three hundred thousand francs in good,
ringing coin! Tell me which side they will trust and admire! The artist,
the man of imagination who falls into the bourgeois atmosphere--shall I
tell you to what I compare him? To Daniel cast into the lion's den, less
the miracle of Holy Writ."

This invective against the bourgeoisie was uttered in a tone of heated
conviction which could scarcely fail to be communicated.

"Ah! madame," cried la Peyrade, "how eloquently you say things which
again and again have entered my troubled and anxious mind! But I have
felt myself lashed to that most cruel fate, the necessity of gaining a
position--"

"Necessity! position!" interrupted the countess, again raising the
temperature of her speech,--"words void of meaning! which have not even
sound to able men, though they drive back fools as though they were
formidable barriers. Necessity! does that exist for noble natures, for
those who know how to will? A Gascon minister uttered a saying which
ought to be engraved on the doors of all careers: 'All things come to
him who knows how to wait.' Are you ignorant that marriage, to men of a
high stamp, is either a chain which binds them to the lowest vulgarities
of existence, or a wing on which to rise to the highest summits of the
social world? The wife you need, monsieur,--and she would not be long
wanting to your career if you had not, with such incredible haste,
accepted the first 'dot' that was offered you,--the wife you should
have chosen is a woman capable of understanding you, able to divine
your intellect; one who could be to you a fellow-worker, an intellectual
confidant, and not a mere embodiment of the 'pot-au-feu'; a woman
capable of being now your secretary, but soon the wife of a deputy, a
minister, an ambassador; one, in short, who could offer you her heart as
a mainspring, her salon for a stage, her connections for a ladder, and
who, in return for all she would give you of ardor and strength, asks
only to shine beside your throne in the rays of the glory she predicts
for you!"

Intoxicated, as it were, with the flow of her own words, the countess
was really magnificent; her eyes sparkled, her nostrils dilated; the
prospect her vivid eloquence thus unrolled she seemed to see, and touch
with her quivering fingers. For a moment, la Peyrade was dazzled by this
sunrise which suddenly burst upon his life.

However, as he was a man most eminently prudent, who had made it his
rule of li