questions. Henceforth she resolved to leave Nantes; but old Faucombe
falling ill with his last illness, she, who had been both wife and
daughter to him, remained to nurse him, with the devotion of an angel,
for eighteen months, closing his eyes at the moment when Napoleon was
struggling with all Europe on the corpse of France. Her removal to
Paris was therefore still further postponed until the close of that
crisis.

As a Royalist, she hastened to be present at the return of the
Bourbons to Paris. There the Grandlieus, to whom she was related,
received her as their guest; but the catastrophes of March 20
intervened, and her future was vague and uncertain. She was thus
enabled to see with her own eyes that last image of the Empire, and
behold the Grand Army when it came to the Champ de Mars, as to a Roman
circus, to salute its Caesar before it went to its death at Waterloo.
The great and noble soul of Felicite was stirred by that magic
spectacle. The political commotions, the glamour of that theatrical
play of three months which history has called the Hundred Days,
occupied her mind and preserved her from all personal emotions in the
midst of a convulsion which dispersed the royalist society among whom
she had intended to reside. The Grandlieus followed the Bourbons to
Ghent, leaving their house to Mademoiselle des Touches. Felicite, who
did not choose to take a subordinate position, purchased for one
hundred and thirty thousand francs one of the finest houses in the rue
Mont Blanc, where she installed herself on the return of the Bourbons
in 1815. The garden of this house is to-day worth two millions.

Accustomed to control her own life, Felicite soon familiarized herself
with the ways of thought and action which are held to be exclusively
the province of man. In 1816 she was twenty-five years old. She knew