when he finds neither incense nor censer in his own house! dead
to all! and yet, perhaps for that very reason, jealous. I wished--when
Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was wholly mine--I wished to be a good wife,
but I found myself repulsed with the harshness of a soured spirit by
a man who treated me like a child and took pleasure in humiliating
my self-respect at every turn, in crushing me under the scorn of his
experience, and in convicting me of total ignorance. He wounded me on
all occasions. He did everything to make me detest him and to give me
the right to betray him; but I was still the dupe of my own hope and of
my desire to do right through several years. Shall I tell you the cruel
saying that drove me to further follies? 'The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse
has gone back to her husband,' said the world. 'Bah! it is always a
triumph to bring the dead to life; it is all she can now do,' replied my
best friend, a relation, she, at whose house I met you--"

"Madame d'Espard!" cried Daniel, with a gesture of horror.

"Oh! I have forgiven her. Besides, it was very witty; and I have myself
made just as cruel epigrams on other poor women as innocent as myself."

D'Arthez again kissed the hand of that saintly woman who, having hacked
her mother in pieces, and turned the Prince de Cadignan into an Othello,
now proceeded to accuse herself in order to appear in the eyes of that
innocent great man as immaculate as the silliest or the wisest of women
desire to seem at all costs to their lovers.

"You will readily understand, my friend, that I returned to society for
the purpose of excitement and I may say of notoriety. I felt that I must
conquer my independence. I led a life of dissipation. To divert my mind,
to forget my real life in fictitious enjoyments I was gay, I shone, I
gave fetes, I played the princess, and I ran in debt. At home I could
forget myself in the sleep of weariness, able to rise the next day gay,
and frivolous for the world; but in that sad struggle to escape my real
life I wasted my fortune. The revolution of 1830 came; it came at the
very moment when I had met, at the end of that _Arabian Nights'_ life, a
pure and sacred love which (I desire to be honest) I had longed to know.
Was it not natural in a woman whose heart, repressed by many causes and
accidents, was awakening at an age when a woman feels herself cheated
if she has never known, like the women she sees about her, a happy love?
Ah! why was Michel Chre