Mademoiselle de Watteville, who lived alone on her estate of les
Rouxey, riding, hunting, refusing two or three offers a year, going to
Besancon four or five times in the course of the winter, and busying
herself with improving her land, was regarded as a very eccentric
personage. She was one of the celebrities of the Eastern provinces.
Madame de Soulas has two children, a boy and a girl, and she has grown
younger; but Monsieur de Soulas has aged a good deal.
“My fortune has cost me dear,” said he to young Chavoncourt. “Really
to know a bigot it is unfortunately necessary to marry her!”
Mademoiselle de Watteville behaves in the most extraordinary manner.
“She has vagaries,” people say. Every year she goes to gaze at the
walls of the Grande Chartreuse. Perhaps she dreams of imitating her
grand-uncle by forcing the walls of the monastery to find a husband,
as Watteville broke through those of his monastery to recover his
liberty.
She left Besancon in 1841, intending, it was said, to get married; but
the real reason of this expedition is still unknown, for she returned
home in a state which forbids her ever appearing in society again. By
one of those chances of which the Abbe de Grancey had spoken, she
happened to be on the Loire in a steamboat of which the boiler burst.
Mademoiselle de Watteville was so severely injured that she lost her
right arm and her left leg; her face is marked with fearful scars,
which have bereft her of her beauty; her health, cruelly upset, leaves
her few days free from suffering. In short, she now never leaves the
Chartreuse of les Rouxey, where she leads a life wholly devoted to
religious practices.
PARIS, May 1842.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — Albert Savarus/Part 11. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.