Gaud felt the adoration of a young mother for the child confided to her tender care.

She was his elder by about eighteen months.

He was as dark as she was fair, as obedient and caressing as she was hasty and capricious.

She well remembered that part of her life; neither wealth nor town life had altered it; and like a far-off dream of wild freedom it came back to her, or as the remembrance of an undefined and mysterious previous existence, where the sandy shores seemed longer, and the cliffs higher and nobler.
Towards the age of five or six, which seemed long ago to her, wealth had befallen her father, who began to buy and sell the cargoes of ships.

She had been taken to Saint-Brieuc, and later to Paris.