The rules of the Sainte-Aurore were far stricter and icier than those of the most investigatable of modern orphanages. Among the punishments inflicted on these little wards of God were starvation, beatings, and imprisonment in cold and stone-floored dark cells--for the very mildest transgressions.
Three dire sins, calling always for instant retribution, were: "To laugh, to sing, and to speak above a whisper." For such hideous and unnatural crimes as laughter, song, and ordinary speech, these poor loveless babies were treated like the vilest criminals. One hopes, morbidly, that the theologians who abolished Hell left at least one warm corner of it in commission, for the framers and enforcers of those gentle rules.
All the foregoing is not sentimental mush, but is mentioned to show how dire must have been a pupil's sin that the convent authorities could not cope with.
And such a sin--no one knows what it was--Marie committed when she was sixteen. For which she was expelled in black disgrace from her happy childhood home at Sainte-Aurore, and turned loose upon the world.
Her mother's loving arms were open, ready to receive and succor the disgraced girl, and to start her afresh in life--as only a mother can. So, to keep Marie from feeling unduly dependent upon a poor working woman like herself, she taught her her own trade--the oldest on earth.
With a little basket of cheap jewelry--which served the same purpose as a present-day beggar's stock of lead pencils--Marie went the rounds of the streets. Her career was cut out for her by her mother's fond forethought. And in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, a girl thus launched would have ended in the gutter. But Marie was the thousandth woman--a true super-woman, in every sense of the word. The filth of the streets could not smirch her--outwardly. And luck was waiting around the corner for her.
A rich and eccentric old woman of fashion--Madame Legrade--had a craze for amateur theatricals. Catching sight of Marie one day, she was struck by the girl's beauty, and hired her, partly as a companion and partly as a comedian for her private theatre.
At Madame Legrade's, Marie got her first view of semidecent society. And, being adaptable, she picked up a smattering of manners and of grammatical speech; only a smattering, but all she cared to acquire. There, too, she met such men as the withered old wit, de Richelieu, and the Prince de Soubise; and the Duc de Brissac, whose son was one day to be the one real love of her life. Here, too, she met a genius whom she describes in her "Memoirs" as "a cunning fox; witty ... very ugly and very thin." He was Grimm, the fairytale man.