plied Raoul. "We have awakened in each other
the only true love."

He spoke the truth as he felt it. Posing before this innocent
young heart as a pure man, Raoul was caught himself by his own fine
sentiments. At first purely speculative and born of vanity, his love had
now become sincere. He began by lying, he had ended in speaking truth.
In all writers there is ever a sentiment, difficult to stifle, which
impels them to admire the highest good. The countess, on her part, after
her first rush of gratitude and surprise, was charmed to have inspired
such sacrifices, to have caused him to surmount such difficulties. She
was beloved by a man who was worthy of her! Raoul was totally ignorant
to what his imaginary grandeur bound him. Women will not suffer their
idol to step down from his pedestal. They do not forgive the slightest
pettiness in a god. Marie was far from knowing the solution to the
riddle given by Raoul to his friends at Very's. The struggle of this
writer, risen from the lower classes, had cost him the ten first years
of his youth; and now in the days of his success he longed to be loved
by one of the queens of the great world. Vanity, without which, as
Champfort says, love would be but a feeble thing, sustained his passion
and increased it day by day.

"Can you swear to me," said Marie, "that you belong and will never
belong to any other woman?"

"There is neither time in my life nor place in my heart for any other
woman," replied Raoul, not thinking that he told a lie, so little did he
value Florine.

"I believe you," she said.

When they reached the alley where their carriages were waiting, Marie
dropped Raoul's arm, and the young man assumed a respectful and distant
attitude as if he had just met her; he accompanied her, with his hat
off, to her carriage, then he followed her by the Avenue Charles X.,
breathing in, with satisfaction, the very dust her caleche raised.

In spite of Marie's high renunciations, Raoul continued to follow her
everywhere; he adored the air of mingled pleasure and displeasure with
which she scolded him for wasting his precious time. She took direction
of his labors, she gave him formal orders on the employment of his time;
she stayed at home to deprive him of every pretext for dissipation.
Every morning she read his paper, and became the herald of his staff
of editors, of Etienne Lousteau the feuilletonist, whom she thought
delightful, of Felicien Vernou, of Claude Vignon,-