Do what we will, always, in the course of an ambitious life, we find a woman in the way just when we least expect such an obstacle.  However great a political man may be, he always needs a woman to set against a woman, just as the Dutch use a diamond to cut a diamond.  Rome at the height of its power yielded to this necessity.  And observe how immeasurably more imposing was the life of Mazarin, the Italian cardinal, than that of Richelieu, the French cardinal.  Richelieu met with opposition from the great nobles, and he applied the axe; he died in the flower of his success, worn out by this duel, for which he had only a Capuchin monk as his second.  Mazarin was repulsed by the citizen class and the nobility, armed allies who sometimes victoriously put royalty to flight; but Anne of Austria’s devoted servant took off no heads, he succeeded in vanquishing the whole of France, and trained Louis XIV., who completed Richelieu’s work by strangling the nobility with gilded cords in the grand Seraglio of Versailles.  Madame de Pompadour dead, Choiseul fell!

Had Herrera soaked his mind in these high doctrines?  Had he judged himself at an earlier age than Richelieu?  Had he chosen Lucien to be his Cinq-Mars, but a faithful Cinq-Mars?  No one could answer these questions or measure this Spaniard’s ambition, as no one could foresee what his end might be.  These questions, asked by those who were able to see anything of this coalition, which was long kept a secret, might have unveiled a horrible mystery which Lucien himself had known but a few days.  Carlos was ambitious for two; that was what his conduct made plain to those persons who knew him, and who all imagined that Lucien was the priest’s illegitimate son.

Fifteen months after Lucien’s reappearance at the opera ball, which led him too soon into a world where the priest had not wished to see him till he should have fully armed him against it, he had three fine horses in his stable, a coupe for evening use, a cab and a tilbury to drive by day.  He dined out every day.  Herrera’s foresight was justified; his pupil was carried away by dissipation; he thought it necessary to effect some diversion in the frenzied passion for Esther that the young man still cherished in his heart.  After spending something like forty thousand francs, every folly had brought Lucien back with increased eagerness to La Torpille; he searched for her persistently; and as he could not find her, she became to him what game is to the sportsman.

Could Herrera understand the nature of a poet’s love?

When once this feeling has mounted to the brain of one of these great little men, after firing his heart and absorbing his senses, the poet becomes as far superior to humanity through love as he already is through the power of his imagination.  A freak of intellectual heredity has given him the faculty of expressing nature by imagery, to which he gives the stamp both of sentiment and of thought, and he