without the slightest distrust of the heartless selfishness it so ill
concealed. On fifteen sous she found she could live without encroaching
on the little stock set apart for the support of her grandmother, and she
was content. Alas! The poor girl had not entered into any calculation of
the expense of lodgings, of fuel, of clothes, of health impaired, and as
for any resources for illness or accidents, she was totally without them.
Still Adrienne thought herself the obliged party, in times as critical as
those which then hung over France, in being permitted to toil for a sum
that would barely supply a grisette, accustomed all her life to privations,
with the coarsest necessaries.

{grisette = working-class girl}

I have little to say of the succeeding fortnight. Mad. De la Rocheaimard
gradually grew feebler, but she might still live months. No one could tell,
and Adrienne hoped she would never die. Happily, her real wants were
few; though her appetite was capricious, and her temper querulous.
Love for her grandchild, however, shone in all she said and did, and so
long as she was loved by this, the only being on earth she had ever been
taught to love herself, Adrienne would not think an instant of the ills
caused by the infirmities of age. She husbanded her money, with the
utmost frugality, and contrived to save even a few sous daily, out of her
own wages, to add to her grandmother's stock. This she could not have
done, but for the circumstance of there being so much in the house of
their early stores, to help eke out the supplies of the moment. But, at the
end of a fortnight, Adrienne found herself reduced to her last franc,
including all her own savings. Something must be done, and that without
delay, or Madame de la Rocheaimard would be without the means of
support.