“Very extraordinary,” replied Rastignac, dryly.  “By the tone of your voice I should judge you were in love with her already.  You will be in her house within three days; and I am too old a denizen of Paris not to know what will be the upshot of that.  Well, my dear Daniel, I do entreat you not to allow yourself to be drawn into any confusion of interests, so to speak.  Love the princess if you feel any love for her in your heart, but keep an eye on your fortune.  She has never taken or asked a penny from any man on earth, she is far too much of a d’Uxelles and a Cadignan for that; but, to my knowledge, she has not only spent her own fortune, which was very considerable, but she has made others waste millions.  How? why? by what means?  No one knows; she doesn’t know herself.  I myself saw her swallow up, some thirteen years ago, the entire fortune of a charming young fellow, and that of an old notary, in twenty months.”

“Thirteen years ago!” exclaimed d’Arthez,—­“why, how old is she now?”

“Didn’t you see, at dinner,” replied Rastignac, laughing, “her son, the Duc de Maufrigneuse.  That young man is nineteen years old; nineteen and seventeen make—­”

“Thirty-six!” cried the amazed author.  “I gave her twenty.”

“She’ll accept them,” said Rastignac; “but don’t be uneasy, she will always be twenty to you.  You are about to enter the most fantastic of worlds.  Good-night, here you are at home,” said the baron, as they entered the rue de Bellefond, where d’Arthez lived in a pretty little house of his own.  “We shall meet at Mademoiselle des Touches’s in the course of the week.”

CHAPTER III

The princess Goes to work

D’Arthez allowed love to enter his heart after the manner of my Uncle Toby, without making the slightest resistance; he proceeded by adoration without criticism, and by exclusive admiration.  The princess, that noble creature, one of the most remarkable creations of our monstrous Paris, where all things are possible, good as well as evil, became—­whatever vulgarity the course of time may have given to the expression—­the angel of his dreams.  To fully understand the sudden transformation of this illustrious author, it is necessary to realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the heart; all that love—­reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant, beside an ignoble woman—­excites of regret and longings for diviner sentiments in the higher regions of the soul.  D’Arthez was, indeed, the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized.  An illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful Diane.  At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire and seek, if only to make a plaything of him,—­that power which they consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last she had found the grandeurs of the intellect united