The adventure did not have a long life; a week later Charles Cunningham was called back to England by the news of his brother's illness. Before Lent was out he had become the Earl of Saxby, who really had to think seriously of marriage and treat it with more respect than the Parisian gossip over which Charles Cunningham had idly mused at six o'clock of Ash Wednesday morning in the year 1847. As for Adèle, she met in May the owner of a traveling-booth, a widower called Bassompierre with a small son, who had enough of the gipsy to attract the irresponsible Adèle and enough of the bourgeois to induce her to marry him for the sake of a secure and solid future. She need not have troubled about her future, the deep-voiced Adèle; for just when November darkens to December she died in giving birth to Juliette. The gipsy in Albert Bassompierre accepted as his own daughter Juliette; the bourgeois in him erected a cross in the cemetery and put a wreath of immortelles in a glass case to lie on Adèle's tomb. Then he locked away the few pieces of jewelry that life had brought her, hung another daguerreotype beside the one of his first wife, and wrapped Juliette in a golden shawl of Siamese crêpe. Lightly the two daguerreotypes swung to and fro; and lightly rocked the cradle where the baby Juliette lay sleeping, while the caravan jolted southward along the straight French roads where the poplars seemed to be commenting to one another in the wind. For eighteen years the caravan jolted along these roads, until young Edouard Bassompierre was old enough to play leading man throughout the repertory and thereby most abruptly plunge his predecessor into old age. At the same time Juliette was allowed to act the soubrettes; her father was too much afraid of the leading lady to play any tricks of suddenly imposed senility with her. It was, on the whole, a jolly life, this vagrancy from fair to fair of all the towns of France. It was jolly, when the performance was done, to gather in the tent behind the stage and eat chipped potatoes and drink red wine with all the queer people whose voices were hoarse with crying their wares all the day long. Then came, one springtime, the fair at Compiègne. Business was splendid, for the Emperor was there to hunt the wild boar in the forest. Never had old Albert Bassompierre beaten his big drum so confidently at the entrance of his booth; never had Edouard captured so many young women's hearts; both of them were too much occupied with their own triumphs to notice the young officer who came every night to the play. The Emperor left Compiègne in April; when he departed, the young officer departed also, accompanied by Juliette. "_Ah, la vache,_" cried old Bassompierre; "it's perhaps as well her mother didn't live, for she might have done the same." "You should have let her play the lead," said Edouard. "She can play lead in real life," replied old Bassompierre. "If she can," he added, fiercely.