atrix. Perhaps the noblest men retain some clay in their
constitutions; the slough still pleases them. If this be so, the least
imperfect human being is the woman, in spite of her faults and her want
of reason. Madame de Rochefide, it must be said, amid the circle of
poetic pretensions which surrounded her, and in spite of her fall,
belonged to the highest nobility; she presented a nature more ethereal
than slimy, and hid the courtesan she was meant to be beneath an
aristocratic exterior. Therefore the above explanation does not fully
account for Calyste's strange passion.

Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in
the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice.
There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich,
distinguished, and well-bred, who tire--without their knowledge,
possibly--of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose
own nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom
grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but
who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own
superiority--if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste found
nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers thus
stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great men
have played before our eyes the Saviour's part toward the woman taken
in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their generation than
they?

Calyste reached the hour of two o'clock living on one sentence only,
"I shall see her again!"--a poem which has often paid the costs of a
journey of two thousand miles. He now went with a light step to the
rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had never
before seen it. Once there, he stood--he, the son-in-law of the Duc
de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons--at the foot of the
staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman:
"Monsieur's name?" Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her
freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited,
looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and
yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their chain,
had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she could
not beg from her tyrant. Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had spared
Beatrix all the petty worries