kind-hearted mistress of the house
manifests for her an amount of predilection which I can hardly understand.
Familiar with men, impertinent with women, the Little Countess offers a
broad mark to the most indiscreet homage of the former, and to the jealous
hostility of the latter. Indifferent to the outrages of public opinion,
she seems ready to aspire to the coarsest incense of gallantry; but what
she requires above all things is noise, movement, a whirl, worldly
pleasure carried to its most extreme and most extravagant fury; what she
requires every morning, every evening, and every night, is a break-neck
chase, which she conducts with frenzy; a reckless game, in which she may
break the bank; an uninterrupted German, which she leads until dawn. A
stoppage of a single minute, a moment of rest, of meditation and
reflection, would kill her. Never was an existence at once so busy and so
idle; never a more unceasing and more sterile activity.

Thus she goes through life hurriedly and without a halt, graceful,
careless, busy, and ignorant as the horse she rides. When she reaches the
fatal goal, that woman will fall from the nothingness of her agitation
into the nothingness of eternal rest, without the shadow of a serious
idea, the faintest notion of duty, the lightest cloud of a thought worthy
a human being, having ever grazed, even in a dream, the narrow brain that
is sheltered behind her pure, smiling, and stupid brow. It might be said
that death, at whatever age it may overtake her, will find the Little
Countess just as she left the cradle, if it were possible to suppose that
she has preserved its innocence as well as she has retained its profound
puerility. Has that madcap a soul? The word nothingness has escaped me. It
is indeed difficult for me to conceive what might survive that body when
it has once lost the vain fever and the frivolous breath that seem alone
to animate it.

I know too well the miserable ways of the world, to take to the letter the
accusations of immorality of which Madame de Palme is here the object on
the part of the witches, as also on the part of some of her rivals who are
silly enough to envy her social success. It is not in that respect, as you
may understand, that I treat her with so much severity. Men, when they
show themselves unmerciful for certain errors, are too apt to forget that
they have all, more or less, spent part of their lives seeking to bring
them about for their own benefit. But