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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Parisians in the Country, by Honore de Balzac
+#106 in our series by Honore de Balzac
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+Title: Parisians in the Country
+       [Contents: The Illustrious Gaudissart,
+        and The Muse of the Department]
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7929]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 1, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PARISIANS IN THE COUNTRY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                       PARISIANS IN THE COUNTRY
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+                             INTRODUCTION
+
+I have sometimes wondered whether it was accident or intention which
+made Balzac so frequently combine early and late work in the same
+volume. The question is certainly insoluble, and perhaps not worth
+solving, but it presents itself once more in the present instance.
+/L'Illustre Gaudissart/ is a story of 1832, the very heyday of
+Balzac's creative period, when even his pen could hardly keep up with
+the abundance of his fancy and the gathered stores of his minute
+observation. /La Muse du Departement/ dates ten years and more later,
+when, though there was plenty of both left, both sacks had been deeply
+dipped into.
+
+/L'Illustre Gaudissart/ is, of course, slight, not merely in bulk, but
+in conception. Balzac's Tourangeau patriotism may have amused itself
+by the idea of the villagers "rolling" the great Gaudissart; but the
+ending of the tale can hardly be thought to be quite so good as the
+beginning. Still, that beginning is altogether excellent. The sketch
+of the /commis-voyageur/ generally smacks of that /physiologie/ style
+of which Balzac was so fond; but it is good, and Gaudissart himself,
+as well as the whole scene with his /epouse libre/, is delightful. The
+Illustrious One was evidently a favorite character with his creator.
+He nowhere plays a very great part; but it is everywhere a rather
+favorable and, except in this little mishap with Margaritis (which, it
+must be observed, does not turn entirely to his discomfiture), a
+rather successful part. We have him in /Cesar Birotteau/
+superintending the early efforts of Popinot to launch the Huile
+Cephalique. He was present at the great ball. He served as
+intermediary to M. de Bauvan in the merciful scheme of buying at fancy
+prices the handiwork of the Count's faithful spouse, and so providing
+her with a livelihood; and later as a theatrical manager, a little
+spoilt by his profession, we find him in /Le Cousin Pons/. But he is
+always what the French called "a good devil," and here he is a very
+good devil indeed.
+
+Although /La Muse du Departement/ is an important work, it cannot be
+spoken of in quite unhesitating terms. It contains, indeed, in the
+personage of Lousteau, one of the very most elaborate of Balzac's
+portraits of a particular type of men of letters. The original is said
+to have been Jules Janin, who is somewhat disadvantageously contrasted
+here and elsewhere with Claude Vignon, said on the same rather vague
+authority to be Gustave Planche. Both Janin and Planche are now too
+much forgotten, but in both more or less (and in Lousteau very much
+"more") Balzac cannot be said to have dealt mildly with his /bete
+noire/, the critical temperament. Lousteau, indeed, though not
+precisely a scoundrel, is both a rascal and a cad. Even Balzac seems a
+little shocked at his /lettre de faire part/ in reference to his
+mistress' child; and it is seldom possible to discern in any of his
+proceedings the most remote approximation to the conduct of a
+gentleman. But then, as we have seen, and shall see, Balzac's standard
+for the conduct of his actual gentlemen was by no means fantastically
+exquisite or discouragingly high, and in the case of his Bohemians it
+was accommodating to the utmost degree. He seems to despise Lousteau,
+but rather for his insouciance and neglect of his opportunities of
+making himself a position than for anything else.
+
+I have often felt disposed to ask those who would assert Balzac's
+absolute infallibility as a gynaecologist to give me a reasoned
+criticism of the heroine of this novel. I do not entirely "figure to
+myself" Dinah de la Baudraye. It is perfectly possible that she should
+have loved a "sweep" like Lousteau, there is certainly nothing
+extremely unusual in a woman loving worse sweeps even than he. But
+would she have done it, and having done it, have also done what she
+did afterwards? These questions may be answered differently; I do not
+answer them in the negative myself, but I cannot give them an
+affirmative answer with the conviction which I should like to show.
+
+Among the minor characters, the /substitut/ de Clagny has a touch of
+nobility which contrasts happily enough with Lousteau's unworthiness.
+Bianchon is as good as usual; Balzac always gives Bianchon a favorable
+part. Madame Piedefer is one of the numerous instances in which the
+unfortunate class of mothers-in-law atones for what are supposed to be
+its crimes against the human race; and old La Baudraye, not so
+hopelessly repulsive in a French as he would be in an English novel,
+is a shrewd old rascal enough.
+
+But I cannot think the scene of the Parisians /blaguing/ the
+Sancerrois is a very happy one. That it is in exceedingly bad taste
+might not matter so very much; Balzac would reply, and justly, that he
+had not intended to represent it as anything else. That the fun is not
+very funny may be a matter of definition and appreciation. But what
+scarcely admits of denial or discussion is that it is tyrannously too
+long. The citations of /Olympia/ are pushed beyond measure, beyond
+what is comic, almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments,
+which remind one rather of the heavy jesting on critics in /Un Prince
+de la Boheme/ and the short-lived /Revue Parisienne/, are labored to
+the last degree. The part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate
+exactly, and altogether the book does not seem to me a /reussite/.
+
+The history of /L'Illustre Gaudissart/ is, for a story of Balzac's,
+almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance
+in the first edition of /Scenes de la Vie de Province/ in 1833, and
+entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the
+/Comedie/, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared
+with /La Muse du Departement/, of /Les Parisiens en Province/ was
+given to it.
+
+/La Muse du Departement/ has a rather more complicated record than its
+companion piece in /Les Parisiens en Province/, L'Illustre
+Gaudissart/. It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the
+title of /Dinah Piedefer/, in /Le Messager/ during March and April
+1843, and was almost immediately published as a book, with works of
+other writers, under the general title of /Les Mysteres de Province/,
+and accompanied by some other work of its own author's. It had four
+parts and fifty-two chapters in /Le Messager/, an arrangement which
+was but slightly altered in the volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives
+some curious indications of mosaic work in it, and some fragments
+which do not now appear in the text.
+
+    George Saintsbury
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  I
+
+
+
+
+                      THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
+
+                         By HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+                            Translated By
+                     Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+                              DEDICATION
+
+                  To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.
+
+
+
+                      THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER I
+
+The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of
+the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present
+epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to
+mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period
+of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our
+century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in
+creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might;
+equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses,
+and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final
+expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of
+barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last
+struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of
+the world in one direction?
+
+The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
+stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
+going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
+from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast
+among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human
+pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by
+himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he
+expounds all the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He has
+seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways of the
+world. Soaked in the vices of Paris, he affects to be the fellow-well-
+met of the provinces. He is the link which connects the village with
+the capital; though essentially he is neither Parisian nor provincial,
+--he is a traveller. He sees nothing to the core: men and places he
+knows by their names; as for things, he looks merely at their surface,
+and he has his own little tape-line with which to measure them. His
+glance shoots over all things and penetrates none. He occupies himself
+with a great deal, yet nothing occupies him.
+
+Jester and jolly fellow, he keeps on good terms with all political
+opinions, and is patriotic to the bottom of his soul. A capital mimic,
+he knows how to put on, turn and turn about, the smiles of persuasion,
+satisfaction, and good-nature, or drop them for the normal expression
+of his natural man. He is compelled to be an observer of a certain
+sort in the interests of his trade. He must probe men with a glance
+and guess their habits, wants, and above all their solvency. To
+economize time he must come to quick decisions as to his chances of
+success,--a practice that makes him more or less a man of judgment; on
+the strength of which he sets up as a judge of theatres, and
+discourses about those of Paris and the provinces.
+
+He knows all the good and bad haunts in France, "de actu et visu." He
+can pilot you, on occasion, to vice or virtue with equal assurance.
+Blest with the eloquence of a hot-water spigot turned on at will, he
+can check or let run, without floundering, the collection of phrases
+which he keeps on tap, and which produce upon his victims the effect
+of a moral shower-bath. Loquacious as a cricket, he smokes, drinks,
+wears a profusion of trinkets, overawes the common people, passes for
+a lord in the villages, and never permits himself to be "stumped,"--a
+slang expression all his own. He knows how to slap his pockets at the
+right time, and make his money jingle if he thinks the servants of the
+second-class houses which he wants to enter (always eminently
+suspicious) are likely to take him for a thief. Activity is not the
+least surprising quality of this human machine. Not the hawk swooping
+upon its prey, not the stag doubling before the huntsman and the
+hounds, nor the hounds themselves catching scent of the game, can be
+compared with him for the rapidity of his dart when he spies a
+"commission," for the agility with which he trips up a rival and gets
+ahead of him, for the keenness of his scent as he noses a customer and
+discovers the sport where he can get off his wares.
+
+How many great qualities must such a man possess! You will find in all
+countries many such diplomats of low degree; consummate negotiators
+arguing in the interests of calico, jewels, frippery, wines; and often
+displaying more true diplomacy than ambassadors themselves, who, for
+the most part, know only the forms of it. No one in France can doubt
+the powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares
+all, and boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern
+inventions of Paris into a struggle with the plain commonsense of
+remote villages, and the ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial
+ways. Can we ever forget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms
+himself into the minds of the populace, bringing a volume of words to
+bear upon the refractory, reminding us of the indefatigable worker in
+marbles whose file eats slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you
+seek to know the utmost power of language, or the strongest pressure
+that a phrase can bring to bear against rebellious lucre, against the
+miserly proprietor squatting in the recesses of his country lair?--
+listen to one of these great ambassadors of Parisian industry as he
+revolves and works and sucks like an intelligent piston of the steam-
+engine called Speculation.
+
+"Monsieur," said a wise political economist, the director-cashier-
+manager and secretary-general of a celebrated fire-insurance company,
+"out of every five hundred thousand francs of policies to be renewed
+in the provinces, not more than fifty thousand are paid up
+voluntarily. The other four hundred and fifty thousand are got in by
+the activity of our agents, who go about among those who are in
+arrears and worry them with stories of horrible incendiaries until
+they are driven to sign the new policies. Thus you see that eloquence,
+the labial flux, is nine tenths of the ways and means of our
+business."
+
+To talk, to make people listen to you,--that is seduction in itself. A
+nation that has two Chambers, a woman who lends both ears, are soon
+lost. Eve and her serpent are the everlasting myth of an hourly fact
+which began, and may end, with the world itself.
+
+"A conversation of two hours ought to capture your man," said a
+retired lawyer.
+
+Let us walk round the commercial traveller, and look at him well.
+Don't forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco
+collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so
+original that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we
+come across! In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what
+a battery, all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his
+tongue! Intrepid mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to
+catch five or six thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of
+the red Indians who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial
+fish will not rise to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with
+seines and nets and gentlest persuasions. The traveller's business is
+to extract the gold in country caches by a purely intellectual
+operation, and to extract it pleasantly and without pain. Can you
+think without a shudder of the flood of phrases which, day by day,
+renewed each dawn, leaps in cascades the length and breadth of sunny
+France?
+
+You know the species; let us now take a look at the individual.
+
+There lives in Paris an incomparable commercial traveller, the paragon
+of his race, a man who possesses in the highest degree all the
+qualifications necessary to the nature of his success. His speech is
+vitriol and likewise glue,--glue to catch and entangle his victim and
+make him sticky and easy to grip; vitriol to dissolve hard heads,
+close fists, and closer calculations. His line was once the HAT; but
+his talents and the art with which he snared the wariest provincial
+had brought him such commercial celebrity that all vendors of the
+"article Paris"[*] paid court to him, and humbly begged that he would
+deign to take their commissions.
+
+[*] "Article Paris" means anything--especially articles of wearing
+    apparel--which originates or is made in Paris. The name is
+    supposed to give to the thing a special value in the provinces.
+
+Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals of his triumphant
+progress through France, he lived a life of perpetual festivity in the
+shape of weddings and suppers. When he was in the provinces, the
+correspondents in the smaller towns made much of him; in Paris, the
+great houses feted and caressed him. Welcomed, flattered, and fed
+wherever he went, it came to pass that to breakfast or to dine alone
+was a novelty, an event. He lived the life of a sovereign, or, better
+still, of a journalist; in fact, he was the perambulating "feuilleton"
+of Parisian commerce.
+
+His name was Gaudissart; and his renown, his vogue, the flatteries
+showered upon him, were such as to win for him the surname of
+Illustrious. Wherever the fellow went,--behind a counter or before a
+bar, into a salon or to the top of a stage-coach, up to a garret or to
+dine with a banker,--every one said, the moment they saw him, "Ah!
+here comes the illustrious Gaudissart!"[*] No name was ever so in
+keeping with the style, the manners, the countenance, the voice, the
+language, of any man. All things smiled upon our traveller, and the
+traveller smiled back in return. "Similia similibus,"--he believed in
+homoeopathy. Puns, horse-laugh, monkish face, skin of a friar, true
+Rabelaisian exterior, clothing, body, mind, and features, all pulled
+together to put a devil-may-care jollity into every inch of his
+person. Free-handed and easy-going, he might be recognized at once as
+the favorite of grisettes, the man who jumps lightly to the top of a
+stage-coach, gives a hand to the timid lady who fears to step down,
+jokes with the postillion about his neckerchief and contrives to sell
+him a cap, smiles at the maid and catches her round the waist or by
+the heart; gurgles at dinner like a bottle of wine and pretends to
+draw the cork by sounding a filip on his distended cheek; plays a tune
+with his knife on the champagne glasses without breaking them, and
+says to the company, "Let me see you do THAT"; chaffs the timid
+traveller, contradicts the knowing one, lords it over a dinner-table
+and manages to get the titbits for himself. A strong fellow,
+nevertheless, he can throw aside all this nonsense and mean business
+when he flings away the stump of his cigar and says, with a glance at
+some town, "I'll go and see what those people have got in their
+stomachs."
+
+[*] "Se gaudir," to enjoy, to make fun. "Gaudriole," gay discourse,
+    rather free.--Littre.
+
+When buckled down to his work he became the slyest and cleverest of
+diplomats. All things to all men, he knew how to accost a banker like
+a capitalist, a magistrate like a functionary, a royalist with pious
+and monarchical sentiments, a bourgeois as one of themselves. In
+short, wherever he was he was just what he ought to be; he left
+Gaudissart at the door when he went in, and picked him up when he came
+out.
+
+Until 1830 the illustrious Gaudissart was faithful to the article
+Paris. In his close relation to the caprices of humanity, the varied
+paths of commerce had enabled him to observe the windings of the heart
+of man. He had learned the secret of persuasive eloquence, the knack
+of loosening the tightest purse-strings, the art of rousing desire in
+the souls of husbands, wives, children, and servants; and what is
+more, he knew how to satisfy it. No one had greater faculty than he
+for inveigling a merchant by the charms of a bargain, and disappearing
+at the instant when desire had reached its crisis. Full of gratitude
+to the hat-making trade, he always declared that it was his efforts in
+behalf of the exterior of the human head which had enabled him to
+understand its interior: he had capped and crowned so many people, he
+was always flinging himself at their heads, etc. His jokes about hats
+and heads were irrepressible, though perhaps not dazzling.
+
+Nevertheless, after August and October, 1830, he abandoned the hat
+trade and the article Paris, and tore himself from things mechanical
+and visible to mount into the higher spheres of Parisian speculation.
+"He forsook," to use his own words, "matter for mind; manufactured
+products for the infinitely purer elaborations of human intelligence."
+This requires some explanation.
+
+The general upset of 1830 brought to birth, as everybody knows, a
+number of old ideas which clever speculators tried to pass off in new
+bodies. After 1830 ideas became property. A writer, too wise to
+publish his writings, once remarked that "more ideas are stolen than
+pocket-handkerchiefs." Perhaps in course of time we may have an
+Exchange for thought; in fact, even now ideas, good or bad, have their
+consols, are bought up, imported, exported, sold, and quoted like
+stocks. If ideas are not on hand ready for sale, speculators try to
+pass off words in their stead, and actually live upon them as a bird
+lives on the seeds of his millet. Pray do not laugh; a word is worth
+quite as much as an idea in a land where the ticket on a sack is of
+more importance than the contents. Have we not seen libraries working
+off the word "picturesque" when literature would have cut the throat
+of the word "fantastic"? Fiscal genius has guessed the proper tax on
+intellect; it has accurately estimated the profits of advertising; it
+has registered a prospectus of the quantity and exact value of the
+property, weighing its thought at the intellectual Stamp Office in the
+Rue de la Paix.
+
+Having become an article of commerce, intellect and all its products
+must naturally obey the laws which bind other manufacturing interests.
+Thus it often happens that ideas, conceived in their cups by certain
+apparently idle Parisians,--who nevertheless fight many a moral battle
+over their champagne and their pheasants,--are handed down at their
+birth from the brain to the commercial travellers who are employed to
+spread them discreetly, "urbi et orbi," through Paris and the
+provinces, seasoned with the fried pork of advertisement and
+prospectus, by means of which they catch in their rat-trap the
+departmental rodent commonly called subscriber, sometimes stockholder,
+occasionally corresponding member or patron, but invariably fool.
+
+"I am a fool!" many a poor country proprietor has said when, caught by
+the prospect of being the first to launch a new idea, he finds that he
+has, in point of fact, launched his thousand or twelve hundred francs
+into a gulf.
+
+"Subscribers are fools who never can be brought to understand that to
+go ahead in the intellectual world they must start with more money
+than they need for the tour of Europe," say the speculators.
+
+Consequently there is endless warfare between the recalcitrant public
+which refuses to pay the Parisian imposts and the tax-gatherer who,
+living by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas,
+turns it on the spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses
+(basting all the while with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with
+some toothsome sauce in which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly
+with a black-lead. Moreover, since 1830 what honors and emoluments
+have been scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and self-
+love of the "progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals,
+diplomas, a sort of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs,
+have followed each other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the
+manufactured products of the intellect have developed a spice, a
+ginger, all their own. From this have come premiums, forestalled
+dividends, and that conscription of noted names which is levied
+without the knowledge of the unfortunate writers who bear them, and
+who thus find themselves actual co-operators in more enterprises than
+there are days in the year; for the law, we may remark, takes no
+account of the theft of a patronymic. Worse than all is the rape of
+ideas which these caterers for the public mind, like the slave-
+merchants of Asia, tear from the paternal brain before they are well
+matured, and drag half-clothed before the eyes of their blockhead of a
+sultan, their Shahabaham, their terrible public, which, if they don't
+amuse it, will cut off their heads by curtailing the ingots and
+emptying their pockets.
+
+This madness of our epoch reacted upon the illustrious Gaudissart, and
+here follows the history of how it happened. A life-insurance company
+having been told of his irresistible eloquence offered him an unheard-
+of commission, which he graciously accepted. The bargain concluded and
+the treaty signed, our traveller was put in training, or we might say
+weaned, by the secretary-general of the enterprise, who freed his mind
+of its swaddling-clothes, showed him the dark holes of the business,
+taught him its dialect, took the mechanism apart bit by bit, dissected
+for his instruction the particular public he was expected to gull,
+crammed him with phrases, fed him with impromptu replies, provisioned
+him with unanswerable arguments, and, so to speak, sharpened the file
+of the tongue which was about to operate upon the life of France.
+
+The puppet amply rewarded the pains bestowed upon him. The heads of
+the company boasted of the illustrious Gaudissart, showed him such
+attention and proclaimed the great talents of this perambulating
+prospectus so loudly in the sphere of exalted banking and commercial
+diplomacy, that the financial managers of two newspapers (celebrated
+at that time but since defunct) were seized with the idea of employing
+him to get subscribers. The proprietors of the "Globe," an organ of
+Saint-Simonism, and the "Movement," a republican journal, each invited
+the illustrious Gaudissart to a conference, and proposed to give him
+ten francs a head for every subscriber, provided he brought in a
+thousand, but only five francs if he got no more than five hundred.
+The cause of political journalism not interfering with the pre-
+accepted cause of life insurance, the bargain was struck; although
+Gaudissart demanded an indemnity from the Saint-Simonians for the
+eight days he was forced to spend in studying the doctrines of their
+apostle, asserting that a prodigious effort of memory and intellect
+was necessary to get to the bottom of that "article" and to reason
+upon it suitably. He asked nothing, however, from the republicans. In
+the first place, he inclined in republican ideas,--the only ones,
+according to guadissardian philosophy, which could bring about a
+rational equality. Besides which he had already dipped into the
+conspiracies of the French "carbonari"; he had been arrested, and
+released for want of proof; and finally, as he called the newspaper
+proprietors to observe, he had lately grown a mustache, and needed
+only a hat of certain shape and a pair of spurs to represent, with due
+propriety, the Republic.
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER II
+
+For one whole week this commanding genius went every morning to be
+Saint-Simonized at the office of the "Globe," and every afternoon he
+betook himself to the life-insurance company, where he learned the
+intricacies of financial diplomacy. His aptitude and his memory were
+prodigious; so that he was able to start on his peregrinations by the
+15th of April, the date at which he usually opened the spring
+campaign. Two large commercial houses, alarmed at the decline of
+business, implored the ambitious Gaudissart not to desert the article
+Paris, and seduced him, it was said, with large offers, to take their
+commissions once more. The king of travellers was amenable to the
+claims of his old friends, enforced as they were by the enormous
+premiums offered to him.
+
+*       *       *       *       *
+
+"Listen, my little Jenny," he said in a hackney-coach to a pretty
+florist.
+
+All truly great men delight in allowing themselves to be tyrannized
+over by a feeble being, and Gaudissart had found his tyrant in Jenny.
+He was bringing her home at eleven o'clock from the Gymnase, whither
+he had taken her, in full dress, to a proscenium box on the first
+tier.
+
+"On my return, Jenny, I shall refurnish your room in superior style.
+That big Matilda, who pesters you with comparisons and her real India
+shawls imported by the suite of the Russian ambassador, and her silver
+plate and her Russian prince,--who to my mind is nothing but a humbug,
+--won't have a word to say THEN. I consecrate to the adornment of your
+room all the 'Children' I shall get in the provinces."
+
+"Well, that's a pretty thing to say!" cried the florist. "Monster of a
+man! Do you dare to talk to me of your children? Do you suppose I am
+going to stand that sort of thing?"
+
+"Oh, what a goose you are, my Jenny! That's only a figure of speech in
+our business."
+
+"A fine business, then!"
+
+"Well, but listen; if you talk all the time you'll always be in the
+right."
+
+"I mean to be. Upon my word, you take things easy!"
+
+"You don't let me finish. I have taken under my protection a
+superlative idea,--a journal, a newspaper, written for children. In
+our profession, when travellers have caught, let us suppose, ten
+subscribers to the 'Children's Journal,' they say, 'I've got ten
+Children,' just as I say when I get ten subscriptions to a newspaper
+called the 'Movement,' 'I've got ten Movements.' Now don't you see?"
+
+"That's all right. Are you going into politics? If you do you'll get
+into Saint-Pelagie, and I shall have to trot down there after you. Oh!
+if one only knew what one puts one's foot into when we love a man, on
+my word of honor we would let you alone to take care of yourselves,
+you men! However, if you are going away to-morrow we won't talk of
+disagreeable things,--that would be silly."
+
+The coach stopped before a pretty house, newly built in the Rue
+d'Artois, where Gaudissart and Jenny climbed to the fourth story. This
+was the abode of Mademoiselle Jenny Courand, commonly reported to be
+privately married to the illustrious Gaudissart, a rumor which that
+individual did not deny. To maintain her supremacy, Jenny kept him to
+the performance of innumerable small attentions, and threatened
+continually to turn him off if he omitted the least of them. She now
+ordered him to write to her from every town, and render a minute
+account of all his proceedings.
+
+"How many 'Children' will it take to furnish my chamber?" she asked,
+throwing off her shawl and sitting down by a good fire.
+
+"I get five sous for each subscriber."
+
+"Delightful! And is it with five sous that you expect to make me rich?
+Perhaps you are like the Wandering Jew with your pockets full of
+money."
+
+"But, Jenny, I shall get a thousand 'Children.' Just reflect that
+children have never had a newspaper to themselves before. But what a
+fool I am to try to explain matters to you,--you can't understand such
+things."
+
+"Can't I? Then tell me,--tell me, Gaudissart, if I'm such a goose why
+do you love me?"
+
+"Just because you are a goose,--a sublime goose! Listen, Jenny. See
+here, I am going to undertake the 'Globe,' the 'Movement,' the
+'Children,' the insurance business, and some of my old articles Paris;
+instead of earning a miserable eight thousand a year, I'll bring back
+twenty thousand at least from each trip."
+
+"Unlace me, Gaudissart, and do it right; don't tighten me."
+
+"Yes, truly," said the traveller, complacently; "I shall become a
+shareholder in the newspapers, like Finot, one of my friends, the son
+of a hatter, who now has thirty thousand francs income, and is going
+to make himself a peer of France. When one thinks of that little
+Popinot,--ah, mon Dieu! I forgot to tell you that Monsieur Popinot was
+named minister of commerce yesterday. Why shouldn't I be ambitious
+too? Ha! ha! I could easily pick up the jargon of those fellows who
+talk in the chamber, and bluster with the rest of them. Now, listen to
+me:--
+
+"Gentlemen," he said, standing behind a chair, "the Press is neither a
+tool nor an article of barter: it is, viewed under its political
+aspects, an institution. We are bound, in virtue of our position as
+legislators, to consider all things politically, and therefore" (here
+he stopped to get breath)--"and therefore we must examine the Press
+and ask ourselves if it is useful or noxious, if it should be
+encouraged or put down, taxed or free. These are serious questions. I
+feel that I do not waste the time, always precious, of this Chamber by
+examining this article--the Press--and explaining to you its
+qualities. We are on the verge of an abyss. Undoubtedly the laws have
+not the nap which they ought to have--Hein?" he said, looking at
+Jenny. "All orators put France on the verge of an abyss. They either
+say that or they talk about the chariot of state, or convulsions, or
+political horizons. Don't I know their dodges? I'm up to all the
+tricks of all the trades. Do you know why? Because I was born with a
+caul; my mother has got it, but I'll give it to you. You'll see! I
+shall soon be in the government."
+
+"You!"
+
+"Why shouldn't I be the Baron Gaudissart, peer of France? Haven't they
+twice elected Monsieur Popinot as deputy from the fourth
+arrondissement? He dines with Louis Phillippe. There's Finot; he is
+going to be, they say, a member of the Council. Suppose they send me
+as ambassador to London? I tell you I'd nonplus those English! No man
+ever got the better of Gaudissart, the illustrious Gaudissart, and
+nobody ever will. Yes, I say it! no one ever outwitted me, and no one
+can--in any walk of life, politics or impolitics, here or elsewhere.
+But, for the time being, I must give myself wholly to the capitalists;
+to the 'Globe,' the 'Movement,' the 'Children,' and my article Paris."
+
+"You will be brought up with a round turn, you and your newspapers.
+I'll bet you won't get further than Poitiers before the police will
+nab you."
+
+"What will you bet?"
+
+"A shawl."
+
+"Done! If I lose that shawl I'll go back to the article Paris and the
+hat business. But as for getting the better of Gaudissart--never!
+never!"
+
+And the illustrious traveller threw himself into position before
+Jenny, looked at her proudly, one hand in his waistcoat, his head at
+three-quarter profile,--an attitude truly Napoleonic.
+
+"Oh, how funny you are! what have you been eating to-night?"
+
+Gaudissart was thirty-eight years of age, of medium height, stout and
+fat like men who roll about continually in stage-coaches, with a face
+as round as a pumpkin, ruddy cheeks, and regular features of the type
+which sculptors of all lands adopt as a model for statues of
+Abundance, Law, Force, Commerce, and the like. His protuberant stomach
+swelled forth in the shape of a pear; his legs were small, but active
+and vigorous. He caught Jenny up in his arms like a baby and kissed
+her.
+
+"Hold your tongue, young woman!" he said. "What do you know about
+Saint-Simonism, antagonism, Fourierism, criticism, heroic enterprise,
+or woman's freedom? I'll tell you what they are,--ten francs for each
+subscription, Madame Gaudissart."
+
+"On my word of honor, you are going crazy, Gaudissart."
+
+"More and more crazy about YOU," he replied, flinging his hat upon the
+sofa.
+
+The next morning Gaudissart, having breakfasted gloriously with Jenny,
+departed on horseback to work up the chief towns of the district to
+which he was assigned by the various enterprises in whose interests he
+was now about to exercise his great talents. After spending forty-five
+days in beating up the country between Paris and Blois, he remained
+two weeks at the latter place to write up his correspondence and make
+short visits to the various market towns of the department. The night
+before he left Blois for Tours he indited a letter to Mademoiselle
+Jenny Courand. As the conciseness and charm of this epistle cannot be
+equalled by any narration of ours, and as, moreover, it proves the
+legitimacy of the tie which united these two individuals, we produce
+it here:--
+
+  "My dear Jenny,--You will lose your wager. Like Napoleon,
+  Gaudissart the illustrious has his star, but NOT his Waterloo. I
+  triumph everywhere. Life insurance has done well. Between Paris
+  and Blois I lodged two millions. But as I get to the centre of
+  France heads become infinitely harder and millions correspondingly
+  scarce. The article Paris keeps up its own little jog-trot. It is
+  a ring on the finger. With all my well-known cunning I spit these
+  shop-keepers like larks. I got off one hundred and sixty-two
+  Ternaux shawls at Orleans. I am sure I don't know what they will
+  do with them, unless they return them to the backs of the sheep.
+
+  "As to the article journal--the devil! that's a horse of another
+  color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach
+  these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two 'Movements':
+  exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one
+  town. Those republican rogues! they won't subscribe. They talk,
+  they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all
+  agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure
+  your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three
+  feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to
+  slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated
+  property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,--a whole lot of stuff, and
+  I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It's a bad
+  business! Candidly, the 'Movement' does not move. I have written
+  to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it--on account
+  of my political opinions.
+
+  "As for the 'Globe,' that's another breed altogether. Just set to
+  work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough
+  to believe such lies,--why, they think you want to burn their
+  houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for
+  futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood;
+  for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon
+  man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great
+  providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be
+  found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric,
+  --in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do
+  you think? when I open upon them with such ideas these provincials
+  lock their cupboards as if I wanted to steal their spoons and beg
+  me to go away! Are not they fools? geese? The 'Globe' is smashed.
+  I said to the proprietors, 'You are too advanced, you go ahead too
+  fast: you ought to get a few results; the provinces like results.'
+  However, I have made a hundred 'Globes,' and I must say,
+  considering the thick-headedness of these clodhoppers, it is a
+  miracle. But to do it I had to make them such a lot of promises
+  that I am sure I don't know how the globites, globists, globules,
+  or whatever they call themselves, will ever get out of them. But
+  they always tell me they can make the world a great deal better
+  than it is, so I go ahead and prophesy to the value of ten francs
+  for each subscription. There was one farmer who thought the paper
+  was agricultural because of its name. I Globed HIM. Bah! he gave
+  in at once; he had a projecting forehead; all men with projecting
+  foreheads are ideologists.
+
+  "But the 'Children'; oh! ah! as to the 'Children'! I got two
+  thousand between Paris and Blois. Jolly business! but there is not
+  much to say. You just show a little vignette to the mother,
+  pretending to hide it from the child: naturally the child wants to
+  see, and pulls mamma's gown and cries for its newspaper, because
+  'Papa has DOT his.' Mamma can't let her brat tear the gown; the
+  gown costs thirty francs, the subscription six--economy; result,
+  subscription. It is an excellent thing, meets an actual want; it
+  holds a place between dolls and sugar-plums, the two eternal
+  necessities of childhood.
+
+  "I have had a quarrel here at the table d'hote about the
+  newspapers and my opinions. I was unsuspiciously eating my dinner
+  next to a man with a gray hat who was reading the 'Debats.' I said
+  to myself, 'Now for my rostrum eloquence. He is tied to the
+  dynasty; I'll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for
+  my ministerial talents.' So I went to work and praised his
+  'Debats.' Hein! if I didn't lead him along! Thread by thread, I
+  began to net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases, and the F-
+  sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff. Everybody
+  listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his
+  mustache, just ready to nibble at a 'Movement.' Well, I don't know
+  how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word 'blockhead.'
+  Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
+  (shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his teeth and was
+  furiously angry. I put on my grand air--you know--and said to him:
+  'Ah, ca! Monsieur, you are remarkably aggressive; if you are not
+  content, I am ready to give you satisfaction; I fought in July.'
+  'Though the father of a family,' he replied, 'I am ready--'
+  'Father of a family!' I exclaimed; 'my dear sir, have you any
+  children?' 'Yes.' 'Twelve years old?' 'Just about.' 'Well, then,
+  the "Children's Journal" is the very thing for you; six francs a
+  year, one number a month, double columns, edited by great literary
+  lights, well got up, good paper, engravings from charming sketches
+  by our best artists, actual colored drawings of the Indies--will
+  not fade.' I fired my broadside 'feelings of a father, etc.,
+  etc.,'--in short, a subscription instead of a quarrel. 'There's
+  nobody but Gaudissart who can get out of things like that,' said
+  that little cricket Lamard to the big Bulot at the cafe, when he
+  told him the story.
+
+  "I leave to-morrow for Amboise. I shall do up Amboise in two days,
+  and I will write next from Tours, where I shall measure swords
+  with the inhabitants of that colorless region; colorless, I mean,
+  from the intellectual and speculative point of view. But, on the
+  word of a Gaudissart, they shall be toppled over, toppled down--
+  floored, I say.
+
+  "Adieu, my kitten. Love me always; be faithful; fidelity through
+  thick and thin is one of the attributes of the Free Woman. Who is
+  kissing you on the eyelids?
+
+  "Thy Felix Forever."
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER III
+
+Five days later Gaudissart started from the Hotel des Faisans, at
+which he had put up in Tours, and went to Vouvray, a rich and populous
+district where the public mind seemed to him susceptible of
+cultivation. Mounted upon his horse, he trotted along the embankment
+thinking no more of his phrases than an actor thinks of his part which
+he has played for a hundred times. It was thus that the illustrious
+Gaudissart went his cheerful way, admiring the landscape, and little
+dreaming that in the happy valleys of Vouvray his commercial
+infallibility was about to perish.
+
+Here a few remarks upon the public mind of Touraine are essential to
+our story. The subtle, satirical, epigrammatic tale-telling spirit
+stamped on every page of Rabelais is the faithful expression of the
+Tourangian mind,--a mind polished and refined as it should be in a
+land where the kings of France long held their court; ardent,
+artistic, poetic, voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside
+quickly. The softness of the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a
+certain ease of life and joviality of manners, smother before long the
+sentiment of art, narrow the widest heart, and enervate the strongest
+will. Transplant the Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and
+lead to great results, as we may see in many spheres of action: look
+at Rabelais and Semblancay, Plantin the printer and Descartes,
+Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day, and Pinaigrier, who painted most
+of the colored glass in our cathedrals; also Verville and Courier. But
+the Tourangian, distinguished though he may be in other regions, sits
+in his own home like an Indian on his mat or a Turk on his divan. He
+employs his wit in laughing at his neighbor and in making merry all
+his days; and when at last he reaches the end of his life, he is still
+a happy man. Touraine is like the Abbaye of Theleme, so vaunted in the
+history of Gargantua. There we may find the complying sisterhoods of
+that famous tale, and there the good cheer celebrated by Rabelais
+reigns in glory.
+
+As to the do-nothingness of that blessed land it is sublime and well
+expressed in a certain popular legend: "Tourangian, are you hungry, do
+you want some soup?" "Yes." "Bring your porringer." "Then I am not
+hungry." Is it to the joys of the vineyard and the harmonious
+loveliness of this garden land of France, is it to the peace and
+tranquillity of a region where the step of an invader has never
+trodden, that we owe the soft compliance of these unconstrained and
+easy manners? To such questions no answer. Enter this Turkey of sunny
+France, and you will stay there,--lazy, idle, happy. You may be as
+ambitious as Napoleon, as poetic as Lord Byron, and yet a power
+unknown, invisible, will compel you to bury your poetry within your
+soul and turn your projects into dreams.
+
+The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one
+of those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely
+because they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or
+wrong, the Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents.
+Consequently the doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and
+villified among them. In Touraine hatred and villification take the
+form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of
+good stories and practical jokes,--a spirit which, alas! is yielding,
+day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as
+"English cant."
+
+For his sins, after getting down at the Soleil d'Or, an inn kept by a
+former grenadier of the imperial guard named Mitouflet, married to a
+rich widow, the illustrious traveller, after a brief consultation with
+the landlord, betook himself to the knave of Vouvray, the jovial
+merry-maker, the comic man of the neighborhood, compelled by fame and
+nature to supply the town with merriment. This country Figaro was once
+a dyer, and now possessed about seven or eight thousand francs a year,
+a pretty house on the slope of the hill, a plump little wife, and
+robust health. For ten years he had had nothing to do but take care of
+his wife and his garden, marry his daughter, play whist in the
+evenings, keep the run of all the gossip in the neighborhood, meddle
+with the elections, squabble with the large proprietors, and order
+good dinners; or else trot along the embankment to find out what was
+going on in Tours, torment the cure, and finally, by way of dramatic
+entertainment, assist at the sale of lands in the neighborhood of his
+vineyards. In short, he led the true Tourangian life,--the life of a
+little country-townsman. He was, moreover, an important member of the
+bourgeoisie,--a leader among the small proprietors, all of them
+envious, jealous, delighted to catch up and retail gossip and
+calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging things down to their own
+level; and at war with all kinds of superiority, which they deposited
+with the fine composure of ignorance. Monsieur Vernier--such was the
+name of this great little man--was just finishing his breakfast, with
+his wife and daughter on either side of him, when Gaudissart entered
+the room through a window that looked out on the Loire and the Cher,
+and lighted one of the gayest dining-rooms of that gay land.
+
+"Is this Monsieur Vernier himself?" said the traveller, bending his
+vertebral column with such grace that it seemed to be elastic.
+
+"Yes, Monsieur," said the mischievous ex-dyer, with a scrutinizing
+look which took in the style of man he had to deal with.
+
+"I come, Monsieur," resumed Gaudissart, "to solicit the aid of your
+knowledge and insight to guide my efforts in this district, where
+Mitouflet tells me you have the greatest influence. Monsieur, I am
+sent into the provinces on an enterprise of the utmost importance,
+undertaken by bankers who--"
+
+"Who mean to win our tricks," said Vernier, long used to the ways of
+commercial travellers and to their periodical visits.
+
+"Precisely," replied Gaudissart, with native impudence. "But with your
+fine tact, Monsieur, you must be aware that we can't win tricks from
+people unless it is their interest to play at cards. I beg you not to
+confound me with the vulgar herd of travellers who succeed by humbug
+or importunity. I am no longer a commercial traveller. I was one, and
+I glory in it; but to-day my mission is of higher importance, and
+should place me, in the minds of superior people, among those who
+devote themselves to the enlightenment of their country. The most
+distinguished bankers in Paris take part in this affair; not
+fictitiously, as in some shameful speculations which I call rat-traps.
+No, no, nothing of the kind! I should never condescend--never!--to
+hawk about such CATCH-FOOLS. No, Monsieur; the most respectable houses
+in Paris are concerned in this enterprise; and their interests
+guarantee--"
+
+Hereupon Gaudissart drew forth his whole string of phrases, and
+Monsieur Vernier let him go the length of his tether, listening with
+apparent interest which completely deceived him. But after the word
+"guarantee" Vernier paid no further attention to our traveller's
+rhetoric, and turned over in his mind how to play him some malicious
+trick and deliver a land, justly considered half-savage by speculators
+unable to get a bite of it, from the inroads of these Parisian
+caterpillars.
+
+At the head of an enchanting valley, called the Valley Coquette
+because of its windings and the curves which return upon each other at
+every step, and seem more and more lovely as we advance, whether we
+ascend or descend them, there lived, in a little house surrounded by
+vineyards, a half-insane man named Margaritis. He was of Italian
+origin, married, but childless; and his wife took care of him with a
+courage fully appreciated by the neighborhood. Madame Margaritis was
+undoubtedly in real danger from a man who, among other fancies,
+persisted in carrying about with him two long-bladed knives with which
+he sometimes threatened her. Who has not seen the wonderful self-
+devotion shown by provincials who consecrate their lives to the care
+of sufferers, possibly because of the disgrace heaped upon a
+bourgeoise if she allows her husband or children to be taken to a
+public hospital? Moreover, who does not know the repugnance which
+these people feel to the payment of the two or three thousand francs
+required at Charenton or in the private lunatic asylums? If any one
+had spoken to Madame Margaritis of Doctors Dubuisson, Esquirol,
+Blanche, and others, she would have preferred, with noble indignation,
+to keep her thousands and take care of the "good-man" at home.
+
+As the incomprehensible whims of this lunatic are connected with the
+current of our story, we are compelled to exhibit the most striking of
+them. Margaritis went out as soon as it rained, and walked about bare-
+headed in his vineyard. At home he made incessant inquiries for
+newspapers; to satisfy him his wife and the maid-servant used to give
+him an old journal called the "Indre-et-Loire," and for seven years he
+had never yet perceived that he was reading the same number over and
+over again. Perhaps a doctor would have observed with interest the
+connection that evidently existed between the recurring and spasmodic
+demands for the newspaper and the atmospheric variations of the
+weather.
+
+Usually when his wife had company, which happened nearly every
+evening, for the neighbors, pitying her situation, would frequently
+come to play at boston in her salon, Margaritis remained silent in a
+corner and never stirred. But the moment ten o'clock began to strike
+on a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet, he rose at
+the stroke with the mechanical precision of the figures which are made
+to move by springs in the German toys. He would then advance slowly
+towards the players, give them a glance like the automatic gaze of the
+Greeks and Turks exhibited on the Boulevard du Temple, and say
+sternly, "Go away!" There were days when he had lucid intervals and
+could give his wife excellent advice as to the sale of their wines;
+but at such times he became extremely annoying, and would ransack her
+closets and steal her delicacies, which he devoured in secret.
+Occasionally, when the usual visitors made their appearance he would
+treat them with civility; but as a general thing his remarks and
+replies were incoherent. For instance, a lady once asked him, "How do
+you feel to-day, Monsieur Margaritis?" "I have grown a beard," he
+replied, "have you?" "Are you better?" asked another. "Jerusalem!
+Jerusalem!" was the answer. But the greater part of the time he gazed
+stolidly at his guests without uttering a word; and then his wife
+would say, "The good-man does not hear anything to-day."
+
+On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
+about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy;
+he flourished his knives and shouted, "That joke dishonors me!"
+
+As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men
+in sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the
+same respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture.
+Among his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet
+discovered the object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the
+community had learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries.
+He insisted on keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in
+the cellar of his house, and he would allow no one to lay hands on
+them. But then the month of June came round he grew uneasy with the
+restless anxiety of a madman about the sale of the sack and the
+puncheons. Madame Margaritis could nearly always persuade him that the
+wine had been sold at an enormous price, which she paid over to him,
+and which he hid so cautiously that neither his wife nor the servant
+who watched him had ever been able to discover its hiding-place.
+
+The evening before Gaudissart reached Vouvray Madame Margaritis had
+had more difficulty than usual in deceiving her husband, whose mind
+happened to be uncommonly lucid.
+
+"I really don't know how I shall get through to-morrow," she had said
+to Madame Vernier. "Would you believe it, the good-man insists on
+watching his two casks of wine. He has worried me so this whole day,
+that I had to show him two full puncheons. Our neighbor, Pierre
+Champlain, fortunately had two which he had not sold. I asked him to
+kindly let me have them rolled into our cellar; and oh, dear! now that
+the good-man has seen them he insists on bottling them off himself!"
+
+Madame Vernier had related the poor woman's trouble to her husband
+just before the entrance of Gaudissart, and at the first words of the
+famous traveller Vernier determined that he should be made to grapple
+with Margaritis.
+
+"Monsieur," said the ex-dyer, as soon as the illustrious Gaudissart
+had fired his first broadside, "I will not hide from you the great
+difficulties which my native place offers to your enterprise. This
+part of the country goes along, as it were, in the rough,--'suo modo.'
+It is a country where new ideas don't take hold. We live as our
+fathers lived, we amuse ourselves with four meals a day, and we
+cultivate our vineyards and sell our wines to the best advantage. Our
+business principle is to sell things for more than they cost us; we
+shall stick in that rut, and neither God nor the devil can get us out
+of it. I will, however, give you some advice, and good advice is an
+egg in the hand. There is in this town a retired banker in whose
+wisdom I have--I, particularly--the greatest confidence. If you can
+obtain his support, I will add mine. If your proposals have real
+merit, if we are convinced of the advantage of your enterprise, the
+approval of Monsieur Margaritis (which carries with it mine) will open
+to you at least twenty rich houses in Vouvray who will be glad to try
+your specifics."
+
+When Madame Vernier heard the name of the lunatic she raised her head
+and looked at her husband.
+
+"Ah, precisely; my wife intends to call on Madame Margaritis with one
+of our neighbors. Wait a moment, and you can accompany these ladies--
+You can pick up Madame Fontanieu on your way," said the wily dyer,
+winking at his wife.
+
+To pick out the greatest gossip, the sharpest tongue, the most
+inveterate cackler of the neighborhood! It meant that Madame Vernier
+was to take a witness to the scene between the traveller and the
+lunatic which should keep the town in laughter for a month. Monsieur
+and Madame Vernier played their part so well that Gaudissart had no
+suspicions, and straightway fell into the trap. He gallantly offered
+his arm to Madame Vernier, and believed that he made, as they went
+along, the conquest of both ladies, for those benefit he sparkled with
+wit and humor and undetected puns.
+
+The house of the pretended banker stood at the entrance to the Valley
+Coquette. The place, called La Fuye, had nothing remarkable about it.
+On the ground floor was a large wainscoted salon, on either side of
+which opened the bedroom of the good-man and that of his wife. The
+salon was entered from an ante-chamber, which served as the dining-
+room and communicated with the kitchen. This lower door, which was
+wholly without the external charm usually seen even in the humblest
+dwellings in Touraine, was covered by a mansard story, reached by a
+stairway built on the outside of the house against the gable end and
+protected by a shed-roof. A little garden, full of marigolds,
+syringas, and elder-bushes, separated the house from the fields; and
+all around the courtyard were detached buildings which were used in
+the vintage season for the various processes of making wine.
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER IV
+
+Margaritis was seated in an arm-chair covered with yellow Utrecht
+velvet, near the window of the salon, and he did not stir as the two
+ladies entered with Gaudissart. His thoughts were running on the casks
+of wine. He was a spare man, and his bald head, garnished with a few
+spare locks at the back of it, was pear-shaped in conformation. His
+sunken eyes, overtopped by heavy black brows and surrounded by
+discolored circles, his nose, thin and sharp like the blade of a
+knife, the strongly marked jawbone, the hollow cheeks, and the oblong
+tendency of all these lines, together with his unnaturally long and
+flat chin, contributed to give a peculiar expression to his
+countenance,--something between that of a retired professor of
+rhetoric and a rag-picker.
+
+"Monsieur Margaritis," cried Madame Vernier, addressing him, "come,
+stir about! Here is a gentleman whom my husband sends to you, and you
+must listen to him with great attention. Put away your mathematics and
+talk to him."
+
+On hearing these words the lunatic rose, looked at Gaudissart, made
+him a sign to sit down, and said, "Let us converse, Monsieur."
+
+The two women went into Madame Margaritis' bedroom, leaving the door
+open so as to hear the conversation, and interpose if it became
+necessary. They were hardly installed before Monsieur Vernier crept
+softly up through the field and, opening a window, got into the
+bedroom without noise.
+
+"Monsieur has doubtless been in business--?" began Gaudissart.
+
+"Public business," answered Margaritis, interrupting him. "I
+pacificated Calabria under the reign of King Murat."
+
+"Bless me! if he hasn't gone to Calabria!" whispered Monsieur Vernier.
+
+"In that case," said Gaudissart, "we shall quickly understand each
+other."
+
+"I am listening," said Margaritis, striking the attitude taken by a
+man when he poses to a portrait-painter.
+
+"Monsieur," said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key
+with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
+lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. "Monsieur, if you
+were not a man of superior intelligence" (the fool bowed), "I should
+content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages
+of this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of
+time to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not
+time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
+wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those
+anxieties which I call 'pot-boiling'?--a vulgar expression, but it
+puts the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up
+more time than the inability to give proper security to persons from
+whom you seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are
+nevertheless rich in hope?"
+
+"Money,--yes, that's right," said Margaritis.
+
+"Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of
+bankers and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which
+rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently, of
+intelligence and productive ability. We have seized the idea of
+capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
+talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their
+survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
+time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
+pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
+possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the
+moral qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur,
+living forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three,
+ten, twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement
+onward to a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of
+our epoch; a movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you
+when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical
+co-ordination of the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by
+literal examples, leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I
+call the mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a
+proprietor living upon your income, let us suppose that you are
+painter, a musician, an artist, or a poet--"
+
+"I am a painter," said the lunatic.
+
+"Well, so be it. I see you take my metaphor. You are a painter; you
+have a glorious future, a rich future before you. But I go still
+farther--"
+
+At these words the madman looked anxiously at Gaudissart, thinking he
+meant to go away; but was reassured when he saw that he kept his seat.
