In those days Villiers-le-Bel was a dull town a
half-hour from Paris on the Northern Railway, and about two miles from
the station.
The widow was not long without offers. Her usual answer was to point out
the tiny Berenice, playing in the garden with her nurse. Then a
landscape painter, one of the Barbizon group, appeared, and, as a former
associate of Rudolph Cot, and a man of means and position, his suit was
successful. To the astonishment of Villiers-le-Bel, Madame Valerie Cot
became Madame Theophile Mineur; on the day of the wedding little
Berenice--named after a particularly uncanny heroine of Poe's by his
relentless French admirer--scratched the long features of her
stepfather. The entire town accepted this as a distressing omen and it
was not deceived; Berenice Cot grew up in the likeness of a determined
young lady whose mother weakly endured her tyranny, whose new father
secretly feared her.
At the age of eighteen she had refused nearly all the young painters
between Ecouen and Domaine de Vallieres; and had spent several summers
in England, and four years at a Lausanne school.
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