After these excursions, I often invited myself to the home of the Mairieux. My superintendent never accepted my invitations to dine at the chateau, although in his little house he gave me the warmest welcome in the world, and yet, I must say, with perfect simplicity and without display. Mme. Mairieux would have preferred more ostentation, but happily he restrained her. The poor woman, I recall now, never ceased to evince toward me a kind of sanctimonious admiration. Later I realised that this unmerited worship was directed toward my fortune, through an inborn and conventional respect for social distinctions. At that time, however, I thought it was due to myself, and I did not dislike it. It fed my vanity. She questioned me incessantly about Paris, about the theatres, the fashions and what she called “the grand life,” and never noticed that her husband indulged her with a courtesy that was a trifle mocking. “We live in a desert here,” was her favourite expression, the prelude to, and the excuse for, her questions. Although in delicate health, she was still very pretty, pretty with that grace and delicacy which one sees in the eighteenth century pastels, and which implies in most cases a shallow mind, always ready to blossom forth in society, and less fitted for intimacy. The powder which she used to excess strengthened this resemblance. I have since learned of her humble origin. In order to marry her, M. Mairieux, then an officer in the chasseurs, left the army, for she could not bring him the prescribed dowry. They settled at first at Compiègne, where an honourable place was offered the former captain, the supervision and maintenance of a part of the forest. “We rode to hounds then, Monsieur,” said Mme. Mairieux, in recalling that brilliant phase of her existence. Whether it was due to the too keen pleasure that she took in hunting, or to a taste for more complete isolation, or to more pressing necessities, M. Mairieux accepted an offer to bury himself at the Sleeping Woods, close to his native country, and to manage for Count d’Alligny, whom he had known at Saint-Cyr, this estate, which was in a bad enough way.