have broken down
under a weight of troubles too heavy for her soul to bear, was lying
back on the sofa with bent limbs, and her head tossing restlessly. She
had rushed to her sister's house after a brief appearance at the Opera.
Flowers were still in her hair, but others were scattered upon the
carpet, together with her gloves, her silk pelisse, and muff and hood.
Tears were mingling with the pearls on her bosom; her swollen eyes
appeared to make strange confidences. In the midst of so much luxury her
distress was horrible, and she seemed unable to summon courage to speak.

"Poor darling!" said Madame du Tillet; "what a mistaken idea you have of
my marriage if you think that I can help you!"

Hearing this revelation, dragged from her sister's heart by the violence
of the storm she herself had raised there, the countess looked with
stupefied eyes at the banker's wife; her tears stopped, and her eyes
grew fixed.

"Are you in misery as well, my dearest?" she said, in a low voice.

"My griefs will not ease yours."

"But tell them to me, darling; I am not yet too selfish to listen. Are
we to suffer together once more, as we did in girlhood?"

"But alas! we suffer apart," said the banker's wife. "You and I live in
two worlds at enmity with each other. I go to the Tuileries when you are
not there. Our husbands belong to opposite parties. I am the wife of an
ambitious banker,--a bad man, my darling; while you have a noble, kind,
and generous husband."

"Oh! don't reproach me!" cried the countess. "To understand my position,
a woman must have borne the weariness of a vapid and barren life, and
have entered suddenly into a paradise of light and love; she must
know the happiness of feeling her whole life in that of another; of
espousing, as it were, the infinite emotions of a poet's soul; of living
a double existence,--going, coming with him in his courses through
space, through the world of ambition; suffering with his griefs, rising
on the wings of his high pleasures, developing her faculties on some
vast stage; and all this while living calm, serene, and cold before an
observing world. Ah! dearest, what happiness in having at all hours an
enormous interest, which multiplies the fibres of the heart and varies
them indefinitely! to feel no longer cold indifference! to find one's
very life depending on a thousand trifles!--on a walk where an eye
will beam to us from a crowd, on a glance which pales the sun! Ah! what
intoxi