In the month of September 1835, one of the richest heiresses of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Mademoiselle du Rouvre, the only child of the Marquis du Rouvre, married Count Adam Mitgislas Laginski, a young Polish exile.

I allow myself to spell the names as they are pronounced, to spare the reader the sight of the fortifications of consonants by which, in the Slav languages, the vowels are protected, no doubt to secure them against loss, seeing how few they are.

The Marquis du Rouvre had dissipated almost the whole of one of the finest fortunes of the nobility, to which he had formerly owed his alliance with a Mademoiselle de Ronquerolles. Hence Clémentine had for her uncle, on her mother’s side, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, and for her aunt Madame de Sérizy. On her father’s side she possessed another uncle in the eccentric person of the Chevalier du Rouvre, the younger son of the house, an old bachelor who had grown rich by speculations in lands and houses.

The Marquis de Ronquerolles was so unhappy as to lose both his children during the visitation of cholera. Madame de Sérizy’s only son, a young officer of the highest promise, was killed in Africa at the fight by the Macta. In these days rich families run the risk of ruining their children if they have too many, or of becoming extinct if they have but one or two, a singular result of the Civil Code not foreseen by Napoleon. Thus, by accident, and in spite of Monsieur du Rouvre’s reckless extravagances for Florine, one of the most charming of Paris actresses, Clémentine had become an heiress. The Marquis de Ronquerolles, one of the most accomplished diplomats of the new dynasty, his sister, Madame de Sérizy, and the Chevalier du Rouvre agreed that, to rescue their fortunes from the Marquis’ clutches, they would leave them to their niece, to whom they each promised ten thousand francs a year on her marriage.

It is quite unnecessary to say that the Pole, though a refugee, cost the French Government absolutely nothing. Count Adam belonged to one of the oldest and most illustrious families of Poland, connected with most of the princely houses of Germany, with the Sapiéhas, the Radziwills, the Mniszechs, the Rzewuskis, the Czartoryskis, the Leszinskis, the Lubomirskis, in short, all the great Sarmatian skis. But a knowledge of heraldry is not a strong point in France under Louis Philippe, and such nobility could be no recommendation to the bourgeoisie then in power. Besides, when, in 1833, Adam made his appearance on the Boulevard des Italiens, at Frascati’s, at the Jockey Club, he led the life of a man who, having lost his political prospects, falls back on his vices and his love of pleasure. He was taken for a student.

The Polish nationality, as the result of an odious Government reaction, has fallen as low as the Republicans had tried to think it high. The strange struggle of Movement against Resistance⁠—two words which thirty years hence will be inexplicable⁠—made a farce of what ought to have been so worthy: the name, that is, of a vanquished nation to which France gave hospitality, for which entertainments were devised, for which everyone danced or sang by subscription; a nation, in short, which at the time when, in 1796, Europe was fighting France, had offered her six thousand men, and such men!

Do not conclude from this that I mean to represent the Emperor Nicholas as being in the wrong as regards Poland, or Poland as regards the Emperor Nicholas. In the first place, it would be a silly thing enough to slip a political discussion into a tale which ought to interest or to amuse. Besides, Russia and Poland were equally right: one for aiming at unity of Empire, the other for desiring to be free again. It may be said, in passing, that Poland might have conquered Russia by the influence of manners instead of beating her with weapons; thus imitating the Chinese, who at last Chinesified the Tartars, and who, it is to be hoped, will do the same by the English. Poland ought to have polished the Russians; Poniatowski had tried it in the least temperate district of the Empire. But that gentleman was a misunderstood king⁠—all the more so because he did not perhaps understand himself.

How was it possible not to hate the poor people who were the cause of the horrible deceit committed on the occasion of the review when all Paris was eager to rescue Poland? People affected to regard the Poles as allies of the Republican party, forgetting that Poland was an aristocratic republic. Thenceforth the party of wealth poured ignoble contempt on the Pole, who had been deified but a few days since. The wind of a riot has always blown the Parisians round from north to south under every form of government. This weathercock temper of Paris opinion must be remembered if we would understand how, in 1835, the name of Pole was a word of ridicule among the race who believe themselves to be the wittiest and politest in the world, and its central luminary, in a city which, at this day, wields the sceptre of art and literature.

There are, alas! two types of Polish refugees⁠—the republican Pole, the son of Lelewel, and the noble Pole, of the party led by Prince Czartoryski. These two kinds of Pole are as fire and water, but why blame them? Are not such divisions always to be observed among refugees whatever nation they belong to, and no matter what country they go to? They carry their country and their hatreds with them. At Brussels two French émigré priests expressed the greatest aversion for each other; and when one of them was asked his reasons, he replied, pointing to his companion in misery, “He is a Jansenist!” Dante, in his exile, would gladly have stabbed any adversary of the Bianchi. In this lies the reason of the attacks made on the venerable Prince Adam Czartoryski by the French radicals, and that of the disapproval shown to a section of the Polish emigrants by the Caesars of the counter and the Alexanders by letters patent.

In 1834 Adam Mitgislas Laginski was the butt of Parisian witticisms.⁠—“He is a nice fellow though he is a Pole,” said Rastignac.⁠—“All the Poles are great lords,” said Maxime de Trailles, “but this one pays his gambling debts; I begin to think that he must have had an estate.”

And without offence to the exiles, it may be remarked that the levity, the recklessness, the fluidity of the Sarmatian character justified the calumnies of the Parisians, who, indeed, in similar circumstances, would be exactly like the Poles. The French aristocracy, so admirably supported by the Polish aristocracy during the Revolution, certainly made no equivalent return to those who were forced to emigrate in 1832. We must have the melancholy courage to say that, in this, the Faubourg Saint-Germain remains Poland’s debtor.

Was Count Adam rich, was he poor, was he an adventurer? The problem long remained unsolved. Diplomatic circles, faithful to their instructions, imitated the silence observed by the Emperor Nicholas, who at that time counted every Polish émigré as dead. The Tuileries, and most of those who took their cue from thence, gave an odious proof of this characteristic policy dignified by the name of prudence. A Russian prince, with whom they had smoked many cigars at the time of the emigration, was ignored because, as it seemed, he had fallen into disgrace with the Emperor Nicholas.

Thus placed between the prudence of the Court and that of diplomatic circles, Poles of good family lived in the Biblical solitude of Super flumina Babylonis, or frequented certain drawing-rooms which served as neutral territory for every variety of opinion. In a city of pleasure like Paris, where amusement is to be had in every rank, Polish recklessness found twice as many pretexts as it needed for leading a dissipated bachelor life. Besides, it must be said, Adam had against him at first both his appearance and his manners.

There are two types of Pole, as there are two types of Englishwoman. When an Englishwoman is not a beauty, she is horribly ugly⁠—and Count Adam belongs to the second category. His face is small, somewhat sour, and looks as if it had been squeezed in a vise. His short nose, fair hair, red moustaches and beard, give him the expression of a goat; all the more so because he is short and thin, and his eyes, tinged with dingy yellow, startle you by the oblique leer which Virgil’s line has made famous. How is it that, in spite of such unfavorable conditions, he has such exquisite manners and style? The solution of this mystery is given by his dress, that of a finished dandy, and by the education he owes to his mother, a Radziwill. If his courage carries him to the point of rashness, his mind is not above the current and trivial pleasantries of Paris conversation; still, he does not often find a young fellow who is his superior among men of fashion. These young men nowadays talk far too much of horses, income, taxes, and deputies, for French conversation to be what once it was. Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of position. Conversation is better perhaps at Petersburg and at Vienna than it is in Paris. Equals need no subtleties; they tell each other everything straight out, just as it is. Hence the ironical laughers of Paris could scarcely discern a man of family in a lighthearted student, as he seemed, who in talking passed carelessly from one subject to another, who pursued amusement with all the more frenzy because he had just escaped from great perils, and who, having left the country where his family was known, thought himself at liberty to lead an irresponsible life without risking a loss of consideration.

One fine day in 1834, Adam bought a large house in the Rue de la Pépinière. Six months later it was on as handsome a footing as the richest houses in Paris. Just at the time when Laginski was beginning to be taken seriously, he saw Clémentine at the Italian opera, and fell in love with her. A year later, he married her. Madame d’Espard’s circle set the fashion of approval. Mothers of families then learned, too late, that ever since the year 900, the Laginskis had ranked with the most illustrious families of the North. By a stroke of prudence, most unlike a Pole, the young Count’s mother had, at the beginning of the rebellion, mortgaged her estates for an immense sum advanced by two Jewish houses, and invested in the French funds. Count Adam Laginski had an income of more than eighty thousand francs. This put an end to the astonishment expressed in some drawing-rooms at the rashness of Madame de Sérizy, of old de Ronquerolles, and of the Chevalier du Rouvre in yielding to their niece’s mad passion.

As usual, the world rushed from one extreme to the other. During the winter of 1836, Count Adam became the fashion, and Clémentine Laginski one of the queens of Paris. Madame de Laginski, at the present time, is one of the charming group of young married women among whom shine Mesdames de Lestorade, de Portenduère, Marie de Vandenesse, du Guénic, and de Maufrigneuse, the very flower of Paris society, who live high above the parvenus, bourgeois, and wire-pullers of recent politics.

This preamble was needful to define the sphere in which was carried through one of those sublime efforts, less rare than the detractors of the present time imagine⁠—pearls hidden in rough shells, and lost in the depths of that abyss, that ocean, that never-resting tide called the World⁠—the Age⁠—Paris, London, or Petersburg⁠—whichever you will.

If ever the truth that architecture is the expression of the manners of a race was fully demonstrated, is it not since the revolution of 1830, under the reign of the House of Orléans? Great fortunes have shrunk in France, and the majestic mansions of our fathers are constantly being demolished and replaced by a sort of tenement houses, in which a peer of France of July dwells on the third floor, over some newly-enriched empiric. Styles are mingled in confusion. As there is no longer any Court, any nobility to set a “tone,” no harmony is to be seen in the productions of art. On the other hand, architecture has never found more economical tricks for imitating what is genuine and thorough, never displayed more ingenuity and resource in arrangement. Ask an artist to deal with a strip of the garden of an old “hotel” now destroyed, and he will build you a little Louvre crushed under its ornamentation; he will give you a courtyard, stables, and, if you insist, a garden; inside he contrives such a number of little rooms and corridors, and cheats the eye so effectually, that you fancy yourself comfortable; in fact, there are so many bedrooms, that a ducal retinue can live and move in what was only the bakehouse of a president of a law court.

The Comtesse Laginski’s house is one of these modem structures, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind. To the right of the courtyard are the servants’ quarters, balanced on the left by the stables and coach-houses. The porter’s lodge stands between two handsome gates. The chief luxury of this house consists in a delightful conservatory at the end of a boudoir on the ground floor, where all the beautiful reception rooms are. It was a philanthropist driven out of England who built this architectural gem, constructed the conservatory, planned the garden, varnished the doors, paved the outbuildings with brick, filled the windows with green glass, and realized a vision like that⁠—in due proportion⁠—of George IV at Brighton. The inventive, industrious, and ready Paris artisan had caned his doors and window-frames; his ceilings were imitated from those of the Middle Ages or of Venetian palaces, and there was a lavish outlay of marble slabs in external paneling. Steinbock and François Souchet had carved the cornices of the doors and chimney-shelves; Schinner had painted the ceilings with the brush of a master. The wonders of the stairs⁠—marble as white as a woman’s arm⁠—defied those of the Hôtel Rothschild.

