Then, dear Valentine, he told me his noble history; he confessed, rather unwillingly, that he had been poor like myself; very poor, because he had given all his fortune to save the honor of a friend, M. Frederick de B---- Oh! how I wept, while listening to this touching story, so full of sublime simplicity, generous carelessness and self-sacrifice! This would have made me adore him if I had not already madly loved him. While he was telling me, I was thinking of the unfortunate Frederick's wife, of her anxiety, of the torture she suffered, as a wife and a mother, when she believed her husband lost and her children ruined; of her astonishment and wild joy when she saw them all saved; of her deep, eternal gratitude! and I had but one thought, I said to myself: "How I would like to talk with this woman of Raymond!" I wished in turn to relate my own history; he refused to listen to me, and I did not insist. I wished to be generous, and let him for some time longer believe me to be poor and miserable. He was so happy at the idea of enriching and ennobling me, that I had not the courage to disenchant him. However, yesterday, I was obliged to tell him everything; in his impatience to hasten our marriage he had devoted the morning to the drawing up of his papers, contracts and settlements; for two days he had been tormenting me for my family papers in order to arrange them, and to find the register of my birth, which was indispensable when he appeared before the mayor. I had always put off giving it to him, but yesterday he entreated me so earnestly, that I was compelled to assent. In order to prepare him for the shock, I told him my papers were in my secretary, and that if he would come into my room he could see them. At the sight of the grand family pictures covering the walls of my retreat, he stood aghast; then he examined them with uneasiness. Some of the portraits bore the names and titles of the illustrious persons they represented. Upon reading the name, Victor Louis de Chateaudun, Marechal de France, he stopped motionless and looked at me with a strange air; then he read, beneath the portrait of a beautiful woman, the following inscription: "Marie Felicité Diane de Chateaudun, Duchesse de Montignan," and turning quickly towards me, with a face deadly pale, he exclaimed: "Louise?" "No, not Louise, but Irene!" I replied; and my voice rang with ancestral pride when I thus appeared before him in my true character.