+
+"You may even be nothing at all," said Gaudissart, going on with his
+phrases, "but you are conscious of yourself; you feel yourself--"
+
+"I feel myself," said the lunatic.
+
+"--you feel yourself a great man; you say to yourself, 'I will be a
+minister of state.' Well, then, you--painter, artist, man of letters,
+statesman of the future--you reckon upon your talents, you estimate
+their value, you rate them, let us say, at a hundred thousand
+crowns--"
+
+"Do you give me a hundred thousand crowns?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur, as you will see. Either your heirs and assigns will
+receive them if you die, for the company contemplates that event, or
+you will receive them in the long run through your works of art, your
+writings, or your fortunate speculations during your lifetime. But, as
+I have already had the honor to tell you, when you have once fixed
+upon the value of your intellectual capital,--for it is intellectual
+capital,--seize that idea firmly,--intellectual--"
+
+"I understand," said the fool.
+
+"You sign a policy of insurance with a company which recognizes in you
+a value of a hundred thousand crowns; in you, poet--"
+
+"I am a painter," said the lunatic.
+
+"Yes," resumed Gaudissart,--"painter, poet, musician, statesman--and
+binds itself to pay them over to your family, your heirs, if, by
+reason of your death, the hopes foundered on your intellectual capital
+should be overthrown for you personally. The payment of the premium is
+all that is required to protect--"
+
+"The money-box," said the lunatic, sharply interrupting him.
+
+"Ah! naturally; yes. I see that Monsieur understands business."
+
+"Yes," said the madman. "I established the Territorial Bank in the Rue
+des Fosses-Montmartre at Paris in 1798."
+
+"For," resumed Gaudissart, going back to his premium, "in order to
+meet the payments on the intellectual capital which each man
+recognizes and esteems in himself, it is of course necessary that each
+should pay a certain premium, three per cent; an annual due of three
+per cent. Thus, by the payment of this trifling sum, a mere nothing,
+you protect your family from disastrous results at your death--"
+
+"But I live," said the fool.
+
+"Ah! yes; you mean if you should live long? That is the usual
+objection,--a vulgar prejudice. I fully agree that if we had not
+foreseen and demolished it we might feel we were unworthy of being--
+what? What are we, after all? Book-keepers in the great Bureau of
+Intellect. Monsieur, I don't apply these remarks to you, but I meet on
+all sides men who make it a business to teach new ideas and disclose
+chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my
+word of honor, it is pitiable! But that's the way of the world, and I
+don't pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really sheer
+nonsense."
+
+"Why?" asked the lunatic.
+
+"Why?--this is why: because, if you live and possess the qualities
+which are estimated in your policy against the chances of death,--now,
+attend to this--"
+
+"I am attending."
+
+"Well, then, you have succeeded in life; and you have succeeded
+because of the said insurance. You doubled your chances of success by
+getting rid of the anxieties you were dragging about with you in the
+shape of wife and children who might otherwise be left destitute at
+your death. If you attain this certainty, you have touched the value
+of your intellectual capital, on which the cost of insurance is but a
+trifle,--a mere trifle, a bagatelle."
+
+"That's a fine idea!"
+
+"Ah! is it not, Monsieur?" cried Gaudissart. "I call this enterprise
+the exchequer of beneficence; a mutual insurance against poverty; or,
+if you like it better, the discounting, the cashing, of talent. For
+talent, Monsieur, is a bill of exchange which Nature gives to the man
+of genius, and which often has a long time to run before it falls
+due."
+
+"That is usury!" cried Margaritis.
+
+"The devil! he's keen, the old fellow! I've made a mistake," thought
+Gaudissart, "I must catch him with other chaff. I'll try humbug No. 1.
+Not at all," he said aloud, "for you who--"
+
+"Will you take a glass of wine?" asked Margaritis.
+
+"With pleasure," replied Gaudissart.
+
+"Wife, give us a bottle of the wine that is in the puncheons. You are
+here at the very head of Vouvray," he continued, with a gesture of the
+hand, "the vineyard of Margaritis."
+
+The maid-servant brought glasses and a bottle of wine of the vintage
+of 1819. The good-man filled a glass with circumspection and offered
+it to Gaudissart, who drank it up.
+
+"Ah, you are joking, Monsieur!" exclaimed the commercial traveller.
+"Surely this is Madeira, true Madeira?"
+
+"So you think," said the fool. "The trouble with our Vouvray wine is
+that it is neither a common wine, nor a wine that can be drunk with
+the entremets. It is too generous, too strong. It is often sold in
+Paris adulterated with brandy and called Madeira. The wine-merchants
+buy it up, when our vintage has not been good enough for the Dutch and
+Belgian markets, to mix it with wines grown in the neighborhood of
+Paris, and call it Bordeaux. But what you are drinking just now, my
+good Monsieur, is a wine for kings, the pure Head of Vouvray,--that's
+it's name. I have two puncheons, only two puncheons of it left. People
+who like fine wines, high-class wines, who furnish their table with
+qualities that can't be bought in the regular trade,--and there are
+many persons in Paris who have that vanity,--well, such people send
+direct to us for this wine. Do you know any one who--?"
+
+"Let us go on with what we were saying," interposed Gaudissart.
+
+"We are going on," said the fool. "My wine is capital; you are
+capital, capitalist, intellectual capital, capital wine,--all the same
+etymology, don't you see? hein? Capital, 'caput,' head, Head of
+Vouvray, that's my wine,--it's all one thing."
+
+"So that you have realized your intellectual capital through your
+wines? Ah, I see!" said Gaudissart.
+
+"I have realized," said the lunatic. "Would you like to buy my
+puncheons? you shall have them on good terms."
+
+"No, I was merely speaking," said the illustrious Gaudissart, "of the
+results of insurance and the employment of intellectual capital. I
+will resume my argument."
+
+The lunatic calmed down, and fell once more into position.
+
+"I remarked, Monsieur, that if you die the capital will be paid to
+your family without discussion."
+
+"Without discussion?"
+
+"Yes, unless there were suicide."
+
+"That's quibbling."
+
+"No, Monsieur; you are aware that suicide is one of those acts which
+are easy to prove--"
+
+"In France," said the fool; "but--"
+
+"But in other countries?" said Gaudissart. "Well, Monsieur, to cut
+short discussion on this point, I will say, once for all, that death
+in foreign countries or on the field of battle is outside of our--"
+
+"Then what are you insuring? Nothing at all!" cried Margaritis. "My
+bank, my Territorial Bank, rested upon--"
+
+"Nothing at all?" exclaimed Gaudissart, interrupting the good-man.
+"Nothing at all? What do you call sickness, and afflictions, and
+poverty, and passions? Don't go off on exceptional points."
+
+"No, no! no points," said the lunatic.
+
+"Now, what's the result of all this?" cried Gaudissart. "To you, a
+banker, I can sum up the profits in a few words. Listen. A man lives;
+he has a future; he appears well; he lives, let us say, by his art; he
+wants money; he tries to get it,--he fails. Civilization withholds
+cash from this man whose thought could master civilization, and ought
+to master it, and will master it some day with a brush, a chisel, with
+words, ideas, theories, systems. Civilization is atrocious! It denies
+bread to the men who give it luxury. It starves them on sneers and
+curses, the beggarly rascal! My words may be strong, but I shall not
+retract them. Well, this great but neglected man comes to us; we
+recognize his greatness; we salute him with respect; we listen to him.
+He says to us: 'Gentlemen, my life and talents are worth so much; on
+my productions I will pay you such or such percentage.' Very good;
+what do we do? Instantly, without reserve or hesitation, we admit him
+to the great festivals of civilization as an honored guest--"
+
+"You need wine for that," interposed the madman.
+
+"--as an honored guest. He signs the insurance policy; he takes our
+bits of paper,--scraps, rags, miserable rags!--which, nevertheless,
+have more power in the world than his unaided genius. Then, if he
+wants money, every one will lend it to him on those rags. At the
+Bourse, among bankers, wherever he goes, even at the usurers, he will
+find money because he can give security. Well, Monsieur, is not that a
+great gulf to bridge over in our social system? But that is only one
+aspect of our work. We insure debtors by another scheme of policies
+and premiums. We offer annuities at rates graduated according to ages,
+on a sliding-scale infinitely more advantageous than what are called
+tontines, which are based on tables of mortality that are notoriously
+false. Our company deals with large masses of men; consequently the
+annuitants are secure from those distressing fears which sadden old
+age,--too sad already!--fears which pursue those who receive annuities
+from private sources. You see, Monsieur, that we have estimated life
+under all its aspects."
+
+"Sucked it at both ends," said the lunatic. "Take another glass of
+wine. You've earned it. You must line your inside with velvet if you
+are going to pump at it like that every day. Monsieur, the wine of
+Vouvray, if well kept, is downright velvet."
+
+"Now, what do you think of it all?" said Gaudissart, emptying his
+glass.
+
+"It is very fine, very new, very useful; but I like the discounts I
+get at my Territorial Bank, Rue des Fosses-Montmartre."
+
+"You are quite right, Monsieur," answered Gaudissart; "but that sort
+of thing is taken and retaken, made and remade, every day. You have
+also hypothecating banks which lend upon landed property and redeem it
+on a large scale. But that is a narrow idea compared to our system of
+consolidating hopes,--consolidating hopes! coagulating, so to speak,
+the aspirations born in every soul, and insuring the realization of
+our dreams. It needed our epoch, Monsieur, the epoch of transition--
+transition and progress--"
+
+"Yes, progress," muttered the lunatic, with his glass at his lips. "I
+like progress. That is what I've told them many times--"
+
+"The 'Times'!" cried Gaudissart, who did not catch the whole sentence.
+"The 'Times' is a bad newspaper. If you read that, I am sorry for
+you."
+
+"The newspaper!" cried Margaritis. "Of course! Wife! wife! where is
+the newspaper?" he cried, going towards the next room.
+
+"If you are interested in newspapers," said Gaudissart, changing his
+attack, "we are sure to understand each other."
+
+"Yes; but before we say anything about that, tell me what you think of
+this wine."
+
+"Delicious!"
+
+"Then let us finish the bottle." The lunatic poured out a thimbleful
+for himself and filled Gaudissart's glass. "Well, Monsieur, I have two
+puncheons left of the same wine; if you find it good we can come to
+terms."
+
+"Exactly," said Gaudissart. "The fathers of the Saint-Simonian faith
+have authorized me to send them all the commodities I--But allow me to
+tell you about their noble newspaper. You, who have understood the
+whole question of insurance so thoroughly, and who are willing to
+assist my work in this district--"
+
+"Yes," said Margaritis, "if--"
+
+"If I take your wine; I understand perfectly. Your wine is very good,
+Monsieur; it puts the stomach in a glow."
+
+"They make champagne out of it; there is a man from Paris who comes
+here and makes it in Tours."
+
+"I have no doubt of it, Monsieur. The 'Globe,' of which we were
+speaking--"
+
+"Yes, I've gone over it," said Margaritis.
+
+"I was sure of it!" exclaimed Gaudissart. "Monsieur, you have a fine
+frontal development; a pate--excuse the word--which our gentlemen call
+'horse-head.' There's a horse element in the head of every great man.
+Genius will make itself known; but sometimes it happens that great
+men, in spite of their gifts, remain obscure. Such was very nearly the
+case with Saint-Simon; also with Monsieur Vico,--a strong man just
+beginning to shoot up; I am proud of Vico. Now, here we enter upon the
+new theory and formula of humanity. Attention, if you please."
+
+"Attention!" said the fool, falling into position.
+
+"Man's spoliation of man--by which I mean bodies of men living upon
+the labor of other men--ought to have ceased with the coming of
+Christ, I say CHRIST, who was sent to proclaim the equality of man in
+the sight of God. But what is the fact? Equality up to our day has
+been an 'ignus fatuus,' a chimera. Saint-Simon has arisen as the
+complement of Christ; as the modern exponent of the doctrine of
+equality, or rather of its practice, for theory has served its time--"
+
+"Is he liberated?" asked the lunatic.
+
+"Like liberalism, it has had its day. There is a nobler future before
+us: a new faith, free labor, free growth, free production, individual
+progress, a social co-ordination in which each man shall receive the
+full worth of his individual labor, in which no man shall be preyed
+upon by other men who, without capacity of their own, compel ALL to
+work for the profit of ONE. From this comes the doctrine of--"
+
+"How about servants?" demanded the lunatic.
+
+"They will remain servants if they have no capacity beyond it."
+
+"Then what's the good of your doctrine?"
+
+"To judge of this doctrine, Monsieur, you must consider it from a
+higher point of view: you must take a general survey of humanity. Here
+we come to the theories of Ballance: do you know his Palingenesis?"
+
+"I am fond of them," said the fool, who thought he said "ices."
+
+"Good!" returned Gaudissart. "Well, then, if the palingenistic aspects
+of the successive transformations of the spiritualized globe have
+struck, stirred, roused you, then, my dear sir, the 'Globe' newspaper,
+--noble name which proclaims its mission,--the 'Globe' is an organ, a
+guide, who will explain to you with the coming of each day the
+conditions under which this vast political and moral change will be
+effected. The gentlemen who--"
+
+"Do they drink wine?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur; their houses are kept up in the highest style; I may
+say, in prophetic style. Superb salons, large receptions, the apex of
+social life--"
+
+"Well," remarked the lunatic, "the workmen who pull things down want
+wine as much as those who put things up."
+
+"True," said the illustrious Gaudissart, "and all the more, Monsieur,
+when they pull down with one hand and build up with the other, like
+the apostles of the 'Globe.'"
+
+"They want good wine; Head of Vouvray, two puncheons, three hundred
+bottles, only one hundred francs,--a trifle."
+
+"How much is that a bottle?" said Gaudissart, calculating. "Let me
+see; there's the freight and the duty,--it will come to about seven
+sous. Why, it wouldn't be a bad thing: they give more for worse wines
+--(Good! I've got him!" thought Gaudissart, "he wants to sell me wine
+which I want; I'll master him)--Well, Monsieur," he continued, "those
+who argue usually come to an agreement. Let us be frank with each
+other. You have great influence in this district--"
+
+"I should think so!" said the madman; "I am the Head of Vouvray!"
+
+"Well, I see that you thoroughly comprehend the insurance of
+intellectual capital--"
+
+"Thoroughly."
+
+"--and that you have measured the full importance of the 'Globe'--"
+
+"Twice; on foot."
+
+Gaudissart was listening to himself and not to the replies of his
+hearer.
+
+"Therefore, in view of your circumstances and of your age, I quite
+understand that you have no need of insurance for yourself; but,
+Monsieur, you might induce others to insure, either because of their
+inherent qualities which need development, or for the protection of
+their families against a precarious future. Now, if you will subscribe
+to the 'Globe,' and give me your personal assistance in this district
+on behalf of insurance, especially life-annuity,--for the provinces
+are much attached to annuities--Well, if you will do this, then we can
+come to an understanding about the wine. Will you take the 'Globe'?"
+
+"I stand on the globe."
+
+"Will you advance its interests in this district?"
+
+"I advance."
+
+"And?"
+
+"And--"
+
+"And I--but you do subscribe, don't you, to the 'Globe'?"
+
+"The globe, good thing, for life," said the lunatic.
+
+"For life, Monsieur?--ah, I see! yes, you are right: it is full of
+life, vigor, intellect, science,--absolutely crammed with science,--
+well printed, clear type, well set up; what I call 'good nap.' None of
+your botched stuff, cotton and wool, trumpery; flimsy rubbish that
+rips if you look at it. It is deep; it states questions on which you
+can meditate at your leisure; it is the very thing to make time pass
+agreeably in the country."
+
+"That suits me," said the lunatic.
+
+"It only costs a trifle,--eighty francs."
+
+"That won't suit me," said the lunatic.
+
+"Monsieur!" cried Gaudissart, "of course you have got grandchildren?
+There's the 'Children's Journal'; that only costs seven francs a
+year."
+
+"Very good; take my wine, and I will subscribe to the children. That
+suits me very well: a fine idea! intellectual product, child. That's
+man living upon man, hein?"
+
+"You've hit it, Monsieur," said Gaudissart.
+
+"I've hit it!"
+
+"You consent to push me in the district?"
+
+"In the district."
+
+"I have your approbation?"
+
+"You have it."
+
+"Well, then, Monsieur, I take your wine at a hundred francs--"
+
+"No, no! hundred and ten--"
+
+"Monsieur! A hundred and ten for the company, but a hundred to me. I
+enable you to make a sale; you owe me a commission."
+
+"Charge 'em a hundred and twenty,"--"cent vingt" ("sans vin," without
+wine).
+
+"Capital pun that!"
+
+"No, puncheons. About that wine--"
+
+"Better and better! why, you are a wit."
+
+"Yes, I'm that," said the fool. "Come out and see my vineyards."
+
+"Willingly, the wine is getting into my head," said the illustrious
+Gaudissart, following Monsieur Margaritis, who marched him from row to
+row and hillock to hillock among the vines. The three ladies and
+Monsieur Vernier, left to themselves, went off into fits of laughter
+as they watched the traveller and the lunatic discussing,
+gesticulating, stopping short, resuming their walk, and talking
+vehemently.
+
+"I wish the good-man hadn't carried him off," said Vernier.
+
+Finally the pair returned, walking with the eager step of men who were
+in haste to finish up a matter of business.
+
+"He has got the better of the Parisian, damn him!" cried Vernier.
+
+And so it was. To the huge delight of the lunatic our illustrious
+Gaudissart sat down at a card-table and wrote an order for the
+delivery of the two casks of wine. Margaritis, having carefully read
+it over, counted out seven francs for his subscription to the
+"Children's Journal" and gave them to the traveller.
+
+"Adieu until to-morrow, Monsieur," said Gaudissart, twisting his
+watch-key. "I shall have the honor to call for you to-morrow.
+Meantime, send the wine at once to Paris to the address I have given
+you, and the price will be remitted immediately."
+
+Gaudissart, however, was a Norman, and he had no idea of making any
+agreement which was not reciprocal. He therefore required his promised
+supporter to sign a bond (which the lunatic carefully read over) to
+deliver two puncheons of the wine called "Head of Vouvray," vineyard
+of Margaritis.
+
+This done, the illustrious Gaudissart departed in high feather,
+humming, as he skipped along,--
+
+  "The King of the South,
+  He burned his mouth," etc.
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER V
+
+The illustrious Gaudissart returned to the Soleil d'Or, where he
+naturally conversed with the landlord while waiting for dinner.
+Mitouflet was an old soldier, guilelessly crafty, like the peasantry
+of the Loire; he never laughed at a jest, but took it with the gravity
+of a man accustomed to the roar of cannon and to make his own jokes
+under arms.
+
+"You have some very strong-minded people here," said Gaudissart,
+leaning against the door-post and lighting his cigar at Mitouflet's
+pipe.
+
+"How do you mean?" asked Mitouflet.
+
+"I mean people who are rough-shod on political and financial ideas."
+
+"Whom have you seen? if I may ask without indiscretion," said the
+landlord innocently, expectorating after the adroit and periodical
+fashion of smokers.
+
+"A fine, energetic fellow named Margaritis."
+
+Mitouflet cast two glances in succession at his guest which were
+expressive of chilling irony.
+
+"May be; the good-man knows a deal. He knows too much for other folks,
+who can't always understand him."
+
+"I can believe it, for he thoroughly comprehends the abstruse
+principles of finance."
+
+"Yes," said the innkeeper, "and for my part, I am sorry he is a
+lunatic."
+
+"A lunatic! What do you mean?"
+
+"Well, crazy,--cracked, as people are when they are insane," answered
+Mitouflet. "But he is not dangerous; his wife takes care of him. Have
+you been arguing with him?" added the pitiless landlord; "that must
+have been funny!"
+
+"Funny!" cried Gaudissart. "Funny! Then your Monsieur Vernier has been
+making fun of me!"
+
+"Did he send you there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Wife! wife! come here and listen. If Monsieur Vernier didn't take it
+into his head to send this gentleman to talk to Margaritis!"
+
+"What in the world did you say to each other, my dear, good Monsieur?"
+said the wife. "Why, he's crazy!"
+
+"He sold me two casks of wine."
+
+"Did you buy them?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But that is his delusion; he thinks he sells his wine, and he hasn't
+any."
+
+"Ha!" snorted the traveller, "then I'll go straight to Monsieur
+Vernier and thank him."
+
+And Gaudissart departed, boiling over with rage, to shake the ex-dyer,
+whom he found in his salon, laughing with a company of friends to whom
+he had already recounted the tale.
+
+"Monsieur," said the prince of travellers, darting a savage glance at
+his enemy, "you are a scoundrel and a blackguard; and under pain of
+being thought a turn-key,--a species of being far below a galley-
+slave,--you will give me satisfaction for the insult you dared to
+offer me in sending me to a man whom you knew to be a lunatic! Do you
+hear me, Monsieur Vernier, dyer?"
+
+Such was the harangue which Gaudissart prepared as he went along, as a
+tragedian makes ready for his entrance on the scene.
+
+"What!" cried Vernier, delighted at the presence of an audience, "do
+you think we have no right to make fun of a man who comes here, bag
+and baggage, and demands that we hand over our property because,
+forsooth, he is pleased to call us great men, painters, artists,
+poets,--mixing us up gratuitously with a set of fools who have neither
+house nor home, nor sous nor sense? Why should we put up with a rascal
+who comes here and wants us to feather his nest by subscribing to a
+newspaper which preaches a new religion whose first doctrine is, if
+you please, that we are not to inherit from our fathers and mothers?
+On my sacred word of honor, Pere Margaritis said things a great deal
+more sensible. And now, what are you complaining about? You and
+Margaritis seemed to understand each other. The gentlemen here present
+can testify that if you had talked to the whole canton you couldn't
+have been as well understood."
+
+"That's all very well for you to say; but I have been insulted,
+Monsieur, and I demand satisfaction!"
+
+"Very good, Monsieur! consider yourself insulted, if you like. I shall
+not give you satisfaction, because there is neither rhyme nor reason
+nor satisfaction to be found in the whole business. What an absurd
+fool he is, to be sure!"
+
+At these words Gaudissart flew at the dyer to give him a slap on the
+face, but the listening crowd rushed between them, so that the
+illustrious traveller only contrived to knock off the wig of his
+enemy, which fell on the head of Mademoiselle Clara Vernier.
+
+"If you are not satisfied, Monsieur," he said, "I shall be at the
+Soleil d'Or until to-morrow morning, and you will find me ready to
+show you what it means to give satisfaction. I fought in July,
+Monsieur."
+
+"And you shall fight in Vouvray," answered the dyer; "and what is
+more, you shall stay here longer than you imagine."
+
+Gaudissart marched off, turning over in his mind this prophetic
+remark, which seemed to him full of sinister portent. For the first
+time in his life the prince of travellers did not dine jovially. The
+whole town of Vouvray was put in a ferment about the "affair" between
+Monsieur Vernier and the apostle of Saint-Simonism. Never before had
+the tragic event of a duel been so much as heard of in that benign and
+happy valley.
+
+"Monsieur Mitouflet, I am to fight to-morrow with Monsieur Vernier,"
+said Gaudissart to his landlord. "I know no one here: will you be my
+second?"
+
+"Willingly," said the host.
+
+Gaudissart had scarcely finished his dinner before Madame Fontanieu
+and the assistant-mayor of Vouvray came to the Soleil d'Or and took
+Mitouflet aside. They told him it would be a painful and injurious
+thing to the whole canton if a violent death were the result of this
+affair; they represented the pitiable distress of Madame Vernier, and
+conjured him to find some way to arrange matters and save the credit
+of the district.
+
+"I take it all upon myself," said the sagacious landlord.
+
+In the evening he went up to the traveller's room carrying pens, ink,
+and paper.
+
+"What have you got there?" asked Gaudissart.
+
+"If you are going to fight to-morrow," answered Mitouflet, "you had
+better make some settlement of your affairs; and perhaps you have
+letters to write,--we all have beings who are dear to us. Writing
+doesn't kill, you know. Are you a good swordsman? Would you like to
+get your hand in? I have some foils."
+
+"Yes, gladly."
+
+Mitouflet returned with foils and masks.
+
+"Now, then, let us see what you can do."
+
+The pair put themselves on guard. Mitouflet, with his former prowess
+as grenadier of the guard, made sixty-two passes at Gaudissart, pushed
+him about right and left, and finally pinned him up against the wall.
+
+"The deuce! you are strong," said Gaudissart, out of breath.
+
+"Monsieur Vernier is stronger than I am."
+
+"The devil! Damn it, I shall fight with pistols."
+
+"I advise you to do so; because, if you take large holster pistols and
+load them up to their muzzles, you can't risk anything. They are SURE
+to fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field
+with honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! 'sapristi,' two brave men
+would be arrant fools to kill each other for a joke."
+
+"Are you sure the pistols will carry WIDE ENOUGH? I should be sorry to
+kill the man, after all," said Gaudissart.
+
+"Sleep in peace," answered Mitouflet, departing.
+
+The next morning the two adversaries, more or less pale, met beside
+the bridge of La Cise. The brave Vernier came near shooting a cow
+which was peaceably feeding by the roadside.
+
+"Ah, you fired in the air!" cried Gaudissart.
+
+At these words the enemies embraced.
+
+"Monsieur," said the traveller, "your joke was rather rough, but it
+was a good one for all that. I am sorry I apostrophized you: I was
+excited. I regard you as a man of honor."
+
+"Monsieur, we take twenty subscriptions to the 'Children's Journal,'"
+replied the dyer, still pale.
+
+"That being so," said Gaudissart, "why shouldn't we all breakfast
+together? Men who fight are always the ones to come to a good
+understanding."
+
+"Monsieur Mitouflet," said Gaudissart on his return to the inn, "of
+course you have got a sheriff's officer here?"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"I want to send a summons to my good friend Margaritis to deliver the
+two casks of wine."
+
+"But he has not got them," said Vernier.
+
+"No matter for that; the affair can be arranged by the payment of an
+indemnity. I won't have it said that Vouvray outwitted the illustrious
+Gaudissart."
+
+Madame Margaritis, alarmed at the prospect of a suit in which the
+plaintiff would certainly win his case, brought thirty francs to the
+placable traveller, who thereupon considered himself quits with the
+happiest region of sunny France,--a region which is also, we must add,
+the most recalcitrant to new and progressive ideas.
+
+On returning from his trip through the southern departments, the
+illustrious Gaudissart occupied the coupe of a diligence, where he met
+a young man to whom, as they journeyed between Angouleme and Paris, he
+deigned to explain the enigmas of life, taking him, apparently, for an
+infant.
+
+As they passed Vouvray the young man exclaimed, "What a fine site!"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur," said Gaudissart, "but not habitable on account of the
+people. You get into duels every day. Why, it is not three months
+since I fought one just there," pointing to the bridge of La Cise,
+"with a damned dyer; but I made an end of him,--he bit the dust!"
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Finot, Andoche
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Start in Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+
+Gaudissart, Felix
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Cousin Pons
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Honorine
+
+Popinot, Anselme
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Cousin Pons
+  Cousin Betty
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+
+
+
+                      THE MUSE OF THE DEPARTMENT
+
+                         By HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+                            Translated by
+                             James Waring
+
+
+
+                              DEDICATION
+
+  To Monsieur le Comte Ferdinand de Gramont.
+
+  MY DEAR FERDINAND,--If the chances of the world of literature--
+  /habent sua fata libelli/--should allow these lines to be an
+  enduring record, that will still be but a trifle in return for the
+  trouble you have taken--you, the Hozier, the Cherin, the King-at-
+  Arms of these Studies of Life; you, to whom the Navarreins,
+  Cadignans, Langeais, Blamont-Chauvrys, Chaulieus, Arthez,
+  Esgrignons, Mortsaufs, Valois--the hundred great names that form
+  the Aristocracy of the "Human Comedy" owe their lordly mottoes and
+  ingenious armorial bearings. Indeed, "the Armorial of the Etudes,
+  devised by Ferdinand de Gramont, gentleman," is a complete manual
+  of French Heraldry, in which nothing is forgotten, not even the
+  arms of the Empire, and I shall preserve it as a monument of
+  friendship and of Benedictine patience. What profound knowledge of
+  the old feudal spirit is to be seen in the motto of the
+  Beauseants, /Pulchre sedens, melius agens/; in that of the
+  Espards, /Des partem leonis/; in that of the Vandenesses, /Ne se
+  vend/. And what elegance in the thousand details of the learned
+  symbolism which will always show how far accuracy has been carried
+  in my work, to which you, the poet, have contributed.
+
+  Your old friend,
+  DE BALZAC.
+
+
+
+                      THE MUSE OF THE DEPARTMENT
+
+
+
+On the skirts of Le Berry stands a town which, watered by the Loire,
+infallibly attracts the traveler's eye. Sancerre crowns the topmost
+height of a chain of hills, the last of the range that gives variety
+to the Nivernais. The Loire floods the flats at the foot of these
+slopes, leaving a yellow alluvium that is extremely fertile, excepting
+in those places where it has deluged them with sand and destroyed them
+forever, by one of those terrible risings which are also incidental to
+the Vistula--the Loire of the northern coast.
+
+The hill on which the houses of Sancerre are grouped is so far from
+the river that the little river-port of Saint-Thibault thrives on the
+life of Sancerre. There wine is shipped and oak staves are landed,
+with all the produce brought from the upper and lower Loire. At the
+period when this story begins the suspension bridges at Cosne and at
+Saint-Thibault were already built. Travelers from Paris to Sancerre by
+the southern road were no longer ferried across the river from Cosne
+to Saint-Thibault; and this of itself is enough to show that the great
+cross-shuffle of 1830 was a thing of the past, for the House of
+Orleans has always had a care for substantial improvements, though
+somewhat after the fashion of a husband who makes his wife presents
+out of her marriage portion.
+
+Excepting that part of Sancerre which occupies the little plateau, the
+streets are more or less steep, and the town is surrounded by slopes
+known as the Great Ramparts, a name which shows that they are the
+highroads of the place.
+
+Outside the ramparts lies a belt of vineyards. Wine forms the chief
+industry and the most important trade of the country, which yields
+several vintages of high-class wine full of aroma, and so nearly
+resembling the wines of Burgundy, that the vulgar palate is deceived.
+So Sancerre finds in the wineshops of Paris the quick market
+indispensable for liquor that will not keep for more than seven or
+eight years. Below the town lie a few villages, Fontenoy and Saint-
+Satur, almost suburbs, reminding us by their situation of the smiling
+vineyards about Neuchatel in Switzerland.
+
+The town still bears much of its ancient aspect; the streets are
+narrow and paved with pebbles carted up from the Loire. Some old
+houses are to be seen there. The citadel, a relic of military power
+and feudal times, stood one of the most terrible sieges of our
+religious wars, when French Calvinists far outdid the ferocious
+Cameronians of Walter Scott's tales.
+
+The town of Sancerre, rich in its greater past, but widowed now of its
+military importance, is doomed to an even less glorious future, for
+the course of trade lies on the right bank of the Loire. The sketch
+here given shows that Sancerre will be left more and more lonely in
+spite of the two bridges connecting it with Cosne.
+
+Sancerre, the pride of the left bank, numbers three thousand five
+hundred inhabitants at most, while at Cosne there are now more than
+six thousand. Within half a century the part played by these two towns
+standing opposite each other has been reversed. The advantage of
+situation, however, remains with the historic town, whence the view on
+every side is perfectly enchanting, where the air is deliciously pure,
+the vegetation splendid, and the residents, in harmony with nature,
+are friendly souls, good fellows, and devoid of Puritanism, though
+two-thirds of the population are Calvinists. Under such conditions,
+though there are the usual disadvantages of life in a small town, and
+each one lives under the officious eye which makes private life almost
+a public concern, on the other hand, the spirit of township--a sort of
+patriotism, which cannot indeed take the place of a love of home--
+flourishes triumphantly.
+
+Thus the town of Sancerre is exceedingly proud of having given birth
+to one of the glories of modern medicine, Horace Bianchon, and to an
+author of secondary rank, Etienne Lousteau, one of our most successful
+journalists. The district included under the municipality of Sancerre,
+distressed at finding itself practically ruled by seven or eight large
+landowners, the wire-pullers of the elections, tried to shake off the
+electoral yoke of a creed which had reduced it to a rotten borough.
+This little conspiracy, plotted by a handful of men whose vanity was
+provoked, failed through the jealousy which the elevation of one of
+them, as the inevitable result, roused in the breasts of the others.
+This result showed the radical defect of the scheme, and the remedy
+then suggested was to rally round a champion at the next election, in
+the person of one of the two men who so gloriously represented
+Sancerre in Paris circles.
+
+This idea was extraordinarily advanced for the provinces, for since
+1830 the nomination of parochial dignitaries has increased so greatly
+that real statesmen are becoming rare indeed in the lower chamber.
+
+In point of fact, this plan, of very doubtful outcome, was hatched in
+the brain of the Superior Woman of the borough, /dux femina fasti/,
+but with a view to personal interest. This idea was so widely rooted
+in this lady's past life, and so entirely comprehended her future
+prospects, that it can scarcely be understood without some sketch of
+her antecedent career.
+
+
+
+Sancerre at that time could boast of a Superior Woman, long misprized
+indeed, but now, about 1836, enjoying a pretty extensive local
+reputation. This, too, was the period at which two Sancerrois in Paris
+were attaining, each in his own line, to the highest degree of glory
+for one, and of fashion for the other. Etienne Lousteau, a writer in
+reviews, signed his name to contributions to a paper that had eight
+thousand subscribers; and Bianchon, already chief physician to a
+hospital, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and member of the Academy of
+Sciences, had just been made a professor.
+
+If it were not that the word would to many readers seem to imply a
+degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created /Sandism/,
+so true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil.
+This leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still,
+/Sandism/ has its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases
+her assumption of superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-
+stocking of sentiment; and she is rather less of a bore, love to some
+extent neutralizing literature. The most conspicuous result of George
+Sand's celebrity was to elicit the fact that France has a perfectly
+enormous number of superior women, who have, however, till now been so
+generous as to leave the field to the Marechal de Saxe's
+granddaughter.
+
+The Superior Woman of Sancerre lived at La Baudraye, a town-house and
+country-house in one, within ten minutes of the town, and in the
+village, or, if you will, the suburb of Saint-Satur. The La Baudrayes
+of the present day have, as is frequently the case, thrust themselves
+in, and are but a substitute for those La Baudrayes whose name,
+glorious in the Crusades, figured in the chief events of the history
+of Le Berry.
+
+The story must be told.
+
+In the time of Louis XIV. a certain sheriff named Milaud, whose
+forefathers had been furious Calvinists, was converted at the time of
+the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. To encourage this movement in
+one of the strong-holds of Calvinism, the King gave said Milaud a good
+appointment in the "Waters and Forests," granted him arms and the
+title of Sire (or Lord) de la Baudraye, with the fief of the old and
+genuine La Baudrayes. The descendants of the famous Captain la
+Baudraye fell, sad to say, into one of the snares laid for heretics by
+the new decrees, and were hanged--an unworthy deed of the great
+King's.
+
+Under Louis XV. Milaud de la Baudraye, from being a mere squire, was
+made Chevalier, and had influence enough to obtain for his son a
+cornet's commission in the Musketeers. This officer perished at
+Fontenoy, leaving a child, to whom King Louis XVI. subsequently
+granted the privileges, by patent, of a farmer-general, in remembrance
+of his father's death on the field of battle.
+
+This financier, a fashionable wit, great at charades, capping verses,
+and posies to Chlora, lived in society, was a hanger-on to the Duc de
+Nivernais, and fancied himself obliged to follow the nobility into
+exile; but he took care to carry his money with him. Thus the rich
+/emigre/ was able to assist more than one family of high rank.
+
+In 1800, tired of hoping, and perhaps tired of lending, he returned to
+Sancerre, bought back La Baudraye out of a feeling of vanity and
+imaginary pride, quite intelligible in a sheriff's grandson, though
+under the consulate his prospects were but slender; all the more so,
+indeed, because the ex-farmer-general had small hopes of his heir's
+perpetuating the new race of La Baudraye.
+
+Jean Athanase Polydore Milaud de la Baudraye, his only son, more than
+delicate from his birth, was very evidently the child of a man whose
+constitution had early been exhausted by the excesses in which rich
+men indulge, who then marry at the first stage of premature old age,
+and thus bring degeneracy into the highest circles of society. During
+the years of the emigration Madame de la Baudraye, a girl of no
+fortune, chosen for her noble birth, had patiently reared this sallow,
+sickly boy, for whom she had the devoted love mothers feel for such
+changeling creatures. Her death--she was a Casteran de la Tour--
+contributed to bring about Monsieur de la Baudraye's return to France.
+
+This Lucullus of the Milauds, when he died, left his son the fief,
+stripped indeed of its fines and dues, but graced with weathercocks
+bearing his coat-of-arms, a thousand louis-d'or--in 1802 a
+considerable sum of money--and certain receipts for claims on very
+distinguished /emigres/ enclosed in a pocketbook full of verses, with
+this inscription on the wrapper, /Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas/.
+
+Young La Baudraye did not die, but he owed his life to habits of
+monastic strictness; to the economy of action which Fontenelle
+preached as the religion of the invalid; and, above all, to the air of
+Sancerre and the influence of its fine elevation, whence a panorama
+over the valley of the Loire may be seen extending for forty leagues.
+
+From 1802 to 1815 young La Baudraye added several plots to his
+vineyards, and devoted himself to the culture of the vine. The
+Restoration seemed to him at first so insecure that he dared not go to
+Paris to claim his debts; but after Napoleon's death he tried to turn
+his father's collection of autographs into money, though not
+understanding the deep philosophy which had thus mixed up I O U's and
+copies of verses. But the winegrower lost so much time in impressing
+his identity on the Duke of Navarreins "and others," as he phrased it,
+that he came back to Sancerre, to his beloved vintage, without having
+obtained anything but offers of service.
+
+The Restoration had raised the nobility to such a degree of lustre as
+made La Baudraye wish to justify his ambitions by having an heir. This
+happy result of matrimony he considered doubtful, or he would not so
+long have postponed the step; however, finding himself still above
+ground in 1823, at the age of forty-three, a length of years which no
+doctor, astrologer, or midwife would have dared to promise him, he
+hoped to earn the reward of his sober life. And yet his choice showed
+such a lack of prudence in regard to his frail constitution, that the
+malicious wit of a country town could not help thinking it must be the
+result of some deep calculation.
+
+Just at this time His Eminence, Monseigneur the Archbishop of Bourges,
+had converted to the Catholic faith a young person, the daughter of
+one of the citizen families, who were the first upholders of
+Calvinism, and who, thanks to their obscurity or to some compromise
+with Heaven, had escaped from the persecutions under Louis XIV. The
+Piedefers--a name that was obviously one of the quaint nicknames
+assumed by the champions of the Reformation--had set up as highly
+respectable cloth merchants. But in the reign of Louis XVI., Abraham
+Piedefer fell into difficulties, and at his death in 1786 left his two
+children in extreme poverty. One of them, Tobie Piedefer, went out to
+the Indies, leaving the pittance they had inherited to his elder
+brother. During the Revolution Moise Piedefer bought up the
+nationalized land, pulled down abbeys and churches with all the zeal
+of his ancestors, oddly enough, and married a Catholic, the only
+daughter of a member of the Convention who had perished on the
+scaffold. This ambitious Piedefer died in 1819, leaving a little girl
+of remarkable beauty. This child, brought up in the Calvinist faith,
+was named Dinah, in accordance with the custom in use among the sect,
+of taking their Christian names from the Bible, so as to have nothing
+in common with the Saints of the Roman Church.
+
+Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer was placed by her mother in one of the
+best schools in Bourges, that kept by the Demoiselles Chamarolles, and
+was soon as highly distinguished for the qualities of her mind as for
+her beauty; but she found herself snubbed by girls of birth and
+fortune, destined by-and-by to play a greater part in the world than a
+mere plebeian, the daughter of a mother who was dependent on the
+settlement of Piedefer's estate. Dinah, having raised herself for the
+moment above her companions, now aimed at remaining on a level with
+them for the rest of her life. She determined, therefore, to renounce
+Calvinism, in the hope that the Cardinal would extend his favor to his
+proselyte and interest himself in her prospects. You may from this
+judge of Mademoiselle Dinah's superiority, since at the age of
+seventeen she was a convert solely from ambition.
+
+The Archbishop, possessed with the idea that Dinah Piedefer would
+adorn society, was anxious to see her married. But every family to
+whom the prelate made advances took fright at a damsel gifted with the
+looks of a princess, who was reputed to be the cleverest of
+Mademoiselle Chamarolles' pupils and who, at the somewhat theatrical
+ceremonial of prize-giving, always took a leading part. A thousand
+crowns a year, which was as much as she could hope for from the estate
+of La Hautoy when divided between the mother and daughter, would be a
+mere trifle in comparison with the expenses into which a husband would
+be led by the personal advantages of so brilliant a creature.
+
+As soon as all these facts came to the ears of little Polydore de la
+Baudraye--for they were the talk of every circle in the Department of
+the Cher--he went to Bourges just when Madame Piedefer, a devotee at
+high services, had almost made up her own mind and her daughter's to
+take the first comer with well-lined pockets--the first /chien
+coiffe/, as they say in Le Berry. And if the Cardinal was delighted to
+receive Monsieur de la Baudraye, Monsieur de la Baudraye was even
+better pleased to receive a wife from the hands of the Cardinal. The
+little gentleman only demanded of His Eminence a formal promise to
+support his claims with the President of the Council to enable him to
+recover his debts from the Duc de Navarreins "and others" by a lien on
+their indemnities. This method, however, seemed to the able Minister
+then occupying the Pavillon Marsan rather too sharp practice, and he
+gave the vine-owner to understand that his business should be attended
+to all in good time.
+
+It is easy to imagine the excitement produced in the Sancerre district
+by the news of Monsieur de la Baudraye's imprudent marriage.
+
+"It is quite intelligible," said President Boirouge; "the little man
+was very much startled, as I am told, at hearing that handsome young
+Milaud, the Attorney-General's deputy at Nevers, say to Monsieur de
+Clagny as they were looking at the turrets of La Baudraye, 'That will
+be mine some day.'--'But,' says Clagny, 'he may marry and have
+children.'--'Impossible!'--So you may imagine how such a changeling as
+little La Baudraye must hate that colossal Milaud."
+
+There was at Nevers a plebeian branch of the Milauds, which had grown
+so rich in the cutlery trade that the present representative of that
+branch had been brought up to the civil service, in which he had
+enjoyed the patronage of Marchangy, now dead.
+
+It will be as well to eliminate from this story, in which moral
+developments play the principal part, the baser material interests
+which alone occupied Monsieur de la Baudraye, by briefly relating the
+results of his negotiations in Paris. This will also throw light on
+certain mysterious phenomena of contemporary history, and the
+underground difficulties in matters of politics which hampered the
+Ministry at the time of the Restoration.
+
+
+
+The promises of Ministers were so illusory that Monsieur de la
+Baudraye determined on going to Paris at the time when the Cardinal's
+presence was required there by the sitting of the Chambers.
+
+This is how the Duc de Navarreins, the principal debtor threatened by
+Monsieur de la Baudraye, got out of the scrape.
+
+The country gentleman, lodging at the Hotel de Mayence, Rue Saint-
+Honore, near the Place Vendome, one morning received a visit from a
+confidential agent of the Ministry, who was an expert in "winding up"
+business. This elegant personage, who stepped out of an elegant cab,
+and was dressed in the most elegant style, was requested to walk up to
+No. 3--that is to say, to the third floor, to a small room where he
+found his provincial concocting a cup of coffee over his bedroom fire.
+
+"Is it to Monsieur Milaud de la Baudraye that I have the honor--"
+
+"Yes," said the little man, draping himself in his dressing-gown.
+
+After examining this garment, the illicit offspring of an old chine
+wrapper of Madame Piedefer's and a gown of the late lamented Madame de
+la Baudraye, the emissary considered the man, the dressing-gown, and
+the little stove on which the milk was boiling in a tin saucepan, as
+so homogeneous and characteristic, that he deemed it needless to beat
+about the bush.
+
+"I will lay a wager, monsieur," said he, audaciously, "that you dine
+for forty sous at Hurbain's in the Palais Royal."
+
+"Pray, why?"
+
+"Oh, I know you, having seen you there," replied the Parisian with
+perfect gravity. "All the princes' creditors dine there. You know that
+you recover scarcely ten per cent on debts from these fine gentlemen.
+I would not give you five per cent on a debt to be recovered from the
+estate of the late Duc d'Orleans--nor even," he added in a low voice--
+"from MONSIEUR."
+
+"So you have come to buy up the bills?" said La Baudraye, thinking
+himself very clever.
+
+"Buy them!" said his visitor. "Why, what do you take me for? I am
+Monsieur des Lupeaulx, Master of Appeals, Secretary-General to the
+Ministry, and I have come to propose an arrangement."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Of course, monsieur, you know the position of your debtor--"
+
+"Of my debtors--"
+
+"Well, monsieur, you understand the position of your debtors; they
+stand high in the King's good graces, but they have no money, and are
+obliged to make a good show.--Again, you know the difficulties of the
+political situation. The aristocracy has to be rehabilitated in the
+face of a very strong force of the third estate. The King's idea--and
+France does him scant justice--is to create a peerage as a national
+institution analogous to the English peerage. To realize this grand
+idea we need years--and millions.--/Noblesse oblige/. The Duc de
+Navarreins, who is, as you know, first gentleman of the Bedchamber to
+the King, does not repudiate his debt; but he cannot--Now, be
+reasonable.--Consider the state of politics. We are emerging from the
+pit of the Revolution.--and you yourself are noble--He simply cannot
+pay--"
+
+"Monsieur--"
+
+"You are hasty," said des Lupeaulx. "Listen. He cannot pay in money.
+Well, then; you, a clever man, can take payment in favors--Royal or
+Ministerial."
+
+"What! When in 1793 my father put down one hundred thousand--"
+
+"My dear sir, recrimination is useless. Listen to a simple statement
+in political arithmetic: The collectorship at Sancerre is vacant; a
+certain paymaster-general of the forces has a claim on it, but he has
+no chance of getting it; you have the chance--and no claim. You will
+get the place. You will hold it for three months, you will then
+resign, and Monsieur Gravier will give twenty thousand francs for it.
+In addition, the Order of the Legion of Honor will be conferred on
+you."
+
+"Well, that is something," said the wine-grower, tempted by the money
+rather than by the red ribbon.
+
+"But then," said des Lupeaulx, "you must show your gratitude to His
+Excellency by restoring to Monseigneur the Duc de Navarreins all your
+claims on him."
+
+La Baudraye returned to Sancerre as Collector of Taxes. Six months
+later he was superseded by Monsieur Gravier, regarded as one of the
+most agreeable financiers who had served under the Empire, and who was
+of course presented by Monsieur de la Baudraye to his wife.
+
+As soon as he was released from his functions, Monsieur de la Baudraye
+returned to Paris to come to an understanding with some other debtors.
+This time he was made a Referendary under the Great Seal, Baron, and
+Officer of the Legion of Honor. He sold the appointment as
+Referendary; and then the Baron de la Baudraye called on his last
+remaining debtors, and reappeared at Sancerre as Master of Appeals,
+with an appointment as Royal Commissioner to a commercial association
+established in the Nivernais, at a salary of six thousand francs, an
+absolute sinecure. So the worthy La Baudraye, who was supposed to have
+committed a financial blunder, had, in fact, done very good business
+in the choice of a wife.
+
+Thanks to sordid economy and an indemnity paid him for the estate
+belonging to his father, nationalized and sold in 1793, by the year
+1827 the little man could realize the dream of his whole life. By
+paying four hundred thousand francs down, and binding himself to
+further instalments, which compelled him to live for six years on the
+air as it came, to use his own expression, he was able to purchase the
+estate of Anzy on the banks of the Loire, about two leagues above
+Sancerre, and its magnificent castle built by Philibert de l'Orme, the
+admiration of every connoisseur, and for five centuries the property
+of the Uxelles family. At last he was one of the great landowners of
+the province! It is not absolutely certain that the satisfaction of
+knowing that an entail had been created, by letters patent dated back
+to December 1820, including the estates of Anzy, of La Baudraye, and
+of La Hautoy, was any compensation to Dinah on finding herself reduced
+to unconfessed penuriousness till 1835.
+
+This sketch of the financial policy of the first Baron de la Baudraye
+explains the man completely. Those who are familiar with the manias of
+country folks will recognize in him the /land-hunger/ which becomes
+such a consuming passion to the exclusion of every other; a sort of
+avarice displayed in the sight of the sun, which often leads to ruin
+by a want of balance between the interest on mortgages and the
+products of the soil. Those who, from 1802 till 1827, had merely
+laughed at the little man as they saw him trotting to Saint-Thibault
+and attending to his business, like a merchant living on his
+vineyards, found the answer to the riddle when the ant-lion seized his
+prey, after waiting for the day when the extravagance of the Duchesse
+de Maufrigneuse culminated in the sale of that splendid property.
