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142 Leonor had often seen her kissing her little boy or her dog like that.

Hortense was thirty. She owed her name to certain Bonapartist sentiments which, in her family, had survived by a few years the events of 1870. Certain elegant habits of thought and manners had also been preserved. Her father, M. d'Urville had been one of the actors of Octave Feuillet's comedies, in this same Compiégne where they were now arriving. At the age when girls begin to forget that there are such things as dolls, she had read the complete works of this shy passionate writer; her mother did not forbid her to look at the Vie Parisienne, in which her happy frivolity had never seen anything that might be dangerous for a well-bred girl. And so, when she married, Hortense knew that though marriage may be a garden surrounded by a wall, there are ladders to climb over this wall; the only things she thought of in her husband were rank, for tune and the conventions. Her ﬁrst lover had been a young ofﬁcer, with whom, as with Leonor, she had lost her way hunting; only with him it had been stag-hunt. Leonor had participated only at an ordinary shoot, M. de