convulsions, not daring to leave her little boy. The baron made a
pretext of business and went out, thus avoiding the home breakfast. He
escaped as prisoners escape, happy in being afoot, and free to go by
the Pont Louis XVI. and the Champs Elysees to a cafe on the boulevard
where he had liked to breakfast when he was a bachelor.

What is there in love? Does Nature rebel against the social yoke? Does
she need that impulse of her given life to be spontaneous, free, the
dash of an impetuous torrent foaming against rocks of opposition and
of coquetry, rather than a tranquil stream flowing between the two
banks of the church and the legal ceremony? Has she her own designs as
she secretly prepares those volcanic eruptions to which, perhaps, we
owe great men?

It would be difficult to find a young man more sacredly brought up
than Calyste, of purer morals, less stained by irreligion; and yet he
bounded toward a woman unworthy of him, when a benign and radiant
chance had given him for his wife a young creature whose beauty was
truly aristocratic, whose mind was keen and delicate, a pious, loving
girl, attached singly to him, of angelic sweetness, and made more
tender still by love, a love that was passionate in spite of marriage,
like his for Beatrix. Perhaps the noblest men retain some clay in
their constitutions; the slough still pleases them. If this be so, the
least imperfect human being is the woman, in spite of her faults and
her want of reason. Madame de Rochefide, it must be said, amid the
circle of poetic pretensions which surrounded her, and in spite of her
fall, belonged to the highest nobility; she presented a nature more
ethereal than slimy, and hid the courtesan she was meant to be beneath
an aristocratic exterior. Therefore the above explanation does not
fully account for Calyste's strange passion.