Grandlieu. These persons found no difficulty in believing that the
Duchess was ill, seeing that she grew thinner and paler and more
dejected every day. The vague ardour of love, the smart of wounded
pride, the continual prick of the only scorn that could touch her,
the yearnings towards joys that she craved with a vain continual
longing--all these things told upon her, mind and body; all the forces
of her nature were stimulated to no purpose. She was paying the arrears
of her life of make-believe.

She went out at last to a review. M. de Montriveau was to be there. For
the Duchess, on the balcony of the Tuileries with the Royal Family,
it was one of those festival days that are long remembered. She looked
supremely beautiful in her languor; she was greeted with admiration in
all eyes. It was Montriveau's presence that made her so fair.

Once or twice they exchanged glances. The General came almost to her
feet in all the glory of that soldier's uniform, which produces an
effect upon the feminine imagination to which the most prudish will
confess. When a woman is very much in love, and has not seen her lover
for two months, such a swift moment must be something like the phase of
a dream when the eyes embrace a world that stretches away forever.
Only women or young men can imagine the dull, frenzied hunger in the
Duchess's eyes. As for older men, if during the paroxysms of early
passion in youth they had experience of such phenomena of nervous power;
at a later day it is so completely forgotten that they deny the very
existence of the luxuriant ecstasy--the only name that can be given to
these wonderful intuitions. Religious ecstasy is the aberration of a
soul that has shaken off its bonds of flesh; whereas in amorous ecstasy
all the forces of soul and body are embraced and blended in one. If
a woman falls a victim to the tyrannous frenzy before which Mme de
Langeais was forced to bend, she will take one decisive resolution
after another so swiftly that it is impossible to give account of them.
Thought after thought rises and flits across her brain, as clouds are
whirled by the wind across the grey veil of mist that shuts out the sun.
Thenceforth the facts reveal all. And the facts are these.

The day after the review, Mme de Langeais sent her carriage and liveried
servants to wait at the Marquis de Montriveau's door from eight o'clock
in the morning till three in the afternoon. Armand lived in the Rue de
Tournon, a fe