heus) 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