Marie Exili clung to Paris. She grew up beautiful and profligate; she coined her rare Italian charms, first into gold and velvet, then into silver and brocade, and at last into copper and rags. When her charms faded entirely, she began to practise the forbidden arts of her mother and father, but without their boldness or long impunity.
She was soon suspected, but receiving timely warning of her danger, from a high patroness at Court, Marie fled to New France in the disguise of a paysanne, one of a cargo of unmarried women sent out to the colony on matrimonial venture, as the custom then was, to furnish wives for the colonists. Her sole possession was an antique cabinet with its contents, the only remnant saved from the fortune of her father, Exili.
Marie Exili landed in New France, cursing the Old World which she had left behind, and bringing as bitter a hatred of the New, which received her without a shadow of suspicion that under her modest peasant's garb was concealed the daughter and inheritrix of the black arts of Antonio Exili and of the sorceress La Voisin.
Marie Exili kept her secret well. She played the ingénue to perfection. Her straight figure and black eyes having drawn a second glance from the Sieur Corriveau, a rich habitan of St. Valier, who was looking for a servant among the crowd of paysannes who had just arrived from France, he could not escape from the power of their fascination.
He took Marie Exili home with him, and installed her in his household, where his wife soon died of some inexplicable disease which baffled the knowledge of both the doctor and the curate, the two wisest men in the parish. The Sieur Corriveau ended his widowhood by marrying Marie Exili, and soon died himself, leaving his whole fortune and one daughter, the image of her mother, to Marie.
Marie Exili, ever in dread of the perquisitions of Desgrais, kept very quiet in her secluded home on the St. Lawrence, guarding her secret with a life-long apprehension, and but occasionally and in the darkest ways practising her deadly skill. She found some compensation and relief for her suppressed passions in the clinging sympathy of her daughter, Marie Josephte dit La Corriveau, who worshipped all that was evil in her mother, and in spite of an occasional reluctance, springing from some maternal instinct, drew from her every secret of her life. She made herself mistress of the whole formula of poisoning as taught by her grandfather Exili, and of the arts of sorcery practised by her wicked grandmother, La Voisin.
As La Corriveau listened to the tale of the burning of her grandmother on the Place de Grève, her own soul seemed bathed in the flames which rose from the faggots, and which to her perverted reason appeared as the fires of cruel injustice, calling for revenge upon the whole race of the oppressors of her family, as she regarded the punishers of their crimes.
With such a parentage, and such dark secrets brooding in her bosom, Marie Josephte, or, as she was commonly called, La Corriveau, had nothing in common with the simple peasantry among whom she lived.
Years passed over her, youth fled, and La Corriveau still sat in her house, eating her heart out, silent and solitary. After the death of her mother, some whispers of hidden treasures known only to herself, a rumor which she had cunningly set afloat, excited the cupidity of Louis Dodier, a simple habitan of St. Valier, and drew him into a marriage with her.
It was a barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without conscience and void of love.