ways,--by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she
wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune
would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance in the
literary world.

With these apparent intentions she had brought Claude Vignon from
Paris to Les Touches, as an eagle bears away a kid in its talons,--to
study him, and decide upon some positive course. But, in truth, she
was misleading both Calyste and Claude; she was not even thinking of
marriage; her heart was in the throes of the most violent convulsion
that could agitate a soul as strong as hers. She found herself the
dupe of her own mind; too late she saw life lighted by the sun of
love, shining as love shines in a heart of twenty.

Let us now see Camille's convent where this was happening.



VII

LES TOUCHES

A few hundred yards from Guerande the soil of Brittany comes to an
end; the salt-marshes and the sandy dunes begin. We descend into a
desert of sand, which the sea has left for a margin between herself
and earth, by a rugged road through a ravine that has never seen a
carriage. This desert contains waste tracts, ponds of unequal size,
round the shores of which the salt is made on muddy banks, and a
little arm of the sea which separates the mainland from the island of
Croisic. Geographically, Croisic is really a peninsula; but as it