As he entered the courtyard of the mansion where he found an excuse for all his vanities, he was saying to himself as he reflected on Trompe-la-Mort’s scheming: 

“I can hear the ground cracking under my feet!”

He loved Esther, and he wanted to marry Mademoiselle de Grandlieu!  A strange dilemma!  One must be sold to buy the other.

Only one person could effect this bargain without damage to Lucien’s honor, and that was the supposed Spaniard.  Were they not bound to be equally secret, each for the other?  Such a compact, in which each is in turn master and slave, is not to be found twice in any one life.

Lucien drove away the clouds that darkened his brow, and walked into the Grandlieu drawing-room gay and beaming.  At this moment the windows were open, the fragrance from the garden scented the room, the flower-basket in the centre displayed its pyramid of flowers.  The Duchess, seated on a sofa in the corner, was talking to the Duchesse de Chaulieu.  Several women together formed a group remarkable for their various attitudes, stamped with the different expression which each strove to give to an affected sorrow.  In the fashionable world nobody takes any interest in grief or suffering; everything is talk.  The men were walking up and down the room or in the garden.  Clotilde and Josephine were busy at the tea-table.  The Vidame de Pamiers, the Duc de Grandlieu, the Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto, and the Duc de Maufrigneuse were playing Wisk, as they called it, in a corner of the room.

When Lucien was announced he walked across the room to make his bow to the Duchess, asking the cause of the grief he could read in her face.

“Madame de Chaulieu has just had dreadful news; her son-in-law, the Baron de Macumer, ex-duke of Soria, is just dead.  The young Duc de Soria and his wife, who had gone to Chantepleurs to nurse their brother, have written this sad intelligence.  Louise is heart-broken.”

“A women is not loved twice in her life as Louise was loved by her husband,” said Madeleine de Mortsauf.

“She will be a rich widow,” observed the old Duchesse d’Uxelles, looking at Lucien, whose face showed no change of expression.

“Poor Louise!” said Madame d’Espard.  “I understand her and pity her.”

The Marquise d’Espard put on the pensive look of a woman full of soul and feeling.  Sabine de Grandlieu, who was but ten years old, raised knowing eyes to her mother’s face, but the satirical glance was repressed by a glance from the Duchess.  This is bringing children up properly.

“If my daughter lives through the shock,” said Madame de Chaulieu, with a very maternal manner, “I shall be anxious about her future life.  Louise is so very romantic.”

“It is so difficult nowadays,” said a venerable Cardinal, “to reconcile feeling with the proprieties.”

Lucien, who had not a word to say, went to the tea-table to do what was polite to the demoiselles de Grandlieu.  When the poet had gone a few yards away, the Marquise d’Espard leaned over to whisper in the Duchess’ ear: