e, the Duc and Duchesse de Rhetore, the Duc and Duchesse
de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the _habitues_ of his mother-in-law's
salon; and he fully understood by this time the differences that
separated Parisian life from the life of the provinces. Wealth has fatal
hours, hours of leisure and idleness, which Paris knows better than all
other capitals how to amuse, charm, and divert. Contact with those young
husbands who deserted the noblest and sweetest of creatures for the
delights of a cigar and whist, for the glorious conversations of a club,
or the excitements of "the turf," undermined before long many of the
domestic virtues of the young Breton noble. The motherly solicitude of a
wife who is anxious not to weary her husband always comes to the support
of the dissipations of young men. A wife is proud to see her husband
return to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.

One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the newly
weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure to see
a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play was to be
given for the first time. The footman whose business it was to engage
a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre which is
called the _avant-scene_. As Calyste looked about him during the first
interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his side, and
not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide. Beatrix in Paris! Beatrix
in public! The two thoughts flew through Calyste's heart like arrows.
To see her again after nearly three years! How shall we depict the
convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far from forgetting the past,
had sometimes substituted Beatrix for his wife so plainly that his wife
had perceived it? Beatrix was light, life, motion, and the Unknown.
Sabine was duty, dulness, and the expected. One became, in a moment,
pleasure; the other, weariness. It was the falling of a thunderbolt.

From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine's husband was to
leave the theatre. As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw
the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there
in spite of his will. The young Breton found Beatrix between two very
distinguished men, Canalis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man
of letters. In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de
Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation
had seriously affect