f at all, it
was to ask whether she deserved so great a happiness, and what she had
done that Heaven should send her such an angel. She wanted to be worthy
of that love, to perpetuate it, to make it her own forever, and to
gently end her career of frivolity in the paradise she now foresaw. As
for coquetting, quibbling, resisting, she never once thought of it. She
was thinking of something very different!--of the grandeur of men of
genius, and the certainty which her heart divined that they would never
subject the woman they chose to ordinary laws.

Here begins one of those unseen comedies, played in the secret regions
of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will be the dupe of
the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness; one of those
dark and comic dramas to which that of _Tartuffe_ is mere child's
play,--dramas that do not enter the scenic domain, although they are
natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity; dramas which
may be characterized as not vice, only the other side of it.

The princess began by sending for d'Arthez's books, of which she had
never, as yet, read a single word, although she had managed to maintain
a twenty minutes' eulogism and discussion of them without a blunder. She
now read them all. Then she wanted to compare these books with the best
that contemporary literature had produced. By the time d'Arthez came to
see her she was having an indigestion of mind. Expecting this visit, she
had daily made a toilet of what may be called the superior order; that
is, a toilet which expresses an idea, and makes it accepted by the eye
without the owner of the eye knowing why or wherefore. She presented an
harmonious combination of shades of gray, a sort of semi-mourning, full
of graceful renunciation,--the garments of a woman who holds to life
only through a few natural ties,--her child, for instance,--but who is
weary of life. Those garments bore witness to an elegant disgust, not
reaching, however, as far as suicide; no, she would live out her days in
these earthly galleys.

She received d'Arthez as a woman who expected him, and as if he had
already been to see her a hundred times; she did him the honor to treat
him like an old acquaintance, and she put him at his ease by pointing
to a seat on a sofa, while she finished a note she was then writing. The
conversation began in a commonplace manner: the weather, the ministry,
de Marsay's illness, the hopes of the legitimists.