' And somehow Tullia managed to induce the most
Puritanical members of du Bruel's family to accept her. From the very
first, before any one suspected her motives, she assiduously visited
old Mme. de Bonfalot, who bored her horribly; she made handsome
presents to mean old Mme. de Chisse, du Bruel's great-aunt; she spent
a summer with the latter lady, and never missed a single mass. She
even went to confession, received absolution, and took the sacrament;
but this, you must remember, was in the country, and under the aunt's
eyes.
"'I shall have real aunts now, do you understand?' she said to us
when she came back in the winter.
"She was so delighted with her respectability, so glad to renounce her
independence, that she found means to compass her end. She flattered
the old people. She went on foot every day to sit for a couple of
hours with Mme. du Bruel the elder while that lady was ill--a
Maintenon's stratagem which amazed du Bruel. And he admired his wife
without criticism; he was so fast in the toils already that he did not
feel his bonds.
"Claudine succeeded in making him understand that only under the
elastic system of a bourgeois government, only at the bourgeois court
of the Citizen-King, could a Tullia, now metamorphosed into a Mme.
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