+
+Madame Piedefer came to live with her daughter. The combined fortunes
+of Monsieur de la Baudraye and his mother-in-law, who had been content
+to accept an annuity of twelve hundred francs on the lands of La
+Hautoy which she handed over to him, amounted to an acknowledged
+income of about fifteen thousand francs.
+
+During the early days of her married life, Dinah had effected some
+alterations which had made the house at La Baudraye a very pleasant
+residence. She turned a spacious forecourt into a formal garden,
+pulling down wine-stores, presses, and shabby outhouses. Behind the
+manor-house, which, though small, did not lack style with its turrets
+and gables, she laid out a second garden with shrubs, flower-beds, and
+lawns, and divided it from the vineyards by a wall hidden under
+creepers. She also made everything within doors as comfortable as
+their narrow circumstances allowed.
+
+In order not to be ruined by a young lady so very superior as Dinah
+seemed to be, Monsieur de la Baudraye was shrewd enough to say nothing
+as to the recovery of debts in Paris. This dead secrecy as to his
+money matters gave a touch of mystery to his character, and lent him
+dignity in his wife's eyes during the first years of their married
+life--so majestic is silence!
+
+The alterations effected at La Baudraye made everybody eager to see
+the young mistress, all the more so because Dinah would never show
+herself, nor receive any company, before she felt quite settled in her
+home and had thoroughly studied the inhabitants, and, above all, her
+taciturn husband. When, one spring morning in 1825, pretty Madame de
+la Baudraye was first seen walking on the Mall in a blue velvet dress,
+with her mother in black velvet, there was quite an excitement in
+Sancerre. This dress confirmed the young woman's reputation for
+superiority, brought up, as she had been, in the capital of Le Berry.
+Every one was afraid lest in entertaining this phoenix of the
+Department, the conversation should not be clever enough; and, of
+course, everybody was constrained in the presence of Madame de la
+Baudraye, who produced a sort of terror among the woman-folk. As they
+admired a carpet of Indian shawl-pattern in the La Baudraye drawing-
+room, a Pompadour writing-table carved and gilt, brocade window
+curtains, and a Japanese bowl full of flowers on the round table among
+a selection of the newest books; when they heard the fair Dinah
+playing at sight, without making the smallest demur before seating
+herself at the piano, the idea they conceived of her superiority
+assumed vast proportions. That she might never allow herself to become
+careless or the victim of bad taste, Dinah had determined to keep
+herself up to the mark as to the fashions and latest developments of
+luxury by an active correspondence with Anna Grossetete, her bosom
+friend at Mademoiselle Chamarolles' school.
+
+Anna, thanks to a fine fortune, had married the Comte de Fontaine's
+third son. Thus those ladies who visited at La Baudraye were
+perpetually piqued by Dinah's success in leading the fashion; do what
+they would, they were always behind, or, as they say on the turf,
+distanced.
+
+While all these trifles gave rise to malignant envy in the ladies of
+Sancerre, Dinah's conversation and wit engendered absolute aversion.
+In her ambition to keep her mind on the level of Parisian brilliancy,
+Madame de la Baudraye allowed no vacuous small talk in her presence,
+no old-fashioned compliments, no pointless remarks; she would never
+endure the yelping of tittle-tattle, the backstairs slander which
+forms the staple of talk in the country. She liked to hear of
+discoveries in science or art, or the latest pieces at the theatres,
+the newest poems, and by airing the cant words of the day she made a
+show of uttering thoughts.
+
+The Abbe Duret, Cure of Sancerre, an old man of a lost type of clergy
+in France, a man of the world with a liking for cards, had not dared
+to indulge this taste in so liberal a district as Sancerre; he,
+therefore, was delighted at Madame de la Baudraye's coming, and they
+got on together to admiration. The /sous-prefet/, one Vicomte de
+Chargeboeuf, was delighted to find in Madame de la Baudraye's drawing-
+room a sort of oasis where there was a truce to provincial life. As to
+Monsieur de Clagny, the Public Prosecutor, his admiration for the fair
+Dinah kept him bound to Sancerre. The enthusiastic lawyer refused all
+promotion, and became a quite pious adorer of this angel of grace and
+beauty. He was a tall, lean man, with a minatory countenance set off
+by terrible eyes in deep black circles, under enormous eyebrows; and
+his eloquence, very unlike his love-making, could be incisive.
+
+Monsieur Gravier was a little, round man, who in the days of the
+Empire had been a charming ballad-singer; it was this accomplishment
+that had won him the high position of Paymaster-General of the forces.
+Having mixed himself up in certain important matters in Spain with
+generals at that time in opposition, he had made the most of these
+connections to the Minister, who, in consideration of the place he had
+lost, promised him the Receivership at Sancerre, and then allowed him
+to pay for the appointment. The frivolous spirit and light tone of the
+Empire had become ponderous in Monsieur Gravier; he did not, or would
+not, understand the wide difference between manners under the
+Restoration and under the Empire. Still, he conceived of himself as
+far superior to Monsieur de Clagny; his style was in better taste; he
+followed the fashion, was to be seen in a buff waistcoat, gray
+trousers, and neat, tightly-fitting coats; he wore a fashionable silk
+tie slipped through a diamond ring, while the lawyer never dressed in
+anything but black--coat, trousers, and waistcoat alike, and those
+often shabby.
+
+These four men were the first to go into ecstasies over Dinah's
+cultivation, good taste, and refinement, and pronounced her a woman of
+most superior mind. Then the women said to each other, "Madame de la
+Baudraye must laugh at us behind our back."
+
+This view, which was more or less correct, kept them from visiting at
+La Baudraye. Dinah, attainted and convicted of pedantry, because she
+spoke grammatically, was nicknamed the Sappho of Saint-Satur. At last
+everybody made insolent game of the great qualities of the woman who
+had thus roused the enmity of the ladies of Sancerre. And they ended
+by denying a superiority--after all, merely comparative!--which
+emphasized their ignorance, and did not forgive it. Where the whole
+population is hunch-backed, a straight shape is the monstrosity; Dinah
+was regarded as monstrous and dangerous, and she found herself in a
+desert.
+
+Astonished at seeing the women of the neighborhood only at long
+intervals, and for visits of a few minutes, Dinah asked Monsieur de
+Clagny the reason of this state of things.
+
+"You are too superior a woman to be liked by other women," said the
+lawyer.
+
+Monsieur Gravier, when questioned by the forlorn fair, only, after
+much entreaty, replied:
+
+"Well, lady fair, you are not satisfied to be merely charming. You are
+clever and well educated, you know every book that comes out, you love
+poetry, you are a musician, and you talk delightfully. Women cannot
+forgive so much superiority."
+
+Men said to Monsieur de la Baudraye:
+
+"You who have such a Superior Woman for a wife are very fortunate----"
+And at last he himself would say:
+
+"I who have a Superior Woman for a wife, am very fortunate," etc.
+
+Madame Piedefer, flattered through her daughter, also allowed herself
+to say such things--"My daughter, who is a very Superior Woman, was
+writing yesterday to Madame de Fontaine such and such a thing."
+
+Those who know the world--France, Paris--know how true it is that many
+celebrities are thus created.
+
+
+
+Two years later, by the end of the year 1825, Dinah de la Baudraye was
+accused of not choosing to have any visitors but men; then it was said
+that she did not care for women--and that was a crime. Not a thing
+could she do, not her most trifling action, could escape criticism and
+misrepresentation. After making every sacrifice that a well-bred woman
+can make, and placing herself entirely in the right, Madame de la
+Baudraye was so rash as to say to a false friend who condoled with her
+on her isolation:
+
+"I would rather have my bowl empty than with anything in it!"
+
+This speech produced a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly
+retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after
+five years of married life, /little/ de la Baudraye became a byword
+for laughter. To understand this provincial witticism, readers may be
+reminded of the Bailli de Ferrette--some, no doubt, having known him--
+of whom it was said that he was the bravest man in Europe for daring
+to walk on his legs, and who was accused of putting lead in his shoes
+to save himself from being blown away. Monsieur de la Baudraye, a
+sallow and almost diaphanous creature, would have been engaged by the
+Bailli de Ferrette as first gentleman-in-waiting if that diplomatist
+had been the Grand Duke of Baden instead of being merely his envoy.
+
+Monsieur de la Baudraye, whose legs were so thin that, for mere
+decency, he wore false calves, whose thighs were like the arms of an
+average man, whose body was not unlike that of a cockchafer, would
+have been an advantageous foil to the Bailli de Ferrette. As he
+walked, the little vine-owner's leg-pads often twisted round on to his
+shins, so little did he make a secret of them, and he would thank any
+one who warned him of this little mishap. He wore knee-breeches, black
+silk stockings, and a white waistcoat till 1824. After his marriage he
+adopted blue trousers and boots with heels, which made Sancerre
+declare that he had added two inches to his stature that he might come
+up to his wife's chin. For ten years he was always seen in the same
+little bottle-green coat with large white-metal buttons, and a black
+stock that accentuated his cold stingy face, lighted up by gray-blue
+eyes as keen and passionless as a cat's. Being very gentle, as men are
+who act on a fixed plan of conduct, he seemed to make his wife happy
+by never contradicting her; he allowed her to do the talking, and was
+satisfied to move with the deliberate tenacity of an insect.
+
+Dinah, adored for her beauty, in which she had no rival, and admired
+for her cleverness by the most gentlemanly men of the place,
+encouraged their admiration by conversations, for which it was
+subsequently asserted, she prepared herself beforehand. Finding
+herself listened to with rapture, she soon began to listen to herself,
+enjoyed haranguing her audience, and at last regarded her friends as
+the chorus in a tragedy, there only to give her her cues. In fact, she
+had a very fine collection of phrases and ideas, derived either from
+books or by assimilating the opinions of her companions, and thus
+became a sort of mechanical instrument, going off on a round of
+phrases as soon as some chance remark released the spring. To do her
+justice, Dinah was choke full of knowledge, and read everything, even
+medical books, statistics, science, and jurisprudence; for she did not
+know how to spend her days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and
+given her orders to the gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and
+the talent which some women have for hitting on the right word, she
+could talk on any subject with the lucidity of a studied style. And so
+men came from Cosne, from la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right
+bank; from Lere, Vailly, Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left
+bank, to be introduced to Madame de la Baudraye, as they used in
+Switzerland, to be introduced to Madame de Stael. Those who only once
+heard the round of tunes emitted by this musical snuff-box went away
+amazed, and told such wonders of Dinah as made all the women jealous
+for ten leagues round.
+
+There is an indescribable mental headiness in the admiration we
+inspire, or in the effect of playing a part, which fends off criticism
+from reaching the idol. An atmosphere, produced perhaps by unceasing
+nervous tension, forms a sort of halo, through which the world below
+is seen. How otherwise can we account for the perennial good faith
+which leads to so many repeated presentments of the same effects, and
+the constant ignoring of warnings given by children, such a terror to
+their parents, or by husbands, so familiar as they are with the
+peacock airs of their wives? Monsieur de la Baudraye had the frankness
+of a man who opens an umbrella at the first drop of rain. When his
+wife was started on the subject of Negro emancipation or the
+improvement of convict prisons, he would take up his little blue cap
+and vanish without a sound, in the certainty of being able to get to
+Saint-Thibault to see off a cargo of puncheons, and return an hour
+later to find the discussion approaching a close. Or, if he had no
+business to attend to, he would go for a walk on the Mall, whence he
+commanded the lovely panorama of the Loire valley, and take a draught
+of fresh air while his wife was performing a sonata in words, or a
+dialectical duet.
+
+Once fairly established as a Superior Woman, Dinah was eager to prove
+her devotion to the most remarkable creations of art. She threw
+herself into the propaganda of the romantic school, including, under
+Art, poetry and painting, literature and sculpture, furniture and the
+opera. Thus she became a mediaevalist. She was also interested in any
+treasures that dated from the Renaissance, and employed her allies as
+so many devoted commission agents. Soon after she was married, she had
+become possessed of the Rougets' furniture, sold at Issoudun early in
+1824. She purchased some very good things at Nivernais and the Haute-
+Loire. At the New Year and on her birthday her friends never failed to
+give her some curiosities. These fancies found favor in the eyes of
+Monsieur de la Baudraye; they gave him an appearance of sacrificing a
+few crowns to his wife's taste. In point of fact, his land mania
+allowed him to think of nothing but the estate of Anzy.
+
+These "antiquities" at that time cost much less than modern furniture.
+By the end of five or six years the ante-room, the dining-room, the
+two drawing-rooms, and the boudoir which Dinah had arranged on the
+ground floor of La Baudraye, every spot even to the staircase, were
+crammed with masterpieces collected in the four adjacent departments.
+These surroundings, which were called /queer/ by the neighbors, were
+quite in harmony with Dinah. All these Marvels, so soon to be the
+rage, struck the imagination of the strangers introduced to her; they
+came expecting something unusual; and they found their expectations
+surpassed when, behind a bower of flowers, they saw these catacombs
+full of old things, piled up as Sommerard used to pile them--that "Old
+Mortality" of furniture. And then these finds served as so many
+springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean
+Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher,
+the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood,
+on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the
+Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth,
+fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, on the glazes of
+Bernard de Palissy, the enamels of Petitot, the engravings of Albrecht
+Durer--whom she called Dur; on illuminations on vellum, on Gothic
+architecture, early decorated, flamboyant and pure--enough to turn an
+old man's brain and fire a young man with enthusiasm.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye, possessed with the idea of waking up Sancerre,
+tried to form a so-called literary circle. The Presiding Judge,
+Monsieur Boirouge, who happened to have a house and garden on his
+hands, part of the Popinot-Chandier property, favored the notion of
+this /coterie/. The wily Judge talked over the rules of the society
+with Madame de la Baudraye; he proposed to figure as one of the
+founders, and to let the house for fifteen years to the literary club.
+By the time it had existed a year the members were playing dominoes,
+billiards, and bouillotte, and drinking mulled wine, punch, and
+liqueurs. A few elegant little suppers were then given, and some
+masked balls during the Carnival. As to literature--there were the
+newspapers. Politics and business were discussed. Monsieur de la
+Baudraye was constantly there--on his wife's account, as she said
+jestingly.
+
+This result deeply grieved the Superior Woman, who despaired of
+Sancerre, and collected the wit of the neighborhood in her own
+drawing-room. Nevertheless, and in spite of the efforts of Messieurs
+de Chargeboeuf, Gravier, and de Clagny, of the Abbe Duret and the two
+chief magistrates, of a young doctor, and a young Assistant Judge--all
+blind admirers of Dinah's--there were occasions when, weary of
+discussion, they allowed themselves an excursion into the domain of
+agreeable frivolity which constitutes the common basis of worldly
+conversation. Monsieur Gravier called this "from grave to gay." The
+Abbe Duret's rubber made another pleasing variety on the monologues of
+the oracle. The three rivals, tired of keeping their minds up to the
+level of the "high range of discussion"--as they called their
+conversation--but not daring to confess it, would sometimes turn with
+ingratiating hints to the old priest.
+
+"Monsieur le Cure is dying for his game," they would say.
+
+The wily priest lent himself very readily to the little trick. He
+protested.
+
+"We should lose too much by ceasing to listen to our inspired
+hostess!" and so he would incite Dinah's magnanimity to take pity at
+last on her dear Abbe.
+
+This bold manoeuvre, a device of the Sous-prefet's, was repeated with
+so much skill that Dinah never suspected her slaves of escaping to the
+prison yard, so to speak, of the cardtable; and they would leave her
+one of the younger functionaries to harry.
+
+One young landowner, and the dandy of Sancerre, fell away from Dinah's
+good graces in consequence of some rash demonstrations. After
+soliciting the honor of admission to this little circle, where he
+flattered himself he could snatch the blossom from the constituted
+authorities who guarded it, he was so unfortunate as to yawn in the
+middle of an explanation Dinah was favoring him with--for the fourth
+time, it is true--of the philosophy of Kant. Monsieur de la
+Thaumassiere, the grandson of the historian of Le Berry, was
+thenceforth regarded as a man entirely bereft of soul and brains.
+
+The three devotees /en titre/ each submitted to these exorbitant
+demands on their mind and attention, in hope of a crowning triumph,
+when at last Dinah should become human; for neither of them was so
+bold as to imagine that Dinah would give up her innocence as a wife
+till she should have lost all her illusions. In 1826, when she was
+surrounded by adorers, Dinah completed her twentieth year, and the
+Abbe Duret kept her in a sort of fervid Catholicism; so her worshipers
+had to be content to overwhelm her with little attentions and small
+services, only too happy to be taken for the carpet-knights of this
+sovereign lady, by strangers admitted to spend an evening or two at La
+Baudraye.
+
+"Madame de la Baudraye is a fruit that must be left to ripen." This
+was the opinion of Monsieur Gravier, who was waiting.
+
+As to the lawyer, he wrote letters four pages long, to which Dinah
+replied in soothing speech as she walked, leaning on his arm, round
+and round the lawn after dinner.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye, thus guarded by three passions, and always
+under the eye of her pious mother, escaped the malignity of slander.
+It was so evident to all Sancerre that no two of these three men would
+ever leave the third alone with Madame de la Baudraye, that their
+jealousy was a comedy to the lookers-on.
+
+To reach Saint-Thibault from Caesar's Gate there is a way much shorter
+than that by the ramparts, down what is known in mountainous districts
+as a /coursiere/, called at Sancerre /le Casse-cou/, or Break-neck
+Alley. The name is significant as applied to a path down the steepest
+part of the hillside, thickly strewn with stones, and shut in by the
+high banks of the vineyards on each side. By way of the Break-neck the
+distance from Sancerre to La Baudraye is much abridged. The ladies of
+the place, jealous of the Sappho of Saint-Satur, were wont to walk on
+the Mall, looking down this Longchamp of the bigwigs, whom they would
+stop and engage in conversation--sometimes the Sous-prefet and
+sometimes the Public Prosecutor--and who would listen with every sign
+of impatience or uncivil absence of mind. As the turrets of La
+Baudraye are visible from the Mall, many a younger man came to
+contemplate the abode of Dinah while envying the ten or twelve
+privileged persons who might spend their afternoons with the Queen of
+the neighborhood.
+
+Monsieur de la Baudraye was not slow to discover the advantage he, as
+Dinah's  husband, held over his wife's adorers, and he made use of
+them without any disguise, obtaining a remission of taxes, and gaining
+two lawsuits. In every litigation he used the Public Prosecutor's name
+with such good effect that the matter was carried no further, and,
+like all undersized men, he was contentious and litigious in business,
+though in the gentlest manner.
+
+At the same time, the more certainly guiltless she was, the less
+conceivable did Madame de la Baudraye's position seem to the prying
+eyes of these women. Frequently, at the house of the Presidente de
+Boirouge, the ladies of a certain age would spend a whole evening
+discussing the La Baudraye household, among themselves of course. They
+all had suspicions of a mystery, a secret such as always interests
+women who have had some experience of life. And, in fact, at La
+Baudraye one of those slow and monotonous conjugal tragedies was being
+played out which would have remained for ever unknown if the merciless
+scalpel of the nineteenth century, guided by the insistent demand for
+novelty, had not dissected the darkest corners of the heart, or at any
+rate those which the decency of past centuries left unopened. And that
+domestic drama sufficiently accounts for Dinah's immaculate virtue
+during her early married life.
+
+
+
+A young lady, whose triumphs at school had been the outcome of her
+pride, and whose first scheme in life had been rewarded by a victory,
+was not likely to pause in such a brilliant career. Frail as Monsieur
+de la Baudraye might seem, he was really an unhoped-for good match for
+Mademoiselle Dinah Piedefer. But what was the hidden motive of this
+country landowner when, at forty-four, he married a girl of seventeen;
+and what could his wife make out of the bargain? This was the text of
+Dinah's first meditations.
+
+The little man never behaved quite as his wife expected. To begin
+with, he allowed her to take the five precious acres now wasted in
+pleasure grounds round La Baudraye, and paid, almost with generosity,
+the seven or eight thousand francs required by Dinah for improvements
+in the house, enabling her to buy the furniture at the Rougets' sale
+at Issoudun, and to redecorate her rooms in various styles--Mediaeval,
+Louis XIV., and Pompadour. The young wife found it difficult to
+believe that Monsieur de la Baudraye was so miserly as he was reputed,
+or else she must have great influence with him. The illusion lasted a
+year and a half.
+
+After Monsieur de la Baudraye's second journey to Paris, Dinah
+discovered in him the Artic coldness of a provincial miser whenever
+money was in question. The first time she asked for supplies she
+played the sweetest of the comedies of which Eve invented the secret;
+but the little man put it plainly to his wife that he gave her two
+hundred francs a month for her personal expenses, and paid Madame
+Piedefer twelve hundred francs a year as a charge on the lands of La
+Hautoy, and that this was two hundred francs a year more than was
+agreed to under the marriage settlement.
+
+"I say nothing of the cost of housekeeping," he said in conclusion.
+"You may give your friends cake and tea in the evening, for you must
+have some amusement. But I, who spent but fifteen hundred francs a
+year as a bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and
+repairs, and this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our
+property. A winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be--the
+making, the duty, the casks--while the returns depend on a scorching
+day or a sudden frost. Small owners, like us, whose income is far from
+being fixed, must base their estimates on their minimum, for they have
+no means of making up a deficit or a loss. What would become of us if
+a wine merchant became bankrupt? In my opinion, promissory notes are
+so many cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to
+have a year's income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of
+our returns."
+
+Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it;
+Dinah flung herself against a will of iron padded round with
+gentleness. She tried to fill the little man's soul with jealousy and
+alarms, but it was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah,
+when he went to Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique's
+fidelity. When she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by
+the scorn a courtesan sometimes shows to her "protector," and which
+acts on him with the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur
+de la Baudraye gazed at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat
+which, in the midst of domestic broils, waits till a blow is
+threatened before stirring from its place. The strange, speechless
+uneasiness that was perceptible under his mute indifference almost
+terrified the young wife of twenty; she could not at first understand
+the selfish quiescence of this man, who might be compared to a cracked
+pot, and who, in order to live, regulated his existence with the
+unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker requires of a clock. So the
+little man always evaded his wife, while she always hit out, as it
+were, ten feet above his head.
+
+Dinah's fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape
+from La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described
+--she who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf
+whom she, the giant, had at first humored in order to command. In the
+hope of some day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris,
+she accepted the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view
+to seeing Monsieur de la Baudraye's name drawn from the electoral urn;
+for she supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice
+from Paris, each time a step higher on the social ladder. But when she
+struck on the man's heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble!
+The man who had been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now
+Master of Appeals, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal
+Commissioner, was but a mole throwing up its little hills round and
+round a vineyard! Then some lamentations were poured into the heart of
+the Public Prosecutor, of the Sous-prefet, even of Monsieur Gravier,
+and they all increased in their devotion to this sublime victim; for,
+like all women, she never mentioned her speculative schemes, and--
+again like all women--finding such speculation vain, she ceased to
+speculate.
+
+Dinah, tossed by mental storms, was still undecided when, in the
+autumn of 1827, the news was told of the purchase by the Baron de la
+Baudraye of the estate of Anzy. Then the little old man showed an
+impulsion of pride and glee which for a few months changed the current
+of his wife's ideas; she fancied there was a hidden vein of greatness
+in the man when she found him applying for a patent of entail. In his
+triumph the Baron exclaimed:
+
+"Dinah, you shall be a countess yet!"
+
+There was then a patched-up reunion between the husband and wife, such
+as can never endure, and which only humiliated and fatigued a woman
+whose apparent superiority was unreal, while her unseen superiority
+was genuine. This whimsical medley is commoner than people think.
+Dinah, who was ridiculous from the perversity of her cleverness, had
+really great qualities of soul, but circumstances did not bring these
+rarer powers to light, while a provincial life debased the small
+change of her wit from day to day. Monsieur de la Baudraye, on the
+contrary, devoid of soul, of strength, and of wit, was fated to figure
+as a man of character, simply by pursuing a plan of conduct which he
+was too feeble to change.
+
+
+
+There was in their lives a first phase, lasting six years, during
+which Dinah, alas! became utterly provincial. In Paris there are
+several kinds of women: the duchess and the financier's wife, the
+ambassadress and the consul's wife, the wife of the minister who is a
+minister, and of him who is no longer a minister; then there is the
+lady--quite the lady--of the right bank of the Seine and of the left.
+But in the country there is but one kind of woman, and she, poor
+thing, is the provincial woman.
+
+This remark points to one of the sores of modern society. It must be
+clearly understood: France in the nineteenth century is divided into
+two broad zones--Paris, and the provinces. The provinces jealous of
+Paris; Paris never thinking of the provinces but to demand money. Of
+old, Paris was the Capital of the provinces, and the court ruled the
+Capital; now, all Paris is the Court, and all the country is the town.
+
+However lofty, beautiful, and clever a girl born in any department of
+France may be on entering life, if, like Dinah Piedefer, she marries
+in the country and remains there, she inevitably becomes the
+provincial woman. In spite of every determination, the commonplace of
+second-rate ideas, indifference to dress, the culture of vulgar
+people, swamp the sublimer essence hidden in the youthful plant; all
+is over, it falls into decay. How should it be otherwise? From their
+earliest years girls bred in the country see none but provincials;
+they cannot imagine anything superior, their choice lies among
+mediocrities; provincial fathers marry their daughters to provincial
+sons; crossing the races is never thought of, and the brain inevitably
+degenerates, so that in many country towns intellect is as rare as the
+breed is hideous. Mankind becomes dwarfed in mind and body, for the
+fatal principle of conformity of fortune governs every matrimonial
+alliance. Men of talent, artists, superior brains--every bird of
+brilliant plumage flies to Paris. The provincial woman, inferior in
+herself, is also inferior through her husband. How is she to live
+happy under this crushing twofold consciousness?
+
+But there is a third and terrible element besides her congenital and
+conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and
+gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the
+most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of
+being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself,
+wittingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes
+were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are
+inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife
+commits her "little sin," she falls in love with some so-called
+handsome native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and
+is supposed to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that
+her fancy is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed.
+Dinah was preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of
+her own superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in
+her early married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never
+weighed upon her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her
+pride, and her high sense of her own destinies, would have protected
+her. Flattered as she was to find herself surrounded by admirers, she
+saw no lover among them. No man here realized the poetical ideal which
+she and Anna Grossetete had been wont to sketch. When, stirred by the
+involuntary temptations suggested by the homage she received, she
+asked herself, "If I had to make a choice, who should it be?" she
+owned to a preference for Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, a gentleman of good
+family, whose appearance and manners she liked, but whose cold nature,
+selfishness, and narrow ambition, never rising above a prefecture and
+a good marriage, repelled her. At a word from his family, who were
+alarmed lest he should be killed for an intrigue, the Vicomte had
+already deserted a woman he had loved in the town where he previously
+had been Sous-prefet.
+
+Monsieur de Clagny, on the other hand, the only man whose mind
+appealed to hers, whose ambition was founded on love, and who knew
+what love means, Dinah thought perfectly odious. When Dinah saw
+herself condemned to six years' residence at Sancerre she was on the
+point of accepting the devotion of Monsieur le Vicomte de Chargeboeuf;
+but he was appointed to a prefecture and left the district. To
+Monsieur de Clagny's great satisfaction, the new Sous-prefet was a
+married man whose wife made friends with Dinah. The lawyer had now no
+rival to fear but Monsieur Gravier. Now Monsieur Gravier was the
+typical man of forty of whom women make use while they laugh at him,
+whose hopes they intentionally and remorselessly encourage, as we are
+kind to a beast of burden. In six years, among all the men who were
+introduced to her from twenty leagues round, there was not one in
+whose presence Dinah was conscious of the excitement caused by
+personal beauty, by a belief in promised happiness, by the impact of a
+superior soul, or the anticipation of a love affair, even an unhappy
+one.
+
+Thus none of Dinah's choicest faculties had a chance of developing;
+she swallowed many insults to her pride, which was constantly
+suffering under the husband who so calmly walked the stage as
+supernumerary in the drama of her life. Compelled to bury her wealth
+of love, she showed only the surface to the world. Now and then she
+would try to rouse herself, try to form some manly resolution; but she
+was kept in leading strings by the need for money. And so, slowly and
+in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her
+own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described.
+Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination. She
+had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually
+departed from. Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the
+little novelties of elegant life, she was obliged to limit her
+purchases by the amount of her allowance. Instead of six hats, caps,
+or gowns, she resigned herself to one gown each season. She was so
+much admired in a certain bonnet that she made it do duty for two
+seasons. So it was in everything.
+
+Not unfrequently her artistic sense led her to sacrifice the
+requirements of her person to secure some bit of Gothic furniture. By
+the seventh year she had come so low as to think it convenient to have
+her morning dresses made at home by the best needlewoman in the
+neighborhood; and her mother, her husband, and her friends pronounced
+her charming in these inexpensive costumes which did credit to her
+taste. Her ideas were imitated! As she had no standard of comparison,
+Dinah fell into the snares that surround the provincial woman. If a
+Parisian woman's hips are too narrow or too full, her inventive wit
+and the desire to please help to find some heroic remedy; if she has
+some defect, some ugly spot, or small disfigurement, she is capable of
+making it an adornment; this is often seen; but the provincial woman--
+never! If her waist is too short and her figure ill balanced, well,
+she makes up her mind to the worst, and her adorers--or they do not
+adore her--must take her as she is, while the Parisian always insists
+on being taken for what she is not. Hence the preposterous bustles,
+the audacious flatness, the ridiculous fulness, the hideous outlines
+ingeniously displayed, to which a whole town will become accustomed,
+but which are so astounding when a provincial woman makes her
+appearance in Paris or among Parisians. Dinah, who was extremely slim,
+showed it off to excess, and never knew a dull moment when it became
+ridiculous; when, reduced by the dull weariness of her life, she
+looked like a skeleton in clothes; and her friends, seeing her every
+day, did not observe the gradual change in her appearance.
+
+This is one of the natural results of a provincial life. In spite of
+marriage, a young woman preserves her beauty for some time, and the
+town is proud of her; but everybody sees her every day, and when
+people meet every day their perception is dulled. If, like Madame de
+la Baudraye, she loses her color, it is scarcely noticed; or, again,
+if she flushes a little, that is intelligible and interesting. A
+little neglect is thought charming, and her face is so carefully
+studied, so well known, that slight changes are scarcely noticed, and
+regarded at last as "beauty spots." When Dinah ceased to have a new
+dress with a new season, she seemed to have made a concession to the
+philosophy of the place.
+
+It is the same with matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as
+it is with matters of feeling. The mind can rust as well as the body
+if it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism
+most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose
+the briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive. The provincial is
+used to walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there
+is nothing to be avoided; so in Paris she walks on as raw recruits do,
+never remembering that there may be hindrances, for there are none in
+her way in her native place, where she is known, where she is always
+in her place, and every one makes way for her. Thus she loses all the
+charm of the unforeseen.
+
+And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in
+common? By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend
+to copy each other. Each one, without knowing it, acquires the
+gestures, the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very
+countenance of others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the
+society she lived in. As she acquired Monsieur de Clagny's ideas she
+assumed his tone of voice; she unconsciously fell into masculine
+manners from seeing none but men; she fancied that by laughing at what
+was ridiculous in them she was safe from catching it; but, as often
+happens, some hue of what she laughed at remained in the grain.
+
+A Parisian woman sees so many examples of good taste that a contrary
+result ensues. In Paris women learn to seize the hour and moment when
+they may appear to advantage; while Madame de la Baudraye, accustomed
+to take the stage, acquired an indefinable theatrical and domineering
+manner, the air of a /prima donna/ coming forward on the boards, of
+which ironical smiles would soon have cured her in the capital.
+
+But after she had acquired this stock of absurdities, and, deceived by
+her worshipers, imagined them to be added graces, a moment of terrible
+awakening came upon her like the fall of an avalanche from a mountain.
+In one day she was crushed by a frightful comparison.
+
+In 1829, after the departure of Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, she was
+excited by the anticipation of a little pleasure; she was expecting
+the Baronne de Fontaine. Anna's husband, who was now Director-General
+under the Minister of Finance, took advantage of leave of absence on
+the occasion of his father's death to take his wife to Italy. Anna
+wished to spend the day at Sancerre with her school-friend. This
+meeting was strangely disastrous. Anna, who at school had been far
+less handsome than Dinah, now, as Baronne de Fontaine, was a thousand
+times handsomer than the Baronne de la Baudraye, in spite of her
+fatigue and her traveling dress. Anna stepped out of an elegant
+traveling chaise loaded with Paris milliners' boxes, and she had with
+her a lady's maid, whose airs quite frightened Dinah. All the
+difference between a woman of Paris and a provincial was at once
+evident to Dinah's intelligent eye; she saw herself as her friend saw
+her--and Anna found her altered beyond recognition. Anna spent six
+thousand francs a year on herself alone, as much as kept the whole
+household at La Baudraye.
+
+In twenty-four hours the friends had exchanged many confidences; and
+the Parisian, seeing herself so far superior to the phoenix of
+Mademoiselle Chamarolles' school, showed her provincial friend such
+kindness, such attentions, while giving her certain explanations, as
+were so many stabs to Dinah, though she perfectly understood that
+Anna's advantages all lay on the surface, while her own were for ever
+buried.
+
+When Anna had left, Madame de la Baudraye, by this time two-and-
+twenty, fell into the depths of despair.
+
+"What is it that ails you?" asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so
+dejected.
+
+"Anna," said she, "has learned to live, while I have been learning to
+endure."
+
+A tragi-comedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye's
+house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her
+successive transformations--a drama to which no one but Monsieur de
+Clagny and the Abbe Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in sheer
+idleness, or perhaps sheer vanity, revealed the secret of her
+anonymous fame.
+
+Though a mixture of verse and prose is a monstrous anomaly in French
+literature, there must be exceptions to the rule. This tale will be
+one of the two instances in these Studies of violation of the laws of
+narrative; for to give a just idea of the unconfessed struggle which
+may excuse, though it cannot absolve Dinah, it is necessary to give an
+analysis of a poem which was the outcome of her deep despair.
+
+Her patience and her resignation alike broken by the departure of the
+Vicomte de Chargeboeuf, Dinah took the worthy Abbe's advice to exhale
+her evil thoughts in verse--a proceeding which perhaps accounts for
+some poets.
+
+"You will find such relief as those who write epitaphs or elegies over
+those whom they have lost. Pain is soothed in the heart as lines surge
+up in the brain."
+
+This strange production caused a great ferment in the departments of
+the Allier, the Nievre, and the Cher, proud to possess a poet capable
+of rivalry with the glories of Paris. /Paquita la Sevillane/, by /Jan
+Diaz/, was published in the /Echo du Morvan/, a review which for
+eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial
+indifference. Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz
+was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric
+verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced
+by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and
+Romanesque mannerisms.
+
+The poem began with this ballad:
+
+  Ah! if you knew the fragrant plain,
+  The air, the sky, of golden Spain,
+  Its fervid noons, its balmy spring,
+  Sad daughters of the northern gloom,
+  Of love, of heav'n, of native home,
+  You never would presume to sing!
+
+  For men are there of other mould
+  Than those who live in this dull cold.
+  And there to music low and sweet
+  Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,
+  Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn
+  In satin shoes, on dainty feet.
+
+  Ah, you would be the first to blush
+  Over your dancers' romp and rush,
+  And your too hideous carnival,
+  That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
+  And skips the mud in hob-nail'd shoe--
+  A truly dismal festival.
+
+  To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,
+  Paquita sang; the murky town beneath
+  Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise
+    To chew the storm with teeth.
+  Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage--
+
+And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen--where Dinah had
+never been--written with the affected brutality which, a little later,
+inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the
+life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between
+the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery,
+in short, between poetry and sordid money-making.
+
+Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita's horror of Normandy by saying:
+
+  Seville, you see, had been her native home,
+    Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet.
+  She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,
+    Had lovers at her feet.
+
+  For her three Toreadors had gone to death
+  Or victory, the prize to be a kiss--
+  One kiss from those red lips of sweetest breath--
+    A longed-for touch of bliss!
+
+The features of the Spanish girl's portrait have served so often as
+those of the courtesan in so many self-styled /poems/, that it would
+be tiresome to quote here the hundred lines of description. To judge
+of the lengths to which audacity had carried Dinah, it will be enough
+to give the conclusion. According to Madame de la Baudraye's ardent
+pen, Paquita was so entirely created for love that she can hardly have
+met with a knight worthy of her; for
+
+  . . . . In her passionate fire
+    Every man would have swooned from the heat,
+  When she at love's feast, in her fervid desire,
+    As yet had but taken her seat.
+
+"And yet she could quit the joys of Seville, its woods and fields of
+orange-trees, for a Norman soldier who won her love and carried her
+away to his hearth and home. She did not weep for her Andalusia, the
+Soldier was her whole joy. . . . But the day came when he was
+compelled to start for Russia in the footsteps of the great Emperor."
+
+Nothing could be more dainty than the description of the parting
+between the Spanish girl and the Normandy Captain of Artillery, who,
+in the delirium of passion expressed with feeling worthy of Byron,
+exacted from Paquita a vow of absolute fidelity, in the Cathedral at
+Rouen in front of the alter of the Blessed Virgin, who
+
+  Though a Maid is a woman, and never forgives
+    When lovers are false to their vows.
+
+A large part of the poem was devoted to describing Paquita's
+sufferings when alone in Rouen waiting till the campaign was over; she
+stood writhing at the window bars as she watched happy couples go by;
+she suppressed her passion in her heart with a determination that
+consumed her; she lived on narcotics, and exhausted herself in dreams.
+
+  Almost she died, but still her heart was true;
+  And when at last her soldier came again,
+  He found her beauty ever fresh and new--
+    He had not loved in vain!
+
+"But he, pale and frozen by the cold of Russia, chilled to the very
+marrow, met his yearning fair one with a melancholy smile."
+
+The whole poem was written up to this situation, which was worked out
+with such vigor and boldness as too entirely justified the Abbe Duret.
+
+Paquita, on reaching the limits set to real love, did not, like Julie
+and Heloise, throw herself into the ideal; no, she rushed into the
+paths of vice, which is, no doubt, shockingly natural; but she did it
+without any touch of magnificence, for lack of means, as it would be
+difficult to find in Rouen men impassioned enough to place Paquita in
+a suitable setting of luxury and splendor. This horrible realism,
+emphasized by gloomy poetic feeling, had inspired some passages such
+as modern poetry is too free with, rather too like the flayed
+anatomical figures known to artists as /ecorches/. Then, by a highly
+philosophical revulsion, after describing the house of ill-fame where
+the Andalusian ended her days, the writer came back to the ballad at
+the opening:
+
+  Paquita now is faded, shrunk, and old,
+    But she it was who sang:
+
+  "If you but knew the fragrant plain,
+  The air, the sky, of golden Spain," etc.
+
+The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines, and
+serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter's word, to the two
+/seguidillas/ at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of
+inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by
+three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous. While she
+fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the
+malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the
+secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance
+between the writer and Paquita. Reflection came too late; Dinah
+shuddered with shame at having made "copy" of some of her woes.
+
+"Write no more," said the Abbe Duret. "You will cease to be a woman;
+you will be a poet."
+
+Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was
+impenetrable. To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen
+chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos
+on /The Mass-Oak/, a legend of the Nivernais:
+
+"Once upon a time the folks of Nevers and the folks of Saint-Saulge,
+at war with each other, came at daybreak to fight a battle, in which
+one or other should perish, and met in the forest of Faye. And then
+there stood between them, under an oak, a priest whose aspect in the
+morning sun was so commanding that the foes at his bidding heard Mass
+as he performed it under the oak, and at the words of the Gospel they
+made friends."--The oak is still shown in the forest of Faye.
+
+This poem, immeasurably superior to /Paquita la Sevillane/, was far
+less admired.
+
+After these two attempts Madame de la Baudraye, feeling herself a
+poet, had a light on her brow and a flash in her eyes that made her
+handsomer than ever. She cast longing looks at Paris, aspiring to fame
+--and fell back into her den of La Baudraye, her daily squabbles with
+her husband, and her little circle, where everybody's character,
+intentions, and remarks were too well known not to have become a bore.
+Though she found relief from her dreary life in literary work, and
+poetry echoed loudly in her empty life, though she thus found an
+outlet for her energies, literature increased her hatred of the gray
+and ponderous provincial atmosphere.
+
+
+
+When, after the Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was
+reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of
+having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille
+Maupin, and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent. Thus
+there arose in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or
+young wives tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory. Very
+strange doctrines were proclaimed as to the part women should play in
+society. Though the sound common sense which lies at the root of the
+French nature was not perverted, women were suffered to express ideas
+and profess opinions which they would not have owned to a few years
+previously.
+
+Monsieur de Clagny took advantage of this outbreak of freedom to
+collect the works of Jan Diaz in a small volume printed by Desroziers
+at Moulins. He wrote a little notice of the author, too early snatched
+from the world of letters, which was amusing to those who were in the
+secret, but which even then had not the merit of novelty. Such
+practical jokes, capital so long as the author remains unknown, fall
+rather flat if subsequently the poet stands confessed.
+
+From this point of view, however, the memoir of Jan Diaz, born at
+Bourges in 1807, the son of a Spanish prisoner, may very likely some
+day deceive the compiler of some /Universal Biography/. Nothing is
+overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges
+College, nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau,
+Bianchon, and other famous natives of the province, who, it is said,
+knew the dreamy, melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards
+poetry. An elegy called /Tristesse/ (Melancholy), written at school;
+the two poems /Paquita la Sevillane/ and /Le Chene de la Messe/; three
+sonnets, a description of the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur
+at Bourges, with a tale called /Carola/, published as the work he was
+engaged on at the time of his death, constituted the whole of these
+literary remains; and the poet's last hours, full of misery and
+despair, could not fail to wring the hearts of the feeling public of
+the Nievre, the Bourbonnais, the Cher, and the Morvan, where he died
+near Chateau-Chinon, unknown to all, even to the woman he had loved!
+
+Of this little yellow paper volume two hundred copies were printed;
+one hundred and fifty were sold--about fifty in each department. This
+average of tender and poetic souls in three departments of France is
+enough to revive the enthusiasm of writers as to the /Furia Francese/,
+which nowadays is more apt to expend itself in business than in books.
+
+When Monsieur de Clagny had given away a certain number of copies,
+Dinah still had seven or eight, wrapped up in the newspapers which had
+published notices of the work. Twenty copies forwarded to the Paris
+papers were swamped in the editors' offices. Nathan was taken in as
+well as several of his fellow-countrymen of Le Berry, and wrote an
+article on the great man, in which he credited him with all the fine
+qualities we discover in those who are dead and buried.
+
+Lousteau, warned by his fellow-schoolfellows, who could not remember
+Jan Diaz, waited for information from Sancerre, and learned that Jan
+Diaz was a pseudonym assumed by a woman.
+
+Then, in and around Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye became the rage;
+she was the future rival of George Sand. From Sancerre to Bourges a
+poem was praised which, at any other time, would certainly have been
+hooted. The provincial public--like every French public, perhaps--does
+not share the love of the King of the French for the happy medium: it
+lifts you to the skies or drags you in the mud.
+
+By this time the good Abbe, Madame de la Baudraye's counselor, was
+dead; he would certainly have prevented her rushing into public life.
+But three years of work without recognition weighed on Dinah's soul,
+and she accepted the clatter of fame as a substitute for her
+disappointed ambitions. Poetry and dreams of celebrity, which had
+lulled her grief since her meeting with Anna Grossetete, no longer
+sufficed to exhaust the activity of her morbid heart. The Abbe Duret,
+who had talked of the world when the voice of religion was impotent,
+who understood Dinah, and promised her a happy future by assuring her
+that God would compensate her for her sufferings bravely endured,--
+this good old man could no longer stand between the opening to sin and
+the handsome young woman he had called his daughter.
+
+The wise old priest had more than once endeavored to enlighten Dinah
+as to her husband's character, telling her that the man could hate;
+but women are not ready to believe in such force in weak natures, and
+hatred is too constantly in action not to be a vital force. Dinah,
+finding her husband incapable of love, denied him the power to hate.
+
+"Do not confound hatred and vengeance," said the Abbe. "They are two
+different sentiments. One is the instinct of small minds; the other is
+the outcome of law which great souls obey. God is avenged, but He does
+not hate. Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all
+their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny. So beware of
+offending Monsieur de la Baudraye; he would forgive an infidelity,
+because he could make capital of it, but he would be doubly implacable
+if you should touch him on the spot so cruelly wounded by Monsieur
+Milaud of Nevers, and would make your life unendurable."
+
+Now, at the time when the whole countryside--Nevers and Sancerre, Le
+Morvan and Le Berry--was priding itself on Madame de la Baudraye, and
+lauding her under the name of Jan Diaz, "little La Baudraye" felt her
+glory a mortal blow. He alone knew the secret source of /Paquita la
+Sevillane/. When this terrible work was spoken of, everybody said of
+Dinah--"Poor woman! Poor soul!"
+
+The women rejoiced in being able to pity her who had so long oppressed
+them; never had Dinah seemed to stand higher in the eyes of the
+neighborhood.
+
+The shriveled old man, more wrinkled, yellower, feebler than ever,
+gave no sign; but Dinah sometimes detected in his eyes, as he looked
+at her, a sort of icy venom which gave the lie to his increased
+politeness and gentleness. She understood at last that this was not,
+as she had supposed, a mere domestic squabble; but when she forced an
+explanation with her "insect," as Monsieur Gravier called him, she
+found the cold, hard impassibility of steel. She flew into a passion;
+she reproached him for her life these eleven years past; she made--
+intentionally--what women call a scene. But "little La Baudraye" sat
+in an armchair with his eyes shut, and listened phlegmatically to the
+storm. And, as usual, the dwarf got the better of his wife. Dinah saw
+that she had done wrong in writing; she vowed never to write another
+line, and she kept her vow.
+
+Then was there desolation in the Sancerrois.
+
+"Why did not Madame de la Baudraye compose any more verses?" was the
+universal cry.
+
+At this time Madame de la Baudraye had no enemies; every one rushed to
+see her, not a week passed without fresh introductions. The wife of
+the presiding judge, an august /bourgeoise/, /nee/ Popinot-Chandier,
+desired her son, a youth of two-and-twenty, to pay his humble respects
+to La Baudraye, and flattered herself that she might see her Gatien in
+the good graces of this Superior Woman.--The words Superior Woman had
+superseded the absurd nickname of /The Sappho of Saint-Satur/.--This
+lady, who for nine years had led the opposition, was so delighted at
+the good reception accorded to her son, that she became loud in her
+praises of the Muse of Sancerre.
+
+"After all," she exclaimed, in reply to a tirade from Madame de
+Clagny, who hated her husband's supposed mistress, "she is the
+handsomest and cleverest woman in the whole province!"
+
+After scrambling through so many brambles and setting off on so many
+different roads, after dreaming of love in splendor and scenting the
+darkest dramas, thinking such terrible joys would be cheaply purchased
+so weary was she of her dreary existence, one day Dinah fell into the
+pit she had sworn to avoid. Seeing Monsieur de Clagny always
+sacrificing himself, and at last refusing a high appointment in Paris,
+where his family wanted to see him, she said to herself, "He loves
+me!" She vanquished her repulsion, and seemed willing to reward so
+much constancy.
+
+It was to this impulse of generosity on her part that a coalition was
+due, formed in Sancerre to secure the return of Monsieur de Clagny at
+the next elections. Madame de la Baudraye had dreamed of going to
+Paris in the wake of the new deputy.
+
+But, in spite of the most solemn promises, the hundred and fifty votes
+to be recorded in favor of this adorer of the lovely Dinah--who hoped
+to see this defender of the widow and the orphan wearing the gown of
+the Keeper of the Seals--figured as an imposing minority of fifty
+votes. The jealousy of the President de Boirouge, and Monsieur
+Gravier's hatred, for he believed in the candidate's supremacy in
+Dinah's heart, had been worked upon by a young Sous-prefet; and for
+this worthy deed the allies got the young man made a prefet elsewhere.
+
+"I shall never cease to regret," said he, as he quitted Sancerre,
+"that I did not succeed in pleasing Madame de la Baudraye; that would
+have made my triumph complete!"
+
+The household that was thus racked by domestic troubles was calm on
+the surface; here were two ill-assorted but resigned beings, and the
+indescribable propriety, the lie that society insists on, and which to
+Dinah was an unendurable yoke. Why did she long to throw off the mask
+she had worn for twelve years? Whence this weariness which, every day,
+increased her hope of finding herself a widow?
+
+The reader who has noted all the phases of her existence will have
+understood the various illusions by which Dinah, like many another
+woman, had been deceived. After an attempt to master Monsieur de la
+Baudraye, she had indulged the hope of becoming a mother. Between
+those miserable disputes over household matters and the melancholy
+conviction as to her fate, quite a long time had elapsed. Then, when
+she had looked for consolation, the consoler, Monsieur de Chargeboeuf
+had left her. Thus, the overwhelming temptation which commonly causes
+women to sin had hitherto been absent. For if there are, after all,
+some women who make straight for unfaithfulness, are there not many
+more who cling to hope, and do not fall till they have wandered long
+in a labyrinth of secret woes?
+
+Such was Dinah. She had so little impulse to fail in her duty, that
+she did not care enough for Monsieur de Clagny to forgive him his
+defeat.