In consequence of the disturbances, the price of this folly was not more than eleven hundred thousand francs. For an Englishman this was giving it away. All this splendor, called princely by people who do not know what a real prince is, stood in the garden of a contractor⁠—a Croesus of the Revolution, who had died at Brussels, a bankrupt after a sudden convulsion of the Bourse. The Englishman died at Paris⁠—died of Paris⁠—for to many people Paris is a disease; sometimes it is several diseases. His widow, a Methodist, had a perfect horror of the nabob’s little house⁠—this philanthropist had been a dealer in opium. The virtuous widow ordered that the scandalous property should be sold just at the time when the disturbances made peace doubtful on any terms. Count Adam took advantage of the opportunity; and you shall be told how it happened, for nothing could be less consonant with his lordly habits.

Behind this house, built of stone fretted like a melon, spreads the green velvet of an English lawn, shaded at the further end by an elegant clump of exotic trees, among which rises a Chinese pavilion with its mute bells and pendent gilt eggs. The greenhouse and its fantastic decorations screen the outer wall on the south side. The other wall, opposite the greenhouse, is hung with creepers grown in arcades over poles and crossbeams painted green. This meadow, this realm of flowers, these graveled paths, this mimic forest, these aerial trellises cover an area of about twenty-five square perches, of which the present value would be four hundred thousand francs, as much as a real forest. In the heart of this silence won from Paris, birds sing; there are blackbirds, nightingales, bullfinches, chaffinches, and numbers of sparrows. The conservatory is a vast flowerbed, where the air is loaded with perfume, and where you may walk in winter as though summer was blazing with all its fires. The means by which an atmosphere is produced at will of the tropics, China or Italy, are ingeniously concealed from view. The pipes in which the boiling water circulates⁠—the steam, hot air, what not⁠—are covered with soil, and look like garlands of growing flowers.

The boudoir is spacious. On a small plot of ground the miracle wrought by the Paris fairy called Architecture is to produce everything on a large scale. The young Countess’ boudoir was the pride of the artist to whom Count Adam entrusted the task of redecorating the house. To sin there would be impossible, there are too many pretty trifles. Love would not know where to alight amid worktables of Chinese carving, where the eye can find thousands of droll little figures wrought in the ivory⁠—the outcome of the toil of two families of Chinese artists; vases of burnt topaz mounted on filigree stands; mosaics that invite to theft; Dutch pictures, such as Schinner now paints again; angels imagined as Steinbock conceives of them (but does not always work them out himself); statuettes executed by geniuses pursued by creditors (the true interpretation of the Arab myths); sublime first sketches by our greatest artists; fronts of carved chests let into the wainscot, and alternating with the inventions of Indian embroidery; gold-colored curtains draped over the doors from an architrave of black oak wrought with the swarming figures of a hunting scene; chairs and tables worthy of Madame de Pompadour; a Persian carpet, and so forth. And finally, as a crowning touch, all this splendor, seen under a softened light filtering in through lace curtains, looks all the more beautiful. On a marble slab, among some antiques, a lady’s whip, with a handle carved by Mademoiselle de Fauveau, shows that the Countess is fond of riding.

Such is a boudoir in 1837, a display of property to divert the eye, as though ennui threatened to invade the most restless and unresting society in the world. Why is there nothing individual, intimate, nothing to invite reverie and repose?⁠—Why?⁠—Because no one is sure of the morrow, and everyone enjoys life as a prodigal spends a life interest.

One morning Clémentine affected a meditative air, as she lounged on one of those deep siesta chairs from which we cannot bear to rise, so cleverly has the upholsterer who invented them contrived to fit them to the curves of laziness and the comfort of the Dolce far niente. The doors to the conservatory were open, admitting the scent of vegetation and the perfumes of the tropics. The young wife watched Adam, who was smoking an elegant narghileh, the only form of pipe she allowed in this room. Over the other door, curtains, caught back by handsome ropes, showed two magnificent rooms beyond: one in white and gold, resembling that of the Hôtel Forbin-Janson, the other in the taste of the Renaissance. The dining-room, unrivaled in Paris by any but that of the Baron de Nucingen, is at the end of a corridor, with a ceiling and walls decorated in a medieval style. This corridor is reached, on the courtyard front, through a large anteroom, through whose glass door the splendor of the stairs is seen.

The Count and Countess had just breakfasted; the sky was a sheet of blue without a cloud; the month of April was drawing to a close. The household had already known two years of happiness, and now, only two days since, Clémentine had discovered in her home something resembling a secret, a mystery. A Pole, let it be repeated to his honor, is generally weak in the presence of a woman; he is so full of tenderness that, in Poland, he becomes her inferior; and though Polish women are admirable creatures, a Pole is even more quickly routed by a Parisienne. Hence, Count Adam, pressed hard with questions, had not enough artless cunning to sell his secret dear to his wife. With a woman there is always something to be got for a secret; and she likes you the better for it, as a rogue respects an honest man whom he has failed to take in. The Count, more ready with his sword than with his tongue, only stipulated that he should not be required to answer till he had finished his narghileh full of tombaki.

“When we were traveling,” said she, “you replied to every difficulty by saying, ‘Paz will see to that!’ You never wrote to anybody but Paz. On my return, everyone refers me to the Captain. I want to go out.⁠—The Captain! Is there a bill to be paid?⁠—The Captain. If my horse’s pace is rough, they will speak to Captain Paz. In short, here I feel as if it were a game of dominoes; everywhere Paz! I hear no one talked of but Paz, but I can never see Paz. What is Paz? Let our Paz be brought to see me.”

“Then is not everything as it ought to be?” said the Count, relinquishing the mouthpiece of his narghileh.

“Everything is so quite what it ought to be, that if we had two hundred thousand francs a year, we should be ruined by living in the way we do with a hundred and ten thousand,” said she. She pulled the bell-handle embroidered in tent-stitch, a marvel of skill. A manservant dressed like a Minister at once appeared.

“Tell Monsieur le Capitaine Paz that I wish to speak to him,” said she.

“If you fancy you will find anything out in that way⁠—” said Count Adam with a smile.

It may be useful to say that Adam and Clémentine, married in December 1835, after spending the winter in Paris, had during 1836 traveled in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. They returned home in November, and during the winter just past the Countess had for the first time received her friends, and then had discovered the existence⁠—the almost speechless and unacknowledged, but most useful presence⁠—of a factotum whose person seemed to be invisible⁠—this Captain Paz or Paç.

“Monsieur le Capitaine Paz begs Madame le Comtesse to excuse him; he is round at the stables, and in a dress which does not allow of his coming at this minute. But as soon as he is dressed Count Paz will come,” said the manservant.

“Why, what was he doing?”

“He was showing Constantine how to groom the Countess’ horse; the man did not do it to his mind,” replied the servant.

The Countess looked at the man; he was quite serious, and took good care not to imply by a smile that comment which inferiors so often allow themselves on a superior who seems to have descended to their level.

“Ah, he was brushing down Cora?”

“You are not riding out this morning, madame?” said the servant; but he got no answer, and went.

“Is he a Pole?” asked Clémentine of her husband, who bowed affirmatively.

Clémentine lay silent, examining Adam. Her feet, almost at full length on a cushion, her head in the attitude of a bird listening on the edge of its nest to the sounds of the grove, she would have seemed charming to the most blasé of men. Fair and slight, her hair curled à l’Anglaise, she looked like one of the almost fabulous figures in Keepsakes, especially as she was wrapped in a morning gown of Persian silk, of which the thick folds did not so effectually disguise the graces of her figure and the slenderness of her waist, as that they could not be admired through the thick covering of flowers and embroidery. As she crossed the brightly colored stuff over her chest, the hollow of her throat remained visible, the white skin contrasting in tone with the handsome lace trimming over the shoulders. Her eyes, fringed with black lashes, emphasized the expression of curiosity that puckered a pretty mouth. On her well-formed brow were traced the characteristic curves of the Paris woman, wilful, lighthearted, well-educated, but invulnerable to vulgar temptations. Her hands, almost transparent, hung from each arm of her deep chair; the taper fingers, curved at the tips, showed nails like pink almonds that caught the light.

Adam smiled at his wife’s impatience, gazing at her with a look which conjugal satiety had not yet made lukewarm. This slim little Countess had known how to be mistress in her own house, for she scarcely acknowledged Adam’s admiration. In the glances she stole at him there was perhaps a dawning consciousness of the superiority of a Parisienne to this spruce, lean, and red-haired Pole.

“Here comes Paz,” said the Count, hearing a step that rang in the corridor.

The Countess saw a tall, handsome man come in, well built, bearing in his features the marks of the grief which comes of strength and misfortune. Paz had dressed hastily in one of those tightly-fitting coats, fastened by braid straps and oval buttons, which used to be called polonaises. Thick, black hair, but ill-kempt, covered his squarely-shaped head, and Clémentine could see his broad forehead as shiny as a piece of marble, for he held his peaked cap in his hand. That hand was like the hand of the Hercules carrying the infant Mercury. Robust health bloomed in a face equally divided by a large Roman nose, which reminded Clémentine of the handsome Trasteverini. A black silk stock put a finishing touch of martial appearance to this mystery of near six feet high, with jet-black eyes as lustrous as an Italian’s. The width of his full trousers, hiding all but the toes of his boots, showed that Paz still was faithful to the fashions of Poland. Certainly, to a romantic woman, there must have been something burlesque in the violent contrast observable between the Captain and the Count, between the little Pole with his narrow frame and this fine soldier, between the carpet-knight and the knight servitor.

“Good morning, Adam,” he said to the Count with familiarity.

Then he bowed gracefully, asking Clémentine in what way he could serve her.

“Then you are Laginski’s friend?” asked the lady.

“For life and death,” replied Paz, on whom the young Count shed his most affectionate smile, as he exhaled his last fragrant puff of smoke.

“Well, then, why do you not eat with us? Why did you not accompany us to Italy and to Switzerland? Why do you hide yourself so as to avoid the thanks I owe you for the constant services you do us?” said the young Countess, with a sort of irritation, but without the slightest feeling.

In fact, she detected a kind of volunteer slavery on the part of Paz. At that time such an idea was inseparable from a certain disdain for a socially amphibious creature, a being at once secretary and bailiff, neither wholly bailiff nor wholly secretary, some poor relation⁠—inconvenient as a friend.

“The fact is, Countess,” he replied with some freedom, “that no thanks are owing to me. I am Adam’s friend, and I find my pleasure in taking charge of his interests.”

“And is it for your pleasure too that you remain standing?” said Count Adam.

Paz sat down in an armchair near the doorway.

“I remember having seen you on the occasion of our marriage, and sometimes in the courtyard,” said the lady; “but why do you, a friend of Adam’s, place yourself in a position of inferiority?”

“The opinion of the Paris world is to me a matter of indifference,” said he. “I live for myself, or, if you choose, for you two.”

“But the opinion of the world as regards my husband’s friend cannot be a matter of indifference to me⁠—”

“Oh, madame, the world is easily satisfied by one word: Eccentric⁠—say that.”

After a short pause he asked, “Do you purpose going out?”

“Will you come to the Bois?” said the Countess.

“With pleasure,” and so saying Paz bowed and went out.

“What a good soul! He is as simple as a child,” said Adam.

“Tell me now how you became friends,” said Clémentine.

