des I have passed. You know what family
I belong to. I will tell you, however--for you may be ignorant of the
fact--that our house is the equal of any in France in lineage, splendor
of alliance, and fortune. When I was a child, my parents lived at the
Hotel de Chalusse, in the Faubourg Saint Germain, a perfect palace,
surrounded by one of those immense gardens, which are no longer seen in
Paris--a real park, shaded with century-old trees. Certainly everything
that money could procure, or vanity desire, was within my reach; and
yet my youth was wretchedly unhappy. I scarcely knew my father, who
was devoured by ambition, and had thrown himself body and soul into
the vortex of politics. Either my mother did not love me, or thought
it beneath her dignity to make any display of sensibility; but at all
events her reserve had raised a wall of ice between herself and me. As
for my brother he was too much engrossed in pleasure to think of a
mere child. So I lived quite alone, too proud to accept the love and
friendship of my inferiors--abandoned to the dangerous inspirations of
solitude, and with no other consolation than my books--books which had
been chosen for me by my mother's confessor, and which were calculated
to fill my imagination with visionary and romantic fancies. The only
conversation I heard dealt with the means of leaving all the family
fortune to my brother, so that he might uphold the splendor of the name,
and with the necessity of marrying me to some superannuated nobleman who
would take me without a dowry, or of compelling me to enter one of those
aristocratic convents, which are the refuge, and often the prison, of
poor girls of noble birth.

"I do not pretend to justify my fault, I am only explaining it. I
thought myself the most unfortunate being in the world--and such I
really was, since I honestly believed it--when I happened to meet Arthur
Gordon, your father. I saw him for the first time at a fete given at the
house of the Comte de Commarin. How he, a mere adventurer, had succeeded
in forcing his way into the most exclusive society in the world, is a
point which I have never been able to explain. But, alas! it is only too
true that when our glances met for the first time, my heart was stirred
to its inmost depths; I felt that it was no longer mine--that I was no
longer free! Ah! why does not God allow a man's face to reflect at
least something of his nature? This man, who was a corrupt and audacious
hyp