known that you were related to Monsieur le Baron, I should long
since have craved your kind interest with him. I saw him come in, so I
took the liberty of coming across; for my husband, Monsieur le Baron,
spoke to me of a report on the office clerks which is to be laid before
the minister to-morrow."

She seemed quite agitated and nervous--but she had only run upstairs.

"You have no need to play the petitioner, fair lady," replied the Baron.
"It is I who should ask the favor of seeing you."

"Very well, if mademoiselle allows it, pray come!" said Madame Marneffe.

"Yes--go, Cousin, I will join you," said Lisbeth judiciously.

The Parisienne had so confidently counted on the chief's visit and
intelligence, that not only had she dressed herself for so important
an interview--she had dressed her room. Early in the day it had been
furnished with flowers purchased on credit. Marneffe had helped his
wife to polish the furniture, down to the smallest objects, washing,
brushing, and dusting everything. Valerie wished to be found in an
atmosphere of sweetness, to attract the chief and to please him enough
to have a right to be cruel; to tantalize him as a child would, with all
the tricks of fashionable tactics. She had gauged Hulot. Give a Paris
woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.

The man of the Empire, accustomed to the ways to the Empire, was no
doubt quite ignorant of the ways of modern love-making, of the scruples
in vogue and the various styles of conversation invented since 1830,
which led to the poor weak woman being regarded as the victim of
her lover's desires--a Sister of Charity salving a wound, an angel
sacrificing herself.

This modern art of love uses a vast amount of evangelical phrases in the
service of the Devil. Passion is martyrdom. Both parties aspire to the
Ideal, to the Infinite; love is to make them so much better. All these
fine words are but a pretext for putting increased ardor into the
practical side of it, more frenzy into a fall than of old. This
hypocrisy, a characteristic of the times, is a gangrene in gallantry.
The lovers are both angels, and they behave, if they can, like two
devils.

Love had no time for such subtle analysis between two campaigns, and in
1809 its successes were as rapid as those of the Empire. So, under the
Restoration, the handsome Baron, a lady's man once more, had begun by
consoling some old friends now fallen from the political f