Madame de Malouet tapped the carpet with her foot, and manifested other
signs of impatience, which I knew not at first how to interpret, for she
is never out of humor; but suddenly a thought, which I took for a luminous
one, occurred in my mind; I had no doubt that I had at last discovered the
weak side and the only failing in that charming old woman. She was
possessed with the mania of match making, and, in her Christian anxiety to
snatch the Little Countess from the abyss of perdition, she was secretly
meditating to hurl me into it with her, unworthy though I be. Penetrated
with this modest conviction, I kept upon a defensive that seems to me, at
the present moment, perfectly ridiculous.

"Mon Dieu!" said Madame de Malouet, "because you doubt her learning!"

"I do not doubt her learning," I said; "I doubt whether she knows how to
read."

"But, in short, what fault do you find with her?" rejoined Madame de
Malouet in a singularly agitated tone of voice.

I determined to demolish, at a single stroke, the matrimonial dream with
which I supposed the marchioness to be deluding herself.

"I find fault with her," I replied, "for giving to the world the
spectacle, supremely irritating even for a profane being like me, of
triumphant nullity and haughty vice. I am not worth much, it's true, and I
have no right to judge, but there is in me, as well as in any theatrical
audience, a certain sentiment of reason and morality that rises in
indignation in presence of personages wholly devoid of common-sense or
virtue, and that protests against their triumph."

The old lady's indignation seemed to increase.

"Do you think I would receive her, if she deserved all the stones which
slander casts at her?"

"I think it is impossible for you to believe any evil."

"Bah! I assure you that you do not show in this case any evidence of
penetration. These love-stories which are attributed to her are so little
like her! She is a child who does not even know what it is to love!"

"I am convinced of that, madame. Her commonplace coquetry is sufficient
evidence of that. I am even ready to swear that the allurements of the
imagination or the impulses of passion are wholly foreign to her errors,
which thus remain without excuse."

"Oh! mon Dieu!" exclaimed Madame de Malouet, clasping her hands, "do hush!
she is a poor, forsaken child! I know her better than you do. I assure you
that beneath her appearance--much too frivolous, I admit--she