athe its perfume, listen to the music of her voice, watch the
graceful composition of her movements, embrace at a glance the whole
figure, and study her as a general studies the field where he means
to win a decisive battle. He willed as lovers will; he was grasped by
desires which closed his ears and darkened his intellect, and threw him
into an unnatural state in which he was conscious of neither obstacles,
nor distances, nor the existence even of his own body.

One morning he resolved to go to Les Touches at an earlier hour than
that agreed upon, and endeavor to meet Beatrix in the garden. He knew
she walked there daily before breakfast.

Mademoiselle des Touches and the marquise had gone, as it happened, to
see the marshes and the little bay with its margin of fine sand, where
the sea penetrates and lies like a lake in the midst of the dunes. They
had just returned, and were walking up a garden path beside the lawn,
conversing as they walked.

"If the scenery pleases you," said Camille, "we must take Calyste and
make a trip to Croisic. There are splendid rocks there, cascades of
granite, little bays with natural basins, charmingly unexpected and
capricious things, besides the sea itself, with its store of marble
fragments,--a world of amusement. Also you will see women making fuel
with cow-dung, which they nail against the walls of their houses to dry
in the sun, after which they pile it up as we do peat in Paris."

"What! will you really risk Calyste?" cried the marquise, laughing, in a
tone which proved that Camille's ruse had answered its purpose.

"Ah, my dear," she replied, "if you did but know the angelic soul
of that dear child, you would understand me. In him, mere beauty is
nothing; one must enter that pure heart, which is amazed at every
step it takes into the kingdom of love. What faith! what grace! what
innocence! The ancients were right enough in the worship they paid to
sacred beauty. Some traveller, I forget who, relates that when wild
horses lose their leader they choose the handsomest horse in the herd
for his successor. Beauty, my dear, is the genius of things; it is the
ensign which Nature hoists over her most precious creations; it is the
trust of symbols as it is the greatest of accidents. Did any one ever
suppose that angels could be deformed? are they not necessarily a
combination of grace and strength? What is it that makes us stand for
hours before some picture in Italy, where genius has