“Paz, my dearest, is of a family as old, as noble, and as illustrious as our own. At the time of the fall of the Pazzi a member of that family escaped from Florence into Poland, where he settled with some little fortune, and founded the family of the Paz, on which the title of count was conferred.

“This family, having distinguished itself in the days of our royal republic, grew rich. The cutting from the tree felled in Italy grew with such vigor that there are several branches of the house of the Counts Paz. It will not, therefore, surprise you to be told that there are rich and poor members of the family. Our Paz is the son of a poor branch. As an orphan, with no fortune but his sword, he served under the Grand Duke Constantine at the time of our Revolution. Carried away by the Polish party, he fought like a Pole, like a patriot, like a man who has nothing⁠—three reasons for fighting well. In the last skirmish, believing his men were following him, he rushed on a Russian battery, and was taken prisoner. I was there. This feat of courage roused my blood. ‘Let us go and fetch him!’ cried I to my horsemen. We charged the battery like freebooters, and I rescued Paz, I being the seventh. We were twenty when we set out, and eight when we came back, including Paz.

“When Warsaw was betrayed we had to think of escaping from the Russians. By a singular chance Paz and I found ourselves together at the same hour and in the same place on the other side of the Vistula. I saw the poor Captain arrested by some Prussians, who at that time had made themselves bloodhounds for the Russians. When one has fished a man out of the Styx, one gets attached to him. This new danger threatening Paz distressed me so much that I allowed myself to be taken with him, intending to be of service to him. Two men can sometimes escape when one alone is lost. Thanks to my name and some family connection with those on whom our fate depended⁠—for we were then in the power of the Prussians⁠—my flight was winked at. I got my dear Captain through as a common soldier and a servant of my house, and we succeeded in reaching Danzig. We stowed ourselves in a Dutch vessel sailing for England, where we landed two months later.

“My mother had fallen ill in England, and awaited me there; Paz and I nursed her till her death, which was accelerated by the disasters to our cause.

“We then left England, and I brought Paz to France; in such adversities two men become brothers. When I found myself in Paris with sixty odd thousand francs a year, not to mention the remains of a sum derived from the sale of my mother’s diamonds and the family pictures, I wished to secure a living to Paz before giving myself up to the dissipations of Paris life. I had discerned some sadness in the Captain’s eyes, sometimes even a suppressed tear floated there. I had had opportunities of appreciating his soul, which is thoroughly noble, lofty, and generous. Perhaps it was painful to him to find himself bound by benefits to a man six years younger than himself without being able to repay him. I, careless and lighthearted as a boy, might ruin myself at play, or let myself be ensnared by some woman; Paz and I might some day be sundered. Though I promised myself that I would always provide for all his needs, I foresaw many chances of forgetting, or being unable to pay Paz an allowance. In short, my angel, I wished to spare him the discomfort, the humiliation, the shame of having to ask me for money, or of seeking in vain for his comrade in some day of necessity. Dunque, one morning after breakfast, with our feet on the firedogs, each smoking his pipe, after many blushes, and with many precautions, till I saw he was looking at me quite anxiously, I held out to him a bond to bearer producing two thousand four hundred francs interest yearly⁠—”

Clémentine rose, seated herself on Adam’s knees, and putting her arm round his neck, kissed him on the brow, saying:

“Dear heart, how noble I think you! And what did Paz say?”

“Thaddeus?” said the Count; “he turned pale and said nothing.”

“Thaddeus⁠—is that his name?”

“Yes.⁠—Thaddeus folded up the paper and returned it to me, saying, ‘I thought, Adam, that we were as one in life and death, and that we should never part; do you wish to see no more of me?’⁠—‘Oh,’ said I, ‘is that the way you take it? Well, then, say no more about it. If I am ruined, you will be ruined.’⁠—Said he, ‘You are not rich enough to live as a Laginski should; and do you not need a friend to take care of your concerns, who will be father and brother to you, and a trusted confidant?’ My dear girl, Paz, as he uttered the words, spoke with a calmness of tone and look which covered a motherly feeling, but which betrayed the gratitude of an Arab, the devotion of a dog, and the friendship of a savage, always ready and always unassuming. On my honor! I took him in our Polish fashion, laying my hand on his shoulder, and I kissed him on the lips. ‘For life and death, then,’ said I. ‘All I have is yours, do just as you will.’

“It was he who found me this house for almost nothing. He sold my shares when they were high, and bought when they were low, and we purchased this hovel out of the difference. He is a connoisseur in horses, and deals in them so well that my stable has cost me very little, and yet I have the finest beasts and the prettiest turnout in Paris. Our servants, old Polish soldiers whom he found, would pass through the fire for us. While I seem to be ruining myself, Paz keeps my house with such perfect order and economy that he has even made good some losses at play, the follies of a young man. My Thaddeus is as cunning as two Genoese, as keen for profit as a Polish Jew, as cautious as a good housekeeper. I have never been able to persuade him to live as I did when I was a bachelor. Sometimes it has needed the gentle violence of friendship to induce him to come to the play when I was going alone, or to one of the dinners I was giving at an eating house to a party of congenial companions. He does not like the life of drawing-rooms.”

“Then what does he like?” asked Clémentine.

“He loves Poland, and weeps over her. His only extravagance has been money sent, more in my name than his own, to some of our poor exiles.”

“Dear, how fond I shall be of that good fellow,” said the Countess. “He seems to me as simple as everything that is truly great.”

“All the pretty things you see here,” said Adam, praising his friend with the most generous security, “have been found by Paz; he has bought them at sales, or by some chance. Oh! he is keener at a bargain than a trader. If you see him rubbing his hands in the courtyard, it is because he has exchanged a good horse for a better. He lives in me; his delight is to see me well dressed in a dazzlingly smart carriage. He performs all the duties he imposes on himself without fuss or display. One night I had lost twenty thousand francs at whist. ‘What will Paz say?’ thought I to myself as I reached home. Paz gave me the sum, not without a sigh; but he did not blame me even by a look. This sigh checked me more than all the remonstrances of uncles, wives, or mothers in similar circumstances. ‘You regret the money?’ I asked him.⁠—‘Oh, not for you, nor for myself; no, I was only thinking that twenty poor relations of mine could have lived on it for a year.’

“The family of Paz, you understand, is quite equal to that of Laginski, and I have never regarded my dear Paz as an inferior. I have tried to be as magnanimous in my degree as he in his. I never go out or come in without going to Paz, as if he were my father. My fortune is his. In short, Thaddeus knows that at this day I would rush into danger to rescue him, as I have done twice before.”

“That is not a small thing to say, my dear,” remarked the Countess. “Devotion is a lightning-flash. Men devote themselves in war, but they no longer devote themselves in Paris.”

“Well, then,” said Adam, “for Paz I am always in war. Our two natures have preserved their asperities and their faults, but the mutual intimacy of our souls has tightened the bonds, already so close, of our friendship. A man may save his comrade’s life, and kill him afterwards if he finds him a bad companion; but we have gone through what makes friendship indissoluble. There is between us that constant exchange of pleasing impressions on both sides which makes friendship, from that point of view, a richer joy, perhaps, than love.”

A pretty little hand shut the Count’s mouth so suddenly that the movement was almost a blow.

“Yes, indeed, my darling,” said he. “Friendship knows nothing of the bankruptcy of sentiment, the insolvency of pleasures. Love, after giving more than it has, ends by giving less than it receives.”

“On both sides alike then,” said Clémentine, smiling.

“Yes,” said Adam. “While friendship can but increase. You need not pout. We, my angel, are as much friends as lovers; we, at least, I hope, have combined the two feelings in our happy marriage.”

“I will explain to you what has made you two such good friends,” said Clémentine. “The difference in your love arises from a difference in your tastes, and not from compulsory choice; from preference, and not from the necessity of position. So far as a man can be judged from a glimpse, and from what you tell me, in this instance the subaltern may at times be the superior.”

“Oh! Paz is really my superior,” replied Adam simply. “I have no advantage over him but that of luck.”

His wife kissed him for this generous avowal.

“The perfect skill with which he conceals the loftiness of his soul is an immense superiority,” the Count went on. “I say to him, ‘You are a sly fellow; you have vast domains in your mind to which you retire.’ He has a right to the title of Count Paz; in Paris he will only be called Captain.”

“In short, a Florentine of the Middle Ages has resuscitated after three centuries,” said the Countess. “There is something of Dante in him, and something of Michelangelo.”

“Indeed, you are right; he is at heart a poet,” replied Adam.

“And so I am married to two Poles,” said the young Countess, with a gesture resembling that of a genius on the stage.

“Darling child!” said Adam, clasping Clémentine to him, “you would have distressed me very much if you had not liked my friend. We were both afraid of that, though he was delighted at my marrying. You will make him very happy by telling him that you love him⁠—oh! as an old friend.”

“Then I will go to dress; it is fine, we will all three go out,” said Clémentine, ringing for her maid.

Paz led such an underground life that all the fashion of Paris wondered who it was that accompanied Clémentine Laginski when they saw her driving to the Bois and back between him and her husband. During the drive Clémentine had insisted that Thaddeus was to dine with her. This whim of a despotic sovereign compelled the Captain to make an unwonted toilet. On returning from her drive Clémentine dressed with some coquettish care, in such a way as to produce as effect even on Adam as she entered the room where the two friends were awaiting her.

“Count Paz,” said she, “we will go to the opera together.”

It was said in the tone which from a woman conveys, “If you refuse, we shall quarrel.”

“With pleasure, madame,” replied the Captain. “But as I have not a Count’s fortune, call me Captain.”

“Well, then. Captain, give me your arm,” said she, taking it and leading him into the dining-room with a suggestion of the caressing familiarity which enraptures a lover.

The Countess placed the Captain next her, and he sat like a poor sublieutenant dining with a wealthy general. Paz left it to Clémentine to talk, listening to her with all the air of deference to a superior, contradicting her in nothing, and waiting for a positive question before making any reply. In short, to the Countess he seemed almost stupid, and her graces all fell flat before this icy gravity and diplomatic dignity. In vain did Adam try to rouse him by saying, “Come, cheer up. Captain. It might be supposed that you were not at home. You must have laid a bet that you would disconcert Clémentine?” Thaddeus remained heavy and half asleep.

When the three were alone at dessert the Captain explained that his life was planned diametrically unlike that of other people; he went to bed at eight o’clock, and rose at daybreak; and he thus excused himself, saying he was very sleepy.

“My intention in taking you to the opera was only to amuse you, Captain; but do just as you please,” said Clémentine, a little nettled.

“I will go,” said Paz.

“Duprez is singing in William Tell,” said Adam. “Would you prefer the Variétiés?”

The Captain smiled and rang the bell; the manservant appeared. “Tell Constantine,” said Paz, “to take out the large carriage instead of the coupe.⁠—We cannot sit comfortably in it,” he added, turning to the Count.

“A Frenchman would not have thought of that,” said Clémentine, smiling.

“Ah, but we are Florentines transplanted to the North,” replied Thaddeus, with a meaning and an expression which showed that his dullness at dinner had been assumed.

But by a very conceivable want of judgment, there was too great a contrast between the involuntary self-betrayal of this speech and the Captain’s attitude during dinner. Clémentine examined him with one of those keen flashes by which a woman reveals at once her surprise and her observancy. Thus, during the few minutes while they were taking their coffee in the drawing-room, silence reigned⁠—an uncomfortable silence for Adam, who could not divine its cause. Clémentine no longer disturbed Thaddeus. The Captain, for his part, retired again into military rigidity, and came out of it no more, either on the way, or in the box, where he affected to be asleep.

