ABSTRACT
to break her spirit. They did not succeed. She fled into marriage at the age of seventeen. By the time she began working for Vallès in the 1880s she had been separated for many years from her first husband, Henri Montrobert, from whom she had run away following the birth of their son. In the interim she had been living with Adrien Guebhard, whom she met while employed as a reader for his mother. She bore a son by him and married him after the 1884 divorce law allowed her to terminate her marriage to Montrobert. Meanwhile she had met Vallès in Brussels. After his return to Paris she went to work for him and soon became Vallès's spiritual daughter. Her two sons were sent out to nurse and then away to school.
