The week after this, when the marriage service had been celebrated at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, at seven in the morning⁠—as was the custom in some families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain⁠—Calyste and Sabine got into a neat traveling-carriage in the midst of the embracing, congratulations, and tears of a score of persons gathered in groups under the awning of the Hôtel de Grandlieu. The congratulations were offered by the witnesses and the men; the tears were to be seen in the eyes of the Duchesse de Grandlieu and her daughter Clotilde⁠—both tremulous, and from the same reflection.

“Poor Sabine! she is starting in life at the mercy of a man who is married not altogether willingly.”

Marriage does not consist solely of pleasures, which are as fugitive under those conditions as under any others; it involves a consonance of tempers and physical sympathies, a concord of character, which make this social necessity an ever new problem. Girls to be married know the conditions and dangers of this lottery fully as well as their mothers do; this is why women shed tears as they look on at a marriage, while men smile; the men think they risk nothing; the women know pretty well how much they risk.

In another carriage, which had started first, was the Baronne du Guénic, to whom the Duchess had said at parting:

“You are a mother though you have only a son. Try to fill my place to my darling Sabine.”

On the box of that carriage sat a groom serving as a courier, and behind it two ladies’-maids. The four postilions, in splendid liveries⁠—each carriage having four horses⁠—all had nosegays in their buttonholes and favors in their hats. The Duc de Grandlieu, even by paying them, had the greatest difficulty in persuading them to remove the ribbons. The French postilion is eminently intelligent, but he loves his joke; and these took the money, and replaced the favors outside the city walls.

“Well, well, goodbye, Sabine!” said the Duchess. “Remember your promise, and write often.⁠—Calyste, I say no more, but you understand me.”

Clotilde, leaning on the arm of her youngest sister Athénaïs, who was smiling at the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu, gave the bride a keen glance through her tears, and watched the carriage till it disappeared amid the repeated salvo of four postilions’ whips, noisier than pistol shots. In a very short time the gay procession reached the Esplanade of the Invalides, followed the Quay to the Pont d’Iéna, the Passy Gate, the Versailles avenue, and, finally, the highroad to Brittany.

Is it not strange, to say the least, that the artisan class of Switzerland and Germany, and the greatest families of France and England, obey the same custom, and start on a journey after the nuptial ceremony? The rich pack themselves into a box on wheels. The poor walk gaily along the roads, resting in the woods, feeding at every inn, so long as their glee, or rather their money, holds out. A moralist would find it difficult to decide which is the finest flower of modesty⁠—that which hides from the public eye, inaugurating the domestic hearth and bed as the worthy citizen does, or that which flies from the family and displays itself in the fierce light of the highroad to the eyes of strangers? Refined natures must crave for solitude, and avoid the world and the family alike. The rush of love that begins a marriage is a diamond, a pearl, a gem cut by the highest of all arts, a treasure to be buried deep in the heart.

Who could tell the tale of a honeymoon excepting the bride? And how many women would here admit that this period of uncertain duration⁠—sometimes of only a single night⁠—is the preface to married life? Sabine’s first three letters to her mother betrayed a state of things which, unfortunately, will not seem new to some young wives, nor to many old women. All who have become sick-nurses, so to speak, to a man’s heart have not found it out so quickly as Sabine did. But the girls of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, when they are keen-witted, are women already in mind. Before marriage, they have received the baptism of fine manners from the world and from their mothers. Duchesses, anxious to perpetuate the tradition, are often unaware of all the bearings of their lessons when they say to their daughters⁠—“No one ever does that.”⁠—“Do not laugh at such things.”⁠—“You must never fling yourself on a sofa, you must sit down quietly.”⁠—“Never do such a thing again.”⁠—“It is most incorrect, my dear!” and so forth.

And critical middle-class folks refuse to recognize any innocence or virtue in young creatures who, like Sabine, are virgin souls, but perfected by cleverness, by the habits of good style, and good taste, knowing from the age of sixteen how to use an opera glass. Sabine, to lend herself to Mademoiselle des Touches’ schemes for her marriage, could not but be of the school of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This innate mother-wit, these gifts of birth, may perhaps make this young wife as interesting as the heroine of the Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées, in which we see the vanity of such social advantages in the great crisis of married life, where they are often crushed under the double weight of unhappiness and passion.

I

To Madame la Duchesse de Grandlieu

Guérande, April 1838.

“Dear Mother⁠—You can easily understand why I did not write to you on the journey; one’s mind turns like the wheels. So here I have been these two days in the depths of Brittany, at the Hôtel du Guénic, a house carved all over like a coconut box. Notwithstanding the affectionate attentions of Calyste’s family, I feel an eager longing to fly away to you, and tell you a thousand things which I feel can only be told to a mother.

“Dear mamma, Calyste married me cherishing a great sorrow in his soul; we all of us know it, and you did not disguise the difficulties of my position; but, alas! they are greater than you imagined. Oh, dear mamma, how much experience we may acquire in a few days⁠—why should I not say to you in a few hours? All your counsels proved useless, and you will understand why by this simple fact: I love Calyste as if he were not my husband. That is to say, if I were married to another man and were traveling with Calyste, I should love him and hate my husband. Consider him, then, as a man loved entirety, involuntarily, absolutely, and as many more adverbs as you choose to supply. So, in spite of your warnings, my slavery is an established fact.

“You advised me to keep myself lofty, haughty, dignified, and proud, in order to bring Calyste to a state of feeling which should never undergo any changes throughout life; in the esteem and respect which must sanctify the wife in the home and family. You spoke warmly, and with reason, no doubt, against the young women of the day who, under the excuse of living on good terms with their husbands, begin by being docile, obliging, submissive, with a familiarity, a free-and-easyness which are, in your opinion, rather too cheap⁠—a word I own to not understanding yet, but we shall see by and by⁠—and which, if you are right, are only the early and rapid stages towards indifference and perhaps contempt.

“ ‘Remember that you are a Grandlieu,’ you said in my ear.

“This advice, full of the maternal eloquence of Dedalus, has shared the fate of mythological things. Dear, darling mother, could you believe that I should begin by the catastrophe which, according to you, closes the honeymoon of the young wives of our day?

“When Calyste and I were alone in the carriage, each thought the other as silly as himself, as we both perceived the importance of the first word, the first look; and each, bewildered by the marriage sacrament, sat looking out of a window. It was so preposterous that, as we got near the city gate, Monsieur made me a little speech in a rather broken voice⁠—a speech prepared, no doubt, like all extempore efforts, to which I listened with a beating heart, and which I take the liberty of epitomizing for your benefit.

“ ‘My dear Sabine,’ said he, ‘I wish you to be happy, and, above all, to be happy in your own way,’ said he. ‘In our position, instead of deceiving each other as to our characters and sentiments by magnanimous concessions, let us both be now what we should be a few years hence. Regard me as being your brother, as I would wish to find a sister in you.’

“Though this was most delicately meant, I did not find in this first speech of married love anything answering to the eagerness of my soul, and, after replying that I felt quite as he did, I remained pensive. After this declaration of rights to be equally cold, we talked of the weather, the dust, the houses, and the scenery with the most gracious politeness, I laughing a rather forced laugh, he lost in dreams.

“Finally, as we left Versailles, I asked Calyste point-blank⁠—calling him ‘my dear Calyste,’ as he called me ‘my dear Sabine’⁠—if he could tell me the history of the events which had brought him to death’s door, and to which I owed the honor of being his wife. He hesitated for a long time. In fact, it was the subject of a little discussion lasting through three stages; I trying to play the part of a wilful girl determined to sulk; he debating with himself on the ominous question asked as a challenge to Charles X by the public press: ‘Will the King give in?’ At last, when we had left Verneuil, and after swearing often enough to satisfy three dynasties that I would never remind him of his folly, never treat him coldly, and so on, he painted his passion for Madame de Rochefide: ‘I do not wish,’ he said, in conclusion, ‘that there should be any secrets between us.’

“Poor dear Calyste did not know, I suppose, that his friend Mademoiselle des Touches and you had been obliged to tell me all; for a girl cannot be dressed as I was on the day of the contract without being taught her part.

“I cannot but tell everything to so good a mother as you are. Well, then, I was deeply hurt at seeing that he had yielded far less to my request than to his own wish to talk about the unknown object of his passion. Will you blame me, dearest mother, for having wanted to know the extent of this sorrow, of the aching wound in his heart of which you had told me?

“Thus, within eight hours of having been blessed by the Curé of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, your Sabine found herself in the rather false position of a young wife hearing from her husband’s own lips his confidences as to a cheated passion and the misdeeds of a rival. Yes, I was playing a part in the drama of a young wife, officially informed that she owed her marriage to the disdain of an old beauty!

“By this narrative I gained what I sought. ‘What?’ you will ask. Oh, my dear mother! on clocks and chimney-carvings I have often enough seen Loves leading each other on, hand-in-hand, to put the lesson into practice! Calyste ended the romance of his memories with the most vehement protestations that he had entirely got over what he called his madness. Every protest needs a signature. The happy hapless one took my hand, pressed it to his lips, and then held it for a long time. A declaration followed. This one seemed to me more suitable than the first to our position as man and wife, though our lips did not utter a single word. This happiness I owed to my spirited indignation against the bad taste of a woman so stupid as not to love my handsome and delightful Calyste.

“I am called away to play a game of cards, which I have not yet mastered. I will continue my letter tomorrow. That I should have to leave you just now to make the fifth at a game of mouche! Such a thing is impossible anywhere but in the depths of Brittany.

“May.

“I resume the tale of my Odyssey. By the third day your children had dropped the ceremonial vous and adopted the lover-like tu. My mother-in-law, delighted to see us happy, tried to fill your place, dearest mother; and, as is always the case with those who take a part with the idea of effacing past impressions, she is so delightful that she has been almost as much to me as you could be. She, no doubt, guessed how heroic my conduct was; at the beginning of our journey she hid her anxiety too carefully not to betray it by her excessive precaution.

“When I caught sight of the towers of Guérande I said in your son-in-law’s ear, ‘Have you quite forgotten her?’

“And my husband, now my angel, had perhaps never known the depth of an artless and genuine affection, for that little speech made him almost crazy with joy.

“Unluckily, my desire to make him forget Madame de Rochefide led me too far. How could I help it! I love him, and I am almost Portuguese, for I am like you rather than my father. Calyste accepted everything, as spoilt children do; he is above everything an only son. Between you and me, I will never let my daughter⁠—if I ever should have a daughter⁠—marry an only son. It is quite enough to have to manage one tyrant, and in an only son there are several. And so we exchanged parts; I played the devoted wife. There are dangers in self-devotion to gain an end; it is loss of dignity. So I have to announce the wreck in me of that semi-virtue; dignity is really no more than a screen set up by pride, behind which we may fume at our ease. How could I help myself, mamma; you were not here, and I looked into a gulf. If I had maintained my dignity, I should have known the chill pangs of a sort of brotherliness, which would certainly have become simple indifference. And what future would have lain before me?

“As a result of my devotion, I am Calyste’s slave. Shall I get out of that position? We shall see; for the present I like it. I love Calyste⁠—I love him entirely with the frenzy of a mother who thinks everything right that her son can do, even when he punishes her a little.

“May 15.

“So far, dear mother, marriage has come to me in a most attractive form. I lavish all my tenderest affection on the handsomest of men, who was thrown over by a fool for the sake of a wretched singer⁠—for the woman is evidently a fool, and a fool in cold blood, the worst sort of fool. I am charitable in my lawful passion, and heal his scars while inflicting eternal wounds on myself. Yes, for the more I love Calyste, the more I feel that I should die of grief if anything put an end to our present happiness. And I am worshiped, too, by all the family, and by the little company that meets at the Hôtel du Guénic, all of them born figures in some ancient tapestry, and having stepped out of it to show that the impossible can exist. One day when I am alone I will describe them to you⁠—Aunt Zéphirine, Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël, the Chevalier du Halga, the Demoiselles de Kergarouët, and the rest, down to the two servants, whom I shall be allowed, I hope, to take to Paris⁠—Mariotte and Gasselin, who regard me as an angel alighted on earth from heaven, and who are still startled when I speak to them⁠—they are all figures to put under glass shades.

“My mother-in-law solemnly installed us in the rooms she and her deceased husband had formerly inhabited. The scene was a touching one. ‘I lived all my married life here,’ said she, ‘quite happy. May that be a happy omen for you, my dear children!’

“And she has taken Calyste’s room. The saintly woman seemed to wish to divest herself of her memories and her admirable life as a wife to endow us with them.

“The province of Brittany, this town, this family with its antique manners⁠—the whole thing, in spite of the absurdities, which are invisible to any but a mocking Parisian woman, has something indescribably grandiose, even in its details, to be expressed only by the word sacred. The tenants of the last estates of the du Guénics, repurchased, as you know, by Mademoiselle des Touches⁠—whom we are to visit in the convent⁠—all came out to receive us. These good folks in their holiday dresses, expressing the greatest joy at greeting Calyste as really their master once more, made me understand what Brittany is, and feudality, and old France. It was a festival I will not write about; I will tell you when we meet. The terms of all the leases have been proposed by the tenants themselves, and we are to sign after the tour of inspection we are to make round our lands that have been pledged this century and a half. Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël tells us that these yeomen have assessed the returns with an accuracy that Paris folk would not believe in. We are to start three days hence, and ride everywhere.

“On my return I will write again, dear mother; but what can I have to say to you, since my happiness is already complete? So I must write what you know already, namely, how much I love you.”

II

From the same to the same

“After playing the part of the Lady of the Castle, worshiped by her vassals as though the revolutions of 1830 and 1789 had never torn down our banners; after riding through woods, halting at farms, dining at old tables spread with cloths a century old, and groaning under Homeric dishes served in antediluvian plate; after drinking delicious wine out of goblets like those we see in the hands of conjurors; after salvos fired at dessert, and deafening shouts of ‘Vive les du Guénics!’ and balls, where the orchestra is a bagpipe, which a man blows at for ten hours on end! and such bouquets! and brides who insist on having our blessing! and healthy fatigue, cured by such sleep as I had never known, and a delicious waking to love as radiant as the sun that shines above us, twinkling on a myriad insects that hum in genuine Breton! Finally, after a grotesque visit to the Castle of du Guénic, where the windows are open gates, and the cows might pasture on the grass grown in the halls; but we have vowed to restore it, and furnish it, so as to come here every year and be hailed by the vassals of the clan, one of whom carried our banner.⁠—Ouf! here I am at Nantes.

“What a day we had when we went to le Guénic! The priest and all the clergy came out to meet us, all crowned with flowers, mother, and blessed us with such joy! The tears come into my eyes as I write about it. And my lordly Calyste played his part as a liege like a figure of Walter Scott’s. Monsieur received homage as if we had stepped back into the thirteenth century. I heard girls and women saying, ‘What a handsome master we have!’ just like the chorus of a comic opera.

“The old folks discussed Calyste’s likeness to the du Guénics whom they had known. Oh! Brittany is a noble and sublime country, a land of faith and religion. But progress has an eye on it; bridges and roads are to be made, ideas will invade it, and farewell to the sublime. The peasants will certainly cease to be as free and proud as I saw them when it has been proved to them that they are Calyste’s equals, if, indeed, they can be brought to believe it.

“So after the poetry of this pacific restoration, when we had signed the leases we left that delightful country, flowery and smiling, gloomy and barren by turns, and we came here to kneel before her to whom we owe our good fortune, and give her thanks. Calyste and I both felt the need to thank the novice of the Visitation. In memory of her he will bear on his shield quarterly the arms of des Touches: party per pale engrailed or and vert. He will assume one of the silver eagles as a supporter, and place in its beak the pretty womanly motto, ‘Souviègne-vous.’⁠—So we went yesterday to the Convent of the Ladies of the Visitation, conducted by the Abbé Grimont, a friend of the Guénic family; he told us that your beloved Félicité, dear mamma, is a saint; indeed, she can be no less to him, since this illustrious conversion has led to his being made vicar-general of the diocese. Mademoiselle des Touches would not see Calyste; she received me alone. I found her a little altered, paler and thinner; she seemed extremely pleased by my visit.

“ ‘Tell Calyste,’ said she in a low voice, ‘that my not seeing him is a matter of conscience and self-discipline, for I have permission; but I would rather not purchase the happiness of a few minutes with months of suffering! Oh, if you could only know how difficult I find it to answer when I am asked, “What are you thinking about?” The mistress of the novices can never understand the vastness and multiplicity of the ideas which rush through my brain like a whirlwind. Sometimes I see Italy once more, or Paris, with all their display, always with Calyste, who,’ she said with the poetic turn you know so well, ‘is the sun of my memory. I was too old to be admitted to the Carmelites, so I chose the Order of Saint Francis de Sales, solely because he said, “I will have you bareheaded instead of barefoot!” disapproving of such austerities as only mortify the body. In fact, the head is the sinner. The holy Bishop did well to make his rule stern to the brain and merciless to the will!⁠—This was what I needed, for my mind is the real culprit; it deceived me as to my heart till the age of forty, when, though we are sometimes for a moment forty times happier than younger women, we are sometimes fifty times more wretched.⁠—Well, my child, and are you happy?’ she ended by asking me, evidently glad to say no more about herself.

“ ‘You see me in a rapture of love and happiness,’ I told her.

“ ‘Calyste is as kind and genuine as he is noble and handsome,’ she said gravely. ‘You are my heiress; you have, besides my fortune, the twofold ideal of which I dreamed.⁠—I am glad of what I have done,’ she added after a pause. ‘Now, my child, do not be blinded. You have easily grasped happiness, you had only to put out your hand; now try to keep it. If you had come here merely to carry away the advice of my experience, your journey would be well rewarded. Calyste at this moment is fired by an infection of passion; you did not inspire it. To make your happiness durable, dear child, strive to add this element to the former one. In your own interest and your husband’s, try to be capricious, coy, a little severe if necessary. I do not advise a spirit of odious calculation, nor tyranny, but the science of conduct. Between usury and extravagance there is economy. Learn to acquire a certain decent control of your husband.

“ ‘These are the last worldly words I shall ever speak; I have been waiting to say them to you, for my conscience quaked at the notion of having sacrificed you to save Calyste; attach him to you, give him children, let him respect you as their mother.⁠—Finally,’ she added in an agitated voice, ‘manage that he shall never see Béatrix again!’

“This name was enough to produce a sort of torpor in us both; we remained looking into each other’s eyes, exchanging our vague sentiments of uneasiness.

“ ‘Are you going home to Guérande?’ she asked.

“ ‘Yes,’ said I.

“ ‘Well, never go to les Touches. I was wrong to give you the place.’

“ ‘Why?’

“ ‘Child, les Touches is for you a Bluebeard’s cupboard, for there is nothing so dangerous as rousing a sleeping passion.’

“I have given you the substance of our conversation, my dear mother. If Mademoiselle des Touches made me talk, on the other hand she gave me much to think about⁠—all the more because in the excitement of our travels, and my happiness with my Calyste, I had forgotten the serious matter of which I spoke in my first letter.

“After admiring Nantes, a delightful and splendid city; after going to see, in the Place de Bretagne, the spot where Charette so nobly fell, we arranged to return to Saint-Nazaire down the Loire, since we had already gone from Nantes to Guérande by the road. Public traveling is an invention of the modern monster the Monopole. Two rather pretty women belonging to Nantes were behaving rather noisily on deck, suffering evidently from Kergarouëtism⁠—a jest you will understand when I shall have told you what the Kergarouëts are. Calyste behaved very well. Like a true gentleman, he did not parade me as his wife. Though pleased by his good taste, like a child with his first drum, I thought this an admirable opportunity for practising the system recommended by Camille Maupin⁠—for it was certainly not the novice that had spoken to me. I put on a little sulky face, and Calyste was very flatteringly distressed. In reply to his question, whispered in my ear, ‘What is the matter?’ I answered the truth:

“ ‘Nothing whatever.’

“And I could judge at once how little effect the truth has in the first instance. Falsehood is a decisive weapon in cases where rapidity is the only salvation for a woman or an empire. Calyste became very urgent, very anxious. I led him to the forepart of the boat, among a mass of ropes, and there, in a voice full of alarms, if not of tears, I told him all the woes and fears of a woman whose husband happens to be the handsomest of men.

“ ‘Oh, Calyste!’ said I, ‘there is one dreadful blot on our marriage. You did not love me! you did not choose me! You did not stand fixed like a statue when you saw me for the first time. My heart, my attachment, my tenderness cry out to you for affection, and some day you will punish me for having been the first to offer the treasure of my pure and involuntary girlish love! I ought to be grudging and capricious, but I have no strength for it against you.⁠—If that odious woman who scorned you had been in my place now, you would not even have seen those two hideous provincial creatures who would be classed with cattle by the Paris octroi.’

“Calyste, my dear mother, had tears in his eyes and turned away to hide them; he saw la Basse Indre, and ran to desire the captain to put us on shore. No one can hold out against such a response, especially as it was followed by a stay of three hours in a little country inn, where we breakfasted off fresh fish, in a little room such as genre painters love, while through the windows came the roar of the ironworks of Indret across the broad waters of the Loire. Seeing the happy result of the experiments of experience, I exclaimed, ‘Oh, sweet Félicité!’

“Calyste, who of course knew nothing of the advice I had received, or of the artfulness of my behavior, fell into a delightful punning blunder by replying, ‘Never let us forget it!⁠—We will send an artist here to sketch the scene.’

“I laughed, dear mamma!⁠—well, I laughed till Calyste was quite disconcerted and on the point of being angry.

“ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but there is in my heart a picture of this landscape, of this scene, which nothing can ever efface, and inimitable in its color.’

“Indeed, mother, I find it impossible to give my love the appearance of warfare or hostility. Calyste can do what he likes with me. That tear is, I believe, the first he ever bestowed on me! is it not worth more than a second declaration of a wife’s rights? A heartless woman, after the scene on the boat, would have been mistress of the situation; I lost all I had gained. By your system, the more I am a wife, the more I become a sort of prostitute, for I am a coward in happiness; I cannot hold out against a glance from my lord. I do not abandon myself to love; I hug it as a mother clasps her child to her breast for fear of some harm.”

III

From the same to the same

“July, Guérande.”

“Oh! my dear mother, to be jealous after three months of married life! My heart is indeed full. I feel the deepest hatred and the deepest love.⁠—I am worse than deserted, I am not loved!⁠—Happy am I to have a mother, another heart to which I may cry at my ease.

