, I saw him," she said, speaking into the lawyer's ear. "And
as I saw him looking so sad, so out of heart, I said to myself, Has he a
cigar? Has he any money?"

"If you wish for the truth, I can tell it you," said the lawyer. "He is
living as a husband with Fanny Beaupre. You have forced me to tell you
this secret; I should never have told you, for you might have suspected
me perhaps of an ungenerous motive."

Madame de la Baudraye grasped his hand.

"Your husband," said she to her chaperon, "is one of the rarest
souls!--Ah! Why----"

She shrank into her corner, looking out of the window, but she did not
finish her sentence, of which the lawyer could guess the end: "Why had
not Lousteau a little of your husband's generosity of heart?"

This information served, however, to cure Dinah of her melancholy; she
threw herself into the whirl of fashion. She wished for success, and she
achieved it; still, she did not make much way with women, and found it
difficult to get introductions.

In the month of March, Madame Piedefer's friends the priests and
Monsieur de Clagny made a fine stroke by getting Madame de la Baudraye
appointed receiver of subscriptions for the great charitable work
founded by Madame de Carcado. Then she was commissioned to collect from
the Royal Family their donations for the benefit of the sufferers from
the earthquake at Guadeloupe. The Marquise d'Espard, to whom Monsieur
de Canalis read the list of ladies thus appointed, one evening at the
Opera, said, on hearing that of the Countess:

"I have lived a long time in the world, and I can remember nothing finer
than the manoeuvres undertaken for the rehabilitation of Madame de la
Baudraye."

In the early spring, which, by some whim of our planets, smiled on Paris
in the first week of March in 1843, making the Champs-Elysees green and
leafy before Longchamp, Fanny Beaupre's attache had seen Madame de la
Baudraye several times without being seen by her. More than once he
was stung to the heart by one of those promptings of jealousy and envy
familiar to those who are born and bred provincials, when he beheld
his former mistress comfortably ensconced in a handsome carriage, well
dressed, with dreamy eyes, and his two little boys, one at each window.
He accused himself with all the more virulence because he was waging
war with the sharpest poverty of all--poverty unconfessed. Like all
essentially light and frivolous natures, he cherished the singular