of splendour? is she so
ready-witted that a keen-edged jest never brings her into confusion?
beautiful enough to rival any woman?--Is it such a small thing to know
that your self-love will never suffer through her? A man makes these
reflections in the twinkling of an eye. And how if, in the future opened
out by early ripened passion, he catches glimpses of the changeful
delight of her charm, the frank innocence of a maiden soul, the perils
of love's voyage, the thousand folds of the veil of coquetry? Is not
this enough to move the coldest man's heart?

This, therefore, was M. de Montriveau's position with regard to woman;
his past life in some measure explaining the extraordinary fact. He
had been thrown, when little more than a boy, into the hurricane of
Napoleon's wars; his life had been spent on fields of battle. Of women
he knew just so much as a traveller knows of a country when he travels
across it in haste from one inn to another. The verdict which Voltaire
passed upon his eighty years of life might, perhaps, have been applied
by Montriveau to his own thirty-seven years of existence; had he not
thirty-seven follies with which to reproach himself? At his age he was
as much a novice in love as the lad that has just been furtively reading
_Faublas_. Of women he had nothing to learn; of love he knew nothing;
and thus, desires, quite unknown before, sprang from this virginity of
feeling.

There are men here and there as much engrossed in the work demanded of
them by poverty or ambition, art or science, as M. de Montriveau by war
and a life of adventure--these know what it is to be in this unusual
position if they very seldom confess to it. Every man in Paris is
supposed to have been in love. No woman in Paris cares to take what
other women have passed over. The dread of being taken for a fool is the
source of the coxcomb's bragging so common in France; for in France to
have the reputation of a fool is to be a foreigner in one's own country.
Vehement desire seized on M. de Montriveau, desire that had gathered
strength from the heat of the desert and the first stirrings of a heart
unknown as yet in its suppressed turbulence.

A strong man, and violent as he was strong, he could keep mastery over
himself; but as he talked of indifferent things, he retired within
himself, and swore to possess this woman, for through that thought lay
the only way to love for him. Desire became a solemn compact made with
himself, an oath