s, completely null and completely tiresome; nerves and
brain and blood are all in harmony; but the Duchess, and others like
her, are capable of rising to the highest heights of feelings, or of
showing the most selfish insensibility. It is one of the glories of
Moliere that he has given us a wonderful portrait of such a woman,
from one point of view only, in that greatest of his full-length
figures--Celimene; Celimene is the typical aristocratic woman, as
Figaro, the second edition of Panurge, represents the people.

So, the Duchess, being overwhelmed with debt, laid it upon herself to
give no more than a moment's thought to the avalanche of cares, and to
take her resolution once and for all; Napoleon could take up or lay
down the burden of his thoughts in precisely the same way. The Duchess
possessed the faculty of standing aloof from herself; she could look on
as a spectator at the crash when it came, instead of submitting to be
buried beneath. This was certainly great, but repulsive in a woman. When
she awoke in the morning she collected her thoughts; and by the time she
had begun to dress she had looked at the danger in its fullest extent
and faced the possibilities of terrific downfall. She pondered. Should
she take refuge in a foreign country? Or should she go to the King and
declare her debts to him? Or again, should she fascinate a du Tillet or
a Nucingen, and gamble on the stock exchange to pay her creditors? The
city man would find the money; he would be intelligent enough to bring
her nothing but the profits, without so much as mentioning the losses, a
piece of delicacy which would gloss all over. The catastrophe, and these
various ways of averting it, had all been reviewed quite coolly, calmly,
and without trepidation.

As a naturalist takes up some king of butterflies and fastens him down
on cotton-wool with a pin, so Mme. de Maufrigneuse had plucked love out
of her heart while she pondered the necessity of the moment, and was
quite ready to replace the beautiful passion on its immaculate setting
so soon as her duchess' coronet was safe. _She_ knew none of the
hesitation which Cardinal Richelieu hid from all the world but Pere
Joseph; none of the doubts that Napoleon kept at first entirely to
himself. "Either the one or the other," she told herself.

She was sitting by the fire, giving orders for her toilette for a drive
in the Bois if the weather should be fine, when Victurnien came in.

The Comte d'Esgr