beings who rise in humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted
by its rarity,--for in twenty centuries we can count, at most, twenty
famous women. Therefore, although in these pages she stands as a
secondary character, in consideration of the fact that she plays a
great part in the literary history of our epoch, and that her
influence over Calyste was great, no one, we think, will regret being
made to pause before that figure rather longer than modern art
permits.

Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches became an orphan in 1793. Her
property escaped confiscation by reason of the deaths of her father
and brother. The first was killed on the 10th of August, at the
threshold of the palace, among the defenders of the king, near whose
person his rank as major of the guards of the gate had placed him. Her
brother, one of the body-guard, was massacred at Les Carmes.
Mademoiselle des Touches was two years old when her mother died,
killed by grief, a few days after this second catastrophe. When dying,
Madame des Touches confided her daughter to her sister, a nun of
Chelles. Madame de Faucombe, the nun, prudently took the orphan to
Faucombe, a good-sized estate near Nantes, belonging to Madame des
Touches, and there she settled with the little girl and three sisters
of her convent. The populace of Nantes, during the last days of the
Terror, tore down the chateau, seized the nuns and Mademoiselle des
Touches, and threw them into prison on a false charge of receiving
emissaries of Pitt and Coburg. The 9th Thermidor released them.
Felicite's aunt died of fear. Two of the sisters left France, and the
third confided the little girl to her nearest relation, Monsieur de
Faucombe, her maternal great-uncle, who lived in Nantes.

Monsieur de Faucombe, an old man sixty years of age, had married a