. . . A mistress! that meant
independence. But bashful and timid as I was, knowing nobody, and
ignorant of the dialect of drawing-rooms, I always came back as
awkward as ever, and swelling with unsatisfied desires, to be put in
harness like a troop horse next day by my father, and to return with
morning to my advocate, the Palais de Justice, and the law. To have
swerved from the straight course which my father had mapped out for
me, would have drawn down his wrath upon me; at my first delinquency,
he threatened to ship me off as a cabin-boy to the Antilles. A
dreadful shiver ran through me if I had ventured to spend a couple of
hours in some pleasure party.
"Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate temperament,
the tenderest soul and most artistic nature, dwelling continually in
the presence of the most flint-hearted, atrabilious, and frigid man on
earth; think of me as a young girl married to a skeleton, and you will
understand the life whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to
you; the plans for running away that perished at the sight of my
father, the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed
away by music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. Beethoven or
Mozart would keep my confidences sacred.
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