Life of Count Rumford, 609 



lieve that her father, disgusted with the world and seek- 

 ing for absolute privacy or a chance to wander away 

 among strangers, had, with one or two sympathizing or 

 helping confidants, enacted a farce on this occasion. She 

 affirmed that she had reasons for thinking that a trick 

 had been played upon his friends by bringing into his 

 house a corpse to represent him, and that this was 

 the subject of the burial rites supposed to have been 

 performed for Count Rumford. The Countess further 

 alleged that Madame de Rumford shared this opinion 

 of hers, and that she even made, subsequently, three 

 visits to England, where she had never been before, 

 with a hope of tracing her late husband. A reference 

 to this fancy, and to the presumed grounds of it, can 

 be indulged here only as it illustrates the vagaries of 

 human nature, for it would seem as if the occupation 

 of mind which the Countess found in dwelling upon 

 this strange delusion was to some extent a relief from 

 the brooding sorrow of realizing her own loneliness. 



The Countess had been for more than a year absent 

 from Auteuil at the time of her father's death. She 

 gives a circumstantial account, the details of which 

 would be unedifying here, of her occasional encounters 

 in his house with a woman who was not a servant, but 

 who seemed to take charge of the flowers, the illumina- 

 tions, and the singing birds of the dining-room. Her 

 curiosity was roused, and her feelings were alternately 

 excited and quieted as she asked one or another of the 

 domestics about this additional member of the family. 

 At times she seems to have acquiesced in the arrange- 

 ment as an excusable one, considering the circumstances 

 of her father and the usages of the country where she 

 was. At other times she felt as if she had a right to 

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