ds
where their ambition or their vanity prompted. But Juana, whose
childhood was passed in her retreat in Tarragona, knew nothing of the
vices, the meannesses, or the resources of Parisian society; she looked
at that society with the curiosity of a girl, but she learned from it
only that which her sorrow and her wounded pride revealed to her.

Juana had the tact of a virgin heart which receives impressions in
advance of the event, after the manner of what are called "sensitives."
The solitary young girl, so suddenly become a woman and a wife, saw
plainly that were she to attempt to compel society to respect her
husband, it must be after the manner of Spanish beggars, carbine in
hand. Besides, the multiplicity of the precautions she would have to
take, would they meet the necessity? Suddenly she divined society as,
once before, she had divined life, and she saw nothing around her but
the immense extent of an irreparable disaster. She had, moreover, the
additional grief of tardily recognizing her husband's peculiar form
of incapacity; he was a man unfitted for any purpose that required
continuity of ideas. He could not understand a consistent part, such as
he ought to play in the world; he perceived it neither as a whole nor
in its gradations, and its gradations were everything. He was in one of
those positions where shrewdness and tact might have taken the place
of strength; when shrewdness and tact succeed, they are, perhaps, the
highest form of strength.

Now Diard, far from arresting the spot of oil on his garments left by
his antecedents, did his best to spread it. Incapable of studying the
phase of the empire in the midst of which he came to live in Paris, he
wanted to be made prefect. At that time every one believed in the genius
of Napoleon; his favor enhanced the value of all offices. Prefectures,
those miniature empires, could only be filled by men of great names, or
chamberlains of H.M. the emperor and king. Already the prefects were
a species of vizier. The myrmidons of the great man scoffed at Diard's
pretensions to a prefecture, whereupon he lowered his demand to a
sub-prefecture. There was, of course, a ridiculous discrepancy between
this latter demand and the magnitude of his fortune. To frequent the
imperial salons and live with insolent luxury, and then to abandon that
millionaire life and bury himself as sub-prefect at Issoudun or Savenay
was certainly holding himself below his position. Juana, too lat