It was that of Monsieur Colleville, an intimate friend of Thuillier.  But before we proceed to describe Pylades let us finish with Orestes, and explain why Thuillier—­that handsome Thuillier—­was left without a family of his own—­for the family, be it said, is non-existent without children.  Herein appears one of those deep mysteries which lie buried in the arena of private life, a few shreds of which rise to the surface at moments when the pain of a concealed situation grows poignant.  This concerns the life of Madame and Mademoiselle Thuillier; so far, we have seen only the life (and we may call it the public life) of Jerome Thuillier.

Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, four years older than her brother, had been utterly sacrificed to him; it was easier to give a career to one than a “dot” to the other.  Misfortune to some natures is a pharos, which illumines to their eyes the dark low corners of social existence.  Superior to her brother both in mind and energy, Brigitte had one of those natures which, under the hammer of persecution, gather themselves together, become compact and powerfully resistant, not to say inflexible.  Jealous of her independence, she kept aloof from the life of the household; choosing to make herself the sole arbiter of her own fate.  At fourteen years of age, she went to live alone in a garret, not far from the ministry of finance, which was then in the rue Vivienne, and also not far from the Bank of France, then, and now, in the rue de la Vrilliere.  There she bravely gave herself up to a form of industry little known and the perquisite of a few persons, which she obtained, thanks to the patrons of her father.  It consisted in making bags to hold coin for the Bank, the Treasury, and the great financial houses.  At the end of three years she employed two workwomen.  By investing her savings on the Grand-Livre, she found herself, in 1814, the mistress of three thousand six hundred francs a year, earned in fifteen years.  As she spent little, and dined with her father as long as he lived, and, as government securities were very low during the last convulsions of the Empire, this result, which seems at first sight exaggerated, explains itself.

On the death of their father, Brigitte and Jerome, the former being twenty-seven, the latter twenty-three, united their existence.  Brother and sister were bound together by an extreme affection.  If Jerome, then at the height of his success, was pinched for money, his sister, clothed in serge, and her fingers roughened by the coarse thread with which she sewed her bags, would give him a few louis.  In Brigitte’s eyes Jerome was the handsomest and most charming man in the whole French Empire.  To keep house for this cherished brother, to be initiated into the secrets of Lindor and Don Juan, to be his handmaiden, his spaniel, was Brigitte’s dream.  She immolated herself lovingly to an idol whose selfishness, always great, was enormously increased by her self-sacrifice.