warlike
luxury of the days when France shone like a vast encampment, prodigal
and magnificent because it was victorious. After the Spanish campaign,
the administration seemed to enter upon an era of tranquillity in which
some good might be accomplished; and three months before the opening of
our story a new reign had begun without any apparent opposition; for the
liberalism of the Left had welcomed Charles X. with as much enthusiasm
as the Right. Even clear-sighted and suspicious persons were misled. The
moment seemed propitious for Rabourdin. What could better conduce to the
stability of the government than to propose and carry through a reform
whose beneficial results were to be so vast?

Never had Rabourdin seemed so anxious and preoccupied as he now did
in the mornings as he walked from his house to the ministry, or at
half-past four in the afternoon, when he returned. Madame Rabourdin, on
her part, disconsolate over her wasted life, weary of secretly
working to obtain a few luxuries of dress, never appeared so bitterly
discontented as now; but, like any wife who is really attached to her
husband, she considered it unworthy of a superior woman to condescend
to the shameful devices by which the wives of some officials eke out the
insufficiency of their husband's salary. This feeling made her refuse
all intercourse with Madame Colleville, then very intimate with Francois
Keller, whose parties eclipsed those of the rue Duphot. Nevertheless,
she mistook the quietude of the political thinker and the preoccupation
of the intrepid worker for the apathetic torpor of an official broken
down by the dulness of routine, vanquished by that most hateful of all
miseries, the mediocrity that simply earns a living; and she groaned at
being married to a man without energy.

Thus it was that about this period in their lives she resolved to take
the making of her husband's fortune on herself; to thrust him at any
cost into a higher sphere, and to hide from him the secret springs of
her machinations. She carried into all her plans the independence of
ideas which characterized her, and was proud to think that she could
rise above other women by sharing none of their petty prejudices and by
keeping herself untrammelled by the restraints which society imposes.
In her anger she resolved to fight fools with their own weapons, and to
make herself a fool if need be. She saw things coming to a crisis. The
time was favorable. Monsieur de la Bil