“To us wives who are still to some extent girls, it is quite enough to be told⁠—‘Here, among the keys of your palace, is one all rusty with remembrance; go where you will, enjoy everything, but beware of visiting les Touches’⁠—to make us rush in hotfoot, our eyes full of Eve’s curiosity. What a provoking element Mademoiselle des Touches had infused into my love! And why was I forbidden les Touches? What! does such happiness as mine hang on an excursion, on a visit to an old house in Brittany? What have I to fear?⁠—In short, add to Mrs. Bluebeard’s reasons the craving that gnaws at every woman’s heart to know whether her power is precarious or durable, and you will understand why one day I asked, with an air of indifference:

“ ‘What sort of place is les Touches?’

“ ‘Les Touches is your own,’ said my adorable mother-in-law.

“ ‘Ah! If only Calyste had never set his foot there!⁠—’ said Aunt Zéphirine, shaking her head.

“ ‘He would not now be my husband,’ said I.

“ ‘Then you know what happened there?’ said my mother-in-law sharply.

“ ‘It is a place of perdition,’ said Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoël. ‘Mademoiselle des Touches committed many sins there for which she now begs forgiveness of God.’

“ ‘And has it not saved that noble creature’s soul, besides making the fortune of the Convent?’ cried the Chevalier du Halga. ‘The Abbé Grimont tells me that she has given a hundred thousand francs to the Ladies of the Visitation.’

“ ‘Would you like to go to les Touches?’ said the Baroness. ‘It is worth seeing.’

“ ‘No, no!’ cried I eagerly.

“Now, does not this little scene strike you as taken from some diabolical drama? And it was repeated under a hundred pretences. At last my mother-in-law said:

“ ‘I understand why you should not wish to go to les Touches. You are quite right.’

“Confess, dear mamma, that such a stab, so unintentionally given, would have made you determine that you must know whether your happiness really rested on so frail a basis that it must perish under one particular roof? I must do this justice to Calyste, he had never proposed to visit this retreat which is now his property. Certainly when we love, we become bereft of our senses, for his silence and reserve nettled me, till I said one day, ‘What are you afraid of seeing at les Touches that you never mention it even?’

“ ‘Let us go there,’ said he.

“I was caught, as every woman is who wishes to be caught, and who trusts to chance to cut the Gordian knot of her hesitancy. So we went to les Touches.

“It is a delightful spot, most artistically tasteful, and I revel in the abyss whither Mademoiselle des Touches had warned me never to go. All poison-flowers are beautiful. The devil sows them⁠—for there are flowers of Satan’s and flowers from God! We have only to look into our own hearts to see that they went halves in the work of creation.⁠—What bittersweet joys I found in this place where I played, not with fire but with ashes. I watched Calyste; I wanted to know if every spark was dead, and looked out for every chance draught of air, believe me! I noted his face as we went from room to room, from one piece of furniture to another, exactly like children seeking some hidden object. He seemed thoughtful; still, at first I fancied I had conquered. I felt brave enough to speak of Madame de Rochefide, who, since the adventure of her fall at le Croisic, is called Rocheperfide. Finally, we went to look at the famous box-shrub on which Béatrix was caught when Calyste pushed her into the sea that she might never belong to any man.

“ ‘She must be very light to have rested there!’ said I, laughing.

“Calyste said nothing. ‘Peace to the dead,’ I added.

“Still he was silent. ‘Have I vexed you?’ I asked.

“ ‘No. But do not galvanize that passion,’ he replied.

“What a speech!⁠—Calyste, seeing it had saddened me, was doubly kind and tender to me.

“August.

“Alas! I was at the bottom of the pit and amusing myself, like the innocents in a melodrama, with plucking the flowers. Suddenly a horrible idea came galloping across my happiness like the horse in the German ballad. I fancied I could discern that Calyste’s love was fed by his reminiscences, that he was wreaking on me the storms I could revive in him, by reminding him of that horrible coquette Béatrix.⁠—That unwholesome, cold, limp, tenacious nature⁠—akin to the mollusk and the coral insect⁠—dares to be called Béatrix!

“So already, dear mother, I am forced to have an eye on a suspicion when my heart is wholly Calyste’s, and is it not a terrible misfortune that the eye should get the better of the heart; that the suspicion, in short, has been justified?⁠—And in this way:

“ ‘I love this place,’ I said to Calyste one morning, ‘for I owe my happiness to it⁠—so I forgive you for sometimes mistaking me for another woman⁠—’

“My loyal Breton colored, and I threw my arms round his neck; but I came away from les Touches, and shall never go back there.

“The depth of my hatred, which makes me long for the death of Madame de Rochefide⁠—oh dear, a natural death, of course, from a cold or some accident⁠—revealed to me the extent and vehemence of my love for Calyste. This woman has haunted my slumbers; I have seen her in my dreams.⁠—Am I fated to meet her?⁠—Yes, the novice in the Convent was right; les Touches is a fatal spot. Calyste renewed his impressions there, and they are stronger than the pleasures of our love.

“Find out, my dear mother, whether Madame de Rochefide is in Paris; for if so, I shall remain on our estates in Brittany. Poor Mademoiselle des Touches, who is now sorry that she dressed me like Béatrix on the day when our marriage contract was signed, to carry out her scheme⁠—if she could now know how completely I am a substitute for our odious rival! What would she say! Why, it is prostitution! I am no longer myself! I am put to shame.⁠—I am suffering from a mad desire to flee from Guérande and the sands of le Croisic.

“August 25.

“I am quite resolved to return to the ruins of le Guénic. Calyste, uneasy at seeing me so uneasy, is taking me thither. Either he does not know much of the world, or he guesses nothing; or, if he knows the reason of my flight, he does not love me. I am so afraid of discovering the hideous certainty if I seek it, that, like the children, I cover my eyes with my hands not to hear the explosion. Oh, mother! I am not loved with such love as I feel in my own heart. Calyste, to be sure, is charming; but what man short of a monster would not be, like Calyste, amiable and gracious, when he is given all the opening blossoms of the soul of a girl of twenty, brought up by you, pure as I am, and loving, and⁠—as many women have told you⁠—very pretty⁠—”

“Le Guénic, September 18th.

“Has he forgotten her? This is the one thought which echoes like remorse in my soul. Dear mother, has every wife, like me, some such memory to contend with? Pure girls ought to marry none but innocent youths! And yet, that is an illusory Utopia; and it is better to have a rival in the past than in the future. Pity me, mamma, though at this moment I am happy; happy as a woman is who fears to lose her happiness and clings to it!⁠—a way of killing it sometimes, says wise Clotilde.

“I perceive that for the last five months I have thought only of myself; that is, of Calyste. Tell my sister Clotilde that the dicta of her melancholy wisdom recur to me sometimes. She is happy in being faithful to the dead; she need fear no rival.

“A kiss to my dear Athénaïs; I see that Juste is madly in love with her. From what you say in your last letter, all he fears is that he may not win her. Cultivate that fear as a precious flower. Athénaïs will be mistress; I, who dreaded lest I should not win Calyste from himself, shall be the handmaid. A thousand loves, dearest mother. Indeed, if my fears should not prove vain, I shall have paid very dear for Camille Maupin’s fortune. Affectionate respects to my father.”

These letters fully explain the secret attitude of this husband and wife. Where Sabine saw a love-match, Calyste saw a mariage de convenance. And the joys of the honeymoon had not altogether fulfilled the requirements of the law as to community of goods.

During their stay in Brittany the work of restoring, arranging, and decorating the Hôtel du Guénic in Paris had been carried on by the famous architect Grindot, under the eye of Clotilde and the Duchesse and Duc de Grandlieu. Every step was taken to enable the young couple to return to Paris in December 1838; and Sabine was glad to settle in the Rue de Bourbon, less for the pleasure of being mistress of the house than to discover what her family thought of her married life. Calyste, handsome and indifferent, readily allowed himself to be guided in matters of fashion by Clotilde and his mother-in-law, who were gratified by his docility. He filled the place in the world to which his name, his fortune, and his connection entitled him. His wife’s success, regarded as she was as one of the most charming women of the year, the amusements of the best society, duties to be done, and the dissipations of a Paris season, somewhat recruited the happiness of the young couple by supplying excitement and interludes. The Duchess and Clotilde believed in Sabine’s happiness, ascribing Calyste’s cold manners to his English blood, and the young wife got over her gloomy notions; she heard herself envied by so many less happy wives, that she banished her terrors to the limbo of bad dreams. Finally, Sabine’s prospect of motherhood was the crowning guarantee for the future of this neutral-tinted union, a good augury which women of experience rely on.

In October 1839 the young Baronne du Guénic had a son, and was so foolish as to nurse him herself, like almost every woman under similar circumstances. How can she help being wholly a mother when her child is the child of a husband so truly idolized? Thus by the end of the following summer Sabine was preparing to wean her first child.

In the course of a two years’ residence in Paris, Calyste had entirely shed the innocence which had cast the light of its prestige on his first experience in the world of passion. Calyste, as the comrade of the young Duc de Maufrigneuse⁠—like himself, lately married to an heiress, Bertha de Cinq-Cygne⁠—of the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduère, of the Duc and Duchesse de Rhétoré, the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the company that met in his mother-in-law’s drawing-room, learnt to see the differences that divide provincial from Paris life. Wealth has its dark hours, its tracts of idleness, for which Paris, better than any other capital, can provide amusement, diversion, and interest. Hence, under the influence of these young husbands, who would leave the noblest and most beautiful creatures for the delights of the cigar or of whist, for the sublime conversation at a club or the absorbing interests of the turf, many of the domestic virtues were undermined in the young Breton husband. The maternal instinct in a woman who cannot endure to bore her husband is always ready to support young married men in their dissipations. A woman is so proud of seeing the man she leaves perfectly free come back to her side.

One evening, in October this year, to escape the cries of a weaned child, Calyste⁠—on whose brow Sabine could not bear to see a cloud⁠—was advised by her to go to the Théâtre des Variétés, where a new piece was being acted. The servant sent to secure a stall had taken one quite near to the stage-boxes. Between the first and second acts, Calyste, looking about him, saw in one of these boxes on the ground tier, not four yards away, Madame de Rochefide.

Béatrix in Paris! Béatrix in public! The two ideas pierced Calyste’s brain like two arrows. He could see her again after nearly three years!⁠—Who can describe the commotion in the soul of this lover who, far from forgetting, had sometimes so completely identified Béatrix with his wife that Sabine had been conscious of it? Who can understand how this poem of a lost and misprized love, ever living in the heart of Sabine’s husband, overshadowed the young wife’s dutiful charms and ineffable tenderness? Béatrix became light, the daystar, excitement, life, the unknown; while Sabine was duty, darkness, the familiar! In that instant one was pleasure, the other satiety. It was a thunderbolt.

Sabine’s husband in a loyal impulse felt a noble prompting to leave the house. As he went out from the stalls, the door of the box was open, and in spite of himself his feet carried him in. He found Béatrix between two very distinguished men, Canalis and Nathan⁠—a politician and a literary celebrity. During nearly three years, since Calyste had last seen Madame de Rochefide, she had altered very much; but though the metamorphosis had changed the woman’s nature, she seemed all the more poetical and attractive in Calyste’s eyes. Up to the age of thirty, clothing is all a pretty Parisian demands of dress; but when she has crossed the threshold of the thirties, she looks to finery for armor, fascinations, and embellishment; she composes it to lend her graces; she finds a purpose in it, assumes a character, makes herself young again, studies the smallest accessories⁠—in short, abandons nature for art.

Madame de Rochefide had just gone through the changing scenes of the drama which, in this history of the manners of the French in the nineteenth century, is called “The Deserted Woman.” Conti having thrown her over, she had naturally become a great artist in dress, in flirtation, and in artificial bloom of every description.

“How is it that Conti is not here,” asked Calyste of Canalis in a whisper, after the commonplace greetings which begin the most momentous meeting when it takes place in public.

The erewhile poet of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, twice minister, and now for the fourth time a speaker hoping for fresh promotion, laid his finger with meaning on his lips. This explained all.

“I am so glad to see you,” said Béatrix, in a kittenish way. “I said to myself as soon as I saw you, before you saw me, that you, at any rate, would not disown me! Oh, my Calyste,” she murmured in his ear, “why are you married?⁠—and to such a little fool, too!”

As soon as a woman whispers to a newcomer in her box, and makes him sit down by her, men of breeding always find some excuse for leaving them together.

“Are you coming, Nathan?” said Canalis; “Madame la Marquise will excuse me if I go to speak a word to d’Arthez, whom I see with the Princesse de Cadignan. I must talk about a combination of speakers for tomorrow’s sitting.”

This retreat, effected with good taste, gave Calyste a chance of recovering from the shock he had sustained; but he lost all his remaining strength and presence of mind as he inhaled the, to him, intoxicating and poisonous fragrance of the poem called Béatrix.

Madame de Rochefide, who had grown bony and stringy, whose complexion was almost ruined, thin, faded, with dark circles round her eyes, had that evening wreathed the untimely ruin with the most ingenious devices of Parisian frippery. Like all deserted women, she had tried to give herself a virgin grace, and by the effect of various white draperies to recall the maidens of Ossian, with names ending in a, so poetically represented by Girodet. Her fair hair fell about her long face in bunches of curls, reflecting the flare of the footlights in the sheen of scented oil. Her pale forehead shone, she had applied an imperceptible touch of rouge over the dull whiteness of her skin, bathed in bran-water, and its brilliancy cheated the eye. A scarf, so fine that it was hard to believe that man could have woven it of silk, was wound about her neck so as to diminish its length by hiding it, and barely revealing the treasures enticingly displayed by her stays. The bodice was a masterpiece of art. As to her attitude, it is enough to say that it was well worth the pains she had taken to elaborate it. Her arms, lean and hard, were scarcely visible through the carefully arranged puffs of her wide sleeves. She presented that mixture of false glitter and sheeny silk, of flowing gauze and frizzled hair, of liveliness, coolness, and movement which has been called je ne sais quoi. Everyone knows what is meant by this je ne sais quoi. It is a compound of cleverness, taste, and temperament. Béatrix was, in fact, a drama, a spectacle, all scenery, and transformations, and marvelous machinery.

The performance of these fairy pieces, which are no less brilliant in dialogue, turns the head of a man blessed with honesty; for, by the law of contrast, he feels a frenzied desire to play with the artificial thing. It is false and seductive, elaborate, but pleasing, and there are men who adore these women who play at being charming as one plays a game of cards. This is the reason⁠—man’s desire is a syllogism, and argues from this external skill to the secret theorems of voluptuous enjoyment. The mind concludes, though not in words, “A woman who can make herself so attractive must have other resources of passion.” And it is true. The women who are deserted are the women who love; the women who keep their lovers are those who know how to love. Now, though this lesson in Italian had been a hard one for Béatrix’s vanity, her nature was too thoroughly artificial not to profit by it.

“It is not a matter of loving you men,” she had been saying some minutes before Calyste went in; “we have to worry you when we have got you; that is the secret of keeping you. Dragons who guard treasures are armed with talons and wings!”

“Your idea might be put into a sonnet,” Canalis was saying just as Calyste entered the box.

At one glance Béatrix read Calyste’s condition; she saw, still fresh and raw, the marks of the collar she had put on him at les Touches. Calyste, offended by her phrase about his wife, hesitated between his dignity as a husband, defending Sabine, and finding a sharp word to cast on the heart whence, for him, rose such fragrant reminiscences⁠—a heart he believed to be yet bleeding. The Marquise discerned this hesitancy; she had spoken thus, solely to gauge the extent of her power over Calyste, and, seeing him so weak, she came to his assistance to get him out of his difficulty.

“Well, my friend,” said she, when the two courtiers had left, “you see me alone⁠—yes, alone in the world!”

“And you never thought of me?” said Calyste.

“You!” she replied; “are not you married?⁠—It has been one of my great griefs among the many I have endured since we last met. ‘Not merely have I lost love,’ I said to myself, ‘but friendship too, a friendship I believed to be wholly Breton.’ We get used to anything. I now suffer less, but I am broken. This is the first time for a long while that I have unburdened my heart. Compelled to be reserved in the presence of indifferent persons, and as arrogant to those who court me as though I had never fallen, and having lost my dear Félicité, I have no ear into which to breathe the words, ‘I am wretched!’ And even now, can I tell you what my anguish was when I saw you a few yards away from me, not recognizing me; or what my joy is at seeing you close to me.⁠—Yes,” said she, at a movement on Calyste’s part, “it is almost fidelity! In this you see what misfortune means! A nothing, a visit, is everything.

“Yes, you really loved me, as I deserved to be loved by the man who has chosen to trample on all the treasures I cast at his feet. And, alas! to my woe, I cannot forget; I love, and I mean to be true to the past, which can never return.”

As she poured out this speech, a hundred times rehearsed, she used her eyes in such a way as to double the effect of words which seemed to surge up from her soul with the violence of a long-restrained torrent. Calyste, instead of speaking, let fall the tears that had been gathering in his eyes. Béatrix took his hand and pressed it, making him turn pale.

“Thank you, Calyste; thank you, my poor boy; that is the way a true friend should respond to a friend’s sorrow. We understand each other. There, do not add another word!⁠—Go now; if we were seen, you might cause your wife grief if by chance anyone told her that we had met⁠—though innocently enough, in the face of a thousand people.⁠—Goodbye, I am brave, you see⁠—” And she wiped her eyes by what should be called in feminine rhetoric the antithesis of action.

“Leave me to laugh the laugh of the damned with the people I do not care for, but who amuse me,” she went on. “I see artists and writers, the circle I knew at our poor Camille’s⁠—she was right, no doubt! Enrich the man you love, and then disappear, saying, ‘I am too old for him!’ It is to die a martyr. And that is best when one cannot die a virgin.”

She laughed, as if to efface the melancholy impression she might have made on her adorer.

“But where can I call on you?” asked Calyste.

“I have hidden myself in the Rue de Courcelles, close to the Pare Monceaux, in a tiny house suited to my fortune, and I cram my brain with literature⁠—but for my own satisfaction only, to amuse myself. Heaven preserve me from the mania of writing!⁠—Go, leave me; I do not want to be talked about, and what will not people say if they see us together? And besides, Calyste, I tell you, if you stay a minute longer I shall cry, for I can’t help it.”

Calyste withdrew, after giving his hand to Béatrix, and feeling a second time the deep strange sensation of a pressure on both sides full of suggestive incitement.

“My God! Sabine never stirred my heart like this,” was the thought that assailed him in the corridor.

Throughout the rest of the evening the Marquise de Rochefide did not look three times straight at Calyste; but she sent him side glances which rent the soul of the man who had given himself up wholly to his first and rejected love.

When the Baron du Guénic was at home again, the magnificence of his rooms reminded him of the sort of mediocrity to which Béatrix had alluded, and he felt a hatred for the fortune that did not belong to that fallen angel. On hearing that Sabine had been in bed some time, he was happy in having a night to himself to live in his emotions.

He now cursed the perspicacity given to Sabine by her affection. When it happens that a man is adored by his wife, she can read his face like a book, she knows the slightest quiver of his muscles, she divines the reason when he is calm, she questions herself when he is in the least sad, wondering if she is in fault, she watches his eyes; to her those eyes are colored by his ruling thought⁠—they love or they love not. Calyste knew himself to be the object of a worship so complete, so artless, so jealous, that he doubted whether he could assume a countenance that would preserve the secret of the change that had come over him.

“What shall I do tomorrow morning?” said he to himself as he fell asleep, fearing Sabine’s scrutiny.

For when they first met, or even in the course of the day, Sabine would ask him, “Do you love me as much as ever?” or, “I don’t bore you?” Gracious questionings, varying according to the wife’s wit or mood, and covering real or imaginary terrors.

A storm will stir up mud and bring it to the top of the noblest and purest hearts. And so, next morning, Calyste, who was genuinely fond of his child, felt a thrill of joy at hearing that Sabine was anxious as to the cause of some symptoms, and, fearing croup, could not leave the infant Calyste. The Baron excused himself on the score of business from breakfasting at home, and went out. He fled as a prisoner escapes, happy in the mere act of walking, in going across the Pont Louis XVI and the Champs-Élysées to a café on the boulevard, where he breakfasted alone.

What is there in love? Does Nature turn restive under the social yoke? Does Nature insist that the spring of a devoted life shall be spontaneous and free, its flow that of a wild torrent tossed by the rocks of contradiction and caprice, instead of a tranquil stream trickling between two banks⁠—the mairie on one side, and the church on the other? Has she schemes of her own when she is hatching those volcanic eruptions to which perhaps we owe our great men?

It would have been difficult to find a young man more piously brought up than Calyste, of purer life, or less tainted by infidelity; and he was rushing towards a woman quite unworthy of him, when a merciful and glorious chance brought to him, in Sabine, a girl of really aristocratic beauty, with a refined and delicate mind, pious, loving, and wholly attached to him; her angelic sweetness still touched with the pathos of love, passionate love in spite of marriage⁠—such love as his for Béatrix.

The greatest men perhaps have still some clay in their composition; the mire still has charms. So, in spite of folly and frailty, the woman would then be the less imperfect creature. Madame de Rochefide in the midst of the crowd of artistic pretenders who surrounded her, and in spite of her fall, belonged to the highest nobility all the same; her nature was ethereal rather than earthborn, and she hid the courtesan she meant to be under the most aristocratic exterior. So this explanation cannot account for Calyste’s strange passion.

The reason may perhaps be found in a vanity so deeply buried that moralists have not yet discerned that side of vice. There are men, truly noble as Calyste was, and as handsome, rich, elegant, and well bred, who weary⁠—unconsciously perhaps⁠—of wedded life with a nature like their own; beings whose loftiness is not amazed by loftiness, who are left cold by a dignity and refinement on a constant level with their own, but who crave to find in inferior or fallen natures a corroboration of their own superiority though they would not ask their praises. The contrast of moral degradation and magnanimity fascinates their sight. What is pure shines so vividly by the side of what is impure! This comparison is pleasing. Calyste found nothing in Sabine to protect; she was irreproachable; all the wasted energies of his heart went forth to Béatrix. And if we have seen great men playing the part of Jesus, raising up the woman taken in adultery, how should commonplace folks be any wiser?

Calyste lived till two o’clock on the thought, “I shall see her again!”⁠—a poem which ere now has proved sustaining during a journey of seven hundred leagues. Then he went with a light step to the Rue de Courcelles; he recognized the house though he had never seen it; and he, the Duc de Grandlieu’s son-in-law, he, as rich, as noble as the Bourbons, stood at the foot of the stairs, stopped by the question from an old butler, “Your name, if you please, sir?”

