It may not be too bold to declare that Julienne imbibed at the convent those qualities of tact and restraint, and that air of distinction she exhibited later in the drawing-rooms of Victor Hugo. To the Convent of the Bernardines was attached a sort of house of retreat where aged ladies of rank could end their days, as also nuns of the various orders whose cloisters had been destroyed during the Revolution. Some of these preserved within their hearts a generous instinct of maternity, which Julienne easily managed to waken. She fell into the habit of running across to break the rule of everlasting silence in that fairly cheerful environment, and, in defiance of the prohibition against intimacy, she turned the old ladies into personal friends. She listened attentively, and remembered much, and forty years later she could describe correctly the names, appearance, and habits of that picturesque group, somewhat archaic, but invariably courteous and witty. Perhaps because of this slight lifting of the veil, Julienne began already, at the age of sixteen, to fix her eager gaze beyond the cloister and the gate. Perhaps also some instinct of dignity and self-respect urged her to learn something of the world before entering the novitiate to pronounce her vows. However this may be, it seems certain that, on the solemn occasion of her presentation to the Archbishop of Paris, Monsignor Quelen, as a postulant, she managed to convey that her vocation was of the frailest, and her desire for the world, deeply rooted. The prelate understood, and signified to the nuns that this particular lamb desired to wander. That very evening Julienne left the convent. Here follows a somewhat obscure interlude in the girl's life. We meet her next among the pupils of the sculptor Pradier, in 1825. James Pradier: to those of our generation this name recalls merely a number of groups and statues: statues more graceful than chaste, groups more elegant than virile; the work of a master who aimed at rivalling Praxiteles, but only succeeded in treading in the footsteps of Clodion. Pradier, however, only needs a careful biographer to acquire another kind of celebrity: that of an artist, _grand viveur_, magnificent and vain, careless and weak, born too late to lead without scandal the frivolous life he loved, too early to acquire by industry the fortune needed for the indulgence of his tastes. Twice a week his studio was transformed into a drawing-room, and his receptions were attended by a most varied company: painters and poets, models, actresses, dames of high degree, politicians and men of the sword--all society, in short, liked to be seen in the Rue de l'Abbaye.