greenish-gray eyes so cruelly that she then wore the look of an old
Madonna; for amid the coming ruin she retained her gentle sincerity,
her pure though saddened glance; and no one ever thought her less than
a beautiful woman, whose bearing was virtuous and full of dignity. At
the ball now planned by Cesar she was to shine with a last lustre of
beauty, remarked upon at the time and long remembered.

Every life has its climax,--a period when causes are at work, and are
in exact relation to results. This mid-day of life, when living forces
find their equilibrium and put forth their productive powers with full
effect, is common not only to organized beings but to cities, nations,
ideas, institutions, commerce, and commercial enterprises, all of
which, like noble races and dynasties, are born and rise and fall.
From whence comes the vigor with which this law of growth and decay
applies itself to all organized things in this lower world? Death
itself, in times of scourge, has periods when it advances, slackens,
sinks back, and slumbers. Our globe is perhaps only a rocket a little
more continuing than the rest. History, recording the causes of the
rise and fall of all things here below, could enlighten man as to the
moment when he might arrest the play of all his faculties; but neither
the conquerors, nor the actors, nor the women, nor the writers in the
great drama will listen to the salutary voice.

Cesar Birotteau, who might with reason think himself at the apogee of
his fortunes, used this crucial pause as the point of a new departure.
He did not know, moreover neither nations nor kings have attempted to
make known in characters ineffaceable, the cause of the vast
overthrows with which history teems, and of which so many royal and
commercial houses offer signal examples. Why are there no modern
pyramids to recall ceaselessly the one principle which dominates the