the affair. My interests demand that the man shall go to prison.
Remember my orders."

Madame du Tillet left the room.
"She will disobey me, of course, and I shall find out all the facts by

watching her," thought du Tillet, when alone in the boudoir. "These
poor fools always think they can do battle against us."

He shrugged his shoulders and rejoined his wife, or to speak the
truth, his slave.

The confidence made to Madame du Tillet by Madame Felix de Vandenesse
is connected with so many points of the latter's history for the last

six years, that it would be unintelligible without a succinct account
of the principal events of her life.

CHAPTER III
THE HISTORY OF A FORTUNATE WOMAN

Among the remarkable men who owed their destiny to the Restoration,
but whom, unfortunately, the restored monarchy kept, with Martignac,

aloof from the concerns of government, was Felix de Vandenesse,
removed, with several others, to the Chamber of peers during the last

days of Charles X. This misfortune, though, as he supposed, temporary,
made him think of marriage, towards which he was also led, as so many

men are, by a sort of disgust for the emotions of gallantry, those
fairy flowers of the soul. There comes a vital moment to most of us

when social life appears in all its soberness.
Felix de Vandenesse had been in turn happy and unhappy, oftener

unhappy than happy, like men who, at their start in life, have met
with Love in its most perfect form. Such privileged beings can never

subsequently be satisfied; but, after fully experiencing life, and
comparing characters, they attain to a certain contentment, taking

refuge in a spirit of general indulgence. No one deceives them, for
they delude themselves no longer; but their resignation, their

disillusionment is always graceful; they expect what comes, and
therefor they suffer less. Felix might still rank among the handsomest

and most agreeable men in Paris. He was originally commended to many
women by one of the noblest creatures of our epoch, Madame de

Mortsauf, who had died, it was said, out of love and grief for him;
but he was specially trained for social life by the handsome and well-

known Lady Dudley.
In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance,

owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him. Madame de
Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures; and perhaps

her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind. At any rate,
without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world of

love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of
politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of which--

perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life, he
despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas

were extremely" target="_blank" title="ad.极端地；非常地">extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the
strictest tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the

Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he
had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He

himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still
remembered his unhappychildhood too well not to recognize, beneath

the reserves of feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must
have brought the heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured,

embittered, or rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable,
and ready to unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two

opposite effects, the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of
ancient slavery, Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on

the one hand, resignation and tenderness, on the other.
The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de

Granville. In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure
young girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling

with the conjugal feeling. He knew his own heart was withered by the
world and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for

a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence. Beside those
springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience

with young and innocentignorance. After soberly judging the position,
he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and

perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it. Mothers
of families ought to seek such men for their daughters. A good mind

protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a
surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother. Those three qualities

are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage. All that his past career
had taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was

busy, literary, and thoughtful by turns, all his forces, in fact, were
now employed in making his wife happy; to that end he applied his

mind.
When Marie-Angelique left the maternal purgatory, she rose at once

into the conjugal paradise prepared for her by Felix, rue du Rocher,
in a house where all things were redolent of aristocracy, but where

the varnish of society did not impede the ease and "laisser-aller"
which young and loving hearts desire so much. From the start, Marie-

Angelique tasted all the sweets of material life to the very utmost.
For two years her husband made himself, as it were, her purveyor. He

explained to her, by degrees, and with great art, the things of life;
he initiated her slowly into the mysteries of the highest society; he

taught her the genealogies of noble families; he showed her the world;
he guided her taste in dress; he trained her to converse; he took her

from theatre to theatre, and made her study literature and current
history. This education he accomplished with all the care of a lover,

father, master, and husband; but he did it soberly and discreetly; he
managed both enjoyments and instructions in such a manner as not to

destroy the value of her religious ideas. In short, he carried out his
enterprise with the wisdom of a great master. At the end of four

years, he had the happiness of having formed in the Comtesse de
Vandenesse one of the most lovable and remarkable young women of our

day.
Marie-Angelique felt for Felix precisely the feelings with which Felix

desired to inspire her,--true friendship, sinceregratitude, and a
fraternal love, in which was mingled, at certain times, a noble and

dignified tenderness, such as tenderness between husband and wife
ought to be. She was a mother, and a good mother. Felix had therefore

attached himself to his young wife by every bond without any
appearance of garroting her,--relying for his happiness on the charms

of habit.
None but men trained in the school of life--men who have gone round

the circle of disillusionment, political and amorous--are capable of
following out a course like this. Felix, however, found in his work

the same pleasure that painters, writers, architects take in their
creations. He doubly enjoyed both the work and its fruition as he

admired his wife, so artless, yet so well-informed, witty, but
natural, lovable and chaste, a girl, and yet a mother, perfectly free,

though bound by the chains of righteousness. The history of all good
homes is that of prosperous peoples; it can be written in two lines,

and has in it nothing for literature. So, as happiness is only
explicable to and by itself, these four years furnish nothing to

relate which was not as tender as the soft outlines of eternal
cherubs, as insipid, alas! as manna, and about as amusing as the tale

of "Astrea."
In 1833, this edifice of happiness, so carefully erected by Felix de

Vandenesse, began to crumble, weakened at its base without his
knowledge. The heart of a woman of twenty-five is no longer that of a

girl of eighteen, any more than the heart of a woman of forty is that
of a woman of thirty. There are four ages in the life of woman; each

age creates a new woman. Vandenesse knew, no doubt, the law of these
transformations (created by our modern manners and morals), but he

forgot them in his own case,--just as the best grammarian will forget
a rule of grammar in writing a book, or the greatest general in the

field under fire, surprised by some unlooked-for change of base,
forgets his military tactics. The man who can perpetually bring his

thought to bear upon his facts is a man of genius; but the man of the
highest genius does not display genius at all times; if he did, he

would be like to God.
After four years of this life, with never a shock to the soul, nor a

word that produced the slightest discord in this sweet concert of
sentiment, the countess, feeling herself developed like a beautiful

plant in a fertile soil, caressed by the sun of a cloudless sky, awoke