moke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning! It
was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush
of blood to the head. She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois,
enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting him as to refrigerants. On
such occasions the shrewd old gentleman would pull out his snuff-box,
gaze at the Princess Goritza, and say, by way of conclusion:--

"The right composing draught, my dear lady, is a good and kind husband."

"But whom can one trust?" she replied.

The chevalier would then brush away the snuff which had settled in the
folds of his waistcoat or his paduasoy breeches. To the world at large
this gesture would have seemed very natural; but it always gave extreme
uneasiness to the poor woman.

The violence of this hope without an object was so great that Rose was
afraid to look a man in the face lest he should perceive in her eyes the
feelings that filled her soul. By a wilfulness, which was perhaps
only the continuation of her earlier methods, though she felt herself
attracted toward the men who might still suit her, she was so afraid of
being accused of folly that she treated them ungraciously. Most persons
in her society, being incapable of appreciating her motives, which
were always noble, explained her manner towards her co-celibates as the
revenge of a refusal received or expected. When the year 1815 began,
Rose had reached that fatal age which she dared not avow. She was
forty-two years old. Her desire for marriage then acquired an intensity
which bordered on monomania, for she saw plainly that all chance of
progeny was about to escape her; and the thing which in her celestial
ignorance she desired above all things was the possession of children.
Not a person in all Alencon ever attributed to this virtuous woman
a single desire for amorous license. She loved, as it were, in bulk
without the slightest imagination of love. Rose was a Catholic Agnes,
incapable of inventing even one of the wiles of Moliere's Agnes.

For some months past she had counted on chance. The disbandment of the
Imperial troops and the reorganization of the Royal army caused a change
in the destination of many officers, who returned, some on half-pay,
others with or without a pension, to their native towns,--all having a
desire to counteract their luckless fate, and to end their life in a way
which might to Rose Cormon be a happy beginning of hers. It would surely
be strange if, am