The Duchess smiled.

“We are always too generous,” said Diane de Maufrigneuse.  “I shall do just like that odious Madame d’Espard.”

“And what does she do?” asked the judge’s wife, very curious.

“She has written a thousand love-notes——­”

“So many!” exclaimed Amelie, interrupting the Duchess.

“Well, my dear, and not a word that could compromise her is to be found in any one of them.”

“You would be incapable of maintaining such coldness, such caution,” said Madame Camusot.  “You are a woman; you are one of those angels who cannot stand out against the devil——­”

“I have made a vow to write no more letters.  I never in my life wrote to anybody but that unhappy Lucien.—­I will keep his letters to my dying day!  My dear child, they are fire, and sometimes we want——­”

“But if they were found!” said Amelie, with a little shocked expression.

“Oh!  I should say they were part of a romance I was writing; for I have copied them all, my dear, and burned the originals.”

“Oh, madame, as a reward allow me to read them.”

“Perhaps, child,” said the Duchess.  “And then you will see that he did not write such letters as those to Leontine.”

This speech was woman all the world over, of every age and every land.

Madame Camusot, like the frog in la Fontaine’s fable, was ready to burst her skin with the joy of going to the Grandlieus’ in the society of the beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse.  This morning she would forge one of the links that are so needful to ambition.  She could already hear herself addressed as Madame la Presidente.  She felt the ineffable gladness of triumphing over stupendous obstacles, of which the greatest was her husband’s ineptitude, as yet unrevealed, but to her well known.  To win success for a second-rate man! that is to a woman —­as to a king—­the delight which tempts great actors when they act a bad play a hundred times over.  It is the very drunkenness of egoism.  It is in a way the Saturnalia of power.

Power can prove itself to itself only by the strange misapplication which leads it to crown some absurd person with the laurels of success while insulting genius—­the only strong-hold which power cannot touch.  The knighting of Caligula’s horse, an imperial farce, has been, and always will be, a favorite performance.

In a few minutes Diane and Amelie had exchanged the elegant disorder of the fair Diane’s bedroom for the severe but dignified and splendid austerity of the Duchesse de Grandlieu’s rooms.

She, a Portuguese, and very pious, always rose at eight to attend mass at the little church of Sainte-Valere, a chapelry to Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, standing at that time on the esplanade of the Invalides.  This chapel, now destroyed, was rebuilt in the Rue de Bourgogne, pending the building of a Gothic church to be dedicated to Sainte-Clotilde.

On hearing the first words spoken in her ear by Diane de Maufrigneuse, this saintly lady went to find Monsieur de Grandlieu, and brought him back at once.  The Duke threw a flashing look at Madame Camusot, one of those rapid glances with which a man of the world can guess at a whole existence, or often read a soul.  Amelie’s dress greatly helped the Duke to decipher the story of a middle-class life, from Alencon to Mantes, and from Mantes to Paris.