ue. But, in the first place, what nobler
destiny can you offer to a virtuous woman than to purify, like charcoal,
the muddy waters of vice? How is it some observers fail to see that
these noble creatures, obliged by the sternness of their own principles
never to infringe on conjugal fidelity, must naturally desire a husband
of wider practical experience than their own? The scamps of social life
are great men in love. Thus the poor woman groaned in spirit at finding
her chosen vessel parted into two pieces. God alone could solder
together a Chevalier de Valois and a du Bousquier.

In order to explain the importance of the few words which the chevalier
and Mademoiselle Cormon are about to say to each other, it is necessary
to reveal two serious matters which agitated the town, and about which
opinions were divided; besides, du Bousquier was mysteriously connected
with them.

One concerns the rector of Alencon, who had formerly taken the
constitutional oath, and who was now conquering the repugnance of the
Catholics by a display of the highest virtues. He was Cheverus on a
small scale, and became in time so fully appreciated that when he died
the whole town mourned him. Mademoiselle Cormon and the Abbe de Sponde
belonged to that "little Church," sublime in its orthodoxy, which was to
the court of Rome what the Ultras were to be to Louis XVIII. The abbe,
more especially, refused to recognize a Church which had compromised
with the constitutionals. The rector was therefore not received in
the Cormon household, whose sympathies were all given to the curate of
Saint-Leonard, the aristocratic parish of Alencon. Du Bousquier, that
fanatic liberal now concealed under the skin of a royalist, knowing how
necessary rallying points are to all discontents (which are really at
the bottom of all oppositions), had drawn the sympathies of the middle
classes around the rector. So much for the first case; the second was
this:--

Under the secret inspiration of du Bousquier the idea of building a
theatre had dawned on Alencon. The henchmen of the purveyor did not know
their Mohammed; and they thought they were ardent in carrying out their
own conception. Athanase Granson was one of the warmest partisans for
the theatre; and of late he had urged at the mayor's office a cause
which all the other young clerks had eagerly adopted.

The chevalier, as we have said, offered his arm to the old maid for
a turn on the terrace. She accepted it, not