fortunate to enter a minister's family and give Louise to a young man who seemed to have such fine prospects. Louise, said her father, would have a dowry of a million francs. Deformed, ugly, and yet adorable, she was condemned to die young; a chest complaint was stealthily undermining her, lending her nervous gaiety and caressing grace. Young girls who are ailing quickly grow old, and become women before their time. She was sensually ingenuous, she seemed to have been born at fifteen years of age in full puberty. When her father, a healthy brutified colossus, looked at her he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, during her lifetime, had also been a strong well-built woman; but stories were told about her which explained this child's stuntedness, her manners of a millionaire Bohemian, and her vicious and charming ugliness. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died from the most shameful profligacy. Pleasure had eaten into her like an ulcer, without her husband realising her lucid madness, though he ought to have had her shut up in a private asylum. Developed in this diseased form, Louise had left it with impoverished blood and crooked limbs, with her brain attacked and her memory already full of a dirty life. She thought at times that she could confusedly remember another existence, she saw strange scenes unfolded before her in a vague dimness, men and women kissing one another, quite a carnal drama with which her childish curiosity was amused. It was her mother that spoke within her. This vice remained in her throughout her childhood. As she gradually grew up, nothing astonished her, she recollected everything, or rather she knew everything, and she went to forbidden things, with a sureness of hand that made her, in life, seem like a person returning home after a long absence, and only having to stretch out his hand to set himself at ease and partake of the comforts of his abode. This singular girl, whose evil instincts flattered Maxime, and who, moreover--in this second life which she lived as a virgin with all the science and shame of a grown woman--possessed an ingenuous effrontery, a spicy mixture of childishness and boldness, was bound in the result to please the young fellow, and seem to him very much funnier even than Sylvia, who, the daughter of a worthy stationer, possessed a usurer's heart and was horribly middle-class at bottom. The marriage was arranged with a laugh, and it was decided that "the youngsters" should be allowed to grow up. The two families lived on a footing of close friendship. M. de Mareuil promoted his candidature. Saccard watched his prey. It was understood that Maxime should place his nomination as an auditor of the Council of State among the marriage presents.