“You see, madame, that I am very dull company,” said he, during the ballet in the last act of William Tell. “Was I not right to ‘stick to my last,’ as the proverb says?”

“On my word, my dear Captain, you are neither a coxcomb nor a chatterbox; you are perhaps a Pole.”

“Leave me then to watch over your pleasures,” he replied, “to take care of your fortune and your house; that is all I am good for.”

“Tartufe! begone!” cried Adam, smiling. “My dear, he is full of heart, well informed⁠—he could, if he chose, hold his own in any drawing-room. Clémentine, do not believe what his modesty tells you.”

“Good night, Countess. I have proved my willingness, and now will avail myself of your carriage to go to bed at once. I will send it back for you.”

Clémentine bowed slightly, and let him go without replying.

“What a bear!” said she to the Count. “You are much, much nicer.”

Adam pressed his wife’s hand unseen.

“Poor, dear Thaddeus, he has endeavored to be a foil when many men would have tried to seem more attractive than I.”

“Oh!” said she, “I am not sure that was not intentional; his behavior would have mystified an ordinary woman.”

Half an hour later, while Boleslas the groom was calling “Gate,” and the coachman, having turned the carriage to drive in, was waiting for the gates to be opened, Clémentine said to the Count:

“Where does the Captain roost?”

“Up there,” said Adam, pointing to an elegantly constructed attic extending on both sides of the gateway with a window looking on to the street. “His rooms are over the coach-houses.”

“And who lives in the other half?”

“No one as yet,” replied Adam. “The other little suite, over the stables, will do for our children and their tutor.”

“He is not in bed,” said the Countess, seeing a light in the Captain’s room when the carriage was under the pillared portico⁠—copied from that at the Tuileries, and taking the place of the ordinary zinc awning painted to imitate striped ticking.

Paz, in his dressing-gown, and pipe in hand, was watching Clémentine as she disappeared into the hall. The day had been a cruel one to him. And this is the reason: Thaddeus had felt a fearful shock to his heart on the day when, Adam having taken him to the opera to pronounce his opinion, he first saw Mademoiselle du Rouvre; and again, when he saw her in the Maire’s office and at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, and recognized in her the woman whom a man must love to the exclusion of all others⁠—for Don Juan himself preferred one among the mille e tre!

Hence Paz had strongly advocated the classical bridal tour after the wedding. Fairly easy all the time while Clémentine was absent, his tortures began again on the return of the happy couple. And this was what he was thinking as he inhaled his latakia from a cherry-stem pipe, six feet long, a gift from Adam: “Only I and God, who will reward me for suffering in silence, may ever know how I love her! But how can I manage to avoid alike her love or her hatred?”

And he sat thinking, thinking, over this problem of the strategy of love.

It must not be supposed that Thaddeus lived bereft of all joy in the midst of his pain. The triumphant cunning of this day was a source of secret satisfaction. Since the Count’s return with his wife, day by day he felt ineffable happiness in seeing that he was necessary to the couple, who, but for him, would have rushed inevitably into ruin. What fortune can hold out against the extravagance of Paris life? Clémentine, brought up by a reckless father, knew nothing of household management, which nowadays the richest women and the highest in rank are obliged to undertake themselves. Who in these days can afford to keep a steward? Adam, on his part, as the son of one of the great Polish nobles who allowed themselves to be devoured by the Jews, and who was incapable of husbanding the remains of one of the most enormous fortunes in Poland⁠—where fortunes were enormous⁠—was not of a temper to restrict either his own fancies or his wife’s. If he had been alone, he would probably have ruined himself before his marriage. Paz had kept him from gambling on the Bourse, and does not that say all?

Consequently, when he found that, in spite of himself, he was in love with Clémentine, Paz had not the choice of leaving the house and traveling to forget his passion. Gratitude, the clue of the mystery of his life, held him to the house where he alone could act as man of business to this heedless couple. Their long absence made him hope for a calmer spirit; but the Countess came back more than ever lovely, having acquired that freedom of thought which marriage confers on the Paris woman, and displaying all the charms of a young wife, with the indefinable something which comes of happiness or of the independence allowed her by a man as trusting, as chivalrous, and as much in love as Adam was.

The consciousness of being the working hub of this magnificent house, the sight of Clémentine stepping out of her carriage on her return from a party, or setting out in the morning for the Bois de Boulogne, a glimpse of her on the Boulevards in her pretty carriage, like a flower in its nest of leaves, filled poor Thaddeus with deep, mysterious ecstasies which blossomed at the bottom of his heart without the slightest trace appearing in his features. How, during these five months, should the Countess ever have seen the Captain? He hid from her, concealing the care he took to keep out of her way.

Nothing is so near divine love as a hopeless love. Must not a man have some depth of soul thus to devote himself in silence and obscurity? This depth, where lurks the pride of a father⁠—or of God⁠—enshrines the worship of love for love’s sake, as power for power’s sake was the watchword of the Jesuits; a sublime kind of avarice, since it is perennially generous, and modeled indeed on the mysterious Being of the first principles of the world. Is not their result Nature? And Nature is an enchantress; she belongs to man, to the poet, the painter, the lover; but is not the Cause superior to Nature in the sight of certain privileged souls, and some stupendous thinkers? The Cause is God. In that sphere of Causes dwelt the spirits of Newton, of Laplace, of Kepler, of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Buffon, of the true poets and saints of the second century of our era, of Saint Theresa of Spain and the sublime mystics. Every human emotion contains some analogy with the frame of mind in which the Effect is neglected in favor of the Cause, and Thaddeus has risen to the height whence all things look different. Abandoned to the unspeakable joys of creative energy, Thaddeus was, in love, what we recognize as greatest in the records of genius.

“No, she is not altogether deceived,” thought he, as he watched the smoke curl from his pipe. “She might involve me in an irremediable quarrel with Adam if she spited me; and if she should flirt to torment me, what would become of me?”

The fatuity of this hypothesis was so unlike the Captain’s modest nature, and his somewhat German shyness, that he was vexed with himself for its having occurred to him, and went to bed determined to await events before taking any decisive steps.

Next morning Clémentine breakfasted very well without Thaddeus, and made no remark on his disobedience. That day, as it happened, was her day for being “at home,” and this, with her, demanded a royal display. She did not observe the absence of Captain Paz, on whom devolved all the arrangements for these great occasions.

“Well and good!” said Paz to himself, as he heard the carriages rumble out at two in the morning; “the Countess was only prompted by a Parisian’s whim or curiosity.”

So the Captain fell back into his regular routine, disturbed for a day by this incident. Clémentine, diverted by the details of life in Paris, seemed to have forgotten Paz. For do you suppose that it is a mere trifle to reign over this inconstant city? Do you imagine, by any chance, that a woman risks nothing but her fortune at that absorbing game?

The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a campaign was to the soldiers of the Empire. What a work of art⁠—of genius⁠—is a costume or a headdress created to make a sensation! A fragile, delicate woman wears her hard and dazzling armor of flowers and diamonds, silk and steel, from nine in the evening till two or often three in the morning. She eats little, to attract the eye by her slender shape; she cheats the hunger that attacks her during the evening with debilitating cups of tea, sweet cakes, heating ices, or heavy slices of pastry. The stomach must submit to the commands of vanity. She awakes late, and thus everything is in contradiction to the laws of Nature, and Nature is ruthless.

No sooner is she up than the woman of fashion begins to dress for the morning, planning her dress for the afternoon. Must she not receive and pay visits, and go to the Bois on horseback or in her carriage? Must she not always be practising the drill of smiles, and fatigue her brain in inventing compliments which shall seem neither stale nor studied? And it is not every woman who succeeds. And then you are surprised, when you see a young woman, whom the world has welcomed in her freshness, faded and blighted at the end of three years. Six months spent in the country are barely enough to heal the wounds inflicted by the winter. We hear nothing talked of but dyspepsia and strange maladies, unknown to women who devote themselves to their household. Formerly a woman was sometimes seen; now she is perpetually on the stage.

Clémentine had to fight her way; she was beginning to be quoted, and amid the cares of this struggle between her and her rivals there was hardly a place for love of her husband! Thaddeus might well be forgotten. However, a month later, in May, a few days before her departure to stay at Ronquerolles in Burgundy, as she was returning from her drive she saw Thaddeus in a side alley of the Champs-Élysées⁠—Thaddeus, carefully dressed, and in raptures at seeing his Countess so beautiful in her phaeton, with champing horses, splendid liveries; in short, the dear people he admired so much.

“There is the Captain,” said she to Adam.

“Happy fellow!” said the Count. “These are his great treats. There is not a smarter turnout than ours, and he delights in seeing everybody envying us our happiness. You have never noticed him before, but he is there almost every day.”

“What can he be thinking of?” said Clémentine.

“He is thinking at this moment that the winter has cost a great deal, and that we shall save a little by staying with your old uncle Ronquerolles,” said Adam.

The Countess had the carriage stopped in front of Paz, and desired him to take the seat by her side in the carriage. Thaddeus turned as red as a cherry.

“I shall poison you,” he said; “I have just been smoking cigars.”

“And does not Adam poison me?” she replied quickly.

“Yes, but he is Adam,” replied the Captain.

“And why should not Thaddeus enjoy the same privilege?” said the Countess with a smile.

This heavenly smile had a power which was too much for his heroic resolutions; he gazed at Clémentine with all the fire of his soul in his eyes, but tempered by the angelic expression of his gratitude⁠—that of a man who lived solely by gratitude. The Countess folded her arms in her shawl, leaned back pensively against the cushions, crumpling the feathers of her handsome bonnet, and gazed out at the passersby. This flash from a soul so noble, and hitherto so resigned, appealed to her feelings. What, after all, was Adam’s great merit? Was it not natural that he should be brave and generous? But the Captain!⁠—Thaddeus possessed, or seemed to possess, an immense superiority over Adam. What sinister thoughts distressed the Countess when she once more observed the contrast between the fine, complete physical nature which distinguished Thaddeus and the frail constitution which, in her husband, betrayed the inevitable degeneration of aristocratic families which are so mad as to persist in intermarrying! But the Devil alone knew these thoughts, for the young wife sat with vague meditation in her eyes, saying nothing till they reached home.

“You must dine with us, or I shall be angry with you for having disobeyed me,” said she as she went in. “You are Thaddeus to me, as you are to Adam. I know the obligations you feel to him, but I also know all we owe to you. In return for two impulses of generosity which are so natural, you are generous at all hours and day after day.⁠—My father is coming to dine with us, as well as my uncle Ronquerolles and my aunt de Sérizy; dress at once,” she said, pressing the hand he offered to help her out of the carriage.

Thaddeus went to his room to dress, his heart at once rejoicing and oppressed by an agonizing flutter. He came down at the last moment, and all through dinner played his part of a soldier fit for nothing but to fulfil the duties of a steward. But this time Clémentine was not his dupe. His look had enlightened her. Ronquerolles, the cleverest of ambassadors next to Talleyrand, and who served de Marsay so well during his short ministry, was informed by his niece of the high merits of Count Paz, who so modestly made himself his friend’s steward.

“And how is it that this is the first time I have ever seen Count Paz?” asked the Marquis de Ronquerolles.