+
+Then the move to the Chateau d'Anzy, the rearrangement of her
+collected treasures and curiosities, which derived added value from
+the splendid setting which Philibert de Lorme seemed to have planned
+on purpose for this museum, occupied her for several months, giving
+her leisure to meditate one of those decisive steps that startle the
+public, ignorant of the motives which, however, it sometimes discovers
+by dint of gossip and suppositions.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye had been greatly struck by the reputation of
+Lousteau, who was regarded as a lady's man of the first water in
+consequence of his intimacies among actresses; she was anxious to know
+him; she read his books, and was fired with enthusiasm, less perhaps
+for his talents than for his successes with women; and to attract him
+to the country, she started the notion that it was obligatory on
+Sancerre to return one of its great men at the elections. She made
+Gatien Boirouge write to the great physician Bianchon, whom he claimed
+as a cousin through the Popinots. Then she persuaded an old friend of
+the departed Madame Lousteau to stir up the journalist's ambitions by
+letting him know that certain persons in Sancerre were firmly bent on
+electing a deputy from among the distinguished men in Paris.
+
+Tired of her commonplace neighbors, Madame de la Baudraye would thus
+at last meet really illustrious men, and might give her fall the
+lustre of fame.
+
+Neither Lousteau nor Bianchon replied; they were waiting perhaps till
+the holidays. Bianchon, who had won his professor's chair the year
+before after a brilliant contest, could not leave his lectures.
+
+In the month of September, when the vintage was at its height, the two
+Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in
+the unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore
+be no public demonstration in their favor. "We have fallen flat," said
+Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.
+
+In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
+and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
+disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
+thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
+harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face by
+over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
+dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
+Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
+superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his
+native town he thought proper to exaggerate his affected contempt of
+life and his spurious misanthropy. Still, his eyes could flash with
+fire like a volcano supposed to be extinct, and he endeavored, by
+dressing fashionably, to make up for the lack of youth that might
+strike a woman's eye.
+
+Horace Bianchon, who wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat
+and burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air,
+his hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker,
+and the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic
+personality set off his more frivolous companion to advantage.
+
+
+
+The two great men remained unrecognized during a whole morning at the
+inn where they had put up, and it was only by chance that Monsieur de
+Clagny heard of their arrival. Madame de la Baudraye, in despair at
+this, despatched Gatien Boirouge, who had no vineyards, to beg the two
+gentlemen to spend a few days at the Chateau d'Anzy. For the last year
+Dinah had played the chatelaine, and spent the winter only at La
+Baudraye. Monsieur Gravier, the Public Prosecutor, the Presiding
+Judge, and Gatien Boirouge combined to give a banquet to the great
+men, to meet the literary personages of the town.
+
+On hearing that the beautiful Madame de la Baudraye was Jan Diaz, the
+Parisians went to spend three days at Anzy, fetched in a sort of
+wagonette driven by Gatien himself. The young man, under a genuine
+illusion, spoke of Madame de la Baudraye not only as the handsomest
+woman in those parts, a woman so superior that she might give George
+Sand a qualm, but as a woman who would produce a great sensation in
+Paris. Hence the extreme though suppressed astonishment of Doctor
+Bianchon and the waggish journalist when they beheld, on the garden
+steps of Anzy, a lady dressed in thin black cashmere with a deep
+tucker, in effect like a riding-habit cut short, for they quite
+understood the pretentiousness of such extreme simplicity. Dinah also
+wore a black velvet cap, like that in the portrait of Raphael, and
+below it her hair fell in thick curls. This attire showed off a rather
+pretty figure, fine eyes, and handsome eyelids somewhat faded by the
+weariful life that has been described. In Le Berry the singularity of
+this /artistic/ costume was a cloak for the romantic affectations of
+the Superior Woman.
+
+On seeing the affectations of their too amiable hostess--which were,
+indeed, affectations of soul and mind--the friends glanced at each
+other, and put on a deeply serious expression to listen to Madame de
+la Baudraye, who made them a set speech of thanks for coming to cheer
+the monotony of her days. Dinah walked her guests round and round the
+lawn, ornamented with large vases of flowers, which lay in front of
+the Chateau d'Anzy.
+
+"How is it," said Lousteau, the practical joker, "that so handsome a
+woman as you, and apparently so superior, should have remained buried
+in the country? What do you do to make life endurable?"
+
+"Ah! that is the crux," said the lady. "It is unendurable. Utter
+despair or dull resignation--there is no third alternative; that is
+the arid soil in which our existence is rooted, and on which a
+thousand stagnant ideas fall; they cannot fertilize the ground, but
+they supply food for the etiolated flowers of our desert souls. Never
+believe in indifference! Indifference is either despair or
+resignation. Then each woman takes up the pursuit which, according to
+her character, seems to promise some amusement. Some rush into jam-
+making and washing, household management, the rural joys of the
+vintage or the harvest, bottling fruit, embroidering handkerchiefs,
+the cares of motherhood, the intrigues of a country town. Others
+torment a much-enduring piano, which, at the end of seven years,
+sounds like an old kettle, and ends its asthmatic life at the Chateau
+d'Anzy. Some pious dames talk over the different brands of the Word of
+God--the Abbe Fritaud as compared with the Abbe Guinard. They play
+cards in the evening, dance with the same partners for twelve years
+running, in the same rooms, at the same dates. This delightful life is
+varied by solemn walks on the Mall, visits of politeness among the
+women, who ask each other where they bought their gowns.
+
+"Conversation is bounded on the south by remarks on the intrigues
+lying hidden under the stagnant water of provincial life, on the north
+by proposed marriages, on the west by jealousies, and on the east by
+sour remarks.
+
+"And so," she went on, striking an attitude, "you see a woman wrinkled
+at nine-and-twenty, ten years before the time fixed by the rules of
+Doctor Bianchon, a woman whose skin is ruined at an early age, who
+turns as yellow as a quince when she is yellow at all--we have seen
+some turn green. When we have reached that point, we try to justify
+our normal condition; then we turn and rend the terrible passion of
+Paris with teeth as sharp as rat's teeth. We have Puritan women here,
+sour enough to tear the laces of Parisian finery, and eat out all the
+poetry of your Parisian beauties, who undermine the happiness of
+others while they cry up their walnuts and rancid bacon, glorify this
+squalid mouse-hole, and the dingy color and conventual small of our
+delightful life at Sancerre."
+
+"I admire such courage, madame," said Bianchon. "When we have to
+endure such misfortunes, it is well to have the wit to make a virtue
+of necessity."
+
+Amazed at the brilliant move by which Dinah thus placed provincial
+life at the mercy of her guests, in anticipation of their sarcasms,
+Gatien Boirouge nudged Lousteau's elbow, with a glance and a smile,
+which said:
+
+"Well! did I say too much?"
+
+"But, madame," said Lousteau, "you are proving that we are still in
+Paris. I shall steal this gem of description; it will be worth ten
+thousand francs to me in an article."
+
+"Oh, monsieur," she retorted, "never trust provincial women."
+
+"And why not?" said Lousteau.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye was wily enough--an innocent form of cunning, to
+be sure--to show the two Parisians, one of whom she would choose to be
+her conquerer, the snare into which he would fall, reflecting that she
+would have the upper hand at the moment when he should cease to see
+it.
+
+"When you first come," said she, "you laugh at us. Then when you have
+forgotten the impression of Paris brilliancy, and see us in our own
+sphere, you pay court to us, if only as a pastime. And you, who are
+famous for your past passions, will be the object of attentions which
+will flatter you. Then take care!" cried Dinah, with a coquettish
+gesture, raising herself above provincial absurdities and Lousteau's
+irony by her own sarcastic speech. "When a poor little country-bred
+woman has an eccentric passion for some superior man, some Parisian
+who has wandered into the provinces, it is to her something more than
+a sentiment; she makes it her occupation and part of all her life.
+There is nothing more dangerous than the attachment of such a woman;
+she compares, she studies, she reflects, she dreams; and she will not
+give up her dream, she thinks still of the man she loves when he has
+ceased to think of her.
+
+"Now one of the catastrophes that weigh most heavily on a woman in the
+provinces is that abrupt termination of her passion which is so often
+seen in England. In the country, a life under minute observation as
+keen as an Indian's compels a woman either to keep on the rails or to
+start aside like a steam engine wrecked by an obstacle. The strategies
+of love, the coquetting which form half the composition of a Parisian
+woman, are utterly unknown here."
+
+"That is true," said Lousteau. "There is in a country-bred woman's
+heart a store of surprises, as in some toys."
+
+"Dear me!" Dinah went on, "a woman will have spoken to you three times
+in the course of a winter, and without your knowing it, you will be
+lodged in her heart. Then comes a picnic, an excursion, what not, and
+all is said--or, if you prefer it, all is done! This conduct, which
+seems odd to unobserving persons, is really very natural. A poet, such
+as you are, or a philosopher, an observer, like Doctor Bianchon,
+instead of vilifying the provincial woman and believing her depraved,
+would be able to guess the wonderful unrevealed poetry, every chapter,
+in short, of the sweet romance of which the last phrase falls to the
+benefit of some happy sub-lieutenant or some provincial bigwig."
+
+"The provincial women I have met in Paris," said Lousteau, "were, in
+fact, rapid in their proceedings--"
+
+"My word, they are strange," said the lady, giving a significant shrug
+of her shoulders.
+
+"They are like the playgoers who book for the second performance,
+feeling sure that the piece will not fail," replied the journalist.
+
+"And what is the cause of all these woes?" asked Bianchon.
+
+"Paris is the monster that brings us grief," replied the Superior
+Woman. "The evil is seven leagues round, and devastates the whole
+land. Provincial life is not self-existent. It is only when a nation
+is divided into fifty minor states that each can have a physiognomy of
+its own, and then a woman reflects the glory of the sphere where she
+reigns. This social phenomenon, I am told, may be seen in Italy,
+Switzerland, and Germany; but in France, as in every country where
+there is but one capital, a dead level of manners must necessarily
+result from centralization."
+
+"Then you would say that manners could only recover their
+individuality and native distinction by the formation of a federation
+of French states into one empire?" said Lousteau.
+
+"That is hardly to be wished, for France would have to conquer too
+many countries," said Bianchon.
+
+"This misfortune is unknown in England," exclaimed Dinah. "London does
+not exert such tyranny as that by which Paris oppresses France--for
+which, indeed, French ingenuity will at last find a remedy; however,
+it has a worse disease in its vile hypocrisy, which is a far greater
+evil!"
+
+"The English aristocracy," said Lousteau, hastening to put a word in,
+for he foresaw a Byronic paragraph, "has the advantage over ours of
+assimilating every form of superiority; it lives in the midst of
+magnificent parks; it is in London for no more than two months. It
+lives in the country, flourishing there, and making it flourish."
+
+"Yes," said Madame de la Baudraye, "London is the capital of trade and
+speculation and the centre of government. The aristocracy hold a
+'mote' there for sixty days only; it gives and takes the passwords of
+the day, looks in on the legislative cookery, reviews the girls to
+marry, the carriages to be sold, exchanges greetings, and is away
+again; and is so far from amusing, that it cannot bear itself for more
+than the few days known as 'the season.'"
+
+"Hence," said Lousteau, hoping to stop this nimble tongue by an
+epigram, "in Perfidious Albion, as the /Constitutionnel/ has it, you
+may happen to meet a charming woman in any part of the kingdom."
+
+"But charming /English/ women!" replied Madame de la Baudraye with a
+smile. "Here is my mother, I will introduce you," said she, seeing
+Madame Piedefer coming towards them.
+
+Having introduced the two Paris lions to the ambitious skeleton that
+called itself woman under the name of Madame Piedefer--a tall, lean
+personage, with a red face, teeth that were doubtfully genuine, and
+hair that was undoubtedly dyed, Dinah left her visitors to themselves
+for a few minutes.
+
+"Well," said Gatien to Lousteau, "what do you think of her?"
+
+"I think that the clever woman of Sancerre is simply the greatest
+chatterbox," replied the journalist.
+
+"A woman who wants to see you deputy!" cried Gatien. "An angel!"
+
+"Forgive me, I forgot you were in love with her," said Lousteau.
+"Forgive the cynicism of an old scamp.--Ask Bianchon; I have no
+illusions left. I see things as they are. The woman has evidently
+dried up her mother like a partridge left to roast at too fierce a
+fire."
+
+Gatien de Boirouge contrived to let Madame de la Baudraye know what
+the journalist had said of her in the course of the dinner, which was
+copious, not to say splendid, and the lady took care not to talk too
+much while it was proceeding. This lack of conversation betrayed
+Gatien's indiscretion. Etienne tried to regain his footing, but all
+Dinah's advances were directed to Bianchon.
+
+However, half-way through the evening, the Baroness was gracious to
+Lousteau again. Have you never observed what great meanness may be
+committed for small ends? Thus the haughty Dinah, who would not
+sacrifice herself for a fool, who in the depths of the country led
+such a wretched life of struggles, of suppressed rebellion, of
+unuttered poetry, who to get away from Lousteau had climbed the
+highest and steepest peak of her scorn, and who would not have come
+down if she had seen the sham Byron at her feet, suddenly stepped off
+it as she recollected her album.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye had caught the mania for autographs; she
+possessed an oblong volume which deserved the name of album better
+than most, as two-thirds of the pages were still blank. The Baronne de
+Fontaine, who had kept it for three months, had with great difficulty
+obtained a line from Rossini, six bars written by Meyerbeer, the four
+lines that Victor Hugo writes in every album, a verse from Lamartine,
+a few words from Beranger, /Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart
+d'Ulysse/ (the first words of /Telemaque/) written by George Sand,
+Scribe's famous lines on the Umbrella, a sentence from Charles Nodier,
+an outline of distance by Jules Dupre, the signature of David
+d'Angers, and three notes written by Hector Berlioz. Monsieur de
+Clagny, during a visit to Paris, added a song by Lacenaire--a much
+coveted autograph, two lines from Fieschi, and an extremely short note
+from Napoleon, which were pasted on to pages of the album. Then
+Monsieur Gravier, in the course of a tour, had persuaded Mademoiselle
+Mars to write her name on this album, with Mademoiselles Georges,
+Taglioni, and Grisi, and some distinguished actors, such as Frederick
+Lemaitre, Monrose, Bouffe, Rubini, Lablache, Nourrit, and Arnal; for
+he knew a set of old fellows brought up in the seraglio, as they
+phrased it, who did him this favor.
+
+This beginning of a collection was all the more precious to Dinah
+because she was the only person for ten leagues round who owned an
+album. Within the last two years, however, several young ladies had
+acquired such books, in which they made their friends and
+acquaintances write more or less absurd quotations or sentiments. You
+who spend your lives in collecting autographs, simple and happy souls,
+like Dutch tulip fanciers, you will excuse Dinah when, in her fear of
+not keeping her guests more than two days, she begged Bianchon to
+enrich the volume she handed to him with a few lines of his writing.
+
+The doctor made Lousteau smile by showing him this sentence on the
+first page:
+
+  "What makes the populace dangerous is that it has in its pocket an
+  absolution for every crime.
+
+  "J. B. DE CLAGNY."
+
+
+"We will second the man who is brave enough to plead in favor of the
+Monarchy," Desplein's great pupil whispered to Lousteau, and he wrote
+below:
+
+  "The distinction between Napoleon and a water-carrier is evident
+  only to Society; Nature takes no account of it. Thus Democracy,
+  which resists inequality, constantly appeals to Nature.
+
+  "H. BIANCHON."
+
+
+"Ah!" cried Dinah, amazed, "you rich men take a gold piece out of your
+purse as poor men bring out a farthing. . . . I do not know," she went
+on, turning to Lousteau, "whether it is taking an unfair advantage of
+a guest to hope for a few lines--"
+
+"Nay, madame, you flatter me. Bianchon is a great man, but I am too
+insignificant!--Twenty years hence my name will be more difficult to
+identify than that of the Public Prosecutor whose axiom, written in
+your album, will designate him as an obscurer Montesquieu. And I
+should want at least twenty-four hours to improvise some sufficiently
+bitter reflections, for I could only describe what I feel."
+
+"I wish you needed a fortnight," said Madame de la Baudraye
+graciously, as she handed him the book. "I should keep you here all
+the longer."
+
+
+
+At five next morning all the party in the Chateau d'Anzy were astir,
+little La Baudraye having arranged a day's sport for the Parisians--
+less for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit. He was
+delighted to make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste
+land that he was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost
+some hundred thousand francs, but which might yield an increase of
+thirty to sixty thousand francs a year in the returns of the estate of
+Anzy.
+
+"Do you know why the Public Prosecutor has not come out with us?"
+asked Gatien Boirouge of Monsieur Gravier.
+
+"Why he told us that he was obliged to sit to-day; the minor cases are
+before the Court," replied the other.
+
+"And did you believe that?" cried Gatien. "Well, my papa said to me,
+'Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has
+begged him as his deputy to sit for him!'
+
+"Indeed!" said Gravier, changing countenance. "And Monsieur de la
+Baudraye is gone to La Charite!"
+
+"But why do you meddle in such matters?" said Bianchon to Gatien.
+
+"Horace is right," said Lousteau. "I cannot imagine why you trouble
+your heads so much about each other; you waste your time in
+frivolities."
+
+Horace Bianchon looked at Etienne Lousteau, as much as to say that
+newspaper epigrams and the satire of the "funny column" were
+incomprehensible at Sancerre.
+
+On reaching a copse, Monsieur Gravier left the two great men and
+Gatien, under the guidance of a keeper, to make their way through a
+little ravine.
+
+"Well, we must wait for Monsieur Gravier," said Bianchon, when they
+had reached a clearing.
+
+"You may be a great physician," said Gatien, "but you are ignorant of
+provincial life. You mean to wait for Monsieur Gravier?--By this time
+he is running like a hare, in spite of his little round stomach; he is
+within twenty minutes of Anzy by now----" Gatien looked at his watch.
+"Good! he will be just in time."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"At the chateau for breakfast," replied Gatien. "Do you suppose I
+could rest easy if Madame de la Baudraye were alone with Monsieur de
+Clagny? There are two of them now; they will keep an eye on each
+other. Dinah will be well guarded."
+
+"Ah, ha! Then Madame de la Baudraye has not yet made up her mind?"
+said Lousteau.
+
+"So mamma thinks. For my part, I am afraid that Monsieur de Clagny has
+at last succeeded in bewitching Madame de la Baudraye. If he has been
+able to show her that he had any chance of putting on the robes of the
+Keeper of the Seals, he may have hidden his moleskin complexion, his
+terrible eyes, his touzled mane, his voice like a hoarse crier's, his
+bony figure, like that of a starveling poet, and have assumed all the
+charms of Adonis. If Dinah sees Monsieur de Clagny as Attorney-
+General, she may see him as a handsome youth. Eloquence has great
+privileges.--Besides, Madame de la Baudraye is full of ambition. She
+does not like Sancerre, and dreams of the glories of Paris."
+
+"But what interest have you in all this?" said Lousteau. "If she is in
+love with the Public Prosecutor!--Ah! you think she will not love him
+for long, and you hope to succeed him."
+
+"You who live in Paris," said Gatien, "meet as many different women as
+there are days in the year. But at Sancerre, where there are not half
+a dozen, and where, of those six, five set up for the most extravagant
+virtue, when the handsomest of them all keeps you at an infinite
+distance by looks as scornful as though she were of the blood royal, a
+young man of two-and-twenty may surely be allowed to make a guess at
+her secrets, since she must then treat him with some consideration."
+
+"Consideration! So that is what you call it in these parts?" said the
+journalist with a smile.
+
+"I should suppose Madame de la Baudraye to have too much good taste to
+trouble her head about that ugly ape," said Bianchon.
+
+"Horace," said Lousteau, "look here, O learned interpreter of human
+nature, let us lay a trap for the Public Prosecutor; we shall be doing
+our friend Gatien a service, and get a laugh out of it. I do not love
+Public Prosecutors."
+
+"You have a keen intuition of destiny," said Horace. "But what can we
+do?"
+
+"Well, after dinner we will tell sundry little anecdotes of wives
+caught out by their husbands, killed, murdered under the most terrible
+circumstances.--Then we shall see the faces that Madame de la Baudraye
+and de Clagny will make."
+
+"Not amiss!" said Bianchon; "one or the other must surely, by look or
+gesture--"
+
+"I know a newspaper editor," Lousteau went on, addressing Gatien,
+"who, anxious to forefend a grievous fate, will take no stories but
+such as tell the tale of lovers burned, hewn, pounded, or cut to
+pieces; of wives boiled, fried, or baked; he takes them to his wife to
+read, hoping that sheer fear will keep her faithful--satisfied with
+that humble alternative, poor man! 'You see, my dear, to what the
+smallest error may lead you!' says he, epitomizing Arnolfe's address
+to Agnes."
+
+"Madame de la Baudraye is quite guiltless; this youth sees double,"
+said Bianchon. "Madame Piedefer seems to me far too pious to invite
+her daughter's lover to the Chateau d'Anzy. Madame de la Baudraye
+would have to hoodwink her mother, her husband, her maid, and her
+mother's maid; that is too much to do. I acquit her."
+
+"Well with more reason because her husband never 'quits her,'  said
+Gatien, laughing at his own wit.
+
+"We can easily remember two or three stories that will make Dinah
+quake," said Lousteau. "Young man--and you too, Bianchon--let me beg
+you to maintain a stern demeanor; be thorough diplomatists, an easy
+manner without exaggeration, and watch the faces of the two criminals,
+you know, without seeming to do so--out of the corner of your eye, or
+in a glass, on the sly. This morning we will hunt the hare, this
+evening we will hunt the Public Prosecutor."
+
+The evening began with a triumph for Lousteau, who returned the album
+to the lady with this elegy written in it:
+
+
+  SPLEEN
+
+  You ask for verse from me, the feeble prey
+  Of this self-seeking world, a waif and stray
+    With none to whom to cling;
+  From me--unhappy, purblind, hopeless devil!
+  Who e'en in what is good see only evil
+    In any earthly thing!
+
+  This page, the pastime of a dame so fair,
+  May not reflect the shadow of my care,
+    For all things have their place.
+  Of love, to ladies bright, the poet sings,
+  Of joy, and balls, and dress, and dainty things--
+    Nay, or of God and Grace.
+
+  It were a bitter jest to bid the pen
+  Of one so worn with life, so hating men,
+    Depict a scene of joy.
+  Would you exult in sight to one born blind,
+  Or--cruel! of a mother's love remind
+    Some hapless orphan boy?
+
+  When cold despair has gripped a heart still fond,
+  When there is no young heart that will respond
+    To it in love, the future is a lie.
+  If there is none to weep when he is sad,
+  And share his woe, a man were better dead!--
+    And so I soon must die.
+
+  Give me your pity! often I blaspheme
+  The sacred name of God. Does it not seem
+    That I was born in vain?
+  Why should I bless him? Or why thank Him, since
+  He might have made me handsome, rich, a prince--
+    And I am poor and plain?
+
+  ETIENNE LOUSTEAU.
+  September 1836, Chateau d'Anzy.
+
+
+"And you have written those verses since yesterday?" cried Clagny in a
+suspicious tone.
+
+"Dear me, yes, as I was following the game; it is only too evident! I
+would gladly have done something better for madame."
+
+"The verses are exquisite!" cried Dinah, casting up her eyes to
+heaven.
+
+"They are, alas! the expression of a too genuine feeling," replied
+Lousteau, in a tone of deep dejection.
+
+The reader will, of course, have guessed that the journalist had
+stored these lines in his memory for ten years at least, for he had
+written them at the time of the Restoration in disgust at being unable
+to get on. Madame de la Baudraye gazed at him with such pity as the
+woes of genius inspire; and Monsieur de Clagny, who caught her
+expression, turned in hatred against this sham /Jeune Malade/ (the
+name of an Elegy written by Millevoye). He sat down to backgammon with
+the cure of Sancerre. The Presiding Judge's son was so extremely
+obliging as to place a lamp near the two players in such a way as that
+the light fell full on Madame de la Baudraye, who took up her work;
+she was embroidering in coarse wool a wicker-plait paper-basket. The
+three conspirators sat close at hand.
+
+"For whom are you decorating that pretty basket, madame?" said
+Lousteau. "For some charity lottery, perhaps?"
+
+"No," she said, "I think there is too much display in charity done to
+the sound of a trumpet."
+
+"You are very indiscreet," said Monsieur Gravier.
+
+"Can there be any indiscretion," said Lousteau, "in inquiring who the
+happy mortal may be in whose room that basket is to stand?"
+
+"There is no happy mortal in the case," said Dinah; "it is for
+Monsieur de la Baudraye."
+
+The Public Prosecutor looked slily at Madame de la Baudraye and her
+work, as if he had said to himself, "I have lost my paper-basket!"
+
+"Why, madame, may we not think him happy in having a lovely wife,
+happy in her decorating his paper-baskets so charmingly? The colors
+are red and black, like Robin Goodfellow. If ever I marry, I only hope
+that twelve years after, my wife's embroidered baskets may still be
+for me."
+
+"And why should they not be for you?" said the lady, fixing her fine
+gray eyes, full of invitation, on Etienne's face.
+
+"Parisians believe in nothing," said the lawyer bitterly. "The virtue
+of women is doubted above all things with terrible insolence. Yes, for
+some time past the books you have written, you Paris authors, your
+farces, your dramas, all your atrocious literature, turn on
+adultery--"
+
+"Come, come, Monsieur the Public Prosecutor," retorted Etienne,
+laughing, "I left you to play your game in peace, I did not attack
+you, and here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor
+as a journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the
+writers you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to
+attempt something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you
+must condemn Homer, whose /Iliad/ turns on Helen of Troy; you must
+condemn Milton's /Paradise Lost/. Eve and her serpent seem to me a
+pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the
+Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of
+that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must make a bonfire of /Mithridate, le
+Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le Mariage de
+Figaro/, Dante's /Inferno/, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of Jean-
+Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of
+France, and of Rome, etc., etc. Excepting Bossuet's /Histoire des
+Variations/ and Pascal's /Provinciales/, I do not think there are many
+books left to read if you insist on eliminating all those in which
+illicit love is mentioned."
+
+"Much loss that would be!" said Monsieur de Clagny.
+
+Etienne, nettled by the superior air assumed by Monsieur de Clagny,
+wanted to infuriate him by one of those cold-drawn jests which consist
+in defending an opinion in which we have no belief, simply to rouse
+the wrath of a poor man who argues in good faith; a regular
+journalist's pleasantry.
+
+"If we take up the political attitude into which you would force
+yourself," he went on, without heeding the lawyer's remark, "and
+assume the part of Public Prosecutor of all the ages--for every
+Government has its public ministry--well, the Catholic religion is
+infected at its fountain-head by a startling instance of illegal
+union. In the opinion of King Herod, and of Pilate as representing the
+Roman Empire, Joseph's wife figured as an adulteress, since, by her
+avowal, Joseph was not the father of Jesus. The heathen judge could no
+more recognize the Immaculate Conception than you yourself would admit
+the possibility of such a miracle if a new religion should nowadays be
+preached as based on a similar mystery. Do you suppose that a judge
+and jury in a police court would give credence to the operation of the
+Holy Ghost! And yet who can venture to assert that God will never
+again redeem mankind? Is it any better now than it was under
+Tiberius?"
+
+"Your argument is blasphemy," said Monsieur de Clagny.
+
+"I grant it," said the journalist, "but not with malicious intent. You
+cannot suppress historical fact. In my opinion, Pilate, when he
+sentenced Jesus, and Anytus--who spoke for the aristocratic party at
+Athens--when he insisted on the death of Socrates, both represented
+established social interests which held themselves legitimate,
+invested with co-operative powers, and obliged to defend themselves.
+Pilate and Anytus in their time were not less logical than the public
+prosecutors who demanded the heads of the sergeants of La Rochelle;
+who, at this day, are guillotining the republicans who take up arms
+against the throne as established by the revolution of July, and the
+innovators who aim at upsetting society for their own advantage under
+pretence of organizing it on a better footing. In the eyes of the
+great families of Greece and Rome, Socrates and Jesus were criminals;
+to those ancient aristocracies their opinions were akin to those of
+the Mountain; and if their followers had been victorious, they would
+have produced a little 'ninety-three' in the Roman Empire or in
+Attica."
+
+"What are you trying to come to, monsieur?" asked the lawyer.
+
+"To adultery!--For thus, monsieur, a Buddhist as he smokes his pipe
+may very well assert that the Christian religion is founded in
+adultery; as we believe that Mahomet is an impostor; that his Koran is
+an epitome of the Old Testament and the Gospels; and that God never
+had the least intention of constituting that camel-driver His
+Prophet."
+
+"If there were many men like you in France--and there are more than
+enough, unfortunately--all government would be impossible."
+
+"And there would be no religion at all," said Madame Piedefer, who had
+been making strangely wry faces all through this discussion.
+
+"You are paining them very much," said Bianchon to Lousteau in an
+undertone. "Do not talk of religion; you are saying things that are
+enough to upset them."
+
+"If I were a writer or a romancer," said Monsieur Gravier, "I should
+take the side of the luckless husbands. I, who have seen many things,
+and strange things too, know that among the ranks of deceived husbands
+there are some whose attitude is not devoid of energy, men who, at a
+crisis, can be very dramatic, to use one of your words, monsieur," he
+said, addressing Etienne.
+
+"You are very right, my dear Monsieur Gravier," said Lousteau. "I
+never thought that deceived husbands were ridiculous; on the contrary,
+I think highly of them--"
+
+"Do you not think a husband's confidence a sublime thing?" said
+Bianchon. "He believes in his wife, he does not suspect her, he trusts
+her implicitly. But if he is so weak as to trust her, you make game of
+him; if he is jealous and suspicious, you hate him; what, then, I ask
+you, is the happy medium for a man of spirit?"
+
+"If Monsieur de Clagny had not just expressed such vehement
+disapproval of the immorality of stories in which the matrimonial
+compact is violated, I could tell you of a husband's revenge," said
+Lousteau.
+
+Monsieur de Clagny threw the dice with a convulsive jerk, and dared
+not look up at the journalist.
+
+"A story, from you!" cried Madame de la Baudraye. "I should hardly
+have dared to hope for such a treat--"
+
+"It is not my story, madame; I am not clever enough to invent such a
+tragedy. It was told me--and how delightfully!--by one of our greatest
+writers, the finest literary musician of our day, Charles Nodier."
+
+"Well, tell it," said Dinah. "I never met Monsieur Nodier, so you have
+no comparison to fear."
+
+"Not long after the 18th Brumaire," Etienne began, "there was, as you
+know, a call to arms in Brittany and la Vendee. The First Consul,
+anxious before all things for peace in France, opened negotiations
+with the rebel chiefs, and took energetic military measures; but,
+while combining his plans of campaign with the insinuating charm of
+Italian diplomacy, he also set the Machiavelian springs of the police
+in movement, Fouche then being at its head. And none of these means
+were superfluous to stifle the fire of war then blaring in the West.
+
+"At this time a young man of the Maille family was despatched by the
+Chouans from Brittany to Saumur, to open communications between
+certain magnates of that town and its environs and the leaders of the
+Royalist party. The envoy was, in fact, arrested on the very day he
+landed--for he traveled by boat, disguised as a master mariner.
+However, as a man of practical intelligence, he had calculated all the
+risks of the undertaking; his passport and papers were all in order,
+and the men told off to take him were afraid of blundering.
+
+"The Chevalier de Beauvoir--I now remember his name--had studied his
+part well; he appealed to the family whose name he had borrowed,
+persisted in his false address, and stood his examination so boldly
+that he would have been set at large but for the blind belief that the
+spies had in their instructions, which were unfortunately only too
+minute. In this dilemma the authorities were more ready to risk an
+arbitrary act than to let a man escape to whose capture the Minister
+attached great importance. In those days of liberty the agents of the
+powers in authority cared little enough for what we now regard as
+/legal/. The Chevalier was therefore imprisoned provisionally, until
+the superior officials should come to some decision as to his
+identity. He had not long to wait for it; orders were given to guard
+the prisoner closely in spite of his denials.
+
+"The Chevalier de Beauvoir was next transferred, in obedience to
+further orders, to the Castle of l'Escarpe, a name which sufficiently
+indicates its situation. This fortress, perched on very high rocks,
+has precipices for its trenches; it is reached on all sides by steep
+and dangerous paths; and, like every ancient castle, its principal
+gate has a drawbridge over a wide moat. The commandant of this prison,
+delighted to have charge of a man of family whose manners were most
+agreeable, who expressed himself well, and seemed highly educated,
+received the Chevalier as a godsend; he offered him the freedom of the
+place on parole, that they might together the better defy its dulness.
+The prisoner was more than content.
+
+"Beauvoir was a loyal gentleman, but, unfortunately, he was also a
+very handsome youth. He had attractive features, a dashing air, a
+pleasing address, and extraordinary strength. Well made, active, full
+of enterprise, and loving danger, he would have made an admirable
+leader of guerillas, and was the very man for the part. The commandant
+gave his prisoner the most comfortable room, entertained him at his
+table, and at first had nothing but praise for the Vendean. This
+officer was a Corsican and married; his wife was pretty and charming,
+and he thought her, perhaps, not to be trusted--at any rate, he was as
+jealous as a Corsican and a rather ill-looking soldier may be. The
+lady took a fancy to Beauvoir, and he found her very much to his
+taste; perhaps they loved! Love in a prison is quick work. Did they
+commit some imprudence? Was the sentiment they entertained something
+warmer than the superficial gallantry which is almost a duty of men
+towards women?
+
+"Beauvoir never fully explained this rather obscure episode of the
+story; it is at least certain that the commandant thought himself
+justified in treating his prisoner with excessive severity. Beauvoir
+was placed in the dungeon, fed on black bread and cold water, and
+fettered in accordance with the time-honored traditions of the
+treatment lavished on captives. His cell, under the fortress-yard, was
+vaulted with hard stone, the walls were of desperate thickness; the
+tower overlooked the precipice.
+
+"When the luckless man had convinced himself of the impossibility of
+escape, he fell into those day-dreams which are at once the comfort
+and the crowning despair of prisoners. He gave himself up to the
+trifles which in such cases seem so important; he counted the hours
+and the days; he studied the melancholy trade of being prisoner; he
+became absorbed in himself, and learned the value of air and sunshine;
+then, at the end of a fortnight, he was attacked by that terrible
+malady, that fever for liberty, which drives prisoners to those heroic
+efforts of which the prodigious achievements seem to us impossible,
+though true, and which my friend the doctor" (and he turned to
+Bianchon) "would perhaps ascribe to some unknown forces too recondite
+for his physiological analysis to detect, some mysteries of the human
+will of which the obscurity baffles science."
+
+Bianchon shook his head in negation.
+
+"Beauvoir was eating his heart out, for death alone could set him
+free. One morning the turnkey, whose duty it was to bring him his
+food, instead of leaving him when he had given him his meagre
+pittance, stood with his arms folded, looking at him with strange
+meaning. Conversation between them was brief, and the warder never
+began it. The Chevalier was therefore greatly surprised when the man
+said to him: 'Of course, monsieur, you know your own business when you
+insist on being always called Monsieur Lebrun, or citizen Lebrun. It
+is no concern of mine; ascertaining your name is no part of my duty.
+It is all the same to me whether you call yourself Peter or Paul. If
+every man minds his own business, the cows will not stray. At the same
+time, /I/ know,' said he, with a wink, 'that you are Monsieur Charles-
+Felix-Theodore, Chevalier de Beauvoir, and cousin to Madame la
+Duchesse de Maille.--Heh?' he added after a short silence, during
+which he looked at his prisoner.
+
+"Beauvoir, seeing that he was safe under lock and key, did not imagine
+that his position could be any the worse if his real name were known.
+
+"'Well, and supposing I were the Chevalier de Beauvoir, what should I
+gain by that?' said he.
+
+"'Oh, there is everything to be gained by it,' replied the jailer in
+an undertone. 'I have been paid to help you to get away; but wait a
+minute! If I were suspected in the smallest degree, I should be shot
+out of hand. So I have said that I will do no more in the matter than
+will just earn the money.--Look here,' said he, taking a small file
+out of his pocket, 'this is your key; with this you can cut through
+one of your bars. By the Mass, but it will not be any easy job,' he
+went on, glancing at the narrow loophole that let daylight into the
+dungeon.
+
+"It was in a splayed recess under the deep cornice that ran round the
+top of the tower, between the brackets that supported the embrasures.
+
+"'Monsieur,' said the man, 'you must take care to saw through the
+iron low enough to get your body through.'
+
+"'I will get through, never fear,' said the prisoner.
+
+"'But high enough to leave a stanchion to fasten a cord to,' the
+warder went on.
+
+"'And where is the cord?' asked Beauvoir.
+
+"'Here,' said the man, throwing down a knotted rope. 'It is made of
+raveled linen, that you may be supposed to have contrived it yourself,
+and it is long enough. When you have got to the bottom knot, let
+yourself drop gently, and the rest you must manage for yourself. You
+will probably find a carriage somewhere in the neighborhood, and
+friends looking out for you. But I know nothing about that.--I need
+not remind you that there is a man-at-arms to the right of the tower.
+You will take care, of course, to choose a dark night, and wait till
+the sentinel is asleep. You must take your chance of being shot;
+but--'
+
+"'All right! All right! At least I shall not rot here,' cried the
+young man.
+
+"'Well, that may happen nevertheless,' replied the jailer, with a
+stupid expression.
+
+"Beauvoir thought this was merely one of the aimless remarks that such
+folks indulge in. The hope of freedom filled him with such joy that he
+could not be troubled to consider the words of a man who was no more
+than a better sort of peasant. He set to work at once, and had filed
+the bars through in the course of the day. Fearing a visit from the
+Governor, he stopped up the breaches with bread crumb rubbed in rust
+to make it look like iron; he hid his rope, and waited for a favorable
+night with the intensity of anticipation, the deep anguish of soul
+that makes a prisoner's life dramatic.
+
+"At last, one murky night, an autumn night, he finished cutting
+through the bars, tied the cord firmly to the stump, and perched
+himself on the sill outside, holding on by one hand to the piece of
+iron remaining. Then he waited for the darkest hour of the night, when
+the sentinels would probably be asleep; this would be not long before
+dawn. He knew the hours of their rounds, the length of each watch,
+every detail with which prisoners, almost involuntarily, become
+familiar. He waited till the moment when one of the men-at-arms had
+spent two-thirds of his watch and gone into his box for shelter from
+the fog. Then, feeling sure that the chances were at the best for his
+escape, he let himself down knot by knot, hanging between earth and
+sky, and clinging to his rope with the strength of a giant. All was
+well. At the last knot but one, just as he was about to let himself
+drop, a prudent impulse led him to feel for the ground with his feet,
+and he found no footing. The predicament was awkward for a man bathed
+in sweat, tired, and perplexed, and in a position where his life was
+at stake on even chances. He was about to risk it, when a trivial
+incident stopped him; his hat fell off; happily, he listened for the
+noise it must make in striking the ground, and he heard not a sound.
+
+"The prisoner felt vaguely suspicious as to this state of affairs. He
+began to wonder whether the Commandant had not laid a trap for him--
+but if so, why? Torn by doubts, he almost resolved to postpone the
+attempt till another night. At any rate, he would wait for the first
+gleam of day, when it would still not be impossible to escape. His
+great strength enabled him to climb up again to his window; still, he
+was almost exhausted by the time he gained the sill, where he crouched
+on the lookout, exactly like a cat on the parapet of a gutter. Before
+long, by the pale light of dawn, he perceived as he waved the rope
+that there was a little interval of a hundred feet between the lowest
+knot and the pointed rocks below.
+
+"'Thank you, my friend, the Governor!' said he, with characteristic
+coolness. Then, after a brief meditation on this skilfully-planned
+revenge, he thought it wise to return to his cell.
+
+"He laid his outer clothes conspicuously on the bed, left the rope
+outside to make it seem that he had fallen, and hid himself behind the
+door to await the arrival of the treacherous turnkey, arming himself
+with one of the iron bars he had filed out. The jailer, who returned
+rather earlier than usual to secure the dead man's leavings, opened
+the door, whistling as he came in; but when he was at arm's length,
+Beauvoir hit him such a tremendous blow on the head that the wretch
+fell in a heap without a cry; the bar had cracked his skull.
+
+"The Chevalier hastily stripped him and put on his clothes, mimicked
+his walk, and, thanks to the early hour and the undoubting confidence
+of the warders of the great gate, he walked out and away."
+
+It did not seem to strike either the lawyer or Madame de la Baudraye
+that there was in this narrative the least allusion that should apply
+to them. Those in the little plot looked inquiringly at each other,
+evidently surprised at the perfect coolness of the two supposed
+lovers.
+
+"Oh! I can tell you a better story than that," said Bianchon.
+
+"Let us hear," said the audience, at a sign from Lousteau, conveying
+that Bianchon had a reputation as a story-teller.
+
+Among the stock of narratives he had in store, for every clever man
+has a fund of anecdotes as Madame de la Baudraye had a collection of
+phrases, the doctor chose that which is known as /La Grande Breteche/,
+and is so famous indeed, that it was put on the stage at the /Gymnase-
+Dramatique/ under the title of /Valentine/. So it is not necessary to
+repeat it here, though it was then new to the inhabitants of the
+Chateau d'Anzy. And it was told with the same finish of gesture and
+tone which had won such praise for Bianchon when at Mademoiselle des
+Touches' supper-party he had told it for the first time. The final
+picture of the Spanish grandee, starved to death where he stood in the
+cupboard walled up by Madame de Merret's husband, and that husband's
+last word as he replied to his wife's entreaty, "You swore on that
+crucifix that there was no one in that closet!" produced their full
+effect. There was a silent minute, highly flattering to Bianchon.
+
+"Do you know, gentlemen," said Madame de la Baudraye, "love must be a
+mighty thing that it can tempt a woman to put herself in such a
+position?"
+
+"I, who have certainly seen some strange things in the course of my
+life," said Gravier, "was cognizant in Spain of an adventure of the
+same kind."
+
+"You come forward after two great performers," said Madame de la
+Baudraye, with coquettish flattery, as she glanced at the two
+Parisians. "But never mind--proceed."
+
+"Some little time after his entry into Madrid," said the Receiver-
+General, "the Grand Duke of Berg invited the magnates of the capital
+to an entertainment given to the newly conquered city by the French
+army. In spite of the splendor of the affair, the Spaniards were not
+very cheerful; their ladies hardly danced at all, and most of the
+company sat down to cards. The gardens of the Duke's palace were so
+brilliantly illuminated, that the ladies could walk about in as
+perfect safety as in broad daylight. The fete was of imperial
+magnificence. Nothing was grudged to give the Spaniards a high idea of
+the Emperor, if they were to measure him by the standard of his
+officers.
+
+"In an arbor near the house, between one and two in the morning, a
+party of French officers were discussing the chances of war, and the
+not too hopeful outlook prognosticated by the conduct of the Spaniards
+present at that grand ball.
+
+"'I can only tell you,' said the surgeon-major of the company of
+which I was paymaster, 'I applied formally to Prince Murat only
+yesterday to be recalled. Without being afraid exactly of leaving my
+bones in the Peninsula, I would rather dress the wounds made by our
+worthy neighbors the Germans. Their weapons do not run quite so deep
+into the body as these Castilian daggers. Besides, a certain dread of
+Spain is, with me, a sort of superstition. From my earliest youth I
+have read Spanish books, and a heap of gloomy romances and tales of
+adventures in this country have given me a serious prejudice against
+its manners and customs.
+
+"'Well, now, since my arrival in Madrid, I have already been, not
+indeed the hero, but the accomplice of a dangerous intrigue, as dark
+and mysterious as any romance by Lady (Mrs.) Radcliffe. I am apt to
+attend to my presentiments, and I am off to-morrow. Murat will not
+refuse me leave, for, thanks to our varied services, we always have
+influential friends.'
+
+"'Since you mean to cut your stick, tell us what's up,' said an old
+Republican colonel, who cared not a rap for Imperial gentility and
+choice language.
+
+"The surgeon-major looked about him cautiously, as if to make sure who
+were his audience, and being satisfied that no Spaniard was within
+hearing, he said:
+
+"'We are none but Frenchmen--then, with pleasure, Colonel Hulot.
+About six days since, I was quietly going home, at about eleven at
+night, after leaving General Montcornet, whose hotel is but a few
+yards from mine. We had come away together from the Quartermaster-
+General's, where we had played rather high at /bouillotte/. Suddenly,
+at the corner of a narrow high-street, two strangers, or rather, two
+demons, rushed upon me and flung a large cloak round my head and arms.
+I yelled out, as you may suppose, like a dog that is thrashed, but the
+cloth smothered my voice, and I was lifted into a chaise with
+dexterous rapidity. When my two companions released me from the cloak,
+I heard these dreadful words spoken by a woman, in bad French:
+
+"'"If you cry out, or if you attempt to escape, if you make the very
+least suspicious demonstration, the gentleman opposite to you will
+stab you without hesitation. So you had better keep quiet.--Now, I
+will tell you why you have been carried off. If you will take the
+trouble to put your hand out in this direction, you will find your
+case of instruments lying between us; we sent a messenger for them to
+your rooms, in your name. You will need them. We are taking you to a
+house that you may save the honor of a lady who is about to give birth
+to a child that she wishes to place in this gentleman's keeping
+without her husband's knowledge. Though monsieur rarely leaves his
+wife, with whom he is still passionately in love, watching over her
+with all the vigilance of Spanish jealousy, she had succeeded in
+concealing her condition; he believes her to be ill. You must bring
+the child into the world. The dangers of this enterprise do not
+concern us: only, you must obey us, otherwise the lover, who is
+sitting opposite to you in this carriage, and who does not understand
+a word of French, will kill you on the least rash movement."
+
+"'"And who are you?" I asked, feeling for the speaker's hand, for
+her arm was inside the sleeve of a soldier's uniform.
+
+"'"I am my lady's waiting-woman," said she, "and ready to reward you
+with my own person if you show yourself gallant and helpful in our
+necessities."
+
+"'"Gladly," said I, seeing that I was inevitably started on a
+perilous adventure.
+
+"'Under favor of the darkness, I felt whether the person and figure
+of the girl were in keeping with the idea I had formed of her from her
+tone of voice. The good soul had, no doubt, made up her mind from the
+first to accept all the chances of this strange act of kidnapping, for
+she kept silence very obligingly, and the coach had not been more than
+ten minutes on the way when she accepted and returned a very
+satisfactory kiss. The lover, who sat opposite to me, took no offence
+at an occasional quite involuntary kick; as he did not understand
+French, I conclude he paid no heed to them.
+
+"'"I can be your mistress on one condition only," said the woman, in
+reply to the nonsense I poured into her ear, carried away by the
+fervor of an improvised passion, to which everything was unpropitious.
+
+"'"And what is it?"
+
+"'"That you will never attempt to find out whose servant I am. If I
+am to go to you, it must be at night, and you must receive me in the
+dark."
+
+"'"Very good," said I.
+
+"'We had got as far as this, when the carriage drew up under a garden
+wall.
+
+"'"You must allow me to bandage your eyes," said the maid. "You can
+lean on my arm, and I will lead you."
+
+"'She tied a handkerchief over my eyes, fastening it in a tight knot
+at the back of my head. I heard the sound of a key being cautiously
+fitted to the lock of a little side door by the speechless lover who
+had sat opposite to me. In a moment the waiting-woman, whose shape was
+slender, and who walked with an elegant jauntiness'--/meneho/, as they
+call it," Monsieur Gravier explained in a superior tone, "a word which
+describes the swing which women contrive to give a certain part of
+their dress that shall be nameless.--'The waiting-woman'--it is the
+surgeon-major who is speaking," the narrator went on--"'led me along
+the gravel walks of a large garden, till at a certain spot she
+stopped. From the louder sound of our footsteps, I concluded that we
+were close to the house. "Now silence!" said she in a whisper, "and
+mind what you are about. Do not overlook any of my signals; I cannot
+speak without terrible danger for both of us, and at this moment your
+life is of the first importance." Then she added: "My mistress is in a
+room on the ground floor. To get into it we must pass through her
+husband's room and close to his bed. Do not cough, walk softly, and
+follow me closely, so as not to knock against the furniture or tread
+anywhere but on the carpets I laid down."
+
+"'Here the lover gave an impatient growl, as a man annoyed by so much
+delay.
+
+"'The woman said no more, I heard a door open, I felt the warm air of
+the house, and we stole in like thieves. Presently the girl's light
+hand removed the bandage. I found myself in a lofty and spacious room,
+badly lighted by a smoky lamp. The window was open, but the jealous
+husband had fitted it with iron bars. I was in the bottom of a sack,
+as it were.
+
+"'On the ground a woman was lying on a mat; her head was covered with
+a muslin veil, but I could see her eyes through it full of tears and
+flashing with the brightness of stars; she held a handkerchief in her
+mouth, biting it so hard that her teeth were set in it: I never saw
+finer limbs, but her body was writhing with pain like a harp-string
+thrown on the fire. The poor creature had made a sort of struts of her
+legs by setting her feet against a chest of drawers, and with both
+hands she held on to the bar of a chair, her arms outstretched, with
+every vein painfully swelled. She might have been a criminal
+undergoing torture. But she did not utter a cry; there was not a
+sound, all three speechless and motionless. The husband snored with
+reassuring regularity. I wanted to study the waiting-woman's face, but
+she had put on a mask, which she had removed, no doubt, during our
+drive, and I could see nothing but a pair of black eyes and a
+pleasingly rounded figure.
