Men ought to be faithful to the wives who love them, were it only on account of the perpetual miracles wrought by true love in the sublime regions of the spiritual world.  The woman who loves is, in relation to the man she loves, in the position of a somnambulist to whom the magnetizer should give the painful power, when she ceases to be the mirror of the world, of being conscious as a woman of what she has seen as a somnambulist.  Passion raises the nervous tension of a woman to the ecstatic pitch at which presentiment is as acute as the insight of a clairvoyant.  A wife knows she is betrayed; she will not let herself say so, she doubts still—­she loves so much!  She gives the lie to the outcry of her own Pythian power.  This paroxysm of love deserves a special form of worship.

In noble souls, admiration of this divine phenomenon will always be a safeguard to protect them from infidelity.  How should a man not worship a beautiful and intellectual creature whose soul can soar to such manifestations?

By one in the morning Hortense was in a state of such intense anguish, that she flew to the door as she recognized her husband’s ring at the bell, and clasped him in her arms like a mother.

“At last—­here you are!” cried she, finding her voice again.  “My dearest, henceforth where you go I go, for I cannot again endure the torture of such waiting.—­I pictured you stumbling over a curbstone, with a fractured skull!  Killed by thieves!—­No, a second time I know I should go mad.—­Have you enjoyed yourself so much?—­And without me!  —­Bad boy!”

“What can I say, my darling?  There was Bixiou, who drew fresh caricatures for us; Leon de Lora, as witty as ever; Claude Vignon, to whom I owe the only consolatory article that has come out about the Montcornet statue.  There were—­”

“Were there no ladies?” Hortense eagerly inquired.

“Worthy Madame Florent—­”

“You said the Rocher de Cancale.—­Were you at the Florents’?”

“Yes, at their house; I made a mistake.”

“You did not take a coach to come home?”

“No.”

“And you have walked from the Rue des Tournelles?”

“Stidmann and Bixiou came back with me along the boulevards as far as the Madeleine, talking all the way.”

“It is dry then on the boulevards and the Place de la Concorde and the Rue de Bourgogne?  You are not muddy at all!” said Hortense, looking at her husband’s patent leather boots.

It had been raining, but between the Rue Vanneau and the Rue Saint-Dominique Wenceslas had not got his boots soiled.

“Here—­here are five thousand francs Chanor has been so generous as to lend me,” said Wenceslas, to cut short this lawyer-like examination.

He had made a division of the ten thousand-franc notes, half for Hortense and half for himself, for he had five thousand francs’ worth of debts of which Hortense knew nothing.  He owed money to his foreman and his workmen.