“You have nothing to expect from the Liberals but hard knocks,” she said.  “They plot and conspire; they murdered the Duc de Berri.  Will they upset the Government?  Never!  You will never come to anything through them, while you will be Comte de Rubempre if you throw in your lot with the other side.  You might render services to the State, and be a peer of France, and marry an heiress.  Be an Ultra.  It is the proper thing besides,” she added, this being the last word with her on all subjects.  “I dined with the Val-Noble; she told me that Theodore Gaillard is really going to start his little Royalist Revue, so as to reply to your witticisms and the jokes in the Miroir.  To hear them talk, M. Villele’s party will be in office before the year is out.  Try to turn the change to account before they come to power; and say nothing to Etienne and your friends, for they are quite equal to playing you some ill turn.”

A week later, Lucien went to Mme. de Montcornet’s house, and saw the woman whom he had so loved, whom later he had stabbed to the heart with a jest.  He felt the most violent agitation at the sight of her, for Louise also had undergone a transformation.  She was the Louise that she would always have been but for her detention in the provinces —­she was a great lady.  There was a grace and refinement in her mourning dress which told that she was a happy widow; Lucien fancied that this coquetry was aimed in some degree at him, and he was right; but, like an ogre, he had tasted flesh, and all that evening he vacillated between Coralie’s warm, voluptuous beauty and the dried-up, haughty, cruel Louise.  He could not make up his mind to sacrifice the actress to the great lady; and Mme. de Bargeton—­all the old feeling reviving in her at the sight of Lucien, Lucien’s beauty, Lucien’s cleverness—­was waiting and expecting that sacrifice all evening; and after all her insinuating speeches and her fascinations, she had her trouble for her pains.  She left the room with a fixed determination to be revenged.

“Well, dear Lucien,” she had said, and in her kindness there was both generosity and Parisian grace; “well, dear Lucien, so you, that were to have been my pride, took me for your first victim; and I forgave you, my dear, for I felt that in such a revenge there was a trace of love still left.”

With that speech, and the queenly way in which it was uttered, Mme. de Bargeton recovered her position.  Lucien, convinced that he was a thousand times in the right, felt that he had been put in the wrong.  Not one word of the causes of the rupture! not one syllable of the terrible farewell letter!  A woman of the world has a wonderful genius for diminishing her faults by laughing at them; she can obliterate them all with a smile or a question of feigned surprise, and she knows this.  She remembers nothing, she can explain everything; she is amazed, asks questions, comments, amplifies, and quarrels with you, till in the end her sins disappear like stains on the application of a little soap and water; black as ink you knew them to be; and lo! in a moment, you behold immaculate white innocence, and lucky are you if you do not find that you yourself have sinned in some way beyond redemption.