As with
other timid souls of limited intelligence, one shock to her feelings
rousing her distrust led her to exaggerate a defect in her character
until it assumed the consistency of a virtue. The Emperor, she said to
herself, might forget them; he might die in battle; her pension, at
any rate, ceased with her life. She shuddered at the risk her children
ran of being left alone in the world without means. Quite incapable of
understanding Roguin when he explained to her that in seven years
Madame Descoings's assignment would replace the money she had sold out
of the Funds, she persisted in trusting neither the notary nor her
aunt, nor even the government; she believed in nothing but herself and
the privations she was practising. By laying aside three thousand
francs every year from her pension, she would have thirty thousand
francs at the end of ten years; which would give fifteen hundred a
year to her children. At thirty-six, she might expect to live twenty
years longer; and if she kept to the same system of economy she might
leave to each child enough for the bare necessaries of life.
Thus the two widows passed from hollow opulence to voluntary poverty,
--one under the pressure of a vice, the other through the promptings
of the purest virtue. None of these petty details are useless in
teaching the lesson which ought to be learned from this present
history, drawn as it is from the most commonplace interests of life,
but whose bearings are, it may be, only the more widespread.
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