mind, always, so to speak, in half-tints, was better appreciated than

in Paris.
The arrangement of his house and the restoration of the chateau de

Lanstrac, where he introduced the comfort and luxury of an English
country-house, absorbed the capital saved by the notary during the

preceding six years. Reduced now to his strictincome of forty-odd
thousand a year, he thought himself wise and prudent in so regulating

his household as not to exceed it.
After publicly exhibiting his equipages, entertaining the most

distinguished young men of the place, and giving various hunting
parties on the estate at Lanstrac, Paul saw very plainly that

provincial life would never do without marriage. Too young to employ
his time in miserly occupations, or in trying to interest himself in

the speculative improvements in which provincials sooner or later
engage (compelled thereto by the necessity of establishing their

children), he soon felt the need of that variety of distractions a
habit of which becomes at last the very life of a Parisian. A name to

preserve, property to transmit to heirs, social relations to be
created by a household where the principal families of the

neighborhood could assemble, and a weariness of all irregular
connections, were not, however, the determining reasons of his

matrimonial desires. From the time he first returned to the provinces
he had been secretly in love with the queen of Bordeaux, the great

beauty, Mademoiselle Evangelista.
About the beginning of the century, a rich Spaniard, named

Evangelista, established himself in Bordeaux, where his letters of
recommendation, as well as his large fortune, gave him an entrance to

the salons of the nobility. His wife contributed greatly to maintain
him in the good graces of an aristocracy which may perhaps have

adopted him in the first instance merely to pique the society of the
class below them. Madame Evangelista, who belonged to the Casa-Reale,

an illustrious family of Spain, was a Creole, and, like all women
served by slaves, she lived as a great lady, knew nothing of the value

of money, repressed no whims, even the most expensive, finding them
ever satisfied by an adoring husband who generously concealed from her

knowledge the running-gear of the financial machine. Happy in finding
her pleased with Bordeaux, where his interests obliged him to live,

the Spaniard bought a house, set up a household, received in much
style, and gave many proofs of possessing a fine taste in all things.

Thus, from 1800 to 1812, Monsieur and Madame Evangelista were objects
of great interest to the community of Bordeaux.

The Spaniard died in 1813, leaving his wife a widow at thirty-two
years of age, with an immense fortune and the prettiest little girl in

the world, a child of eleven, who promised to be, and did actually
become, a most accomplished young woman. Clever as Madame Evangelista

was, the Restoration altered her position; the royalist party cleared
its ranks and several of the old families left Bordeaux. Though the

head and hand of her husband were lacking in the direction of her
affairs, for which she had hitherto shown the indifference of a Creole

and the inaptitude of a lackadaisical woman, she was determined to
make no change in her manner of living. At the period when Paul

resolved to return to his native town, Mademoiselle Natalie
Evangelista was a remarkably beautiful young girl, and, apparently,

the richest match in Bordeaux, where the steady diminution of her
mother's capital was unknown. In order to prolong her reign, Madame

Evangelista had squandered enormous sums. Brilliant fetes and the
continuation of an almost regal style of living kept the public in its

past belief as to the wealth of the Spanish family.
Natalie was now in her nineteenth year, but no proposal of marriage

had as yet reached her mother's ear. Accustomed to gratify her
fancies, Mademoiselle Evangelista wore cashmeres and jewels, and lived

in a style of luxury which alarmed all speculativesuitors in a region
and at a period when sons were as calculating as their parents. The

fatal remark, "None but a prince can afford to marry Mademoiselle
Evangelista," circulated among the salons and the cliques. Mothers of

families, dowagers who had granddaughters to establish, young girls
jealous of Natalie, whose elegance and tyrannical beauty annoyed them,

took pains to envenom this opinion with treacherous remarks. When they
heard a possible suitor say with ecstatic admiration, as Natalie

entered a ball-room, "Heavens, how beautiful she is!" "Yes," the
mammas would answer, "but expensive." If some new-comer thought

Mademoiselle Evangelista bewitching and said to a marriageable man
that he couldn't do it better, "Who would be bold enough," some woman

would reply, "to marry a girl whose mother gives her a thousand francs
a month for her toilet,--a girl who has horses and a maid of her own,

and wears laces? Yes, her 'peignoirs' are trimmed with mechlin. The
price of her washing would support the household of a clerk. She wears

pelerines in the morning which actually cost six francs to get up."
These, and other speeches said occasionally in the form of praise

extinguished the desires that some men might have had to marry the
beautiful Spanish girl. Queen of every ball, accustomed to flattery,

"blasee" with the smiles and the admiration which followed her every
step, Natalie, nevertheless, knew nothing of life. She lived as the

bird which flies, as the flower that blooms, finding every one about
her eager to do her will. She was ignorant of the price of things; she

knew neither the value of money, nor whence it came, how it should be
managed, and how spent. Possibly she thought that every household had

cooks and coachmen, lady's-maids and footmen, as the fields have hay
and the trees their fruits. To her, beggars and paupers, fallen trees

and waste lands seemed in the same category. Pampered and petted as
her mother's hope, no fatigue was allowed to spoil her pleasure. Thus

she bounded through life as a courser on his steppe, unbridled and
unshod.

Six month's after Paul's arrival the Pink of Fashion and the Queen of
Balls met in presence of the highest society of the town of Bordeaux.

The two flowers looked at each other with apparentcoldness, and
mutually thought each other charming. Interested in watching the

effects of the meeting, Madame Evangelista divined in the expression
of Paul's eyes the feelings within him, and she muttered to herself,

"He will be my son-in-law." Paul, on the other hand, said to himself,
as he looked at Natalie, "She will be my wife."

The wealth of the Evangelistas, proverbial in Bordeaux, had remained
in Paul's mind as a memory of his childhood. Thus the pecuniary

conditions were known to him from the start, without necessitating
those discussions and inquiries which are as repugnant to a timid mind

as to a proud one. When some persons attempting to say to Paul a few
flattering phrases as to Natalie's manner, language, and beauty,

ending by remarks, cruelly calculated to deter him, on the lavish
extravagance of the Evangelistas, the Pink of Fashion replied with a

disdain that was well-deserved by such provincial pettiness. This
method of receiving such speeches soon silenced them; for he now set

the tone to the ideas and language as well as to the manners of those
about him. He had imported from his travels a certain development of

the Britannic personality with its icy barriers, also a tone of
Byronic pessimism as to life, together with English plate, boot-

polish, ponies, yellow gloves, cigars, and the habit of galloping.
It thus happened that Paul escaped the discouragements hitherto

presented to marriageable men by dowagers and young girls. Madame
Evangelista began by asking him to formal dinners on various

occasions. The Pink of Fashion would not, of course, miss festivities
to which none but the most distinguished young men of the town were

bidden. In spite of the coldness that Paul assumed, which deceived
neither mother nor daughter, he was drawn, step by step, into the path

of marriage. Sometimes as he passed in his tilbury, or rode by on his
fine English horse, he heard the young men of his acquaintance say to

one another:--
"There's a lucky man. He is rich and handsome, and is to marry, so

they say, Mademoiselle Evangelista. There are some men for whom the
world seems made."

When he met the Evangelistas he felt proud of the particular
distinction which mother and daughter imparted to their bows. If Paul

had not secretly, within his heart, fallen in love with Mademoiselle
Natalie, society would certainly have married him to her in spite of

himself. Society, which never causes good, is the accomplice of much
evil; then when it beholds the evil it has hatched maternally, it

rejects and revenges it. Society in Bordeaux, attributing a "dot" of a
million to Mademoiselle Evangelista, bestowed it upon Paul without