atch with an income of nearly eighty thousand livres, who has taken
a fancy to nobody, or else no one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of
feminine enigma, a half Russian Parisienne, or a half Parisian Russian.
All the romantic productions that never get published are brought out at
her house; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and the most gracious!
You are not even a Hottentot; you are something between the Hottentot
and the beast.... Good-bye till to-morrow.'

"He swung round on his heel and made off without waiting for my
answer. It never occurred to him that a reasoning being could refuse an
introduction to Foedora. How can the fascination of a name be explained?
FOEDORA haunted me like some evil thought, with which you seek to come
to terms. A voice said in me, 'You are going to see Foedora!' In vain
I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to me; all my arguments
were defeated by the name 'Foedora.' Was not the name, and even the
woman herself, the symbol of all my desires, and the object of my life?

"The name called up recollections of the conventional glitter of the
world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant fetes and the tinsel
of its vanities. The woman brought before me all the problems of passion
on which my mind continually ran. Perhaps it was neither the woman nor
the name, but my own propensities, that sprang up within me and tempted
me afresh. Here was the Countess Foedora, rich and loveless, proof
against the temptations of Paris; was not this woman the very
incarnation of my hopes and visions? I fashioned her for myself, drew
her in fancy, and dreamed of her. I could not sleep that night; I became
her lover; I overbrimmed a few hours with a whole lifetime--a lover's
lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights burned me.

"The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I borrowed a
novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I could not possibly
think nor keep account of the time till night. Foedora's name echoed
through me even as I read, but only as a distant sound; though it
could be heard, it was not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly
creditable black coat and a white waistcoat; of all my fortune there
now remained abut thirty francs, which I had distributed about among
my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my whims and
the spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier of search, and an
adventurous peregrination round my room. While I as d