the Vicomte Savinien de Portenduere, the Duc and Duchesse de Rhetore,
the Duc and Duchesse de Lenoncourt-Chaulieu, and all the /habitues/ of
his mother-in-law's salon; and he fully understood by this time the
differences that separated Parisian life from the life of the
provinces. Wealth has fatal hours, hours of leisure and idleness,
which Paris knows better than all other capitals how to amuse, charm,
and divert. Contact with those young husbands who deserted the noblest
and sweetest of creatures for the delights of a cigar and whist, for
the glorious conversations of a club, or the excitements of "the
turf," undermined before long many of the domestic virtues of the
young Breton noble. The motherly solicitude of a wife who is anxious
not to weary her husband always comes to the support of the
dissipations of young men. A wife is proud to see her husband return
to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.

One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the
newly weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure
to see a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play
was to be given for the first time. The footman whose business it was
to engage a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre
which is called the /avant-scene/. As Calyste looked about him during
the first interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his
side, and not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide. Beatrix in
Paris! Beatrix in public! The two thoughts flew through Calyste's
heart like arrows. To see her again after nearly three years! How
shall we depict the convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far
from forgetting the past, had sometimes substituted Beatrix for his
wife so plainly that his wife had perceived it? Beatrix was light,
life, motion, and the Unknown. Sabine was duty, dulness, and the
expected. One became, in a moment, pleasure; the other, weariness. It