The things we do!

The Duke
was now for ever coming to Madame de Florac; he poured all his wrongs and
griefs into her ear with garrulous senile eagerness. "That little
Duchesse is a monstre, a femme d'Eugene Sue," the Vicomte used to say;
"the poor old Duke he cry--ma parole d'honneur, he cry and I cry too when
he comes to recount to my poor mother, whose sainted heart is the asile
of all griefs, a real Hotel Dieu, my word the most sacred, with beds for
all the afflicted, with sweet words, like Sisters of Charity, to minister
to them:--I cry, mon bon Pendennis, when this vieillard tells his stories
about his wife and tears his white hairs to the feet of my mother."
When the little Antoinette was separated by her father from her mother,
the Duchesse d'Ivry, it might have been expected that that poetess would
have dashed off a few more cris de l'ame, shrieking according to her
wont, and baring and beating that shrivelled maternal bosom of hers, from
which her child had been just torn. The child skipped and laughed to go
away to the convent.


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