“Oh, I am yours and no mistake!  And I have not an excuse left but that of being faithful to you.—­Monster that you are!” she added, laughing, and allowing him to kiss her, “you knew very well what you were doing!  Madame Coquet, our chief clerk’s wife, came to sit down by me, and admired my lace.  ‘English point!’ said she.  ’Was it very expensive, madame?’—­’I do not know.  This lace was my mother’s.  I am not rich enough to buy the like,’ said I.”

Madame Marneffe, in short, had so bewitched the old beau, that he really believed she was sinning for the first time for his sake, and that he had inspired such a passion as had led her to this breach of duty.  She told him that the wretch Marneffe had neglected her after they had been three days married, and for the most odious reasons.  Since then she had lived as innocently as a girl; marriage had seemed to her so horrible.  This was the cause of her present melancholy.

“If love should prove to be like marriage——­” said she in tears.

These insinuating lies, with which almost every woman in Valerie’s predicament is ready, gave the Baron distant visions of the roses of the seventh heaven.  And so Valerie coquetted with her lover, while the artist and Hortense were impatiently awaiting the moment when the Baroness should have given the girl her last kiss and blessing.

At seven in the morning the Baron, perfectly happy—­for his Valerie was at once the most guileless of girls and the most consummate of demons—­went back to release his son and Celestine from their duties.  All the dancers, for the most part strangers, had taken possession of the territory, as they do at every wedding-ball, and were keeping up the endless figures of the cotillions, while the gamblers were still crowding round the bouillotte tables, and old Crevel had won six thousand francs.

The morning papers, carried round the town, contained this paragraph in the Paris article:—­

“The marriage was celebrated this morning, at the Church of Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, between Monsieur le Comte Steinbock and Mademoiselle Hortense Hulot, daughter of Baron Hulot d’Ervy, Councillor of State, and a Director at the War Office; niece of the famous General Comte de Forzheim.  The ceremony attracted a large gathering.  There were present some of the most distinguished artists of the day:  Leon de Lora, Joseph Bridau, Stidmann, and Bixiou; the magnates of the War Office, of the Council of State, and many members of the two Chambers; also the most distinguished of the Polish exiles living in Paris:  Counts Paz, Laginski, and others.

“Monsieur le Comte Wenceslas Steinbock is grandnephew to the famous general who served under Charles XII., King of Sweden.  The young Count, having taken part in the Polish rebellion, found a refuge in France, where his well-earned fame as a sculptor has procured him a patent of naturalization.”