She was very cruel to herself in those days, telling herself that it would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her fears and scruples.  She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she was tender and flattered him.  At first, while he was overawed by her rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish.  For two months Mme. de Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother’s interest in him; but confidences came next.  Mme. de Bargeton began to address her poet as “dear Lucien,” and then as “dear,” without more ado.  The poet grew bolder, and addressed the great lady as Nais, and there followed a flash of anger that captivates a boy; she reproached him for calling her by a name in everybody’s mouth.  The haughty and high-born Negrepelisse offered the fair angel youth that one of her appellations which was unsoiled by use; for him she would be “Louise.”  Lucien was in the third heaven.

One evening when Lucien came in, he found Mme. de Bargeton looking at a portrait, which she promptly put away.  He wished to see it, and to quiet the despair of a first fit of jealousy Louise showed him Cante-Croix’s picture, and told with tears the piteous story of a love so stainless, so cruelly cut short.  Was she experimenting with herself?  Was she trying a first unfaithfulness to the memory of the dead?  Or had she taken it into her head to raise up a rival to Lucien in the portrait?  Lucien was too much of a boy to analyze his lady-love; he gave way to unfeigned despair when she opened the campaign by entrenching herself behind the more or less skilfully devised scruples which women raise to have them battered down.  When a woman begins to talk about her duty, regard for appearances or religion, the objections she raises are so many redoubts which she loves to have carried by storm.  But on the guileless Lucien these coquetries were thrown away; he would have advanced of his own accord.

“I shall not die for you, I will live for you,” he cried audaciously one evening; he meant to have no more of M. de Cante-Croix, and gave Louise a glance which told plainly that a crisis was at hand.

Startled at the progress of this new love in herself and her poet, Louise demanded some verses promised for the first page of her album, looking for a pretext for a quarrel in his tardiness.  But what became of her when she read the following stanzas, which, naturally, she considered finer than the finest work of Canalis, the poet of the aristocracy?—­

  The magic brush, light flying flights of song—­
  To these, but not to these alone, belong
    My pages fair;
  Often to me, my mistress’ pencil steals
  To tell the secret gladness that she feels,
    The hidden care.