h of duty was wide enough and lined
sufficiently with flowers to gratify or at least pacify her.

But Cesarine was, like her aunt, a born dissolvent of society's vital
elements. Ruled by a strong hand, and removed from the pernicious
influence of the vicious countess, her mother had never inculcated evil
to her child; on the contrary, impressed by the lesson of Iza's career,
she had perhaps been too Puritanic with Cesarine, whose flight from home
at an early age, was like the spring of a deer through a gap in a fence.
Cesarine, wherever placed, sapped morality, faith, labor and the family
ties.

In the new country she feared at first that she had but exchanged
parental despotism for marital tyranny. But soon she perceived that
nothing was changed that would affect her. On the contrary, France, in
the last decade of the Empire, was more corrupt than Russia's chief
towns and the dissoluteness, though not as coarse as at Munich, was more
diffused. Here she was assured that she could gratify her insatiable
appetite at any moment. She saw that the manners excused her; the laws
guaranteed the unfaithful wife, and religion screened her; that the
social atmosphere, despite slander and gossip, enveloped and preserved
her; in short, it was clear that to a creature in whom wickedness
developed like a plant in a hot-house, the freedom society accorded her
was as delicious as that given by her husband in his trust and his
devotion to art.

It seemed to her that, after the death of their first-born, his silence
signified some contempt for her; in fact, she had, stupidly frank for
once, expressed relief at this escape from the cares of maternity. Did
he suspect that she had, not with any repugnance, precipitated its
death? She feared this passionate man who, by strength of will, made
himself calm, alarmed her more than an angry one would have done. Moved
by instinct, for she really felt that his sacrifice to her in marrying
had condoned for his father's blow at her ancestress, she tried to
return him harm for good. But it is not easy for a serpent to sting a
rock.

Recovered from the slight eclipse of beauty during her experience as a
mother, she endeavored to make him once again her worshiper. But her
tricks, her tears and her caresses seemed not to count as before when
they fled from Von Sendlingen's vengeance. He remained so strictly the
husband that she could perceive scarcely an atom of the lover. Then she
vowed to torture h