Calyste understood that he must leave Madame de Rochefide free to act, and he looked out on the garden and the walls streaked with black and yellow lines left by the rain on the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like most fine ladies when they break their chain, had fled, leaving her fortune in her husband’s hands, and she would not appeal for help to her tyrant. Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had spared Béatrix all the cares of material life, and her mother from time to time sent her a sum of money. Now that she was alone, she was reduced to economy of a rather severe kind to a woman used to luxury. So she had taken herself to the top of the hill on which lies the Pare Monceaux, sheltering herself in a little old house of some departed magnate, facing the street, but with a charming little garden behind it, at a rent of not more than eighteen hundred francs. And still, with an old manservant, a maid and a cook from Alençon, who had clung to her in her reverses, her poverty would have seemed opulence to many an ambitious middle-class housewife.

Calyste went up a flight of well-whitened stone stairs, the landings gay with flowers. On the first floor the old butler showed Calyste into the rooms through a double door of red velvet paneled with red silk and gilt nails. The rooms he went through were also hung with red silk and velvet. Dark-toned carpets, hangings across the windows and doors, the whole interior was in contrast with the outside, which the owner was at no pains to keep up.

Calyste stood waiting for Béatrix in a drawing-room, quiet in style, where luxury affected simplicity. It was hung with bright crimson velvet set off by cording of dull yellow silk; the carpet was a darker red, the windows looked like conservatories, they were so crowded with flowers, and there was so little daylight, that he could scarcely see two vases of fine old red porcelain, and between them a silver cup attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and brought from Italy by Béatrix. The furniture of gilt wood upholstered with velvet, the handsome consoles, on one of which stood a curious clock, the table covered with a Persian cloth, all bore witness to past wealth, of which the remains were carefully arranged. On a small table Calyste saw some trinkets, and a book half read, in which the place was marked by a dagger⁠—symbolical of criticism⁠—its handle sparkling with jewels. On the walls ten watercolor drawings, handsomely framed, all representing bedrooms in various houses where Béatrix had lived in the course of her wandering life, gave an idea of her supreme impertinence.

The rustle of a silk dress announced the unfortunate lady, who appeared in a studied toilet, which, if Calyste had been an older hand, would certainly have shown him that he was expected. The dress, made like a dressing-gown to show a triangle of the white throat, was of pearl-gray watered silk with open hanging sleeves, showing the arms covered with an under sleeve made with puffs divided by straps, and with lace ruffles. Her fine hair, loosely fastened with a comb, escaped from under a cap of lace and flowers.

“So soon?” said she with a smile. “A lover would not have been so eager. So you have some secrets to tell me, I suppose?” And she seated herself on a sofa, signing to Calyste to take a place by her.

By some chance⁠—not perhaps unintentional, for women have two kinds of memory, that of the angels and that of the devils⁠—Béatrix carried about her the same perfume that she had used at les Touches when she had first met Calyste. The breath of this scent, the touch of that dress, the look of those eyes, which in the twilight seemed to focus and reflect light, all went to Calyste’s brain. The unhappy fellow felt the same surge of violence as had already so nearly killed Béatrix; but now the Marquise was on the edge of a divan, not of the ocean; she rose to ring the bell, putting her finger to her lips. At this Calyste, called to order, controlled himself; he understood that Béatrix had no hostile intentions.

“Antoine, I am not at home,” she said to the old servant. “Put some wood on the fire.⁠—You see, Calyste, I treat you as a friend,” she added with dignity when the old man was gone. “Do not treat me as your mistress.⁠—I have two remarks to make. First, that I should not make any foolish stipulations with a man I loved; next, that I will never belong again to any man in the world. For I believed myself loved, Calyste, by a sort of Rizzio whom no pledges could bind, a man absolutely free, and you see whither that fatal infatuation has brought me.⁠—As for you, you are tied to the most sacred duties; you have a young, amiable, delightful wife; and you are a father. I should be as inexcusable as you are, and we should both be mad⁠—”

“My dear Béatrix, all your logic falls before one word. I have never loved anyone on earth but you, and I married in spite of myself.”

“A little trick played us by Mademoiselle des Touches,” said she with a smile.

For three hours Madame de Rochefide kept Calyste faithful to his conjugal duties by pressing on him the horrible ultimatum of a complete breach with Sabine. Nothing less, she declared, could reassure her in the dreadful position in which she would be placed by Calyste’s passion. And, indeed, she thought little of sacrificing Sabine; she knew her so well.

“Why, my dear boy, she is a woman who fulfils all the promise of her girlhood. She is a thorough Grandlieu, as brown as her Portuguese mother, not to say orange-colored, and as dry as her father. To speak the truth, your wife will never be lost to you; she is just a great boy, and can walk alone. Poor Calyste! is this the wife to suit you? She has fine eyes, but such eyes are common in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Can a woman so lean be really tender? Eve was fair; dark women are descended from Adam, fair women from God, whose hand left a last touch on Eve when all creation was complete.” At about six o’clock Calyste in desperation took up his hat to go.

“Yes, go, my poor friend; do not let her have the disappointment of dining without you.”

Calyste stayed. He was so young, so easy to take on the wrong side.

“You would really dare to dine with me?” said Béatrix, affecting the most provoking surprise. “My humble fare does not frighten you away, and you have enough independence of spirit to crown my joy by this little proof of affection?”

“Only let me write a line to Sabine,” said he, “for she would wait for me till nine o’clock.”

“There is my writing table,” said Béatrix.

She herself lighted the candles, and brought one to the table to see what Calyste would write.

“My dear Sabine.”

“My dear! Is your wife still dear to you?” said she, looking at him so coldly that it froze the marrow in his bones. “Go, then, go to dine with her.”

“I am dining at an eating-house with some friends⁠—”

“That is a lie. For shame! You are unworthy of her love or mine. All men are cowards with us. That will do, monsieur; go and dine with your dear Sabine!”

Calyste threw himself back in his armchair and turned paler than death. Bretons have a sort of obstinate courage which makes them hold their own under difficulties. The young Baron sat up again with his elbow firmly set on the table, his chin in his hand, and his sparkling eyes fixed on Béatrix, who was relentless. He looked so fine that a true northern or southern woman would have fallen on her knees, saying, “Take me!” But in Béatrix, born on the border between Normandy and Brittany, of the race of Casteran, desertion had brought out the ferocity of the Frank and the malignity of the Norman; she craved a tremendous and terrible revenge; she did not yield to his noble impulse.

“Dictate what I am to write, and I will obey,” said the poor boy. “But then⁠—”

“Then, yes,” she replied, “for you will love me then as you loved me at Guérande.⁠—Write, ‘I am dining in town; do not wait.’ ”

“And⁠—?” said Calyste, expecting something more.

“Nothing.⁠—Sign it. Good,” she said, seizing this note with covert joy. “I will send it by a messenger.”

“Now!” cried Calyste, starting up like a happy man.

“I have preserved my liberty of action, I believe,” said she, looking round, and pausing halfway between the table and the fireplace, where she was about to ring.

“Here, Antoine, have this note taken to the address.⁠—Monsieur will dine with me.”

Calyste went home about two in the morning.

After sitting up till half-past twelve, Sabine had gone to bed tired out. She slept, though she had been cruelly startled by the brevity of her husband’s note; still, she accounted for it. True love in a woman can always explain everything to the advantage of the man she loves.

“Calyste was in a hurry!” thought she.

Next day the child had recovered, the mother’s alarms were past. Sabine came in smiling, with little Calyste in her arms to show him to his father just before breakfast, full of the pretty nonsense, and saying the silly things that all young mothers are full of. This little domestic scene enabled Calyste to put a good face on matters, and he was charming to his wife while feeling that he was a wretch. He played like a boy himself with Monsieur le Chevalier; indeed, he overdid it, overacting his part; but Sabine had not reached that pitch of distrust in which a wife notes so subtle a shade.

At last, during breakfast, Sabine asked:

“And what were you doing yesterday?”

“Portenduère,” said he, “kept me to dinner, and we went to the club to play a few rubbers of whist.”

“It is a foolish life, my Calyste,” replied Sabine. “The young men of our day ought rather to think of recovering all the estates in the country that their fathers lost. They cannot live by smoking cigars, playing whist, and dissipating their idleness by being content with making impertinent speeches to the parvenus who are ousting them from all their dignities, by cutting themselves off from the masses, whose soul and brain they ought to be, and to whom they should appear as Providence. Instead of being a party, you will only be an opinion, as de Marsay said. Oh! if you could only know how my views have expanded since I have rocked and suckled your child. I want to see the old name of du Guénic figure in history.”

Then, suddenly looking straight into Calyste’s eyes, which were pensively fixed on her, she said:

“You must admit that the first note you ever wrote me was a little abrupt?”

“I never thought of writing till I reached the club.”

“But you wrote on a woman’s paper; it had some womanly scent.”

“The club managers do such queer things⁠—”

The Vicomte de Portenduère and his wife, a charming young couple, had become so intimate with the du Guénics that they shared a box at the Italian opera. The two young women, Sabine and Ursule, had been drawn into this friendship by a delightful exchange of advice, anxieties, and confidences about their babies. While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was thinking to himself, “I must go to warn Savinien,” Sabine was reflecting, “I fancied that the paper was stamped with a coronet!”

The suspicion flashed like lightning through her consciousness, and she blamed herself for it; but she made up her mind to look for the note, which, in the midst of her alarms on the previous day, she had tossed into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, telling his wife he should soon return; he got into one of the little low one-horse carriages which were just beginning to take the place of the inconvenient cabriolet of our grandfathers. In a few minutes he reached the Rue des Saints-Pères, where the Vicomte lived, and begged him to do him the little kindness of lying in case Sabine should question the Vicomtesse⁠—he would do as much for him next time. Then, when once out of the house, Calyste, having first bidden the coachman to hurry as much as possible, went in a few minutes from the Rue des Saints-Pères to the Rue de Courcelles. He was anxious to know how Béatrix had spent the rest of the night.

He found the happy victim of fate just out of her bath, fresh, beautified, and breakfasting with a good appetite. He admired the grace with which his angel ate boiled eggs, and was delighted with the service of gold, a present from a music-mad lord for whom Conti had written some songs, on ideas supplied by his lordship, who had published them as his own. Calyste listened to a few piquant anecdotes related by his idol, whose chief aim was to amuse him, though she got angry and cried when he left her. He fancied he had been with her half an hour, and did not get home till three o’clock. His horse, a fine beast given him by the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, looked as if it had come out of the river, it was so streaming with sweat.

By such a chance as a jealous woman always plans, Sabine was on guard at a window looking out into the courtyard, out of patience at Calyste’s late return, and uneasy without knowing why. She was struck by the condition of the horse, its mouth full of foam.

“Where has he been?”

The question was whispered in her ear by that power which is not conscience⁠—not the devil, nor an angel⁠—the power which sees, feels, knows, and shows us the unknown; which makes us believe in the existence of spiritual beings, creatures of our own brain, going and coming, and living in the invisible spheres of ideas.

“Where have you come from, my darling?” said she, going down to the first landing to meet Calyste. “Abdel-Kader is half dead; you said you would be out but a few minutes, and I have been expecting you these three hours⁠ ⁠…”

“Well, well,” said Calyste to himself, improving in the art of dissimulation, “I must get out of the scrape by a present.⁠—Dear little nurse,” he said, putting his arm round his wife’s waist with a more coaxing pressure than he would have given it if he had not felt guilty, “it is impossible, I see, to keep a secret, however innocent, from a loving wife⁠ ⁠…”

“We don’t tell secrets on the stairs,” she replied, laughing. “Come along!”

In the middle of the drawing-room that led to the bedroom, she saw, reflected in a mirror, Calyste’s face, in which, not knowing that it could be seen, his fatigue and his real feeling showed; he had ceased to smile.

“That secret?” said she, turning round.

“You have been such a heroic nurse that the heir-presumptive of the du Guénics is dearer to me than ever; I wanted to surprise you⁠—just like a worthy citizen of the Rue Saint Denis. A dressing-table is being fitted for yon which is a work of art⁠—my mother and Aunt Zéphirine have helped⁠—”

Sabine threw her arms around Calyste, and held him clasped to her heart, her head on his neck, trembling with the weight of happiness, not on account of the dressing-table, but because her suspicions were blown to the winds. It was one of those glorious gushes of joy which can be counted in a lifetime, and of which even the most excessive love cannot be prodigal, for life would be too quickly burnt out. Men ought, in such moments, to kneel at the woman’s feet in adoration, for the impulse is sublime; all the powers of the heart and intellect overflow as water gushes from the urn of fountain-nymphs. Sabine melted into tears.

Suddenly, as if stung by a viper, she pushed Calyste from her, dropped on to a divan, and fainted away; the sudden chill on her glowing heart had almost killed her. As she held Calyste, her nose in his necktie, given up to happiness, she had smelt the same perfume as that on the notepaper!⁠—Another woman’s head had lain there, her face and hair had left the very scent of adultery. She had just kissed the spot where her rival’s kisses were still warm.

“What is the matter?” said Calyste, after bringing Sabine back to her senses by bathing her face with a wet handkerchief.

“Go and fetch the doctor, and the accoucheur⁠—both. Yes, I feel the milk has turned to fever.⁠ ⁠… They will not come at once unless you go yourself⁠—” Vous, she said, not tu, and the vous startled Calyste, who flew off in alarm. As soon as Sabine heard the outer gate shut, she sprang to her feet like a frightened deer, and walked round and round the room like a crazy thing, exclaiming, “My God! my God! my God!”

The two words took the place of thought. The crisis she had used as a pretext really came on. The hair on her head felt like so many eels, made red hot in the fire of nervous torment. Her heated blood seemed to her to have mingled with her nerves, and to be bursting from every pore. For a moment she was blind. “I am dying!” she shrieked.

At this fearful cry of an insulted wife and mother, her maid came in; and when she had been carried to her bed and had recovered her sight and senses, her first gleam of intelligence made her send the woman to fetch her friend Madame de Portenduère. Sabine felt her thoughts swirling in her brain like straws in a whirlwind.

“I saw myriads of them at once,” she said afterwards.

Then she rang for the manservant, and in the transport of fever found strength enough to write the following note, for she was possessed by a mania, she must be sure of the truth:⁠—

To Madame la Baronne du Guénic.

“Dear Mamma⁠—When you come to Paris, as you have led us to hope you may, I will thank you in person for the beautiful present by which you and Aunt Zéphirine and Calyste propose to thank me for having done my duty. I have been amply paid by my own happiness.⁠—I cannot attempt to express my pleasure in this beautiful dressing-table, when you are here I will try to tell you. Believe me, when I dress before this glass, I shall always think, like the Roman lady, that my choicest jewel is our darling angel,” and so on.

She had this letter posted by her own maid.

When the Vicomtesse de Portenduère came in, the shivering fit of a violent fever had succeeded the first paroxysm of madness.

“Ursule, I believe I am going to die,” said she.

“What ails you, my dear?”

“Tell me, what did Calyste and Savinien do yesterday evening after dinner at your house?”

“What dinner?” replied Ursule, to whom her husband had as yet said nothing, not expecting an immediate inquiry. “Savinien and I dined alone last evening, and went to the Opera without Calyste.”

“Ursule, dear child, in the name of your love for Savinien, I adjure you, keep the secret of what I have asked you, and what I will tell you. You alone will know what I am dying of⁠—I am betrayed, at the end of three years⁠—when I am not yet three-and-twenty⁠—”

Her teeth chattered, her eyes were lifeless and dull; her face had the greenish hue and surface of old Venetian glass.

“You⁠—so handsome!⁠—But for whom!”

“I do not know. But Calyste has lied to me⁠—twice. Not a word! Do not pity me, do not be indignant, affect ignorance; you will hear who, perhaps, through Savinien.⁠—Oh! yesterday’s note⁠—”

And shivering in her shift, she flew to a little cabinet and took out the letter.

“A Marquise’s coronet!” she said, getting into bed again. “Find out whether Madame de Rochefide is in Paris. Have I a heart left to weep or groan?⁠—Oh, my dear, to see my beliefs, my poem, my idol, my virtue, my happiness, all, all destroyed, crushed, lost!⁠—There is no God in Heaven now, no love on earth, no more life in my heart⁠—nothing!⁠—I do not feel sure of the daylight, I doubt if there is a sun.⁠—In short, my heart is suffering so cruelly, that I hardly feel the horrible pain in my breast and my face. Happily the child is weaned. My milk would have poisoned him!” And at this thought, a torrent of tears relieved her eyes, hitherto dry.

Pretty Madame de Portenduère, holding the fatal note which Sabine had smelt at for certainty, stood speechless at this desperate woe, amazed by this death of love, and unable to say anything in spite of the incoherent fragments in which Sabine strove to tell her all. Suddenly Ursule was enlightened by one of those flashes which come only to sincere souls.

“I must save her!” thought she. “Wait till I return, Sabine,” cried she. “I will know the truth.”

“Oh, and I shall love you in my grave!” cried Sabine.

Madame de Portenduère went to the Duchess de Grandlieu, insisted on absolute secrecy, and informed her as to the state Sabine was in.

“Madame,” said she, in conclusion, “are you not of opinion that, to save her from some dreadful illness, or perhaps even madness⁠—who can tell?⁠—we ought to tell the doctor everything, and invent some fables about that abominable Calyste, so as to make him seem innocent, at any rate, for the present?”

“My dear child,” said the Duchess, who had felt a chill at this revelation, “friendship has lent you for the nonce the experience of a woman of my age. I know how Sabine worships her husband; you are right, she may go mad.”

“And she might lose her beauty, which would be worse,” said the Vicomtesse.

“Let us go at once!” cried the Duchess.

They, happily, were a few minutes in advance of the famous accoucheur Dommanget, the only one of the two doctors whom Calyste had succeeded in finding.

“Ursule has told me all,” said the Duchess to her daughter. “You are mistaken. In the first place, Béatrix is not in Paris. As to what your husband was doing yesterday, my darling, he lost a great deal of money, and does not know where to find enough to pay for your dressing-table⁠—”

“And this?” interrupted Sabine, holding out the note.

“This!” said the Duchess, laughing, “is Jockey Club paper. Everyone writes on coroneted paper⁠—the grocers will have titles soon⁠—”

The prudent mother tossed the ill-starred document into the fire.

When Calyste and Dommanget arrived, the Duchess, who had given her orders, was informed; she left Sabine with Madame de Portenduère, and met the doctor and Calyste in the drawing-room.

“Sabine’s life is in danger, monsieur,” said she to Calyste. “You have been false to her with Madame de Rochefide”⁠—Calyste blushed like a still decent girl caught tripping⁠—“and as you do not know how to deceive,” the Duchess went on, “you were so clumsy that Sabine’s guessed everything. You do not wish my daughter’s death, I suppose?⁠—All this, Monsieur Dommanget, gives you a clue to my daughter’s illness and its cause.⁠—As for you, Calyste, an old woman like me can understand your error, but I do not forgive you. Such forgiveness can only be purchased by a life of happiness. If you desire my esteen, first save my child’s life. Then forget Madame de Rochefide⁠—she is good for nothing after the first time!⁠—Learn to lie, have the courage and impudence of a criminal. I have lied, God knows! I, who shall be compelled to do cruel penance for such mortal sin.”

She explained to him the fictions she had just invented. The skilful doctor, sitting by the bed, was studying the patient’s symptoms, and the means of staving off the mischief. While he was prescribing measures, of which the success must depend on their immediate execution, Calyste, at the foot of the bed, kept his eyes fixed on Sabine, trying to give them an expression of tender anxiety.

“Then it is gambling that has given you those dark marks round your eyes?” she said in a feeble voice.

The words startled the doctor, the mother, and Ursule, who looked at each other; Calyste turned as red as a cherry.

“That comes of suckling your child,” said Dommanget cleverly but roughly. “Then husbands are dull, being so much separated from their wives, they go to the club and play high. But do not lament over the thirty thousand francs that Monsieur le Baron lost last night⁠—”

“Thirty thousand francs!” said Ursule like a simpleton.

“Yes, I know it for certain,” replied Dommanget. “I heard this morning at the house of the Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that you lost the money to Monsieur de Trailles,” he added to Calyste. “How can you play with such a man? Honestly, Monsieur le Baron, I understand your being ashamed of yourself.”

Calyste, a kind and generous soul, when he saw his mother-in-law⁠—the pious Duchess, the young Viscountess⁠—a happy wife, and a selfish old doctor all lying like curiosity dealers, understood the greatness of the danger; he shed two large tears, which deceived Sabine.

“Monsieur,” said she, sitting up in bed, and looking wrathfully at Dommanget, “Monsieur du Guénic may lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if he chooses without giving anyone a right to find fault with him or lecture him. It is better that Monsieur de Trailles should have won the money from him than that we, we, should have won from Monsieur de Trailles!”

Calyste rose and put his arm round his wife’s neck. Kissing her on both cheeks, he said in her ear, “Sabine, you are an angel!”

Two days later the young Baroness was considered out of danger. On the following day Calyste went to Madame de Rochefide, and making a virtue of his infamy⁠—

“Béatrix,” said he, “you owe me much happiness. I sacrificed my poor wife to you, and she discovered everything. The fatal notepaper on which you made me write, with your initial and coronet on it, which I did not happen to see⁠—I saw nothing but you! The letter B, happily, was worn away; but the scent you left clinging to me, the lies in which I entangled myself like a fool, have ruined my happiness. Sabine has been at death’s door; the milk went to her brain, she has erysipelas, and will perhaps be disfigured for life.⁠ ⁠…”

Béatrix, while listening to this harangue, had a face of Arctic coldness, enough to freeze the Seine if she had looked at it.

“Well, so much the better; it may bleach her a little, perhaps.” And Béatrix, as dry as her own bones, as variable as her complexion, as sharp as her voice, went on in this tone, a tirade of cruel epigrams.

There can be no greater blunder than for a husband to talk to his mistress of his wife, if she is virtuous, unless it be to talk to his wife of his mistress if she is handsome. But Calyste had not yet had the sort of Parisian education which may be called the good manners of the passions. He could neither tell his wife a lie nor tell his mistress the truth⁠—an indispensable training to enable a man to manage women. So he was obliged to appeal to all the powers of passion for two long hours, to wring from Béatrix the forgiveness he begged, denied him by an angel who raised her eyes to heaven not to see the culprit, and who uttered the reasons peculiar to Marquises in a voice choked with well-feigned tears, that she furtively wiped away with the lace edge of her handkerchief.

“You can talk to me of your wife the very day after I have yielded!⁠—Why not say at once that she is a pearl of virtue? I know, she admires your beauty! That is what I call depravity! I⁠—I love your soul! For I assure you, my dear boy, you are hideous compared with some shepherds of the Roman Campagna,” etc., etc.

