n his element.

This carnival, which lasted eighteen months, was not altogether without
its troubles. The beautiful Mariette no sooner appeared at the Opera, in
January, 1821, than she captured one of the most distinguished dukes of
the court of Louis XVIII. Philippe tried to make head against the
peer, and by the month of April he was compelled by his passion,
notwithstanding some luck at cards, to dip into the funds of which he
was cashier. By May he had taken eleven hundred francs. In that fatal
month Mariette started for London, to see what could be done with
the lords while the temporary opera house in the Hotel Choiseul, rue
Lepelletier, was being prepared. The luckless Philippe had ended,
as often happens, in loving Mariette notwithstanding her flagrant
infidelities; she herself had never thought him anything but a
dull-minded, brutal soldier, the first rung of a ladder on which she
had never intended to remain long. So, foreseeing the time when Philippe
would have spent all his money, she captured other journalistic support
which released her from the necessity of depending on him; nevertheless,
she did feel the peculiar gratitude that class of women acknowledge
towards the first man who smooths their way, as it were, among the
difficulties and horrors of a theatrical career.

Forced to let his terrible mistress go to London without him, Philippe
went into winter quarters, as he called it,--that is, he returned to
his attic room in his mother's _appartement_. He made some gloomy
reflections as he went to bed that night, and when he got up again. He
was conscious within himself of the inability to live otherwise than as
he had been living the last year. The luxury that surrounded Mariette,
the dinners, the suppers, the evenings in the side-scenes, the animation
of wits and journalists, the sort of racket that went on around him,
the delights that tickled both his senses and his vanity,--such a life,
found only in Paris, and offering daily the charm of some new thing, was
now more than habit,--it had become to Philippe as much a necessity as
his tobacco or his brandy. He saw plainly that he could not live without
these continual enjoyments. The idea of suicide came into his head; not
on account of the deficit which must soon be discovered in his accounts,
but because he could no longer live with Mariette in the atmosphere
of pleasure in which he had disported himself for over a year. Full
of these gloomy thoughts