coming with delirious joy. She begged Clotilde, who was resolved to
remain unmarried, to be a mother to her little Calyste, the finest
child that any royal race could desire for heir presumptive.

One evening, as she sat with her young sister Athenais (whose marriage
to the Vicomte de Grandlieu was to take place at the end of Lent), and
with Clotilde and the duchess, Sabine gave utterance to the supreme
cries of her heart's anguish, excited by the pangs of a last
humiliation.

"Athenais," she said, when the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu departed at
eleven o'clock, "you are going to marry; let my example be a warning
to you. Consider it a crime to display your best qualities; resist the
pleasure of adorning yourself to please Juste. Be calm, dignified,
cold; measure the happiness you give by that which you receive. This
is shameful, but it is necessary. Look at me. I perish through my best
qualities. All that I /know/ was fine and sacred and grand within me,
all my virtues, were rocks on which my happiness is wrecked. I have
ceased to please because I am not thirty-six years old. In the eyes of
some men youth is thought an inferiority. There is nothing to imagine
on an innocent face. I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate
I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who
wants to hide her yellowing teeth. A fresh complexion is monotonous;
some men prefer their doll's wax made of rouge and spermaceti and cold
cream. I am straightforward; but duplicity is more pleasing. I am
loyally passionate, as an honest woman may be, but I ought to be
manoeuvring, tricky, hypocritical, and simulate a coldness I have not,
--like any provincial actress. I am intoxicated with the happiness of
having married one of the most charming men in France; I tell him,
naively, how distinguished he is, how graceful his movements are, how