This tone may seem strange, but it was a part of a system deliberately planned by Béatrix. In her third incarnation⁠—for a woman completely changes with each fresh passion⁠—she is far advanced in fraud⁠—that is the only word that can describe the result of the experience gained in such adventures. The Marquise de Rochefide had sat in judgment on herself in front of her mirror. Clever women have no delusions about themselves; they count their wrinkles; they watch the beginnings of crows’-feet; they note the appearance of every speck in their skin; they know themselves by heart, and show it too plainly by the immense pains they take to preserve their beauty. And so, to contend against a beautiful young wife, to triumph over her six days a week, Béatrix sought to win by the weapons of the courtesan. Without confessing to herself the baseness of her conduct, and carried away to use such means by a Turklike passion for the handsome young man, she resolved to make him believe that he was clumsy, ugly, ill made, and to behave as if she hated him.

There is no more successful method with men of a domineering nature. To them the conquest of such disdain is the triumph of the first day renewed on every morrow. It is more; it is flattery hidden under the mask of aversion, and owing to it the charm and truth which underlie all the metamorphoses invented by the great nameless poets. Does not a man then say to himself, “I am irresistible!” or “I must love her well, since I conquer her repugnance!” If you deny this principle, which flirts and courtesans of every social grade discovered long ago, you must discredit the pursuers of science, the inquirers into secrets, who have long been repulsed in their duel with hidden causes.

Béatrix seconded her use of contempt as a moral incitement by a constant comparison between her comfortable poetic home and the Hôtel du Guénic. Every deserted wife neglects her home out of deep discouragement. Foreseeing this, Madame de Rochefide began covert innuendoes as to the luxury of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, which she stigmatized as absurd. The reconciliation scene, when Béatrix made Calyste swear to hate the wife who, as she said, was playing the farce of spilt milk, took place in a perfect bower, where she put herself into attitudes in the midst of beautiful flowers and jardinieres of lavish costliness. She carried the art of trifles, of fashionable toys, to an extreme. Béatrix, sunk into contempt since Conti’s desertion, was bent on gaining such fame as may be had by sheer perversity. The woes of a young wife, a Grandlieu, rich and lovely, were to build her a pedestal.

When a woman reappears in society after nursing her first child, she comes out again improved in charm and beauty. If this phase of maternity can rejuvenate even women no longer in their first youth, it gives young wives a splendid freshness, a cheerful activity, a brio of life⁠—if we may apply to the body a word which the Italians have invented for the mind. But while trying to resume the pleasant habits of the honeymoon, Sabine did not find the same Calyste. The unhappy girl watched him instead of abandoning herself to happiness. She expected the fatal perfume, and she smelt it; and she no longer confided in Ursule, nor in her mother, who had so charitably deceived her. She wanted certainty, and she had not long to wait for it. Certainty is never coy; it is like the sun, we soon need to pull down the blinds before it. In love it is a repetition of the fable of the Woodman calling on Death. We wish that certainty would blind us.

One morning, a fortnight after the first catastrophe, Sabine received this dreadful letter:⁠—

To Madame la Baronne du Guénic.

“Guérande.

“My dear Daughter⁠—My sister Zéphirine and I are lost in conjectures as to the dressing-table mentioned in your letter; I am writing about it to Calyste, and beg your forgiveness for my ignorance. You cannot doubt our affection. We are saving treasure for you. Thanks to Mademoiselle de Pen-Hoëls advice as to the management of your land, you will in a few years find yourself possessed of a considerable capital without having to diminish your expenditure.

“Your letter, dearest daughter⁠—whom I love as much as if I had borne you and fed you at my own breast⁠—surprised me by its brevity, and especially by your making no mention of my dear little Calyste; you had nothing to tell me about the elder Calyste; he, I know, is happy,” etc.

Sabine wrote across this letter, “Brittany is too noble to lie with one accord!” and laid it on Calyste’s writing-table. He found it and read it. After recognizing Sabine’s writing in the line across it, he threw it into the fire, determined never to have seen it. Sabine spent a whole week in misery, of which the secret may be understood by those celestial or hermit souls that have never been touched by the wing of the fallen angel. Calyste’s silence terrified Sabine.

“I, who ought to be all sweetness, all joy to him⁠—I have vexed him, hurt him! My virtue is become hateful; I have perhaps humiliated my idol,” said she to herself.

These thoughts ploughed furrows in her soul. She thought of asking forgiveness for this fault, but certainty brought her fresh proofs.

Béatrix, insolently bold, wrote to Calyste one day at his own house. The letter was put into Madame du Guénic’s hands; she gave it to her husband unopened, but she said, with death in her soul, and in a broken voice:

“My dear, this note is from the Jockey Club; I know the scent and the paper.”

Calyste blushed and put the letter in his pocket.

“Why do you not read it?”

“I know what they want.”

The young wife sat down. She did not get an attack of fever, she did not cry, but she felt one of those surges of rage which in such feeble creatures bring forth monsters of crime, which arm them with arsenic for themselves or for their rivals. Little Calyste was presently brought to her, and she took him on her lap; the child, but just weaned, turned to find the breast under her dress.

“He remembers!” said she in a whisper.

Calyste went to his room to read the letter. When he was gone the poor young creature burst into tears, such tears as women shed when they are alone. Pain, like pleasure, has its initiatory stage; the first anguish, like that of which Sabine had so nearly died, can never recur, any more than a first experience of any kind. It is the first wedge of the torture of the heart; the others are expected, the wringing of the nerves is a known thing, the capital of strength has accumulated a deposit for firm resistance. And Sabine, sure now of the worst, sat by the fire for three hours with her boy on her knee, and was quite startled when Gasselin, now their house-servant, came to announce that dinner was on the table.

“Let Monsieur know.”

“Monsieur is not dining at home, Madame la Baronne.”

Who can tell all the misery for a young woman of three-and-twenty, the torture of finding herself alone in the midst of a vast dining-room, in an ancient house, served by silent men, and in such circumstances?

“Order the carriage,” she said suddenly; “I am going to the Opera.”

She dressed splendidly; she meant to show herself alone, and smiling like a happy woman. In the midst of her remorse for the endorsement on that letter she was determined to triumph, to bring Calyste back to her by the greatest gentleness, by wifely virtues, by the meekness of a Paschal lamb. She would lie to all Paris. She loved him, she loved him as courtesans love, or angels, with pride and with humility.

But the Opera was Othello. When Rubini sang “Il mio cor si divide”, she fled. Music is often more powerful than the poet and the actor, the two most formidable natures combined. Savinien de Portenduère accompanied Sabine to the portico and put her into her carriage, unable to account for her precipitate escape.

Madame du Guénic now entered on a period of sufferings such as only the highest classes can know. You who are poor, envious, wretched, when you see on ladies’ arms those snakes with diamond heads, those necklaces and pins, tell yourselves that those vipers sting, that those necklaces have poisoned teeth, that those light bonds cut into the tender flesh to the very quick. All this luxury must be paid for. In Sabine’s position women can curse the pleasures of wealth; they cease to see the gilding of their rooms, the silk of sofas is as tow, exotic flowers as nettles, perfumes stink, miracles of cookery scrape the throat like barley-bread, and life has the bitterness of the Dead Sea.

Two or three instances will so plainly show the reaction of a room or of a woman on happiness, that everyone who has experienced it will be reminded of their home-life.

Sabine, warned of the dreadful truth, studied her husband when he was going out, to guess at the day’s prospects. With what a surge of suppressed fury does a woman fling herself on to the red-hot pikes of such torture!⁠—What joy for Sabine when he did not go to the Rue de Courcelles! When he came in she would look at his brow, his hair, his eyes, his expression and attitude, with a horrible interest in trifles, and the studious observation of the most recondite details of his dress, by which a woman loses her self-respect and dignity. These sinister investigations, buried in her heart, turned sour there and corroded the slender roots, whence grow the blue flowers of holy confidence, the golden stars of saintly love, all the blossoms of memory.

One day Calyste looked round at everything with ill-humor, but he stayed at home! Sabine was coaxing and humble, cheerful and amusing.

“You are cross with me, Calyste; am I not a good wife?⁠—What is there here that you do not like?”

“All the rooms are so cold and bare,” said he. “You do not understand this kind of thing.”

“What is wanting?”

“Flowers⁠—”

“Very good,” said Sabine to herself; “Madame de Rochefide is fond of flowers, it would seem.”

Two days later the rooms at the Hôtel du Guénic were completely altered. No house in Paris could pride itself on finer flowers than those that decorated it.

Some time after this Calyste, one evening after dinner, complained of the cold. He shivered in his chair, looking about him to see whence the draught came, and evidently seeking something close about him. It was some time before Sabine could guess the meaning of this new whim, for the house was fitted with a hot-air furnace to warm the staircase, anterooms, and passages. Finally, after three days’ meditation, it struck her that her rival had a screen, no doubt, so as to produce the subdued light that was favorable to the deterioration of her face; so Sabine purchased a screen made of glass, and of Jewish magnificence.

“Which way will the wind blow now?” she wondered.

This was not the end of the mistress’ indirect criticism. Calyste ate so little at home as to drive Sabine crazy; he sent away his plate after nibbling two or three mouthfuls.

“Is it not nice?” asked Sabine, in despair, seeing all the pains wasted which she devoted to her conferences with the cook.

“I did not say so, my darling,” replied Calyste, without annoyance. “I am not hungry, that is all.”

A wife given up to a legitimate passion and to such a contest as this, feels a sort of fury in her desire to triumph over her rival, and often outruns the mark even in the most secret regions of married life. This cruel struggle, fierce and ceaseless, over the visible and outward facts of home-life, was carried on with equal frenzy over the feelings of the heart. Sabine studied her attitudes and dress, and watched herself in the smallest trivialities of love.

This matter of the cookery went on for nearly a month. Sabine, with the help of Mariotte and Gasselin, invented stage tricks to discover what dishes Madame de Rochefide served up for Calyste. Gasselin took the place of the coachman, who fell ill to order, and was thus enabled to make friends with Béatrix’s cook; so at last Sabine could give Calyste the same fare, only better; but again she saw him give himself airs over it.

“What is wanting?” said she.

“Nothing,” he answered, looking round the table for something that was not there.

“Ah!” cried Sabine to herself, as she woke next morning, “Calyste is pining for powdered cockroaches3 and all the English condiments which are sold by the druggist in cruets; Madame de Rochefide has accustomed him to all sorts of spices.”

She bought an English cruet-stand and its scorching contents; but she could not pursue her discoveries down to every dainty devised by her rival.

This phase lasted for several months; nor need we wonder when we remember all the attractions of such a contest. It is life; with all its wounds and pangs it is preferable to the blank gloom of disgust, to the poison of contempt, to the blankness of abdication, to the death of the heart that we call indifference. Still, all Sabine’s courage oozed out one evening when she appeared dressed, as women only dress by a sort of inspiration, in the hope of winning the victory over another, and when Calyste said with a laugh:

“Do what you will, Sabine, you will never be anything but a lovely Andalusian!”

“Alas!” said she, sinking onto her sofa, “I can never be fair. But if this goes on, I know that I shall soon be five-and-thirty.”

She refused to go to the Italian opera; she meant to stay in her room all the evening. When she was alone she tore the flowers from her hair and stamped upon them, she undressed, trampled her gown, her sash, all her finery under foot, exactly like a goat caught in a loop of its tether, which never ceases struggling till death. Then she went to bed. The maid presently came in. Imagine her surprise!

“It is nothing,” said Sabine. “It is Monsieur.”

Unhappy wives know this superb vanity, these falsehoods, where, of two kinds of shame both in arms, the more womanly wins the day.

Sabine was growing thin under these terrible agitations, grief ate into her soul; but she never forgot the part she had forced on herself. A sort of fever kept her up, her life sent back to her throat the bitter words suggested to her by grief; she sheathed the lightnings of her fine black eyes, and made them soft, even humble.

Her fading health was soon perceptible. The Duchess, an admirable mother, though her piety had become more and more Portuguese, thought there was some mortal disease in the really sickly condition which Sabine evidently encouraged. She knew of the acknowledged intimacy of Calyste and Béatrix. She took care to have her daughter with her to try to heal her wounded feelings, and, above all, to save her from her daily martyrdom; but Sabine for a long time remained persistently silent as to her woes, fearing some intervention between herself and Calyste. She declared she was happy! Having exhausted sorrow, she fell back on her pride, on all her virtues.

At the end of the month, however, of being petted by her sister Clotilde and her mother, she confessed her griefs, told them all her sufferings, and cursed life, saying that she looked forward to death with delirious joy. She desired Clotilde, who meant never to marry, to be a mother to little Calyste, the loveliest child any royal race need wish for as its heir-presumptive.

One evening, sitting with her youngest sister Athénaïs⁠—who was to be married to the Vicomte de Grandlieu after Lent⁠—with Clotilde, and the Duchess, Sabine uttered the last cry of her anguish of heart, wrung from her by the extremity of her last humiliation.

“Athénaïs,” said she, when at about eleven o’clock the young Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu took his leave, “you are going to be married, profit by my example! Keep your best qualities to yourself, as if they were a crime, resist the temptation to display them in order to please Juste. Be calm, dignified, cold; measure out the happiness you give in proportion to what you receive. It is mean, but it is necessary.⁠—You see, I am ruined by my merits. All I feel within me that is the best of me, that is fine, holy, noble⁠—all my virtues have been rocks on which my happiness is shipwrecked. I have ceased to be attractive because I am not six-and-thirty!⁠—In some men’s eyes youth is a defect! There is no guesswork in a guileless face.

“I laugh honestly, and that is quite wrong when, to be fascinating, you ought to be able to elaborate the melancholy, suppressed smile of the fallen angels who are obliged to hide their long yellow teeth. A fresh complexion is so monotonous; far preferable is a doll’s waxen surface, compounded of rouge, spermaceti, and cold-cream. I am straightforward, and double dealing is more pleasing! I am frankly in love like an honest woman, and I ought to be trained to tricks and manoeuvres like a country actress. I am intoxicated with the delight of having one of the most charming men in France for my husband, and I tell him sincerely how fine a gentleman he is, how gracefully he moves, how handsome I think him; to win him I ought to look away with affected aversion, to hate lovemaking, to tell him that his air of distinction is simply an unhealthy pallor and the figure of a consumptive patient, to cry up the shoulders of the Farnese Hercules, to make him angry, keep him at a distance as though a struggle were needed to hide from him at the moment of happiness some imperfection which might destroy love. I am so unlucky as to be able to admire a fine thing without striving to give myself importance by bitter and envious criticism of everything glorious in poetry or beauty. I do not want to be told in verse and in prose by Canalis and Nathan that I have a superior intellect! I am a mere simple girl; I see no one but Calyste!

“If I had only run all over the world as she has; if, like her, I had said, ‘I love you,’ in every European tongue, I should be made much of, and pitied, and adored, and could serve him up a Macedonian banquet of cosmopolitan loves! A man does not thank you for your tenderness till you have set it off by contrast with malignity. So I, a wellborn wife, must learn all impurity, the interested charms of a prostitute!⁠ ⁠… And Calyste, the dupe of this grimacing!⁠ ⁠… Oh, mother! oh, my dear Clotilde! I am stricken to death. My pride is a deceptive aegis; I am defenceless against sorrow; I still love my husband like a fool, and to bring him back to me I need to borrow the keen wit of indifference.”

“Silly child,” whispered Clotilde, “pretend that you are bent on vengeance.”

“I mean to die blameless, without even the appearance of wrongdoing,” replied Sabine. “Our vengeance should be worthy of our love.”

“My child,” said the Duchess, “a mother should look on life with colder eyes than yours. Love is not the end but the means of family life. Do not imitate that poor little Baronne de Macumer. Excessive passion is barren and fatal. And God sends us our afflictions for reasons of His own.⁠ ⁠…

“Now that Athénaïs’ marriage is a settled thing, I shall have time to attend to you. I have already discussed the delicate position in which you are placed with your father and the Duc de Chaulieu and d’Ajuda. We shall find means to bring Calyste back to you.”

“With the Marquise de Rochefide there is no cause for despair,” said Clotilde, smiling at her sister. “She does not keep her adorers long.”

“D’Ajuda, my darling, was Monsieur de Rochefide’s brother-in-law. If our good Confessor approves of the little manoeuvres we must achieve to ensure the success of the plan I have submitted to your father, I will guarantee Calyste’s return. My conscience loathes the use of such methods, and I will lay them before the Abbé Brossette. We need not wait, my child, till you are in extremis to come to your assistance. Keep up your hopes. Your grief this evening is so great that I have let out my secret; I cannot bear not to give you a little encouragement.”

“Will it cause Calyste any grief?” asked Sabine, looking anxiously at the Duchess.

“Bless me, shall I be such another fool?” asked Athénaïs simply.

“Oh! child, you cannot know the straits into which Virtue can plunge us when she allows herself to be overruled by Love!” replied Sabine, so bewildered with grief that she fell into a vein of poetry.

The words were spoken with such intense bitterness that the Duchess, enlightened by her daughter’s tone, accent, and look, understood that there was some unconfessed trouble.

“Girls, it is midnight; go to bed,” said she to the two others, whose eyes were sparkling.

“And am I in the way, too, in spite of my six-and-thirty years?” asked Clotilde ironically. And while Athénaïs was kissing her mother, she whispered in Sabine’s ear:

“You shall tell me all about it. I will dine with you tomorrow. If mamma is afraid of compromising her conscience, I myself will rescue Calyste from the hands of the infidels.”

“Well, Sabine,” said the Duchess, leading her daughter into her bedroom, “tell me, my child, what is the new trouble.”

“Oh, mother, I am done for!”

“Why?”

“I wanted to triumph over that horrible woman; I succeeded, I have another child coming, and Calyste loves her so vehemently that I foresee being absolutely deserted. When she has proof of this infidelity to her she will be furious!⁠—Oh, I am suffering such torments that I must die. I know when he is going to her, know it by his glee; then his surliness shows me when he has left her. In short, he makes no secret of it; he cannot endure me. Her influence over him is as unwholesome as she is herself, body and soul. You will see; as her reward for making up some quarrel, she will insist on a public rupture with me, a breach like her own; she will carry him off to Switzerland perhaps, or to Italy. He has been saying that it is ridiculous to know nothing of Europe, and I can guess what these hints mean, thrown out as a warning. If Calyste is not cured within the next three months, I do not know what will come of it⁠—I shall kill myself, I know!”

“Unhappy child! And your son? Suicide is a mortal sin.”

“But do not you understand⁠—she might bear him a child; and if Calyste loved that woman’s more than mine⁠—Oh! this is the end of my patience and resignation.”

She dropped on a chair; she had poured out the inmost thoughts of her heart; she had no hidden pang left; and sorrow is like the iron prop that sculptors place inside a clay figure, it is supporting, it is a power.

“Well, well, go home now, poor little thing! Face to face with so much suffering, perhaps the Abbé will give me absolution for the venial sins we are forced to commit by the trickery of the world. Leave me, daughter,” she said, going to her prie-Dieu; “I will beseech the Lord and the Blessed Virgin more especially for you. Above all, do not neglect your religious duties if you hope for success.”

“Succeed as we may, mother, we can only save the family honor. Calyste has killed the sacred fervor of love in me by exhausting all my powers, even of suffering. What a honeymoon was that in which from the first day I was bitterly conscious of his retrospective adultery!”

At about one in the afternoon of the following day one of the priests of the Faubourg Saint-Germain⁠—a man distinguished among the clergy of Paris, designate as a Bishop in 1840, but who had three times refused a see⁠—the Abbé Brossette was crossing the courtyard of the Hôtel Grandlieu with the peculiar gait one must call the ecclesiastical gait, so expressive is it of prudence, mystery, calmness, gravity, and dignity itself. He was a small, lean man, about fifty years of age, with a face as white as an old woman’s, chilled by priestly fasting, furrowed by all the sufferings he made his own. Black eyes, alight with faith, but softened by an expression that was mysterious rather than mystical, gave life to this apostolic countenance. He almost smiled as he went up the steps, so little did he believe in the enormity of the case for which his penitent had sent for him; but as the Duchess’ hand was a sieve for alms, she was well worth the time her guileless confessions stole from the serious troubles of his parish. On hearing him announced, the Duchess rose and went forward a few steps to meet him, an honor she did to none but cardinals, bishops, priests of every grade, duchesses older than herself, and personages of the blood royal.

“My dear Abbé,” said she, pointing to an armchair, and speaking in a low tone, “I require the authority of your experience before I embark on a rather nasty intrigue, from which, however, I hope for a good result; I wish to learn from you whether I shall find the way of salvation very thorny in consequence.”

“Madame la Duchesse,” said the Abbé Brossette, “do not mix up spiritual and wordly matters; they are often irreconcilable.⁠—In the first place, what is this business?”

“My daughter Sabine, you know, is dying of grief. Monsieur du Guénic neglects her for Madame de Rochefide.”

“It is terrible⁠—a very serious matter; but you know what the beloved Saint-François de Sales says of such a case. And remember Madame de Guyon, who bewailed the lack of mysticism in the proofs of conjugal love; she would have been only too glad to find a Madame de Rochefide for her husband.”

“Sabine is only too meek, she is only too completely the Christian wife; but she has not the smallest taste for mysticism.”

“Poor young thing!” said the curé slyly. “And what is your plan for remedying the mischief?”

“I have been so sinful, my dear Director, as to think that I might let loose at her a smart little gentleman, wilful, and stocked with evil characteristics, who will certainly get my son-in-law out of the way.”

“Daughter,” said he, stroking his chin, “we are not in the tribunal of the repentant; I need not speak as your judge. —From a wordly point of view, I confess it would be final⁠—”

“Such a proceeding strikes me as truly odious!” she put in.

“And why? It is, no doubt, far more the part of a Christian to snatch a woman from her evil ways than to push her forward in them; still, when she has already gone so far as Madame de Rochefide, it is not the hand of man, but the hand of God, that can rescue the sinner. She needs a special sign from Heaven.”

“Thank you, Father, for your indulgence,” said the Duchess. ‘But we must remember that my son-in-law is brave, and a Breton; he was heroic at the time of that poor Madame’s attempted rising. Now if the young scapegrace who should undertake to charm Madame de Rochefide were to fall out with Calyste, and a duel should ensue⁠—”

“There, Madame la Duchesse, you show your wisdom; this proves that in such devious courses we always find some stumbling-block.”

“But I hit upon a means, my dear Abbé, of doing good, of rescuing Madame de Rochefide from the fatal path she is following, of bringing Calyste back to his wife, and of saving a poor wandering soul perhaps from hell⁠—”

“But, then, why consult me?” said the curé, smiling.

“Well,” said the Duchess, “I should have to do some ugly things⁠—”

“You do not mean to rob anyone?”