+
+"'The lover threw some towels over his mistress' legs and folded the
+muslin veil double over her face. As soon as I had examined the lady
+with care, I perceived from certain symptoms which I had noted once
+before on a very sad occasion in my life, that the infant was dead. I
+turned to the maid in order to tell her this. Instantly the suspicious
+stranger drew his dagger; but I had time to explain the matter to the
+woman, who explained in a word or two to him in a low voice. On
+hearing my opinion, a quick, slight shudder ran through him from head
+to foot like a lightning flash; I fancied I could see him turn pale
+under his black velvet mask.
+
+"'The waiting-woman took advantage of a moment when he was bending in
+despair over the dying woman, who had turned blue, to point to some
+glasses of lemonade standing on a table, at the same time shaking her
+head negatively. I understood that I was not to drink anything in
+spite of the dreadful thirst that parched my throat. The lover was
+thirsty too; he took an empty glass, poured out some fresh lemonade,
+and drank it off.
+
+"'At this moment the lady had a violent attack of pain, which showed
+me that now was the time to operate. I summoned all my courage, and in
+about an hour had succeeded in delivering her of the child, cutting it
+up to extract it. The Spaniard no longer thought of poisoning me,
+understanding that I had saved the mother's life. Large tears fell on
+his cloak. The woman uttered no sound, but she trembled like a hunted
+animal, and was bathed in sweat.
+
+"'At one horribly critical moment she pointed in the direction of her
+husband's room; he had turned in his sleep, and she alone had heard
+the rustle of the sheets, the creaking of the bed or of the curtain.
+We all paused, and the lover and the waiting-woman, through the
+eyeholes of their masks, gave each other a look that said, "If he
+wakes, shall we kill him?"
+
+"'At that instant I put out my hand to take the glass of lemonade the
+Spaniard had drunk of. He, thinking that I was about to take one of
+the full glasses, sprang forward like a cat, and laid his long dagger
+over the two poisoned goblets, leaving me his own, and signing to me
+to drink what was left. So much was conveyed by this quick action, and
+it was so full of good feeling, that I forgave him his atrocious
+schemes for killing me, and thus burying every trace of this event.
+
+"'After two hours of care and alarms, the maid and I put her mistress
+to bed. The lover, forced into so perilous an adventure, had, to
+provide means in case of having to fly, a packet of diamonds stuck to
+paper; these he put into my pocket without my knowing it; and I may
+add parenthetically, that as I was ignorant of the Spaniard's
+magnificent gift, my servant stole the jewels the day after, and went
+off with a perfect fortune.
+
+"'I whispered my instructions to the waiting-woman as to the further
+care of her patient, and wanted to be gone. The maid remained with her
+mistress, which was not very reassuring, but I was on my guard. The
+lover made a bundle of the dead infant and the blood-stained clothes,
+tying it up tightly, and hiding it under his cloak; he passed his hand
+over my eyes as if to bid me to see nothing, and signed to me to take
+hold of the skirt of his coat. He went first out of the room, and I
+followed, not without a parting glance at my lady of an hour. She,
+seeing the Spaniard had gone out, snatched off her mask and showed me
+an exquisite face.
+
+"'When I found myself in the garden, in the open air, I confess that
+I breathed as if a heavy load had been lifted from my breast. I
+followed my guide at a respectful distance, watching his least
+movement with keen attention. Having reached the little door, he took
+my hand and pressed a seal to my lips, set in a ring which I had seen
+him wearing on a finger of his left hand, and I gave him to understand
+that this significant sign would be obeyed. In the street two horses
+were waiting; we each mounted one. My Spaniard took my bridle, held
+his own between his teeth, for his right hand held the bloodstained
+bundle, and we went off at lightning speed.
+
+"'I could not see the smallest object by which to retrace the road we
+came by. At dawn I found myself close by my own door, and the Spaniard
+fled towards the Atocha gate.'
+
+"'And you saw nothing which could lead you to suspect who the woman
+was whom you had attended?' the Colonel asked of the surgeon.
+
+"'One thing only,' he replied. 'When I turned the unknown lady over,
+I happened to remark a mole on her arm, about half-way down, as big as
+a lentil, and surrounded with brown hairs.'--At this instant the rash
+speaker turned pale. All our eyes, that had been fixed on his,
+followed his glance, and we saw a Spaniard, whose glittering eyes
+shone through a clump of orange-trees. On finding himself the object
+of our attention, the man vanished with the swiftness of a sylph. A
+young captain rushed in pursuit.
+
+"'By Heaven!' cried the surgeon, 'that basilisk stare has chilled me
+through, my friends. I can hear bells ringing in my ears! I may take
+leave of you; you will bury me here!'
+
+"'What a fool you are!' exclaimed Colonel Hulot. 'Falcon is on the
+track of the Spaniard who was listening, and he will call him to
+account.'
+
+"'Well,' cried one and another, seeing the captain return quite out
+of breath.
+
+"'The devil's in it,' said Falcon; 'the man went through a wall, I
+believe! As I do not suppose that he is a wizard, I fancy he must
+belong to the house! He knows every corner and turning, and easily
+escaped.'
+
+"'I am done for,' said the surgeon, in a gloomy voice.
+
+"'Come, come, keep calm, Bega,' said I (his name was Bega), 'we will
+sit on watch with you till you leave. We will not leave you this
+evening.'
+
+"In point of fact, three young officers who had been losing at play
+went home with the surgeon to his lodgings, and one of us offered to
+stay with him.
+
+"Within two days Bega had obtained his recall to France; he made
+arrangements to travel with a lady to whom Murat had given a strong
+escort, and had just finished dinner with a party of friends, when his
+servant came to say that a young lady wished to speak to him. The
+surgeon and the three officers went down suspecting mischief. The
+stranger could only say, 'Be on your guard--' when she dropped down
+dead. It was the waiting-woman, who, finding she had been poisoned,
+had hoped to arrive in time to warn her lover.
+
+"'Devil take it!' cried Captain Falcon, 'that is what I call love! No
+woman on earth but a Spaniard can run about with a dose of poison in
+her inside!'
+
+"Bega remained strangely pensive. To drown the dark presentiments that
+haunted him, he sat down to table again, and with his companions drank
+immoderately. The whole party went early to bed, half drunk.
+
+"In the middle of the night the hapless Bega was aroused by the sharp
+rattle of the curtain rings pulled violently along the rods. He sat up
+in bed, in the mechanical trepidation which we all feel on waking with
+such a start. He saw standing before him a Spaniard wrapped in a
+cloak, who fixed on him the same burning gaze that he had seen through
+the bushes.
+
+"Bega shouted out, 'Help, help, come at once, friends!' But the
+Spaniard answered his cry of distress with a bitter laugh.--'Opium
+grows for all!' said he.
+
+"Having thus pronounced sentence as it were, the stranger pointed to
+the three other men sleeping soundly, took from under his cloak the
+arm of a woman, freshly amputated, and held it out to Bega, pointing
+to a mole like that he had so rashly described. 'Is it the same?' he
+asked. By the light of the lantern the man had set on the bed, Bega
+recognized the arm, and his speechless amazement was answer enough.
+
+"Without waiting for further information, the lady's husband stabbed
+him to the heart."
+
+"You must tell that to the marines!" said Lousteau. "It needs their
+robust faith to swallow it! Can you tell me which told the tale, the
+dead man or the Spaniard?"
+
+"Monsieur," replied the Receiver-General, "I nursed poor Bega, who
+died five days after in dreadful suffering.--That is not the end.
+
+"At the time of the expedition sent out to restore Ferdinand VII. I
+was appointed to a place in Spain; but, happily for me, I got no
+further than Tours when I was promised the post of Receiver here at
+Sancerre. On the eve of setting out I was at a ball at Madame de
+Listomere's, where we were to meet several Spaniards of high rank. On
+rising from the card-table, I saw a Spanish grandee, an /afrancesado/
+in exile, who had been about a fortnight in Touraine. He had arrived
+very late at this ball--his first appearance in society--accompanied
+by his wife, whose right arm was perfectly motionless. Everybody made
+way in silence for this couple, whom we all watched with some
+excitement. Imagine a picture by Murillo come to life. Under black and
+hollow brows the man's eyes were like a fixed blaze; his face looked
+dried up, his bald skull was red, and his frame was a terror to
+behold, he was so emaciated. His wife--no, you cannot imagine her. Her
+figure had the supple swing for which the Spaniards created the word
+/meneho/; though pale, she was still beautiful; her complexion was
+dazzlingly fair--a rare thing in a Spaniard; and her gaze, full of the
+Spanish sun, fell on you like a stream of melted lead.
+
+"'Madame,' said I to her, towards the end of the evening, 'what
+occurrence led to the loss of your arm?'
+
+"'I lost it in the war of independence,' said she."
+
+"Spain is a strange country," said Madame de la Baudraye. "It still
+shows traces of Arab manners."
+
+"Oh!" said the journalist, laughing, "the mania for cutting off arms
+is an old one there. It turns up every now and then like some of our
+newspaper hoaxes, for the subject has given plots for plays on the
+Spanish stage so early as 1570--"
+
+"Then do you think me capable of inventing such a story?" said
+Monsieur Gravier, nettled by Lousteau's impertinent tone.
+
+"Quite incapable of such a thing," said the journalist with grave
+irony.
+
+"Pooh!" said Bianchon, "the inventions of romances and play-writers
+are quite as often transferred from their books and pieces into real
+life, as the events of real life are made use of on the stage or
+adapted to a tale. I have seen the comedy of /Tartufe/ played out--
+with the exception of the close; Orgon's eyes could not be opened to
+the truth."
+
+"And the tragi-comedy of /Adolphe/ by Benjamin Constant is constantly
+enacted," cried Lousteau.
+
+"And do you suppose," asked Madame de la Baudraye, "that such
+adventures as Monsieur Gravier has related could ever occur now, and
+in France?"
+
+"Dear me!" cried Clagny, "of the ten or twelve startling crimes that
+are annually committed in France, quite half are mixed up with
+circumstances at least as extraordinary as these, and often outdoing
+them in romantic details. Indeed, is not this proved by the reports in
+the /Gazette des Tribunaux/--the Police news--in my opinion, one of
+the worst abuses of the Press? This newspaper, which was started only
+in 1826 or '27, was not in existence when I began my professional
+career, and the facts of the crime I am about to speak of were not
+known beyond the limits of the department where it was committed.
+
+"In the quarter of Saint-Pierre-des-Corps at Tours a woman whose
+husband had disappeared at the time when the army of the Loire was
+disbanded, and who had mourned him deeply, was conspicuous for her
+excess of devotion. When the mission priests went through all the
+provinces to restore the crosses that had been destroyed and to efface
+the traces of revolutionary impiety, this widow was one of their most
+zealous proselytes, she carried a cross and nailed to it a silver
+heart pierced by an arrow; and, for a long time after, she went every
+evening to pray at the foot of the cross which was erected behind the
+Cathedral apse.
+
+"At last, overwhelmed by remorse, she confessed to a horrible crime.
+She had killed her husband, as Fualdes was murdered, by bleeding him;
+she had salted the body and packed it in pieces into old casks,
+exactly as if it have been pork; and for a long time she had taken a
+piece every morning and thrown it into the Loire. Her confessor
+consulted his superiors, and told her that it would be his duty to
+inform the public prosecutor. The woman awaited the action of the Law.
+The public prosecutor and the examining judge, on examining the
+cellar, found the husband's head still in pickle in one of the casks.
+--'Wretched woman,' said the judge to the accused, 'since you were so
+barbarous as to throw your husband's body into the river, why did you
+not get rid of the head? Then there would have been no proof.'
+
+"'I often tried, monsieur,' said she, 'but it was too heavy.'"
+
+"Well, and what became of the woman?" asked the two Parisians.
+
+"She was sentenced and executed at Tours," replied the lawyer; "but
+her repentance and piety had attracted interest in spite of her
+monstrous crime."
+
+"And do you suppose," said Bianchon, "that we know all the tragedies
+that are played out behind the curtain of private life that the public
+never lifts?--It seems to me that human justice is ill adapted to
+judge of crimes as between husband and wife. It has every right to
+intervene as the police; but in equity it knows nothing of the heart
+of the matter."
+
+"The victim has in many cases been for so long the tormentor," said
+Madame de la Baudraye guilelessly, "that the crime would sometimes
+seem almost excusable if the accused could tell all."
+
+This reply, led up to by Bianchon and by the story which Clagny had
+told, left the two Parisians excessively puzzled as to Dinah's
+position.
+
+At bedtime council was held, one of those discussions which take place
+in the passages of old country-houses where the bachelors linger,
+candle in hand, for mysterious conversations.
+
+Monsieur Gravier was now informed of the object in view during this
+entertaining evening which had brought Madame de la Baudraye's
+innocence to light.
+
+"But, after all," said Lousteau, "our hostess' serenity may indicate
+deep depravity instead of the most child-like innocence. The Public
+Prosecutor looks to me quite capable of suggesting that little La
+Baudraye should be put in pickle----"
+
+"He is not to return till to-morrow; who knows what may happen in the
+course of the night?" said Gatien.
+
+"We will know!" cried Monsieur Gravier.
+
+In the life of a country house a number of practical jokes are
+considered admissible, some of them odiously treacherous. Monsieur
+Gravier, who had seen so much of the world, proposed setting seals on
+the door of Madame de la Baudraye and of the Public Prosecutor. The
+ducks that denounced the poet Ibycus are as nothing in comparison with
+the single hair that these country spies fasten across the opening of
+a door by means of two little flattened pills of wax, fixed so high
+up, or so low down, that the trick is never suspected. If the gallant
+comes out of his own door and opens the other, the broken hair tells
+the tale.
+
+When everybody was supposed to be asleep, the doctor, the journalist,
+the receiver of taxes, and Gatien came barefoot, like robbers, and
+silently fastened up the two doors, agreeing to come again at five in
+the morning to examine the state of the fastenings. Imagine their
+astonishment and Gatien's delight when all four, candle in hand, and
+with hardly any clothes on, came to look at the hairs, and found them
+in perfect preservation on both doors.
+
+"Is it the same wax?" asked Monsieur Gravier.
+
+"Are they the same hairs?" asked Lousteau.
+
+"Yes," replied Gatien.
+
+"This quite alters the matter!" cried Lousteau. "You have been beating
+the bush for a will-o'-the-wisp."
+
+Monsieur Gravier and Gatien exchanged questioning glances which were
+meant to convey, "Is there not something offensive to us in that
+speech? Ought we to laugh or to be angry?"
+
+"If Dinah is virtuous," said the journalist in a whisper to Bianchon,
+"she is worth an effort on my part to pluck the fruit of her first
+love."
+
+The idea of carrying by storm a fortress that had for nine years stood
+out against the besiegers of Sancerre smiled on Lousteau.
+
+With this notion in his head, he was the first to go down and into the
+garden, hoping to meet his hostess. And this chance fell out all the
+more easily because Madame de la Baudraye on her part wished to
+converse with her critic. Half such chances are planned.
+
+"You were out shooting yesterday, monsieur," said Madame de la
+Baudraye. "This morning I am rather puzzled as to how to find you any
+new amusement; unless you would like to come to La Baudraye, where you
+may study more of our provincial life than you can see here, for you
+have made but one mouthful of my absurdities. However, the saying
+about the handsomest girl in the world is not less true of the poor
+provincial woman!"
+
+"That little simpleton Gatien has, I suppose, related to you a speech
+I made simply to make him confess that he adored you," said Etienne.
+"Your silence, during dinner the day before yesterday and throughout
+the evening, was enough to betray one of those indiscretions which we
+never commit in Paris.--What can I say? I do not flatter myself that
+you will understand me. In fact, I laid a plot for the telling of all
+those stories yesterday solely to see whether I could rouse you and
+Monsieur de Clagny to a pang of remorse.--Oh! be quite easy; your
+innocence is fully proved.
+
+"If you had the slightest fancy for that estimable magistrate, you
+would have lost all your value in my eyes.--I love perfection.
+
+"You do not, you cannot love that cold, dried-up, taciturn little
+usurer on wine casks and land, who would leave any man in the lurch
+for twenty-five centimes on a renewal. Oh, I have fully recognized
+Monsieur de la Baudraye's similarity to a Parisian bill-discounter;
+their nature is identical.--At eight-and-twenty, handsome, well
+conducted, and childless--I assure you, madame, I never saw the
+problem of virtue more admirably expressed.--The author of /Paquita la
+Sevillane/ must have dreamed many dreams!
+
+"I can speak of such things without the hypocritical gloss lent them
+by young men, for I am old before my time. I have no illusions left.
+Can a man have any illusions in the trade I follow?"
+
+By opening the game in this tone, Lousteau cut out all excursions in
+the /Pays de Tendre/, where genuine passion beats the bush so long; he
+went straight to the point and placed himself in a position to force
+the offer of what women often make a man pray for, for years; witness
+the hapless Public Prosecutor, to whom the greatest favor had
+consisted in clasping Dinah's hand to his heart more tenderly than
+usual as they walked, happy man!
+
+And Madame de la Baudraye, to be true to her reputation as a Superior
+Woman, tried to console the Manfred of the Press by prophesying such a
+future of love as he had not had in his mind.
+
+"You have sought pleasure," said she, "but you have never loved.
+Believe me, true love often comes late in life. Remember Monsieur de
+Gentz, who fell in love in his old age with Fanny Ellsler, and left
+the Revolution of July to take its course while he attended the
+dancer's rehearsals."
+
+"It seems to me unlikely," replied Lousteau. "I can still believe in
+love, but I have ceased to believe in woman. There are in me, I
+suppose, certain defects which hinder me from being loved, for I have
+often been thrown over. Perhaps I have too strong a feeling for the
+ideal--like all men who have looked too closely into reality----"
+
+Madame de la Baudraye at last heard the mind of a man who, flung into
+the wittiest Parisian circles, represented to her its most daring
+axioms, its almost artless depravity, its advanced convictions; who,
+if he were not really superior, acted superiority extremely well.
+Etienne, performing before Dinah, had all the success of a first
+night. /Paquita/ of Sancerre scented the storms, the atmosphere of
+Paris. She spent one of the most delightful days of her life with
+Lousteau and Bianchon, who told her strange tales about the great men
+of the day, the anecdotes which will some day form the /Ana/ of our
+century; sayings and doings that were the common talk of Paris, but
+quite new to her.
+
+Of course, Lousteau spoke very ill of the great female celebrity of Le
+Berry, with the obvious intention of flattering Madame de la Baudraye
+and leading her into literary confidences, by suggesting that she
+could rival so great a writer. This praise intoxicated Madame de la
+Baudraye; and Monsieur de Clagny, Monsieur Gravier, and Gatien, all
+thought her warmer in her manner to Etienne than she had been on the
+previous day. Dinah's three /attaches/ greatly regretted having all
+gone to Sancerre to blow the trumpet in honor of the evening at Anzy;
+nothing, to hear them, had ever been so brilliant. The Hours had fled
+on feet so light that none had marked their pace. The two Parisians
+they spoke of as perfect prodigies.
+
+These exaggerated reports loudly proclaimed on the Mall brought
+sixteen persons to Anzy that evening, some in family coaches, some in
+wagonettes, and a few bachelors on hired saddle horses. By about seven
+o'clock this provincial company had made a more or less graceful entry
+into the huge Anzy drawing-room, which Dinah, warned of the invasion,
+had lighted up, giving it all the lustre it was capable of by taking
+the holland covers off the handsome furniture, for she regarded this
+assembly as one of her great triumphs. Lousteau, Bianchon, and Dinah
+exchanged meaning looks as they studied the attitudes and listened to
+the speeches of these visitors, attracted by curiosity.
+
+What invalided ribbons, what ancestral laces, what ancient flowers,
+more imaginative than imitative, were boldly displayed on some
+perennial caps! The Presidente Boirouge, Bianchon's cousin, exchanged
+a few words with the doctor, from whom she extracted some "advice
+gratis" by expatiating on certain pains in the chest, which she
+declared were nervous, but which he ascribed to chronic indigestion.
+
+"Simply drink a cup of tea every day an hour after dinner, as the
+English do, and you will get over it, for what you suffer from is an
+English malady," Bianchon replied very gravely.
+
+"He is certainly a great physician," said the Presidente, coming back
+to Madame de Clagny, Madame Popinot-Chandier, and Madame Gorju, the
+Mayor's wife.
+
+"They say," replied Madame de Clagny behind her fan, "that Dinah sent
+for him, not so much with a view to the elections as to ascertain why
+she has no children."
+
+In the first excitement of this success, Lousteau introduced the great
+doctor as the only possible candidate at the ensuing elections. But
+Bianchon, to the great satisfaction of the new Sous-prefet, remarked
+that it seemed to him almost impossible to give up science in favor of
+politics.
+
+"Only a physician without a practice," said he, "could care to be
+returned as a deputy. Nominate statesmen, thinkers, men whose
+knowledge is universal, and who are capable of placing themselves on
+the high level which a legislator should occupy. That is what is
+lacking in our Chambers, and what our country needs."
+
+Two or three young ladies, some of the younger men, and the elder
+women stared at Lousteau as if he were a mountebank.
+
+"Monsieur Gatien Boirouge declares that Monsieur Lousteau makes twenty
+thousand francs a year by his writings," observed the Mayor's wife to
+Madame de Clagny. "Can you believe it?"
+
+"Is it possible? Why, a Public Prosecutor gets but a thousand crowns!"
+
+"Monsieur Gatien," said Madame Chandier, "get Monsieur Lousteau to
+talk a little louder. I have not heard him yet."
+
+"What pretty boots he wears," said Mademoiselle Chandier to her
+brother, "and how they shine!"
+
+"Yes--patent leather."
+
+"Why haven't you the same?"
+
+Lousteau began to feel that he was too much on show, and saw in the
+manners of the good townsfolk indications of the desires that had
+brought them there.
+
+"What trick can I play them?" thought he.
+
+At this moment the footman, so called--a farm-servant put into livery
+--brought in the letters and papers, and among them a packet of proof,
+which the journalist left for Bianchon; for Madame de la Baudraye, on
+seeing the parcel, of which the form and string were obviously from
+the printers, exclaimed:
+
+"What, does literature pursue you even here?"
+
+"Not literature," replied he, "but a review in which I am now
+finishing a story to come out ten days hence. I have reached the stage
+of '/To be concluded in our next/,' so I was obliged to give my
+address to the printer. Oh, we eat very hard-earned bread at the hands
+of these speculators in black and white! I will give you a description
+of these editors of magazines."
+
+"When will the conversation begin?" Madame de Clagny asked of Dinah,
+as one might ask, "When do the fireworks go off?"
+
+"I fancied we should hear some amusing stories," said Madame Popinot
+to her cousin, the Presidente Boirouge.
+
+At this moment, when the good folks of Sancerre were beginning to
+murmur like an impatient pit, Lousteau observed that Bianchon was lost
+in meditation inspired by the wrapper round the proofs.
+
+"What is it?" asked Etienne.
+
+"Why, here is the most fascinating romance possible on some spoiled
+proof used to wrap yours in. Here, read it. /Olympia, or Roman
+Revenge/."
+
+"Let us see," said Lousteau, taking the sheet the doctor held out to
+him, and he read aloud as follows:--
+
+  240          OLYMPIA
+
+  cavern. Rinaldo, indignant at his
+  companions' cowardice, for they had
+  no courage but in the open field, and
+  dared not venture into Rome, looked
+  at them with scorn.
+
+  "Then I go alone?" said he. He
+  seemed to reflect, and then he went
+  on: "You are poor wretches. I shall
+  proceed alone, and have the rich
+  booty to myself.--You hear me!
+  Farewell."
+
+  "My Captain," said Lamberti, "if
+  you should be captured without
+  having succeeded?"
+
+  "God protects me!" said Rinaldo,
+  pointing to the sky.
+
+  With these words he went out,
+  and on his way he met the steward
+
+"That is the end of the page," said Lousteau, to whom every one had
+listened devoutly.
+
+"He is reading his work to us," said Gatien to Madame Popinot-
+Chandier's son.
+
+"From the first word, ladies," said the journalist, jumping at an
+opportunity of mystifying the natives, "it is evident that the
+brigands are in a cave. But how careless romancers of that date were
+as to details which are nowadays so closely, so elaborately studied
+under the name of 'local color.' If the robbers were in a cavern,
+instead of pointing to the sky he ought to have pointed to the vault
+above him.--In spite of this inaccuracy, Rinaldo strikes me as a man
+of spirit, and his appeal to God is quite Italian. There must have
+been a touch of local color in this romance. Why, what with brigands,
+and a cavern, and one Lamberti who could foresee future possibilities
+--there is a whole melodrama in that page. Add to these elements a
+little intrigue, a peasant maiden with her hair dressed high, short
+skirts, and a hundred or so of bad couplets.--Oh! the public will
+crowd to see it! And then Rinaldo--how well the name suits Lafont! By
+giving him black whiskers, tightly-fitting trousers, a cloak, a
+moustache, a pistol, and a peaked hat--if the manager of the
+Vaudeville Theatre were but bold enough to pay for a few newspaper
+articles, that would secure fifty performances, and six thousand
+francs for the author's rights, if only I were to cry it up in my
+columns.
+
+"To proceed:--
+
+         OR ROMAN REVENGE    219
+
+  The Duchess of Bracciano found
+  her glove. Adolphe, who had brought
+  her back to the orange grove, might
+  certainly have supposed that there
+  was some purpose in her forgetful-
+  ness, for at this moment the arbor
+  was deserted. The sound of the fes-
+  tivities was audible in the distance.
+  The puppet show that had been
+  promised had attracted all the
+  guests to the ballroom. Never had
+  Olympia looked more beautiful.
+  Her lover's eyes met hers with an
+  answering glow, and they under-
+  stood each other. There was a mo-
+  ment of silence, delicious to their
+  souls, and impossible to describe.
+  They sat down on the same bench
+  where they had sat in the presence
+  of the Cavaliere Paluzzi and the
+
+"Devil take it! Our Rinaldo has vanished!" cried Lousteau. "But a
+literary man once started by this page would make rapid progress in
+the comprehension of the plot. The Duchesse Olympia is a lady who
+could intentionally forget her gloves in a deserted arbor."
+
+"Unless she may be classed between the oyster and head-clerk of an
+office, the two creatures nearest to marble in the zoological kingdom,
+it is impossible to discern in Olympia--" Bianchon began.
+
+"A woman of thirty," Madame de la Baudraye hastily interposed, fearing
+some all too medical term.
+
+"Then Adolphe must be two-and-twenty," the doctor went on, "for an
+Italian woman at thirty is equivalent to a Parisian of forty."
+
+"From these two facts, the romance may easily be reconstructed," said
+Lousteau. "And this Cavaliere Paluzzi--what a man!--The style is weak
+in these two passages; the author was perhaps a clerk in the Excise
+Office, and wrote the novel to pay his tailor!"
+
+"In his time," said Bianchon, "the censor flourished; you must show as
+much indulgence to a man who underwent the ordeal by scissors in 1805
+as to those who went to the scaffold in 1793."
+
+"Do you understand in the least?" asked Madame Gorju timidly of Madame
+de Clagny.
+
+The Public Prosecutor's wife, who, to use a phrase of Monsieur
+Gravier's, might have put a Cossack to flight in 1814, straightened
+herself in her chair like a horseman in his stirrups, and made a face
+at her neighbor, conveying, "They are looking at us; we must smile as
+if we understood."
+
+"Charming!" said the Mayoress to Gatien. "Pray go on, Monsieur
+Lousteau."
+
+Lousteau looked at the two women, two Indian idols, and contrived to
+keep his countenance. He thought it desirable to say, "Attention!"
+before going on as follows:--
+
+          OR ROMAN REVENGE      209
+
+  dress rustled in the silence. Sud-
+  denly Cardinal Borborigano stood
+  before the Duchess.
+
+  "His face was gloomy, his brow
+  was dark with clouds, and a bitter
+  smile lurked in his wrinkles.
+
+  "Madame," said he, "you are under
+  suspicion. If you are guilty, fly. If
+  you are not, still fly; because,
+  whether criminal or innocent, you
+  will find it easier to defend yourself
+  from a distance."
+
+  "I thank your Eminence for your
+  solicitude," said she. "The Duke of
+  Bracciano will reappear when I find
+  it needful to prove that he is alive."
+
+"Cardinal Borborigano!" exclaimed Bianchon. "By the Pope's keys! If
+you do not agree with me that there is a magnificent creation in the
+very name, if at those words /dress rustled in the silence/ you do not
+feel all the poetry thrown into the part of Schedoni by Mrs. Radcliffe
+in /The Black Penitent/, you do not deserve to read a romance."
+
+"For my part," said Dinah, who had some pity on the eighteen faces
+gazing up at Lousteau, "I see how the story is progressing. I know it
+all. I am in Rome; I can see the body of a murdered husband whose
+wife, as bold as she is wicked, has made her bed on the crater of a
+volcano. Every night, at every kiss, she says to herself, 'All will be
+discovered!'"
+
+"Can you see her," said Lousteau, "clasping Monsieur Adolphe in her
+arms, to her heart, throwing her whole life into a kiss?--Adolphe I
+see as a well-made young man, but not clever--the sort of man an
+Italian woman likes. Rinaldo hovers behind the scenes of a plot we do
+not know, but which must be as full of incident as a melodrama by
+Pixerecourt. Or we can imagine Rinaldo crossing the stage in the
+background like a figure in one of Victor Hugo's plays."
+
+"He, perhaps, is the husband," exclaimed Madame de la Baudraye.
+
+"Do you understand anything of it all?" Madame Piedefer asked of the
+Presidente.
+
+"Why, it is charming!" said Dinah to her mother.
+
+All the good folks of Sancerre sat with eyes as large as five-franc
+pieces.
+
+"Go on, I beg," said the hostess.
+
+Lousteau went on:--
+
+  210           OLYMPIA
+
+  "Your key----"
+
+  "Have you lost it?"
+
+  "It is in the arbor."
+
+  "Let us hasten."
+
+  "Can the Cardinal have taken it?"
+
+  "No, here it is."
+
+  "What danger we have escaped!"
+
+  Olympia looked at the key, and
+  fancied she recognized it as her own.
+  But Rinaldo had changed it; his
+  cunning had triumphed; he had the
+  right key. Like a modern Cartouche,
+  he was no less skilful than bold,
+  and suspecting that nothing but a
+  vast treasure could require a duchess
+  to carry it constantly at her belt.
+
+"Guess!" cried Lousteau. "The corresponding page is not here. We must
+look to page 212 to relieve our anxiety."
+
+  212        OLYMPIA
+
+  "If the key had been lost?"
+
+  "He would now be a dead man."
+
+  "Dead? But ought you not to
+  grant the last request he made, and
+  to give him his liberty on the con-
+  ditions----"
+
+  "You do not know him."
+
+  "But--"
+
+  "Silence! I took you for my
+  lover, not for my confessor."
+
+  Adolphe was silent.
+
+"And then comes an exquisite galloping goat, a tail-piece drawn by
+Normand, and cut by Duplat.--the names are signed," said Lousteau.
+
+"Well, and then?" said such of the audience as understood.
+
+"That is the end of the chapter," said Lousteau. "The fact of this
+tailpiece changes my views as to the authorship. To have his book got
+up, under the Empire, with vignettes engraved on wood, the writer must
+have been a Councillor of State, or Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, or the
+late lamented Desforges, or Sewrin."
+
+"'Adolphe was silent.'--Ah!" cried Bianchon, "the Duchess must have
+been under thirty."
+
+"If there is no more, invent a conclusion," said Madame de la
+Baudraye.
+
+"You see," said Lousteau, "the waste sheet has been printed fair on
+one side only. In printer's lingo, it is a back sheet, or, to make it
+clearer, the other side which would have to be printed is covered all
+over with pages printed one above another, all experiments in making
+up. It would take too long to explain to you all the complications of
+a making-up sheet; but you may understand that it will show no more
+trace of the first twelve pages that were printed on it than you would
+in the least remember the first stroke of the bastinado if a Pasha
+condemned you to have fifty on the soles of your feet."
+
+"I am quite bewildered," said Madame Popinot-Chandier to Monsieur
+Gravier. "I am vainly trying to connect the Councillor of State, the
+Cardinal, the key, and the making-up----"
+
+"You have not the key to the jest," said Monsieur Gravier. "Well! no
+more have I, fair lady, if that can comfort you."
+
+"But here is another sheet," said Bianchon, hunting on the table where
+the proofs had been laid.
+
+"Capital!" said Lousteau, "and it is complete and uninjured. It is
+signed IV.; J, Second Edition. Ladies, the figure IV. means that this
+is part of the fourth volume. The letter J, the tenth letter of the
+alphabet, shows that this is the tenth sheet. And it is perfectly
+clear to me, that in spite of any publisher's tricks, this romance in
+four duodecimo volumes, had a great success, since it came to a second
+edition.--We will read on and find a clue to the mystery.
+
+          OR ROMAN REVENGE     21
+
+  corridor; but finding that he was
+  pursued by the Duchess' people
+
+"Oh, get along!"
+
+"But," said Madame de la Baudraye, "some important events have taken
+place between your waste sheet and this page."
+
+"This complete sheet, madame, this precious made-up sheet. But does
+the waste sheet in which the Duchess forgets her gloves in the arbor
+belong to the fourth volume? Well, deuce take it--to proceed.
+
+  Rinaldo saw no safer refuge than to
+  make forthwith for the cellar where
+  the treasures of the Bracciano fam-
+  ily no doubt lay hid. As light of
+  foot as Camilla sung by the Latin
+  poet, he flew to the entrance to the
+  Baths of Vespasian. The torchlight
+  already flickered on the walls when
+  Rinaldo, with the readiness be-
+  stowed on him by nature, discovered
+  the door concealed in the stone-
+  work, and suddenly vanished. A
+  hideous thought then flashed on
+  Rinaldo's brain like lightning rend-
+  ing a cloud: He was imprisoned!
+  He felt the wall with uneasy haste
+
+"Yes, this made-up sheet follows the waste sheet. The last page of the
+damaged sheet was 212, and this is 217. In fact, since Rinaldo, who in
+the earlier fragment stole the key of the Duchess' treasure by
+exchanging it for another very much like it, is now--on the made-up
+sheet--in the palace of the Dukes of Bracciano, the story seems to me
+to be advancing to a conclusion of some kind. I hope it is as clear to
+you as it is to me.--I understand that the festivities are over, the
+lovers have returned to the Bracciano Palace; it is night--one o'clock
+in the morning. Rinaldo will have a good time."
+
+"And Adolphe too!" said President Boirouge, who was considered rather
+free in his speech.
+
+"And the style!" said  Bianchon.--"Rinaldo, who saw /no better refuge
+than to make for the cellar/."
+
+"It is quite clear that neither Maradan, nor Treuttel and Wurtz, nor
+Doguereau, were the printers," said Lousteau, "for they employed
+correctors who revised the proofs, a luxury in which our publishers
+might very well indulge, and the writers of the present day, would
+benefit greatly. Some scrubby pamphlet printer on the Quay--"
+
+"What quay?" a lady asked of her neighbor. "They spoke of baths--"
+
+"Pray go on," said Madame de la Baudraye.
+
+"At any rate, it is not by a councillor," said Bianchon.
+
+"It may be by Madame Hadot," replied Lousteau.
+
+"What has Madame Hadot of La Charite to do with it?" the Presidente
+asked of her son.
+
+"This Madame Hadot, my dear friend," the hostess answered, "was an
+authoress, who lived at the time of the Consulate."
+
+"What, did women write in the Emperor's time?" asked Madame Popinot-
+Chandier.
+
+"What of Madame de Genlis and Madame de Stael?" cried the Public
+Prosecutor, piqued on Dinah's account by this remark.
+
+"To be sure!"
+
+"I beg you to go on," said Madame de la Baudraye to Lousteau.
+
+Lousteau went on saying: "Page 218.
+
+  218          OLYMPIA
+
+  and gave a shriek of despair when
+  he had vainly sought any trace of a
+  secret spring. It was impossible to
+  ignore the horrible truth. The door,
+  cleverly constructed to serve the
+  vengeful purposes of the Duchess,
+  could not be opened from within.
+  Rinaldo laid his cheek against the
+  wall in various spots; nowhere
+  could he feel the warmer air from
+  the passage. He had hoped he
+  might find a crack that would show
+  him where there was an opening in
+  the wall, but nothing, nothing! The
+  whole seemed to be of one block of
+  marble.
+
+  Then he gave a hollow roar like
+  that of a hyaena----
+
+"Well, we fancied that the cry of the hyaena was a recent invention of
+our own!" said Lousteau, "and here it was already known to the
+literature of the Empire. It is even introduced with a certain skill
+in natural history, as we see in the word /hollow/."
+
+"Make no more comments, monsieur," said Madame de la Baudraye.
+
+"There, you see!" cried Bianchon. "Interest, the romantic demon, has
+you by the collar, as he had me a while ago."
+
+"Read on," cried de Clagny, "I understand."
+
+"What a coxcomb!" said the Presiding Judge in a whisper to his
+neighbor the Sous-prefet.
+
+"He wants to please Madame de la Baudraye," replied the new Sous-
+prefet.
+
+"Well, then I will read straight on," said Lousteau solemnly.
+
+Everybody listened in dead silence.
+
+         OR ROMAN REVENGE     219
+
+  A deep groan answered Rinaldo's
+  cry, but in his alarm he took it for
+  an echo, so weak and hollow was
+  the sound. It could not proceed
+  from any human breast.
+
+  "Santa Maria!" said the voice.
+
+  "If I stir from this spot I shall
+  never find it again," thought Ri-
+  naldo, when he had recovered his
+  usual presence of mind. "If I knock,
+  I shall be discovered. What am I
+  to do?"
+
+  "Who is here?" asked the voice.
+
+  "Hallo!" cried the brigand; "do
+  the toads here talk?"
+
+  "I am the Duke of Bracciano.
+  Whoever you may be, if you are not
+  a follower of the Duchess', in the
+  name of all the saints, come towards
+  me."
+
+  220         OLYMPIA
+
+  "I should have to know where to
+  find you, Monsieur le Duc," said Ri-
+  naldo, with the insolence of a man
+  who knows himself to be necessary.
+
+  "I can see you, my friend, for my
+  eyes are accustomed to the darkness.
+  Listen: walk straight forward--
+  good; now turn to the left--come
+  on--this way. There, we are close
+  to each other."
+
+  Rinaldo putting out his hands as
+  a precaution, touched some iron
+  bars.
+
+  "I am being deceived," cried the
+  bandit.
+
+  "No, you are touching my cage.
+
+         OR ROMAN REVENGE       221
+
+  Sit down on a broken shaft of por-
+  phyry that is there."
+
+  "How can the Duke of Bracciano
+  be in a cage?" asked the brigand.
+
+  "My friend, I have been here for
+  thirty months, standing up, unable
+  to sit down----But you, who are
+  you?"
+
+  "I am Rinaldo, prince of the Cam-
+  pagna, the chief of four-and-twenty
+  brave men whom the law describes
+  as miscreants, whom all the ladies
+  admire, and whom judges hang in
+  obedience to an old habit."
+
+  "God be praised! I am saved.
+  An honest man would have been
+  afraid, whereas I am sure of coming
+  to an understanding with you,"
+  cried the Duke. "Oh, my worthy
+
+  222           OLYMPIA
+
+  deliverer, you must be armed to the
+  teeth."
+
+  "/E verissimo/" (most true).
+
+  "Do you happen to have--"
+
+  "Yes, files, pincers--/Corpo di
+  Bacco/! I came to borrow the treas-
+  ures of the Bracciani on a long
+  loan."
+
+  "You will earn a handsome share
+  of them very legitimately, my good
+  Rinaldo, and we may possibly go
+  man hunting together--"
+
+  "You surprise me, Eccellenza!"
+
+  "Listen to me, Rinaldo. I will
+  say nothing of the craving for
+  vengeance that gnaws at my heart.
+  I have been here for thirty months
+  --you too are Italian--you will un-
+
+         OR ROMAN REVENGE       223
+
+  derstand me! Alas, my friend, my
+  fatigue and my horrible incarcera-
+  tion are nothing in comparison
+  with the rage that devours my soul.
+  The Duchess of Bracciano is still
+  one of the most beautiful women in
+  Rome. I loved her well enough to
+  be jealous--"
+
+  "You, her husband!"
+
+  "Yes, I was wrong, no doubt."
+
+  "It is not the correct thing, to be
+  sure," said Rinaldo.
+
+  "My jealousy was roused by the
+  Duchess' conduct," the Duke went
+  on. "The event proved me right. A
+  young Frenchman fell in love with
+  Olympia, and she loved him. I had
+  proofs of their reciprocal affection
+
+"Pray excuse me, ladies," said Lousteau, "but I find it impossible to
+go on without remarking to you how direct this Empire literature is,
+going to the point without any details, a characteristic, as it seems
+to me, of a primitive time. The literature of that period holds a
+place between the summaries of chapters in /Telemaque/ and the
+categorical reports of a public office. It had ideas, but refrained
+from expressing them, it was so scornful! It was observant, but would
+not communicate its observations to any one, it was so miserly! Nobody
+but Fouche ever mentioned what he had observed. 'At that time,' to
+quote the words of one of the most imbecile critics in the /Revue des
+Deux Mondes/, 'literature was content with a clear sketch and the
+simple outline of all antique statues. It did not dance over its
+periods.'--I should think not! It had no periods to dance over. It had
+no words to play with. You were plainly told that Lubin loved
+Toinette; that Toinette did not love Lubin; that Lubin killed Toinette
+and the police caught Lubin, who was put in prison, tried at the
+assizes, and guillotined.--A strong sketch, a clear outline! What a
+noble drama! Well, in these days the barbarians make words sparkle."
+
+"Like a hair in a frost," said Monsieur de Clagny.
+
+"So those are the airs you affect?"[*] retorted Lousteau.
+
+[*] The rendering given above is only intended to link the various
+    speeches into coherence; it has no resemblance with the French. In
+    the original, "Font chatoyer les /mots/."
+
+    "Et quelquefois les /morts/," dit Monsieur de Clagny.
+
+    "Ah! Lousteau! vous vous donnez de ces R-la (airs-la)."
+
+    Literally: "And sometimes the dead."--"Ah, are those the airs you
+    assume?"--the play on the insertion of the letter R (/mots,
+    morts/) has no meaning in English.
+
+"What can he mean?" asked Madame de Clagny, puzzled by this vile pun.
+
+"I seem to be walking in the dark," replied the Mayoress.
+
+"The jest would be lost in an explanation," remarked Gatien.
+
+"Nowadays," Lousteau went on, "a novelist draws characters, and
+instead of a 'simple outline,' he unveils the human heart and gives
+you some interest either in Lubin or in Toinette."
+
+"For my part, I am alarmed at the progress of public knowledge in the
+matter of literature," said Bianchon. "Like the Russians, beaten by
+Charles XII., who at least learned the art of war, the reader has
+learned the art of writing. Formerly all that was expected of a
+romance was that it should be interesting. As to style, no one cared
+for that, not even the author; as to ideas--zero; as to local color--
+/non est/. By degrees the reader has demanded style, interest, pathos,
+and complete information; he insists on the five literary senses--
+Invention, Style, Thought, Learning, and Feeling. Then some criticism
+commenting on everything. The critic, incapable of inventing anything
+but calumny, pronounces every work that proceeds from a not perfect
+brain to be deformed. Some magicians, as Walter Scott, for instance,
+having appeared in the world, who combined all the five literary
+senses, such writers as had but one--wit or learning, style or feeling
+--these cripples, these acephalous, maimed or purblind creatures--in a
+literary sense--have taken to shrieking that all is lost, and have
+preached a crusade against men who were spoiling the business, or have
+denounced their works."
+
+"The history of your last literary quarrel!" Dinah observed.
+
+"For pity's sake, come back to the Duke of Bracciano," cried Monsieur
+de Clagny.
+
+To the despair of all the company, Lousteau went on with the made-up
+sheet.
+
+  224           OLYMPIA
+
+  I then wished to make sure of my
+  misfortune that I might be avenged
+  under the protection of Providence
+  and the Law. The Duchess guessed
+  my intentions. We were at war in
+  our purposes before we fought with
+  poison in our hands. We tried to
+  tempt each other to such confidence
+  as we could not feel, I to induce her
+  to drink a potion, she to get posses-
+  sion of me. She was a woman, and
+  she won the day; for women have a
+  snare more than we men. I fell into
+  it--I was happy; but I awoke next
+  day in this iron cage. All through
+  the day I bellowed with rage in the
+
+          OR ROMAN REVENGE         225
+
+  darkness of this cellar, over which
+  is the Duchess' bedroom. At night
+  an ingenious counterpoise acting as
+  a lift raised me through the floor,
+  and I saw the Duchess in her lover's
+  arms. She threw me a piece of
+  bread, my daily pittance.
+
+  "Thus have I lived for thirty
+  months! From this marble prison
+  my cries can reach no ear. There is
+  no chance for me. I will hope no
+  more. Indeed, the Duchess' room is
+  at the furthest end of the palace,
+  and when I am carried up there
+  none can hear my voice. Each time
+  I see my wife she shows me the
+
+  226          OLYMPIA
+
+  poison I had prepared for her and
+  her lover. I crave it for myself, but
+  she will not let me die; she gives
+  me bread, and I eat it.
+
+  "I have done well to eat and live;
+  I had not reckoned on robbers!"
+
+  "Yes, Eccellenza, when those fools
+  the honest men are asleep, we are
+  wide awake."
+
+  "Oh, Rinaldo, all I possess shall
+  be yours; we will share my treasure
+  like brothers; I would give you
+  everything--even to my Duchy----"
+
+  "Eccellenza, procure from the
+  Pope an absolution /in articulo mor-
+  tis/. It would be of more use to me
+  in my walk of life."
+
+          OR ROMAN REVENGE        227
+
+  "What you will. Only file
+  through the bars of my cage and
+  lend me your dagger. We have but
+  little time, quick, quick! Oh, if my
+  teeth were but files!--I have tried
+  to eat through this iron."
+
+  "Eccellenza," said Rinaldo, "I
+  have already filed through one bar."
+
+  "You are a god!"
+
+  "Your wife was at the fete given
+  by the Princess Villaviciosa. She
+  brought home her little Frenchman;
+  she is drunk with love.--You have
+  plenty of time."
+
+  "Have you done?"
+
+  "Yes."
+
+  228            OLYMPIA
+
+  "Your dagger?" said the Duke
+  eagerly to the brigand.
+
+  "Here it is."
+
+  "Good. I hear the clatter of the
+  spring."
+
+  "Do not forget me!" cried the
+  robber, who knew what gratitude
+  was.
+
+  "No more than my father," cried
+  the Duke.
+
+  "Good-bye!" said Rinaldo. "Lord!
+  How he flies up!" he added to him-
+  self as the Duke disappeared.--"No
+  more than his father! If that is
+  all he means to do for me.--And I
+
+         OR ROMAN REVENGE        229
+
+  had sworn a vow never to injure a
+  woman!"
+
+  But let us leave the robber for a
+  moment to his meditations and go
+  up, like the Duke, to the rooms in
+  the palace.
+
+"Another tailpiece, a Cupid on a snail! And page 230 is blank," said
+the journalist. "Then there are two more blank pages before we come to
+the word it is such a joy to write when one is unhappily so happy as
+to be a novelist--/Conclusion/!
+
+              CONCLUSION
+
+  Never had the Duchess been more
+  lovely; she came from her bath
+  clothed like a goddess, and on seeing
+
+  234            OLYMPIA
+
+  Adolphe voluptuously reclining on
+  piles of cushions--
+
+  "You are beautiful," said she.
+
+  "And so are you, Olympia!"
+
+  "And you still love me?"
+
+  "More and more," said he.
+
+  "Ah, none but a Frenchman
+  knows how to love!" cried the
+  Duchess. "Do you love me well to-
+  night?"
+
+  "Yes."
+
+  "Then come!"
+
+  And with an impulse of love and
+  hate--whether it was that Cardinal
+  Borborigano had reminded her of
+  her husband, or that she felt un-
+  wonted passion to display, she
+  pressed the springs and held out her
+  arms.
+
+"That is all," said Lousteau, "for the foreman has torn off the rest
+in wrapping up my proofs. But it is enough to show that the author was
+full of promise."
+
+"I cannot make head or tail of it," said Gatien Boirouge, who was the
+first to break the silence of the party from Sancerre.
+
+"Nor I," replied Monsieur Gravier.
+
+"And yet it is a novel of the time of the Empire," said Lousteau.
+
+"By the way in which the brigand is made to speak," said Monsieur
+Gravier, "it is evident that the author knew nothing of Italy.
+Banditti do not allow themselves such graceful conceits."
+
+Madame Gorju came up to Bianchon, seeing him pensive, and with a
+glance towards her daughter Mademoiselle Euphemie Gorju, the owner of
+a fairly good fortune--"What a rhodomontade!" said she. "The
+prescriptions you write are worth more than all that rubbish."
