indispensabletrifle for her education.

In 1802 the Abbe died, before the marriage of his dear child, a
marriage which he, doubtless, would never have advised. The old father

found his daughter a great care now that the Abbe was gone. The high-
spirited girl, with nothing else to do, was sure to break into

rebellion against his niggardliness, and he felt quite unequal to the
struggle. Like all young women who leave the appointed track of

woman's life, Nais had her own opinions about marriage, and had no
great inclinationthereto. She shrank from submitting herself, body

and soul, to the feeble, undignified specimens of mankind whom she had
chanced to meet. She wished to rule, marriage meant obedience; and

between obedience to coarse caprices and a mind without indulgence" target="_blank" title="n.沉迷；宽容；恩惠">indulgence for
her tastes, and flight with a lover who should please her, she would

not have hesitated for a moment.
M. de Negrepelisse maintained sufficient of the tradition of birth to

dread a mesalliance. Like many another parent, he resolved to marry
his daughter, not so much on her account as for his own peace of mind.

A noble or a country gentleman was the man for him, somebody not too
clever, incapable of haggling over the account of the trust; stupid

enough and easy enough to allow Nais to have her own way, and
disinterested enough to take her without a dowry. But where to look

for a son-in-law to suit father and daughter equally well, was the
problem. Such a man would be the phoenix of sons-in-law.

To M. de Negrepelisse pondering over the eligible bachelors of the
province with these double requirements in his mind. M. de Bargeton

seemed to be the only one who answered to this description. M. de
Bargeton, aged forty, considerably shattered by the amorous

dissipations of his youth, was generally held to be a man of
remarkably feebleintellect; but he had just the exact amount of

commonsense required for the management of his fortune, and breeding
sufficient to enable him to avoid blunders or blatant follies in

society in Angouleme. In the bluntest manner M. de Negrepelisse
pointed out the negativevirtues of the model husband designed for his

daughter, and made her see the way to manage him so as to secure her
own happiness. So Nais married the bearer of arms, two hundred years

old already, for the Bargeton arms are blazoned thus: the first or,
three attires gules; the second, three ox's heads cabossed, two and

one, sable; the third, barry of six, azure and argent, in the first,
six shells or, three, two, and one. Provided with a chaperon, Nais

could steer her fortunes as she chose under the style of the firm, and
with the help of such connections as her wit and beauty would obtain

for her in Paris. Nais was enchanted by the prospect of such liberty.
M. de Bargeton was of the opinion that he was making a brilliant

marriage, for he expected that in no long while M. de Negrepelisse
would leave him the estates which he was rounding out so lovingly; but

to an unprejudiced spectator it certainly seemed as though the duty of
writing the bridegroom's epitaph might devolve upon his father-in-law.

By this time Mme. de Bargeton was thirty-six years old and her husband
fifty-eight. The disparity in age was the more startling since M. de

Bargeton looked like a man of seventy, whereas his wife looked
scarcely half her age. She could still wear rose-color, and her hair

hanging loose upon her shoulders. Although their income did not exceed
twelve thousand francs, they ranked among the half-dozen largest

fortunes in the old city, merchants and officials excepted; for M. and
Mme. de Bargeton were obliged to live in Angouleme until such time as

Mme. de Bargeton's inheritance should fall in and they could go to
Paris. Meanwhile they were bound to be attentive to old M. de

Negrepelisse (who kept them waiting so long that his son-in-law in
fact predeceased him), and Nais' brilliantintellectual gifts, and the

wealth that lay like undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her
nothing, underwent the transforming operation of Time and changed to

absurdities. For our absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part,
from the good in us, from some faculty or quality abnormally

developed. Pride, untempered by intercourse with the great world
becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in a loftier

moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity. Enthusiasm,
that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring the devotion

hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in verse, turns to
exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence for its object.

Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds, where the air
is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is corrupted like

stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away upon the
infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein lies the

secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poisonprovincial life.
The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the noblest

natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and women
who would have been charming if they had fallen under the forming

influence of greater minds, are balked of their lives.
Here was Mme. de Bargeton, for instance, smiting the lyre for every

trifle, and publishing her emotions indiscriminately to her circle. As
a matter of fact, when sensations appeal to an audience of one, it is

better to keep them to ourselves. A sunset certainly is a glorious
poem; but if a woman describes it, in high-sounding words, for the

benefit of matter-of-fact people, is she not ridiculous? There are
pleasures which can only be felt to the full when two souls meet, poet

and poet, heart and heart. She had a trick of using high-sounding
phrases, interlarded with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff

ingeniously nicknamed tartines by the French journalist, who furnishes
a daily supply of the commodity for a public that daily performs the

difficult feat of swallowing it. She squandered superlatives
recklessly in her talk, and the smallest things took giant

proportions. It was at this period of her career that she began to
type-ize, individualize, synthesize, dramatize, superiorize, analyze,

poetize, angelize, neologize, tragedify, prosify, and colossify--you
must violate the laws of language to find words to express the new-

fangled whimsies in which even women here and there indulge. The heat
of her language communicated itself to the brain, and the dithyrambs

on her lips were spoken out of the abundance of her heart. She
palpitated, swooned, and went into ecstasies over anything and

everything, over the devotion of a sister of Charity, and the
execution of the brothers Fauchet, over M. d'Arlincourt's Ipsiboe,

Lewis' Anaconda, or the escape of La Valette, or the presence of mind
of a lady friend who put burglars to flight by imitating a man's

voice. Everything was heroic, extraordinary, strange, wonderful, and
divine. She would work herself into a state of excitement,

indignation, or depression; she soared to heaven, and sank again,
gazed at the sky, or looked to earth; her eyes were always filled with

tears. She wore herself out with chronicadmiration, and wasted her
strength on curious dislikes. Her mind ran on the Pasha of Janina; she

would have liked to try conclusions with him in his seraglio, and had
a great notion of being sewn in a sack and thrown into the water. She

envied that blue-stocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she
longed to be a sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of

yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas a high, a noble
destiny! In short, she thirsted for any draught but the clear spring

water of her own life, flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored
Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or

dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for every misfortune;
she sang paeans for every victory. She sympathized with the fallen

Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali, massacring the foreign usurpers of
Egypt. In short, any kind of genius was accommodated with an aureole,

and she was fully persuaded that gifted immortals lived on incense and
light.

A good many people looked upon her as a harmlesslunatic, but in these
extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the

broken fragments of a magnificentedifice that had crumbled into ruin
before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in

short, without a lover. And this was indeed the fact.
The story of the first eighteen years of Mme. de Bargeton's married

life can be summed up in a few words. For a long while she lived upon
herself and distant hopes. Then, when she began to see that their

narrow income put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the
question, she looked about her at the people with whom her life must

be spent, and shuddered at her loneliness. There was not a single man
who could inspire the madness to which women are prone when they

despair of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present, and
with no outlook for the future. She had nothing to look for, nothing

to expect from chance, for there are lives in which chance plays no
part. But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and

Napoleon was sending the flower of his troops to the Peninsula, her
disappointed hopes revived. Natural curiosity prompted her to make an

effort to see the heroes who were conquering Europe in obedience to a
word from the Emperor in the order of the day; the heroes of a modern

time who outdid the mythical feats of paladins of old. The cities of
France, however 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