“On the contrary, I shall probably spend a good deal of money.”

“You will not slander anybody, nor⁠—”

“Oh!”

“Nor do any injury to your neighbor?”

“Well, well, I cannot answer for that.”

“Let us hear this new plan,” said the curé, really curious.

“If, instead of driving one nail out by another, thought I, as I knelt on my prie-Dieu, after beseeching the Blessed Virgin to guide me, I were to get Monsieur de Rochefide to take back his wife and pack off Calyste⁠—then, instead of abetting evil to do good, I should be doing a good action through another by means of a no less good deed of my own⁠—” The priest looked at the lady, and seemed thoughtful.

“The idea has evidently come to you from so far that⁠—”

“Yes,” said the simple and humble-minded woman, “and I have thanked the Virgin.⁠—And I vowed that besides paying for a neuvaine, I would give twelve hundred francs to some poor family if I should succeed. But when I spoke of the matter to Monsieur de Grandlieu, he burst out laughing, and said⁠—‘I really believe that at your time of life you women have a special devil all to yourselves.’ ”

“Monsieur le Duc said, in a husband’s fashion, just what I was about to observe when you interrupted me,” replied the Abbé, who could not help smiling.

“Oh, Father, if you approve of the plan, will you approve of the method of execution? The point will be to do with a certain Madame Schontz⁠—a Béatrix of the Saint-Georges quarter⁠—what I had intended to do with Béatrix; the Marquis will then return to his wife.”

“I am sure you will do no wrong,” said the Abbé dexterously, not choosing to know more, as he thought the result necessary. “And you can consult me if your conscience makes itself heard,” he added. “Supposing that instead of affording the lady in the Rue Saint-Georges some fresh occasion of misconduct, you were to find her a husband?⁠—”

“Ah, my dear Director, you have set right the only bad feature of my scheme. You are worthy to be an archbishop, and I hope to live to address you as your Eminence.”

“In all this, I see but one hitch,” the priest went on.

“And what is that?”

“Madame de Rochefide might keep your son-in-law even if she returned to her husband?”

“That is my affair,” said the Duchess. “We, who so rarely intrigue, when we do⁠—”

“Do it badly, very badly,” said the Abbé. “Practice is needed for everything. Try to annex one of the rascally race who live on intrigue, and employ him without betraying yourself.”

“Oh! Monsieur le Curé, but if we have recourse to hell, will heaven be on our side?”

“You are not in the confessional,” replied the Abbé; “save your child.”

The good Duchess, delighted with the keeper of her conscience, escorted him as far as the drawing-room door.

A storm, it will be seen, was gathering over Monsieur de Rochefide, who, at this time, was enjoying the greatest share of happiness that a Parisian need desire, finding himself quite as much the master in Madame Schontz’s house as in his wife’s; as the Duke had very shrewdly remarked to his wife, it would seem impossible to upset so delightful and perfect a plan of life. This theory of the matter necessitates a few details as to the life led by Monsieur de Rochefide since his wife had placed him in the position of a deserted husband. We shall thus understand the enormous difference in the view taken by law and by custom of the two sexes in the same circumstances. Everything that works woe to a deserted wife becomes happiness to the deserted husband. This striking antithesis may perhaps induce more than one young wife to remain in her home and fight it out, like Sabine du Guénic, by practising the most cruel or the most inoffensive virtues, whichever she may prefer.

A few days after Béatrix’s flight, Arthur de Rochefide⁠—an only child after the death of his sister, the first wife of the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, who left him no children⁠—found himself master of the family mansion of the Rochefides, Rue d’Anjou-Saint-Honoré, and of two hundred thousand francs a year, left to him by his father. This fine fortune, added to that which he had when he married, raised his income, including his wife’s portion, to a thousand francs a day. To a gentleman of such a character as Mademoiselle des Touches had sketched to Calyste, such a fortune was happiness. While his wife was occupied with lovemaking and motherhood, Rochefide was enjoying his vast possessions, but he did not waste the money any more than he would waste his intelligence. His burly, good-natured conceit, amply satisfied with the reputation for being a fine man, to which he owed some success, entitling him, as he believed, to condemn women as a class, gave itself full play in the sphere of intellect. He was gifted with the sort of wit which may be termed refracting, by the way he repeated other person’s jests and witticisms from plays or the newspapers; he appropriated them as his own; he affected to ridicule them, caricaturing them in repetition, and using them as a formula of criticism; then his military high spirits⁠—for he had served in the King’s Guard⁠—lent spice to his conversation, so that dull women called him witty, and the rest dared not contradict them.

Arthur carried this system out in everything; he owed to nature the useful trick of being an imitator without being an ape; he could imitate quite seriously. And so, though he had no taste, he was always the first to take up and to drop a fashion. He was accused of giving too much time to his toilet, and of wearing stays; but he was a typical example of those men who, by accepting the notions and the follies of others, never offend anyone, who, always being up to date, never grow any older. They are the heroes of the second-rate.

This husband was pitied; Béatrix was held inexcusable for having run away from the best fellow in the world; ridicule fell only on the wife. This worthy, loyal, and very silly gentleman, a member of every club, a subscriber to every absurdity to which blundering patriotism and party-spirit gave rise, with a facile good-nature which brought him to the front on every occasion, was, of course, bent on glorifying himself by some fashionable hobby. His chief pride was to be the sultan of a four-footed seraglio, managed by an old English groom, and this kennel cost him from four to five thousand francs a month. His favorite fad was running horses; he patronized breeders, and paid the expenses of a paper in the racing interest; but he knew little about horses, and from the bridle to the shoes trusted to his groom. This is enough to show that this “grass-husband” had nothing of his own⁠—neither wit, nor taste, nor position, nor even absurdities; and his fortune had come to him from his forefathers.

After having tasted all the annoyances of married life, he was so happy to find himself a bachelor again, that he would say among friends, “I was born to good luck!” He rejoiced especially in being able to live free of the expenses to which married folks are compelled; and his house, in which nothing had been altered since his father’s death, was in the state of a man’s home when he is traveling; he rarely went there, never fed there, and scarcely ever slept there.

This was the history of this neglect. After many love affairs, tired of women of fashion, who are indeed weariful enough, and who set too many dry thorn-hedges round the happiness they have to give, he had practically married Madame Schontz, a woman notorious in the world of Fanny Beaupré and Suzanne du Val-Noble, of Mariettes, Florentines, Jenny Cadines, and the like. This world⁠—of which one of our draughtsmen wittily remarked, as he pointed to the whirl of an Opera ball, “When you think that all that mob is well housed, and dressed, and fed, you can form a good idea of what men are!”⁠—this dangerous world has already been seen in this History of Manners in the typical figures of Florine and the famous Malaga (of A Daughter of Eve and “The Imaginary Mistress”); but to paint it faithfully, the historian would have to represent such persons in some numerical proportion to the variety of their strange individual lives, ending in poverty of the most hideous kind, in early death, in ease, in happy marriage, or sometimes in great wealth.

Madame Schontz, at first known as la Petite Aurélie, to distinguish her from a rival far less clever than herself, belonged to the higher class of these women on whose social uses no doubt can be thrown either by the Préfet of the Seine or by those who take an interest in the prosperity of the city of Paris. Certainly the “rats” accused of devouring fortunes, which are often imaginary, in some respects are more like a beaver. Without the Aspasias of the Notre-Dame de Lorette quarter, fewer houses would be built in Paris. Pioneers of fresh stucco, in tow of speculation, pitch their outlying tents along the hillsides of Montmartre, beyond those deserts of masonry which are to be seen in the streets round the Place de l’Europe⁠—Amsterdam, Milan, Stockholm, London, and Moscow⁠—architectural steppes betraying their emptiness by endless placards announcing Apartments to let.

The position of these ladies is commensurate with that of their lodgings in these innominate regions. If the house is near the line marked by the Rue de Provence, the woman has money in the Funds, her income is assured; but if she lives out near the exterior boulevards, or on the height towards the horrible suburb of Batignolles, she is certainly poor.

Now when Monsieur de Rochefide first met Madame Schontz, she was lodging on the third floor of the only house then standing in the Rue de Berlin. The name of this unmarried wife, as you will have understood, was neither Aurélie nor Schontz. She concealed her father’s name⁠—that of an old soldier of the Empire, the perennial colonel who always adorns the origin of these existences, as the father or the seducer. Madame Schontz had enjoyed the benefits of a gratuitous education at Saint-Denis, where the young persons are admirably taught, but where the young persons are not provided on leaving with husbands or a living⁠—an admirable foundation of the Emperor’s, the only thing lacking being the Emperor himself! “I shall be there to provide for the daughters of my legionaries,” said he, in answer to one of his Ministers who looked forward to the future. And in the same way Napoleon said, “I shall be there,” to the members of the Institute, to whom it would be better to give no honorarium at all than to pay them eighty-three francs a month, less than the wages of many an office clerk.

Aurélie was very certainly the daughter of the valiant Colonel Schiltz, a leader of those daring Alsatian partisans who so nearly succeeded in saving the Emperor in the French campaign; he died at Metz, robbed, neglected, and ruined. In 1814 Napoleon sent little Joséphine Schiltz, then nine years old, to school at Saint-Denis. Without father or mother, home or money, the poor child was not driven out of the Institution on the second return of the Bourbons. She remained there as under-teacher till 1827; but then her patience failed, and her beauty led her astray. When she was of age, Joséphine Schiltz, the Empress’ goddaughter, embarked on the adventurous life of the courtesan, tempted to this doubtful career by the fatal example of some of her schoolfellows as destitute as she was, and who rejoiced in their decision. She substituted on for il in her father’s name, and placed herself under the protection of Saint-Aurelia.

Clever, witty, and well informed, she made more mistakes than her more stupid companions, whose wrongdoing was always based on self-interest. After various connections with writers, some poor but unmannerly, some clever but in debt; after trying her fortune with some rich men as closefisted as they were silly; after sacrificing ease to a true passion, and learning in every school where experience may be gained, one day, when, in the depths of poverty, she was dancing at Valentino’s⁠—the first stage to Musard’s⁠—dressed in a borrowed gown, hat, and cape, she attracted Rochefide’s attention; he had come to see the famous galop! Her cleverness bewitched the gentleman, who had exhausted every sensation; and when, two years after, being deserted by Béatrix, whose wit had often disconcerted him, he allied himself with a secondhand Béatrix “of the Thirteenth Arrondissement,” no one thought of blaming him.

We may here give a sketch of the four seasons of such a happy home. It is desirable to show how the theory of “a marriage in the Thirteenth Arrondissement” includes all the whole connection. Whether a marquis of forty or a retired shopkeeper of sixty, a millionaire six times over or a man of narrow private means, a fine gentleman or a middle-class citizen, the tactics of passion, barring the differences inseparable from dissimilar social spheres, never vary. Heart and banking account maintain an exact and definite relation. And you will be able to form an idea of the obstacles the Duchess must meet with to her charitable scheme.

Few persons understand the power of words over ordinary folks in France, or the mischief done by the wits who invent them. For instance, no bookkeeper could add up the figures of the sums of money which have lain unproductive and rusty at the bottom of generous hearts and full coffers in consequence of the mean phrase, Tirer une carotte⁠—to fleece or bleed a victim. The words have become so common that they must be allowed to deface this page. Besides, if we venture into the “Thirteenth Arrondissement,” we must needs adopt its picturesque language.

Monsieur de Rochefide, like all small minds, was constantly in fear of being bled. From the beginning of his attachment to Madame Schontz, Arthur was on his guard, and was at that time a dreadful screw, très rat, to use another slang word of the studio and the brothel. This word “rat” (which in French has many slang uses) when applied to a young girl means the person entertained, but applied to a man means the stingy entertainer. Madame Schontz had too much intelligence, and knew men too thoroughly, not to found high hopes on such a beginning. Monsieur de Rochefide allowed Madame Schontz five hundred francs a month, furnished, meagerly enough, a set of rooms at twelve hundred francs a year on the second floor of a house in the Rue Coquenard, and set himself to study Aurélie’s character; and she, finding herself spied upon, gave him character to study.

Rochefide was delighted to have come across a woman of such a noble nature, but it did not astonish him; her mother was a Barnheim of Baden, quite a lady! And then Aurélie had been so well brought up! Speaking English, German, and Italian, she was versed in foreign literature; she could pit herself, without discomfiture, against pianists of the second class. And, note the point! she behaved as regarded her talents like a woman of breeding; she never talked about them. In a painter’s studio she would take up a brush in fun, and sketch a head with so much go as to amaze the company. As a pastime, when she was pining as a school teacher, she had dabbled in some sciences, but her life as a kept mistress had sown salt over all this good seed, and, of course, she laid the flower of these precious growths, revived for him, at Arthur’s feet. Thus did Aurélie at first make a display of disinterestedness to match the pleasures she could give, which enabled this light corvette to cast her grappling-irons firmly on board the statelier craft. Still, even at the end of the first year, she made a vulgar noise in the anteroom, managing to come in just when the Marquis was waiting for her, and tried to hide the disgracefully muddy hem of her gown in such a way as to make it more conspicuous. In short, she so cleverly contrived to persuade her Gros Papa that her utmost ambition, after so many vicissitudes, was to enjoy a simple, middle-class existence, that by the end of ten months the second phase of their connection began.

Then Madame Schontz had a fine apartment in the Rue Saint-Georges. Arthur, who could no longer conceal from her the fact of his wealth, gave her handsome furniture, a service of plate, twelve hundred francs a month, and a little low carriage, with a single horse, by the week, and he granted her a little groom with a fairly good grace. She knew what this munificence was worth; she detected the motives of her Arthur’s conduct, and saw in them the calculations of a closefisted man. Tired of living at restaurants, where the food is generally execrable, where the simplest dinner of any refinement costs sixty francs, and two hundred for a party of four friends, Rochefide offered Madame Schontz forty francs a day for his dinner and a friend’s, wine included. Aurélie had no mind to refuse. After getting all her moral bills of exchange accepted, drawn on Monsieur de Rochefide’s habits at a year’s date, she was favorably heard when she asked for five hundred francs a year more for dress, on the plea that her Gros Papa, whose friends all belonged to the Jockey Club, might not be ashamed of her.

“A pretty thing, indeed,” said she, “if Rastignac, Maxime de Trailles, la Roche-Hugon, Ronquerolles, Laginski, Lenoncourt, and the rest should see you with a Madame Évrard! Put your trust in me, Gros Père, and you will be the gainer.”

And Aurélie did, in fact, lay herself out for a fresh display of virtues in these new circumstances. She sketched a part for herself as the housewife, in which she won ample credit. She made both ends meet, said she, at the end of the month, and had no debts, on two thousand five hundred francs, such a thing as had never been seen in the Faubourg Saint-Germain of the Thirteenth Arrondissement⁠—the upper ten of the demirep’s world; and she gave dinners infinitely better than Nucingen’s, with first-class wines at ten and twelve francs a bottle. So that Rochefide, amazed and delighted to be able to ask his friends pretty often to his mistress’ house as a matter of economy, would say to her, with his arm round her waist, “You are a perfect treasure!”

Before long he took a third share in an opera box for her, and at last went with her to first-night performances. He began to take counsel of his Aurélie, acknowledging the soundness of her advice; she allowed him to appropriate the wit she was always ready with; and her sallies, being new, won him the reputation for being an amusing man. At last he felt perfectly sure that she loved him truly, and for himself. Aurélie refused to make a Russian prince happy at the rate of five thousand francs a month.

“You are a happy man, my dear Marquis,” cried old Prince Galathionne as they ended a rubber of whist at the club. “Yesterday, when you left us together, I tried to get her away from you; but ‘Mon Prince,’ said she, ‘you are not handsomer than Rochefide though you are older; you would beat me, and he is like a father to me; show me then the quarter of a good reason for leaving him! I do not love Arthur with the crazy passion I had for the young rogues with patent leather boots, whose bills I used to pay; but I love him as a wife loves her husband when she is a decent woman.’⁠—And she showed me to the door.”

This speech, which had no appearance of exaggeration, had the effect of adding considerably to the state of neglect and shabbiness that disfigured the home of the Rochefides. Ere long Arthur had transplanted his existence and his pleasures to Madame Schontz’s lodgings, and found it answer; for by the end of three years he had four hundred thousand francs to invest.

Then began the third phase. Madame Schontz became the kindest of mothers to Arthur’s son; she fetched him from school and took him back herself; she loaded him with presents, sweetmeats, and pocket money; and the child, who adored her, called her his “little mamma.” She advised her Arthur in the management of his money-matters, making him buy consols at the fall before the famous treaty of London, which led to the overthrow of the Ministry on the 1st of March. Arthur made two hundred thousand francs, and Aurélie did not ask for a sou. Rochefide, being a gentleman, invested his six hundred thousand francs in Bank bills, half of them in the name of Mademoiselle Joséphine Schiltz.

A small house, rented in the Rue de la Bruyère, was placed in the hands of Grindot, that great architect on a small scale, with instructions to make it a delicious jewel case. Thenceforth Rochefide left everything in the hands of Madame Schontz, who received the dividends and paid the bills. Thus installed in his wife’s place, she justified him by making her Gros Papa happier than ever. She understood his whims, and satisfied them, as Madame de Pompadour humored the fancies of Louis XV. She was, in fact, maîtresse en titre⁠—absolute mistress.

She now allowed herself to patronize certain charming young men, artists and literary youths newly born to glory, who disowned the ancients and the moderns alike, and tried to achieve a great reputation by achieving nothing else. Madame Schontz’s conduct, a master-work of tactics, shows her superior intelligence. In the first place, a party of ten or twelve young men amused Arthur, supplied him with witty sayings and shrewd opinions on every subject, and never cast any doubt on the fidelity of the mistress of the house; in the second place, they looked up to her as a highly intellectual woman. These living advertisements, these walking “puffs,” reported that Madame Schontz was the most charming woman to be found on the borderland dividing the Thirteenth Arrondissement from the other twelve.

Her rivals, Suzanne Gaillard, who since 1838 had the advantage over her of being a legitimately married wife, Fanny Beaupré, Mariette, and Antonia, spread more than scandalous reports as to the beauty of these youths and the kindness with which Monsieur de Rochefide welcomed them. Madame Schontz, who could, she declared, give these ladies a start of three bad jokes and beat them, exclaimed one evening, at a supper given by Florine after an opera, when she had set forth to them her good fortune and her success, “Do thou likewise!” a retort which had been remembered against her. At this stage of her career Madame Schontz got the racers sold, in deference to certain considerations, which she owed no doubt to the critical acumen of Claude Vignon, a frequent visitor.

“I could quite understand,” said she one day, after lashing the horses with her tongue, “that princes and rich men should take horse-breeding to heart, but for the good of the country, and not for the childish satisfaction of a gambler’s vanity. If you had stud stables on your estates and could breed a thousand or twelve hundred horses, if each owner sent the best horse in his stable, and if every breeder in France and Navarre should compete every time, it would be a great and fine thing; but you buy a single horse, as the manager of a theatre engages his artists, you reduce an institution to the level of a game, you have a Bourse for legs as you have a Bourse for shares. It is degrading. Would you spend sixty thousand francs to see in the papers⁠—‘Monsieur de Rochefide’s Lélia beat Monsieur le Duc de Rhétoré’s Fleur-de-Genêt by a length⁠—’ Why, you had better give the money to a poet who will hand you down to immortality in verse or in prose, like the late lamented Montyon!”

By dint of such goading the Marquis was brought to see the hollowness of the turf; he saved his sixty thousand francs; and next year Madame Schontz could say to him: “I cost you nothing now, Arthur.”

Many rich men envied the Marquis his Aurélie, and tried to win her from him; but, like the Russian Prince, they wasted their old age.

“Listen to me, my dear fellow,” she had said a fortnight ago to Finot, now a very rich man, “I know that Rochefide would forgive me for a little flirtation if I really fell in love with another man, but no woman would give up a marquis who is such a thorough good fellow to take up with a parvenu like you. You would never keep me in such a position as Arthur has placed me in. He has made me all but his wife, and half a lady, and you could never do as much for me even if you married me.”

This was the last rivet that held the fortunate slave. The speech reached those absent ears for which it was intended.

Thus began the fourth phase, that of habit, the crowning victory of the plan of campaign which enables a woman of this stamp to say of the man, “I have him safe!” Rochefide, who had just bought a pretty house in the name of Mademoiselle Joséphine Schiltz, a mere trifle of eighty thousand francs, had, at the time when the Duchess was laying her plans, come to the point when he was vain of his mistress, calling her Ninon II, and boasting of her strict honesty, her excellent manners, her information, and wit. He had concentrated his good and bad qualities, his tastes and pleasures all in Madame Schontz, and had reached that stage of life when from weariness, indifference, or philosophy a man changes no more, but is faithful to his wife or his mistress.

The importance to which Madame Schontz had risen in five years may be understood when it is said that to be introduced to her a man had to be mentioned to her some time in advance. She had refused to make the acquaintance of certain tiresome rich men, and others of flyblown reputations; she made no exceptions to this strict rule but in the case of certain great aristocratic names.

“They have a right to be stupid,” she would say, “because they are swells.”

Ostensibly she possessed the three hundred thousand francs that Rochefide had given her, and that a thorough good fellow, a stockbroker named Gobenheim⁠—the only stockbroker she allowed in her house⁠—managed for her; but she also managed for herself a little private fortune of two hundred thousand francs, formed of her savings on her house allowance for three years, by constantly buying and selling with the three hundred thousand francs, which were all she would ever confess to.

“The more you make, the less you seem to have,” Gobenheim remarked one day.

“Water is so dear!” said she.

This unrevealed store was increased by the jewelry and diamonds which Aurélie would wear for a month and then sell, and by money given her for fancies she had forgotten. When she heard herself called rich, Madame Schontz would reply that, at present rates, three hundred thousand francs brought in twelve thousand francs, and that she had spent it all in the hard times of her life when Lousteau had been her lover.

Such method showed a plan; and Madame Schontz, you may be sure, had a plan. For the last two years she had been jealous of Madame du Bruel, and the desire to be married at the mairie and in church gnawed at her heart. Every social grade has its forbidden fruit, some little thing exaggerated by desire, till it seems as weighty as the globe. This ambition had, of course, its duplicate in the ambition of a second Arthur, whom watchfulness had entirely failed to discover. Bixiou would have it that the favorite was Léon de Lora; the painter believed that it was Bixiou, who was now past forty, and should be thinking of settling. Suspicion also fell on Victor de Vernisset, a young poet of the Canalis school, whose passion for Madame Schontz was a perfect madness; while the poet accused Stidmann, a sculptor, of being his favored rival. This artist, a very good-looking young man, worked for goldsmiths, for bronze dealers, and jewelers; he dreamed of being a Benvenuto Cellini. Claude Vignon, the young Comte de la Palférine, Gobenheim, Vermanton, a cynic philosopher, and other frequenters of this lively salon were suspected by turns, but all acquitted. No one was a match for Madame Schontz, not even Rochefide, who fancied she had a weakness for la Palférine, a clever youth; she was, in fact, virtuous in her own interests, and thought only of making a good match.

