and call into being all the tender and delicate delights for
which we are steeped in a thousand superstitions, imagining them to be
inherent in the heart that lavishes them upon us. It is this wonderful
response of one nature to another, this religious belief, this certainty
of finding peculiar or excessive happiness in the presence of one we
love, that accounts in part for perdurable attachments and long-lived
passion. If a woman possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to
be a matter of use and wont. She brings all her heart and brain to love,
clothes her tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her
most natural moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence
her memory is almost as potent as her presence. All other women are as
shadows compared with her. Not until we have lost or known the dread of
losing a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth.
And if a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it
by his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some
incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom
he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never
be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his
lips, he has dealt a deadly wound to _her_, his wife in truth, whom he
forsook for a social chimera,--then he must either die or take refuge
in a materialistic, selfish, and heartless philosophy, from which
impassioned souls shrink in horror.

As for Mme. de Beauseant, she doubtless did not imagine that her
friend's despair could drive him to suicide, when he had drunk deep of
love for nine years. Possibly she may have thought that she alone was
to suffer. At any rate, she did quite rightly to refuse the most
humiliating of all positions; a wife may stoop for weighty social
reasons to a kind of compromise which a mistress is bound to hold in
abhorrence, for in the purity of her passion lies all its justification.

ANGOULEME, September 1832.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Beauseant, Marquis and Comte de
Father Goriot
An Episode under the Terror

Beauseant, Marquise de
Letters of Two Brides

Beauseant, Vicomte de
Father Goriot

Beauseant, Vicomtesse de
Father Goriot
Albert Savarus

Champignelles, De
The Seamy Side of History