“Eh! he is very sly and underhand,” replied Clémentine, with a look at Paz to desire him to change his demeanor.

Alas! it must be owned, at the risk of making the Captain less interesting to the reader, Paz, though superior to his friend Adam, was not a man of strong temper. He owed his apparent superiority to his misfortunes. In his days of poverty and isolation at Warsaw he had read and educated himself, had compared and thought much; but the creative power which makes a great man he did not possess⁠—can it ever be acquired? Paz was great only through his feelings, and there could rise to the sublime; but in the sphere of sentiment, being a man of action rather than of ideas, he kept his thoughts to himself. His thoughts, then, did nothing but eat his heart out.

And what, after all, is an unuttered thought?

At Clémentine’s speech the Marquis de Ronquerolles and his sister exchanged glances, with a side look at their niece, Count Adam, and Paz. It was one of those swift dramas which are played only in Italy or in Paris. Only in these two parts of the world⁠—excepting at all courts⁠—can the eyes say as much. To infuse into the eye all the power of the soul, to give it the full value of speech and throw a poem or a drama into a single flash, excessive servitude or excessive liberty is needed.

Adam, the Marquis du Rouvre, and the Countess did not perceive this flash of observation between a past coquette and an old diplomatist; but Paz, like a faithful dog, understood its forecast. It was, you must remember, an affair of two seconds. To describe the hurricane that ravaged the Captain’s heart would be too elaborate for these days.

“What! the uncle and aunt already fancy that she perhaps loves me?” said he to himself. “My happiness then depends only on my own audacity.⁠—And Adam!⁠ ⁠…”

Ideal love and mere desire, both quite as potent as friendship and gratitude, rent his soul, and for a moment love had the upper hand. This poor heroic lover longed to have his day! Paz became witty; he intended to please, and in answer to some question from Monsieur de Ronquerolles he sketched in grand outlines the Polish rebellion. Thus, at dessert, Paz saw Clémentine hanging on his lips, regarding him as a hero, and forgetting that Adam, after sacrificing a third of his immense fortune, had taken the risks of exile. At nine o’clock, having taken coffee, Madame de Sérizy kissed her niece on the forehead and took leave, carrying off Count Adam with an assertion of authority, and leaving the Marquis du Rouvre and M. de Ronquerolles, who withdrew ten minutes later. Paz and Clémentine were left together.

“I will bid you good night, madame,” said Thaddeus; “you will join them at the opera.”

“No,” replied she. “I do not care for dancing, and they are giving an odious ballet this evening, The Revolt of the Seraglio.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Two years ago Adam would not have gone without me,” she went on, without looking at Paz.

“He loves you to distraction⁠—” Thaddeus began.

“Oh! it is because he loves me to distraction that by tomorrow he will perhaps have ceased to love me!” exclaimed the Countess.

“The women of Paris are inexplicable,” said Thaddeus. “When they are loved to distraction, they want to be loved rationally; when they are loved rationally, they accuse a man of not knowing how to love.”

“And they are always right, Thaddeus,” she replied with a smile. “I know Adam well; I owe him no grudge for it; he is fickle, and, above all, a great gentleman; he will always be pleased to have me for his wife, and will never thwart me in any of my tastes; but⁠—”

“What marriage was ever without a but?” said Thaddeus gently, trying to give the Countess’ thoughts another direction.

The least conceited man would perhaps have had the thought which nearly drove this lover mad: “If I do not tell her that I love her,” said he to himself, “I am an idiot!”

There was silence between these two, one of those terrible pauses which seem bursting with thoughts. The Countess fixed a covert gaze on Paz, and Paz watched her in a mirror. Sitting back in his armchair, like a man given up to digestion, in the attitude of an old man or an indifferent husband, the Captain clasped his hands over his stomach, and mechanically twirled his thumbs, looking stupidly at their rapid movement.

“But say something good about Adam!” exclaimed Clémentine. “Tell me that he is not fickle, you who know him so well.”

The appeal was sublime.

“This is the opportunity for raising an insurmountable barrier between us,” thought the unhappy Paz, devising a heroic lie.⁠—“Something good?” he said aloud. “I love him too well, you would not believe me. I am incapable of telling you any evil of him.⁠ ⁠… And so⁠ ⁠… Madame, I have a hard part to play between you two.”

Clémentine looked down, fixing her eyes on his patent leather shoes.

“You northerners have mere physical courage, you have no constancy in your decisions,” said she in a low tone.

“What are you going to do alone, madame?” replied Paz, with a perfectly ingenuous expression.

“You are not going to keep me company?”

“Forgive me for leaving you.”

“Why! where are you going?”

“I am going to the circus; it is the first night, in the Champs-Élysées, and I must not fail to be there⁠ ⁠…”

“Why not?” asked Clémentine, with a half-angry flash.

“Must I lay bare my heart?” he replied, coloring, “and confide to you what I conceal from my dear Adam, who believes that I love Poland alone?”

“What! our dear, noble Captain has a secret?”

“A disgrace which you will understand, and for which you can comfort me.”

“A disgrace!⁠—You?⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes, I⁠—Count Paz, am madly in love with a girl who was touring round France with the Bouthor family, people who have a circus after the pattern of Franconi’s, but who only perform at fairs! I got her an engagement from the manager of the Cirque-Olympique.”

“Is she handsome?” asked the Countess.

“In my eyes,” he replied sadly. “Malaga, that is her name to the public, is strong, nimble, and supple. Why do I prefer her to every other woman in the world?⁠—Indeed, I cannot tell you. When I see her with her black hair tied back with blue ribbons that float over her bare olive-tinted shoulders, dressed in a white tunic with a gilt border, and silk tights which make her appear a living Greek statue, her feet in frayed satin slippers, flourishing flags in her hand to the sound of a military band, and flying through an enormous hoop covered with paper which crashes in the air⁠—when her horse rushes round at a gallop, and she gracefully drops on to him again, applauded, honestly applauded, by a whole people⁠—well, it excites me.”

“More than a woman at a ball?” said Clémentine, with insinuating surprise.

“Yes,” said Paz in a choked voice. “This splendid agility, this unfailing grace in constant peril, seem to me the greatest triumph of woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Ellsler, all who reign or ever reigned on the boards, seem to me unworthy to untie Malaga’s shoe strings⁠—Malaga, who can mount or dismount a horse at a mad gallop, who slips under him from the left to reappear on the right, who flutters about the most fiery steed like a white will-o’-the-wisp, who can stand on the tip of one toe and then drop, sitting with her feet hanging, on a horse still galloping round, and who finally stands on his back without any reins, knitting a stocking, beating eggs, or stirring an omelette, to the intense admiration of the people, the true people, the peasantry and soldiers. During the walk round, madame, that enchanting Columbine used to carry chairs balanced on the tip of her nose, the prettiest Greek nose I ever saw. Malaga is dexterity personified. Her strength is Herculean; with her tiny fist or her little foot she can shake off three or four men. She is the goddess of athletics.”

“She must be stupid.”

“Oh!” cried Paz, “she is as amusing as the heroine of Peveril of the Peak. As heedless as a gypsy, she says everything that comes into her head; she cares no more for the future than you care for the halfpence you throw to a beggar, and she lets out really sublime things. Nothing will ever convince her that an old diplomat is a handsome young man, and a million of francs would not make her change her opinion. Her love for a man is a perpetual flattery. Enjoying really insolent health, her teeth are two-and-thirty Oriental pearls set in coral. Her ‘snout’⁠—so she calls the lower part of her face⁠—is, as Shakespeare has it, as fresh and sweet as a heifer’s muzzle. And it can give bitter pain! She respects fine men, strong men⁠—an Adolphus, an Augustus, an Alexander⁠—acrobats and tumblers. Her teacher, a horrible Cassandro, thrashed her unmercifully; it cost thousands of blows to give her such agility, grace, and intrepidity.”

“You are drunk with Malaga!” said the Countess.

“Her name is Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with a look of annoyance. “She lives in the Rue Saint-Lazare, in a little apartment on the third floor, in velvet and silk, like a princess. She leads two lives⁠—one as a dancer, and one as a pretty woman.”

“And does she love you?”

“She loves me⁠—you will laugh⁠—solely because I am a Pole. She sees in every Pole a Poniatowski, as he is shown in the print, jumping into the Elster; for to every Frenchman the Elster, in which it is impossible to drown, is a foaming torrent which swallowed up Poniatowski.⁠—And with all this I am very unhappy, madame⁠—”

Clémentine was touched by a tear of rage in the Captain’s eye.

“You love the extraordinary, you men,” said she.

“And you?” asked Thaddeus.

“I know Adam so well that I know he could forget me for some acrobatic tumbler like your Malaga. But where did you find her?”

“At Saint-Cloud, last September, at the fair. She was standing in a corner of the platform covered with canvas where the performers walk round. Her comrades, all dressed as Poles, were making a terrific Babel. I saw her silent and dreamy, and fancied I could guess that her thoughts were melancholy. Was there not enough to make her so⁠—a girl of twenty? That was what touched me.”

The Countess was leaning in a bewitching attitude, pensive, almost sad.

“Poor, poor Thaddeus!” she exclaimed. And with the good-fellowship of a really great lady, she added, not without a meaning smile, “Go; go to the circus!”

Thaddeus took her hand and kissed it, dropping a hot tear, and then went out. After having invented a passion for a circus-rider, he must give it some reality. Of his whole story nothing had been true but the minute’s attention he had given to the famous Malaga, the rider of the Bouthor troupe at Saint-Cloud; her name had just caught his eye on an advertisement of the circus. The clown, bribed by a single five-franc piece, had told Paz that the girl was a foundling, or had perhaps been stolen.

Thaddeus now went to the circus and saw the handsome horsewoman again. For ten francs, a groom⁠—they fill the place of dressers at a circus⁠—informed him that Malaga’s name was Marguerite Turquet, and that she lived at the Rue des Fossés-du-Temple, on a fifth floor.

Next day, with death in his soul, Paz found his way to that quarter, and asked for Mademoiselle Turquet, in summer the understudy of the principal rider at the cirque, and in winter “a super” in a Boulevard theatre.

“Malaga!” shouted the doorkeeper, rushing into the attic, “here is a fine gentleman for you! He is asking Chapuzot all about you; and Chapuzot is cramming him to give me time to let you know.”

“Thank you, M’ame Chapuzot; but what will he say to find me ironing my gown?”

“Pooh, stuff! When a man is in love, he loves everything about you.”

“Is he an Englishman? They are fond of horses.”

“No. He looks to me like a Spaniard.”

“So much the worse. The Spaniards are down in the market they say.⁠—Stay here, Madame Chapuzot, I shall not look so left to myself.”

“Who were you wanting, monsieur?” said the woman, opening the door to Thaddeus.

“Mademoiselle Turquet.”

“My child,” said the porter’s wife, wrapping her shawl round her, “There is somebody asking for you.”

A rope on which some linen was airing knocked off the Captain’s hat.

“What is your business, monsieur?” asked Malaga, picking it up.

“I saw you at the circus; you remind me, mademoiselle, of a daughter I lost; and out of affection for my Héloïse, whom you are so wonderfully like, I should wish to be of use to you if you will allow me.”

“Well, to be sure! But sit down. Monsieur le Général,” said Madame Chapuzot. “You cannot say fairer⁠—nor handsomer.”

