The Purse | Page 5

acquaintance; but he did not lightly entrust to others the secrets of his
life. He was the idol of a necessitous mother, who had brought him up
at the cost of the severest privations. Mademoiselle Schinner, the
daughter of an Alsatian farmer, had never been married. Her tender
soul had been cruelly crushed, long ago, by a rich man, who did not
pride himself on any great delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as
a young girl, in all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her
life, she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions, the
disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so quickly--for we
try to postpone as long as possible our belief in evil, and it seems to
come too soon--that day was a whole age of reflection, and it was also a
day of religious thought and resignation. She refused the alms of the
man who had betrayed her, renounced the world, and made a glory of
her shame. She gave herself up entirely to her motherly love, seeking in
it all her joys in exchange for the social pleasures to which she bid
farewell. She lived by work, saving up a treasure for her son. And, in
after years, a day, an hour repaid her amply for the long and weary
sacrifices of her indigence.
At the last exhibition her son had received the Cross of the Legion of
Honor. The newspapers, unanimous in hailing an unknown genius, still
rang with sincere praises. Artists themselves acknowledged Schinner as
a master, and dealers covered his canvases with gold pieces. At
five-and-twenty Hippolyte Schinner, to whom his mother had
transmitted her woman's soul, understood more clearly than ever his
position in the world. Anxious to restore to his mother the pleasures of
which society had so long robbed her, he lived for her, hoping by the
aid of fame and fortune to see her one day happy, rich, respected, and
surrounded by men of mark. Schinner had therefore chosen his friends

among the most honorable and distinguished men. Fastidious in the
selection of his intimates, he desired to raise still further a position
which his talent had placed high. The work to which he had devoted
himself from boyhood, by compelling him to dwell in solitude--the
mother of great thoughts--had left him the beautiful beliefs which grace
the early days of life. His adolescent soul was not closed to any of the
thousand bashful emotions by which a young man is a being apart,
whose heart abounds in joys, in poetry, in virginal hopes, puerile in the
eyes of men of the world, but deep because they are single- hearted.
He was endowed with the gentle and polite manners which speak to the
soul, and fascinate even those who do not understand them. He was
well made. His voice, coming from his heart, stirred that of others to
noble sentiments, and bore witness to his true modesty by a certain
ingenuousness of tone. Those who saw him felt drawn to him by that
attraction of the moral nature which men of science are happily unable
to analyze; they would detect in it some phenomenon of galvanism, or
the current of I know not what fluid, and express our sentiments in a
formula of ratios of oxygen and electricity.
These details will perhaps explain to strong-minded persons and to men
of fashion why, in the absence of the porter whom he had sent to the
end of the Rue de la Madeleine to call him a coach, Hippolyte Schinner
did not ask the man's wife any questions concerning the two women
whose kindness of heart had shown itself in his behalf. But though he
replied Yes or No to the inquiries, natural under the circumstances,
which the good woman made as to his accident, and the friendly
intervention of the tenants occupying the fourth floor, he could not
hinder her from following the instinct of her kind; she mentioned the
two strangers, speaking of them as prompted by the interests of her
policy and the subterranean opinions of the porter's lodge.
"Ah," said she, "they were, no doubt, Mademoiselle Leseigneur and her
mother, who have lived here these four years. We do not know exactly
what these ladies do; in the morning, only till the hour of noon, an old
woman who is half deaf, and who never speaks any more than a wall,
comes in to help them; in the evening, two or three old gentlemen, with
loops of ribbon, like you, monsieur, come to see them, and often stay
very late. One of them comes in a carriage with servants, and is said to
have sixty thousand francs a year. However, they are very quiet