The Savannah morning news., 1901-08-18
come the end of this poor wreck. !"

come the end of this poor wreck"
Melancholy shreds of paper, garland
ed with faded roses, hung from the de-
serted walls. Some pure Louis XVI.
chests, gaping at each angle and tot
tering on their legs, stood against the
walls and the huge chairs, in grand
style, in the four corners of the room,
vomited their stuffing through the
rents of the moth eaten tapestry that
essayed to cover them.
1 did not tell her that I had come to
hear the story of her life.
She came to that by the easy stages
of polite interlocution. Such histories
are obscure, perhaps, when they are
but the story of the complicated details
that mark the dissipation of millions
by INSCRIPTIONS caretakers.
She was brought up and educated,
like all French girls of family, and
came to Paris in her early maiden
hood.
Then she tasted the delights of the
brilliant society of the period. Her
father, Admiral Baudin, was welcomed
everywhere, and his daughter soon won
a distinct place by her wit, her esprit
and her manner.
She lost herself in the seductions OF
the Tuileries and St. Cloud, and her
palms were read by the bards, In the
salons of the day.
II was to her that the gallant Napo-
leon III. remarked after reading, or
hearing, one of her palms:
Beginning of Trouble.
"Ah. madame, but you are more
blessed than a titular ruler, for you
have an empire that trembles before
no conqueror but yourself-the empire
of your mind"
Then she married the handsome
Comte' de Treguain, an aristocrat of
the old regime, whose family, despoiled
during the great, revolution and re-
turned at the restoration. had nothing
to give him but the luster of a name
and the blood stained record that the
guillotine of the Terror had written
for him.
1t was one of his ancestors that went
to the block in the tumbril with Ma
dame Roland, that aged Lamarch,
whom she begged the executioner to
take first, for" she said to her COM
rade, my blood spreading before your
eyes would make you feel death twice
you should not have the
pain Of seeing my head fall"
Welded life was period OF great
happiness for the young comteSSe;
great, but all too brief.
Part of it passed among the distrac-
items of the court; part among the
quietnesses of her rural estates.
Her first sorrow was the death of
her father; a greater soon followed,
when the ruthless reaper cut down her
husband.
Distracted by grief. the widow buried
herself in her weeds in the semi
sion of her house in Paris, and sought
surcease in her literary inclinations.
She went nowhere, and saw but few
of the callers whose names went up to
her through the portal that immured
her in the Rue de Calais.
At first she was much missed in the
places she had shone most brilliantly,
but with the great world, one of the
saddest axioms is "out Of sight; out
of mind"
Sought SecIusion.
At the end of two years she no longer
had any inclination to go back, and
those who had known her as an orna-
ment to their salons recalled her now
as a memory only among the new
claimants that crowded around them,
clamoring for laurels-
Soon, only the domestics who knew
the garden at the back of the Coun-
tess house, were all who ever saw her.
Meantime, the forces of hypotheca-
ton were at work upon her fortune.
Idealist that she was, living in a
WOElu lndl IldQ IN IL iO uOI
lands-exoept fields of asphodel-ror
revenues, nor lawyers, she knew no
more about the management of her
property than an infant in arms.
When the man of affairs told her
that to pay off certain accumulated
debts the hotel in Rue de Calais would
have to be sold. she merely said she
would go into the country, and gather
ing up her books there she went.
n ok In,
of the hotel in Paris.
The farms that had shed their hsr-
vests of the gold of Brest, and the
broad lands of historic Vile d'Avray;
ancient Jeu de Paume of Louis XVI
that he gave TO Clery--all melted into
the air or were appropriated by the
ravening sharks that fed upon her Gre
dulity.
All, everything, until there was moth