“I am not by way of lovemaking, my good lady,” said Paz. “I am a father in deep distress, eager to be cheated by a likeness.”

“And so I am to pass as your daughter?” said Malaga, very roguishly, and without suspecting the absolute truth of the statement.

“Yes,” said Paz. “I will come sometimes to see you; and that the illusion may be perfect, I will place you in handsome lodgings, nicely furnished⁠—”

“I shall have furniture of my own?” said Malaga, looking at Madame Chapuzot.

“And servants,” Paz went on; “and live quite at your ease.”

Malaga looked at the stranger from under her brows.

“From what country are you, monsieur?”

“I am a Pole.”

“Then I accept,” said she.

Paz went away, promising to call again.

“That is a tough one!” said Marguerite Turquet, looking at Madame Chapuzot. “But I am afraid this man is wheedling me to humor some fancy. Well, I will risk it.”

A month after this whimsical scene, the fair circus-rider was established in rooms charmingly furnished by Count Adam’s upholsterer, for Paz wished that his folly should be talked about in the Laginski household. Malaga, to whom the adventure was like an Arabian Nights’ dream, was waited on by the Chapuzot couple⁠—at once her servants and her confidants. The Chapuzots and Marguerite Turquet expected some startling climax; but at the end of three months, neither Malaga nor the Chapuzots could account for the Polish Count’s fancy. Paz would spend about an hour there once a week, during which he sat in the drawing-room, never choosing to go either into Malaga’s boudoir nor into her bedroom, which, in fact, he never entered in spite of the cleverest manoeuvring on her part and on that of the Chapuzots. The Count inquired about the little incidents that varied the horsewoman’s life, and on going away he always left two forty-franc pieces on the chimney-shelf.

“He looks dreadfully bored,” said Madame Chapuzot.

“Yes,” replied Malaga, “that man is as cold as frost after a thaw.”

“He is a jolly good fellow, all the same,” cried Chapuzot, delighted to see himself dressed in blue Elbeuf cloth, and as smart as a Minister’s office-messenger.

Paz, by his periodical tribute, made Marguerite Turquet an allowance of three hundred and twenty francs a month. This sum, added to her small earnings at the circus, secured her a splendid existence as compared with her past squalor. Strange tales were current among the performers at the circus as to Malaga’s good fortune. The girl’s vanity allowed her rent to be stated at sixty thousand francs, instead of the modest six thousand which her rooms cost the prudent Captain. According to the clowns and supers, Malaga ate off silver plate; and she certainly came to the circus in pretty burnouses, in shawls, and elegant scarfs. And, to crown all, the Pole was the best fellow a circus-rider could come across; never tiresome, never jealous, leaving Malaga perfect freedom.

“Some women are so lucky!” said Malaga’s rival. “Such a thing would never happen to me, though I bring in a third of the receipts.”

Malaga wore smart “coal-scuttles,” and sometimes gave herself airs in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, where the youth of fashion began to observe her. In short, Malaga was talked about in the flash world of equivocal women, and her good fortune was attacked by calumny. She was reported to be a somnambulist, and the Pole was said to be a magnetizer in search of the Philosopher’s Stone. Other comments of a far more venomous taint made Malaga more inquisitive than Psyche; she reported them, with tears, to Paz.

“When I owe a woman a grudge,” said she to conclude, “I do not calumniate her, I do not say that a man magnetizes her to find stones. I say that she is a bad lot, and I prove it. Why do you get me into trouble?”

Paz was cruelly speechless.

Madame Chapuzot succeeded at last in discovering his name and title. Then, at the Hôtel Laginski, she ascertained some positive facts: Thaddeus was unmarried, he was not known to have a dead daughter either in Poland or France. Malaga could not help feeling a thrill of terror.

“My dear child,” said Madame Chapuzot, “that monster⁠—”

A man who was satisfied with gazing at a beautiful creature like Malaga⁠—gazing at her by stealth⁠—from under his brows⁠—not daring to come to any decision⁠—without any confidence; such a man, in Madame Chapuzot’s mind, must be a monster. “That monster is breaking you in, to lead you on to something illegal or criminal. God above us! if you were to be brought up at the Assizes⁠—and it makes me shudder from head to foot to think of it, I quake only to speak of it⁠—or in the Criminal Court, and your name was in the newspapers!⁠ ⁠… Do you know what I should do in your place? Well, in your place, to make all safe, I should warn the police.”

One day, when mad notions were fermenting in Malaga’s brain, Paz having laid his gold pieces on the velvet chimney-shelf, she snatched up the money and flung it in his face, saying, “I will not take stolen money!”

The Captain gave the gold to the Chapuzots, and came no more.

Clémentine was spending the summer on the estate of her uncle, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, in Burgundy.

When the troupe at the circus no longer saw Thaddeus in his seat, there was a great talk among the artists. Malaga’s magnanimity was regarded as folly by some, as cunning by others. The Pole’s behavior, as explained to the most experienced of the women, seemed inexplicable. In the course of a single week, Thaddeus received thirty-seven letters from women of the town. Happily for him, his singular reserve gave rise to no curiosity in fashionable circles, and remained the subject of discussion in the flash set only.

Two months later, the handsome rider, swamped in debt, wrote to Count Paz the following letter, which the dandies of the day regarded as a masterpiece:⁠—

“You, whom I still venture to call my friend, will you not take pity on me after what passed between us, which you took so ill? My heart disowns everything that could hurt your feelings. If I was so happy as to make you feel some charm when you sat near me, as you used to do, come again⁠ ⁠… otherwise, I shall sink into despair. Poverty has come upon me already, and you do not know what stupid things it brings with it. Yesterday I lived on a herring for two sous and one sou’s worth of bread. Is that a breakfast for the woman you love? The Chapuzots have left me after seeming so devoted to me. Your absence has shown me the shallowness of human attachment. A bailiff, who turned a deaf ear to me, has seized everything on behalf of the landlord, who has no pity, and of the jeweler, who will not wait even ten days; for with you men, credit vanishes with confidence. What a position for a woman who has nothing to reproach herself for but a little amusement! My dear friend, I have taken everything of any value to my uncle’s; I have nothing left but my memory of you, and the hard weather is coming on. All through the winter I shall have no fire, since nothing but melodrama is played at the Boulevard, in which I have nothing to do but tiny parts, which do not show a woman off. How could you misunderstand my noble feelings towards you, for, after all, we have not two ways of expressing our gratitude? How is it that you, who seemed so pleased to see me comfortable, could leave me in misery? Oh, my only friend on earth, before I go back to travel from fair to fair with the Bouthors⁠—for so, at any rate, I can make my living⁠—forgive me for wanting to know if I have really lost you forever. If I should happen to think of you just as I was jumping through the hoop, I might break my legs by missing time. Come what may, I am yours for life.

“This letter,” exclaimed Thaddeus, shouting with laughter, “is well worth my ten thousand francs.”

Clémentine came home on the following day, and Paz saw her once more, lovelier and more gracious than ever. During dinner the Countess preserved an air of perfect indifference towards Thaddeus, but a scene took place between the Count and his wife after their friend had left. Thaddeus, with an affectation of asking Adam’s advice, had left Malaga’s letter in his hands, as if by accident.

“Poor Thaddeus!” said Adam to his wife, after seeing Paz make his escape. “What a misfortune for a man of his superior stamp to be the plaything of a ballet-girl of the lowest class! He will love anything; he will degrade himself; he will be unrecognizable before long. Here, my dear, read that,” and he handed her Malaga’s letter.

Clémentine read the note, which smelt of tobacco, and tossed it away with disgust.

“However thick the bandage over his eyes may be, he must have found something out. Malaga must have played him some faithless trick.”

“And he is going back to her!” cried Clémentine. “He will forgive her! You men can have no pity for any but those horrible women.”

“They want it so badly!” said Adam.

“Thaddeus did himself justice⁠—by keeping to himself!” said she.

“Oh, my dearest, you go too far,” said the Count, who, though he was at first delighted to lower his friend in his wife’s eyes, would not the death of the sinner.

Thaddeus, who knew Adam well, had begged for absolute secrecy; he had only spoken, he said, as an excuse for his dissipations, and to beg his friend to allow him to have a thousand crowns for Malaga.

“He is a man of great pride,” Adam went on.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, to have spent no more than ten thousand francs on her, and to wait for such a letter as that to rouse him before taking her the money to pay her debts! For a Pole, on my honor!⁠ ⁠…”

“But he may ruin you!” said Clémentine in the acrid tone of a Parisian woman when she expresses her catlike distrustfulness.

“Oh! I know him,” said Adam. “He would sacrifice Malaga to us.”

“We shall see,” replied the Countess.

“If it were needful for his happiness, I should not hesitate to ask him to give her up. Constantino tells me that during the time when he was seeing her, Paz, usually so sober, sometimes came in quite fuddled. If he allowed himself to take to drink, I should be as much grieved as if he were my son.”

“Do not tell me any more!” cried the Countess with another gesture of disgust.

Two days later the Captain could see in her manner, in the tone of her voice, in her eyes, the terrible results of Adam’s betrayal. Scorn had opened gulfs between him and this charming woman. And he fell forthwith into deep melancholy, devoured by this thought, “You have made yourself unworthy of her.” Life became a burden to him; the bright sunshine was gloomy in his eyes. Nevertheless, under these floods of bitter thought, he had some happy moments: he could now give himself up without danger to his admiration for the Countess, who never paid him the slightest attention when, at a party, hidden in a corner, mute, all eyes and all heart, he did not lose one of her movements, not a note of her song when she sang. He lived in this enchanting life: he might himself groom the horse that she was to ride, and devote himself to the management of her splendid house with redoubled care for its interests.

These unspoken joys were buried in his heart like those of a mother, whose child never knows anything of his mother’s heart: for is it knowledge so long as even one thing remains unknown? Was not this finer than Petrarch’s chaste passion for Laura, which, after all, was well repaid by a wealth of glory, and by the triumph of the poetry she had inspired? Was not the emotion which Assas felt in dying, in truth a whole life? This emotion Paz felt every day without dying, but also without the guerdon of immortality.

What is there in love, that Paz, notwithstanding these secret delights, was consumed by sorrow? The Catholic religion has so elevated love that she has married it inseparably, so to speak, to esteem and generosity. Love does not exist apart from the fine qualities of which man is proud, and so rarely are we loved if we are contemned, that Thaddeus was perishing of his self-inflicted wounds. Only to hear her say that she could have loved him, and then to die! The hapless lover would have thought his life well paid for. The torments of his previous position seemed to him preferable to living close to her, loading her with his generosity without being appreciated or understood. In short, he wanted the price of his virtue.

He grew thin and yellow, and fell so thoroughly ill, consumed by low fever, that during the month of January he kept his bed, though refusing to see a physician. Count Adam grew extremely uneasy about his poor Thaddeus. The Countess then was so cruel as to say, when they were together one day, “Let him alone; do not you see that he has some Olympian remorse?”

This speech stung Thaddeus to the courage of despair; he got up, went out, tried some amusement, and recovered his health.

In the month of February Adam lost a rather considerable sum at the Jockey Club, and, being afraid of his wife, he begged Thaddeus to place this sum to the account of his extravagance for Malaga.

“What is there strange in the notion that the ballet-girl should have cost you twenty thousand francs? It concerns no one but me. Whereas, if the Countess should know that I had lost it at play, I should fall in her esteem, and she would be in alarm for the future.”

