even went to confession, received absolution, and took the sacrament;
but this, you must remember, was in the country, and under the aunt's
eyes.

"'I shall have real aunts now, do you understand?' she said to us
when she came back in the winter.

"She was so delighted with her respectability, so glad to renounce her
independence, that she found means to compass her end. She flattered
the old people. She went on foot every day to sit for a couple of
hours with Mme. du Bruel the elder while that lady was ill--a
Maintenon's stratagem which amazed du Bruel. And he admired his wife
without criticism; he was so fast in the toils already that he did not
feel his bonds.

"Claudine succeeded in making him understand that only under the
elastic system of a bourgeois government, only at the bourgeois court
of the Citizen-King, could a Tullia, now metamorphosed into a Mme. du
Bruel, be accepted in the society which her good sense prevented her
from attempting to enter. Mme. de Bonfalot, Mme. de Chisse, and Mme.
du Bruel received her; she was satisfied. She took up the position of
a well-conducted, simple, and virtuous woman, and never acted out of
character. In three years' time she was introduced to the friends of
these ladies.

"'And still I cannot persuade myself that young Mme. du Bruel used to
display her ankles, and the rest, to all Paris, with the light of a
hundred gas-jets pouring upon her,' Mme. Anselme Popinot remarked
naively.