punishing us by keeping his word to the infanta? I should be pitiable
indeed if I did not know her----"

"And I was once a coxcomb even as he," said the Vidame, indicating de
Marsay.

The conversation continued pitched in the same key, charmingly
scandalous, and agreeably corrupt. The dinner went off very

pleasantly. Rastignac and de Marsay went to the Opera with the Vidame
and Victurnien, with a view to following them afterwards to Mlle. des

Touches' salon. And thither, accordingly, this pair of rakes betook
themselves, calculating that by that time the tragedy would have been

read; for of all things to be taken between eleven and twelve o'clock
at night, a tragedy in their opinion was the most unwholesome. They

went to keep a watch on Victurnien and to embarrass him, a piece of
schoolboys's mischief embittered by a jealous dandy's spite. But

Victurnien was gifted with that page's effrontery which is a great
help to ease of manner; and Rastignac, watching him as he made his

entrance, was surprised to see how quickly he caught the tone of the
moment.

"That young d'Esgrignon will go far, will he not?" he said, addressing
his companion.

"That is as may be," returned de Marsay, "but he is in a fair way."
The Vidame introduced his young friend to one of the most amiable and

frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an
explosion five years later. Just then, however, she was in the full

blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal
conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof,

marks a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to
a man. Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are

left in peace. This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse,
a daughter of the d'Uxelles; her father-in-law was still alive; she

was not to be the Princesse de Cadignan for some years to come. A
friend of the Duchesse de Langeais and the Vicomtesse de Beauseant,

two glories departed, she was likewiseintimate with the Marquise
d'Espard, with whom she disputed her fragilesovereignty as queen of

fashion. Great relations lent her countenance for a long while, but
the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was one of those women who, in some way,

nobody knows how, or why, or where, will spend the rents of all the
lands of earth, and of the moon likewise, if they were not out of

reach. The general outline of her character was scarcely known as yet;
de Marsay, and de Marsay only, really had read her. That redoubtable

dandy now watched the Vidame de Pamiers' introduction of his young
friend to that lovely woman, and bent over to say in Rastignac's ear:

"My dear fellow, he will go up WHIZZ! like a rocket, and come down
like a stick," an atrociously vulgarsaying which was remarkably

fulfilled.
The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse had lost her heart to Victurnien after

first giving her mind to a serious study of him. Any lover who should
have caught the glance by which she expressed her gratitude to the

Vidame might well have been jealous of such friendship. Women are like
horses let loose on a steppe when they feel, as the Duchess felt with

the Vidame de Pamiers, that the ground is safe; at such moments they
are themselves; perhaps it pleases them to give, as it were, samples

of their tenderness in intimacy in this way. It was a guarded glance,
nothing was lost between eye and eye; there was no possibility of

reflection in any mirror. Nobody intercepted it.
"See how she has prepared herself," Rastignac said, turning to de

Marsay. "What a virginal toilette; what swan's grace in that snow-
white throat of hers! How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash

like a little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate. Who
would think that you had passed that way?"

"The very reason why she looks as she does," returned de Marsay, with
a triumphant air.

The two young men exchanged a smile. Mme. de Maufrigneuse saw the
smile and guessed at their conversation, and gave the pair a broadside

of her eyes, an art acquired by Frenchwomen since the Peace, when
Englishwomen imported it into this country, together with the shape of

their silver plate, their horses and harness, and the piles of insular
ice which impart a refreshingcoolness to the atmosphere of any room

in which a certain number of British females are gathered together.
The young men grew serious as a couple of clerks at the end of a

homily from headquarters before the receipt of an expected bonus.
The Duchess when she lost her heart to Victurnien had made up her mind

to play the part of romantic Innocence, a role much understudied
subsequently by other women, for the misfortune of modern youth. Her

Grace of Maufrigneuse had just come out as an angel at a moment's
notice, precisely as she meant to turn to literature and science

somewhere about her fortieth year instead of taking to devotion. She
made a point of being like nobody else. Her parts, her dresses, her

caps, opinions, toilettes, and manner of acting were all entirely new
and original. Soon after her marriage, when she was scarcely more than

a girl, she had played the part of a knowing and almost depraved
woman; she ventured on risky repartees with shallow people, and

betrayed her ignorance to those who knew better. As the date of that
marriage made it impossible to abstract one little year from her age

without the knowledge of Time, she had taken it into her head to be
immaculate. She scarcely seemed to belong to earth; she shook out her

wide sleeves as if they had been wings. Her eyes fled to heaven at too
warm a glance, or word, or thought.

There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese painter, who
bade fair to bring out a second edition of Raphael till his career was

cut short by jealousy and murder; his madonna, however, you may dimly
discern through a pane of glass in a little street in Genoa.

A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola's does not exist but compared
with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that heavenly creature was a Messalina.

Women wondered among themselves how such a giddy young thing had been
transformed by a change of dress into the fair veiled seraph who

seemed (to use an expression now in vogue) to have a soul as white as
new fallen snow on the highest Alpine crests. How had she solved in

such short space the Jesuitical problem how to display a bosom whiter
than her soul by hiding it in gauze? How could she look so ethereal

while her eyes drooped so murderously? Those almost wanton glances
seemed to give promise of untold languorous delight, while by an

ascetic's sigh of aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to
add that none of those promises would be fulfilled. Ingenuous youths

(for there were a few to be found in the Guards of that day) privately
wondered whether, in the most intimate moments, it were possible to

speak familiarly to this White Lady, this starry vapor slidden down
from the Milky Way. This system, which answered completely for some

years at a stretch, was turned to good account by women of fashion,
whose breasts were lined with a stout philosophy, for they could cloak

no inconsiderable exactions with these little airs from the sacristy.
Not one of the celestial creatures but was quite well aware of the

possibilities of less ethereal love which lay in the longing of every
well-conditioned male to recall such beings to earth. It was a fashion

which permitted them to abide in a semi-religious, semi-Ossianic
empyrean; they could, and did, ignore all the practical details of

daily life, a short and easy method of disposing of many questions. De
Marsay, foreseeing the future developments of the system, added a last

word, for he saw that Rastignac was jealous of Victurnien.
"My boy," said he, "stay as you are. Our Nucingen will make your

fortune, whereas the Duchess would ruin you. She is too expensive."
Rastignac allowed de Marsay to go without asking further questions. He

knew Paris. He knew that the most refined and noble and disinterested
of women--a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a

bouquet--can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any
opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an

almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and
actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of

woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character
of respected and respectable mothers of families, and act men's parts

in tight-fitting garments at night.
Worthy M. Chesnel, in his country notary's office, was right; he had

foreseen one of the reefs on which the Count might shipwreck.
Victurnien was dazzled by the poetic aureole which Mme. de

Maufrigneuse chose to assume; he was chained and padlocked from the
first hour in her company, bound captive by that girlish sash, and

caught by the curls twined round fairy fingers. Far corrupted the boy
was already, but he really believed in that farrago of maidenliness

and muslin, in sweet looks as much studied as an Act of Parliament.
And if the one man, who is in duty bound to believe in feminine fibs,

is deceived by them, is not that enough?