have the staff on which to lean as they skirt those precipices,--a force
which is lacking to most women, but which, if we do possess it, makes
abnormal beings of us. Her old grandmother, the dowager de Casteran, was
well pleased to see her marry a man to whom she was superior in every
way. The Rochefides were equally satisfied with the Casterans, who
connected them with the Verneuils, the d'Esgrignons, the Troisvilles,
and gave them a peerage for their son in that last big batch of peers
made by Charles X., but revoked by the revolution of July. The first
days of marriage are perilous for little minds as well as for great
loves. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife's ignorance for
coldness; he classed her among frigid, lymphatic women, and made that
an excuse to return to his bachelor life, relying on the coldness of the
marquise, her pride, and the thousand barriers that the life of a great
lady sets up about a woman in Paris. You'll know what I mean when you go
there. People said to Rochefide: 'You are very lucky to possess a cold
wife who will never have any but head passions. She will always be
content if she can shine; her fancies are purely artistic, her desires
will be satisfied if she can make a salon, and collect about her
distinguished minds; her debauches will be in music and her orgies
literary.' Rochefide, however, is not an ordinary fool; he has as much
conceit and vanity as a clever man, which gives him a mean and squinting
jealousy, brutal when it comes to the surface, lurking and cowardly for
six months, and murderous the seventh. He thought he was deceiving his
wife, and yet he feared her,--two causes for tyranny when the day came
on which the marquise let him see that she was charitably assuming
indifference to his unfaithfulness. I analyze all this in order to
explain her conduct. Beatrix had the keenest admiration for me; there
is but one step, however, from admiration to jealousy. I have one of the
most remarkable salons in Paris; she wished to make herself another; and
in order to do so she attempted to draw away my circle. I don't know how
to keep those who wish to leave me. She obtained the superficial people
who are friends with every one from mere want of occupation, and whose
object is to get out of a salon as soon as they have entered it; but
she did not have time to make herself a real society. In those days I
thought her consumed with a desire for celebrity of one kind or another.
Neve