"'Well, madame, my uncle got a place for a penniless youth as
secretary to the Commissary of police in this part of Paris. That
young man told me everything. If you leave this house this evening,
however stealthily, your husband will know where you are gone, and his
care will follow you everywhere.--How could a woman so clever as you
are believe that shopkeepers buy flowers and caps as dear as they sell
them? Ask a thousand crowns for a bouquet, and you will get it. No
mother's tenderness was ever more ingenious than your husband's! I
have learned from the porter of this house that the Count often comes
behind the fence when all are asleep, to see the glimmer of your
nightlight! Your large cashmere shawl cost six thousand francs--your
old-clothes-seller brings you, as second hand, things fresh from the
best makers. In short, you are living here like Venus in the toils of
Vulcan; but you are alone in your prison by the devices of a sublime
magnanimity, sublime for seven years past, and at every hour.'

"The Countess was trembling as a trapped swallow trembles while, as
you hold it in your hand, it strains its neck to look about it with
wild eyes. She shook with a nervous spasm, studying me with a defiant
look. Her dry eyes glittered with a light that was almost hot: still,
she was a woman! The moment came when her tears forced their way, and
she wept--not because she was touched, but because she was helpless;
they were tears of desperation. She had believed herself independent
and free; marriage weighed on her as the prison cell does on the
captive.

"'I will go!' she cried through her tears. 'He forces me to it; I
will go where no one certainly will come after me.'

"'What,' I said, 'you would kill yourself?--Madame, you must have