g;
"but ours is worse, and it is very humiliating. Well, it is a
mortification we offer up in expiation of our fruitless search; yes,
my dear, fruitless, for it isn't probable we shall find in our autumn
season the fine flower we missed in the spring and summer."

"That's not the question," resumed the marquise, after a meditative
pause. "We are both still beautiful enough to inspire love, but we could
never convince any one of our innocence and virtue."

"If it were a lie, how easy to dress it up with commentaries, and
serve it as some delicious fruit to be eagerly swallowed! But how is
it possible to get a truth believed? Ah! the greatest of men have been
mistaken there!" added the princess, with one of those meaning smiles
which the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci alone has rendered.

"Fools love well, sometimes," returned the marquise.

"But in this case," said the princess, "fools wouldn't have enough
credulity in their nature."

"You are right," said the marquise. "But what we ought to look for is
neither a fool nor even a man of talent. To solve our problem we need a
man of genius. Genius alone has the faith of childhood, the religion of
love, and willingly allows us to band its eyes. Look at Canalis and the
Duchesse de Chaulieu! Though we have both encountered men of genius,
they were either too far removed from us or too busy, and we too
absorbed, too frivolous."

"Ah! how I wish I might not leave this world without knowing the
happiness of true love," exclaimed the princess.

"It is nothing to inspire it," said Madame d'Espard; "the thing is to
feel it. I see many women who are only the pretext for a passion without
being both its cause and its effect."

"The last love I inspired was a beautiful and sacred thing," said the
princess. "It had a future in it. Chance had brought me, for once in a
way, the man of genius who is due to us, and yet so difficult to obtain;
there are more pretty women than men of genius. But the devil interfered
with the affair."

"Tell me about it, my dear; this is all news to me."

"I first noticed this beautiful passion about the middle of the winter
of 1829. Every Friday, at the opera, I observed a young man, about
thirty years of age, in the orchestra stalls, who evidently came there
for me. He was always in the same stall, gazing at me with eyes of fire,
but, seemingly, saddened by the distance between us, perhaps by the
hopelessness of reaching me."

"Poor fellow! When