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As brief as sparks, the fancies glittered and succeeded each other in the mind of Marie-Madeleine; and the grave man with the smile, and the bright clothes under the plain mantle, haunted her with incongruous explanations. She recalled him sitting there alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet she was sure he was not stupid.
The young Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne had inherited a taste for letters and was carefully instructed by her father, who was a field-marshal and the governor of Havre, where he died when she was only fifteen.
He was built more like a bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and with a hand like a baby for size. Marie-Madeleine was the name of his wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor was any fairer than herself.
Madame de Brinvilliers was then scarcely eight-and-twenty: she had married the marquis in 1651-that is, nine years before. He enjoyed an income of 30,000 livres, to which she added her dowry of 200,000 livres, exclusive of her expectations in the future. Her name was Marie-Madeleine; she had a sister and two brothers: her father, M. de Dreux d'Aubray; was civil lieutenant at the Chatelet de Paris.
And he has laid this first stone." Recit de Mlle. It appears from Tanguay, Dictionnaire Genealogique, that Marie-Madeleine Jarret de Vercheres was born in April, 1678, which corresponds to the age given in the Recit. She married Thomas Tarleu de la Naudiere in 1706, and M. de la Perrade, or Prade, in 1722.
Something made me ask at our first interview how old she was. 'Monsieur, she said, 'if I were to live till Sainte-Madeleine's day I should be forty-six. On her day I came into the world, and I bear her name. I was christened Marie-Madeleine. But near to the day as we now are, I shall not live so long: I must end to-day, or at latest to-morrow, and it will be a favour to give me the one day.
Of a sudden, at least, the tortured brute turned and fled from the shop in the footsteps of his former victim, to whose continued flight his reappearance added wings. So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself, Marie-Madeleine transferred to him her eyes. It might be her last moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable courage and illimitable valour to protect.
Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing her false Account for the misleading of future generations. Like her French "parallel," Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, like that other Madeleine of Scottish fame, she leaves us but a catalogue of ambiguous acts; her secret is still her own.
Something made me ask at our first interview how old she was. 'Monsieur, she said, 'if I were to live till Sainte-Madeleine's day I should be forty-six. On her day I came into the world, and I bear her name. I was christened Marie-Madeleine. But near to the day as we now are, I shall not live so long: I must end to-day, or at latest to-morrow, and it will be a favour to give me the one day.
For a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the wine-shop and eat a meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more often alone, when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and the thoughts would show in the man's face in little glooms and lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a water. For a long time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart.
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