d in the world
of love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world
of politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of
which--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life,
he despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas
were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the strictest
tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the Comtesse
de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he had once
resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He himself had
suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still remembered his
unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath the reserves of
feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must have brought the
heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured, embittered, or
rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable, and ready to
unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two opposite effects,
the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of ancient slavery,
Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on the one hand,
resignation and tenderness, on the other.

The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de
Granville. In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure young
girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling with
the conjugal feeling. He knew his own heart was withered by the world
and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for
a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence. Beside those
springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience
with young and innocent ignorance. After soberly judging the position,
he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and
perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers
of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind
protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a
surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities are
the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career had
taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was busy,
literary, and thoughtful by turns, all his forces, in fact, were now
employed in making his wife happy; to that end he applied his mind.

When Marie-Angelique