“I will rescue you from Madame d’Espard,” said Clotilde.

“How?” cried Lucien.

“My mother will ask the young d’Espards here; they are charming boys, and growing up now.  The father and sons will sing your praises, and then we are sure never to see their mother again.”

“Oh, Clotilde, you are an angel!  If I did not love you for yourself, I should love you for being so clever.”

“It is not cleverness,” said she, all her love beaming on her lips.  “Goodnight.  Do not come again for some few days.  When you see me in church, at Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin, with a pink scarf, my father will be in a better temper.—­You will find an answer stuck to the back of the chair you are sitting in; it will comfort you perhaps for not seeing me.  Put the note you have brought under my handkerchief——­”

This young person was evidently more than seven-and-twenty.

Lucien took a cab in the Rue de la Planche, got out of it on the Boulevards, took another by the Madeleine, and desired the driver to have the gates opened and drive in at the house in the Rue Taitbout.

On going in at eleven o’clock, he found Esther in tears, but dressed as she was wont to dress to do him honor.  She awaited her Lucien reclining on a sofa covered with white satin brocaded with yellow flowers, dressed in a bewitching wrapper of India muslin with cherry-colored bows; without her stays, her hair simply twisted into a knot, her feet in little velvet slippers lined with cherry-colored satin; all the candles were burning, the hookah was prepared.  But she had not smoked her own, which stood beside her unlighted, emblematical of her loneliness.  On hearing the doors open she sprang up like a gazelle, and threw her arms round Lucien, wrapping him like a web caught by the wind and flung about a tree.

“Parted.—­Is it true?”

“Oh, just for a few days,” replied Lucien.

Esther released him, and fell back on her divan like a dead thing.

In these circumstances, most women babble like parrots.  Oh! how they love!  At the end of five years they feel as if their first happiness were a thing of yesterday, they cannot give you up, they are magnificent in their indignation, despair, love, grief, dread, dejection, presentiments.  In short, they are as sublime as a scene from Shakespeare.  But make no mistake!  These women do not love.  When they are really all that they profess, when they love truly, they do as Esther did, as children do, as true love does; Esther did not say a word, she lay with her face buried in the pillows, shedding bitter tears.

Lucien, on his part, tried to lift her up, and spoke to her.

“But, my child, we are not to part.  What, after four years of happiness, is this the way you take a short absence.—­What on earth do I do to all these girls?” he added to himself, remembering that Coralie had loved him thus.

“Ah, monsieur, you are so handsome,” said Europe.