e aware
of our laws and habits and administrative customs, did not enlighten her
husband soon enough. Diard, desperate, petitioned successively all the
ministerial powers; repulsed everywhere, he found nothing open to him;
and society then judged him as the government judged him and as he
judged himself. Diard, grievously wounded on the battlefield, was
nevertheless not decorated; the quartermaster, rich as he was, was
allowed no place in public life, and society logically refused him that
to which he pretended in its midst.

Finally, to cap all, the luckless man felt in his own home the
superiority of his wife. Though she used great tact--we might say velvet
softness if the term were admissible--to disguise from her husband this
supremacy, which surprised and humiliated herself, Diard ended by being
affected by it.

At a game of life like this men are either unmanned, or they grow the
stronger, or they give themselves to evil. The courage or the ardor of
this man lessened under the reiterated blows which his own faults dealt
to his self-appreciation, and fault after fault he committed. In the
first place he had to struggle against his own habits and character.
A passionate Provencal, frank in his vices as in his virtues, this man
whose fibres vibrated like the strings of a harp, was all heart to his
former friends. He succored the shabby and spattered man as readily as
the needy of rank; in short, he accepted everybody, and gave his hand in
his gilded salons to many a poor devil. Observing this on one occasion,
a general of the empire, a variety of the human species of which no
type will presently remain, refused his hand to Diard, and called him,
insolently, "my good fellow" when he met him. The few persons of really
good society whom Diard knew, treated him with that elegant, polished
contempt against which a new-made man has seldom any weapons. The
manners, the semi-Italian gesticulations, the speech of Diard, his
style of dress,--all contributed to repulse the respect which careful
observation of matters of good taste and dignity might otherwise obtain
for vulgar persons; the yoke of such conventionalities can only be cast
off by great and unthinkable powers. So goes the world.

These details but faintly picture the many tortures to which Juana was
subjected; they came upon her one by one; each social nature pricked her
with its own particular pin; and to a soul which preferred the thrust of
a dagger, there coul