At these words, Madame d'Harville turned rather pale, and her resolution appeared to forsake her. After a pause, she resumed: "Immediately after the ceremony, my father embraced me tenderly, as did Madame Roland also. Before so many persons I could not avoid the display of this fresh exhibition of hypocrisy. With her dry and white hand she squeezed mine so hard as to pain me, and said, in a whisper, and in a tone as gentle as it was perfidious, these words, which I never can forget: 'Think of me sometimes in the midst of your bliss, for it was I who arranged your marriage.' Alas, I was far from comprehending at that moment the full force of those words! Our marriage took place at eleven o'clock, and we immediately entered our carriage, followed by my waiting-woman and the old _valet de chambre_ of M. d'Harville's, and we travelled so rapidly that we reached Paris before ten o'clock in the evening. I should have been surprised at the silence and melancholy of M. d'Harville had I not known that he had what he termed his happy sadness. I was myself painfully disturbed; I was returning to Paris for the first time since my mother's death; I arrived there alone with my husband, whom I had hardly known more than six weeks, and who, up to the evening before, had not addressed a word to me but what was marked by respectful formality. Men, however well bred, do not think sufficiently of the fear which the sudden change in their tone and manners occasions to a young female as soon as she belongs to them; they do not reflect that a youthful maiden cannot in a few hours forget all her timidity and virgin scruples." "Nothing is to me more barbarous than this system of carrying off a young female as soon as the wedding ceremony is over,--a ceremony which ought to consecrate the right and duty to employ still more every tenderness of love and effort to render mutual affection still stronger and more endearing." "You will imagine, monseigneur, the indefinable alarm with which I found myself in Paris,--in the city in which my mother had died hardly a year before. We reached the Hôtel d'Harville--" The emotion of the young lady redoubled, her cheeks were flushed with scarlet, and she added, in a voice scarcely intelligible: