you see me, and where the marquise came,--to the verge of abysses. Men
alone have the staff on which to lean as they skirt those precipices,
--a force which is lacking to most women, but which, if we do possess
it, makes abnormal beings of us. Her old grandmother, the dowager de
Casteran, was well pleased to see her marry a man to whom she was
superior in every way. The Rochefides were equally satisfied with the
Casterans, who connected them with the Verneuils, the d'Esgrignons,
the Troisvilles, and gave them a peerage for their son in that last
big batch of peers made by Charles X., but revoked by the revolution
of July. The first days of marriage are perilous for little minds as
well as for great loves. Rochefide, being a fool, mistook his wife's
ignorance for coldness; he classed her among frigid, lymphatic women,
and made that an excuse to return to his bachelor life, relying on the
coldness of the marquise, her pride, and the thousand barriers that
the life of a great lady sets up about a woman in Paris. You'll know
what I mean when you go there. People said to Rochefide: 'You are very
lucky to possess a cold wife who will never have any but head
passions. She will always be content if she can shine; her fancies are
purely artistic, her desires will be satisfied if she can make a
salon, and collect about her distinguished minds; her debauches will
be in music and her orgies literary.' Rochefide, however, is not an
ordinary fool; he has as much conceit and vanity as a clever man,
which gives him a mean and squinting jealousy, brutal when it comes to
the surface, lurking and cowardly for six months, and murderous the
seventh. He thought he was deceiving his wife, and yet he feared her,
--two causes for tyranny when the day came on which the marquise let
him see that she was charitably assuming indifference to his
unfaithfulness. I analyze all this in order to explain her conduct.
Beatrix had the keenest admiration for me; there is but one step,
however, from admiration to jealousy. I have one of the most