e of Mme. de la Garde, in order to approach, as closely as
Parisian usages permit, the conditions of a real marriage. As a matter
of fact, many of these unfortunate girls have one fixed idea, to be
looked upon as respectable middle-class women, who lead humdrum lives of
faithfulness to their husbands; women who would make excellent mothers,
keepers of household accounts, and menders of household linen. This
longing springs from a sentiment so laudable, that society should take
it into consideration. But society, incorrigible as ever, will assuredly
persist in regarding the married woman as a corvette duly authorized by
her flag and papers to go on her own course, while the woman who is a
wife in all but name is a pirate and an outlaw for lack of a document.
A day came when Mme. de la Garde would fain have signed herself "Mme.
Castanier." The cashier was put out by this.

"So you do not love me well enough to marry me?" she said.

Castanier did not answer; he was absorbed by his thoughts. The poor girl
resigned herself to her fate. The ex-dragoon was in despair. Naqui's
heart softened towards him at the sight of his trouble; she tried to
soothe him, but what could she do when she did not know what ailed him?
When Naqui made up her mind to know the secret, although she never asked
him a question, the cashier dolefully confessed to the existence of a
Mme. Castanier. This lawful wife, a thousand times accursed, was living
in a humble way in Strasbourg on a small property there; he wrote to her
twice a year, and kept the secret of her existence so well, that no one
suspected that he was married. The reason of this reticence? If it
is familiar to many military men who may chance to be in a like
predicament, it is perhaps worth while to give the story.

Your genuine trooper (if it is allowable here to employ the word which
in the army signifies a man who is destined to die as a captain) is a
sort of serf, a part and parcel of his regiment, an essentially simple
creature, and Castanier was marked out by nature as a victim to the
wiles of mothers with grown-up daughters left too long on their hands.
It was at Nancy, during one of those brief intervals of repose when the
Imperial armies were not on active service abroad, that Castanier was so
unlucky as to pay some attention to a young lady with whom he danced at
a _ridotto_, the provincial name for the entertainments often given
by the military to the townsfolk, or vice versa,