charm, and divert.  Contact with those young husbands who deserted the noblest and sweetest of creatures for the delights of a cigar and whist, for the glorious conversations of a club, or the excitements of “the turf,” undermined before long many of the domestic virtues of the young Breton noble.  The motherly solicitude of a wife who is anxious not to weary her husband always comes to the support of the dissipations of young men.  A wife is proud to see her husband return to her when she has allowed him full liberty of action.

One evening, on October of that year, to escape the crying of the newly weaned child, Calyste, on whose forehead Sabine could not endure to see a frown, went, urged by her, to the Varietes, where a new play was to be given for the first time.  The footman whose business it was to engage a stall had taken it quite near to that part of the theatre which is called the avant-scene.  As Calyste looked about him during the first interlude, he saw in one of the two proscenium boxes on his side, and not ten steps from him, Madame de Rochefide.  Beatrix in Paris!  Beatrix in public!  The two thoughts flew through Calyste’s heart like arrows.  To see her again after nearly three years!  How shall we depict the convulsion in the soul of this lover, who, far from forgetting the past, had sometimes substituted Beatrix for his wife so plainly that his wife had perceived it?  Beatrix was light, life, motion, and the Unknown.  Sabine was duty, dulness, and the expected.  One became, in a moment, pleasure; the other, weariness.  It was the falling of a thunderbolt.

From a sense of loyalty, the first thought of Sabine’s husband was to leave the theatre.  As he left the door of the orchestra stalls, he saw the door of the proscenium box half-open, and his feet took him there in spite of his will.  The young Breton found Beatrix between two very distinguished men, Canalis and Raoul Nathan, a statesman and a man of letters.  In the three years since Calyste had seen her, Madame de Rochefide was amazingly changed; and yet, although the transformation had seriously affected her as a woman, she was only the more poetic and the more attractive to Calyste.  Until the age of thirty the pretty women of Paris ask nothing more of their toilet than clothing; but after they pass through the fatal portal of the thirties, they look for weapons, seductions, embellishments among their chiffons; out of these they compose charms, they find means, they take a style, they seize youth, they study the slightest accessory,—­in a word, they pass from nature to art.

Madame de Rochefide had just come through the vicissitudes of a drama which, in this history of the manners and morals of France in the nineteenth century may be called that of the Deserted Woman.  Deserted by Conti, she became, naturally, a great artist in dress, in coquetry, in artificial flowers of all kinds.

“Why is Conti not here?” inquired Calyste in a low voice of Canalis, after going through the commonplace civilities with which even the most solemn interviews begin when they take place publicly.