her, insensibly, to her slave. At last, however, Diane grew impatient

with an Epictetus of love; and when she thought she had trained him to
the utmostcredulity, she set to work to tie a thicker bandage still

over his eyes.
CHAPTER IV

THE CONFESSION OF A PRETTY WOMAN
One evening Daniel found the princessthoughtful, one elbow resting on

a little table, her beautiful blond head bathed in light from the
lamp. She was toying with a letter which lay on the table-cloth. When

d'Arthez had seen the paper distinctly, she folded it up, and stuck it
in her belt.

"What is the matter?" asked d'Arthez; "you seem distressed."
"I have received a letter from Monsieur de Cadignan," she replied.

"However great the wrongs he has done me, I cannot help thinking of
his exile--without family, without son--from his native land."

These words, said in a soulful voice, betrayed angelic sensibility.
D'Arthez was deeply moved. The curiosity of the lover became, so to

speak, a psychological and literarycuriosity. He wanted to know the
height that woman had attained, and what were the injuries she thus

forgave; he longed to know how these women of the world, taxed with
frivolity, cold-heartedness, and egotism, could be such angels.

Remembering how the princess had already repulsed him when he first
tried to read that celestial heart, his voice, and he himself,

trembled as he took the transparent, slender hand of the beautiful
Diane with its curving finger-tips, and said,--

"Are we now such friends that you will tell me what you have
suffered?"

"Yes," she said, breathing forth the syllable like the most
mellifluous note that Tulou's flute had ever sighed.

Then she fell into a revery, and her eyes were veiled. Daniel remained
in a state of anxiousexpectation, impressed with the solemnity of the

occasion. His poeticimagination made him see, as it were, clouds
slowly dispersing and disclosing to him the sanctuary where the

wounded lamb was kneeling at the divine feet.
"Well?" he said, in a soft, still voice.

Diane looked at the tender petitioner; then she lowered her eyes
slowly, dropping their lids with a movement of noble modesty. None but

a monster would have been capable of imagining hypocrisy in the
graceful undulation of the neck with which the princess again lifted

her charming head, to look once more into the eager eyes of that great
man.

"Can I? ought I?" she murmured, with a gesture of hesitation, gazing
at d'Arthez with a sublime expression of dreamytenderness. "Men have

so little faith in things of this kind; they think themselves so
little bound to be discreet!"

"Ah! if you distrust me, why am I here?" cried d'Arthez.
"Oh, friend!" she said, giving to the exclamation the grace of an

involuntary avowal, "when a woman attaches herself for life, think you
she calculates? It is not question of refusal (how could I refuse you

anything?), but the idea of what you may think of me if I speak. I
would willinglyconfide to you the strange position in which I am at

my age; but what would you think of a woman who could reveal the
secret wounds of her married life? Turenne kept his word to robbers;

do I not owe to my torturers the honor of a Turenne?"
"Have you passed your word to say nothing?"

"Monsieur de Cadignan did not think it necessary to bind me to
secrecy-- You are asking more than my soul! Tyrant! you want me to

bury my honor itself in your breast," she said, casting upon d'Arthez
a look, by which she gave more value to her coming confidence than to

her personal self.
"You must think me a very ordinary man, if you fear any evil, no

matter what, from me," he said, with ill-concealed bitterness.
"Forgive me, friend," she replied, taking his hand in hers

caressingly, and letting her fingers wandergently over it. "I know
your worth. You have related to me your whole life; it is noble, it is

beautiful, it is sublime, and worthy of your name; perhaps, in return,
I owe you mine. But I fear to lower myself in your eyes by relating

secrets which are not wholly mine. How can you believe--you, a man of
solitude and poesy--the horrors of social life? Ah! you little think

when you invent your dramas that they are far surpassed by those that
are played in families apparently united. You are whollyignorant of

certain gilded sorrows."
"I know all!" he cried.

"No, you know nothing."
D'Arthez felt like a man lost on the Alps of a dark night, who sees,

at the first gleam of dawn, a precipice at his feet. He looked at the
princess with a bewildered air, and felt a cold chill running down his

back. Diane thought for a moment that her man of genius was a
weakling, but a flash from his eyes reassured her.

"You have become to me almost my judge," she said, with a desperate
air. "I must speak now, in virtue of the right that all calumniated

beings have to show their innocence. I have been, I am still (if a
poor recluse forced by the world to renounce the world is still

remembered) accused of such light conduct, and so many evil things,
that it may be allowed me to find in one strong heart a haven from

which I cannot be driven. Hitherto I have always considered self-
justification an insult to innocence; and that is why I have disdained

to defend myself. Besides, to whom could I appeal? Such cruel things
can be confided to none but God or to one who seems to us very near

Him--a priest, or another self. Well! I do know this, if my secrets
are not as safe there," she said, laying her hand on d'Arthez's heart,

"as they are here" (pressing the upper end of her busk beneath her
fingers), "then you are not the grand d'Arthez I think you--I shall

have been deceived."
A tear moistened d'Arthez's eyes, and Diane drank it in with a side

look, which, however, gave no motion either to the pupils or the lids
of her eyes. It was quick and neat, like the action of a cat pouncing

on a mouse.
D'Arthez, for the first time, after sixty days of protocols, ventured

to take that warm and perfumed hand, and press it to his lips with a
long-drawn kiss, extending from the wrist to the tip of the fingers,

which made the princess augur well of literature. She thought to
herself that men of genius must know how to love with more perfection

than conceited fops, men of the world, diplomatists, and even
soldiers, although such beings have nothing else to do. She was a

connoisseur, and knew very well that the capacity for love reveals
itself chiefly in mere nothings. A woman well informed in such matters

can read her future in a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say from
the fragment of a bone: This belonged to an animal of such or such

dimensions, with or without horns, carnivorous, herbivorous,
amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand years. Sure now of finding in

d'Arthez as much imagination in love as there was in his written
style, she thought it wise to bring him up at once to the highest

pitch of passion and belief.
She withdrew her hand hastily, with a magnificentmovement full of

varied emotions. If she had said in words: "Stop, or I shall die," she
could not have spoken more plainly. She remained for a moment with her

eyes in d'Arthez's eyes, expressing in that one glance happiness,
prudery, fear, confidence, languor, a vague longing, and virgin

modesty. She was twenty years old! but remember, she had prepared for
this hour of comic falsehood by the choicest art of dress; she was

there in her armchair like a flower, ready to blossom at the first
kiss of sunshine. True or false, she intoxicated Daniel.

It if is permissible to risk a personal opinion we must avow that it
would be delightful to be thus deceived for a good long time.

Certainly Talma on the stage was often above and beyond nature, but
the Princesse de Cadignan is the greatest true comedian of our day.

Nothing was wanting to this woman but an attentive audience.
Unfortunately, at epochs perturbed by political storms, women

disappear like water-lilies which need a cloudless sky and balmy
zephyrs to spread their bloom to our enraptured eyes.

The hour had come; Diane was now to entangle that great man in the
inextricable meshes of a romance carefully prepared, to which he was

fated to listen as the neophyte of early Christian times listened to
the epistles of an apostle.

"My friend," began Diane, "my mother, who still lives at Uxelles,
married me in 1814, when I was seventeen years old (you see how old I

am now!) to Monsieur de Maufrigneuse, not out of affection for me, but
out of regard for him. She discharged her debt to the only man she had