"Is my mother alive?" asked Léonie, shivering.
"No: she died three years ago. Your father never would see her again, but when he heard that she was sick and in want (she had entirely lost her wonderful voice), he gave her an annuity because she was your mother. Father Aubrey used to see her from time to time, and he said she was truly penitent before she died."
"Oh, what shall I do? I shall never be happy again—never, never! What made you tell me? How could you?" said poor Léonie, wringing her little hands and burying her face in the cushions.
"My child, you would hear it sooner or later in that great, wicked city, and it is better that you should be prepared. You are beautiful like your mother, you will sing like her, and I am so afraid—" here the poor little woman broke down and began to cry like Léonie, but less violently—"I am so afraid that you will go on the stage and be tempted and fall like her. Promise me that you will never sing in the opera, Léonie, no matter who urges it, even if it is your father himself."
"I will die first," answered Léonie. "I wish I had never been born."
"Don't tell your father, Léonie," sobbed Madame Perrin; and here the conversation ended.
"What's the matter with Léonie?" asked Colonel Regnault the night after his arrival. "She looks so pale and languid, and hardly gives me a welcome. What ails the child?"
"She has not been quite well for a few days, and I dare say she feels sad at leaving Hélène and me," replied his sister.
"She'll brighten up when she gets to Paris," said the colonel.
The sorrow of early youth, however violent, is seldom proof against new impressions, and this was especially true of one so susceptible and mobile as Léonie Regnault. She entered enthusiastically upon her musical studies, taking lessons of Madame Viardot and also at the Conservatoire. Madame Regnault was a sweet and quiet woman, devotedly attached to her husband, and not a little afraid of him. Colonel Regnault, with all his urbanity, had a despotic will, extending to the most minute and seemingly indifferent things: he was just the kind of man to graduate a gentle, loving woman into a saint. The only time I ever dined with Madame Regnault I was forced to eat under the cold steel of his clear blue eye a plate of those small red shrimps which Parisians think so delicious (I could have swallowed spiders with as little effort), and afterward quaff a cup of black coffee with its cap of blue flame, which reminded me of "Deacon Giles's Distillery," in spite of protest and direful headache in terrorem; and the colonel thought he was polite to me. He chose all madame's gowns: the poor little woman did not venture to buy even a ribbon for herself; and from having been one of the most elegant women in Paris, she grew at length almost dowdyish; not but that her garments were as fresh and as costly as ever, but the brilliant colors and conspicuous styles which had suited the opera-singer, and which heightened the beauty of Léonie, extinguished the delicate color and soft blue eyes of Madame Regnault, and were so little in harmony with her person and character as to have almost the effect of a discord in music.