Exili home with him, and installed her in his household,
where his wife soon died of some inexplicable disease which baffled the
knowledge of both the doctor and the curate, the two wisest men in the
parish. The Sieur Corriveau ended his widowhood by marrying Marie Exili,
and soon died himself, leaving his whole fortune and one daughter, the
image of her mother, to Marie.

Marie Exili, ever in dread of the perquisitions of Desgrais, kept very
quiet in her secluded home on the St. Lawrence, guarding her secret with
a life-long apprehension, and but occasionally and in the darkest ways
practising her deadly skill. She found some compensation and relief for
her suppressed passions in the clinging sympathy of her daughter, Marie
Josephte dit La Corriveau, who worshipped all that was evil in her
mother, and in spite of an occasional reluctance, springing from some
maternal instinct, drew from her every secret of her life. She made
herself mistress of the whole formula of poisoning as taught by her
grandfather Exili, and of the arts of sorcery practised by her wicked
grandmother, La Voisin.

As La Corriveau listened to the tale of the burning of her grandmother
on the Place de Greve, her own soul seemed bathed in the flames which
rose from the faggots, and which to her perverted reason appeared as the
fires of cruel injustice, calling for revenge upon the whole race of the
oppressors of her family, as she regarded the punishers of their crimes.

With such a parentage, and such dark secrets brooding in her bosom,
Marie Josephte, or, as she was commonly called, La Corriveau, had
nothing in common with the simple peasantry among whom she lived.

Years passed over her, youth fled, and La Corriveau still sat in her
house, eating her heart out, silent and solitary. After the death of her
mother, some whispers of hidden treasures known only to herself, a
rumor which she had cunningly set afloat, excited the cupidity of Louis
Dodier, a simple habitan of St. Valier, and drew him into a marriage
with her.

It was a barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little
hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La
Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became
an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil
passion of a woman without conscience and void of love.

But La Corriveau had inherited the sharp intellect and Italian
dissimulation of Antonio