sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow.
They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny,
accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their
devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features.
Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever
will be a living poem. Mademoiselle Salomon de Villenoix belonged to
the race of these heroic beings. Her devotion was religiously sublime,
inasmuch as it won her no glory after being, for years, a daily agony.
Beautiful and young, she loved and was beloved; her lover lost his
reason. For five years she gave herself, with love's devotion, to the
mere mechanical well-being of that unhappy man, whose madness she so
penetrated that she never believed him mad. She was simple in manner,
frank in speech, and her pallid face was not lacking in strength and
character, though its features were regular. She never spoke of the
events of her life. But at times a sudden quiver passed over her as she
listened to the story of some sad or dreadful incident, thus betraying
the emotions that great sufferings had developed within her. She had
come to live at Tours after losing the companion of her life; but she
was not appreciated there at her true value and was thought to be
merely an amiable woman. She did much good, and attached herself,
by preference, to feeble beings. For that reason the poor vicar had
naturally inspired her with a deep interest.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix, who returned to Tours the next morning, took
Birotteau with her and set him down on the quay of the cathedral leaving
him to make his own way to the Cloister, where he was bent on going,
to save at least the canonry and to superintend the removal of his
furniture. He rang, not without violent palpitations of the heart, at
the door of the house whither, for fourteen years, he had come daily,
and where he had lived blissfully, and from which he was now exiled
forever, after dreaming that he should die there in peace like his
friend Chapeloud. Marianne was surprised at the vicar's visit. He told
her that he had come to see the Abbe Troubert, and turned towards the
ground-floor apartment where the canon lived; but Marianne called to
him:--

"Not there, monsieur le vicaire; the Abbe Troubert is in your old
apartment."

These words gave the vicar a frightful shock. He was forced to
comprehend both Troubert's character and the