Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in
the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice.
There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich,
distinguished, and well-bred, who tire--without their knowledge,
possibly--of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose own
nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom
grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but
who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own
superiority--if indeed they do not openly beg for praise. Calyste
found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers
thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix. If great
men have played before our eyes the Saviour's part toward the woman
taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their
generation than they?

Calyste reached the hour of two o'clock living on one sentence only,
"I shall see her again!"--a poem which has often paid the costs of a
journey of two thousand miles. He now went with a light step to the
rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had
never before seen it. Once there, he stood--he, the son-in-law of the
Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons--at the foot of the
staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman:
"Monsieur's name?" Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her
freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited,
looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and
yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their
chain, had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she