FIRMIANI, a respectable quadragenarian who in 1813 married the lady who afterwards became Mme. Octave de Camps.  He was unable, so it was said, to offer her more than his name and his fortune.  He was formerly receiver-general in the department of Montenotte.  He died in Greece in 1823. [Madame Firmiani.]

FIRMIANI (Madame). (See Camps, Mme. de.)

FISCHER, the name of three brothers, laborers in a village situated on the extreme frontiers of Lorraine, at the foot of the Vosges.  They set out to join the army of the Rhine by reason of Republican conscriptions.  The first, Pierre, father of Lisbeth—­or “Cousin Betty” —­was killed in 1815 in the Francstireurs.  The second, Andre, father of Adeline who became the wife of Baron Hulot, died at Treves in 1820.  The third, Johann, having committed some acts of peculation, at the instigation of his nephew Hulot, while a commissary contractor in Algiers, province of Oran, committed suicide in 1841.  He was over seventy when he killed himself. [Cousin Betty.]

FISCHER (Adeline). (See Hulot, d’Ervy, Baronne Hector.)

FISCHER (Lisbeth), known as “Cousin Betty”; born in 1796; brought up a peasant.  In her childhood she had to give way to her first cousin, the pretty Adeline, who was pampered by the whole family.  In 1809 she was called to Paris by Adeline’s husband and placed as an apprentice with the well-known Pons Brothers, embroiderers to the Imperial Court.  She became a skilled workwoman and was about to set up for herself when the Empire was overthrown.  Lisbeth was a Republican, of restive temperament, capricious, independent and unaccountably savage.  She habitually declined to wed.  She refused in succession a clerk of the minister of war, a major, an army-contractor, a retired captain and a wealthy lace-maker.  Baron Hulot nick-named her the “Nanny-Goat.”  A resident of rue du Doyenne (which ended at the Louvre and was obliterated about 1855), where she worked for Rivet, a successor of Pons, she made the acquaintance of her neighbor, Wenceslas Steinbock, a Livonian exile, whom she saved from poverty and suicide, but whom she watched with a jealous strictness.  Hortense Hulot sought out and succeeded in seeing the Pole; a wedding followed between the young people which caused Cousin Betty a deep resentment, cunningly concealed, but terrific in its effects.  Through her Wenceslas was introduced to the irresistible Mme. Marneffe, and the happiness of a young household was quickly demolished.  The same thing happened to Baron Hulot whose misconduct Lisbeth secretly abetted.  Lisbeth died in 1844 of a pulmonary phthisis, principally caused by chagrin at seeing the Hulot family reunited.  The relatives of the old maid never found out her evil actions.  They surrounded her bedside, caring for her and lamenting the loss of “the angel of the family.”  Mlle. Fischer died on rue Louis-le-Grand, Paris, after having dwelt in turn on rues du Doyenne, Vaneau, Plumet (now Oudinot) and du Montparnasse, where she managed the household of Marshal Hulot, through whom she dreamed of wearing the countess’ coronet, and for whom she donned mourning. [Cousin Betty.]