key of madame's nature - the mainspring of her motives - the alpha and
omega of her life. I have seen her feelings appealed to, and I have smiled in
half-pity, half-scorn at the appellants. None ever gained her ear through that
channel, or swayed her purpose by that means. On the contrary, to attempt to
touch her heart was the surest way to rouse her antipathy, and to make of her a
secret foe. It proved to her that she had no heart to be touched: it reminded
her where she was impotent and dead. Never was the distinction between charity
and mercy better exemplified than in her. While devoid of sympathy, she had a
sufficiency of rational benevolence: she would give in the readiest manner to
people she had never seen - rather, however, to classes than to individuals.
»Pour les pauvres,« she opened her purse freely - against the poor man, as a
rule, she kept it closed. In philanthropic schemes, for the benefit of society
at large, she took a cheerful part; no private sorrow touched her: no force or
mass of suffering concentrated in one heart had power to pierce hers. Not the
agony in Gethsemane, not the death on Calvary, could have wrung from her eyes
one tear.
    I say again, madame was a very great and a very capable woman. That school
offered for her powers too limited a sphere; she ought to have swayed a nation:
she should have been the leader of a turbulent legislative assembly. Nobody
could have brow-beaten her, none irritated her nerves, exhausted her patience,
or over-reached her astuteness. In her own single person, she could have
comprised the duties of a first minister and a superintendent of police. Wise,
firm, faithless; secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute
and insensate - withal perfectly decorous - what more could be desired?
    The sensible reader will not suppose that I gained all the knowledge here
condensed for his benefit in one month, or in one half-year. No! what I saw at
first was the thriving outside of a large and flourishing educational
establishment. Here was a great house, full of healthy, lively girls, all
well-dressed and many of them handsome, gaining knowledge by a marvellously easy
method, without painful exertion or useless waste of spirits; not, perhaps,
making very rapid progress in anything; taking it easy, but still always
employed, and never oppressed. Here was a corps of teachers and masters more
stringently tasked, as all the real