“This to crown all!” cried Thaddeus, with a deep sigh.

“Ah! Thaddeus, this service would make us quits if I were not already the debtor.”

“Adam, you may have children. Give up gambling,” said his friend.

“Twenty thousand francs more that Malaga has cost us!” exclaimed the Countess some days after, on discovering Adam’s generosity to Paz. “And ten thousand before⁠—that is thirty thousand in all! Fifteen hundred francs a year, the price of my box at the Italian opera, a whole fortune to many people.⁠ ⁠… Oh! you Poles are incomprehensible!” cried she, as she picked some flowers in her beautiful conservatory. “You care no more than that!”

“Poor Paz⁠—”

“Poor Paz, poor Paz!” she echoed, interrupting him. “What good does he do us? I will manage the house myself! Give him the hundred louis a year that he refused, and let him make his own arrangements with the Olympic Circus.”

“He is of the greatest use to us; he has saved us at least forty thousand francs this year. In short, my dearest, he placed a hundred thousand francs for us in Nucingen’s bank, and a steward would have netted them.”

Clémentine was softened, but she was not the less hard on Thaddeus.

Some days after she desired Paz to come to her in her boudoir, where, a year since, she had been startled by comparing him with the Count. This time she received him alone, without any suspicion of danger.

“My dear Paz,” said she, with the careless familiarity of fine folks to their inferiors, “if you love Adam as you say you do, you will do one thing which he will never ask, but which I, as his wife, do not hesitate to require of you⁠—”

“It is about Malaga?” said Thaddeus with deep irony.

“Well, yes, it is,” she said. “If you want to end your days with us, if you wish that we should remain friends, give her up. How can an old soldier⁠—”

“I am but five-and-thirty, and have not a gray hair!”

“You look as if you had,” said she, “and that is the same thing. How can a man so capable of putting two and two together, so superior⁠ ⁠…”

What was horrible was that she spoke the word with such an evident intention of rousing in him the nobleness of soul which she believed to be dead.

“So superior as you are,” she went on, after a little pause, which a gesture from Paz forced from her, “allow yourself to be entrapped like a boy. Your affair with her has made Malaga famous.⁠—Well! My uncle wanted to see her, My uncle is not the only one; Malaga is very ready to receive all these gentlemen.⁠—I believed you to be high-minded.⁠—Take shame to yourself! Come, would she be an irreparable loss to you?”

“Madame, if I knew of any sacrifice by which I might recover your esteem, it would soon be made; but to give up Malaga is not a sacrifice⁠—”

“In your place that is what I should say if I were a man,” replied Clémentine. “Well, but if I take it as a great sacrifice, there is nothing to be angry at.”

Paz went away, fearing he might do some mad act; he felt his brain invaded by crazy notions. He went out for a walk, lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but failed to cool the burning of his face and brow. “I believed you to be high-minded!” He heard the words again and again. “And scarcely a year ago,” said he to himself, “to hear Clémentine, I had beaten the Russians single-handed!” He thought of quitting the Laginski household, of asking to be sent on service in the Spahi regiment, and getting himself killed in Africa; but a dreadful fear checked him: “What would become of them without me? They would soon be ruined. Poor Countess, what a horrible life it would be for her to be reduced even to thirty thousand francs a year! Come,” said he to himself, “since she can never be yours, courage, finish your work!”

As all the world knows, since 1830 the Carnival in Paris has grown to prodigious proportions, making it European, and burlesque, and animated to a far greater degree than the departed carnivals of Venice. Is this because, since fortunes have so enormously diminished, Parisians have thought of amusing themselves collectively, just as in their clubs they have a drawing-room without any mistress of the house, without politeness, and quite cheap? Be this as it may, the month of March was prodigal of those balls, where dancing, farce, coarse fun, delirium, grotesque figures, and banter made keen by Paris wit, achieved gigantic results. This madness had its Pandemonium at that time in the Rue Saint-Honoré, and its Napoleon in Musard, a little man born to rule an orchestra as tremendous as the rampant mob, and to conduct a galop⁠—that whirl of witches at their Sabbath, and one of Auber’s triumphs, for the galop derived its form and its poetry from the famous galop in Gustavus. May not this vehement finale serve as a symbol of an age when, for fifty years, everything has rushed on with the swiftness of a dream?

Now, our grave Thaddeus, bearing an immaculate image in his heart, went to Malaga to invite her, the queen of carnival dancing, to spend an evening at Musard’s as soon as he learned that the Countess, disguised to the teeth, was intending to come with two other young ladies, escorted by their husbands, to see the curious spectacle of one of these monster balls. On Shrove Tuesday night, in the year of grace 1838, at four o’clock in the morning, the Countess, wrapped in a black domino, and seated on a bench of one of the amphitheatres of the Babylonian hall where Valentino has since given his concerts, saw Thaddeus, dressed as Robert Macaire, leading the circus-rider in the costume of a savage, her head dressed with nodding plumes like a horse at a coronation, and leaping among the groups like a perfect Jack-o’-lantern.

“Oh!” exclaimed Clémentine to her husband, “you Poles are not men of character. Who would not have felt sure of Thaddeus? He gave me his word, not knowing that I should be here and see all without being seen.”

Some days after this she invited Paz to dinner. After dinner, Adam left them together, and Clémentine scolded Thaddeus in such a way as to make him feel that she would no longer have him about the house.

“Indeed, madame,” said Thaddeus humbly, “you are quite right. I am a wretch; I had pledged my word. But what can I do? I put off the parting with Malaga till after the Carnival.⁠ ⁠… And I will be honest with you; the woman has so much power over me⁠ ⁠…”

“A woman who gets herself turned out of Musard’s by the police, and for such dancing?”

“I admit it; I sit condemned; I will quit your house. But you know Adam. If I hand over to you the conduct of your affairs, you will have to exert great energy. Though I have the vice of Malaga, I know how to keep an eye on your concerns, how to manage your household, and superintend the smallest details. Allow me then to remain till I have seen you qualified to continue my system of management. You have now been married three years, and are safe from the first follies consequent on the honeymoon. The ladies of Paris society, even with the highest titles, understand very well in these days how to control a fortune and a household.⁠ ⁠… Well, as soon as I am assured, not of your capacity, but of your firmness, I will leave Paris.”

“It is Thaddeus of Warsaw that speaks, not Thaddeus of the circus. Come back to us cured.”

“Cured?⁠—Never!” said Paz, his eyes fixed on Clémentine’s pretty feet. “You cannot know, Countess, all the spice, the unexpectedness there is in that woman’s wit.” And feeling his courage fail him, he added: “There is not a single woman of fashion, with her prim airs, who is worth that frank young animal nature.”

“In fact, I should not choose to have anything in me of the animal!” said the Countess, with a flashing look like an adder in a rage.

After that day Count Paz explained to Clémentine all her affairs, made himself her tutor, taught her the difficulties of managing her property, the real cost of things, and the way to avoid being too extensively robbed by her people. She might trust Constantine, and make him her majordomo. Thaddeus had trained Constantine. By the month of May he thought the Countess perfectly capable of administering her fortune; for Clémentine was one of those clear-sighted women whose instincts are alert, with an inborn genius for household rule.

The situation thus naturally brought about by Thaddeus took a sudden turn most distressing for him, for his sufferings were not so light as he made them seen. The hapless lover had not reckoned with accident. Adam fell very seriously ill. Thaddeus, instead of leaving, installed himself as his friend’s sick-nurse. His devotedness was indefatigable. A woman who had had an interest in looking through the telescope of foresight would have seen in the Captain’s heroism the sort of punishment which noble souls inflict on themselves to subdue their involuntary thoughts of sin; but women see everything or nothing, according to their frame of mind; love is their sole luminary.

For forty-five days Paz watched and nursed Mitgislas without seeming to have a thought of Malaga, for the excellent reason that he never did think of her. Clémentine, seeing Adam at death’s door, and yet not dead, had a consultation of the most famous doctors.

“If he gets through this,” said the most learned of the physicians, “it can only be by an effort of nature. It lies with those who nurse him to watch for the moment and aid nature. The Count’s life is in the hands of his attendants.”

Thaddeus went to communicate this verdict to Clémentine, who was sitting in the Chinese pavilion, as much to rest after her fatigues as to leave the field free for the doctors, and not to be in their way. As he trod the graveled paths leading from the boudoir to the rockery on which the Chinese summer house was built, Clémentine’s lover felt as though he were in one of the gulfs described by Alighieri. The unhappy man had never foreseen the chance of becoming Clémentine’s husband, and he had bogged himself in a swamp of mud. When he reached her his face was set, sublime in its despair. Like Medusa’s head, it communicated terror.

“He is dead?” said Clémentine.

“They have given no hope; at least, they leave it to nature. Do not go in just yet. They are still there, and Bianchon himself is examining him.”

“Poor fellow!⁠—I wonder whether I have ever worried him,” she said.

“You have made him very happy; be quite easy on that point,” said Thaddeus; “and you have been indulgent to him⁠—”

“The loss will be irreparable.”

“But, dear lady, supposing the Count should die, had you not formed your opinion of him?”

“I do not love him blindly,” she said; “but I loved as a wife ought to love her husband.”

“Then,” said Thaddeus, in a voice new to Clémentine’s experience of him, “you ought to feel less regret than if you were losing one of those men who are a woman’s pride, her love, her whole life! You may be frank with such a friend as I am.⁠ ⁠… I shall regret him⁠—I! Long before your marriage I had made him my child, and I have devoted my life to him. I shall have no interest left on earth. But life still has charms for a widow of four-and-twenty.”

“Why, you know very well that I love no one,” said she, with the roughness of sorrow.

“You do not know yet what it is to love,” said Thaddeus.

“Oh! husband for husband, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. For nearly a month now we have been asking ourselves, ‘Will he live?’ These fluctuations have prepared me, as they have you, for this end. I may be frank with you?⁠—Well, then, I would give part of my life to save Adam’s. Does not independence for a woman, here in Paris, mean liberty to be gulled by the pretence of love in men who are ruined or profligate? I have prayed God to spare me my husband⁠—so gentle, such a good fellow, so little fractious, and who was beginning to be a little afraid of me.”

“You are honest, and I like you the better for it,” said Thaddeus, taking Clémentine’s hands, which she allowed him to kiss. “In such a solemn moment there is indescribable satisfaction in finding a woman devoid of hypocrisy. It is possible to talk to you.⁠—Consider the future; supposing God should not listen to you⁠—and I am one of those who are most ready to cry to Him: Spare my friend!⁠—for these fifty nights past have not made my eyes heavy, and if thirty days’ and thirty nights’ more care are needed, you, madame, may sleep while I watch. I will snatch him from death, if, as they say, he can be saved by care. But if, in spite of you, in spite of me, the Count is dead. Well, then, if you were loved, or worshiped, by a man whose heart and character were worthy of yours⁠—”

“I have perhaps madly wished to be loved, but I have never met⁠—”

“Supposing you were mistaken.”

Clémentine looked steadily at Thaddeus, suspecting him less of loving her than of a covetous dream; she poured contempt on him by a glance, measuring him from head to foot, and crushed him with two words, “Poor Malaga!” pronounced in those tones such as fine ladies alone can find in the gamut of their contempt.

She rose and left Thaddeus fainting, for she did not turn round, but walked with great dignity back to her boudoir, and thence up to her husband’s room.

