He joined to these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels.
He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings.

He adored his daughter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the perspective of the workshop.

He gave her an education of the highest degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated destinies.

We need not say what dreams, misery, and misfortunes men with such characters invariably bring upon their honest families.
The young girl grew up in this atmosphere of luxuriant imagination and actual wretchedness.

Endowed with a premature judgment, she early detected these domestic miseries, and took refuge in the good sense of her mother from the illusions of her father and her own presentiments of the future.
Marguerite Bimont (her mother's name) had brought her husband a calm beauty, and a mind very superior to her destiny, but angelic piety and resignation armed her equally against ambition and despair.