters filled the empty streets, and the
houses, like sponges, absorbed the moisture which, penetrating to the
interior, made the walls wet from cellar to attic.

Jeanne, who had left the convent the day before, free at last and ready
for all the happiness of a life of which she had dreamed for so long,
feared that her father would hesitate about starting if the weather did
not clear up, and, for the hundredth time since the morning, she studied
the horizon.

Looking round, she saw that she had forgotten to put her almanac in her
traveling bag. She took from the wall the little card which bore in the
center of a design, the date of the current year 1819 in gilt letters,
and crossed out with a pencil the first four columns, drawing a line
through each saint's name till she came to the second of May, the day
she had left the convent.

A voice outside the door called: "Jeannette!"

Jeanne answered: "Come in, papa." And her father appeared.

The Baron Simon-Jecques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman of the old
school, eccentric and good-hearted. An enthusiastic follower of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he had a loving tenderness for all nature; for
the fields, the woods, and for animals. An aristocrat by birth, he hated
'93 by instinct; but of a philosophical temperament and liberal by
education, he loathed tyranny with an inoffensive and declamatory
hatred. The strongest, and at the same time the weakest, trait in his
character was his generosity; a generosity which had not enough arms to
caress, to give, to embrace; the generosity of a creator which was
utterly devoid of system, and to which he gave way with no attempt to
resist his impulses, as though part of his will were paralyzed; it was a
want of energy, and almost amounted to a vice.

A man of theories, he had thought out a whole plan of education for his
daughter, wishing to make her