A great change came over our household after the year ’48, whose events had swept away half our revenues, our style of living was much simplified, the little court disbanded, even some of the servants--among them my mother’s first waiting-maid--dismissed, and everything reorganised on a much smaller, more modest scale. And to what purpose had been henceforth pomp and lavish expenditure, in a house in which sorrow and sickness had taken up their abode! The diminished retinue, the cessation of open-handed hospitality, those were as naught beside the weightier cares that combined to crush the gay spirits of the revellers, and in the first place, of the young châtelaine herself. The death of her beloved brother Maurice was a blow from which my mother never recovered, and the shock much accelerated the morbid symptoms that had just begun to declare themselves. Never shall I forget the heartrending expression on her face, as bathed in tears, she made her appearance in the nursery to tell us children, that the bright, handsome, gallant Uncle Maurice was dead! So small was I at the time, that I could not help finding a little consolation in the black and black and white striped dresses made for me on this occasion--it was a change from the perpetual white! But the gloom of mourning did not pass away; my mother’s health had begun to fail. I remember her listless gait, how she seemed each day to find greater difficulty in going about, holding on to every piece of furniture for support, and then how, all at once, she could no longer walk at all. It seemed doubly hard that this should be her fate, who had been the gayest of the gay, blithe as a lark and lightfooted as a gazelle, out-tiring all her partners in the dance, and out-stripping every one of her young companions in their mad races through the woods, bounding up and down the hills as if she scarcely touched the ground!