“Why, they are seductive; it is their business,” said Cousin Betty.  “Valerie that evening, my dear, was, I declare, enough to bring an angel to perdition.”

“But tell me how she set to work.”

“There is no principle, only practice in that walk of life,” said Lisbeth ironically.

The Baroness, recalling this conversation, would have liked to consult Cousin Betty; but there was no time for that.  Poor Adeline, incapable of imagining a patch, of pinning a rosebud in the very middle of her bosom, of devising the tricks of the toilet intended to resuscitate the ardors of exhausted nature, was merely well dressed.  A woman is not a courtesan for the wishing!

“Woman is soup for man,” as Moliere says by the mouth of the judicious Gros-Rene.  This comparison suggests a sort of culinary art in love.  Then the virtuous wife would be a Homeric meal, flesh laid on hot cinders.  The courtesan, on the contrary, is a dish by Careme, with its condiments, spices, and elegant arrangement.  The Baroness could not —­did not know how to serve up her fair bosom in a lordly dish of lace, after the manner of Madame Marneffe.  She knew nothing of the secrets of certain attitudes.  This high-souled woman might have turned round and round a hundred times, and she would have betrayed nothing to the keen glance of a profligate.

To be a good woman and a prude to all the world, and a courtesan to her husband, is the gift of a woman of genius, and they are few.  This is the secret of long fidelity, inexplicable to the women who are not blessed with the double and splendid faculty.  Imagine Madame Marneffe virtuous, and you have the Marchesa di Pescara.  But such lofty and illustrious women, beautiful as Diane de Poitiers, but virtuous, may be easily counted.

So the scene with which this serious and terrible drama of Paris manners opened was about to be repeated, with this singular difference —­that the calamities prophesied then by the captain of the municipal Militia had reversed the parts.  Madame Hulot was awaiting Crevel with the same intentions as had brought him to her, smiling down at the Paris crowd from his milord, three years ago.  And, strangest thing of all, the Baroness was true to herself and to her love, while preparing to yield to the grossest infidelity, such as the storm of passion even does not justify in the eyes of some judges.

“What can I do to become a Madame Marneffe?” she asked herself as she heard the door-bell.

She restrained her tears, fever gave brilliancy to her face, and she meant to be quite the courtesan, poor, noble soul.

“What the devil can that worthy Baronne Hulot want of me?” Crevel wondered as he mounted the stairs.  “She is going to discuss my quarrel with Celestine and Victorin, no doubt; but I will not give way!”

As he went into the drawing-room, shown in by Louise, he said to himself as he noted the bareness of the place (Crevel’s word):