Caroline de Combray was very small,--"as large as a dog sitting," they said,--but charming; her complexion was delicately pure, her black hair of extraordinary length and abundance. She was loving and sensible, very romantic, full of frankness and vivacity; the great attraction of her small person was the result of a piquant combination of energy and gentleness. She had been brought up in the convent of the Nouvelles Catholiques de Caen, where she stayed six years, receiving lessons from "masters of all sorts of accomplishments, and of different languages." She was a musician and played the harp, and as soon as they were settled in Rouen her mother engaged Boieldieu as her accompanist, "to whom she long paid six silver francs per lesson," a sum that seemed fabulous in that period of paper-money, and territorial mandates. Madame de Combray, besides, was much straightened. As both her sons had emigrated, all the property that they inherited from their father was sequestrated. Of the income of 50,000 francs possessed by the family before the Revolution, scarcely fifty remained at her disposal, and she had been obliged to borrow to sustain the heavy expenses of her house in Rouen. Besides her two daughters and the servants, she housed half a dozen nuns and two or three Chartreux, among them a recusant friar called Lemercier, who soon gained great influence in the household. By reason of his refractoriness Pere Lemercier was doomed, if discovered, to death, or at least to deportation, and it will be understood that he sympathised but feebly with the Revolution that consigned him, against his will, to martyrdom. He called down the vengeance of heaven on the miscreants, and not daring to show himself, with unquenchable ardour preached the holy crusade to the women who surrounded him. Mme. de Combray's royalist enthusiasm did not need this inspiration; a wise man would have counselled resignation, or at least patience, but unhappily, she was surrounded only by those whose fanaticism encouraged and excused her own. Enthusiastic frenzy had become the habitual state of these people, whose overheated imaginations were nourished on legendary tales, and foolish hopes of imminent reprisals. They welcomed with unfailing credulity the wildest prophecies, announcing terrible impending massacres, to which the miraculous return of the Bourbon lilies would put an end, and as illusions of this kind are strengthened by their own deceptions, the house in the Rue de Valasse soon heard mysterious voices, and became the scene "of celestial apparitions," which, on the invitation of Pere Lemercier predicted the approaching destruction of the blues and the restoration of the monarchy.