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Updated: June 12, 2025
The girl who had put love from her was now a woman ripened by repressed and pent-up passion, by all the longings continually and gladly offered up as a sacrifice on the altar of the hearth. Mlle. Armande was not like the Duchess. She did not look like an angel.
"'God be praised! she whispered; 'Sairmeuse is saved! "I heard a deep sigh. I turned; she was dead." This scene that M. Lacheneur was relating rose vividly before him. To feign, to disguise the truth, or to conceal any portion of it was an impossibility. He forgot himself and his daughter; he thought only of the dead woman, of Mlle. Armande de Sairmeuse.
That's how he got in on Hikihoho. Came in trading when trading was the real thing. About a hundred miserable Paumotans lived on the island. He married the queen native fashion. When she died, everything was his. Measles came through, and there weren't more than a dozen survivors. He fed them, and worked them, and was king. Now before the queen died she gave birth to a girl. That's Armande.
Then, as Armande de Fleury, before uttering a note, reels, wavers, turns white as snow and falls dead upon the floor, the Duchess breathes a sigh of relief. The Duchess had poisoned her. Then the guests crowd about the piano, gazing with bated breath, and shuddering as they look upon the music rack and observe that the song that Armande came so near singing is "Sweet Marie."
While my relatives were gayly ruining themselves, I was saving the five hundred louis which the duke, my brother, gave me each year. "She motioned me to come nearer, and to kneel beside her bed. "I obeyed, and Mademoiselle Armande leaned toward me, almost glued her lips to my ear, and added: "'I possess eighty thousand francs. "I felt a sudden giddiness, but my godmother did not notice it.
And he shuddered on pronouncing the words: "She was dead." It seemed to him that she was about to speak, and to insist upon the fulfilment of his pledge. After a moment's silence, he resumed, in a hollow voice: "I called for aid; it came. Mademoiselle Armande was adored by everyone; there was great lamentation, and a half hour of indescribable confusion followed her death.
Moreover, he was of the opinion that he had acted with great generosity, and that he was entitled to the deep gratitude of the Lacheneur family; for M. Lacheneur had received the legacy bequeathed him by Mlle. Armande, and an indemnity, besides all the furniture he had chosen to take from the chateau, a total of at least sixty thousand francs.
"The things will spoil if you wait too long, sir. The mistress was very particular with me and cook about it." And Armande, with an air of declining further responsibility, went out. "What shall I do without Marian?" said Conolly. "Not one woman in a hundred is capable of being a mistress to her servants. She saved me all the friction of housekeeping."
He spread before him the bundle of documents prepared for him by his secretary and, consulting his notes as he spoke, continued: "Over fifty years ago, in 1860, three sisters, three orphans, Ermeline, Elizabeth, and Armande Roussel, aged twenty-two, twenty, and eighteen respectively, were living at Saint-Etienne with a cousin named Victor, who was a few years younger.
M. d'Esgrignon, the father of the present Marquis, had married a second wife, the daughter of a farmer of taxes ennobled by Louis XIV. It was a shocking mesalliance in the eyes of his family, but fortunately of no importance, since a daughter was the one child of the marriage. Armande knew this. Kind as her brother had always been, he looked on her as a stranger in blood.
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