ial possibilities. Three
days before the arrival of Maria Louisa, Napoleon flung himself on
his wedding bed at Compiegne. All stupendous passions have the same
impulses. I love as a poet--as an emperor!'

"As I heard the last words, I believed that Count Octave's fears were
realized; he had risen, and was walking up and down, and gesticulating,
but he stopped as if shocked by the vehemence of his own words.

"'I am very ridiculous,' he added, after a long pause, looking at me, as
if craving a glance of pity.

"'No, monsieur, you are very unhappy.'

"'Ah yes!' said he, taking up the thread of his confidences. 'From the
violence of my speech you may, you must believe in the intensity of a
physical passion which for nine years has absorbed all my faculties; but
that is nothing in comparison with the worship I feel for the soul, the
mind, the heart, all in that woman; the enchanting divinities in the
train of Love, with whom we pass our life, and who form the daily poem
of a fugitive delight. By a phenomenon of retrospection I see now the
graces of Honorine's mind and heart, to which I paid little heed in the
time of my happiness--like all who are happy. From day to day I have
appreciated the extent of my loss, discovering the exquisite gifts of
that capricious and refractory young creature who has grown so strong
and so proud under the heavy hand of poverty and the shock of the most
cowardly desertion. And that heavenly blossom is fading in solitude and
hiding!--Ah! The law of which we were speaking,' he went on with bitter
irony, 'the law is a squad of gendarmes--my wife seized and dragged away
by force! Would not that be to triumph over a corpse? Religion has no
hold on her; she craves its poetry, she prays, but she does not listen
to the commandments of the Church. I, for my part, have exhausted
everything in the way of mercy, of kindness, of love; I am at my wits'
end. Only one chance of victory is left to me; the cunning and patience
with which bird-catchers at last entrap the wariest birds, the swiftest,
the most capricious, and the rarest. Hence, Maurice, when M. de
Grandville's indiscretion betrayed to you the secret of my life, I ended
by regarding this incident as one of the decrees of fate, one of the
utterances for which gamblers listen and pray in the midst of their
most impassioned play.... Have you enough affection for me to show me
romantic devotion?'

"'I see what you are coming to, Monsieur le Comte,