+
+The Mayoress had elaborately worked up this speech, which, in her
+opinion, showed strong judgment.
+
+"Well, madame, we must be lenient, we have but twenty pages out of a
+thousand," said Bianchon, looking at Mademoiselle Gorju, whose figure
+threatened terrible things after the birth of her first child.
+
+"Well, Monsieur de Clagny," said Lousteau, "we were talking yesterday
+of the forms of revenge invented by husbands. What do you say to those
+invented by wives?"
+
+"I say," replied the Public Prosecutor, "that the romance is not by a
+Councillor of State, but by a woman. For extravagant inventions the
+imagination of women far outdoes that of men; witness /Frankenstein/
+by Mrs. Shelley, /Leone Leoni/ by George Sand, the works of Anne
+Radcliffe, and the /Nouveau Promethee/ (New Prometheus) of Camille de
+Maupin."
+
+Dinah looked steadily at Monsieur de Clagny, making him feel, by an
+expression that gave him a chill, that in spite of the illustrious
+examples he had quoted, she regarded this as a reflection on /Paquita
+la Sevillane/.
+
+"Pooh!" said little Baudraye, "the Duke of Bracciano, whom his wife
+puts into a cage, and to whom she shows herself every night in the
+arms of her lover, will kill her--and do you call that revenge?--Our
+laws and our society are far more cruel."
+
+"Why, little La Baudraye is talking!" said Monsieur Boirouge to his
+wife.
+
+"Why, the woman is left to live on a small allowance, the world turns
+its back on her, she has no more finery, and no respect paid her--the
+two things which, in my opinion, are the sum-total of woman," said the
+little old man.
+
+"But she has happiness!" said Madame de la Baudraye sententiously.
+
+"No," said the master of the house, lighting his candle to go to bed,
+"for she has a lover."
+
+"For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has
+some spunk," said Lousteau.
+
+"Well, he must have something!" replied Bianchon.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon's
+remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that
+the physician could guess the mystery of this woman's life; her
+premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.
+
+But Dinah did not guess, on her part, the ominous prophecy contained
+for her in her husband's little speech, which her kind old Abbe Duret,
+if he had been alive, would not have failed to elucidate. Little La
+Baudraye had detected in Dinah's eyes, when she glanced at the
+journalist returning the ball of his jests, that swift and luminous
+flash of tenderness which gilds the gleam of a woman's eye when
+prudence is cast to the winds, and she is fairly carried away. Dinah
+paid no more heed to her husband's hint to her to observe the
+proprieties than Lousteau had done to Dinah's significant warnings on
+the day of his arrival.
+
+Any other man than Bianchon would have been surprised at Lousteau's
+immediate success; but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even
+nettled at Dinah's marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the
+prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally
+more alive to wit than to fame. Love generally prefers contrast to
+similitude. Everything was against the physician--his frankness, his
+simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to
+love--and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved--have an
+instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing
+occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter
+of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with
+a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the
+half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen
+insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not
+confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind--"The
+doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him."
+
+Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering
+whether a woman could ever be anything but a /subject/ to a medical
+man, who saw so many subjects in the course of a day's work. The first
+sentence of the aphorism written by Bianchon in her album was a
+medical observation striking so directly at woman, that Dinah could
+not fail to be hit by it. And then Bianchon was leaving on the morrow;
+his practice required his return. What woman, short of having Cupid's
+mythological dart in her heart, could decide in so short a time?
+
+These little things, which lead to such great catastrophes--having
+been seen in a mass by Bianchon, he pronounced the verdict he had come
+to as to Madame de la Baudraye in a few words to Lousteau, to the
+journalist's great amazement.
+
+While the two friends stood talking together, a storm was gathering in
+the Sancerre circle, who could not in the least understand Lousteau's
+paraphrases and commentaries, and who vented it on their hostess. Far
+from finding in his talk the romance which the Public Prosecutor, the
+Sous-prefet, the Presiding Judge, and his deputy, Lebas, had
+discovered there--to say nothing of Monsieur de la Baudraye and Dinah
+--the ladies now gathered round the tea-table, took the matter as a
+practical joke, and accused the Muse of Sancerre of having a finger in
+it. They had all looked forward to a delightful evening, and had all
+strained in vain every faculty of their mind. Nothing makes provincial
+folks so angry as the notion of having been a laughing-stock for Paris
+folks.
+
+Madame Piedefer left the table to say to her daughter, "Do go and talk
+to the ladies; they are quite annoyed by your behavior."
+
+Lousteau could not fail to see Dinah's great superiority over the best
+women of Sancerre; she was better dressed, her movements were
+graceful, her complexion was exquisitely white by candlelight--in
+short, she stood out against this background of old faces, shy and
+ill-dressed girls, like a queen in the midst of her court. Visions of
+Paris faded from his brain; Lousteau was accepting the provincial
+surroundings; and while he had too much imagination to remain
+unimpressed by the royal splendor of this chateau, the beautiful
+carvings, and the antique beauty of the rooms, he had also too much
+experience to overlook the value of the personality which completed
+this gem of the Renaissance. So by the time the visitors from Sancerre
+had taken their leave one by one--for they had an hour's drive before
+them--when no one remained in the drawing-room but Monsieur de Clagny,
+Monsieur Lebas, Gatien, and Monsieur Gravier, who were all to sleep at
+Anzy--the journalist had already changed his mind about Dinah. His
+opinion had gone through the evolution that Madame de la Baudraye had
+so audaciously prophesied at their first meeting.
+
+"Ah, what things they will say about us on the drive home!" cried the
+mistress of the house, as she returned to the drawing-room after
+seeing the President and the Presidente to their carriage with Madame
+and Mademoiselle Popinot-Chandier.
+
+The rest of the evening had its pleasant side. In the intimacy of a
+small party each one brought to the conversation his contribution of
+epigrams on the figure the visitors from Sancerre had cut during
+Lousteau's comments on the paper wrapped round the proofs.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Bianchon to Lousteau as they went to bed--they
+had an enormous room with two beds in it--"you will be the happy man
+of this woman's choice--/nee/ Piedefer!"
+
+"Do you think so?"
+
+"It is quite natural. You are supposed here to have had many
+mistresses in Paris; and to a woman there is something indescribably
+inviting in a man whom other women favor--something attractive and
+fascinating; is it that she prides herself on being longer remembered
+than all the rest? that she appeals to his experience, as a sick man
+will pay more to a famous physician? or that she is flattered by the
+revival of a world-worn heart?"
+
+"Vanity and the senses count for so much in love affairs," said
+Lousteau, "that there may be some truth in all those hypotheses.
+However, if I remain, it will be in consequence of the certificate of
+innocence, without ignorance, that you have given Dinah. She is
+handsome, is she not?"
+
+"Love will make her beautiful," said the doctor. "And, after all, she
+will be a rich widow some day or other! And a child would secure her
+the life-interest in the Master of La Baudraye's fortune--"
+
+"Why, it is quite an act of virtue to make love to her," said
+Lousteau, rolling himself up in the bed-clothes, "and to-morrow, with
+your help--yes, to-morrow, I--well, good-night."
+
+On the following day, Madame de la Baudraye, to whom her husband had
+six months since given a pair of horses, which he also used in the
+fields, and an old carriage that rattled on the road, decided that she
+would take Bianchon so far on his way as Cosne, where he would get
+into the Lyons diligence as it passed through. She also took her
+mother and Lousteau, but she intended to drop her mother at La
+Baudraye, to go on to Cosne with the two Parisians, and return alone
+with Etienne. She was elegantly dressed, as the journalist at once
+perceived--bronze kid boots, gray silk stockings, a muslin dress, a
+green silk scarf with shaded fringe at the ends, and a pretty black
+lace bonnet with flowers in it. As to Lousteau, the wretch had assumed
+his war-paint--patent leather boots, trousers of English kerseymere
+with pleats in front, a very open waistcoat showing a particularly
+fine shirt and the black brocade waterfall of his handsome cravat, and
+a very thin, very short black riding-coat.
+
+Monsieur de Clagny and Monsieur Gravier looked at each other, feeling
+rather silly as they beheld the two Parisians in the carriage, while
+they, like two simpletons, were left standing at the foot of the
+steps. Monsieur de la Baudraye, who stood at the top waving his little
+hand in a little farewell to the doctor, could not forbear from
+smiling as he heard Monsieur de Clagny say to Monsieur Gravier:
+
+"You should have escorted them on horseback."
+
+At this juncture, Gatien, riding Monsieur de la Baudraye's quiet
+little mare, came out of the side road from the stables and joined the
+party in the chaise.
+
+"Ah, good," said the Receiver-General, "the boy has mounted guard."
+
+"What a bore!" cried Dinah as she saw Gatien. "In thirteen years--for
+I have been married nearly thirteen years--I have never had three
+hours' liberty.
+
+"Married, madame?" said the journalist with a smile. "You remind me of
+a saying of Michaud's--he was so witty! He was setting out for the
+Holy Land, and his friends were remonstrating with him, urging his
+age, and the perils of such an expedition. 'And then,' said one, 'you
+are married.'--'Married!' said he, 'so little married.'"
+
+Even the rigid Madame Piedefer could not repress a smile.
+
+"I should not be surprised to see Monsieur de Clagny mounted on my
+pony to complete the escort," said Dinah.
+
+"Well, if the Public Prosecutor does not pursue us, you can get rid of
+this little fellow at Sancerre. Bianchon must, of course, have left
+something behind on his table--the notes for the first lecture of his
+course--and you can ask Gatien to go back to Anzy to fetch it."
+
+This simple little plot put Madame de la Baudraye into high spirits.
+From the road between Anzy to Sancerre, a glorious landscape
+frequently comes into view, of the noble stretches of the Loire,
+looking like a lake, and it was got over very pleasantly, for Dinah
+was happy in finding herself well understood. Love was discussed in
+theory, a subject allowing lovers /in petto/ to take the measure, as
+it were, of each other's heart. The journalist took a tone of refined
+corruption to prove that love obeys no law, that the character of the
+lovers gives infinite variety to its incidents, that the circumstances
+of social life add to the multiplicity of its manifestations, that in
+love all is possible and true, and that any given woman, after
+resisting every temptation and the seductions of the most passionate
+lover, may be carried off her feet in the course of a few hours by a
+fancy, an internal whirlwind of which God alone would ever know the
+secret!
+
+"Why," said he, "is not that the key to all the adventures we have
+talked over these three days past?"
+
+For these three days, indeed, Dinah's lively imagination had been full
+of the most insidious romances, and the conversation of the two
+Parisians had affected the woman as the most mischievous reading might
+have done. Lousteau watched the effects of this clever manoeuvre, to
+seize the moment when his prey, whose readiness to be caught was
+hidden under the abstraction caused by irresolution, should be quite
+dizzy.
+
+Dinah wished to show La Baudraye to her two visitors, and the farce
+was duly played out of remembering the papers left by Bianchon in his
+room at Anzy. Gatien flew off at a gallop to obey his sovereign;
+Madame Piedefer went to do some shopping in Sancerre; and Dinah went
+on to Cosne alone with the two friends. Lousteau took his seat by the
+lady, Bianchon riding backwards. The two friends talked affectionately
+and with deep compassion for the fate of this choice nature so ill
+understood and in the midst of such vulgar surroundings. Bianchon
+served Lousteau well by making fun of the Public Prosecutor, of
+Monsieur Gravier, and of Gatien; there was a tone of such genuine
+contempt in his remarks, that Madame de la Baudraye dared not take the
+part of her adorers.
+
+"I perfectly understand the position you have maintained," said the
+doctor as they crossed the Loire. "You were inaccessible excepting to
+that brain-love which often leads to heart-love; and not one of those
+men, it is very certain, is capable of disguising what, at an early
+stage of life, is disgusting to the senses in the eyes of a refined
+woman. To you, now, love is indispensable."
+
+"Indispensable!" cried Dinah, looking curiously at the doctor. "Do you
+mean that you prescribe love to me?"
+
+"If you go on living as you live now, in three years you will be
+hideous," replied Bianchon in a dictatorial tone.
+
+"Monsieur!" said Madame de la Baudraye, almost frightened.
+
+"Forgive my friend," said Lousteau, half jestingly. "He is always the
+medical man, and to him love is merely a question of hygiene. But he
+is quite disinterested--it is for your sake only that he speaks--as is
+evident, since he is starting in an hour--"
+
+At Cosne a little crowd gathered round the old repainted chaise, with
+the arms on the panels granted by Louis XIV. to the new La Baudraye.
+Gules, a pair of scales or; on a chief azure (color on color) three
+cross-crosslets argent. For supporters two greyhounds argent, collared
+azure, chained or. The ironical motto, /Deo sic patet fides et
+hominibus/, had been inflicted on the converted Calvinist by Hozier
+the satirical.
+
+"Let us get out; they will come and find us," said the Baroness,
+desiring her coachman to keep watch.
+
+Dinah took Bianchon's arm, and the doctor set off by the banks of the
+Loire at so rapid a pace that the journalist had to linger behind. The
+physician had explained by a single wink that he meant to do Lousteau
+a good turn.
+
+"You have been attracted by Etienne," said Bianchon to Dinah; "he has
+appealed strongly to your imagination; last night we were talking
+about you.--He loves you. But he is frivolous, and difficult to hold;
+his poverty compels him to live in Paris, while everything condemns
+you to live at Sancerre.--Take a lofty view of life. Make Lousteau
+your friend; do not ask too much of him; he will come three times a
+year to spend a few days with you, and you will owe to him your
+beauty, happiness, and fortune. Monsieur de la Baudraye may live to be
+a hundred; but he might die in a few days if he should leave off the
+flannel winding-sheet in which he swathes himself. So run no risks, be
+prudent both of you.--Say not a work--I have read your heart."
+
+Madame de la Baudraye was defenceless under this serried attack, and
+in the presence of a man who spoke at once as a doctor, a confessor,
+and confidential friend.
+
+"Indeed!" said she. "Can you suppose that any woman would care to
+compete with a journalist's mistresses?--Monsieur Lousteau strikes me
+as agreeable and witty; but he is /blase/, etc., etc.----"
+
+Dinah had turned back, and was obliged to check the flow of words by
+which she tried to disguise her intentions; for Etienne, who seemed to
+be studying progress in Cosne, was coming to meet them.
+
+"Believe me," said Bianchon, "what he wants is to be truly loved; and
+if he alters his course of life, it will be to the benefit of his
+talent."
+
+Dinah's coachman hurried up breathlessly to say that the diligence had
+come in, and they walked on quickly, Madame de la Baudraye between the
+two men.
+
+"Good-bye, my children!" said Bianchon, before they got into the town,
+"you have my blessing!"
+
+He released Madame de la Baudraye's hand from his arm, and allowed
+Lousteau to draw it into his, with a tender look, as he pressed it to
+his heart. What a difference to Dinah! Etienne's arm thrilled her
+deeply. Bianchon's had not stirred her in the least. She and the
+journalist exchanged one of those glowing looks that are more than an
+avowal.
+
+"Only provincial women wear muslin gowns in these days," thought
+Lousteau to himself, "the only stuff which shows every crease. This
+woman, who has chosen me for her lover, will make a fuss over her
+frock! If she had but put on a foulard skirt, I should be happy.--What
+is the meaning of these difficulties----"
+
+While Lousteau was wondering whether Dinah had put on a muslin gown on
+purpose to protect herself by an insuperable obstacle, Bianchon, with
+the help of the coachman, was seeing his luggage piled on the
+diligence. Finally, he came to take leave of Dinah, who was
+excessively friendly with him.
+
+"Go home, Madame la Baronne, leave me here--Gatien will be coming," he
+added in an undertone. "It is getting late," said he aloud. "Good-
+bye!"
+
+"Good-bye--great man!" cried Lousteau, shaking hands with Bianchon.
+
+When the journalist and Madame de la Baudraye, side by side in the
+rickety old chaise, had recrossed the Loire, they both were unready to
+speak. In these circumstances, the first words that break the silence
+are full of terrible meaning.
+
+"Do you know how much I love you?" said the journalist point blank.
+
+Victory might gratify Lousteau, but defeat could cause him no grief.
+This indifference was the secret of his audacity. He took Madame de la
+Baudraye's hand as he spoke these decisive words, and pressed it in
+both his; but Dinah gently released it.
+
+"Yes, I am as good as an actress or a /grisette/," she said in a voice
+that trembled, though she spoke lightly. "But can you suppose that a
+woman who, in spite of her absurdities, has some intelligence, will
+have reserved the best treasures of her heart for a man who will
+regard her merely as a transient pleasure?--I am not surprised to hear
+from your lips the words which so many men have said to me--but----"
+
+The coachman turned round.
+
+"Here comes Monsieur Gatien," said he.
+
+"I love you, I will have you, you shall be mine, for I have never felt
+for any woman the passion I have for you!" said Lousteau in her ear.
+
+"In spite of my will, perhaps?" said she, with a smile.
+
+"At least you must seem to have been assaulted to save my honor," said
+the Parisian, to whom the fatal immaculateness of clean muslin
+suggested a ridiculous notion.
+
+Before Gatien had reached the end of the bridge, the outrageous
+journalist had crumpled up Madame de la Baudraye's muslin dress to
+such an effect that she was absolutely not presentable.
+
+"Oh, monsieur!" she exclaimed in dignified reproof.
+
+"You defied me," said the Parisian.
+
+But Gatien now rode up with the vehemence of a duped lover. To regain
+a little of Madame de la Baudraye's esteem, Lousteau did his best to
+hide the tumbled dress from Gatien's eyes by leaning out of the chaise
+to speak to him from Dinah's side.
+
+"Go back to our inn," said he, "there is still time; the diligence
+does not start for half an hour. The papers are on the table of the
+room Bianchon was in; he wants them particularly, for he will be lost
+without his notes for the lecture."
+
+"Pray go, Gatien," said Dinah to her young adorer, with an imperious
+glance. And the boy thus commanded turned his horse and was off with a
+loose rein.
+
+"Go quickly to La Baudraye," cried Lousteau to the coachman. "Madame
+is not well--Your mother only will know the secret of my trick," added
+he, taking his seat by Dinah.
+
+"You call such infamous conduct a trick?" cried Madame de la Baudraye,
+swallowing down a few tears that dried up with the fire of outraged
+pride.
+
+She leaned back in the corner of the chaise, crossed her arms, and
+gazed out at the Loire and the landscape, at anything rather than at
+Lousteau. The journalist put on his most ingratiating tone, and talked
+till they reached La Baudraye, where Dinah fled indoors, trying not to
+be seen by any one. In her agitation she threw herself on a sofa and
+burst into tears.
+
+"If I am an object of horror to you, of aversion or scorn, I will go,"
+said Lousteau, who had followed her. And he threw himself at her feet.
+
+It was at this crisis that Madame Piedefer came in, saying to her
+daughter:
+
+"What is the matter? What has happened?"
+
+"Give your daughter another dress at once," said the audacious
+Parisian in the prim old lady's ear.
+
+Hearing the mad gallop of Gatien's horse, Madame de la Baudraye fled
+to her bedroom, followed by her mother.
+
+"There are no papers at the inn," said Gatien to Lousteau, who went
+out to meet him.
+
+"And you found none at the Chateau d'Anzy either?" replied Lousteau.
+
+"You have been making a fool of me," said Gatien, in a cold, set
+voice.
+
+"Quite so," replied Lousteau. "Madame de la Baudraye was greatly
+annoyed by your choosing to follow her without being invited. Believe
+me, to bore a woman is a bad way of courting her. Dinah has played you
+a trick, and you have given her a laugh; it is more than any of you
+has done in these thirteen years past. You owe that success to
+Bianchon, for your cousin was the author of the Farce of the
+'Manuscript.'--Will the horse get over it?" asked Lousteau with a
+laugh, while Gatien was wondering whether to be angry or not.
+
+"The horse!" said Gatien.
+
+At this moment Madame de la Baudraye came in, dressed in a velvet
+gown, and accompanied by her mother, who shot angry flashes at
+Lousteau. It would have been too rash for Dinah to seem cold or severe
+to Lousteau in Gatien's presence; and Etienne, taking advantage of
+this, offered his arm to the supposed Lucretia; however, she declined
+it.
+
+"Do you mean to cast off a man who has vowed to live for you?" said
+he, walking close beside her. "I shall stop at Sancerre and go home
+to-morrow."
+
+"Are you coming, mamma?" said Madame de la Baudraye to Madame
+Piedefer, thus avoiding a reply to the direct challenge by which
+Lousteau was forcing her to a decision.
+
+Lousteau handed the mother into the chaise, he helped Madame de la
+Baudraye by gently taking her arm, and he and Gatien took the front
+seat, leaving the saddle horse at La Baudraye.
+
+"You have changed your gown," said Gatien, blunderingly, to Dinah.
+
+"Madame la Baronne was chilled by the cool air off the river," replied
+Lousteau. "Bianchon advised her to put on a warm dress."
+
+Dinah turned as red as a poppy, and Madame Piedefer assumed a stern
+expression.
+
+"Poor Bianchon! he is on the road to Paris. A noble soul!" said
+Lousteau.
+
+"Oh, yes!" cried Madame de la Baudraye, "he is high-minded, full of
+delicate feeling----"
+
+"We were in such good spirits when we set out," said Lousteau; "now
+you are overdone, and you speak to me so bitterly--why? Are you not
+accustomed to being told how handsome and how clever you are? For my
+part, I say boldly, before Gatien, I give up Paris; I mean to stay at
+Sancerre and swell the number of your /cavalieri serventi/. I feel so
+young again in my native district; I have quite forgotten Paris and
+all its wickedness, and its bores, and its wearisome pleasures.--Yes,
+my life seems in a way purified."
+
+Dinah allowed Lousteau to talk without even looking at him; but at
+last there was a moment when this serpent's rhodomontade was really so
+inspired by the effort he made to affect passion in phrases and ideas
+of which the meaning, though hidden from Gatien, found a loud response
+in Dinah's heart, that she raised her eyes to his. This look seemed to
+crown Lousteau's joy; his wit flowed more freely, and at last he made
+Madame de la Baudraye laugh. When, under circumstances which so
+seriously compromise her pride, a woman has been made to laugh, she is
+finally committed.
+
+As they drove in by the spacious graveled forecourt, with its lawn in
+the middle, and the large vases filled with flowers which so well set
+off the facade of Anzy, the journalist was saying:
+
+"When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they
+do not love, they cannot forgive anything--not even our virtues.--Do
+you forgive me," he added in Madame de la Baudraye's ear, and pressing
+her arm to his heart with tender emphasis. And Dinah could not help
+smiling.
+
+All through dinner, and for the rest of the evening, Etienne was in
+the most delightful spirits, inexhaustibly cheerful; but while thus
+giving vent to his intoxication, he now and then fell into the dreamy
+abstraction of a man who seems rapt in his own happiness.
+
+After coffee had been served, Madame de la Baudraye and her mother
+left the men to wander about the gardens. Monsieur Gravier then
+remarked to Monsieur de Clagny:
+
+"Did you observe that Madame de la Baudraye, after going out in a
+muslin gown came home in a velvet?"
+
+"As she got into the carriage at Cosne, the muslin dress caught on a
+brass nail and was torn all the way down," replied Lousteau.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Gatien, stricken to the heart by hearing two such
+different explanations.
+
+The journalist, who understood, took Gatien by the arm and pressed it
+as a hint to him to be silent. A few minutes later Etienne left
+Dinah's three adorers and took possession of little La Baudraye. Then
+Gatien was cross-questioned as to the events of the day. Monsieur
+Gravier and Monsieur de Clagny were dismayed to hear that on the
+return from Cosne Lousteau had been alone with Dinah, and even more so
+on hearing the two versions explaining the lady's change of dress. And
+the three discomfited gentlemen were in a very awkward position for
+the rest of the evening.
+
+Next day each, on various business, was obliged to leave Anzy; Dinah
+remained with her mother, Lousteau, and her husband. The annoyance
+vented by the three victims gave rise to an organized rebellion in
+Sancerre. The surrender of the Muse of Le Berry, of the Nivernais, and
+of Morvan was the cause of a perfect hue and cry of slander, evil
+report, and various guesses in which the story of the muslin gown held
+a prominent place. No dress Dinah had ever worn had been so much
+commented on, or was half as interesting to the girls, who could not
+conceive what the connection might be, that made the married women
+laugh, between love and a muslin gown.
+
+The Presidente Boirouge, furious at her son's discomfiture, forgot the
+praise she had lavished on the poem of /Paquita/, and fulminated
+terrific condemnation on the woman who could publish such a
+disgraceful work.
+
+"The wretched woman commits every crime she writes about," said she.
+"Perhaps she will come to the same end as her heroine!"
+
+Dinah's fate among the good folks of Sancerre was like that of
+Marechal Soult in the opposition newspapers; as long as he is minister
+he lost the battle of Toulouse; whenever he is out of the Government
+he won it! While she was virtuous, Dinah was a match for Camille de
+Maupin, a rival of the most famous women; but as soon as she was
+happy, she was an /unhappy creature/.
+
+Monsieur de Clagny was her valiant champion; he went several times to
+the Chateau d'Anzy to acquire the right to contradict the rumors
+current as to the woman he still faithfully adored, even in her fall;
+and he maintained that she and Lousteau were engaged together on some
+great work. But the lawyer was laughed to scorn.
+
+The month of October was lovely; autumn is the finest season in the
+valley of the Loire; but in 1836 it was unusually glorious. Nature
+seemed to aid and abet Dinah, who, as Bianchon had predicted,
+gradually developed a heart-felt passion. In one month she was an
+altered woman. She was surprised to find in herself so many inert and
+dormant qualities, hitherto in abeyance. To her Lousteau seemed an
+angel; for heart-love, the crowning need of a great nature, had made a
+new woman of her. Dinah was alive! She had found an outlet for her
+powers, she saw undreamed-of vistas in the future--in short, she was
+happy, happy without alarms or hindrances. The vast castle, the
+gardens, the park, the forest, favored love.
+
+Lousteau found in Madame de la Baudraye an artlessness, nay, if you
+will, an innocence of mind which made her very original; there was
+much more of the unexpected and winning in her than in a girl.
+Lousteau was quite alive to a form of flattery which in most women is
+assumed, but which in Dinah was genuine; she really learned from him
+the ways of love; he really was the first to reign in her heart. And,
+indeed, he took the trouble to be exceedingly amiable.
+
+Men, like women, have a stock in hand of recitatives, of /cantabile/,
+of /nocturnes/, airs and refrains--shall we say of recipes, although
+we speak of love--which each one believes to be exclusively his own.
+Men who have reached Lousteau's age try to distribute the "movements"
+of this repertoire through the whole opera of a passion. Lousteau,
+regarding this adventure with Dinah as a mere temporary connection,
+was eager to stamp himself on her memory in indelible lines; and
+during that beautiful October he was prodigal of his most entrancing
+melodies and most elaborate /barcarolles/. In fact, he exhausted every
+resource of the stage management of love, to use an expression
+borrowed from the theatrical dictionary, and admirably descriptive of
+his manoeuvres.
+
+"If that woman ever forgets me!" he would sometimes say to himself as
+they returned together from a long walk in the woods, "I will owe her
+no grudge--she will have found something better."
+
+When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting
+score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.
+
+Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave
+Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence in
+Paris. Before breakfast, on the day before he was to leave, the
+journalist and Dinah saw the master of the house come in with an
+artist from Nevers, who restored carvings of all kinds.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Lousteau. "What is to be done to the
+chateau?"
+
+"This is what I am going to do," said the little man, leading
+Lousteau, the local artist, and Dinah out on the terrace.
+
+He pointed out, on the front of the building, a shield supported by
+two sirens, not unlike that which may be seen on the arcade, now
+closed, through which there used to be a passage from the Quai des
+Tuileries to the courtyard of the old Louvre, and over which the words
+may still be seen, "/Bibliotheque du Cabinet du Roi/." This shield
+bore the arms of the noble House of Uxelles, namely, Or and gules
+party per fess, with two lions or, dexter and sinister as supporters.
+Above, a knight's helm, mantled of the tincture of the shield, and
+surmounted by a ducal coronet. Motto, /Cy paroist!/ A proud and
+sonorous device.
+
+"I want to put my own coat of arms in the place of that of the
+Uxelles; and as they are repeated six times on the two fronts and the
+two wings, it is not a trifling affair."
+
+"Your arms, so new, and since 1830!" exclaimed Dinah.
+
+"Have I not created an entail?"
+
+"I could understand it if you had children," said the journalist.
+
+"Oh!" said the old man, "Madame de la Baudraye is still young; there
+is no time lost."
+
+This allusion made Lousteau smile; he did not understand Monsieur de
+la Baudraye.
+
+"There, Didine!" said he in Dinah's ear, "what a waste of remorse!"
+
+Dinah begged him to give her one day more, and the lovers parted after
+the manner of certain theatres, which give ten last performances of a
+piece that is paying. And how many promises they made! How many solemn
+pledges did not Dinah exact and the unblushing journalist give her!
+
+Dinah, with superiority of the Superior Woman, accompanied Lousteau,
+in the face of all the world, as far as Cosne, with her mother and
+little La Baudraye. When, ten days later, Madame de la Baudraye saw in
+her drawing-room at La Baudraye, Monsieur de Clagny, Gatien, and
+Gravier, she found an opportunity of saying to each in turn:
+
+"I owe it to Monsieur Lousteau that I discovered that I had not been
+loved for my own sake."
+
+And what noble speeches she uttered, on man, on the nature of his
+feelings, on the end of his base passions, and so forth. Of Dinah's
+three worshipers, Monsieur de Clagny only said to her: "I love you,
+come what may"--and Dinah accepted him as her confidant, lavished on
+him all the marks of friendship which women can devise for the Gurths
+who are ready thus to wear the collar of gilded slavery.
+
+
+
+In Paris once more, Lousteau had, in a few weeks, lost the impression
+of the happy time he had spent at the Chateau d'Anzy. This is why:
+Lousteau lived by his pen.
+
+In this century, especially since the triumph of the /bourgeoisie/--
+the commonplace, money-saving citizen--who takes good care not to
+imitate Francis I. or Louis XIV.--to live by the pen is a form of
+penal servitude to which a galley-slave would prefer death. To live by
+the pen means to create--to create to-day, and to-morrow, and
+incessantly--or to seem to create; and the imitation costs as dear as
+the reality. So, besides his daily contribution to a newspaper, which
+was like the stone of Sisyphus, and which came every Monday, crashing
+down on to the feather of his pen, Etienne worked for three or four
+literary magazines. Still, do not be alarmed; he put no artistic
+conscientiousness into his work. This man of Sancerre had a facility,
+a carelessness, if you call it so, which ranked him with those writers
+who are mere scriveners, literary hacks. In Paris, in our day, hack-
+work cuts a man off from every pretension to a literary position. When
+he can do no more, or no longer cares for advancement, the man who can
+write becomes a journalist and a hack.
+
+The life he leads is not unpleasing. Blue-stockings, beginners in
+every walk of life, actresses at the outset or the close of a career,
+publishers and authors, all make much of these writers of the ready
+pen. Lousteau, a thorough man about town, lived at scarcely any
+expense beyond paying his rent. He had boxes at all the theatres; the
+sale of the books he reviewed or left unreviewed paid for his gloves;
+and he would say to those authors who published at their own expense,
+"I have your book always in my hands!" He took toll from vanity in the
+form of drawings or pictures. Every day had its engagements to dinner,
+every night its theatre, every morning was filled up with callers,
+visits, and lounging. His serial in the paper, two novels a year for
+weekly magazines, and his miscellaneous articles were the tax he paid
+for this easy-going life. And yet, to reach this position, Etienne had
+struggled for ten years.
+
+At the present time, known to the literary world, liked for the good
+or the mischief he did with equally facile good humor, he let himself
+float with the stream, never caring for the future. He ruled a little
+set of newcomers, he had friendships--or rather, habits of fifteen
+years' standing, and men with whom he supped, and dined, and indulged
+his wit. He earned from seven to eight hundred francs a month, a sum
+which he found quite insufficient for the prodigality peculiar to the
+impecunious. Indeed, Lousteau found himself now just as hard up as
+when, on first appearing in Paris, he had said to himself, "If I had
+but five hundred francs a month, I should be rich!"
+
+The cause of this phenomenon was as follows: Lousteau lived in the Rue
+des Martyrs in pretty ground-floor rooms with a garden, and splendidly
+furnished. When he settled there in 1833 he had come to an agreement
+with an upholsterer that kept his pocket money low for a long time.
+These rooms were let for twelve hundred francs. The months of January,
+April, July, and October were, as he phrased it, his indigent months.
+The rent and the porter's account cleaned him out. Lousteau took no
+fewer hackney cabs, spend a hundred francs in breakfasts all the same,
+smoked thirty francs' worth of cigars, and could never refuse the
+mistress of a day a dinner or a new dress. He thus dipped so deeply
+into the fluctuating earnings of the following months, that he could
+no more find a hundred francs on his chimney-piece now, when he was
+making seven or eight hundred francs a month, than he could in 1822,
+when he was hardly getting two hundred.
+
+Tired, sometimes, by the incessant vicissitudes of a literary life,
+and as much bored by amusement as a courtesan, Lousteau would get out
+of the tideway and sit on the bank, and say to one and another of his
+intimate allies--Nathan or Bixiou, as they sat smoking in his scrap of
+garden, looking out on an evergreen lawn as big as a dinner-table:
+
+"What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful
+hints!"
+
+"Lord! we shall marry when we choose to give as much thought to the
+matter as we give to a drama or a novel," said Nathan.
+
+"And Florine?" retorted Bixiou.
+
+"Oh, we all have a Florine," said Etienne, flinging away the end of
+his cigar and thinking of Madame Schontz.
+
+Madame Schontz was a pretty enough woman to put a very high price on
+the interest on her beauty, while reserving absolute ownership for
+Lousteau, the man of her heart. Like all those women who get the name
+in Paris of /Lorettes/, from the Church of Notre Dame de Lorette,
+round about which they dwell, she lived in the Rue Flechier, a stone's
+throw from Lousteau. This lady took a pride and delight in teasing her
+friends by boasting of having a Wit for her lover.
+
+These details of Lousteau's life and fortune are indispensable, for
+this penury and this bohemian existence of a man to whom Parisian
+luxury had become a necessity, were fated to have a cruel influence on
+Dinah's life. Those to whom the bohemia of Paris is familiar will now
+understand how it was that, by the end of a fortnight, the journalist,
+up to his ears in the literary environment, could laugh about his
+Baroness with his friends and even with Madame Schontz. To such
+readers as regard such things as utterly mean, it is almost useless to
+make excuses which they will not accept.
+
+"What did you do at Sancerre?" asked Bixiou the first time he met
+Lousteau.
+
+"I did good service to three worthy provincials--a Receiver-General of
+Taxes, a little cousin of his, and a Public Prosecutor, who for ten
+years had been dancing round and round one of the hundred 'Tenth
+Muses' who adorn the Departments," said he. "But they had no more
+dared to touch her than we touch a decorated cream at dessert till
+some strong-minded person has made a hole in it."
+
+"Poor boy!" said Bixiou. "I said you had gone to Sancerre to turn
+Pegasus out to grass."
+
+"Your joke is as stupid as my Muse is handsome," retorted Lousteau.
+"Ask Bianchon, my dear fellow."
+
+"A Muse and a Poet! A homoeopathic cure then!" said Bixiou.
+
+On the tenth day Lousteau received a letter with the Sancerre post-
+mark.
+
+"Good! very good!" said Lousteau.
+
+"'Beloved friend, idol of my heart and soul----' twenty pages of it!
+all at one sitting, and dated midnight! She writes when she finds
+herself alone. Poor woman! Ah, ha! And a postscript--
+
+"'I dare not ask you to write to me as I write, every day; still, I
+hope to have a few lines from my dear one every week, to relieve my
+mind.'--What a pity to burn it all! it is really well written," said
+Lousteau to himself, as he threw the ten sheets of paper into the fire
+after having read them. "That woman was born to reel off copy!"
+
+Lousteau was not much afraid of Madame Schontz, who really loved him
+for himself, but he had supplanted a friend in the heart of a
+Marquise. This Marquise, a lady nowise coy, sometimes dropped in
+unexpectedly at his rooms in the evening, arriving veiled in a hackney
+coach; and she, as a literary woman, allowed herself to hunt through
+all his drawers.
+
+A week later, Lousteau, who hardly remembered Dinah, was startled by
+another budget from Sancerre--eight leaves, sixteen pages! He heard a
+woman's step; he thought it announced a search from the Marquise, and
+tossed these rapturous and entrancing proofs of affections into the
+fire--unread!
+
+"A woman's letter!" exclaimed Madame Schontz, as she came in. "The
+paper, the wax, are scented--"
+
+"Here you are, sir," said a porter from the coach office, setting down
+two huge hampers in the ante-room. "Carriage paid. Please to sign my
+book."
+
+"Carriage paid!" cried Madame Schontz. "It must have come from
+Sancerre."
+
+"Yes, madame," said the porter.
+
+"Your Tenth Muse is a remarkably intelligent woman," said the
+courtesan, opening one of the hampers, while Lousteau was writing his
+name. "I like a Muse who understands housekeeping, and who can make
+game pies as well as blots. And, oh! what beautiful flowers!" she went
+on, opening the second hamper. "Why, you could get none finer in
+Paris!--And here, and here! A hare, partridges, half a roebuck!--We
+will ask your friends and have a famous dinner, for Athalie has a
+special talent for dressing venison."
+
+Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was
+clever. The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of
+Mirabeau's letters to Sophie. The style of a true lover is
+transparent. It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart
+to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence,
+and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every
+day, full of intoxicating beauty--but only for two beings. As soon as
+a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the
+product of the head, not of the heart. But a woman will always be
+beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of
+this flow of wit.
+
+By the end of December Lousteau had ceased to read Dinah's letters;
+they lay in a heap in a drawer of his chest that was never locked,
+under his shirts, which they scented.
+
+Then one of those chances came to Lousteau which such bohemians ought
+to clutch by every hair. In the middle of December, Madame Schontz,
+who took a real interest in Etienne, sent to beg him to call on her
+one morning on business.
+
+"My dear fellow, you have a chance of marrying."
+
+"I can marry very often, happily, my dear."
+
+"When I say marrying, I mean marrying well. You have no prejudices: I
+need not mince matters. This is the position: A young lady has got
+into trouble; her mother knows nothing of even a kiss. Her father is
+an honest notary, a man of honor; he has been wise enough to keep it
+dark. He wants to get his daughter married within a fortnight, and he
+will give her a fortune of a hundred and fifty thousand francs--for he
+has three other children; but--and it is not a bad idea--he will add a
+hundred thousand francs, under the rose, hand to hand, to cover the
+damages. They are an old family of Paris citizens, Rue des
+Lombards----"
+
+"Well, then, why does not the lover marry her?"
+
+"Dead."
+
+"What a romance! Such things are nowhere to be heard of but in the Rue
+des Lombards."
+
+"But do not take it into your head that a jealous brother murdered the
+seducer. The young man died in the most commonplace way of a pleurisy
+caught as he came out of the theatre. A head-clerk and penniless, the
+man entrapped the daughter in order to marry into the business--A
+judgment from heaven, I call it!"
+
+"Where did you hear the story?"
+
+"From Malaga; the notary is her /milord/."
+
+"What, Cardot, the son of that little old man in hair-powder,
+Florentine's first friend?"
+
+"Just so. Malaga, whose 'fancy' is a little tomtit of a fiddler of
+eighteen, cannot in conscience make such a boy marry the girl.
+Besides, she has no cause to do him an ill turn.--Indeed, Monsieur
+Cardot wants a man of thirty at least. Our notary, I feel sure, will
+be proud to have a famous man for his son-in-law. So just feel
+yourself all over.--You will pay your debts, you will have twelve
+thousand francs a year, and be a father without any trouble on your
+part; what do you say to that to the good? And, after all, you only
+marry a very consolable widow. There is an income of fifty thousand
+francs in the house, and the value of the connection, so in due time
+you may look forward to not less than fifteen thousand francs a year
+more for your share, and you will enter a family holding a fine
+political position; Cardot is the brother-in-law of old Camusot, the
+depute who lived so long with Fanny Beaupre."
+
+"Yes," said Lousteau, "old Camusot married little Daddy Cardot's
+eldest daughter, and they had high times together!"
+
+"Well!" Madame Schontz went on, "and Madame Cardot, the notary's wife,
+was a Chiffreville--manufacturers of chemical products, the
+aristocracy of these days! Potash, I tell you! Still, this is the
+unpleasant side of the matter. You will have a terrible mother-in-law,
+a woman capable of killing her daughter if she knew--! This Cardot
+woman is a bigot; she has lips like two faded narrow pink ribbons.
+
+"A man of the town like you would never pass muster with that woman,
+who, in her well-meaning way, will spy out your bachelor life and know
+every fact of the past. However, Cardot says he means to exert his
+paternal authority. The poor man will be obliged to do the civil to
+his wife for some days; a woman made of wood, my dear fellow; Malaga,
+who has seen her, calls her a penitential scrubber. Cardot is a man of
+forty; he will be mayor of his district, and perhaps be elected
+deputy. He is prepared to give in lieu of the hundred thousand francs
+a nice little house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, with a forecourt and a
+garden, which cost him no more than sixty thousand at the time of the
+July overthrow; he would sell, and that would be an opportunity for
+you to go and come at the house, to see the daughter, and be civil to
+the mother.--And it would give you a look of property in Madame
+Cardot's eyes. You would be housed like a prince in that little
+mansion. Then, by Camusot's interest, you may get an appointment as
+librarian to some public office where there is no library.--Well, and
+then if you invest your money in backing up a newspaper, you will get
+ten thousand francs a year on it, you can earn six, your librarianship
+will bring you in four.--Can you do better for yourself?
+
+"If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman
+by the end of two years. What is the damage?--an anticipated dividend!
+It is quite the fashion.
+
+"Take my word for it, you can do no better than come to dine with
+Malaga to-morrow. You will meet your father-in-law; he will know the
+secret has been let out--by Malaga, with whom he cannot be angry--and
+then you are master of the situation. As to your wife!--Why her
+misconduct leaves you as free as a bachelor----"
+
+"Your language is as blunt as a cannon ball."
+
+"I love you for your own sake, that is all--and I can reason. Well!
+why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is
+nothing to meditate over. Marriage is heads or tails--well, you have
+tossed heads up."
+
+"You shall have my reply to-morrow," said Lousteau.
+
+"I would sooner have it at once; Malaga will write you up to-night."
+
+"Well, then, yes."
+
+Lousteau spent the evening in writing a long letter to the Marquise,
+giving her the reasons which compelled him to marry; his constant
+poverty, the torpor of his imagination, his white hairs, his moral and
+physical exhaustion--in short, four pages of arguments.--"As to Dinah,
+I will send her a circular announcing the marriage," said he to
+himself. "As Bixiou says, I have not my match for knowing how to dock
+the tail of a passion."
+
+Lousteau, who at first had been on some ceremony with himself, by next
+day had come to the point of dreading lest the marriage should not
+come off. He was pressingly civil to the notary.
+
+"I knew monsieur your father," said he, "at Florentine's, so I may
+well know you here, at Mademoiselle Turquet's. Like father, like son.
+A very good fellow and a philosopher, was little Daddy Cardot--excuse
+me, we always called him so. At that time, Florine, Florentine,
+Tullia, Coralie, and Mariette were the five fingers of your hand, so
+to speak--it is fifteen years ago. My follies, as you may suppose, are
+a thing of the past.--In those days it was pleasure that ran away with
+me; now I am ambitious; but, in our day, to get on at all a man must
+be free from debt, have a good income, a wife, and a family. If I pay
+taxes enough to qualify me, I may be a deputy yet, like any other
+man."
+
+Maitre Cardot appreciated this profession of faith. Lousteau had laid
+himself out to please and the notary liked him, feeling himself more
+at his ease, as may be easily imagined, with a man who had known his
+father's secrets than he would have been with another. On the
+following day Lousteau was introduced to the Cardot family as the
+purchaser of the house in the Rue Saint-Lazare, and three days later
+he dined there.
+
+Cardot lived in an old house near the Place du Chatelet. In this house
+everything was "good." Economy covered every scrap of gilding with
+green gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was
+impossible to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the
+inhabitants, at the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn.
+Boredom perched in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the
+dining-room was like Harpagon's. Even if Lousteau had not known all
+about Malaga, he could have guessed that the notary's real life was
+spent elsewhere.
+
+The journalist saw a tall, fair girl with blue eyes, at once shy and
+languishing. The elder brother took a fancy to him; he was the fourth
+clerk in the office, but strongly attracted by the snares of literary
+fame, though destined to succeed his father. The younger sister was
+twelve years old. Lousteau, assuming a little Jesuitical air, played
+the Monarchist and Churchman for the benefit of the mother, was quite
+smooth, deliberate, and complimentary.
+
+Within three weeks of their introduction, at his fourth dinner there,
+Felicie Cardot, who had been watching Lousteau out of the corner of
+her eye, carried him a cup of coffee where he stood in the window
+recess, and said in a low voice, with tears in her eyes:
+
+"I will devote my whole life, monsieur, to thanking you for your
+sacrifice in favor of a poor girl----"
+
+Lousteau was touched; there was so much expression in her look, her
+accent, her attitude. "She would make a good man happy," thought he,
+pressing her hand in reply.
+
+Madame Cardot looked upon her son-in-law as a man with a future before
+him; but, above all the fine qualities she ascribed to him, she was
+most delighted by his high tone of morals. Etienne, prompted by the
+wily notary, had pledged his word that he had no natural children, no
+tie that could endanger the happiness of her dear Felicie.
+
+"You may perhaps think I go rather too far," said the bigot to the
+journalist; "but in giving such a jewel as my Felicie to any man, one
+must think of the future. I am not one of those mothers who want to be
+rid of their daughters. Monsieur Cardot hurries matters on, urges
+forward his daughter's marriage; he wishes it over. This is the only
+point on which we differ.--Though with a man like you, monsieur, a
+literary man whose youth has been preserved by hard work from the
+moral shipwreck now so prevalent, we may feel quite safe; still, you
+would be the first to laugh at me if I looked for a husband for my
+daughter with my eyes shut. I know you are not an innocent, and I
+should be very sorry for my Felicie if you were" (this was said in a
+whisper); "but if you had any /liaison/--For instance, monsieur, you
+have heard of Madame Roguin, the wife of a notary who, unhappily for
+our faculty, was sadly notorious. Madame Roguin has, ever since 1820,
+been kept by a banker--"
+
+"Yes, du Tillet," replied Etienne; but he bit his tongue as he
+recollected how rash it was to confess to an acquaintance with du
+Tillet.
+
+"Yes.--Well, monsieur, if you were a mother, would you not quake at
+the thought that Madame du Tillet's fate might be your child's? At her
+age, and /nee/ de Granville! To have as a rival a woman of fifty and
+more. Sooner would I see my daughter dead than give her to a man who
+had such a connection with a married woman. A grisette, an actress,
+you take her and leave her.--There is no danger, in my opinion, from
+women of that stamp; love is their trade, they care for no one, one
+down and another to come on!--But a woman who has sinned against duty
+must hug her sin, her only excuse is constancy, if such a crime can
+ever have an excuse. At least, that is the view I hold of a
+respectable woman's fall, and that is what makes it so terrible----"
+
+Instead of looking for the meaning of these speeches, Etienne made a
+jest of them at Malaga's, whither he went with his father-in-law
+elect; for the notary and the journalist were the best of friends.
+
+Lousteau had already given himself the airs of a person of importance;
+his life at last was to have a purpose; he was in luck's way, and in a
+few days would be the owner of a delightful little house in the Rue
+Saint-Lazare; he was going to be married to a charming woman, he would
+have about twenty thousand francs a year, and could give the reins to
+his ambition; the young lady loved him, and he would be connected with
+several respectable families. In short, he was in full sail on the
+blue waters of hope.
+
+
+
+Madame Cardot had expressed a wish to see the prints for /Gil Blas/,
+one of the illustrated volumes which the French publishers were at
+that time bringing out, and Lousteau had taken the first numbers for
+the lady's inspection. The lawyer's wife had a scheme of her own, she
+had borrowed the book merely to return it; she wanted an excuse for
+walking in on her future son-in-law quite unexpectedly. The sight of
+those bachelor rooms, which her husband had described as charming,
+would tell her more, she thought, as to Lousteau's habits of life than
+any information she could pick up. Her sister-in-law, Madame Camusot,
+who knew nothing of the fateful secret, was terrified at such a
+marriage for her niece. Monsieur Camusot, a Councillor of the Supreme
+Court, old Camusot's son by his first marriage, had given his step-
+mother, who was Cardot's sister, a far from flattering account of the
+journalist.
+
+Lousteau, clever as he was, did not think it strange that the wife of
+a rich notary should wish to inspect a volume costing fifteen francs
+before deciding on the purchase. Your clever man never condescends to
+study the middle-class, who escape his ken by this want of attention;
+and while he is making game of them, they are at leisure to throttle
+him.
