FIFTY YEARS’ SORROWING.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 422, 11 August 1908, Page 4

FIFTY YEARS’ SORROWING.

For fifty years No 19 Boulevard Poissouiere, in Paris, a house of four storeys, has been closely shuttered, and yet it has been continuously inhabited (wrote the correspondent of the London Daily Express recently.) Servants were seen to enter and leave the building, and the other day it _ was dressed in the black and silver trappings which usher France’s citizens to their last resting-place. Mme. de Provigny, its occupant for fifty years, was dead. She was an old lady of seventy, and for the last half century she lived in that closed and shuttered house without a newspaper, without an open book, without a flower, and without a word to her from any living soul. For fifty years Mme. de Provigny wore white satin. She wore it on her wedding day, and always dressed in white to the end. Fifty years ago M. de Provigny died. They had been married the same morning, and the young husband died of apoplexy an hour after the ceremony. When she recovered from the shock, if, indeed, she can be said ever to have recovered from it, Mme. de Provigny had the house shut up, but she retained her servants on condition that they were never to confront her with a living being and never to speak to her again. In her will she left her whole fortune to men and women aged over sixty years of good character. She left a large house in the country as a home for them, and ,£400,000 for its support.