Page:Repertory of the Comedie Humaine.djvu/33

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Shortly thereafter she became a mother and found, in the realization of her new duties, strength to resist the mutual attachment between herself and the young and romantic Englishman, Lord Arthur Ormond Grenville, a student of medicine who had nursed her and healed her bodily ailments, and who died rather than compromise her. Heart-broken, the marquise withdrew to the solitude of an old chateau situated between Moret and Montereau in the midst of a neglected waste. She remained a recluse for almost a year, given over utterly to her grief, refusing the consolations of the Church offered her by the old cure of the village of Saint-Lange. Then she re-entered society at Paris. There, at the age of about thirty, she yielded to the genuine passion of the Marquis de Vandenesse. A child, christened Charles, was born of this union, but he perished at an early age under very tragic circumstances. Two other children, Moina and Abel, were also the result of this love union. They were favored by their mother above the two eldest children, Helene and Gustave, the only ones really belonging to the Marquis d'Aiglemont. Madame d'Aiglemont, when nearly fifty, a widow, and having none of her children remaining alive save her daughter Moina, sacrificed all her own fortune for a dower in order to marry the latter to M. de Saint-Hereen, heir of one of the most famous families of France. She then went to live with her son-in-law in a magnificent mansion overlooking the Esplanade des Invalides. But her daughter gave her slight return for her love. Ruffled one day by some remarks made to her by Madame d'Aiglemont concerning the suspicious devotion of the Marquis de Vandenesse, Moina went so far as to fling back at her mother the remembrance of the latter's own guilty relations with the young man's father. Terribly overcome by this attack, the poor woman, who was a physical wreck, deaf and subject to heart disease, died in 1844. (A Woman of Thirty)

AIGLEMONT (Helene d'), eldest daughter of the Marquis and Marquise Victor d'Aiglemont; born in 1817. She and her brother Gustave were neglected by her mother for Charles,