+
+So one day early in January 1837, Madame Cardot and her daughter took
+a hackney coach and went to the Rue des Martyrs to return the parts of
+/Gil Blas/ to Felicie's betrothed, both delighted at the thought of
+seeing Lousteau's rooms. These domiciliary visitations are not unusual
+in the old citizen class. The porter at the front gate was not in; but
+his daughter, on being informed by the worthy lady that she was in the
+presence of Monsieur Lousteau's future mother-in-law and bride, handed
+over the key of the apartment--all the more readily because Madame
+Cardot placed a gold piece in her hand.
+
+It was by this time about noon, the hour at which the journalist would
+return from breakfasting at the Cafe Anglais. As he crossed the open
+space between the Church of Notre-Dame de Lorette and the Rue des
+Martyrs, Lousteau happened to look at a hired coach that was toiling
+up the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre, and he fancied it was a dream when
+he saw the face of Dinah! He stood frozen to the spot when, on
+reaching his house, he beheld his Didine at the coach door.
+
+"What has brought you here?" he inquired.--He adopted the familiar
+/tu/. The formality of /vous/ was out of the question to a woman he
+must get rid of.
+
+"Why, my love," cried she, "have you not read my letters?"
+
+"Certainly I have," said Lousteau.
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"You are a father," replied the country lady.
+
+"Faugh!" cried he, disregarding the barbarity of such an exclamation.
+"Well," thought he to himself, "she must be prepared for the blow."
+
+He signed to the coachman to wait, gave his hand to Madame de la
+Baudraye, and left the man with the chaise full of trunks, vowing that
+he would send away /illico/, as he said to himself, the woman and her
+luggage, back to the place she had come from.
+
+"Monsieur, monsieur," called out little Pamela.
+
+The child had some sense, and felt that three women must not be
+allowed to meet in a bachelor's rooms.
+
+"Well, well!" said Lousteau, dragging Dinah along.
+
+Pamela concluded that the lady must be some relation; however, she
+added:
+
+"The key is in the door; your mother-in-law is there."
+
+In his agitation, while Madame de la Baudraye was pouring out a flood
+of words, Etienne understood the child to say, "Mother is there," the
+only circumstance that suggested itself as possible, and he went in.
+
+Felicie and her mother, who were by this time in the bed-room, crept
+into a corner on seeing Etienne enter with a woman.
+
+"At last, Etienne, my dearest, I am yours for life!" cried Dinah,
+throwing her arms round his neck, and clasping him closely, while he
+took the key from the outside of the door. "Life is a perpetual
+anguish to me in that house at Anzy. I could bear it no longer; and
+when the time came for me to proclaim my happiness--well, I had not
+the courage.--Here I am, your wife with your child! And you have not
+written to me; you have left me two months without a line."
+
+"But, Dinah, you place me in the greatest difficulty--"
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"How can I do otherwise than love you?--But would you not have been
+wiser to remain at Sancerre?--I am in the most abject poverty, and I
+fear to drag you into it--"
+
+"Your misery will be paradise to me. I only ask to live here, never to
+go out--"
+
+"Good God! that is all very fine in words, but--" Dinah sat down and
+melted into tears as she heard this speech, roughly spoken.
+
+Lousteau could not resist this distress. He clasped the Baroness in
+his arms and kissed her.
+
+"Do not cry, Didine!" said he; and, as he uttered the words, he saw in
+the mirror the figure of Madame Cardot, looking at him from the
+further end of the rooms. "Come, Didine, go with Pamela and get your
+trunks unloaded," said he in her ear. "Go; do not cry; we will be
+happy!"
+
+He led her to the door, and then came back to divert the storm.
+
+"Monsieur," said Madame Cardot, "I congratulate myself on having
+resolved to see for myself the home of the man who was to have been my
+son-in-law. If my daughter were to die of it, she should never be the
+wife of such a man as you. You must devote yourself to making your
+Didine happy, monsieur."
+
+And the virtuous lady walked out, followed by Felicie, who was crying
+too, for she had become accustomed to Etienne. The dreadful Madame
+Cardot got into her hackney-coach again, staring insolently at the
+hapless Dinah, in whose heart the sting still rankled of "that is all
+very fine in words"; but who, nevertheless, like every woman in love,
+believed in the murmured, "Do not cry, Didine!"
+
+Lousteau, who was not lacking in the sort of decision which grows out
+of the vicissitudes of a storm-tossed life, reflected thus:
+
+"Didine is high-minded; when once she knows of my proposed marriage,
+she will sacrifice herself for my future prospects, and I know how I
+can manage to let her know." Delighted at having hit on a trick of
+which the success seemed certain, he danced round to a familiar tune:
+
+"/Larifla, fla, fla!/--And Didine once out of the way," he went on,
+talking to himself, "I will treat Maman Cardot to a call and a
+novelette: I have seduced her Felicie at Saint-Eustache--Felicie,
+guilty through passion, bears in her bosom the pledge of our affection
+--and /larifla, fla, fla!/ the father /Ergo/, the notary, his wife,
+and his daughter are caught, nabbed----"
+
+And, to her great amazement, Dinah discovered Etienne performing a
+prohibited dance.
+
+"Your arrival and our happiness have turned my head with joy," said
+he, to explain this crazy mood.
+
+"And I had fancied you had ceased to love me!" exclaimed the poor
+woman, dropping the handbag she was carrying, and weeping with joy as
+she sank into a chair.
+
+"Make yourself at home, my darling," said Etienne, laughing in his
+sleeve; "I must write two lines to excuse myself from a bachelor
+party, for I mean to devote myself to you. Give your orders; you are
+at home."
+
+Etienne wrote to Bixiou:
+
+  "MY DEAR BOY,--My Baroness has dropped into my arms, and will be
+  fatal to my marriage unless we perform one of the most familiar
+  stratagems of the thousand and one comedies at the Gymnase. I rely
+  on you to come here, like one of Moliere's old men, to scold your
+  nephew Leandre for his folly, while the Tenth Muse lies hidden in
+  my bedroom; you must work on her feelings; strike hard, be brutal,
+  offensive. I, you understand, shall express my blind devotion, and
+  shall seem to be deaf, so that you may have to shout at me.
+
+  "Come, if you can, at seven o'clock.
+
+  "Yours,
+  "E. LOUSTEAU."
+
+
+Having sent this letter by a commissionaire to the man who, in all
+Paris, most delighted in such practical jokes--in the slang of
+artists, a /charge/--Lousteau made a great show of settling the Muse
+of Sancerre in his apartment. He busied himself in arranging the
+luggage she had brought, and informed her as to the persons and ways
+of the house with such perfect good faith, and a glee which overflowed
+in kind words and caresses, that Dinah believed herself the best-
+beloved woman in the world. These rooms, where everything bore the
+stamp of fashion, pleased her far better than her old chateau.
+
+Pamela Migeon, the intelligent damsel of fourteen, was questioned by
+the journalist as to whether she would like to be waiting-maid to the
+imposing Baroness. Pamela, perfectly enchanted, entered on her duties
+at once, by going off to order dinner from a restaurant on the
+boulevard. Dinah was able to judge of the extreme poverty that lay
+hidden under the purely superficial elegance of this bachelor home
+when she found none of the necessaries of life. As she took possession
+of the closets and drawers, she indulged in the fondest dreams; she
+would alter Etienne's habits, she would make him home-keeping, she
+would fill his cup of domestic happiness.
+
+The novelty of the position hid its disastrous side; Dinah regarded
+reciprocated love as the absolution of her sin; she did not yet look
+beyond the walls of these rooms. Pamela, whose wits were as sharp as
+those of a /lorette/, went straight to Madame Schontz to beg the loan
+of some plate, telling her what had happened to Lousteau. After making
+the child welcome to all she had, Madame Schontz went off to her
+friend Malaga, that Cardot might be warned of the catastrophe that had
+befallen his future son-in-law.
+
+The journalist, not in the least uneasy about the crisis as affecting
+his marriage, was more and more charming to the lady from the
+provinces. The dinner was the occasion of the delightful child's-play
+of lovers set at liberty, and happy to be free. When they had had
+their coffee, and Lousteau was sitting in front of the fire, Dinah on
+his knee, Pamela ran in with a scared face.
+
+"Here is Monsieur Bixiou!" said she.
+
+"Go into the bedroom," said the journalist to his mistress; "I will
+soon get rid of him. He is one of my most intimate friends, and I
+shall have to explain to him my new start in life."
+
+"Oh, ho! dinner for two, and a blue velvet bonnet!" cried Bixiou. "I
+am off.--Ah! that is what comes of marrying--one must go through some
+partings. How rich one feels when one begins to move one's sticks,
+heh?"
+
+"Who talks of marrying?" said Lousteau.
+
+"What! are you not going to be married, then?" cried Bixiou.
+
+"No!"
+
+"No? My word, what next? Are you making a fool of yourself, if you
+please?--What!--You, who, by the mercy of Heaven, have come across
+twenty thousand francs a year, and a house, and a wife connected with
+all the first families of the better middle class--a wife, in short,
+out of the Rue des Lombards--"
+
+"That will do, Bixiou, enough; it is at an end. Be off!"
+
+"Be off? I have a friend's privileges, and I shall take every
+advantage of them.--What has come over you?"
+
+"What has 'come over' me is my lady from Sancerre. She is a mother,
+and we are going to live together happily to the end of our days.--You
+would have heard it to-morrow, so you may as well be told it now."
+
+"Many chimney-pots are falling on my head, as Arnal says. But if this
+woman really loves you, my dear fellow, she will go back to the place
+she came from. Did any provincial woman ever yet find her sea-legs in
+Paris? She will wound all your vanities. Have you forgotten what a
+provincial is? She will bore you as much when she is happy as when she
+is sad; she will have as great a talent for escaping grace as a
+Parisian has in inventing it.
+
+"Lousteau, listen to me. That a passion should lead you to forget to
+some extent the times in which we live, is conceivable; but I, my dear
+fellow, have not the mythological bandage over my eyes.--Well, then
+consider your position. For fifteen years you have been tossing in the
+literary world; you are no longer young, you have padded the hoof till
+your soles are worn through!--Yes, my boy, you turn your socks under
+like a street urchin to hide the holes, so that the legs cover the
+heels! In short, the joke is too stale. Your excuses are more familiar
+than a patent medicine--"
+
+"I may say to you, like the Regent to Cardinal Dubois, 'That is
+kicking enough!'" said Lousteau, laughing.
+
+"Oh, venerable young man," replied Bixiou, "the iron has touched the
+sore to the quick. You are worn out, aren't you? Well, then; in the
+heyday of youth, under the pressure of penury, what have you done? You
+are not in the front rank, and you have not a thousand francs of your
+own. That is the sum-total of the situation. Can you, in the decline
+of your powers, support a family by your pen, when your wife, if she
+is an honest woman, will not have at her command the resources of the
+woman of the streets, who can extract her thousand-franc note from the
+depths where milord keeps it safe? You are rushing into the lowest
+depths of the social theatre.
+
+"And this is only the financial side. Now, consider the political
+position. We are struggling in an essentially /bourgeois/ age, in
+which honor, virtue, high-mindedness, talent, learning--genius, in
+short, is summed up in paying your way, owing nobody anything, and
+conducting your affairs with judgment. Be steady, be respectable, have
+a wife, and children, pay your rent and taxes, serve in the National
+Guard, and be on the same pattern as all the men of your company--then
+you may indulge in the loftiest pretensions, rise to the Ministry!--
+and you have the best chances possible, since you are no Montmorency.
+You were preparing to fulfil all the conditions insisted on for
+turning out a political personage, you are capable of every mean trick
+that is necessary in office, even of pretending to be commonplace--you
+would have acted it to the life. And just for a woman, who will leave
+you in the lurch--the end of every eternal passion--in three, five, or
+seven years--after exhausting your last physical and intellectual
+powers, you turn your back on the sacred Hearth, on the Rue des
+Lombards, on a political career, on thirty thousand francs per annum,
+on respectability and respect!--Ought that to be the end of a man who
+has done with illusions?
+
+"If you had kept a pot boiling for some actress who gave you your fun
+for it--well; that is what you may call a cabinet matter. But to live
+with another man's wife? It is a draft at sight on disaster; it is
+bolting the bitter pills of vice with none of the gilding."
+
+"That will do. One word answers it all; I love Madame de la Baudraye,
+and prefer her to every fortune, to every position the world can
+offer.--I may have been carried away by a gust of ambition, but
+everything must give way to the joy of being a father."
+
+"Ah, ha! you have a fancy for paternity? But, wretched man, we are the
+fathers only of our legitimate children. What is a brat that does not
+bear your name? The last chapter of the romance.--Your child will be
+taken from you! We have seen that story in twenty plays these ten
+years past.
+
+"Society, my dear boy, will drop upon you sooner or later. Read
+/Adolphe/ once more.--Dear me! I fancy I can see you when you and she
+are used to each other;--I see you dejected, hang-dog, bereft of
+position and fortune, and fighting like the shareholders of a bogus
+company when they are tricked by a director!--Your director is
+happiness."
+
+"Say no more, Bixiou."
+
+"But I have only just begun," said Bixiou. "Listen, my dear boy.
+Marriage has been out of favor for some time past; but, apart from the
+advantages it offers in being the only recognized way of certifying
+heredity, as it affords a good-looking young man, though penniless,
+the opportunity of making his fortune in two months, it survives in
+spite of disadvantages. And there is not the man living who would not
+repent, sooner or later, of having, by his own fault, lost the chance
+of marrying thirty thousand francs a year."
+
+"You won't understand me," cried Lousteau, in a voice of exasperation.
+"Go away--she is there----"
+
+"I beg your pardon; why did you not tell me sooner?--You are of age,
+and so is she," he added in a lower voice, but loud enough to be heard
+by Dinah. "She will make you repent bitterly of your happiness!----"
+
+"If it is a folly, I intend to commit it.--Good-bye."
+
+"A man gone overboard!" cried Bixiou.
+
+"Devil take those friends who think they have a right to preach to
+you," said Lousteau, opening the door of the bedroom, where he found
+Madame de la Baudraye sunk in an armchair and dabbing her eyes with an
+embroidered handkerchief.
+
+"Oh, why did I come here?" sobbed she. "Good Heavens, why indeed?--
+Etienne, I am not so provincial as you think me.--You are making a
+fool of me."
+
+"Darling angel," replied Lousteau, taking Dinah in his arms, lifting
+her from her chair, and dragging her half dead into the drawing-room,
+"we have both pledged our future, it is sacrifice for sacrifice. While
+I was loving you at Sancerre, they were engaging me to be married
+here, but I refused.--Oh! I was extremely distressed----"
+
+"I am going," cried Dinah, starting wildly to her feet and turning to
+the door.
+
+"You will stay here, my Didine. All is at an end. And is this fortune
+so lightly earned after all? Must I not marry a gawky, tow-haired
+creature, with a red nose, the daughter of a notary, and saddle myself
+with a stepmother who could give Madame de Piedefer points on the
+score of bigotry--"
+
+Pamela flew in, and whispered in Lousteau's ear:
+
+"Madame Schontz!"
+
+Lousteau rose, leaving Dinah on the sofa, and went out.
+
+"It is all over with you, my dear," said the woman. "Cardot does not
+mean to quarrel with his wife for the sake of a son-in-law. The lady
+made a scene--something like a scene, I can tell you! So, to conclude,
+the head-clerk, who was the late head-clerk's deputy for two years,
+agrees to take the girl with the business."
+
+"Mean wretch!" exclaimed Lousteau. "What! in two hours he has made up
+his mind?"
+
+"Bless me, that is simple enough. The rascal, who knew all the dead
+man's little secrets, guessed what a fix his master was in from
+overhearing a few words of the squabble with Madame Cardot. The notary
+relies on your honor and good feeling, for the affair is settled. The
+clerk, whose conduct has been admirable, went so far as to attend
+mass! A finished hypocrite, I say--just suits the mamma. You and
+Cardot will still be friends. He is to be a director in an immense
+financial concern, and he may be of use to you.--So you have been
+waked from a sweet dream."
+
+"I have lost a fortune, a wife, and--"
+
+"And a mistress," said Madame Schontz, smiling. "Here you are, more
+than married; you will be insufferable, you will be always wanting to
+get home, there will be nothing loose about you, neither your clothes
+nor your habits. And, after all, my Arthur does things in style. I
+will be faithful to him and cut Malaga's acquaintance.
+
+"Let me peep at her through the door--your Sancerre Muse," she went
+on. "Is there no finer bird than that to be found in the desert?" she
+exclaimed. "You are cheated! She is dignified, lean, lachrymose; she
+only needs Lady Dudley's turban!"
+
+"What is it now?" asked Madame de la Baudraye, who had heard the
+rustle of a silk dress and the murmur of a woman's voice.
+
+"It is, my darling, that we are now indissolubly united.--I have just
+had an answer to the letter you saw me write, which was to break off
+my marriage----"
+
+"So that was the party which you gave up?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh, I will be more than your wife--I am your slave, I give you my
+life," said the poor deluded creature. "I did not believe I could love
+you more than I did!--Now I shall not be a mere incident, but your
+whole life?"
+
+"Yes, my beautiful, my generous Didine."
+
+"Swear to me," said she, "that only death shall divide us."
+
+Lousteau was ready to sweeten his vows with the most fascinating
+prettinesses. And this was why. Between the door of the apartment
+where he had taken the lorette's farewell kiss, and that of the
+drawing-room, where the Muse was reclining, bewildered by such a
+succession of shocks, Lousteau had remembered little De la Baudraye's
+precarious health, his fine fortune, and Bianchon's remark about
+Dinah, "She will be a rich widow!" and he said to himself, "I would a
+hundred times rather have Madame de la Baudraye for a wife than
+Felicie!"
+
+His plan of action was quickly decided on; he determined to play the
+farce of passion once more, and to perfection. His mean self-
+interestedness and his false vehemence of passion had disastrous
+results. Madame de la Baudraye, when she set out from Sancerre for
+Paris, had intended to live in rooms of her own quite near to
+Lousteau; but the proofs of devotion her lover had given her by giving
+up such brilliant prospects, and yet more the perfect happiness of the
+first days of their illicit union, kept her from mentioning such a
+parting. The second day was to be--and indeed was--a high festival, in
+which such a suggestion proposed to "her angel" would have been a
+discordant note.
+
+Lousteau, on his part, anxious to make Dinah feel herself dependent on
+him, kept her in a state of constant intoxication by incessant
+amusement. These circumstances hindered two persons so clever as these
+were from avoiding the slough into which they fell--that of a life in
+common, a piece of folly of which, unfortunately, many instances may
+be seen in Paris in literary circles.
+
+And thus was the whole programme played out of a provincial amour, so
+satirically described by Lousteau to Madame de la Baudraye--a fact
+which neither he nor she remembered. Passion is born a deaf-mute.
+
+
+
+This winter in Paris was to Madame de la Baudraye all that the month
+of October had been at Sancerre. Etienne, to initiate "his wife" into
+Paris life, varied this honeymoon by evenings at the play, where Dinah
+would only go to the stage box. At first Madame de la Baudraye
+preserved some remnants of her countrified modesty; she was afraid of
+being seen; she hid her happiness. She would say:
+
+"Monsieur de Clagny or Monsieur Gravier may have followed me to
+Paris." She was afraid on Sancerre even in Paris.
+
+Lousteau, who was excessively vain, educated Dinah, took her to the
+best dressmakers, and pointed out to her the most fashionable women,
+advising her to take them as models for imitation. And Madame de la
+Baudraye's provincial appearance was soon a thing of the past.
+Lousteau, when his friends met him, was congratulated on his conquest.
+
+All through that season Etienne wrote little and got very much into
+debt, though Dinah, who was proud, bought all her clothes out of her
+savings, and fancied she had not been the smallest expense to her
+beloved. By the end of three months Dinah was acclimatized; she had
+reveled in the music at the Italian opera; she knew the pieces "on" at
+all theatres, and the actors and jests of the day; she had become
+inured to this life of perpetual excitement, this rapid torrent in
+which everything is forgotten. She no longer craned her neck or stood
+with her nose in the air, like an image of Amazement, at the constant
+surprises that Paris has for a stranger. She had learned to breathe
+that witty, vitalizing, teeming atmosphere where clever people feel
+themselves in their element, and which they can no longer bear to
+quit.
+
+One morning, as she read the papers, for Lousteau had them all, two
+lines carried her back to Sancerre and the past, two lines that seemed
+not unfamiliar--as follows:
+
+"Monsieur le Baron de Clagny, Public Prosecutor to the Criminal Court
+at Sancerre, has been appointed Deputy Public Prosecutor to the
+Supreme Court in Paris."
+
+"How well that worthy lawyer loves you!" said the journalist, smiling.
+
+"Poor man!" said she. "What did I tell you? He is following me."
+
+Etienne and Dinah were just then at the most dazzling and fervid stage
+of a passion when each is perfectly accustomed to the other, and yet
+love has not lost its freshness and relish. The lovers know each other
+well, but all is not yet understood; they have not been a second time
+to the same secret haunts of the soul; they have not studied each
+other till they know, as they must later, the very thought, word, and
+gesture that responds to every event, the greatest and the smallest.
+Enchantment reigns; there are no collisions, no differences of
+opinion, no cold looks. Their two souls are always on the same side.
+And Dinah would speak the magical words, emphasized by the yet more
+magical expression and looks which every woman can use under such
+circumstances.
+
+"When you cease to love me, kill me.--If you should cease to love me,
+I believe I could kill you first and myself after."
+
+To this sweet exaggeration, Lousteau would reply:
+
+"All I ask of God is to see you as constant as I shall be. It is you
+who will desert me!"
+
+"My love is supreme."
+
+"Supreme," echoed Lousteau. "Come, now? Suppose I am dragged away to a
+bachelor party, and find there one of my former mistresses, and she
+makes fun of me; I, out of vanity, behave as if I were free, and do
+not come in here till next morning--would you still love me?"
+
+"A woman is only sure of being loved when she is preferred; and if you
+came back to me, if--Oh! you make me understand what the happiness
+would be of forgiving the man I adore."
+
+"Well, then, I am truly loved for the first time in my life!" cried
+Lousteau.
+
+"At last you understand that!" said she.
+
+Lousteau proposed that they should each write a letter setting forth
+the reasons which would compel them to end by suicide. Once in
+possession of such a document, each might kill the other without
+danger in case of infidelity. But in spite of mutual promises, neither
+wrote the letter.
+
+The journalist, happy for the moment, promised himself that he would
+deceive Dinah when he should be tired of her, and would sacrifice
+everything to the requirements of that deception. To him Madame de la
+Baudraye was a fortune in herself. At the same time, he felt the yoke.
+
+Dinah, by consenting to this union, showed a generous mind and the
+power derived from self-respect. In this absolute intimacy, in which
+both lovers put off their masks, the young woman never abdicated her
+modesty, her masculine rectitude, and the strength peculiar to
+ambitious souls, which formed the basis of her character. Lousteau
+involuntarily held her in high esteem. As a Parisian, Dinah was
+superior to the most fascinating courtesan; she could be as amusing
+and as witty as Malaga; but her extensive information, her habits of
+mind, her vast reading enabled her to generalize her wit, while the
+Florines and the Schontzes exerted theirs over a very narrow circle.
+
+"There is in Dinah," said Etienne to Bixiou, "the stuff to make both a
+Ninon and a De Stael."
+
+"A woman who combines an encyclopaedia and a seraglio is very
+dangerous," replied the mocking spirit.
+
+When the expected infant became a visible fact, Madame de la Baudraye
+would be seen no more; but before shutting herself up, never to go out
+unless into the country, she was bent on being present at the first
+performance of a play by Nathan. This literary solemnity occupied the
+minds of the two thousand persons who regard themselves as
+constituting "all Paris." Dinah, who had never been at a first night's
+performance, was very full of natural curiosity. She had by this time
+arrived at such a pitch of affection for Lousteau that she gloried in
+her misconduct; she exerted a sort of savage strength to defy the
+world; she was determined to look it in the face without turning her
+head aside.
+
+She dressed herself to perfection, in a style suited to her delicate
+looks and the sickly whiteness of her face. Her pallid complexion gave
+her an expression of refinement, and her black hair in smooth bands
+enhanced her pallor. Her brilliant gray eyes looked finer than ever,
+set in dark rings. But a terribly distressing incident awaited her. By
+a very simple chance, the box given to the journalist, on the first
+tier, was next to that which Anna Grossetete had taken. The two
+intimate friends did not even bow; neither chose to acknowledge the
+other. At the end of the first act Lousteau left his seat, abandoning
+Dinah to the fire of eyes, the glare of opera-glasses; while the
+Baronne de Fontaine and the Comtesse Marie de Vandenesse, who
+accompanied her, received some of the most distinguished men of
+fashion.
+
+Dinah's solitude was all the more distressing because she had not the
+art of putting a good face to the matter by examining the company
+through her opera-glass. In vain did she try to assume a dignified and
+thoughtful attitude, and fix her eyes on vacancy; she was
+overpoweringly conscious of being the object of general attention; she
+could not disguise her discomfort, and lapsed a little into
+provincialism, displaying her handkerchief and making involuntary
+movements of which she had almost cured herself. At last, between the
+second and third acts, a man had himself admitted to Dinah's box! It
+was Monsieur de Clagny.
+
+"I am happy to see you, to tell you how much I am pleased by your
+promotion," said she.
+
+"Oh! Madame, for whom should I come to Paris----?"
+
+"What!" said she. "Have I anything to do with your appointment?"
+
+"Everything," said he. "Since you left Sancerre, it had become
+intolerable to me; I was dying--"
+
+"Your sincere friendship does me good," replied she, holding out her
+hand. "I am in a position to make much of my true friends; I now know
+their value.--I feared I must have lost your esteem, but the proof you
+have given me by this visit touches me more deeply than your ten
+years' attachment."
+
+"You are an object of curiosity to the whole house," said the lawyer.
+"Oh! my dear, is this a part for you to be playing? Could you not be
+happy and yet remain honored?--I have just heard that you are Monsieur
+Etienne Lousteau's mistress, that you live together as man and wife!--
+You have broken for ever with society; even if you should some day
+marry your lover, the time will come when you will feel the want of
+the respectability you now despise. Ought you not to be in a home of
+your own with your mother, who loves you well enough to protect you
+with her aegis?--Appearances at least would be saved."
+
+"I am in the wrong to have come here," replied she, "that is all.--I
+have bid farewell to all the advantages which the world confers on
+women who know how to reconcile happiness and the proprieties. My
+abnegation is so complete that I only wish I could clear a vast space
+about me to make a desert of my love, full of God, of /him/, and of
+myself.--We have made too many sacrifices on both sides not to be
+united--united by disgrace if you will, but indissolubly one. I am
+happy; so happy that I can love freely, my friend, and confide in you
+more than of old--for I need a friend."
+
+The lawyer was magnanimous, nay, truly great. To this declaration, in
+which Dinah's soul thrilled, he replied in heartrending tones:
+
+"I wanted to go to see you, to be sure that you were loved: I shall
+now be easy and no longer alarmed as to your future.--But will your
+lover appreciate the magnitude of your sacrifice; is there any
+gratitude in his affection?"
+
+"Come to the Rue des Martyrs and you will see!"
+
+"Yes, I will call," he replied. "I have already passed your door
+without daring to inquire for you.--You do not yet know the literary
+world. There are glorious exceptions, no doubt; but these men of
+letters drag terrible evils in their train; among these I account
+publicity as one of the greatest, for it blights everything. A woman
+may commit herself with--"
+
+"With a Public Prosecutor?" the Baronne put in with a smile.
+
+"Well!--and then after a rupture there is still something to fall back
+on; the world has known nothing. But with a more or less famous man
+the public is thoroughly informed. Why look there! What an example you
+have close at hand! You are sitting back to back with the Comtesse
+Marie Vandenesse, who was within an ace of committing the utmost folly
+for a more celebrated man than Lousteau--for Nathan--and now they do
+not even recognize each other. After going to the very edge of the
+precipice, the Countess was saved, no one knows how; she neither left
+her husband nor her house; but as a famous man was scorned, she was
+the talk of the town for a whole winter. But her husband's great
+fortune, great name, and high position, but for the admirable
+management of that true statesman--whose conduct to his wife, they
+say, was perfect--she would have been ruined; in her position no other
+woman would have remained respected as she is."
+
+"And how was Sancerre when you came away?" asked Madame de la
+Baudraye, to change the subject.
+
+"Monsieur de la Baudraye announced that your expected confinement
+after so many years made it necessary that it should take place in
+Paris, and that he had insisted on your going to be attended by the
+first physicians," replied Monsieur de Clagny, guessing what it was
+that Dinah most wanted to know. "And so, in spite of the commotion to
+which your departure gave rise, you still have your legal status."
+
+"Why!" she exclaimed, "can Monsieur de la Baudraye still hope----"
+
+"Your husband, madame, did what he always does--made a little
+calculation."
+
+The lawyer left the box when the journalist returned, bowing with
+dignity.
+
+"You are a greater hit than the piece," said Etienne to Dinah.
+
+This brief triumph brought greater happiness to the poor woman than
+she had ever known in the whole of her provincial existence; still, as
+they left the theatre she was very grave.
+
+"What ails you, my Didine?" asked Lousteau.
+
+"I am wondering how a woman succeeds in conquering the world?"
+
+"There are two ways. One is by being Madame de Stael, the other is by
+having two hundred thousand francs a year."
+
+"Society," said she, "asserts its hold on us by appealing to our
+vanity, our love of appearances.--Pooh! We will be philosophers!"
+
+
+
+That evening was the last gleam of the delusive well-being in which
+Madame de la Baudraye had lived since coming to Paris. Three days
+later she observed a cloud on Lousteau's brow as he walked round the
+little garden-plot smoking a cigar. This woman, who had acquired from
+her husband the habit and the pleasure of never owing anybody a sou,
+was informed that the household was penniless, with two quarters' rent
+owing, and on the eve, in fact, of an execution.
+
+This reality of Paris life pierced Dinah's heart like a thorn; she
+repented of having tempted Etienne into the extravagances of love. It
+is so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has
+wrecked more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets.
+Dinah, happy in seeing Etienne taking his ease, smoking a cigar after
+breakfast, his face beaming as he basked like a lizard in the
+sunshine, could not summon up courage enough to make herself the bum-
+bailiff of a magazine.
+
+It struck her that through the worthy Migeon, Pamela's father, she
+might pawn the few jewels she possessed, on which her "uncle," for she
+was learning to talk the slang of the town, advanced her nine hundred
+francs. She kept three hundred for her baby-clothes and the expenses
+of her illness, and joyfully presented the sum due to Lousteau, who
+was ploughing, furrow by furrow, or, if you will, line by line,
+through a novel for a periodical.
+
+"Dearest heart," said she, "finish your novel without making any
+sacrifice to necessity; polish the style, work up the subject.--I have
+played the fine lady too long; I am going to be the housewife and
+attend to business."
+
+For the last four months Etienne had been taking Dinah to the Cafe
+Riche to dine every day, a corner being always kept for them. The
+countrywoman was in dismay at being told that five hundred francs were
+owing for the last fortnight.
+
+"What! we have been drinking wine at six francs a bottle! A sole
+/Normande/ costs five francs!--and twenty centimes for a roll?" she
+exclaimed, as she looked through the bill Lousteau showed her.
+
+"Well, it makes very little difference to us whether we are robbed at
+a restaurant or by a cook," said Lousteau.
+
+"Henceforth, for the cost of your dinner, you shall live like a
+prince."
+
+Having induced the landlord to let her have a kitchen and two
+servants' rooms, Madame de la Baudraye wrote a few lines to her
+mother, begging her to send her some linen and a loan of a thousand
+francs. She received two trunks full of linen, some plate, and two
+thousand francs, sent by the hand of an honest and pious cook
+recommended her by her mother.
+
+Ten days after the evening at the theatre when they had met, Monsieur
+de Clagny came to call at four o'clock, after coming out of court, and
+found Madame de la Baudraye making a little cap. The sight of this
+proud and ambitious woman, whose mind was so accomplished, and who had
+queened it so well at the Chateau d'Anzy, now condescending to
+household cares and sewing for the coming infant, moved the poor
+lawyer, who had just left the bench. And as he saw the pricks on one
+of the taper fingers he had so often kissed, he understood that Madame
+de la Baudraye was not merely playing at this maternal task.
+
+In the course of this first interview the magistrate saw to the depths
+of Dinah's soul. This perspicacity in a man so much in love was a
+superhuman effort. He saw that Didine meant to be the journalist's
+guardian spirit and lead him into a nobler road; she had seen that the
+difficulties of his practical life were due to some moral defects.
+Between two beings united by love--in one so genuine, and in the other
+so well feigned--more than one confidence had been exchanged in the
+course of four months. Notwithstanding the care with which Etienne
+wrapped up his true self, a word now and then had not failed to
+enlighten Dinah as to the previous life of a man whose talents were so
+hampered by poverty, so perverted by bad examples, so thwarted by
+obstacles beyond his courage to surmount. "He will be a greater man if
+life is easy to him," said she to herself. And she strove to make him
+happy, to give him the sense of a sheltered home by dint of such
+economy and method as are familiar to provincial folks. Thus Dinah
+became a housekeeper, as she had become a poet, by the soaring of her
+soul towards the heights.
+
+"His happiness will be my absolution."
+
+These words, wrung from Madame de la Baudraye by her friend the
+lawyer, accounted for the existing state of things. The publicity of
+his triumph, flaunted by Etienne on the evening of the first
+performance, had very plainly shown the lawyer what Lousteau's purpose
+was. To Etienne, Madame de la Baudraye was, to use his own phrase, "a
+fine feather in his cap." Far from preferring the joys of a shy and
+mysterious passion, of hiding such exquisite happiness from the eyes
+of the world, he found a vulgar satisfaction in displaying the first
+woman of respectability who had ever honored him with her affection.
+
+The Judge, however, was for some time deceived by the attentions which
+any man would lavish on any woman in Madame de la Baudraye's
+situation, and Lousteau made them doubly charming by the ingratiating
+ways characteristic of men whose manners are naturally attractive.
+There are, in fact, men who have something of the monkey in them by
+nature, and to whom the assumption of the most engaging forms of
+sentiment is so easy that the actor is not detected; and Lousteau's
+natural gifts had been fully developed on the stage on which he had
+hitherto figured.
+
+Between the months of April and July, when Dinah expected her
+confinement, she discovered why it was that Lousteau had not triumphed
+over poverty; he was idle and had no power of will. The brain, to be
+sure, must obey its own laws; it recognizes neither the exigencies of
+life nor the voice of honor; a man cannot write a great book because a
+woman is dying, or to pay a discreditable debt, or to bring up a
+family; at the same time, there is no great talent without a strong
+will. These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast
+edifice of personal glory. A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a
+productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons
+always ready for battle. They conquer indolence, they deny themselves
+enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to
+their powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott,
+Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de
+Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle--in short, every man who
+delighted, governed, or led his contemporaries.
+
+A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his
+talent. Though Talent has its germ in a cultivated gift, Will means
+the incessant conquest of his instincts, of proclivities subdued and
+mortified, and difficulties of every kind heroically defeated. The
+abuse of smoking encouraged Lousteau's indolence. Tobacco, which can
+lull grief, inevitably numbs a man's energy.
+
+Then, while the cigar deteriorated him physically, criticism as a
+profession morally stultified a man so easily tempted by pleasure.
+Criticism is as fatal to the critic as seeing two sides to a question
+is to a pleader. In these professions the judgment is undermined, the
+mind loses its lucid rectitude. The writer lives by taking sides.
+Thus, we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may
+distinguish art from practical dexterity. Criticism, after the pattern
+of most contemporary leader-writers, is the expression of judgments
+formed at random in a more or less witty way, just as an advocate
+pleads in court on the most contradictory briefs. The newspaper critic
+always finds a subject to work up in the book he is discussing. Done
+after this fashion, the business is well adapted to indolent brains,
+to men devoid of the sublime faculty of imagination, or, possessed of
+it indeed, but lacking courage to cultivate it. Every play, every book
+comes to their pen as a subject, making no demand on their
+imagination, and of which they simply write a report, seriously or in
+irony, according to the mood of the moment. As to an opinion, whatever
+it may be, French wit can always justify it, being admirably ready to
+defend either side of any case. And conscience counts for so little,
+these /bravi/ have so little value for their own words, that they will
+loudly praise in the greenroom the work they tear to tatters in print.
+
+Nay, men have been known to transfer their services from one paper to
+another without being at the pains to consider that the opinions of
+the new sheet must be diametrically antagonistic to those of the old.
+Madame de la Baudraye could smile to see Lousteau with one article on
+the Legitimist side and one on the side of the new dynasty, both on
+the same occasion. She admired the maxim he preached:
+
+"We are the attorneys of public opinion."
+
+The other kind of criticism is a science. It necessitates a thorough
+comprehension of each work, a lucid insight into the tendencies of the
+age, the adoption of a system, and faith in fixed principles--that is
+to say, a scheme of jurisprudence, a summing-up, and a verdict. The
+critic is then a magistrate of ideas, the censor of his time; he
+fulfils a sacred function; while in the former case he is but an
+acrobat who turns somersaults for a living so long as he had a leg to
+stand on. Between Claude Vignon and Lousteau lay the gulf that divides
+mere dexterity from art.
+
+Dinah, whose mind was soon freed from rust, and whose intellect was by
+no means narrow, had ere long taken literary measure of her idol. She
+saw Lousteau working up to the last minute under the most
+discreditable compulsion, and scamping his work, as painters say of a
+picture from which sound technique is absent; but she would excuse him
+by saying, "He is a poet!" so anxious was she to justify him in her
+own eyes. When she thus guessed the secret of many a writer's
+existence, she also guessed that Lousteau's pen could never be trusted
+to as a resource.
+
+Then her love for him led her to take a step she would never had
+thought of for her own sake. Through her mother she tried to negotiate
+with her husband for an allowance, but without Etienne's knowledge;
+for, as she thought, it would be an offence to his delicate feelings,
+which must be considered. A few days before the end of July, Dinah
+crumbled up in her wrath the letter from her mother containing
+Monsieur de la Baudraye's ultimatum:
+
+"Madame de la Baudraye cannot need an allowance in Paris when she can
+live in perfect luxury at her Chateau of Anzy: she may return."
+
+Lousteau picked up this letter and read it.
+
+"I will avenge you!" said he to Dinah in the ominous tone that
+delights a woman when her antipathies are flattered.
+
+Five days after this Bianchon and Duriau, the famous ladies' doctor,
+were engaged at Lousteau's; for he, ever since little La Baudraye's
+reply, had been making a great display of his joy and importance over
+the advent of the infant. Monsieur de Clagny and Madame Piedefer--sent
+for in all haste were to be the godparents, for the cautious
+magistrate feared lest Lousteau should commit some compromising
+blunder. Madame de la Baudraye gave birth to a boy that might have
+filled a queen with envy who hoped for an heir-presumptive.
+
+Bianchon and Monsieur de Clagny went off to register the child at the
+Mayor's office as the son of Monsieur and Madame de la Baudraye,
+unknown to Etienne, who, on his part, rushed off to a printer's to
+have this circular set up:
+
+  /"Madame la Baronne de la Baudraye is happily delivered of a son.
+
+  "Monsieur Etienne Lousteau has the pleasure of informing you of
+  the fact.
+
+  "The mother and child are doing well."/
+
+Lousteau had already sent out sixty of these announcements when
+Monsieur de Clagny, on coming to make inquiries, happened to see the
+list of persons at Sancerre to whom Lousteau proposed to send this
+amazing notice, written below the names of the persons in Paris to
+whom it was already gone. The lawyer confiscated the list and the
+remainder of the circulars, showed them to Madame Piedefer, begging
+her on no account to allow Lousteau to carry on this atrocious jest,
+and jumped into a cab. The devoted friend then ordered from the same
+printer another announcement in the following words:
+
+  /"Madame la Baronne de la Baudraye is happily delivered of a son.
+
+  "Monsieur le Baron de la Baudraye has the honor of informing you
+  of the fact.
+
+  "Mother and child are doing well."/
+
+After seeing the proofs destroyed, the form of type, everything that
+could bear witness to the existence of the former document, Monsieur
+de Clagny set to work to intercept those that had been sent; in many
+cases he changed them at the porter's lodge, he got back thirty into
+his own hands, and at last, after three days of hard work, only one of
+the original notes existed, that, namely sent to Nathan.
+
+Five times had the lawyer called on the great man without finding him.
+By the time Monsieur de Clagny was admitted, after requesting an
+interview, the story of the announcement was known to all Paris. Some
+persons regarded it as one of those waggish calumnies, a sort of stab
+to which every reputation, even the most ephemeral, is exposed; others
+said they had read the paper and returned it to some friend of the La
+Baudraye family; a great many declaimed against the immorality of
+journalists; in short, this last remaining specimen was regarded as a
+curiosity. Florine, with whom Nathan was living, had shown it about,
+stamped in the post as paid, and addressed in Etienne's hand. So, as
+soon as the judge spoke of the announcement, Nathan began to smile.
+
+"Give up that monument of recklessness and folly?" cried he. "That
+autograph is one of those weapons which an athlete in the circus
+cannot afford to lay down. That note proves that Lousteau has no
+heart, no taste, no dignity; that he knows nothing of the world nor of
+public morality; that he insults himself when he can find no one else
+to insult.--None but the son of a provincial citizen imported from
+Sancerre to become a poet, but who is only the /bravo/ of some
+contemptible magazine, could ever have sent out such a circular
+letter, as you must allow, monsieur. This is a document indispensable
+to the archives of the age.--To-day Lousteau flatters me, to-morrow he
+may ask for my head.--Excuse me, I forgot you were a judge.
+
+"I have gone through a passion for a lady, a great lady, as far
+superior to Madame de la Baudraye as your fine feeling, monsieur, is
+superior to Lousteau's vulgar retaliation; but I would have died
+rather than utter her name. A few months of her airs and graces cost
+me a hundred thousand francs and my prospects for life; but I do not
+think the price too high!--And I have never murmured!--If a woman
+betrays the secret of her passion, it is the supreme offering of her
+love, but a man!--He must be a Lousteau!
+
+"No, I would not give up that paper for a thousand crowns."
+
+"Monsieur," said the lawyer at last, after an eloquent battle lasting
+half an hour, "I have called on fifteen or sixteen men of letters
+about this affair, and can it be that you are the only one immovable
+by an appeal of honor? It is not for Etienne Lousteau that I plead,
+but for a woman and child, both equally ignorant of the damage done to
+their fortune, their prospects, and their honor.--Who knows, monsieur,
+whether you might not some day be compelled to plead for some favor of
+justice for a friend, for some person whose honor was dearer to you
+than your own.--It might be remembered against you that you had been
+ruthless.--Can such a man as you are hesitate?" added Monsieur de
+Clagny.
+
+"I only wished you to understand the extent of the sacrifice," replied
+Nathan, giving up the letter, as he reflected on the judge's influence
+and accepted this implied bargain.
+
+When the journalist's stupid jest had been counteracted, Monsieur de
+Clagny went to give him a rating in the presence of Madame Piedefer;
+but he found Lousteau fuming with irritation.
+
+"What I did monsieur, I did with a purpose!" replied Etienne.
+"Monsieur de la Baudraye has sixty thousand francs a year and refuses
+to make his wife an allowance; I wished to make him feel that the
+child is in my power."
+
+"Yes, monsieur, I quite suspected it," replied the lawyer. "For that
+reason I readily agreed to be little Polydore's godfather, and he is
+registered as the son of the Baron and Baronne de la Baudraye; if you
+have the feelings of a father, you ought to rejoice in knowing that
+the child is heir to one of the finest entailed estates in France."
+
+"And pray, sir, is the mother to die of hunger?"
+
+"Be quite easy," said the lawyer bitterly, having dragged from
+Lousteau the expression of feeling he had so long been expecting. "I
+will undertake to transact the matter with Monsieur de la Baudraye."
+
+Monsieur de Clagny left the house with a chill at his heart.
+
+Dinah, his idol, was loved for her money. Would she not, when too
+late, have her eyes opened?
+
+"Poor woman!" said the lawyer, as he walked away. And this justice we
+will do him--for to whom should justice be done unless to a Judge?--he
+loved Dinah too sincerely to regard her degradation as a means of
+triumph one day; he was all pity and devotion; he really loved her.
+
+
+
+The care and nursing of the infant, its cries, the quiet needed for
+the mother during the first few days, and the ubiquity of Madame
+Piedefer, were so entirely adverse to literary labors, that Lousteau
+moved up to the three rooms taken on the first floor for the old
+bigot. The journalist, obliged to go to the first performances without
+Dinah, and living apart from her, found an indescribable charm in the
+use of his liberty. More than once he submitted to be taken by the arm
+and dragged off to some jollification; more than once he found himself
+at the house of a friend's mistress in the heart of bohemia. He again
+saw women brilliantly young and splendidly dressed, in whom economy
+seemed treason to their youth and power. Dinah, in spite of her
+striking beauty, after nursing her baby for three months, could not
+stand comparison with these perishable blossoms, so soon faded, but so
+showy as long as they live rooted in opulence.
+
+Home life had, nevertheless, a strong attraction for Etienne. In three
+months the mother and daughter, with the help of the cook from
+Sancerre and of little Pamela, had given the apartment a quite changed
+appearance. The journalist found his breakfast and his dinner served
+with a sort of luxury. Dinah, handsome and nicely dressed, was careful
+to anticipate her dear Etienne's wishes, and he felt himself the king
+of his home, where everything, even the baby, was subject to his
+selfishness. Dinah's affection was to be seen in every trifle,
+Lousteau could not possibly cease the entrancing deceptions of his
+unreal passion.
+
+Dinah, meanwhile, was aware of a source of ruin, both to her love and
+to the household, in the kind of life into which Lousteau had allowed
+himself to drift. At the end of ten months she weaned her baby,
+installed her mother in the upstairs rooms, and restored the family
+intimacy which indissolubly links a man and woman when the woman is
+loving and clever. One of the most striking circumstances in Benjamin
+Constant's novel, one of the explanations of Ellenore's desertion, is
+the want of daily--or, if you will, of nightly--intercourse between
+her and Adolphe. Each of the lovers has a separate home; they have
+both submitted to the world and saved appearances. Ellenore,
+repeatedly left to herself, is compelled to vast labors of affection
+to expel the thoughts of release which captivate Adolphe when absent.
+The constant exchange of glances and thoughts in domestic life gives a
+woman such power that a man needs stronger reasons for desertion than
+she will ever give him so long as she loves him.
+
+This was an entirely new phase both to Etienne and to Dinah. Dinah
+intended to be indispensable; she wanted to infuse fresh energy into
+this man, whose weakness smiled upon her, for she thought it a
+security. She found him subjects, sketched the treatment, and at a
+pinch, would write whole chapters. She revived the vitality of this
+dying talent by transfusing fresh blood into his veins; she supplied
+him with ideas and opinions. In short, she produced two books which
+were a success. More than once she saved Lousteau's self-esteem by
+dictating, correcting, or finishing his articles when he was in
+despair at his own lack of ideas. The secret of this collaboration was
+strictly preserved; Madame Piedefer knew nothing of it.
+
+This mental galvanism was rewarded by improved pay, enabling them to
+live comfortably till the end of 1838. Lousteau became used to seeing
+Dinah do his work, and he paid her--as the French people say in their
+vigorous lingo--in "monkey money," nothing for her pains. This
+expenditure in self-sacrifice becomes a treasure which generous souls
+prize, and the more she gave the more she loved Lousteau; the time
+soon came when Dinah felt that it would be too bitter a grief ever to
+give him up.
+
+But then another child was coming, and this year was a terrible trial.
+In spite of the precautions of the two women, Etienne contracted
+debts; he worked himself to death to pay them off while Dinah was laid
+up; and, knowing him as she did, she thought him heroic. But after
+this effort, appalled at having two women, two children, and two maids
+on his hands, he was incapable of the struggle to maintain a family by
+his pen when he had failed to maintain even himself. So he let things
+take their chance. Then the ruthless speculator exaggerated the farce
+of love-making at home to secure greater liberty abroad.
+
+Dinah proudly endured the burden of life without support. The one
+idea, "He loves me!" gave her superhuman strength. She worked as hard
+as the most energetic spirits of our time. At the risk of her beauty
+and health, Didine was to Lousteau what Mademoiselle Delachaux was to
+Gardane in Diderot's noble and true tale. But while sacrificing
+herself, she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress.
+She had her gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black. She stank of
+black, as Malaga said, making fun mercilessly of Lousteau.
+
+By the end of 1839, Etienne, following the example of Louis XV., had,
+by dint of gradual capitulations of conscience, come to the point of
+establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping
+money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the
+public moneys. He deceived Dinah as to his earnings. On discovering
+this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of
+jealousy. She wanted to live two lives--the life of the world and the
+life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-
+night performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded
+vanity, for her black attire rubbed off, as it were, on him, clouding
+his brow, and sometimes leading him to be quite brutal. He was really
+the woman of the two; and he had all a woman's exacting perversity; he
+would reproach Dinah for the dowdiness of her appearance, even while
+benefiting by the sacrifice, which to a mistress is so cruel--exactly
+like a woman who, after sending a man through a gutter to save her
+honor, tells him she "cannot bear dirt!" when he comes out.
