In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance, owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him.  Madame de Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures; and perhaps her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind.  At any rate, without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world of love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of politics.  That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of which —­perhaps to his sorrow—­had lighted and governed his dawn of life, he despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the burden of his various felicities by marriage.  On that point his ideas were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the strictest tenets of Catholicism.  It was enough for him to know how the Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest.  He himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still remembered his unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath the reserves of feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must have brought the heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured, embittered, or rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable, and ready to unclose to noble sentiments.  Tyranny produces two opposite effects, the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of ancient slavery, Epictetus and Spartacus,—­hatred and evil feelings on the one hand, resignation and tenderness, on the other.

The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de Granville.  In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure young girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling with the conjugal feeling.  He knew his own heart was withered by the world and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence.  Beside those springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience with young and innocent ignorance.  After soberly judging the position, he took up his conjugal career with ample precaution; indulgence and perfect confidence were the two anchors to which he moored it.  Mothers of families ought to seek such men for their daughters.  A good mind protects like a divinity; disenchantment is as keen-sighted as a surgeon; experience as foreseeing as a mother.  Those three qualities are the cardinal virtues of a safe marriage.  All that his past career had taught to Felix de Vandenesse, the observations of a life that was busy, literary, and thoughtful by turns, all his forces, in fact, were now employed in making his wife happy; to that end he applied his mind.