ter's marriage, which was solemnized in the
same way, in every particular, as his son's had been to Mademoiselle
Crevel. This display moderated the reports current as to the Baron's
financial position, while the fortune assigned to his daughter explained
the need for having borrowed money.

Here ends what is, in a way, the introduction to this story. It is to
the drama that follows that the premise is to a syllogism, what the
prologue is to a classical tragedy.

In Paris, when a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of
her beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely
creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched
circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is
why. It is not enough merely to accept the shameful life of a courtesan
with a view to earning its profits, and at the same time to bear the
simple garb of a respectable middle-class wife. Vice does not triumph so
easily; it resembles genius in so far that they both need a concurrence
of favorable conditions to develop the coalition of fortune and gifts.
Eliminate the strange prologue of the Revolution, and the Emperor would
never have existed; he would have been no more than a second edition of
Fabert. Venal beauty, if it finds no amateurs, no celebrity, no cross
of dishonor earned by squandering men's fortunes, is Correggio in a
hay-loft, is genius starving in a garret. Lais, in Paris, must first and
foremost find a rich man mad enough to pay her price. She must keep up a
very elegant style, for this is her shop-sign; she must be sufficiently
well bred to flatter the vanity of her lovers; she must have the
brilliant wit of a Sophie Arnould, which diverts the apathy of rich men;
finally, she must arouse the passions of libertines by appearing to be
mistress to one man only who is envied by the rest.

These conditions, which a woman of that class calls being in luck, are
difficult to combine in Paris, although it is a city of millionaires, of
idlers, of used-up and capricious men.

Providence has, no doubt, vouchsafed protection to clerks and
middle-class citizens, for whom obstacles of this kind are at least
double in the sphere in which they move. At the same time, there are
enough Madame Marneffes in Paris to allow of our taking Valerie to
figure as a type in this picture of manners. Some of these women yield
to the double pressure of a genuine passion and of hard necessity,
like Madam