n her certain vices of
education which made her unfit to second him in his schemes.

A speech he made, _a propos_ of Talleyrand's marriage, enlightened the
Countess, to whom it proved that if he had still been a free man she
would never have been Madame Ferraud. What woman could forgive this
repentance? Does it not include the germs of every insult, every crime,
every form of repudiation? But what a wound must it have left in the
Countess' heart, supposing that she lived in the dread of her first
husband's return? She had known that he still lived, and she had ignored
him. Then during the time when she had heard no more of him, she had
chosen to believe that he had fallen at Waterloo with the Imperial
Eagle, at the same time as Boutin. She resolved, nevertheless, to bind
the Count to her by the strongest of all ties, by a chain of gold, and
vowed to be so rich that her fortune might make her second marriage
dissoluble, if by chance Colonel Chabert should ever reappear. And he
had reappeared; and she could not explain to herself why the struggle
she had dreaded had not already begun. Suffering, sickness, had perhaps
delivered her from that man. Perhaps he was half mad, and Charenton
might yet do her justice. She had not chosen to take either Delbecq or
the police into her confidence, for fear of putting herself in their
power, or of hastening the catastrophe. There are in Paris many women
who, like the Countess Ferraud, live with an unknown moral monster, or
on the brink of an abyss; a callus forms over the spot that tortures
them, and they can still laugh and enjoy themselves.

"There is something very strange in Comte Ferraud's position," said
Derville to himself, on emerging from his long reverie, as his cab
stopped at the door of the Hotel Ferraud in the Rue de Varennes. "How is
it that he, so rich as he is, and such a favorite with the King, is not
yet a peer of France? It may, to be sure, be true that the King, as
Mme. de Grandlieu was telling me, desires to keep up the value of the
_pairie_ by not bestowing it right and left. And, after all, the son of
a Councillor of the _Parlement_ is not a Crillon nor a Rohan. A Comte
Ferraud can only get into the Upper Chamber surreptitiously. But if his
marriage were annulled, could he not get the dignity of some old peer
who has only daughters transferred to himself, to the King's great
satisfaction? At any rate this will be a good bogey to put forward and
frighten the Coun