Only one man of equivocal repute was ever to be seen at Madame Schontz’s, and that was Couture, who had more than once been howled at on the Bourse; but Couture was one of Madame Schontz’s oldest friends, and she alone remained faithful to him. The false alarm of 1840 swept away this speculator’s last capital; he had trusted to the 1st of March Ministry; Aurélie, seeing that luck was against him, made Rochefide play for the other side. It was she who spoke of the last overthrow of this inventor of premiums and joint-stock companies as a Découture.4

Couture, delighted to find a knife and fork laid for him at Aurélie’s, and getting from Finot⁠—the cleverest, or perhaps the luckiest of parvenus⁠—a few thousand-franc notes now and then, was the only man shrewd enough to offer his name to Madame Schontz, who studied him to ascertain whether this bold speculator would have strength enough to make a political career for himself, and gratitude enough not to desert his wife. A man of about forty-three years old, and worn for his age, Couture did not redeem the ill-repute of his name by his birth; he had little to say of his progenitors. Madame Schontz was lamenting the rarity of men of business capacity, when one day Couture himself introduced to her a provincial gentleman who happened to be provided with the two handles by which women hold this sort of pitcher when they mean not to drop it.

A sketch of this personage will be a portrait of a certain type of young man of the day. A digression will, in this case, be history.

In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, the son of a President of the Chamber at the King’s Court of Caen, having lost his father about a year before, came from Alençon, throwing up his appointment as magistrate, in which, as he said, his father had made him waste his time, and settled in Paris. His intention now was to get on in the world by cutting a dash, a Norman scheme somewhat difficult of accomplishment, since he had scarcely eight thousand francs a year, his mother still being alive, and enjoying the life-interest of some fine house property in the heart of Alençon. This youth had already, in the course of various visits to Paris, tried his foot on the tight rope; he had discerned the weak point of the social stucco restoration of 1830, and meant to work on it for his own profit, following the lead of the sharpers of the middle class. To explain this, we must glance at one of the results of the new state of things.

Modern notions of equality, which in our day have assumed such extravagant proportions, have inevitably developed in private life⁠—in a parallel line with political life⁠—pride, conceit, and vanity, the three grand divisions of the social I. Fools wish to pass for clever men, clever men want to be men of talent, men of talent expect to be treated as geniuses: as to the geniuses, they are more reasonable; they consent to be regarded as no more than demigods. This tendency of the spirit of the time, which in the Chamber of Deputies makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous of the poet, prompts fools to run down clever men, clever men to run down men of talent, men of talent to run down those who are a few inches higher than themselves, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the throne itself, in short, everything and everybody that does not worship them unconditionally.

As soon as a nation is so impolitic as to overthrow recognized social superiority, it opens the sluice-gates, through which rushes forthwith a torrent of second-rate ambitions, the least of which would fain be first. According to the democrats, its aristocracy was a disease, but a definite and circumscribed disease; it has exchanged this for ten armed and contending aristocracies, the worst possible state of things. To proclaim the equality of all is to declare the rights of the envious. We are enjoying now the Saturnalia of the Revolution transferred to the apparently peaceful sphere of intelligence, industry, and politics; it seems as though the reputations earned by hard work, good service, and talent were a privilege granted at the expense of the masses. The agrarian law will ere long be extended to the field of glory.

Thus, at no time have men demanded public recognition on more puerile grounds. They must be remarked at any cost for an affectation of devotion to the cause of Poland, to the penitential system, to the future prospects of released convicts, to that of small rogues under or over the age of twelve, to any kind of social quackery. These various manias give rise to spurious dignities⁠—Presidents, Vice-presidents, and Secretaries of Societies, which, in Paris, outnumber the social questions to be solved. Society on a grand scale has been demolished to make way for a thousand small ones in the image of the dead one.

Do not all these parasitical organisms point to decomposition? Are they not the worms swarming in the carcase? All these social bodies are the daughters of one mother⁠—Vanity. Not thus does Catholic charity act, or true benevolence; these study disease while healing its sores, and do not speechify in public on morbid symptoms for the mere pleasure of talking.

Fabien du Ronceret, without being a superior man, had divined, by the exercise of that acquisitive spirit peculiar to the Norman race, all the advantage he might take of this public distemper. Each age has its characteristic, which clever men trade on. Fabien’s only aim was to get himself talked about.

“My dear fellow, a man must make his name known if he wants to get on,” said he as he left, to du Bousquier, a friend of his father’s, and the King of Alençon. “In six months I shall be better known than you.”

This was how Fabien interpreted the spirit of his time; he did not rule it, he obeyed it.

He had first appeared in bohemia, a district of the moral topography of Paris (see “A Prince of Bohemia”), and was known as “The Heir,” in consequence of a certain premeditated parade of extravagance. Du Ronceret had taken advantage of Couture’s follies in behalf of pretty Madame Cadine⁠—one of the newer actresses, who was considered extremely clever at the second-class theatres⁠—for whom he had furnished a charming ground-floor apartment with a garden, in the Rue Blanche.

This was the way in which the men made acquaintance. The Norman, in search of ready-made luxury, bought the furniture from Couture, with all the decorative fixtures he could not remove from the rooms, a garden room for smoking in, with a veranda built of rustic woodwork, hung with Indian matting, and decorated with pottery, to get to the smoking-room in rainy weather. When the Heir was complimented on his rooms, he called them his den. The provincial took care not to mention that Grindot the architect had lavished all his art there, as had Stidmann on the carvings, and Léon de Lora on the paintings; for his greatest fault was that form of conceit which goes so far as lying with a view to self-glorification.

The Heir put the finishing touch to this splendor by building a conservatory against a south wall, not because he loved flowers, but because he meant to attack public repute by means of horticulture. At this moment he had almost attained his end. As Vice-president of some gardening society, under the presidency of the Duc de Vissembourg, brother of the Prince de Chiavari, the younger son of the late Maréchal Vernon, he had been able to decorate the vice-presidential coat with the ribbon of the Legion of Honor after an exhibition of horticultural produce, which he opened by an address given out as his own, but purchased of Lousteau for five hundred francs. He was conspicuous by wearing a flower given to him by old Blondet of Alençon, Émile Blondet’s father, which he said had bloomed in his conservatory.

But this triumph was nothing. Du Ronceret, who was anxious to pass as a man of superior intelligence, had schemed to ally himself with a set of famous men, to shine by a reflected light, a plan very difficult to carry out on the basis of an income of eight thousand francs. And, in fact, he had looked by turns, but in vain, to Bixiou, Stidmann, and Léon de Lora to introduce him to Madame Schontz, so as to become a member of that menagerie of lions of every degree. Then he dined Couture so often, that Couture proved categorically to Madame Schontz that she had to admit such an eccentric specimen, were it only to secure him as one of those graceful unpaid messengers whom house-mistresses are glad to employ on the errands for which servants are unsuited.

By the end of the third evening Madame Schontz knew Fabien through and through, and said to herself, “If Couture does not serve my turn, I am perfectly certain of this man. My future life runs on wheels.”

So this simpleton, laughed at by everyone, was the man of her choice; but with a deliberate purpose which made the preference an insult, and the choice was never suspected from its utter improbability. Madame Schontz turned Fabien’s brain by stolen smiles, by little scenes on the threshold when she saw him out the last, if Monsieur de Rochefide spent the evening there. She constantly invited Fabien to be the third, with Arthur in her box at the Italiens, or at first-night performances; excusing herself by saying that he had done her this or that service, and that she had no other way of returning it.

Men have a rivalry of conceit among themselves⁠—in common indeed with women⁠—in their desire to be loved for themselves. Hence of all flattering attachments, none is more highly valued than that of a Madame Schontz for the man she makes the object of her heart’s affections in contrast with the other kind of love. Such a woman as Madame Schontz, who played at being a fine lady, and who was in truth a very superior woman, was, as she could not fail to be, a subject of pride to Fabien, who fell so desperately in love with her that he never appeared in her presence but in full dress, patent leather boots, lemon-colored gloves, an embroidered and frilled shirt, an endless variety of waistcoats, in short, every external symptom of the sincerest adoration.

A month before the conference between the Duchess and the Abbé, Madame Schontz had confided the secret of her birth and her real name to Fabien, who could not understand the object of this disclosure. A fortnight later Madame Schontz, puzzled by the Norman’s lack of comprehension, exclaimed to herself:

“Good heavens, what an idiot I am! Why, he believes that I am in love with him!”

So then she took him out for a drive in the Bois, in her carriage, for she had had a low phaeton with a pair of horses for a year past.

In the course of this public tête-à-tête she discussed the question of her ultimate fate, and explained that she wished to get married.

“I have seven hundred thousand francs,” said she; “and I may confess to you that if I could meet with a man of great ambition, who could understand me thoroughly, I would change my condition; for, do you know, the dream of my life is to be a good citizen’s wife, connected with a respectable family, and to make my husband and children all very happy.”

The Norman was content to be a favorite with Madame Schontz; but to marry her seemed madness beyond discussion to a bachelor of eight-and-thirty, of whom the Revolution of July had made a Judge. Seeing his hesitation, Madame Schontz made the Heir a butt for the arrows of her wit, her irony, and her scorn, and turned to Couture. Within a week the speculator, tempted by a hint of her savings, offered her his hand, his heart, and his future prospects⁠—all three of equal value.

Madame Schontz’s manoeuvres had reached this stage when Madame de Grandlieu began to inquire as to the manners and customs of this Béatrix of the Rue Saint-Georges.

Following the Abbé Brossette’s advice, the Duchess begged the Marquis d’Ajuda to bring to her house that prince of political jugglers, the famous Comte de Trailles, the Archduke of bohemia, and the youngest of the young, though he was now fifty. Monsieur d’Ajuda arranged to dine with Maxime at the club in the Rue de Beaune, and proposed that they should go on together to play dummy whist with the Duc de Grandlieu, who, having had an attack of the gout before dinner, would be alone. Though the Duke’s son-in-law, the Duchess’ cousin, had every right to introduce him into a house where he had never yet set foot, Maxime de Trailles was under no misapprehension as to the invitation thus conveyed; he concluded that either the Duke or the Duchess wanted to make use of him. A not unimportant feature of the time is the club life, where men gamble with others whom they would never receive in their own houses.

The Duke so far honored Maxime as to confess that he was ill; after fifteen games of whist he went to bed, leaving his wife with Maxime and d’Ajuda. The Duchess, supported, by the Marquis, explained her plans to Monsieur de Trailles, and asked his assistance, while seeming only to ask his advice. Maxime listened to the end without saying anything decisive, and would not speak till the Duchess had asked him point-blank to help her.

“I quite understand the matter, madame,” said he after giving her one of those looks⁠—keen, astute, and comprehensive⁠—by which these old hands can compromise their allies. “D’Ajuda will tell you that I, if anyone in Paris, can manage this double business, without your appearing in it, without its being known even that I have been here this evening. But, first of all, we must settle the Preliminaries of Léoben. What do you propose to sacrifice for this end?”

“Everything that is required.”

“Very good, Madame la Duchesse. Then as the reward of my services, you will do me the honor of receiving here and giving your countenance to Madame la Comtesse de Trailles?”

“Are you married?” exclaimed d’Ajuda.

“I am going to be married in a fortnight to the only daughter of a wealthy family, but to the last degree middle class! It is a sacrifice to opinion; I am adopting the strictest principles of my government. I am casting my old skin.

“So you will understand, Madame la Duchesse, how important for me it would be that you and your family should take up my wife. I am quite certain to be elected deputy when my father-in-law retires from his post, as he intends doing, and I have been promised a diplomatic appointment that befits my new fortune.⁠—I cannot see why my wife should not be as well received as Madame de Portenduère in a society of young wives where such stars are to be seen as Mesdames de la Bastie, Georges de Maufrigneuse, de l’Estorade, du Guénic, d’Ajuda, de Restaud, de Rastignac, and de Vandenesse. My wife is pretty, and I will undertake to wake her up.

“Does this meet your views, Madame la Duchesse?

“You are a religious woman; and if you say yes, your promise, which I know will be sacred, will help me immensely in my changed life. And it will be another good action!⁠—Alas, I have long been the chief of a rascally crew; but I want to be quit of all that. After all, our arms are good: Azure, a chimera or, spouting fire, armed gules, scaled vert; a chief counter ermine; granted by Francis I, who thought it desirable to give a patent of nobility to Louis XI’s groom of the chambers⁠—and we have been counts since the time of Catherine de Medicis.”

“I will receive and introduce your wife,” said the Duchess solemnly, “and my family shall never turn their back on her, I give you my word.”

“Oh, Madame la Duchesse,” exclaimed Maxime, visibly touched, “if Monsieur le Duc will also condescend to treat me kindly, I promise you on my part to make your plan succeed with no great loss to yourself.⁠—But,” he went on, after a pause, “you must pledge yourself to obey my instructions.⁠ ⁠… This is the last intrigue of my bachelor life; it must be carried through with all the more care because it is a good action,” he said, smiling.

“Obey?” said the Duchess. “But must I appear in all this?”

“Indeed, madame, I will not compromise you,” cried Maxime, “and I respect you too implicitly to ask for security. You have only to follow my advice. Thus, for instance, du Guénic must be carried off by his wife like a sacred object, and kept away for two years; she must take him to see Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the more strange lands the better⁠—”

“Ah, that answers a fear expressed by my director,” exclaimed the Duchess guilelessly, as she remembered the Abbé Brossette’s judicious observation. Maxime and d’Ajuda could not help smiling at the idea of this coincidence of heaven and hell.

“To prevent Madame de Rochefide from ever seeing Calyste again,” she added, “we will all travel, Juste and his wife, Calyste and Sabine, and I. I will leave Clotilde with her father⁠—”

“Do not let us shout ‘Victory’ just yet, madame,” said Maxime. “I foresee immense difficulties; I shall conquer them, no doubt. Your esteem and favor are a prize for which I will plunge through much dirt; but it will be⁠—”

“Dirt!” said the Duchess, interrupting the modern condottière with a face equally expressive of disgust and surprise.

“Ay, and you will have to step in it, madame, since I act for you. Are you really so ignorant of the pitch of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law? I know it, through Nathan and Canalis, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into that lioness’ maw. Béatrix has made the noble Breton believe that she never loved anyone but him, that she is virtuous, that her attachment to Conti was of the head only, and that her heart and the rest had very little to do with it⁠—a musical passion, in short. As to Rochefide, that was a matter of duty.

“So, you understand, she is virginal. And she proves it by forgetting her son; for a year past she has not made the smallest attempt to see him. The little Count is, in point of fact, nearly twelve years old, and he has found a mother in Madame Schontz; motherhood is the mania, as you know, of women of that stamp.

“Du Guénic would be cut in pieces, and let his wife be cut in pieces, for Béatrix. And do you suppose that it is easy to drag a man back from the depths of the abyss of credulity? Why, madame, Shakespeare’s Iago would waste all his handkerchiefs in such a task. It is generally imagined that Othello, his younger brother Orosmane, and Saint-Preux, and René, and Werther, and other lovers who are famous, typify love! Their icy-hearted creators never knew what was meant by an absorbing passion, Molière alone had a suspicion of it.⁠—Love, Madame la Duchesse, is not an attachment to a noble woman, to a Clarissa; a great achievement that, on my word!⁠—Love is to say to one’s self: ‘The woman I worship is a wretch; she is deceiving me, she will deceive me again, she is an old hand, she smells of the burning pit!’⁠—and to fly to her, to find the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise. That is how Molière loved, and how we love, we scamps and rips; for I can cry at the great scene in Arnolphe! That is how your son-in-law loves Béatrix!

“I shall have some difficulty in getting Rochefide from Madame Schontz; however, Madame Schontz can, no doubt, be got to abet us; I will study her household. As to Calyste and Béatrix, it will need an axe to divide them, treachery of the best quality, infamy so base that your virtuous imagination could not go so low unless your director held your hand. —You have asked for the impossible, you shall have it. Still, in spite of my determination to employ the sword and fire, I cannot absolutely pledge myself to success. I know lovers who do not shrink under the most entire disenchantment. You are too virtuous to understand the power of women who have no virtue.”

“Do not attempt these infamies till I shall have consulted the Abbé Brossette, to know how far I am involved in them,” cried the Duchess, with an artlessness that revealed how selfish religion can be.

“You know nothing about it, my dear mother,” said the Marquis d’Ajuda.

On the steps, while waiting for Ajuda’s carriage to come up, the Marquis said to Maxime:

“You have frightened our good Duchess.”

“But she has no idea of the difficulty of the thing she wants done!⁠—Are we going to the Jockey Club? Rochefide must ask me to dine tomorrow at Schontz’s rooms; in the course of tonight my plans will be laid, and I shall have chosen the pawns in my chessboard that are to move in the game I mean to play. In the days of her splendor Béatrix would have nothing to say to me; I will settle accounts with her, and avenge your sister-in-law so cruelly, that perhaps she will think I have overdone it.”

On the following day Rochefide told Madame Schontz that Maxime de Trailles was coming to dinner. This was to warn her to display the utmost luxury, and prepare the very best fare for this distinguished connoisseur, who was the terror of every woman of Madame Schontz’s class; and she gave as much care to her toilet as to arranging her house in a fitting way to receive the great man.

In Paris there are almost as many royal heads as there are different arts or special sciences, faculties, or professions; the best of those who exercise each has a royal dignity proper to himself; he is revered and respected by his peers, who know the difficulties of his work, and admire unreservedly the man who can defy them. In the eyes of the corps de ballet and courtesans Maxime was an extremely powerful and capable man, for he had succeeded in being immensely loved. He was admired by everybody who knew how hard it is to live in Paris on decent terms with your creditors; and he had never had any rival in elegance, demeanor, and wit but the famous de Marsay, who had employed him on political missions. This is enough to account for his interview with the Duchess, his influence over Madame Schontz, and the authority of his tone in a conference he intended to hold on the Boulevard des Italiens with a young man, who was already famous though recently introduced to the bohemia of Paris.

As he rose next morning, Maxime de Trailles heard Finot announced, to whom he had sent the night before; he begged him to arrange a fortuitous meeting at breakfast at the Café Anglais between Couture, Lousteau, and himself, where they would chat in his hearing. Finot, who was to Maxime de Trailles as a lieutenant in the presence of a Marshal of France, could refuse him nothing; it was indeed too dangerous to provoke this lion. So when Maxime came in to breakfast, he found Finot and his two friends at a table; the conversation had already been directed towards the subject of Madame Schontz. Couture, cleverly steered by Finot and Lousteau, who, unknown to himself, was Finot’s abettor, let out everything that the Comte de Trailles wanted to know about Madame Schontz.

By one o’clock, Maxime, chewing his toothpick, was talking to du Tillet on the steps of Tortoni’s, where speculators form a little Bourse preliminary to real dealings on ’Change. He seemed to be absorbed in business, but he was waiting to see the young Comte de la Palférine, who must pass that way sooner or later. The Boulevard des Italiens is now what the Pont Neuf was in 1650; everybody who is anybody crosses it at least once a day.

In fact, within ten minutes, Maxime took his hand from du Tillet’s arm, and nodding to the young Prince of bohemia, said with a smile, “Two words with you, Count!”

The rivals, one a setting star, the other a rising sun, took their seat on four chairs outside the Café de Paris. Maxime was careful to place himself at a sufficient distance from certain old fogies who, from sheer habit, plant themselves in a row against the wall after one in the afternoon, to dry out their rheumatic pains. He had ample reasons for distrusting these old men. (See “A Man of Business.”)

“Have you any debts?” asked Maxime of the young man.

“If I had not, should I be worthy to succeed you?” replied la Palférine.

“When I ask you such a question, it is not to cast any doubt on the matter,” said de Trailles. “I only want to know if they amount to a respectable sum-total, running into five or six.”

“Five or six what?” said la Palférine.

“Six figures! Do you owe 50,000, 100,000?⁠—My debts ran up to 600,000 francs.”

La Palférine took off his hat with an air of mocking respect.

“If I had credit enough to borrow a hundred thousand francs,” replied he, “I would cut my creditors and go to live at Venice in the midst of its masterpieces of painting, spending the evening at the theatre, the night with pretty women, and⁠—”

“And at my age where would you be?”

“I should not last so long,” replied the young Count.

Maxime returned his rival’s civility by just raising his hat with an expression of comical gravity.

“That is another view of life,” he replied, as a connoisseur answering a connoisseur. “Then you owe?”

“Oh, a mere trifle, not worth confessing to an uncle, if I had one. He would disinherit me for such a contemptible sum; six thousand francs.”

“Six thousand give one more trouble than a hundred thousand,” said Maxime sententiously. “La Palférine, you have a bold wit, you have even more wit than boldness; you may go far and become a political personage. Look here⁠—of all the men who have rushed into the career which I have run, and who have been pitted against me, you are the only one I ever liked.”

La Palférine colored, so greatly was he flattered by this confession, made with gracious bluntness, by the greatest of Parisian adventurers. This instinct of vanity was a confession of inferiority which annoyed him; but Maxime understood the reaction easy to foresee in so clever a man, and did his best to correct it at once by placing himself at the young man’s discretion.

“Will you do something for me now that I am retiring from the Olympian course by marrying, and marrying well?⁠—I would do a great deal for you,” he added.

“You make me very proud,” said la Palférine; “this is to put the fable of the lion and the mouse into practice.”

“In the first place, I will lend you twenty thousand francs,” Maxime went on.

“Twenty thousand francs?⁠—I knew that if I walked this Boulevard long enough⁠—!” said la Palférine in a parenthesis.

“My dear boy, you must set yourself up in some sort of style,” said Maxime, smiling. “Do not trot about on your two feet; set up six. Do as I have done; I never get lower than a tilbury⁠—”

“But then you must want me to do something quite beyond my powers.”

“No. Only to make a woman fall in love with you within a fortnight.”

“A woman of the town?”

“Why?”

“That would be out of the question; but if she is a lady, quite a lady, and very clever⁠—”

“She is a Marquise of the first water.”

“You want her letters?” said the young Count.

“Ah, you are a man after my own heart!” cried Maxime. “No. That is not what is wanted.”

“I am really to love her?”

“Yes, really and truly.”

“If I am to go beyond aesthetics, it is quite impossible,” said la Palférine. “With regard to women, you see, I have a kind of honesty; we may trick them, but not⁠—”

“Then I have not been mistaken,” exclaimed Maxime. “Do you suppose I am the man to scheme for some little tu’pence meanness?⁠ ⁠… No, you must go, you must dazzle and conquer.⁠ ⁠… I give you twenty thousand, and ten days to win in.⁠—Till this evening at Madame Schontz’s.”

“I am dining there.”

“Good,” said Maxime. “By and by, when you want me, you will find me, Monsieur le Comte,” he added, with the air of a king pledging his word rather than promising.

“The poor woman has done you some terrible mischief then?” asked la Palférine.

“Do not try to sound the depth of my waters, my son; but let me tell you that, if you succeed, you will secure such powerful interest, that when you are tired of your Bohemian life you may, like me, retire on the strength of a rich marriage.”

“Does a time come, then, when we are tired of amusing ourselves,” said la Palférine, “of being nothing, of living as the birds live, of hunting in Paris like wild men, and laughing at all that turns up?”

“We tire of everything, even of hell!” said Maxime with a laugh.⁠—“Till this evening.”

The two scamps, the old one and the young one, rose. As Maxime got into his one-horse cab, he said to himself:

“Madame d’Espard cannot endure Béatrix; she will help me.⁠—To the Hôtel Grandlieu,” he cried to the coachman, seeing Rastignac pass. Find a great man without a weakness.

Maxime found the Duchess, Madame du Guénic, and Clotilde in tears.

“What has happened?” he asked the Duchess.

“Calyste did not come in⁠—it is the first time, and my poor Sabine is in despair.”

“Madame la Duchesse,” said Maxime, drawing the pious lady into a window-bay, “in the name of God, who will judge us, do not breathe a word as to my devotion; pledge d’Ajuda to secrecy; never let Calyste know anything of our plots, or we shall fight a duel to the death. When I told you this would not cost you much, I meant that you would not have to spend any monstrous sum. I want about twenty thousand francs, but everything else is my business; you may have to find some good appointments⁠—one Receiver-General’s, perhaps.”

The Duchess and Maxime left the room. When Madame de Grandlieu came back to her two daughters, she heard a fresh lament from Sabine, full of domestic details, even more heartbreaking than those which had put an end to the young wife’s happiness.

“Be calm, my child,” said the Duchess to her daughter; “Béatrix will pay dearly for all your tears and misery; she will endure ten humiliations for each one of yours.”

Madame Schontz had sent word to Claude Vignon, who had frequently expressed a wish to make the acquaintance of Maxime de Trailles; she invited Couture, Fabien, Bixiou, Léon de Lora, la Palférine, and Nathan, whom Rochefide begged to have for Maxime’s benefit. Thus she had a party of nine, all of the first water, excepting du Ronceret; but the Heir’s Norman vanity and brutality were a match for Claude Vignon’s literary force, for Nathan’s poetry, la Palférine’s acumen, Couture’s keen eye to the main chance, Bixiou’s wit, Finot’s foresight, Maxime’s depth, and Léon de Lora’s genius.

Madame Schontz, who aimed at appearing young and handsome, fortified herself in such a toilet as women of that class alone can achieve⁠—a point-lace cape of spiderweb fineness, a blue velvet dress, of which the elegant bodice was buttoned with opals, her hair in smooth bands, and shining like ebony. Madame Schontz owed her fame as a beauty to the brilliancy and color of a warm, creamy complexion like a Creole’s, a face full of original details, with the clean-cut, firm features⁠—of which the Comtesse de Merlin was the most famous example and the most perennially young⁠—peculiar perhaps to southern faces. Unluckily, since her life had been so calm, so easy, little Madame Schontz had grown decidedly fat. Her neck and shoulders, bewitchingly round, were getting coarse. Still, in France a woman’s face is thought all-important, and a fine head will secure a long life to an ungraceful shape.

“My dear child,” said Maxime as he came in and kissed Aurélie on the forehead, “Rochefide wanted me to see your home, where I have not yet been; it is almost worthy of his income of four hundred thousand francs. Well, he had less by fifty thousand a year when he first knew you; in less than five years you have gained for him as much as any other woman⁠—Antonia, Malaga, Cadine, or Florentine⁠—would have devoured.”

“I am not a baggage⁠—I am an artist!” said Madame Schontz, with some dignity. “I hope to end by founding a family of respectable folks, as they say in the play.”

“It is dreadful, we all getting married,” said Maxime, dropping into a chair by the fire. “Here am I within a few days of making a Comtesse Maxime.”

“Oh! how I should like to see her!” cried Madame Schontz. —“But allow me,” she went on, “to introduce Monsieur Claude Vignon⁠—Monsieur Claude Vignon, Monsieur de Trailles.”

“Ah, it was you who let Camille Maupin⁠—mine hostess of literature⁠—go into a convent?” cried Maxime. “After you, God!⁠—No one ever did me so much honor. Mademoiselle des Touches made a Louis XIV of you, monsieur.”

“And this is how history is written!” said Claude Vignon. “Did you not know that her fortune was spent in releasing Monsieur du Guénic’s estates? If she knew that Calyste had fallen into the arms of her ex-friend!⁠—” Maxime kicked the critic’s foot, looking at Monsieur de Rochefide, “on my word, I believe she would come out of her nunnery to snatch him from her.”

“I declare, my dear Rochefide,” said Maxime, finding that his warning had failed to check Claude Vignon, “in your place I would give my wife her fortune, that the world might not suppose that she had taken up Calyste for want of money.”

“Maxime is right!” said Madame Schontz, looking at Arthur, who colored violently. “If I have saved you some thousand francs to invest, you could not spend them better. I should have secured the happiness of both husband and wife.⁠—What a good-conduct stripe!”

“I never thought of it,” replied the Marquis. “But it is true; one is a gentleman first, and a husband after.”

“Let me advise you of the appropriate moment for your generosity,” said Maxime.

“Arthur,” said Aurélie, “Maxime is right. Our generous actions, you see, old boy, must be done as Couture’s shares must be sold,” and she looked in the glass to see who was coming in, “in the nick of time.”

Couture was followed by Finot, and in a few minutes all the guests were assembled in the handsome blue-and-gold drawing-room of the “Hôtel Schontz,” as the men called their place of meeting since Rochefide had bought it for his Ninon II. On seeing la Palférine come in the last, Maxime went up to him, drew him into a recess, and gave him the twenty banknotes.

“Above all, do not be stingy with them,” said he, with the native grace of a spendthrift.

“No one knows so well as you how to double the value of what appears to be a gift,” replied la Palférine.

“Then you agree?”

“Well, since I take the money!” replied the youth, with some pride and irony.

“Very well. Nathan, who is here, will take you within two days to call on the Marquise de Rochefide,” said Maxime in his ear.

La Palférine jumped as he heard the name.

“Do not fail to declare yourself madly in love with her; and, to rouse no suspicions, drink, wine, liqueurs no end! I will tell Aurélie to put you next to Nathan. Only, my son, we must now meet every night on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, at one in the morning; you to report progress, and I to give you instructions.”

“I will be there, master,” said the young Count, with a bow.

“What makes you ask a fellow to dine with us who comes dressed like a waiter?” said Maxime to Madame Schontz in a whisper, and looking at du Ronceret.

“Have you never seen ‘The Heir?’ Du Ronceret, from Alençon.”

“Monsieur,” said Maxime to Fabien, “you must know my friend d’Esgrignon?”

“Victurnien dropped the acquaintance long since,” replied Fabien, “but we were very intimate as boys.”

The dinner was such as can only be given in Paris, and in the houses of these perfectly reckless women, for their refined luxury amazes the most fastidious. It was at a supper of this kind, given by a rich and handsome courtesan like Madame Schontz, that Paganini declared that he had never eaten such food at the table of any sovereign, nor drunk such wine in any prince’s house, nor heard such witty conversation, nor seen such attractive and tasteful magnificence.

Maxime and Madame Schontz were the first to return to the drawing-room, at about ten o’clock, leaving the other guests, who had ceased to veil their anecdotes, and who boasted of their powers, with sticky lips glued to liqueur glasses that they could not empty.

“Well, pretty one,” said Maxime, “you are quite right. Yes, I came to get something out of you. It is a serious matter; you must give up Arthur. But I will see that he gives you two hundred thousand francs.”

“And why am I to give him up, poor old boy?”

“To marry that noodle, who came from Alençon on purpose. He has already been a Judge; I will get him made President of the Court in the place of old Blondet, who is nearly eighty-two, and if you know how to catch the wind, your husband will be elected deputy. You will be people of importance, and crush Madame la Comtesse du Bruel⁠—”

“Never!” cried Madame Schontz; “she is a Countess.”

“Is he of the stuff they make counts of?”

“Well, he has a coat-of-arms,” said Aurélie, seeking a letter in a handsome bag that hung by the fireplace, and handing it to Maxime. “What does it all mean? There are combs on it.”

“He bears: Quarterly, the first argent three combs gules, second and third three bunches of grapes with stems and leaves all proper, fourth azure four pens or, laid in fret. Motto, Servir, and a squire’s helmet.⁠—No great things! They were granted by Louis XV.⁠—They must have had some haberdasher grandfather, the maternal ancestry made money in wine, and the du Ronceret who got the arms must have been a registrar.⁠—But if you succeed in throwing off Arthur, the du Roncerets shall be Barons at least, I promise you, my pretty pigeon. You see, child, you must lie in pickle for five or six years in the country if you want to bury la Schontz in Madame la Présidente. The rascal cast eyes at you, of which the meaning was quite clear; you have hooked him.”

“No,” said Aurélie. “When I offered him my hand, he was as quiet as brandy is in the market.”

“I will make up his mind for him if he is tipsy. Go and see how they are all getting on.”

“It is not worth the trouble of going. I hear no one but Bixiou giving one of his caricatures, to which nobody is listening; but I know my Arthur; he thinks it necessary to be polite to Bixiou, and he is staring at him still, even if his eyes are shut.”

“Let us go back then.”

“By the by, for whose benefit am I doing all this, Maxime?” said Madame Schontz suddenly.

“For Madame de Rochefide,” replied Maxime bluntly. “It is impossible to patch up matters between her and Arthur so long as you keep hold of him. To her it is a matter of being at the head of her house and having four hundred thousand francs a year.”

“And she only offers me two hundred thousand francs down? I will have three hundred thousand if she is at the bottom of it. What, I have taken every care of her brat and her husband, I have filled her place in every way, and she is to beat me down? Look here, my dear fellow, I shall then have just a million. And besides that, you promise me the Presidency of the Court at Alençon if only I can make up for Madame du Ronceret⁠—”

“Right you are!” said Maxime.

“How I shall be bored in that little town!” said Aurélie philosophically. “I have heard so much about that part of the country from d’Esgrignon and Madame Val-Noble, that it is as though I had lived there already.”

“But if I could promise you the help of the title?”

“Oh, Maxime, if you can really do that.⁠—Ay, but the pigeon refuses to fly⁠—”

“And he is very ugly, with his skin like a plum; he has bristles instead of whiskers, and looks like a wild boar, though he has eyes like a bird of prey. He will be the finest President ever seen.⁠—Be easy! In ten minutes he will be singing you Isabelle’s song in the fourth act of Robert le Diable, ‘Je suis à tes genoux.’⁠—But you must undertake to send Arthur back to fall at Béatrix’s feet.”

“It is difficult, but among us we may manage it.”

At about half-past ten the gentlemen came into the drawing-room to take coffee. In the position in which Madame Schontz, Couture, and du Ronceret found themselves, it is easy to imagine the effect that was produced on the ambitious Norman by the following conversation between Couture and Maxime in a corner, carried on indeed in an undertone that they might not be overheard, but which Fabien contrived to hear.

“My dear fellow, if you were wise, you would accept the place of Receiver-General in some out-of-the-way place; Madame de Rochefide would get it for you. Aurélie’s million francs would enable you to deposit the security, and you would settle everything on her as your wife. Then, if you steered your boat cleverly, you would be made deputy, and the only premium I ask for having saved you will be your vote in the Chamber.”

“I shall always be proud to serve under you.”

“Oh, my boy, you have had a very close shave! Just fancy, Aurélie thought herself in love with that Norman from Alençon; she wanted to have him made a Baron, President of the Court in his native town, and officer of the Legion of Honor. The noodle never guessed what Madame Schontz was worth, and you owe your good fortune to her disgust; so do not give such a clever woman time to change her mind. For my part, I will go and put the irons in the fire.”

So Maxime left Couture in the seventh heaven of happiness, and said to la Palférine, “Shall I take you with me, my son?”

By eleven o’clock Aurélie found herself left with Couture, Fabien, and Rochefide. Arthur was asleep in an armchair; Couture and Fabien were trying to outstay each other, but without success. Madame Schontz put an end to this contest by saying to Couture, “Till tomorrow, dear boy!” which he took in good part.

“Mademoiselle,” said Fabien, in a low voice, “when you saw me so unready to respond to the proposal you made me indirectly, do not imagine that there was the smallest hesitation on my part; but you do not know my mother; she would never consent to my happiness⁠ ⁠…”

“You are of age to address her with a sommation respectueuse5 my dear fellow,” retorted Aurélie insolently. “However, if you are afraid of mamma, you are not the man for my money.”

“Joséphine!” said the Heir affectionately, as he boldly put his right arm round Madame Schontz’s waist, “I believed that you loved me.”

“And what then?”

“I might perhaps pacify my mother, and gain more than her consent.”

“How?”

“If you would use your influence⁠—”

“To get you created Baron, officer of the Legion of Honor, and President of the Court, my boy⁠—is that it?⁠—Listen to me, I have done so many things in the course of my life, that I am capable of being virtuous! I could be an honest woman, a loyal wife, and take my husband in tow to upper regions; but I insist on being so loved by him that not a glance, not a thought, shall ever be given to any heart but mine, not even in a wish.⁠ ⁠… How does that do for you? Do not bind yourself rashly; it is for life, my boy.”

“With a woman like you, done, without looking twice!” cried Fabien, as much intoxicated by a look as he was by the West Indian liqueurs.

“You shall never repent of that word, my brave boy; you shall be a peer of France.⁠—As to that poor old chap,” she went on, looking at Rochefide asleep, “it is a, double l, all, o-v-e-r, ver⁠—all over!”

She said it so cleverly, so prettily, that Fabien seized Madame Schontz and kissed her with an impulse of passion and joy, in which the intoxication of love and wine were second to that of happiness and ambition.

“But now, my dear child,” said she, “you must remember henceforth to behave respectfully to your wife, not to play the lover, and to leave me to get out of my slough as decently as may be.⁠—And Couture, who believed himself a rich man and Receiver-General!⁠—”

“I have a horror of the man,” said Fabien. “I wish I might never see him again!”

“I will have him here no more,” said the courtesan with a little prudish air. “Now that we understand each other, my Fabien, go; it is one o’clock.”

This little scene gave rise in the Schontz household, hitherto so perfectly happy, to a phase of domestic warfare between Arthur and Aurélie, such as any covert interest on the part of one of the partners is certain to give rise to.

The very next day Arthur woke to find himself alone; Madame Schontz was cold, as women of that sort know how to be.

“What happened last night?” asked he at breakfast, looking at Aurélie.

“That is the way of it, in Paris,” said she. “You go to bed on a wet night, next morning the pavement is dry, and everything so frozen that the dust flies; would you like a brush?”

“But what ails you, dear little woman?”

“Go, go to your great gawk of a wife!”

“My wife?” cried the unhappy Marquis.

“Couldn’t I guess why you brought Maxime here? You wanted to make it up with Madame de Rochefide, who wants you perhaps for some telltale baby.⁠—And I, whom you think so cunning, was advising you to give her back her money!⁠—Oh, I know your tricks. After five years my gentleman is tired of me. I am fat, Béatrix is bony; it will be a change. You are not the first man I have known with a taste for skeletons. Your Béatrix dresses well too, and you are one of the men who like a clotheshorse. Besides, you want to send Monsieur du Guénic packing. That would be a triumph! How well it will look! Won’t it be talked about! You will be quite a hero!”

At two o’clock Madame Schontz had not come to an end of her ironical banter, in spite of Arthur’s protestations. She said she was engaged to dine out. She desired the “faithless one” to go without her to the Italiens; she was going to a first-night performance at the Ambigu-Comique, and to make the acquaintance of a charming woman, Lousteau’s mistress, Madame de la Baudraye.

To prove his eternal attachment to his little Aurélie, and his aversion for his wife, Arthur offered to set out the very next day for Italy, and to live as her husband in Rome, Naples, or Florence, whichever Aurélie might prefer, giving her sixty thousand francs a year.

“All that is pure whims,” said she. “That will not hinder your making it up with your wife, and you will be wise to do so.”

At the end of this formidable discussion, Arthur and Aurélie parted, he to play and dine at the club, she to dress and spend the evening tête-à-tête with Fabien.

Monsieur de Rochefide found Maxime at the club, and poured out his complaints, as a man who felt happiness being torn up from his heart by the roots that clung by every fibre. Maxime listened to the Marquis’ lament as polite people can listen while thinking of something else.

“I am a capital counselor in such cases, my dear fellow,” said he. “Well, you make a great mistake in letting Aurélie see how much you care for her. Let me introduce you to Madame Antonia⁠—a heart to let. You will see la Schontz sing very small. Why, she is seven-and-thirty, is your Schontz, and Antonia is but twenty-six! And such a woman! Her wits are not all in her brains, I can tell you. Indeed, she is my pupil. If Madame Schontz still struts out her pride, do you know what it means?”

“On my honor, no.”

“That she means to get married; and then nothing can hinder her from throwing you over. After a six years’ lease the woman has a right to do it.⁠—But if you will listen to me, you can do better than that. At the present time your wife is worth a thousand Schontzes and Antonias of the Saint-Georges quarter. She will be hard to win, but not impossible; and she will make you as happy as Orgon! At any rate, if you do not wish to look like a fool, come to supper tonight at Antonia’s.”

“No, I love Aurélie too well; I will not allow her to have any cause for blaming me.”

“Oh, my dear fellow! what a life you are making for yourself!” cried Maxime.

“It is eleven o’clock. She will have returned from the Ambigu,” said Rochefide, going off. And he roared at the coachman to drive as fast as he could to the Rue de la Bruyère.

Madame Schontz had given distinct orders, and Monsieur was admitted exactly as though he and Madame were the best of friends; but Madame, informed of Monsieur’s return, took care to let Monsieur hear the slam of her dressing-room door, shut as doors shut when a lady is taken by surprise. Then, on the corner of the piano, was Fabien’s hat, intentionally forgotten, and conspicuously fetched away by the maid as soon as Monsieur and Madame were engaged in conversation.

“So you did not go to the play, little woman?”

“No, I changed my mind.”

“And who has been here?” he asked quite simply, seeing the maid carry away the hat.

“Nobody.”

To this audacious falsehood Arthur could only bow his head; this was passing under the Caudine forks of submission. True love has this magnanimous cowardice. Arthur behaved to Madame Schontz as Sabine did to Calyste, as Calyste did to Béatrix.

Within a week there was a change like that of a grub to a butterfly in the handsome and clever young Count, Charles-Édouard Rusticoli de la Palférine (the hero of the sketch called “A Prince of Bohemia,” which makes it unnecessary to describe his person and character in this place). Hitherto he had lived very poorly, making up his deficits with the audacity of a Danton; now he paid his debts, by Maxime’s advice he had a little low carriage, he was elected to the Jockey Club, to the club in the Rue de Grammont, he became superlatively elegant. Finally, he published in the Journal des Débats a novel which earned him in a few days such a reputation as professional writers do not achieve after many years of labor and success, for in Paris nothing is so vehement as what is to prove ephemeral. Nathan, perfectly certain that the Count would never write anything more, praised this elegant and impertinent youth to Madame de Rochefide in such terms, that Béatrix, spurred on by the poet’s account of him, expressed a wish to see this prince of fashionable vagabonds.

“He will be all the more delighted to come here,” replied Nathan, “because I know he is so much in love with you as to commit any folly.”

“But he has committed every folly already, I am told.”

“Every folly? No,” replied Nathan, “he has not yet been so foolish as to love a decent woman.”

A few days after the plot of the Boulevard had been laid between Maxime and the seductive Count Charles-Édouard, this young gentleman, on whom Nature had bestowed⁠—in irony, no doubt⁠—a pathetically melancholy countenance, made his first incursion into the nest in the Rue de Courcelles, where the dove, to receive him, fixed an evening when Calyste was obliged to go out with his wife. If ever you meet la Palférine⁠—or when you come to the “Prince of Bohemia” in the third part of this long picture of modern manners⁠—you will at once understand the triumph achieved in a single evening by that sparkling wit, those astonishing high spirits, especially if you can conceive of the capital byplay of the sponsor who agreed to second him on this occasion. Nathan was a good fellow; he showed off the young Count as a jeweler shows off a necklace he wants to sell, by making the stones sparkle in the light.

La Palférine discreetly was the first to leave; he left Nathan and the Marquise together, trusting to the great author’s cooperation, which was admirable. Seeing the Marquise quite amazed, he fired her fancy by a certain reticence, which stirred in her such chords of curiosity as she did not know existed in her. Nathan gave her to understand that it was not so much la Palférine’s wit that won him his successes with women as his superior gifts in the art of love; and he cried him up beyond measure.

This is the place for setting forth a novel result of the great law of contrasts, which gives rise to many a crisis in the human heart, and accounts for so many vagaries that we are forced to refer to it sometimes, as well as to the law of affinities. Courtesans⁠—including all that portion of the female sex which is named, unnamed, and renamed every quarter of a century⁠—all preserve, in the depths of their hearts, a vigorous wish to recover their liberty, to feel a pure, saintly, and heroic love for some man to whom they can sacrifice everything. (See Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.) They feel this antithetical need so keenly, that it is rare to find a woman of the kind who has not many times aspired to become virtuous through love. The most frightful deception cannot discourage them. Women who are, on the contrary, restrained by education, and by their rank in life, fettered by the dignity of their family, living in the midst of wealth, crowned by a halo of virtue, are tempted⁠—secretly, of course⁠—to try the tropical regions of passion. These two antagonistic types of women have, at the bottom of their hearts, the one a little craving for virtue, the other a little craving for dissipation, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau first had the courage to point out. In those it is the last gleam of the divine light not yet extinct; in these it is a trace of the primitive clay.

This remaining claw of the beast was tickled, this hair of the devil was pulled with the greatest skill, by Nathan. The Marquise seriously wondered whether she had not hitherto been the dupe of her intellect, whether her education was complete. Vice!⁠—is perhaps the desire to know everything.

