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Beatrix by Honoré de Balzac
page 303 of 427 (70%)
was the falling of a thunderbolt.

From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine's husband was to
leave the theatre. As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw
the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there
in spite of his will. The young Breton found Beatrix between two very
distinguished men, Canalis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man of
letters. In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de
Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation
had seriously affected her as a woman, she was only the more poetic
and the more attractive to Calyste. Until the age of thirty the pretty
women of Paris ask nothing more of their toilet than clothing; but
after they pass through the fatal portal of the thirties, they look
for weapons, seductions, embellishments among their /chiffons;/ out of
these they compose charms, they find means, they take a style, they
seize youth, they study the slightest accessory,--in a word, they pass
from nature to art.

Madame de Rochefide had just come through the vicissitudes of a drama
which, in this history of the manners and morals of France in the
nineteenth century may be called that of the Deserted Woman. Deserted
by Conti, she became, naturally, a great artist in dress, in coquetry,
in artificial flowers of all kinds.

"Why is Conti not here?" inquired Calyste in a low voice of Canalis,
after going through the commonplace civilities with which even the
most solemn interviews begin when they take place publicly.

The former great poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, twice a cabinet
minister, and now for the fourth time an orator in the Chamber, and
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