Evremond, cheery little
Godeau, Bishop of Vence, and half a dozen other famous wits had been
present, a supper bristling with royal personages. Death had come with
appalling suddenness while the lamps of the festival were burning, and the
cards were still upon the tables, and the last carriage had but just rolled
under the _porte cochere_.
"It is the manner of death she would have chosen," wrote Hyacinth. "She
never missed confession on the first Sunday of the month; and she was so
generous to the Church and to the poor that her director declared she would
have been too saintly for earth, but for the human weakness of liking fine
company. And now, dearest, I have to tell you how she has disposed of her
fortune; and I hope, if you should think she has not used you generously,
you will do me the justice to believe that I have neither courted her for
her wealth nor influenced her to my dear sister's disadvantage. You will
consider, _tres chere_, that I was with her from my eighth year until the
other day when Fareham brought me to England. She loved me passionately in
my childhood, and has often told me since that she never felt towards me
as a grandmother, but as if she had been actually my mother, being indeed
still a young woman when she adopted me, and by strangers always mistaken
for my mother.
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