part of the Normandy
peasantry. For a little while he flitted from one rustic beauty
to another, until he was fairly caught by one more handsome
than the rest, Marie Deshayes. She was not, perhaps,
immaculately virtuous, but, apart from her extraordinary
personal attractions, she was something more than an ordinary
peasant girl.

Some sixty years before Marin Plessis' union with Marie
Deshayes, there lived in the neighbourhood of Evreux a spinster
lady of good descent, though not very well provided with
worldly goods. She was comely and sweet-tempered enough, but
then, as now, comeliness and a sweet temper do not count for
much in the French matrimonial market, and least of all in the
provincial one. Owing to the modesty of her marriage portion,
she had no suitors for her hand, and, being of an exceedingly
amorous disposition, she bestowed her affection where she
could, "without regret, and without false shame," as the old
French chronicler has it.

The annals of the village--for, curiously enough, these annals
do exist, though only in manuscripts--are commendably reticent
about the exact number and names of her lovers. It would seem
that the author, a contemporary of Mdlle. Anne du Mesnil
d'Argentelles and the great-grandfather of the present
possessor of the notes, a gentleman near Bernay, was divided
between the wish of not being too hard upon his neighbour, who
was, after all, a gentle-woman, and the desire to leave a
record of a peculiar phase of the country manners of those days
to posterity. Be this as it may, Mdlle. d'Argentelles' swains,
previous to the very last one, have been doomed to anonymous
obscurity. But with the advent of Etienne Deshayes, the
annalist becomes less reticent, he is considered worthy of
being mentioned in full, perhaps as a reward for having finally
"made an honest woman" of his inamorata. For that is the final
upshot of the love-story between him and Mdlle. d'Argentelles,
which, in its earlier stages, bears a certain resemblance to
that between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Warens, with
this difference--that the Normand Jean-Jacques is considerably
old