An hour later Paz returned to the sick man’s bedside, and gave all his care to the Count, as though he had not received his own deathblow.

From that dreadful moment he became silent; he had a duel to fight with disease, and he carried it through in a way that excited the admiration of the doctors. At any hour his eyes were always beaming like two lamps. Without showing the slightest resentment towards Clémentine, he listened to her thanks without accepting them; he seemed deaf. He had said to himself, “She shall owe Adam’s life to me!” and these words he had, as it were, written in letters of fire in the sick man’s room.

At the end of a fortnight Clémentine was obliged to give up some of the nursing, or risk falling ill from so much fatigue. Paz was inexhaustible. At last, about the end of August, Bianchon, the family doctor, answered for the Count’s life:

“Ah, madame,” said he to Clémentine, “you are under not the slightest obligation to me. But for his friend we could not have saved him!”

On the day after the terrible scene in the Chinese pavilion, the Marquis de Ronquerolles had come to see his nephew, for he was setting out for Russia with a secret mission; and Paz, overwhelmed by the previous evening, had spoken a few words to the diplomat.

On the very day when Count Adam and his wife went out for the first time for a drive, at the moment when the carriage was turning from the steps, an orderly came into the courtyard and asked for Count Paz. Thaddeus, who was sitting with his back to the horses, turned round to take a letter bearing the stamp of the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and put it into the side-pocket of his coat, with a decision which precluded any questions on the part of Clémentine or Adam. It cannot be denied that persons of good breeding are masters of the language that uses no speech. Nevertheless, as they reached the Porte Maillot, Adam, assuming the privilege of a convalescent whose whims must be indulged, said to Thaddeus:

“There can be no indiscretions between two brothers who love each other as you and I do; you know what is in that letter; tell me, I am in a fever of curiosity.”

Clémentine looked at Thaddeus as an angry woman can, and said to her husband, “He has been so sulky with me these two months, that I shall take good care not to press him.”

“Oh dear me!” replied Thaddeus, “as I cannot hinder the newspapers from publishing it, I may very well reveal the secret. The Emperor Nicholas does me the favor of appointing me Captain on service in a regiment starting with the Kiva Expedition.”

“And you are going?” cried Adam.

“I shall go, my dear fellow. I came as Captain, and as Captain I return. Malaga might lead me to make a fool of myself. We shall dine together tomorrow for the last time. If I did not set out in September for St. Petersburg, I should have to travel overland, and I am not rich. I must leave Malaga her little independence. How can I fail to provide for the future of the only woman who has understood me? Malaga thinks me a great man! Malaga thinks me handsome! Malaga may perhaps be faithless, but she would go through⁠—”

“Through a hoop for you, and fall on her feet on horseback!” said Clémentine, sharply.

“Oh, you do not know Malaga,” said the Captain, with deep bitterness, and an ironical look which made Clémentine uneasy and silent.

“Farewell to the young trees of this lovely Bois de Boulogne, where Parisian ladies drive, and the exiles wander who have found a home here. I know that my eyes will never again see the green trees of the Allée de Mademoiselle, or of the Route des Dames, nor the acacias, nor the cedar at the Ronds-points.

“On the Asiatic frontier, obedient to the schemes of the great Emperor I have chosen to be my master, promoted perhaps to command an army, for sheer courage, for constantly risking my life, I may indeed regret the Champs-Élysées where you, once, made me take a place in the carriage, by your side.⁠—Finally, I shall never cease to regret the severity of Malaga⁠—of the Malaga I am at this moment thinking of.”

This was said in a tone that made Clémentine shiver.

“Then you love Malaga very truly?” she said.

“I have sacrificed for her the honor we never sacrifice⁠—”

“Which?”

“That which we would fain preserve at any cost in the eyes of the idol we worship.”

After this speech Thaddeus kept impenetrable silence; he broke it only when, as they drove down the Champs-Élysées, he pointed to a wooden structure and said, “There is the circus!”

Before their last dinner he went to the Russian Embassy for a few minutes, and from thence to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and he started for le Havre next morning before the Countess and Adam were up.

“I have lofft a friend,” said Adam, with tears in his eyes, as he learned that Count Paz was gone, “a friend in the truest sense of the word, and I cannot think what has made him flee from my house as if it were the plague. We are not the sort of friends to quarrel over a woman,” he went on, looking full at Clémentine, “and yet all he said yesterday about Malaga⁠—But he never laid the tip of his finger on the girl.”

“How do you know?” asked Clémentine.

“Well, I was naturally curious to see Mademoiselle Turquet, and the poor girl cannot account for Thaddeus’ extraordinary reserve⁠—”

“That is enough,” said the Countess, going off to her own room, and saying to herself, “I have surely been the victim of some sublime hoax.”

She had scarcely made the reflection, when Constantino placed in her hands the following letter, which Thaddeus had scrawled in the night:⁠—

“Countess⁠—To go to be killed in the Caucasus, and to bear the burden of your scorn, is too much; a man should die unmutilated. I loved you from the first time I saw you, as a man loves the woman he will love forever, even when she is faithless⁠—I, under obligations to Adam, whom you chose and married⁠—I, so poor, the volunteer steward, devoted to your household. In this dreadful catastrophe I found a delightful existence. To be an indispensable wheel in the machine, to know myself useful to your luxury and comfort, was a source of joy to me; and if that joy had been keen when Adam alone was my care, think what it must have been when the woman I worshiped was at once the cause and the effect! I have known all the joys of motherhood in my love; and I accepted life on those terms. Like the beggars on the high roads, I built myself a hut of stones on the skirts of your beautiful home, but without holding out my hand for alms. I, poor and unhappy, but blinded by Adam’s happiness, I was the donor. Yes, you were hedged in by a love as pure as that of a guardian angel; it watched while you slept; it caressed you with a look as you passed by; it was glad merely to exist; in short, you were the sunshine of home to the hapless exile who is now writing to you, with tears in his eyes, as he recalls the happiness of those early days.

“At the age of eighteen, with no one to love me, I had chosen as an ideal mistress a charming woman at Warsaw, to whom I referred all my thoughts and my wishes, the queen of my days and nights. This woman knew nothing of it, but why inform her? For my part, what I loved was love.

“You may fancy, from this adventure of my boyhood, how happy I was, living within the sphere of your influence, grooming your horse, picking out new gold pieces for your purse, superintending the splendor of your table and your entertainments, seeing you eclipse fortunes greater than your own by my good management. With what zeal did I not rush round Paris when Adam said to me, ‘Thaddeus, She wants this or that!’ It was one of those joys for which there are no words. You have now and again wished for some trifle within a certain time which has compelled me to feats of expedition, driving for six or seven hours in a cab; and what happiness it has been to walk in your service. When I have watched you smiling in the midst of your flowers without being seen by you, I have forgotten that no one loved me⁠—in short, at such moments I was but eighteen again.

“Sometimes, when my happiness turned my brain, I would go at night and kiss the spot where your feet had left, for me, a luminous trace, just as of old I had stolen, with a thief’s miraculous skill, to kiss a key which Countess Ladislas had touched on opening a door. The air you breathed was embalmed; to me it was fresh life to breathe it; and I felt, as they say is the case in the tropics, overwhelmed by an atmosphere surcharged with creative elements. I must tell you all these things to account for the strange fatuity of my involuntary thoughts. I would have died sooner than divulge my secret.

“You may remember those few days when you were curious, when you wanted to see the worker of the wonders which had at last struck you with surprise. I believed⁠—forgive me, madame⁠—I believed that you would love me. Your kindliness, your looks⁠—interpreted by a lover⁠—seemed fraught with so much danger to me that I took up Malaga, knowing that there are liaisons which no woman can forgive; I took the girl up at the moment when I saw that my love was inevitably infectious. Overwhelm me now with the scorn which you poured upon me so freely when I did not deserve it; but I think I may be quite sure that if, on the evening when your aunt took the Count out, I had said what I have here written, having once said it I should have been like the tame tiger who has at last set his teeth in living flesh, and who scents warm blood.⁠ ⁠…

“Midnight.

“I could write no more, the memory of that evening was too vivid! Yes, I was then in a delirium! I saw expectancy in your eyes; victory and its crimson banners may have burned in mine and fascinated yours. My crime was to think such things⁠—and perhaps wrongly. You alone can be judge of that fearful scene when I succeeded in crushing love, desire, the most stupendous forces of manhood under the icy hand of gratitude which must be eternal. Your terrible scorn punished me. You have showed me that neither disgust nor contempt can ever be got over. I love you like a madman. I must have gone away if Adam had died. There is all the more reason since Adam is saved. I did not snatch my friend from the grave to betray him. And, indeed, my departure is the due punishment for the thought that came to me that I would let him die when the physicians said his life depended on his attendants.

“Farewell, madame; in leaving Paris I lose everything, but you lose nothing in parting with yours most faithfully,

“If my poor Adam says he has lost a friend, what have I lost?” thought Clémentine, sitting dejected, with her eyes fixed on a flower in the carpet.

This is the note which Constantine delivered privately to his master:⁠—

“My dear Mitgislas⁠—Malaga has told me all. For the sake of your happiness, never let a word escape you in Clémentine’s presence as to your visits to the circus-rider; let her still believe that Malaga cost me a hundred thousand francs. With the Countess’ character she will not forgive you either your losses at play or your visits to Malaga.⁠—I am not going to Rhiva, but to the Caucasus. I have a fit of spleen, and at the pace I mean to go, in three months I shall be Prince Paz, or dead. Farewell; though I have drawn sixty thousand francs out of Nucingen’s, we are quits.

“Idiot that I am! I very nearly betrayed myself just now by speaking of the circus-rider!” said Adam to himself.

Thaddeus has been gone three years, and the papers do not as yet mention any Prince Paz. Countess Laginski takes a keen interest in the Emperor Nicholas’ expeditions; she is a Russian at heart, and reads with avidity all the news from that country. Once or twice a year she says to the Ambassador, with an affectation of indifference, “Do you know what has become of our poor friend Paz?”

Alas! most Parisian women, keen-eyed and subtle as they are supposed to be, pass by⁠—and always will pass by⁠—such an one as Paz without observing him. Yes, more than one Paz remains misunderstood; but, fearful thought! some are misunderstood even when they are loved. The simplest woman in the world requires some little coxcombry in the greatest man; and the most heroic love counts for nothing if it is uncut; it needs the arts of the polisher and the jeweler.

In the month of January 1842 Countess Laginski, beautified by gentle melancholy, inspired a mad passion in the Comte de la Palférine, one of the most audacious bucks of Paris at this day. La Palférine understood the difficulty of conquering a woman guarded by a chimera; to triumph over this bewitching woman, he trusted to a surprise, and to the assistance of a woman who, being a little jealous of Clémentine, would lend herself to plot the chances of the adventure.

Clémentine, incapable with all her wit of suspecting such treachery, was so imprudent as to go with this false friend to the masked ball at the opera. At about three in the morning, carried away by the excitement of the ball, Clémentine, for whom La Palférine had exhausted himself in attentions, consented to sup with him, and was getting into the lady’s carriage. At this critical moment she was seized by a strong arm, and in spite of her cries placed in her own carriage, which was standing with the door open, though she did not know that it was waiting.

“He has not left Paris!” she exclaimed, recognizing Thaddeus, who ran off when he saw the carriage drive away with the Countess.

Had ever another woman such a romance in her life?

Clémentine is always hoping to see Paz again.