Well, and if this despised creature were to inherit five or six millions of francs, she would be courted by princes, bowed to with respect as she went past in her carriage, and might choose among the oldest names in France and Navarre.  That world which would have cried Raca to us, on seeing two handsome creatures united and happy, always did honor to Madame de Stael, in spite of her ’romances in real life,’ because she had two hundred thousand francs a year.  The world, which grovels before money or glory, will not bow down before happiness or virtue—­for I could have done good.  Oh! how many tears I would have dried—­as many as I have shed—­I believe!  Yes, I would have lived only for you and for charity.

“These are the thoughts that make death beautiful.  So do not lament, my dear.  Say often to yourself, ’There were two good creatures, two beautiful creatures, who both died for me ungrudgingly, and who adored me.’  Keep a memory in your heart of Coralie and Esther, and go your way and prosper.  Do you recollect the day when you pointed out to me a shriveled old woman, in a melon-green bonnet and a puce wrapper, all over black grease-spots, the mistress of a poet before the Revolution, hardly thawed by the sun though she was sitting against the wall of the Tuileries and fussing over a pug—­the vilest of pugs?  She had had footmen and carriages, you know, and a fine house!  And I said to you then, ’How much better to be dead at thirty!’—­Well, you thought I was melancholy, and you played all sorts of pranks to amuse me, and between two kisses I said, ’Every day some pretty woman leaves the play before it is over!’—­And I do not want to see the last piece; that is all.

“You must think me a great chatterbox; but this is my last effusion.  I write as if I were talking to you, and I like to talk cheerfully.  I have always had a horror of a dressmaker pitying herself.  You know I knew how to die decently once before, on my return from that fatal opera-ball where the men said I had been a prostitute.

“No, no, my dear love, never give this portrait to any one!  If you could know with what a gush of love I have sat losing myself in your eyes, looking at them with rapture during a pause I allowed myself, you would feel as you gathered up the affection with which I have tried to overlay the ivory, that the soul of your little pet is indeed there.

  “A dead woman craving alms!  That is a funny idea.—­Come, I must
  learn to lie quiet in my grave.

“You have no idea how heroic my death would seem to some fools if they could know Nucingen last night offered me two millions of francs if I would love him as I love you.  He will be handsomely robbed when he hears that I have kept my word and died of him.  I tried all I could still to breathe the air you breathe.  I said to the fat scoundrel, ’Do you want me to love you as you wish?  To promise even that I will