Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad, and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great marriage.
This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see?
There was some doubt about this.
She glided rather than walked, she never spoke; it was not quite known whether she breathed.
Her nostrils were livid and pinched as after yielding up their last sigh.
To touch her hand was like touching snow. She possessed a strange spectral grace.
Wherever she entered, people felt cold.
One day a sister, on seeing her pass, said to another sister, "She passes for a dead woman."
"Perhaps she is one," replied the other.
A hundred tales were told of Madame Albertine.
This arose from the eternal curiosity of the pupils.
In the chapel there was a gallery called L'OEil de Boeuf.
It was in this gallery, which had only a circular bay, an oeil de boeuf, that Madame Albertine listened to the offices.
She always occupied it alone because this gallery, being on the level of the first story, the preacher or the officiating priest could be seen, which was interdicted to the nuns. One day the pulpit was occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de Leon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of Besancon.
It was the first time that M. de Rohan had preached at the Petit-Picpus convent. Madame Albertine usually preserved perfect calmness and complete immobility during the sermons and services.
That day, as soon as she caught sight of M. de Rohan, she half rose, and said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, "Ah!
Auguste!"
The whole community turned their heads in amazement, the preacher raised his eyes, but Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad woman had become a corpse again.
Those two words, however, had set every one in the convent who had the privilege of speech to chattering.
How many things were contained in that "Ah!