e light and strength
of his life; for his desire to rise in life, and the limited knowledge
he had gained of the world, both came from his affection for his wife
and for his daughter.

As for Madame Cesar, then thirty-seven years old, she bore so close a
resemblance to the Venus of Milo that all who knew her recognized the
likeness when the Duc de Riviere sent the beautiful statue to Paris.
In a few months sorrows were to dim with yellowing tints that dazzling
fairness, to hollow and blacken the bluish circle round the lovely
greenish-gray eyes so cruelly that she then wore the look of an old
Madonna; for amid the coming ruin she retained her gentle sincerity,
her pure though saddened glance; and no one ever thought her less than a
beautiful woman, whose bearing was virtuous and full of dignity. At the
ball now planned by Cesar she was to shine with a last lustre of beauty,
remarked upon at the time and long remembered.

Every life has its climax,--a period when causes are at work, and are in
exact relation to results. This mid-day of life, when living forces
find their equilibrium and put forth their productive powers with full
effect, is common not only to organized beings but to cities, nations,
ideas, institutions, commerce, and commercial enterprises, all of which,
like noble races and dynasties, are born and rise and fall. From whence
comes the vigor with which this law of growth and decay applies itself
to all organized things in this lower world? Death itself, in times
of scourge, has periods when it advances, slackens, sinks back, and
slumbers. Our globe is perhaps only a rocket a little more continuing
than the rest. History, recording the causes of the rise and fall of all
things here below, could enlighten man as to the moment when he might
arrest the play of all his faculties; but neither the conquerors, nor
the actors, nor the women, nor the writers in the great drama will
listen to the salutary voice.

Cesar Birotteau, who might with reason think himself at the apogee of
his fortunes, used this crucial pause as the point of a new departure.
He did not know, moreover neither nations nor kings have attempted to
make known in characters ineffaceable, the cause of the vast overthrows
with which history teems, and of which so many royal and commercial
houses offer signal examples. Why are there no modern pyramids to recall
ceaselessly the one principle which dominates the common-weal of nations
and of indiv