Next day Calyste was seen by Béatrix as what he was⁠—a perfect and loyal gentleman, devoid of spirit and wit.

In Paris, to be known as a wit, a man’s wit must flow as water flows from a spring; for all men of fashion, and Parisians in general, are witty. But Calyste was too much in love, he was too much absorbed to observe the change in Béatrix, and satisfy her by opening up fresh veins; he was very colorless in the reflected light of the previous evening, and could not give the greedy Béatrix the smallest excitement. A great love is a credit account open to such voracious drafts on it that the moment of bankruptcy is inevitable.

In spite of the weariness of this day⁠—the day when a woman is bored by her lover!⁠—Béatrix shuddered with fears as she thought of a duel between la Palférine, the successor of Maxime de Trailles, and Calyste du Guénic, a brave man without brag. She therefore hesitated to see the young Count any more; but the knot was cut by a simple incident. Béatrix had a third share in a box at the Italiens⁠—a dark box on the pit tier where she might not be seen. For some few days Calyste had been so bold as to accompany the Marquise and sit behind her, timing their arrival late enough to attract no attention. Béatrix was always one of the first to leave before the end of the last act, and Calyste escorted her, keeping an eye on her, though old Antoine was in waiting on his mistress.

Maxime and la Palférine studied these tactics, dictated by the proprieties, by the love of concealment characteristic of the “Eternal Baby,” and also by a dread that weighs on every woman who, having once been a constellation of fashion, has fallen for love from her rank in the zodiac. She then fears humiliation as a worse agony than death; but this agony of pride, this shipwreck, which women who have kept their place on Olympus inflict on those who have fallen, came upon her, by Maxime’s contriving, under the most horrible circumstances.

At a performance of Lucia, which ended, as is well known, by one of Rubini’s greatest triumphs, Madame de Rochefide, before she was called by Antoine, came out from the corridor into the vestibule of the theatre, where the stairs were crowded with pretty women, grouped on the steps, or standing in knots till their servants should bring up their carriages. Béatrix was at once recognized by all; a whisper ran through every group, rising to a murmur. In the twinkling of an eye every woman vanished; the Marquise was left alone as if plague-stricken. Calyste, seeing his wife on one of the staircases, dared not join the outcast, and it was in vain that Béatrix twice gave him a tearful look, an entreaty to come to her support. At that moment la Palférine, elegant, lordly and charming, quitted two other women, and came, with a bow, to talk to the Marquise.

“Take my arm and come defiantly with me; I can find your carriage,” said he.

“Will you finish the evening with me?” she replied, as she got into her carriage and made room for him by her side.

La Palférine said to his groom, “Follow Madame’s carriage,” and got in with Madame de Rochefide, to Calyste’s amazement. He was left standing, planted on his feet as though they were made of lead, for it was on seeing him looking pale and blank that Béatrix had invited the young Count to accompany her. Every dove is a Robespierre in white feathers.

Three carriages arrived together at the Rue de Courcelles with lightning swiftness⁠—Calyste’s, la Palférine’s, and the Marquise’s.

“So you are here?” said Béatrix, on going into her drawing-room leaning on the young Count’s arm, and finding Calyste already there, his horse having outdistanced the other two carriages.

“So yon are acquainted with this gentleman?” said Calyste to Béatrix with suppressed fury.

“Monsieur le Comte de la Palférine was introduced to me by Nathan ten days ago,” said Béatrix; “and you, monsieur, have known me for four years⁠—”

“And I am ready, madame,” said la Palférine, “to make Madame d’Espard repent of having been the first to turn her back on you⁠—down to her grandchildren⁠—”

“Oh, it was she?” cried Béatrix. “I will pay her out.”

“If you want to be revenged, you must win back your husband, but I am prepared to bring him back to you,” said la Palférine in her ear.

The conversation thus begun was carried on till two in the morning, without giving Calyste an opportunity of speaking two words apart to Béatrix, who constantly kept his rage in subjection by her glances. La Palférine, who was not in love with her, was as superior in good taste, wit, and charm as Calyste was beneath himself; writhing on his seat like a worm cut in two, and thrice starting to his feet with an impulse to stop la Palférine. The third time that Calyste flew at his rival, the Count said, “Are you in pain, monsieur?” in a tone that made Calyste sit down on the nearest chair, and remain as immovable as an image.

The Marquise chatted with the light ease of a Célimène, ignoring Calyste’s presence. La Palférine was so supremely clever as to depart on a last witty speech, leaving the two lovers at war.

Thus, by Maxime’s skill, the flames of discord were raging in the divided households of Monsieur and Madame de Rochefide.

On the morrow, having heard from la Palférine, at the Jockey Club, where the young Count was playing whist with great profit, of the success of the scene he had plotted, Maxime went to the Hôtel Schontz to ascertain how Aurélie was managing her affairs.

“My dear fellow,” cried Madame Schontz, laughing as she saw him, “I am at my wits’ end. I am closing my career with the discovery that it is a misfortune to be clever.”

“Explain your meaning.”

“In the first place, my dear friend, I kept my Arthur for a week on a regimen of kicking his shins, with the most patriotic old stories and the most unpleasant discipline known in our profession. ‘You are ill,’ said he with fatherly mildness, ‘for I have never been anything but kind to you, and I perfectly adore you.’⁠—‘You have one fault, my dear,’ said I; ‘you bore me.’⁠—‘Well, but have you not all the cleverest men and the handsomest young fellows in Paris to amuse you?’ said the poor man. I was shut up. Then I felt that I loved him.”

“Hah!” said Maxime.

“What is to be done? These ways are too much for us; it is impossible to resist them. Then I changed the stop; I made eyes at that wild boar of a lawyer, my future husband, as great a sheep now as Arthur; I made him sit there in Rochefide’s armchair, and I thought him a perfect fool. How bored I was!⁠—But, of course, I had to keep Fabien there that we might be discovered together⁠—”

“Well,” cried Maxime, “get on with your story! When Rochefide found you together, what next?”

“You would never guess, my good fellow. By your instructions the banns are published, the marriage contract is being drawn, Notre-Dame de Lorette is out of court. When it is a case of matrimony, something may be paid on account. —When he found us together, Fabien and me, poor Arthur stole off on tiptoe to the dining-room, and began growling and clearing his throat and knocking the chairs about. That great gaby Fabien, to whom I cannot tell everything, was frightened, and that, my dear Maxime, is the point we have reached.⁠—Why, if Arthur should find the couple of us some morning on coming into my room, he is capable of saying, ‘Have you had a pleasant night, children?’ ”

Maxime nodded his head, and for some minutes sat twirling his cane.

“I know the sort of man,” said he. “This is what you must do; there is no help for it but to throw Arthur out the window and keep the door tightly shut. You must begin again the same scene with Fabien⁠—”

“How intolerable! For, after all, you see, the sacrament has not yet blessed me with virtue.⁠ ⁠…”

“You must contrive to catch Arthur’s eye when he finds you together,” Maxime went on; “if he gets angry, there is an end of the matter. If he only growls as before, there is yet more an end of it.”

“How?”

“Well, you must be angry; you must say, ‘I thought you loved and valued me; but you have ceased to care for me; you feel no jealousy⁠—,’ but you know it all, chapter and verse.⁠—‘Under such circumstances Maxime’ (drag me in) ‘would kill his man on the spot’ (and cry). ‘And Fabien’ (make him ashamed of himself by comparing him with Fabien)⁠—‘Fabien would have a dagger ready to stab you to the heart. That is what I call love! There, go! Goodnight, goodbye! Take back your house; I am going to marry Fabien. He will give me his name, he will! He has thrown over his old mother!’⁠—In short, you⁠—”

“Of course, of course! I will be magnificent!” cried Madame Schontz. “Ah, Maxime! There will never be but one Maxime, as there never was but one de Marsay.”

“La Palférine is greater than I,” said de Trailles modestly. “He is getting on famously.”

“He has a tongue, but you have backbone and a grip. How many people have you kept going! How many have you doubled up!”

“La Palférine has every qualification; he is deep and well informed, while I am ignorant,” replied Maxime.⁠—“I have seen Rastignac, who came to terms at once with the Keeper of the Seals. Fabien will be made President of the Court and officer of the Legion of Honor after a year’s probation.”

“I will take up religion,” replied Madame Schontz, emphasizing the phrase so as to win an approving look from Maxime.

“Priests are worth a hundred of us!” said Maxime.

“Really?” said Aurélie. “Then I may find someone to talk to in a country town.⁠—I have begun my part. Fabien has already told his mother that grace has dawned on me, and he has bewitched the good woman with my million and his Presidency; she agrees that we are to live with her; she asked for a portrait of me, and has sent me hers; if Love were to look at it, he would fall backwards.⁠—Go then, Maxime; I will demolish the poor man this evening. It goes to my heart.”

Two days later la Palférine and Maxime met at the door of the Jockey-Club.

“It is done,” said Charles-Édouard.

The words, containing a whole horrible and terrible drama, such as vengeance often carries out, made the Comte de Trailles smile.

“We shall have all de Rochefide’s jeremiads,” said Maxime, “for you and Aurélie have finished together. Aurélie has turned Arthur out of doors, and now we must get hold of him. He is to give three hundred thousand francs to Madame du Ronceret and return to his wife. We will prove to him that Béatrix is superior to Aurélie.”

“We have at least ten days before us,” said Charles-Édouard sapiently, “and not too much in all conscience; for now I know the Marquise, and the poor man will be handsomely fleeced.”

“What will you do when the bomb bursts?”

“We can always be clever when we have time to think it out; I am grand when I am able to prepare for it.”

The two gamblers went into the drawing-room together, and found the Marquis de Rochefide looking two years older; he had no stays on; he had sacrificed his elegance; his beard had grown.

“Well, my dear Marquis?” said Maxime.

“Oh, my dear fellow, my life is broken⁠ ⁠…” and for ten minutes Arthur talked, and Maxime gravely listened; he was thinking of his marriage, which was to take place a week hence.

“My dear Arthur, I advised you of the only means I knew of to keep Aurélie, and you did not choose⁠ ⁠…”

“What means?”

“Did I not advise you to go to supper with Antonia?”

“Quite true.⁠—How can I help it? I love her.⁠—And you, you make love as Grisier fences.”

“Listen to me, Arthur; give her three hundred thousand francs for her little house, and I promise you I will find you something better. I will speak to you again of the unknown fair one by and by; I see d’Ajuda, who wants to say two words to me.”

And Maxime left the inconsolable man to talk to the representative of the family needing consolation.

“My dear fellow,” said the other Marquis in an undertone, “the Duchess is in despair; Calyste has quietly packed up and procured a passport. Sabine wants to follow the fugitives, catch Béatrix, and claw her. She is expecting another child; and the whole thing looks rather murderous, for she has gone quite openly and bought pistols.”

“Tell the Duchess that Madame de Rochefide is not going, and within a fortnight the whole thing will be settled. Now, d’Ajuda, your hand on it? Neither you nor I have said anything or known anything. We shall admire the effects of chance⁠—”

“The Duchess has already made me swear secrecy on the Gospels and the Cross.”

“You will receive my wife a month hence?”

“With pleasure.”

“Everybody will be satisfied,” replied Maxime. “Only warn the Duchess that something is about to happen which will delay her departure for Italy for six weeks; it concerns Monsieur du Guénic. You will know all about it later.”

“What is it?” asked d’Ajuda, who was looking at la Palférine.

“Socrates said before his death, ‘We owe a cock to Aesculapius.’ But your brother-in-law will be let off for the comb,” replied la Palférine without hesitation.

For ten days Calyste endured the burden of a woman’s anger, all the more implacable because it was seconded by a real passion. Béatrix felt that form of love so roughly but truly described to the Duchess by Maxime de Trailles. Perhaps there is no highly organized being that does not experience this overwhelming passion once in a lifetime. The Marquise felt herself quelled by a superior force, by a young man who was not impressed by her rank, who, being of as noble birth as herself, could look at her with a calm and powerful eye, and from whom her greatest feminine efforts could scarcely extract a smile of admiration. Finally, she was crushed by a tyrant, who always left her bathed in tears, deeply hurt, and believing herself wronged. Charles-Édouard played the same farce on Madame de Rochefide that she had been playing these six months on Calyste.

Since the scene of her mortification at the Italiens, Béatrix had adhered to one formula:

“You preferred the world and your wife to me, so you do not love me. If you wish to prove that you do love me, sacrifice your wife and the world. Give up Sabine, leave her, and let us go to live in Switzerland, in Italy, or in Germany.”

Justifying herself by this cool ultimatum, she had established the sort of blockade which women carry into effect by cold looks, scornful shrugs, and a face like a stone citadel. She believed herself rid of Calyste; she thought he would never venture on a breach with the Grandlieus. To give up Sabine, to whom Mademoiselle des Touches had given her fortune, meant poverty for him.

However, Calyste, mad with despair, had secretly procured a passport, and begged his mother to forward him a considerable sum. While waiting for the money to reach him, he kept watch over Béatrix, himself a victim to the jealousy of a Breton. At last, nine days after the fateful communication made by la Palférine to Maxime at the club, the Baron, to whom his mother had sent thirty thousand francs, flew to the Rue de Courcelles, determined to force the blockade, to turn out la Palférine, and to leave Paris with his idol appeased.

This was one of those fearful alternatives when a woman who has preserved a fragment of self-respect may sink forever into the depths of vice, but may, on the other hand, return to virtue. Hitherto Madame de Rochefide had regarded herself as a virtuous woman, whose heart had been invaded by two passions; but to love Charles-Édouard, and allow herself to be loved by Calyste, would wreck her self-esteem; for where falsehood begins, infamy begins. She had granted rights to Calyste, and no human power could hinder the Breton from throwing himself at her feet and watering them with the tears of abject repentance. Many persons wonder to see the icy insensibility under which women smother their passions; but if they could not thus blot out the past, life for them would be bereft of dignity; they could never escape from the inevitable collusion to which they had once succumbed.

In her entirely new position Béatrix would have been saved if la Palférine had come to her; but old Antoine’s alertness was her ruin.

On hearing a carriage stop at the door, she exclaimed to Calyste, “Here are visitors!” and she hurried away to prevent a catastrophe.

Antoine, a prudent man, replied to Charles-Édouard, who had called solely to hear these very words, “Madame is gone out.”

When Béatrix heard from the old servant that the young Count had called, and what he had been told, she said, “Quite right,” and returned to the drawing-room, saying to herself, “I will be a nun!”

Calyste, who had made so bold as to open the window, caught sight of his rival.

“Who was it?” he asked.

“I do not know; Antoine has not come up yet.”

“It was la Palférine⁠—”

“Very possibly.”

“You love him, and that is why you find fault with me.⁠—I saw him!”

“You saw him?”

“I opened the window.”

Béatrix dropped half dead on the sofa. Then she tried to temporize to save the future; she put off their departure for ten days on the plea of business, and vowed to herself that she would close her door against Calyste if only she could pacify la Palférine, for these are the horrible compromises and burning torments that underlie lives that have gone off the rails on which the great train of Society runs.

As soon as Béatrix was alone she felt so miserable, so deeply humiliated, that she went to bed; she was ill; the fearful struggle that rent her heart seemed to leave a horrible reaction, and she sent for the doctor; but, at the same time, she despatched to la Palférine the following note, in which she avenged herself on Calyste with a sort of frenzy:⁠—

“Come to see me, my friend, I am in desperation. Antoine turned you away when your visit would have put an end to one of the most horrible nightmares of my life, by rescuing me from a man I hate, whom I hope never to see again. I love no one on earth but you, and I never shall love anyone but you, though I am so unhappy as not to please you so much as I could wish⁠ ⁠…”

She covered four pages, which, having begun thus, ended in a rhapsody far too poetical to be reproduced in print, in which Béatrix so effectually compromised herself, that in conclusion she said:

“Am I not wholly at your mercy? Ah, no price would be too great for me to prove how dearly you are loved!”

And she signed her name, a thing she had never done for either Calyste or Conti.

On the following day, when the young Count called on the Marquise, she was taking a bath. Antoine begged him to wait. But he dismissed Calyste in his turn, when, starving with passion, he also came early; and la Palférine could see him as he got into his carriage again in despair.

“Oh, Charles,” said the Marquise coming into the drawing-room, “you have ruined me!”

“I know it, madame,” replied he coolly. “You swore that you loved me alone, you offered to give me a letter in which you will set down the reasons you would have had for killing yourself, so that in the event of your being unfaithful to me I might poison you without fear of human justice⁠—as if superior souls needed to resort to poison to avenge themselves!⁠—You wrote, ‘No price would be too great for me to prove how dearly you are loved!’⁠—Well, I find a contradiction between these closing words of your letter and your speech, ‘You have ruined me.’ I will know now whether you have had the courage to break with du Guénic.”

“You are revenged on him beforehand,” said she throwing her arms round his neck. “And that matter is enough to bind you and me forever⁠—”

“Madame,” said the Prince of bohemia coldly, “if you desire my friendship, I consent; but there are conditions⁠—”

“Conditions?”

“Yes, conditions⁠—as follows: You must be reconciled with Monsieur de Rochefide, resume the honors of your position, return to your fine house in the Rue d’Anjou⁠—you will be one of the queens of Paris. You can achieve this by making Rochefide play a part in politics and guiding your conduct with such skill and tenacity as Madame d’Espard has displayed. This is the position which any woman must fill whom I am to honor with my devotion⁠—”

“But you forget that Monsieur de Rochefide’s consent is necessary.”

“Oh, my dear child,” replied la Palférine, “we have prepared him for it. I have pledged my honor as a gentleman that you were worth all the Schontzes of the Quartier Saint-Georges put together, and you owe it to my honor⁠—”

For eight days, every day, Calyste called on Béatrix, and was invariably sent away by Antoine, who put on a grave face and assured him, “Madame la Marquise is seriously ill.”

From thence Calyste rushed off to la Palférine, whose servant always exclaimed, “Monsieur le Comte is gone hunting.” And each time Calyste left a letter for the Count.

At last, on the ninth day, Calyste, in reply to a note from la Palférine fixing a time for an explanation, found him at home, but with him Maxime de Trailles, to whom the younger rake wished, no doubt, to give proof of his abilities by getting him to witness the scene.

“Monsieur le Baron,” said Charles-Édouard quietly, “here are the six notes you have done me the honor of writing to me. They are unopened, just as you sent them; I knew beforehand what might be in them when I heard that you had been seeking me everywhere since the day when I looked at you out of the window, while you were at the door of a house where, on the previous day, I had been at the door while you were at the window. I thought it best to remain ignorant of an ill-judged challenge. Between you and me, you have too much good taste to owe a woman a grudge because she has ceased to love you. And to fight your preferred rival is a bad way to reinstate yourself.

“Also, in the present case, your letters were invalidated, null and void, as lawyers say, in consequence of a radical error: you have too much good sense to quarrel with a husband for taking back his wife. Monsieur de Rochefide feels the Marquise’s position is undignified. You will no longer find Madame de Rochefide in the Rue de Courcelles; six months hence, next winter, you will see her in her husband’s home. You very rashly thrust yourself into the midst of a reconciliation between a married couple to which you yourself gave rise by failing to shelter Madame de Rochefide from the mortification she endured at the opera-house. As we left, Béatrix, to whom I had already brought some friendly advances on her husband’s part, took me in her carriage, and her first words were, ‘Go and bring Arthur!’ ”

“Oh, Heavens!” cried Calyste, “she was right; I had failed in my devotion⁠—”

“But, unfortunately, monsieur, poor Arthur was living with one of those dreadful women⁠—that Madame Schontz, who for a long time had expected every hour to find herself deserted. Madame Schontz, who, on the strength of Béatrix’s complexion, cherished a desire to see herself some day the Marquise de Rochefide, was furious when she saw her castles in the air fallen. Those women, monsieur, will lose an eye if they can spoil two for an enemy; la Schontz, who has just left Paris, has been the instrument of spoiling six! And if I had been so rash as to love Béatrix, the sum-total would have been eight. You, monsieur, must have discovered that you need an oculist.”

Maxime could not help smiling at the change in Calyste’s face; he turned pale as his eyes were opened to the situation.

“Would you believe, Monsieur le Baron, that that wretched woman has consented to marry the man who furnished her with means of revenge? Oh! women!⁠—You understand now why Béatrix should shut herself up with Arthur for a few months at Nogent-sur-Marne, where they have a charming little house; they will recover their sight there. Meanwhile their house will be entirely redecorated; the Marquise means to display a princely style of splendor. When a man is sincerely in love with so noble a woman, so great, so exquisite, the victim of conjugal devotion, as soon as she has the courage to return to her duties as a wife, the part of those who adore her as you do, who admire her as I do, is to remain her friends when they can be nothing more.

“You will forgive me for having thought it well to invite Monsieur de Trailles to be present at this explanation, but I was particularly anxious to make this all perfectly clear. For my part, I especially wished to assure you that, though I admire Madame de Rochefide’s cleverness as a woman, she is to me supremely odious.”

“And that is what our fairest dreams, our celestial loves end in,” said Calyste, overwhelmed by so many revelations and disenchantments.

“In a fish’s tail,” cried Maxime, “or, which is worse, in an apothecary’s gallipot! I have never known a first love that did not end idiotically. Ah, Monsieur le Baron, whatever there may be that is heavenly in man finds its nourishment in Heaven alone! This is the excuse for us rakes. I, monsieur, have gone deeply into the question, and, as you see, I am just married. I shall be faithful to my wife, and I would urge you to return to Madame du Guénic⁠—but⁠—three months hence.

“Do not regret Béatrix; she is a pattern of those vain natures, devoid of energy, but flirts out of vainglory⁠—a Madame d’Espard without political faculty, a woman devoid of heart and brain, frivolous in wickedness. Madame de Rochefide loves no one but Madame de Rochefide; she would have involved you in an irremediable quarrel with Madame du Guénic, and then have thrown you over without a qualm; in fact, she is as inadequate for vice as for virtue.”

“I do not agree with you, Maxime,” said la Palférine; “she will be the most delightful mistress of a great house in all Paris.”

Calyste did not leave the house without shaking hands with Charles-Édouard and Maxime de Trailles, thanking them for having cured him of his illusions.

Three days later the Duchesse de Grandlieu, who had not seen her daughter Sabine since the morning of the great conference, called one morning and found Calyste in his bathroom. Sabine was sewing at some new finery for her baby-clothes.

“Well, how are you children getting on?” asked the kind Duchess.

“As well as possible, dear mamma,” replied Sabine, looking at her mother with eyes bright with happiness. “We have acted out the fable of the Two Pigeons⁠—that is all.”

Calyste held out his hand to his wife and pressed hers tenderly.