+
+Dinah then found herself obliged to gather up the rather loose reins
+of power by which a clever woman drives a man devoid of will. But in
+so doing she could not fail to lose much of her moral lustre. Such
+suspicions as she betrayed drag a woman into quarrels which lead to
+disrespect, because she herself comes down from the high level on
+which she had at first placed herself. Next she made some concession;
+Lousteau was allowed to entertain several of his friends--Nathan,
+Bixiou, Blondet, Finot, whose manners, language, and intercourse were
+depraving. They tried to convince Madame de la Baudraye that her
+principles and aversions were a survival of provincial prudishness;
+and they preached the creed of woman's superiority.
+
+Before long, her jealousy put weapons into Lousteau's hands. During
+the carnival of 1840, she disguised herself to go to the balls at the
+Opera-house, and to suppers where she met courtesans, in order to keep
+an eye on all Etienne's amusements.
+
+On the day of Mid-Lent--or rather, at eight on the morning after--
+Dinah came home from the ball in her fancy dress to go to bed. She had
+gone to spy on Lousteau, who, believing her to be ill, had engaged
+himself for that evening to Fanny Beaupre. The journalist, warned by a
+friend, had behaved so as to deceive the poor woman, only too ready to
+be deceived.
+
+As she stepped out of the hired cab, Dinah met Monsieur de la
+Baudraye, to whom the porter pointed her out. The little old man took
+his wife by the arm, saying, in an icy tone:
+
+"So this is you, madame!"
+
+This sudden advent of conjugal authority, before which she felt
+herself so small, and, above all, these words, almost froze the heart
+of the unhappy woman caught in the costume of a /debardeur/. To escape
+Etienne's eye the more effectually, she had chosen a dress he was not
+likely to detect her in. She took advantage of the mask she still had
+on to escape without replying, changed her dress, and went up to her
+mother's rooms, where she found her husband waiting for her. In spite
+of her assumed dignity, she blushed in the old man's presence.
+
+"What do you want of me, monsieur?" she asked. "Are we not separated
+forever?"
+
+"Actually, yes," said Monsieur de la Baudraye. "Legally, no."
+
+Madame Piedefer was telegraphing signals to her daughter, which Dinah
+presently observed and understood.
+
+"Nothing could have brought you here but your own interests," she
+said, in a bitter tone.
+
+"/Our/ interests," said the little man coldly, "for we have two
+children.--Your Uncle Silas Piedefer is dead, at New York, where,
+after having made and lost several fortunes in various parts of the
+world, he has finally left some seven or eight hundred thousand francs
+--they say twelve--but there is stock-in-trade to be sold. I am the
+chief in our common interests, and act for you."
+
+"Oh!" cried Dinah, "in everything that relates to business, I trust no
+one but Monsieur de Clagny. He knows the law, come to terms with him;
+what he does, will be done right."
+
+"I have no occasion for Monsieur de Clagny," answered Monsieur de la
+Baudraye, "to take my children from you--"
+
+"Your children!" exclaimed Dinah. "Your children, to whom you have not
+sent a sou! /Your/ children!" She burst into a loud shout of laughter;
+but Monsieur de la Baudraye's unmoved coolness threw ice on the
+explosion.
+
+"Your mother has just brought them to show me," he went on. "They are
+charming boys. I do not intend to part from them. I shall take them to
+our house at Anzy, if it were only to save them from seeing their
+mother disguised like a--"
+
+"Silence!" said Madame de la Baudraye imperatively. "What do you want
+of me that brought you here?"
+
+"A power of attorney to receive our Uncle Silas' property."
+
+Dinah took a pen, wrote two lines to Monsieur de Clagny, and desired
+her husband to call again in the afternoon.
+
+At five o'clock, Monsieur de Clagny--who had been promoted to the post
+of Attorney-General--enlightened Madame de la Baudraye as to her
+position; still, he undertook to arrange everything by a bargain with
+the old fellow, whose visit had been prompted by avarice alone.
+Monsieur de la Baudraye, to whom his wife's power of attorney was
+indispensable to enable him to deal with the business as he wished,
+purchased it by certain concessions. In the first place, he undertook
+to allow her ten thousand francs a year so long as she found it
+convenient--so the document was worded--to reside in Paris; the
+children, each on attaining the age of six, were to be placed in
+Monsieur de la Baudraye's keeping. Finally, the lawyer extracted the
+payment of the allowance in advance.
+
+Little La Baudraye, who came jauntily enough to say good-bye to his
+wife and /his/ children, appeared in a white india-rubber overcoat. He
+was so firm on his feet, and so exactly like the La Baudraye of 1836,
+that Dinah despaired of ever burying the dreadful little dwarf. From
+the garden, where he was smoking a cigar, the journalist could watch
+Monsieur de la Baudraye for so long as it took the little reptile to
+cross the forecourt, but that was enough for Lousteau; it was plain to
+him that the little man had intended to wreck every hope of his dying
+that his wife might have conceived.
+
+This short scene made a considerable change in the writer's secret
+scheming. As he smoked a second cigar, he seriously reviewed the
+position.
+
+His life with Madame de la Baudraye had hitherto cost him quite as
+much as it had cost her. To use the language of business, the two
+sides of the account balanced, and they could, if necessary, cry
+quits. Considering how small his income was, and how hardly he earned
+it, Lousteau regarded himself, morally speaking, as the creditor. It
+was, no doubt, a favorable moment for throwing the woman over. Tired
+at the end of three years of playing a comedy which never can become a
+habit, he was perpetually concealing his weariness; and this fellow,
+who was accustomed to disguise none of his feelings, compelled himself
+to wear a smile at home like that of a debtor in the presence of his
+creditor. This compulsion was every day more intolerable.
+
+Hitherto the immense advantages he foresaw in the future had given him
+strength; but when he saw Monsieur de la Baudraye embark for the
+United States, as briskly as if it were to go down to Rouen in a
+steamboat, he ceased to believe in the future.
+
+He went in from the garden to the pretty drawing-room, where Dinah had
+just taken leave of her husband.
+
+"Etienne," said Madame de la Baudraye, "do you know what my lord and
+master has proposed to me? In the event of my wishing to return to
+live at Anzy during his absence, he has left his orders, and he hopes
+that my mother's good advice will weigh with me, and that I shall go
+back there with my children."
+
+"It is very good advice," replied Lousteau drily, knowing the
+passionate disclaimer that Dinah expected, and indeed begged for with
+her eyes.
+
+The tone, the words, the cold look, all hit the hapless woman so hard,
+who lived only in her love, that two large tears trickled slowly down
+her cheeks, while she did not speak a word, and Lousteau only saw them
+when she took out her handkerchief to wipe away these two beads of
+anguish.
+
+"What is it, Didine?" he asked, touched to the heart by this excessive
+sensibility.
+
+"Just as I was priding myself on having won our freedom," said she--
+"at the cost of my fortune--by selling--what is most precious to a
+mother's heart--selling my children!--for he is to have them from the
+age of six--and I cannot see them without going to Sancerre!--and that
+is torture!--Ah, dear God! What have I done----?"
+
+Lousteau knelt down by her and kissed her hands with a lavish display
+of coaxing and petting.
+
+"You do not understand me," said he. "I blame myself, for I am not
+worth such sacrifices, dear angel. I am, in a literary sense, a quite
+second-rate man. If the day comes when I can no longer cut a figure at
+the bottom of the newspaper, the editors will let me lie, like an old
+shoe flung into the rubbish heap. Remember, we tight-rope dancers have
+no retiring pension! The State would have too many clever men on its
+hands if it started on such a career of beneficence. I am forty-two,
+and I am as idle as a marmot. I feel it--I know it"--and he took her
+by the hand--"my love can only be fatal to you.
+
+"As you know, at two-and-twenty I lived on Florine; but what is
+excusable in a youth, what then seems smart and charming, is a
+disgrace to a man of forty. Hitherto we have shared the burden of
+existence, and it has not been lovely for this year and half. Out of
+devotion to me you wear nothing but black, and that does me no
+credit."--Dinah gave one of those magnanimous shrugs which are worth
+all the words ever spoken.--"Yes," Etienne went on, "I know you
+sacrifice everything to my whims, even your beauty. And I, with a
+heart worn out in past struggles, a soul full of dark presentiments as
+to the future, I cannot repay your exquisite love with an equal
+affection. We were very happy--without a cloud--for a long time.--
+Well, then, I cannot bear to see so sweet a poem end badly. Am I
+wrong?"
+
+Madame de la Baudraye loved Etienne so truly, that this prudence,
+worthy of de Clagny, gratified her and stanched her tears.
+
+"He loves me for myself alone!" thought she, looking at him with
+smiling eyes.
+
+After four years of intimacy, this woman's love now combined every
+shade of affection which our powers of analysis can discern, and which
+modern society has created; one of the most remarkable men of our age,
+whose death is a recent loss to the world of letters, Beyle
+(Stendhal), was the first to delineate them to perfection.
+
+Lousteau could produce in Dinah the acute agitation which may be
+compared to magnetism, that upsets every power of the mind and body,
+and overcomes every instinct of resistance in a woman. A look from
+him, or his hand laid on hers, reduced her to implicit obedience. A
+kind word or a smile wreathed the poor woman's soul with flowers; a
+fond look elated, a cold look depressed her. When she walked, taking
+his arm and keeping step with him in the street or on the boulevard,
+she was so entirely absorbed in him that she lost all sense of
+herself. Fascinated by this fellow's wit, magnetized by his airs, his
+vices were but trivial defects in her eyes. She loved the puffs of
+cigar smoke that the wind brought into her room from the garden; she
+went to inhale them, and made no wry faces, hiding herself to enjoy
+them. She hated the publisher or the newspaper editor who refused
+Lousteau money on the ground of the enormous advances he had had
+already. She deluded herself so far as to believe that her bohemian
+was writing a novel, for which the payment was to come, instead of
+working off a debt long since incurred.
+
+This, no doubt, is true love, and includes every mode of loving; the
+love of the heart and of the head--passion, caprice, and taste--to
+accept Beyle's definitions. Didine loved him so wholly, that in
+certain moments when her critical judgment, just by nature, and
+constantly exercised since she had lived in Paris, compelled her to
+read to the bottom of Lousteau's soul, sense was still too much for
+reason, and suggested excuses.
+
+"And what am I?" she replied. "A woman who has put herself outside the
+pale. Since I have sacrificed all a woman's honor, why should you not
+sacrifice to me some of a man's honor? Do we not live outside the
+limits of social conventionality? Why not accept from me what Nathan
+can accept from Florine? We will square accounts when we part, and
+only death can part us--you know. My happiness is your honor, Etienne,
+as my constancy and your happiness are mine. If I fail to make you
+happy, all is at an end. If I cause you a pang, condemn me.
+
+"Our debts are paid; we have ten thousand francs a year, and between
+us we can certainly make eight thousand francs a year--I will write
+theatrical articles.--With fifteen hundred francs a month we shall be
+as rich as Rothschild.--Be quite easy. I will have some lovely
+dresses, and give you every day some gratified vanity, as on the first
+night of Nathan's play--"
+
+"And what about your mother, who goes to Mass every day, and wants to
+bring a priest to the house and make you give up this way of life?"
+
+"Every one has a pet vice. You smoke, she preaches at me, poor woman!
+But she takes great care of the children, she takes them out, she is
+absolutely devoted, and idolizes me. Would you hinder her from
+crying?"
+
+"What will be thought of me?"
+
+"But we do not live for the world!" cried she, raising Etienne and
+making him sit by her. "Besides, we shall be married some day--we have
+the risks of a sea voyage----"
+
+"I never thought of that," said Lousteau simply; and he added to
+himself, "Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back
+again."
+
+
+
+From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first
+nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris.
+Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude
+of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la
+Baudraye.
+
+"Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from
+Dinah! But no one ever can!" said he. "She loves me enough to throw
+herself out of the window if I told her."
+
+The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against
+Dinah's jealousy when he accepted an invitation. And then he was
+shamelessly unfaithful. Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at
+seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have
+been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her
+original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to
+tell her--"You are betrayed," and she only replied, "I know it."
+
+The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a
+word.
+
+"Do you still love me?" she asked.
+
+"I would lose my soul for you!" he exclaimed, starting to his feet.
+
+The hapless man's eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf,
+his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he
+was so blessed as to be accepted as his idol's avenger, and this poor
+joy filled him with rapture.
+
+"Why are you so startled?" said she, making him sit down again. "That
+is how I love him."
+
+The lawyer understood this argument /ad hominem/. And there were tears
+in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!
+
+Lousteau's satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations,
+had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains
+of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where those
+who love dwell and dream. These grains of sand, which grow to be
+pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big as
+rocks. Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood
+Lousteau's character.
+
+"He is," she said to her mother, "a poet, defenceless against
+disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too
+prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to
+hate. What would become of him without me? I hindered his marriage; he
+has no prospects. His talent would perish in privations."
+
+"Oh, my Dinah!" Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, "what a hell you live
+in! What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?"
+
+"I will be a mother to him!" she had replied.
+
+There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision
+till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor. We accept
+compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to
+play prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had
+been torturing Dinah.
+
+"To preserve my love I will be all that Madame de Pompadour was to
+preserve her power," said she to herself when Monsieur de Clagny had
+left her. And this phrase sufficiently proves that her love was
+becoming a burden to her, and would presently be a toil rather than a
+pleasure.
+
+The part now assumed by Dinah was horribly painful, and Lousteau made
+it no easier to play. When he wanted to go out after dinner he would
+perform the tenderest little farces of affection, and address Dinah in
+words full of devotion; he would take her by the chain, and when he
+had bruised her with it, even while he hurt her, the lordly ingrate
+would say, "Did I wound you?"
+
+These false caresses and deceptions had degrading consequences for
+Dinah, who believed in a revival of his love. The mother, alas, gave
+way to the mistress with shameful readiness. She felt herself a mere
+plaything in the man's hands, and at last she confessed to herself:
+
+"Well, then, I will be his plaything!" finding joy in it--the rapture
+of damnation.
+
+When this woman, of a really manly spirit, pictured herself as living
+in solitude, she felt her courage fail. She preferred the anticipated
+and inevitable miseries of this fierce intimacy to the absence of the
+joys, which were all the more exquisite because they arose from the
+midst of remorse, of terrible struggles with herself, of a /No/
+persuaded to be /Yes/. At every moment she seemed to come across the
+pool of bitter water found in a desert, and drunk with greater relish
+than the traveler would find in sipping the finest wines at a prince's
+table.
+
+When Dinah wondered to herself at midnight:
+
+"Will he come home, or will he not?" she was not alive again till she
+heard the familiar sound of Lousteau's boots, and his well-known ring
+at the bell.
+
+She would often try to restrain him by giving him pleasure; she would
+hope to be a match for her rivals, and leave them no hold on that
+agitated heart. How many times a day would she rehearse the tragedy of
+/Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne/, saying to herself, "To-morrow we
+part." And how often would a word, a look, a kiss full of apparently
+artless feeling, bring her back to the depths of her love!
+
+It was terrible. More than once had she meditated suicide as she paced
+the little town garden where a few pale flowers bloomed. In fact, she
+had not yet exhausted the vast treasure of devotion and love which a
+loving woman bears in her heart.
+
+The romance of /Adolphe/ was her Bible, her study, for above all else
+she would not be an Ellenore. She allowed herself no tears, she
+avoided all the bitterness so cleverly described by the critic to whom
+we owe an analysis of this striking work; whose comments indeed seemed
+to Dinah almost superior to the book. And she read again and again
+this fine essay by the only real critic who has written in the /Revue
+des Deux Mondes/, an article now printed at the beginning of the new
+edition of /Adolphe/.
+
+"No," she would say to herself, as she repeated the author's fateful
+words, "no, I will not 'give my requests the form of an order,' I will
+not 'fly to tears as a means of revenge,' I will not 'condemn the
+things I once approved without reservation,' I will not 'dog his
+footsteps with a prying eye'; if he plays truant, he shall not on his
+return 'see a scornful lip, whose kiss is an unanswerable command.'
+No, 'my silence shall not be a reproach nor my first word a quarrel.'
+--I will not be like every other woman!" she went on, laying on her
+table the little yellow paper volume which had already attracted
+Lousteau's remark, "What! are you studying /Adolphe/?"--"If for one
+day only he should recognize my merits and say, 'That victim never
+uttered a cry!'--it will be all I ask. And besides, the others only
+have him for an hour; I have him for life!"
+
+Thinking himself justified by his private tribunal in punishing his
+wife, Monsieur de la Baudraye robbed her to achieve his cherished
+enterprise of reclaiming three thousand acres of moorland, to which he
+had devoted himself ever since 1836, living like a mouse. He
+manipulated the property left by Monsieur Silas Piedefer so
+ingeniously, that he contrived to reduce the proved value to eight
+hundred thousand francs, while pocketing twelve hundred thousand. He
+did not announce his return; but while his wife was enduring
+unspeakable woes, he was building farms, digging trenches, and
+ploughing rough ground with a courage that ranked him among the most
+remarkable agriculturists of the province.
+
+The four hundred thousand francs he had filched from his wife were
+spent in three years on this undertaking, and the estate of Anzy was
+expected to return seventy-two thousand francs a year of net profits
+after the taxes were paid. The eight hundred thousand he invested at
+four and a half per cent in the funds, buying at eighty francs, at the
+time of the financial crisis brought about by the Ministry of the
+First of March, as it was called. By thus securing to his wife an
+income of forty-eight thousand francs he considered himself no longer
+in her debt. Could he not restore the odd twelve hundred thousand as
+soon as the four and a half per cents had risen above a hundred? He
+was now the greatest man in Sancerre, with the exception of one--the
+richest proprietor in France--whose rival he considered himself. He
+saw himself with an income of a hundred and forty thousand francs, of
+which ninety thousand formed the revenue from the lands he had
+entailed. Having calculated that besides this net income he paid ten
+thousand francs in taxes, three thousand in working expenses, ten
+thousand to his wife, and twelve hundred to his mother-in-law, he
+would say in the literary circles of Sancerre:
+
+"I am reputed miserly, and said to spend nothing; but my outlay
+amounts to twenty-six thousand five hundred francs a year. And I have
+still to pay for the education of my two children! I daresay it is not
+a pleasing fact to the Milauds of Nevers, but the second house of La
+Baudraye may yet have as noble a center as the first.--I shall most
+likely go to Paris and petition the King of the French to grant me the
+title of Count--Monsieur Roy is a Count--and my wife would be pleased
+to be Madame la Comtesse."
+
+And this was said with such splendid coolness that no one would have
+dared to laugh at the little man. Only Monsieur Boirouge, the
+Presiding Judge, remarked:
+
+"In your place, I should not be happy unless I had a daughter."
+
+"Well, I shall go to Paris before long----" said the Baron.
+
+In the early part of 1842 Madame de la Baudraye, feeling that she was
+to Lousteau no more than a reserve in the background, had again
+sacrificed herself absolutely to secure his comfort; she had resumed
+her black raiment, but now it was in sign of mourning, for her
+pleasure was turning to remorse. She was too often put to shame not to
+feel the weight of the chain, and her mother found her sunk in those
+moods of meditation into which visions of the future cast unhappy
+souls in a sort of torpor.
+
+Madame Piedefer, by the advice of her spiritual director, was on the
+watch for the moment of exhaustion, which the priest told her would
+inevitably supervene, and then she pleaded in behalf of the children.
+She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live
+apart, not asking her to give him up. In real life these violent
+situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly
+contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically--in disgust, in
+the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of
+habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the
+interest which is traditionally ascribed to women. So, when common
+sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest--all the mixed
+elements which, since the Restoration, have been dignified by the mane
+of Public Morals, out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic
+religion--where this is seconded by a sense of insults a little too
+offensive; when the fatigue of constant self-sacrifice has almost
+reached the point of exhaustion; and when, under these circumstances,
+a too cruel blow--one of those mean acts which a man never lets a
+woman know of unless he believes himself to be her assured master--
+puts the crowning touch to her revulsion and disenchantment, the
+moment has come for the intervention of the friend who undertakes the
+cure. Madame Piedefer had no great difficulty now in removing the film
+from her daughter's eyes.
+
+She sent for Monsieur de Clagny, who completed the work by assuring
+Madame de la Baudraye that if she would give up Etienne, her husband
+would allow her to keep the children and to live in Paris, and would
+restore her to the command of her own fortune.
+
+"And what a life you are leading!" said he. "With care and judgment,
+and the support of some pious and charitable persons, you may have a
+salon and conquer a position. Paris is not Sancerre."
+
+Dinah left it to Monsieur de Clagny to negotiate a reconciliation with
+the old man.
+
+Monsieur de la Baudraye had sold his wine well, he had sold his wool,
+he had felled his timber, and, without telling his wife, he had come
+to Paris to invest two hundred thousand francs in the purchase of a
+delightful residence in the Rue de l'Arcade, that was being sold in
+liquidation of an aristocratic House that was in difficulties. He had
+been a member of the Council for the Department since 1826, and now,
+paying ten thousand francs in taxes, he was doubly qualified for a
+peerage under the conditions of the new legislation.
+
+Some time before the elections of 1842 he had put himself forward as
+candidate unless he were meanwhile called to the Upper House as Peer
+of France. At the same time, he asked for the title of Count, and for
+promotion to the higher grade of the Legion of Honor. In the matter of
+the elections, the dynastic nominations; now, in the event of Monsieur
+de la Baudraye being won over to the Government, Sancerre would be
+more than ever a rotten borough of royalism. Monsieur de Clagny, whose
+talents and modesty were more and more highly appreciated by the
+authorities, gave Monsieur de la Baudraye his support; he pointed out
+that by raising this enterprising agriculturist to the peerage, a
+guarantee would be offered to such important undertakings.
+
+Monsieur de la Baudraye, then, a Count, a Peer of France, and
+Commander of the Legion of Honor, was vain enough to wish to cut a
+figure with a wife and handsomely appointed house.--"He wanted to
+enjoy life," he said.
+
+He therefore addressed a letter to his wife, dictated by Monsieur de
+Clagny, begging her to live under his roof and to furnish the house,
+giving play to the taste of which the evidences, he said, had charmed
+him at the Chateau d'Anzy. The newly made Count pointed out to his
+wife that while the interests of their property forbade his leaving
+Sancerre, the education of their boys required her presence in Paris.
+The accommodating husband desired Monsieur de Clagny to place sixty
+thousand francs at the disposal of Madame la Comtesse for the interior
+decoration of their mansion, requesting that she would have a marble
+tablet inserted over the gateway with the inscription: /Hotel de la
+Baudraye/.
+
+He then accounted to his wife for the money derived from the estate of
+Silas Piedefer, told her of the investment at four and a half per cent
+of the eight hundred thousand francs he had brought from New York, and
+allowed her that income for her expenses, including the education of
+the children. As he would be compelled to stay in Paris during some
+part of the session of the House of Peers, he requested his wife to
+reserve for him a little suite of rooms in an /entresol/ over the
+kitchens.
+
+"Bless me! why, he is growing young again--a gentleman!--a magnifico!
+--What will he become next? It is quite alarming," said Madame de la
+Baudraye.
+
+"He now fulfils all your wishes at the age of twenty," replied the
+lawyer.
+
+The comparison of her future prospects with her present position was
+unendurable to Dinah. Only the day before, Anna de Fontaine had turned
+her head away in order to avoid seeing her bosom friend at the
+Chamarolles' school.
+
+"I am a countess," said Dinah to herself. "I shall have the peer's
+blue hammer-cloth on my carriage, and the leaders of the literary
+world in my drawing-room--and I will look at her!"--And it was this
+little triumph that told with all its weight at the moment of her
+rehabilitation, as the world's contempt had of old weighed on her
+happiness.
+
+
+
+One fine day, in May 1842, Madame de la Baudraye paid all her little
+household debts and left a thousand crowns on top of the packet of
+receipted bills. After sending her mother and the children away to the
+Hotel de la Baudraye, she awaited Lousteau, dressed ready to leave the
+house. When the deposed king of her heart came into dinner, she said:
+
+"I have upset the pot, my dear. Madame de la Baudraye requests the
+pleasure of your company at the /Rocher de Cancale/."
+
+She carried off Lousteau, quite bewildered by the light and easy
+manners assumed by the woman who till that morning has been the slave
+of his least whim, for she too had been acting a farce for two months
+past.
+
+"Madame de la Baudraye is figged out as if for a first night," said he
+--/une premiere/, the slang abbreviation for a first performance.
+
+"Do not forget the respect you owe to Madame de la Baudraye," said
+Dinah gravely. "I do not mean to understand such a word as /figged
+out/."
+
+"Didine a rebel!" said he, putting his arm round her waist.
+
+"There is no such person as Didine; you have killed her, my dear," she
+replied, releasing herself. "I am taking you to the first performance
+of /Madame la Comtesse de la Baudraye/."
+
+"It is true, then, that our insect is a peer of France?"
+
+"The nomination is to be gazetted in this evening's /Moniteur/, as I
+am told by Monsieur de Clagny, who is promoted to the Court of
+Appeal."
+
+"Well, it is quite right," said the journalist. "The entomology of
+society ought to be represented in the Upper House."
+
+"My friend, we are parting for ever," said Madame de la Baudraye,
+trying to control the trembling of her voice. "I have dismissed the
+two servants. When you go in, you will find the house in order, and no
+debts. I shall always feel a mother's affection for you, but in
+secret. Let us part calmly, without a fuss, like decent people.
+
+"Have you had a fault to find with my conduct during the past six
+years?"
+
+"None, but that you have spoiled my life, and wrecked my prospects,"
+said he in a hard tone. "You have read Benjamin Constant's book very
+diligently; you have even studied the last critique on it; but you
+have read with a woman's eyes. Though you have one of those superior
+intellects which would make a fortune of a poet, you have never dared
+to take the man's point of view.
+
+"That book, my dear, is of both sexes.--We agreed that books were male
+or female, dark or fair. In /Adolphe/ women see nothing but Ellenore;
+young men see only Adolphe; men of experience see Ellenore and
+Adolphe; political men see the whole of social existence. You did not
+think it necessary to read the soul of Adolphe--any more than your
+critic indeed, who saw only Ellenore. What kills that poor fellow, my
+dear, is that he has sacrificed his future for a woman; that he never
+can be what he might have been--an ambassador, a minister, a
+chamberlain, a poet--and rich. He gives up six years of his energy at
+that stage of his life when a man is ready to submit to the hardships
+of any apprenticeship--to a petticoat, which he outstrips in the
+career of ingratitude, for the woman who has thrown over her first
+lover is certain sooner or later to desert the second. Adolphe is, in
+fact, a tow-haired German, who has not spirit enough to be false to
+Ellenore. There are Adolphes who spare their Ellenores all ignominious
+quarreling and reproaches, who say to themselves, 'I will not talk of
+what I have sacrificed; I will not for ever be showing the stump of my
+wrist to let that incarnate selfishness I have made my queen,' as
+Ramorny does in /The Fair Maid of Perth/. But men like that, my dear,
+get cast aside.
+
+"Adolphe is a man of birth, an aristocratic nature, who wants to get
+back into the highroad to honors and recover his social birthright,
+his blighted position.--You, at this moment, are playing both parts.
+You are suffering from the pangs of having lost your position, and
+think yourself justified in throwing over a hapless lover whose
+misfortune it has been that he fancied you so far superior as to
+understand that, though a man's heart ought to be true, his sex may be
+allowed to indulge its caprices."
+
+"And do you suppose that I shall not make it my business to restore to
+you all you have lost by me? Be quite easy," said Madame de la
+Baudraye, astounded by this attack. "Your Ellenore is not dying; and
+if God gives her life, if you amend your ways, if you give up
+courtesans and actresses, we will find you a better match than a
+Felicie Cardot."
+
+The two lovers were sullen. Lousteau affected dejection, he aimed at
+appearing hard and cold; while Dinah, really distressed, listened to
+the reproaches of her heart.
+
+"Why," said Lousteau presently, "why not end as we ought to have begun
+--hide our love from all eyes, and see each other in secret?"
+
+"Never!" cried the new-made Countess, with an icy look. "Do you not
+comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures? Our feelings
+seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on
+earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being. There
+are some feeble, mean natures which may receive an endless number of
+wounds and live on; but there are some more highly-tempered souls
+which snap at last under repeated blows. You have--"
+
+"Oh! enough!" cried he. "No more copy! Your dissertation is
+unnecessary, since you can justify yourself by merely saying--'I have
+ceased to love!'"
+
+"What!" she exclaimed in bewilderment. "Is it I who have ceased to
+love?"
+
+"Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more
+vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner--"
+
+"I desert!----" cried she, clasping her hands.
+
+"Have not you yourself just said 'Never'?"
+
+"Well, then, yes! /Never/," she repeated vehemently.
+
+This final /Never/, spoken in the fear of falling once more under
+Lousteau's influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of
+his power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn.
+
+The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and
+unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere,
+the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could
+hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of
+tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had
+been dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l'Arcade,
+scolding herself and thinking herself a brute.
+
+
+
+Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed
+herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more
+than her husband had anticipated.
+
+The fatal accident which in 1842 deprived the House of Orleans of the
+heir-presumptive having necessitated a meeting of the Chambers in
+August of that year, little La Baudraye came to present his titles to
+the Upper House sooner than he had expected, and then saw what his
+wife had done. He was so much delighted, that he paid the thirty
+thousand francs without a word, just as he had formerly paid eight
+thousand for decorating La Baudraye.
+
+On his return from the Luxembourg, where he had been presented
+according to custom by two of his peers--the Baron de Nucingen and the
+Marquis de Montriveau--the new Count met the old Duc de Chaulieu, a
+former creditor, walking along, umbrella in hand, while he himself sat
+perched in a low chaise on which his coat-of-arms was resplendent,
+with the motto, /Deo sic patet fides et hominibus/. This contrast
+filled his heart with a large draught of the balm on which the middle
+class has been getting drunk ever since 1840.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye was shocked to see her husband improved and
+looking better than on the day of his marriage. The little dwarf, full
+of rapturous delight, at sixty-four triumphed in the life which had so
+long been denied him; in the family, which his handsome cousin Milaud
+of Nevers had declared he would never have; and in his wife--who had
+asked Monsieur and Madame de Clagny to dinner to meet the cure of the
+parish and his two sponsors to the Chamber of Peers. He petted the
+children with fatuous delight.
+
+The handsome display on the table met with his approval.
+
+"These are the fleeces of the Berry sheep," said he, showing Monsieur
+de Nucingen the dish-covers surmounted by his newly-won coronet. "They
+are of silver, you see!"
+
+Though consumed by melancholy, which she concealed with the
+determination of a really superior woman, Dinah was charming, witty,
+and above all, young again in her court mourning.
+
+"You might declare," cried La Baudraye to Monsieur de Nucingen with a
+wave of his hand to his wife, "that the Countess was not yet thirty."
+
+"Ah, ha! Matame is a voman of dirty!" replied the baron, who was prone
+to time-honored remarks, which he took to be the small change of
+conversation.
+
+"In every sense of the words," replied the Countess. "I am, in fact,
+five-and-thirty, and mean to set up a little passion--"
+
+"Oh, yes, my wife ruins me in curiosities and china images--"
+
+"She started that mania at an early age," said the Marquis de
+Montriveau with a smile.
+
+"Yes," said La Baudraye, with a cold stare at the Marquis, whom he had
+known at Bourges, "you know that in '25, '26, and '27, she picked a
+million francs' worth of treasures. Anzy is a perfect museum."
+
+"What a cool hand!" thought Monsieur de Clagny, as he saw this little
+country miser quite on the level of his new position.
+
+But misers have savings of all kinds ready for use.
+
+On the day after the vote on the Regency had passed the Chambers, the
+little Count went back to Sancerre for the vintage and resumed his old
+habits.
+
+In the course of that winter, the Comtesse de la Baudraye, with the
+support of the Attorney-General to the Court of Appeals, tried to form
+a little circle. Of course, she had an "at home" day, she made a
+selection among men of mark, receiving none but those of serious
+purpose and ripe years. She tried to amuse herself by going to the
+Opera, French and Italian. Twice a week she appeared there with her
+mother and Madame de Clagny, who was made by her husband to visit
+Dinah. Still, in spite of her cleverness, her charming manners, her
+fashionable stylishness, she was never really happy but with her
+children, on whom she lavished all her disappointed affection.
+
+Worthy Monsieur de Clagny tried to recruit women for the Countess'
+circle, and he succeeded; but he was more successful among the
+advocates of piety than the women of fashion.
+
+"And they bore her!" said he to himself with horror, as he saw his
+idol matured by grief, pale from remorse, and then, in all the
+splendor of recovered beauty, restored by a life of luxury and care
+for her boys. This devoted friend, encouraged in his efforts by her
+mother and by the cure was full of expedient. Every Wednesday he
+introduced some celebrity from Germany, England, Italy, or Prussia to
+his dear Countess; he spoke of her as a quite exceptional woman to
+people to whom she hardly addressed two words; but she listened to
+them with such deep attention that they went away fully convinced of
+her superiority. In Paris, Dinah conquered by silence, as at Sancerre
+she had conquered by loquacity. Now and then, some smart saying about
+affairs, or sarcasm on an absurdity, betrayed a woman accustomed to
+deal with ideas--the woman who, four years since, had given new life
+to Lousteau's articles.
+
+This phase was to the poor lawyer's hapless passion like the late
+season known as the Indian summer after a sunless year. He affected to
+be older than he was, to have the right to befriend Dinah without
+doing her an injury, and kept himself at a distance as though he were
+young, handsome, and compromising, like a man who has happiness to
+conceal. He tried to keep his little attentions a profound secret, and
+the trifling gifts which Dinah showed to every one; he endeavored to
+suggest a dangerous meaning for his little services.
+
+"He plays at passion," said the Countess, laughing. She made fun of
+Monsieur de Clagny to his face, and the lawyer said, "She notices me."
+
+"I impress that poor man so deeply," said she to her mother, laughing,
+"that if I would say Yes, I believe he would say No."
+
+One evening Monsieur de Clagny and his wife were taking his dear
+Countess home from the theatre, and she was deeply pensive. They had
+been to the first performance of Leon Gozlan's first play, /La Main
+Droite et la Main Gauche/ (The Right Hand and the Left).
+
+"What are you thinking about?" asked the lawyer, alarmed at his idol's
+dejection.
+
+This deep and persistent melancholy, though disguised by the Countess,
+was a perilous malady for which Monsieur de Clagny knew no remedy; for
+true love is often clumsy, especially when it is not reciprocated.
+True love takes its expression from the character. Now, this good man
+loved after the fashion of Alceste, when Madame de la Baudraye wanted
+to be loved after the manner of Philinte. The meaner side of love can
+never get on with the Misanthrope's loyalty. Thus, Dinah had taken
+care never to open her heart to this man. How could she confess to him
+that she sometimes regretted the slough she had left?
+
+She felt a void in this fashionable life; she had no one for whom to
+dress, or whom to tell of her successes and triumphs. Sometimes the
+memory of her wretchedness came to her, mingled with memories of
+consuming joys. She would hate Lousteau for not taking any pains to
+follow her; she would have liked to get tender or furious letters from
+him.
+
+Dinah made no reply, so Monsieur de Clagny repeated the question,
+taking the Countess' hand and pressing it between his own with devout
+respect.
+
+"Will you have the right hand or the left?" said she, smiling.
+
+"The left," said he, "for I suppose you mean the truth or a fib."
+
+"Well, then, I saw him," she said, speaking into the lawyer's ear.
+"And as I saw him looking so sad, so out of heart, I said to myself,
+Has he a cigar? Has he any money?"
+
+"If you wish for the truth, I can tell it you," said the lawyer. "He
+is living as a husband with Fanny Beaupre. You have forced me to tell
+you this secret; I should never have told you, for you might have
+suspected me perhaps of an ungenerous motive."
+
+Madame de la Baudraye grasped his hand.
+
+"Your husband," said she to her chaperon, "is one of the rarest souls!
+--Ah! Why----"
+
+She shrank into her corner, looking out of the window, but she did not
+finish her sentence, of which the lawyer could guess the end: "Why had
+not Lousteau a little of your husband's generosity of heart?"
+
+This information served, however, to cure Dinah of her melancholy; she
+threw herself into the whirl of fashion. She wished for success, and
+she achieved it; still, she did not make much way with women, and
+found it difficult to get introductions.
+
+In the month of March, Madame Piedefer's friends the priests and
+Monsieur de Clagny made a fine stroke by getting Madame de la Baudraye
+appointed receiver of subscriptions for the great charitable work
+founded by Madame de Carcado. Then she was commissioned to collect
+from the Royal Family their donations for the benefit of the sufferers
+from the earthquake at Guadeloupe. The Marquise d'Espard, to whom
+Monsieur de Canalis read the list of ladies thus appointed, one
+evening at the Opera, said, on hearing that of the Countess:
+
+"I have lived a long time in the world, and I can remember nothing
+finer than the manoeuvres undertaken for the rehabilitation of Madame
+de la Baudraye."
+
+
+
+In the early spring, which, by some whim of our planets, smiled on
+Paris in the first week of March in 1843, making the Champs-Elysees
+green and leafy before Longchamp, Fanny Beaupre's attache had seen
+Madame de la Baudraye several times without being seen by her. More
+than once he was stung to the heart by one of those promptings of
+jealousy and envy familiar to those who are born and bred provincials,
+when he beheld his former mistress comfortably ensconced in a handsome
+carriage, well dressed, with dreamy eyes, and his two little boys, one
+at each window. He accused himself with all the more virulence because
+he was waging war with the sharpest poverty of all--poverty
+unconfessed. Like all essentially light and frivolous natures, he
+cherished the singular point of honor which consists in never
+derogating in the eyes of one's own little public, which makes men on
+the Bourse commit crimes to escape expulsion from the temple of the
+goddess Per-cent, and has given some criminals courage enough to
+perform acts of virtue.
+
+Lousteau dined and breakfasted and smoked as if he were a rich man.
+Not for an inheritance would he have bought any but the dearest
+cigars, for himself as well as for the playwright or author with whom
+he went into the shop. The journalist took his walks abroad in patent
+leather boots; but he was constantly afraid of an execution on goods
+which, to use the bailiff's slang, had already received the last
+sacrament. Fanny Beaupre had nothing left to pawn, and her salary was
+pledged to pay her debts. After exhausting every possible advance of
+pay from newspapers, magazines, and publishers, Etienne knew not of
+what ink he could churn gold. Gambling-houses, so ruthlessly
+suppressed, could no longer, as of old, cash I O U's drawn over the
+green table by beggary in despair. In short, the journalist was
+reduced to such extremity that he had just borrowed a hundred francs
+of the poorest of his friends, Bixiou, from whom he had never yet
+asked for a franc. What distressed Lousteau was not the fact of owing
+five thousand francs, but seeing himself bereft of his elegance, and
+of the furniture purchased at the cost of so many privations, and
+added to by Madame de la Baudraye.
+
+On April the 3rd, a yellow poster, torn down by the porter after being
+displayed on the wall, announced the sale of a handsome suite of
+furniture on the following Saturday, the day fixed for sales under
+legal authority. Lousteau was taking a walk, smoking cigars, and
+seeking ideas--for, in Paris, ideas are in the air, they smile on you
+from a street corner, they splash up with a spurt of mud from under
+the wheels of a cab! Thus loafing, he had been seeking ideas for
+articles, and subjects for novels for a month past, and had found
+nothing but friends who carried him off to dinner or to the play, and
+who intoxicated his woes, telling him that champagne would inspire
+him.
+
+"Beware," said the virulent Bixiou one night, the man who would at the
+same moment give a comrade a hundred francs and stab him to the heart
+with a sarcasm; "if you go to sleep drunk every night, one day you
+will wake up mad."
+
+On the day before, the Friday, the unhappy wretch, although he was
+accustomed to poverty, felt like a man condemned to death. Of old he
+would have said:
+
+"Well, the furniture is very old! I will buy new."
+
+But he was incapable now of literary legerdemain. Publishers,
+undermined by piracy, paid badly; the newspapers made close bargains
+with hard-driven writers, as the Opera managers did with tenors that
+sang flat.
+
+He walked on, his eye on the crowd, though seeing nothing, a cigar in
+his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, every feature of his face
+twitching, and an affected smile on his lips. Then he saw Madame de la
+Baudraye go by in a carriage; she was going to the Boulevard by the
+Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin to drive in the Bois.
+
+"There is nothing else left!" said he to himself, and he went home to
+smarten himself up.
+
+That evening, at seven, he arrived in a hackney cab at Madame de la
+Baudraye's door, and begged the porter to send a note up to the
+Countess--a few lines, as follows:
+
+"Would Madame la Comtesse do Monsieur Lousteau the favor of receiving
+him for a moment, and at once?"
+
+This note was sealed with a seal which as lovers they had both used.
+Madame de la Baudraye had had the word /Parce que/ engraved on a
+genuine Oriental carnelian--a potent word--a woman's word--the word
+that accounts for everything, even for the Creation.
+
+The Countess had just finished dressing to go to the Opera; Friday was
+her night in turn for her box. At the sight of this seal she turned
+pale.
+
+"I will come," she said, tucking the note into her dress.
+
+She was firm enough to conceal her agitation, and begged her mother to
+see the children put to bed. She then sent for Lousteau, and received
+him in a boudoir, next to the great drawing-room, with open doors. She
+was going to a ball after the Opera, and was wearing a beautiful dress
+of brocade in stripes alternately plain and flowered with pale blue.
+Her gloves, trimmed with tassels, showed off her beautiful white arms.
+She was shimmering with lace and all the dainty trifles required by
+fashion. Her hair, dressed /a la Sevigne/, gave her a look of
+elegance; a necklace of pearls lay on her bosom like bubbles on snow.
+
+"What is the matter, monsieur?" said the Countess, putting out her
+foot from below her skirt to rest it on a velvet cushion. "I thought,
+I hoped, I was quite forgotten."
+
+"If I should reply /Never/, you would refuse to believe me," said
+Lousteau, who remained standing, or walked about the room, chewing the
+flowers he plucked from the flower-stands full of plants that scented
+the room.
+
+For a moment silence reigned. Madame de la Baudraye, studying
+Lousteau, saw that he was dressed as the most fastidious dandy might
+have been.
+
+"You are the only person in the world who can help me, or hold out a
+plank to me--for I am drowning, and have already swallowed more than
+one mouthful----" said he, standing still in front of Dinah, and
+seeming to yield to an overpowering impulse. "Since you see me here,
+it is because my affairs are going to the devil."
+
+"That is enough," said she; "I understand."
+
+There was another pause, during which Lousteau turned away, took out
+his handkerchief, and seemed to wipe away a tear.
+
+"How much do you want, Etienne," she went on in motherly tones. "We
+are at this moment old comrades; speak to me as you would to--to
+Bixiou."
+
+"To save my furniture from vanishing into thin air to-morrow morning
+at the auction mart, eighteen hundred francs! To repay my friends, as
+much again! Three quarters' rent to the landlord--whom you know.--My
+'uncle' wants five hundred francs--"
+
+"And you!--to live on?"
+
+"Oh! I have my pen----"
+
+"It is heavier to lift than any one could believe who reads your
+articles," said she, with a subtle smile.--"I have not such a sum as
+you need, but come to-morrow at eight; the bailiff will surely wait
+till nine, especially if you bring him away to pay him."
+
+She must, she felt, dismiss Lousteau, who affected to be unable to
+look at her; she herself felt such pity as might cut every social
+Gordian knot.
+
+"Thank you," she added, rising and offering her hand to Lousteau.
+"Your confidence has done me good! It is long indeed since my heart
+has known such joy----"
+
+Lousteau took her hand and pressed it tenderly to his heart.
+
+"A drop of water in the desert--and sent by the hand of an angel! God
+always does things handsomely!"
+
+He spoke half in jest and half pathetically; but, believe me, as a
+piece of acting it was as fine as Talma's in his famous part of
+/Leicester/, which was played throughout with touches of this kind.
+Dinah felt his heart beating through his coat; it was throbbing with
+satisfaction, for the journalist had had a narrow escape from the
+hulks of justice; but it also beat with a very natural fire at seeing
+Dinah rejuvenescent and restored by wealth.
+
+Madame de la Baudraye, stealing an examining glance at Etienne, saw
+that his expression was in harmony with the flowers of love, which, as
+she thought, had blossomed again in that throbbing heart; she tried to
+look once into the eyes of the man she had loved so well, but the
+seething blood rushed through her veins and mounted to her brain.
+Their eyes met with the same fiery glow as had encouraged Lousteau on
+the Quay by the Loire to crumple Dinah's muslin gown. The Bohemian put
+his arm round her waist, she yielded, and their cheeks were touching.
+
+"Here comes my mother, hide!" cried Dinah in alarm. And she hurried
+forward to intercept Madame Piedefer.
+
+"Mamma," said she--this word was to the stern old lady a coaxing
+expression which never failed of its effect--"will you do me a great
+favor? Take the carriage and go yourself to my banker, Monsieur
+Mongenod, with a note I will give you, and bring back six thousand
+francs. Come, come--it is an act of charity; come into my room."
+
+And she dragged away her mother, who seemed very anxious to see who it
+was that her daughter had been talking with in the boudoir.
+
+Two days afterwards, Madame Piedefer held a conference with the cure
+of the parish. After listening to the lamentations of the old mother,
+who was in despair, the priest said very gravely:
+
+"Any moral regeneration which is not based on a strong religious
+sentiment, and carried out in the bosom of the Church, is built on
+sand.--The many means of grace enjoined by the Catholic religion,
+small as they are, and not understood, are so many dams necessary to
+restrain the violence of evil promptings. Persuade your daughter to
+perform all her religious duties, and we shall save her yet."
+
+Within ten days of this meeting the Hotel de la Baudraye was shut up.
+The Countess, the children, and her mother, in short, the whole
+household, including a tutor, had gone away to Sancerre, where Dinah
+intended to spend the summer. She was everything that was nice to the
+Count, people said.
+
+And so the Muse of Sancerre had simply come back to family and married
+life; but certain evil tongues declared that she had been compelled to
+come back, for that the little peer's wishes would no doubt be
+fulfilled--he hoped for a little girl.
+
+Gatien and Monsieur Gravier lavished every care, every servile
+attention on the handsome Countess. Gatien, who during Madame de la
+Baudraye's long absence had been to Paris to learn the art of
+/lionnerie/ or dandyism, was supposed to have a good chance of finding
+favor in the eyes of the disenchanted "Superior Woman." Others bet on
+the tutor; Madame Piedefer urged the claims of religion.
+
+In 1844, about the middle of June, as the Comte de la Baudraye was
+taking a walk on the Mall at Sancerre with the two fine little boys,
+he met Monsieur Milaud, the Public Prosecutor, who was at Sancerre on
+business, and said to him:
+
+"These are my children, cousin."
+
+"Ah, ha! so these are our children!" replied the lawyer, with a
+mischievous twinkle.
+
+
+
+PARIS, June 1843-August 1844.
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Beaupre, Fanny
+  A Start in Life
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+
+Berthier, Madame (Felicie Cardot)
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Bianchon, Horace
+  Father Goriot
+  The Atheist's Mass
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  The Commission in Lunacy
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  The Government Clerks
+  Pierrette
+  A Study of Woman
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Honorine
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Magic Skin
+  A Second Home
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Country Parson
+In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following:
+  Another Study of Woman
+  La Grande Breteche
+
+Bixiou, Jean-Jacques
+  The Purse
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  The Government Clerks
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Member for Arcis
+  Beatrix
+  A Man of Business
+  Gaudissart II.
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Camusot
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Cousin Pons
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+
+Cardot (Parisian notary)
+  A Man of Business
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Pierre Grassou
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Pons
+
+Chargeboeuf, Melchior-Rene, Vicomte de
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Falcon, Jean
+  The Chouans
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Grosstete (younger brother of F. Grosstete)
+  The Country Parson
+
+Hulot (Marshal)
+  The Chouans
+  Cousin Betty
+
+La Baudraye, Madame Polydore Milaud de
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Lebas
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Listomere, Baronne de
+  The Vicar of Tours
+  Cesar Birotteau
+
+Lousteau, Etienne
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Beatrix
+  Cousin Betty
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  A Man of Business
+  The Middle Classes
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Lupeaulx, Clement Chardin des
+  Eugenie Grandet
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Government Clerks
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Ursule Mirouet
+
+Maufrigneuse, Duchesse de
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Milaud
+  Lost Illusions
+
+Nathan, Raoul
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Letters of Two Brides
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  A Man of Business
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Nathan, Madame Raoul
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Government Clerks
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Ursule Mirouet
+  Eugenie Grandet
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Navarreins, Duc de
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Colonel Chabert
+  The Thirteen
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Peasantry
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Country Parson
+  The Magic Skin
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Nucingen, Baron Frederic de
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+  Father Goriot
+  Pierrette
+  Cesar Birotteau
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Man of Business
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Ronceret, Madame Fabien du
+  Beatrix
+  Cousin Betty
+  The Unconscious Humorists
+
+Rouget, Jean-Jacques
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+
+Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des
+  Beatrix
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Another Study of Woman
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  Honorine
+  Beatrix
+
+Turquet, Marguerite
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  A Man of Business
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Vandenesse, Comtesse Felix de
+  A Second Home
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Parisians in the Country, by Honore de Balzac
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