avaricious or refractory,
must perforce do honor to the Imperial Guard, and mayors and prefects
went out to meet them with set speeches as if the conquerors had been
crowned kings. Mme. de Bargeton went to a _ridotto_ given to the town
by a regiment, and fell in love with an officer of a good family, a
sub-lieutenant, to whom the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of the
baton of a Marshal of France. Love, restrained, greater and nobler
than the ties that were made and unmade so easily in those days, was
consecrated coldly by the hands of death. On the battlefield of Wagram
a shell shattered the only record of Mme. de Bargeton's young beauty,
a portrait worn on the heart of the Marquis of Cante-Croix. For long
afterwards she wept for the young soldier, the colonel in his second
campaign, for the heart hot with love and glory that set a letter from
Nais above Imperial favor. The pain of those days cast a veil of sadness
over her face, a shadow that only vanished at the terrible age when a
woman first discovers with dismay that the best years of her life are
over, and she has had no joy of them; when she sees her roses wither,
and the longing for love is revived again with the desire to linger yet
for a little on the last smiles of youth. Her nobler qualities dealt
so many wounds to her soul at the moment when the cold of the provinces
seized upon her. She would have died of grief like the ermine if by
chance she had been sullied by contact with those men whose thoughts are
bent on winning a few sous nightly at cards after a good dinner; pride
saved her from the shabby love intrigues of the provinces. A woman so
much above the level of those about her, forced to decide between the
emptiness of the men whom she meets and the emptiness of her own life,
can make but one choice; marriage and society became a cloister for
Anais. She lived by poetry as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the
famous foreign books published in France for the first time between 1815
and 1821, the great essayists, M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre (those two
eagles of thought)--all the lighter French literature, in short, that
appeared during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might
bring delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind
or body. She stood strong and straight like some forest tree,
lightning-blasted but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted
manner, her social supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental