"About that time Monsieur de Belleville, the only son of the gentleman to whom this property then belonged, was admitted, as a great favour, amongst the pages of Monsieur de Villardin. He was but fifteen, and I was twenty; he was the son of a gentleman, I of the class bourgeoise; but, notwithstanding all these obstacles, I determined, from the moment that he entered the family, to make it my business so to captivate him, as to relieve myself from a situation that I detested by becoming his wife. To obtain this end there were few things that I would not have done, and I soon found that, thanks to his natural disposition and my own address, I was very likely to succeed, as soon as Monsieur de Villardin obtained for him that commission which it was understood he was to receive at the age of seventeen or eighteen. "Such was the state of things when you entered the dwelling of Monsieur de Villardin, and some quarrel took place between you and Gaspard, which ended in his conceiving a hatred for you, which never was and never will be quenched. He, of course, communicated his hatred to me, and more than one scheme did we form between us, for the purpose of compelling you to quit the dwelling that we inhabited. This was the extent of our design at first, but it soon spread out to baser and more criminal purposes, which, for motives that I may hereafter explain, I am now about to reveal to you fully. The high estimation in which you were held by Monsieur de Villardin, of course acted upon Gaspard in adding envy to dislike; but, before two months were over, he found an opportunity of gratifying both, which he did not fail to seize. You communicated, one day, it seems, to Monsieur de Villardin in his presence, that you had rescued a man from the gallows, and, without well knowing whether the consequence would be your own death in place of the malefactor, or your imprisonment in the Bastile for life, he found means of informing against you that very night, and had you not been promptly sent from Paris, you would have been arrested the next morning.