happiness; look at the martyrs!"

"With a husband, my dear innocent, we live, as it were, in our own
life; but to love, is to live in the life of another," said the Marquise
d'Espard.

"A lover is forbidden fruit, and that to me, says all!" cried the pretty
Moina de Saint-Heren, laughing.

When she was not at some diplomatic rout, or at a ball given by rich
foreigners, like Lady Dudley or the Princesse Galathionne, the Comtesse
de Vandenesse might be seen, after the Opera, at the houses of Madame
d'Espard, the Marquise de Listomere, Mademoiselle des Touches, the
Comtesse de Montcornet, or the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu, the only
aristocratic houses then open; and never did she leave any one of them
without some evil seed of the world being sown in her heart. She heard
talk of completing her life,--a saying much in fashion in those days; of
being comprehended,--another word to which women gave strange meanings.
She often returned home uneasy, excited, curious, and thoughtful. She
began to find something less, she hardly knew what, in her life; but she
did not yet go so far as to think it lonely.

CHAPTER IV. A CELEBRATED MAN

The most amusing society, but also the most mixed, which Madame Felix
de Vandenesse frequented, was that of the Comtesse de Montcornet,
a charming little woman, who received illustrious artists, leading
financial personages, distinguished writers; but only after subjecting
them to so rigid an examination that the most exclusive aristocrat had
nothing to fear in coming in contact with this second-class society. The
loftiest pretensions were there respected.

During the winter of 1833, when society rallied after the revolution of
July, some salons, notably those of Mesdames d'Espard and de Listomere,
Mademoiselle des Touches, and the Duchesse de Grandlieu, had selected
certain of the celebrities in art, science, literature, and politics,
and received them. Society can lose nothing of its rights, and it must
be amused. At a concert given by Madame de Montcornet toward the close
of the winter of 1833, a man of rising fame in literature and politics
appeared in her salon, brought there by one of the wittiest, but also
one of the laziest writers of that epoch, Emile Blondet, celebrated
behind closed doors, highly praised by journalists, but unknown beyond
the barriers. Blondet himself was well aware of this; he indulged in no
illusions, and, among his other witty and contemptuous sayings, he w