little year from her age without the
knowledge of Time, she had taken it into her head to be immaculate. She
scarcely seemed to belong to earth; she shook out her wide sleeves as
if they had been wings. Her eyes fled to heaven at too warm a glance, or
word, or thought.

There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese painter, who bade
fair to bring out a second edition of Raphael till his career was
cut short by jealousy and murder; his madonna, however, you may dimly
discern through a pane of glass in a little street in Genoa.

A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola's does not exist but compared
with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that heavenly creature was a Messalina.
Women wondered among themselves how such a giddy young thing had been
transformed by a change of dress into the fair veiled seraph who seemed
(to use an expression now in vogue) to have a soul as white as new
fallen snow on the highest Alpine crests. How had she solved in such
short space the Jesuitical problem how to display a bosom whiter than
her soul by hiding it in gauze? How could she look so ethereal while her
eyes drooped so murderously? Those almost wanton glances seemed to give
promise of untold languorous delight, while by an ascetic's sigh of
aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to add that none of
those promises would be fulfilled. Ingenuous youths (for there were a
few to be found in the Guards of that day) privately wondered whether,
in the most intimate moments, it were possible to speak familiarly to
this White Lady, this starry vapor slidden down from the Milky Way.
This system, which answered completely for some years at a stretch, was
turned to good account by women of fashion, whose breasts were lined
with a stout philosophy, for they could cloak no inconsiderable
exactions with these little airs from the sacristy. Not one of the
celestial creatures but was quite well aware of the possibilities of
less ethereal love which lay in the longing of every well-conditioned
male to recall such beings to earth. It was a fashion which permitted
them to abide in a semi-religious, semi-Ossianic empyrean; they could,
and did, ignore all the practical details of daily life, a short and
easy method of disposing of many questions. De Marsay, foreseeing the
future developments of the system, added a last word, for he saw that
Rastignac was jealous of Victurnien.

"My boy," said he, "stay as you are. Our Nucingen will make your
fortune,