Like the true Creole of Paris, Madame Marneffe abhorred trouble; she had the calm indifference of a cat, which never jumps or runs but when urged by necessity.  To her, life must be all pleasure; and the pleasure without difficulties.  She loved flowers, provided they were brought to her.  She could not imagine going to the play but to a good box, at her own command, and in a carriage to take her there.  Valerie inherited these courtesan tastes from her mother, on whom General Montcornet had lavished luxury when he was in Paris, and who for twenty years had seen all the world at her feet; who had been wasteful and prodigal, squandering her all in the luxurious living of which the programme has been lost since the fall of Napoleon.

The grandees of the Empire were a match in their follies for the great nobles of the last century.  Under the Restoration the nobility cannot forget that it has been beaten and robbed, and so, with two or three exceptions, it has become thrifty, prudent, and stay-at-home, in short, bourgeois and penurious.  Since then, 1830 has crowned the work of 1793.  In France, henceforth, there will be great names, but no great houses, unless there should be political changes which we can hardly foresee.  Everything takes the stamp of individuality.  The wisest invest in annuities.  Family pride is destroyed.

The bitter pressure of poverty which had stung Valerie to the quick on the day when, to use Marneffe’s expression, she had “caught on” with Hulot, had brought the young woman to the conclusion that she would make a fortune by means of her good looks.  So, for some days, she had been feeling the need of having a friend about her to take the place of a mother—­a devoted friend, to whom such things may be told as must be hidden from a waiting-maid, and who could act, come and go, and think for her, a beast of burden resigned to an unequal share of life.  Now, she, quite as keenly as Lisbeth, had understood the Baron’s motives for fostering the intimacy between his cousin and herself.

Prompted by the formidable perspicacity of the Parisian half-breed, who spends her days stretched on a sofa, turning the lantern of her detective spirit on the obscurest depths of souls, sentiments, and intrigues, she had decided on making an ally of the spy.  This supremely rash step was, perhaps premeditated; she had discerned the true nature of this ardent creature, burning with wasted passion, and meant to attach her to herself.  Thus, their conversation was like the stone a traveler casts into an abyss to demonstrate its depth.  And Madame Marneffe had been terrified to find this old maid a combination of Iago and Richard III., so feeble as she seemed, so humble, and so little to be feared.

For that instant, Lisbeth Fischer had been her real self; that Corsican and savage temperament, bursting the slender bonds that held it under, had sprung up to its terrible height, as the branch of a tree flies up from the hand of a child that has bent it down to gather the green fruit.