jolly companion; now
and again he stayed out all night, and to some extent led the life of
a Bohemian; he would unbend at a supper-party. He went out to all
appearance to a rehearsal at the Opera-Comique, and found himself in
some unaccountable way at Dieppe, or Baden, or Saint-Germain; he gave
dinners, led the Titanic thriftless life of artists, journalists, and
writers; levied his tribute on all the greenrooms of Paris; and, in
short, was one of us. Finot, Lousteau, du Tillet, Desroches, Bixiou,
Blondet, Couture, and des Lupeaulx tolerated him in spite of his
pedantic manner and ponderous official attitude. But once married,
Tullia made a slave of du Bruel. There was no help for it. He was in
love with Tullia, poor devil.

"'Tullia' (so he said) 'had left the stage to be his alone, to be a
good and charming wife.' And somehow Tullia managed to induce the most
Puritanical members of du Bruel's family to accept her. From the very
first, before any one suspected her motives, she assiduously visited old
Mme. de Bonfalot, who bored her horribly; she made handsome presents to
mean old Mme. de Chisse, du Bruel's great-aunt; she spent a summer
with the latter lady, and never missed a single mass. She even went to
confession, received absolution, and took the sacrament; but this, you
must remember, was in the country, and under the aunt's eyes.

"'I shall have real aunts now, do you understand?' she said to us when
she came back in the winter.

"She was so delighted with her respectability, so glad to renounce her
independence, that she found means to compass her end. She flattered the
old people. She went on foot every day to sit for a couple of hours with
Mme. du Bruel the elder while that lady was ill--a Maintenon's stratagem
which amazed du Bruel. And he admired his wife without criticism; he was
so fast in the toils already that he did not feel his bonds.

"Claudine succeeded in making him understand that only under the elastic
system of a bourgeois government, only at the bourgeois court of the
Citizen-King, could a Tullia, now metamorphosed into a Mme. du Bruel,
be accepted in the society which her good sense prevented her from
attempting to enter. Mme. de Bonfalot, Mme. de Chisse, and Mme. du
Bruel received her; she was satisfied. She took up the position of
a well-conducted, simple, and virtuous woman, and never acted out of
character. In three years' time she was introduced to the friends of
these ladies.

"'An