. She was becoming my property. I was making
use of her.

Without saying anything, I at once began to search for something for
her. I hesitated between first one thing and then another; but at last
chance came to my aid. Country-bred as she was, the girl was losing her
colour in the Paris air; she was ordered to leave town. She knew a
family at Neufchatel, in Normandy, who were willing to take her as a
boarder for a few weeks. She went and did not come back.

3

What did she do there, how did she spend her time? She wrote to me
before long that she was quite happy, that she was earning her
livelihood without difficulty. There was a little linen-draper's shop,
it seemed, kept by an old maid, who, having no relations of her own, had
taken Rose to assist her at first and perhaps to succeed her in time.

I was not at all surprised. For that matter, when we follow the natural
evolution of things, their conclusion comes so softly that we hardly
notice it. It is the descent which we are approaching: it becomes less
steep at every step and, when we reach it, it is only a faint depression
in the ground.

4

Strange temperament! The more I think of it, the more it appears to me
as an instance of the dangers of virtue, or at least of what we
understand by the word. Does it not look as though, in the charts of our
characters, the virtues are the ultimate goals which can be reached only
by the way of our faults? Each virtue stands like a golden statue in the
centre of a cross-roads. We can hardly know every side of it unless we
have beheld it from the various paths that lead to it. It shines in a
different manner at the end of each road.

Rose never became conscious of her good qualities, because she possessed
them too naturally; and she remained poor in the midst of all the riches
which she was unable to discern.

Oh, if only she had been less wise and had had that ardour, that flame
which feeds on all that is thrown upon it to extinguish it; if she had
had that inordinate prodigality which teaches us by making us commit a
thousand acts of folly; if, in short, she had had faults, vices,
impulses of curiosity, how different her fate would have been! The
equilibrium of a person's character may be compared with that of a pair
of scales; and it is safe to say that, by weighing more heavily upon one
of these, our defects raise our good qualities to their highest level.

5

But every minute is now bringing me nearer to