QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER XXXI. PEACE.

LILY'S life in the Marais was, for six months,
peaceable, and uneventful, and happy. One day
was like another, but all the days were quiet and
cheerful, and they passed swiftly by. Lily rose
at eight, and took Madame de Kergolay her
coffee and milk in her bed-chamber. Lily read to
her, over her own breakfast, the news from the
only journal which was permitted to penetrate
into the establishment: the Legitimist Gazette de
France. Madame de Kergolay was no very
violent politician, but her convictions were firm.
The iron had long since been forged into steel.
She spoke of Napoleon as "the too celebrated
M. de Bonaparte." Whenever she alluded to
Robespierre it was with a shudder, but without
invective. She called him "that miserable
man." Louis the Sixteenth was, to her, always
"the martyr king." Marie Antoinette, Madame
was not very enthusiastic about—her career,
she observed, was "equivocally tenebrous;"
but she regarded the Duc de Berri as the
victim of perfidy, and the Duchesse d'Angoulême
as a saint. The house of Orleans, then
regnant in France, she named with sorrow, but
without asperity, as "the ingrates of the cadet
branch." She seemed (with one exception) to
bear no malice towards any of the deplorably
famous characters of the revolutionary epoch.
As Talleyrand did, she always spoke of the
philosopher of Ferney as "Monsieur de Voltaire."
She gave Mirabeau his title of count, and
admitted the eloquence of Camille Desmoulins and
the patriotism of Madame Roland. But if ever
the name of Jean Jacques Rousseau were
mentioned in her presence, her cheek flushed, and her
voice trembled with indignation. "The vulture
in dove's feathers!" she was wont to cry. "The
sentimentalist who wreathed his murderous
poniard in fine phrases. The philanthropist
who would not have children whipped, and yet
sent his helpless babes to the Foundling
Hospital!" And for poor crazy Jean Jacques there
was no charity to be expected from the Baronne
de Kergolay.

About ten o'clock the lecture of the Gazette
de France was concluded, and Lily was allowed
to enjoy what was to her a most delightful privilege.
She went out to market with Babette, the
homely femme de charge. At first her relations
with this woman were of a slightly embarrassing
nature. Babette seemed to be under a continual
nervous apprehension lest Lily should think that
she was jealous of her, but the girl's gentle and
unassuming nature gradually gained confidence
in the housekeeper's mind, and before a fortnight
was over she told Lily that she loved her next
to Madame de Kergolay. The convict's wife
was zealously but unaffectedly pious; and she
never went to market without going to church
for a few minutes.

"When Lily returned from market it was nearly
noon, and the déjeûner à la fourchette, or
midday breakfast, was served. Until two or three in
the afternoon she worked at some of the marvellous
tasks of embroidery which were always in
hand, or else she read to Madame de Kergolay.
Novels were not entirely banished from the good
dame's intellectual course. The feuilleton novel
was, it need not be said, proscribed; the wild
productions of the romantic school were likewise
inadmissible; and the baronne had probably never
heard of George Sand or of Paul de Kock. But
the genteel fictions of M. le Vicomte d'Arlincourt,
and the decorous numbers of M. le Vicomte
de Chateaubriand, in French, with Walter Scott
and Miss Porter in English, were considered worthy
of entry, and were listened to with complacency by
Madame, and absolutely devoured by Lily.

After this, if the day were fine, came a walk.
In her youth, perhaps, Madame had heard of the
unholy kidnapping expeditions in the streets of
Paris, by means of which, during the reign of
the "well-beloved" and peculiarly abominable
Louis the Fifteenth, the flesh and blood
preserves of the Pare aux Cerfs were recruited. At
any rate, Madame would never permit her protegee
to go out alone. For seven years, confined by a
painful and hopeless malady to her bed and her
invalid chair, she had never left her third floor
in the Marais; but she recognised the necessity
for regular exercise in Lily's case. Sometimes
Babette was deputed to accompany her in a two-
hours' walk on the quays or in the Champs
Elysees. Sometimes Vieux Sablons was commanded
to escort her; but there were drawbacks
to the advantages accruing from the