Perhaps we ought to look for its cause in a vanity so deeply buried in the soul that moralists have not yet uncovered that side of vice.  There are men, truly noble, like Calyste, handsome as Calyste, rich, distinguished, and well-bred, who tire—­without their knowledge, possibly—­of marriage with a nature like their own; beings whose own nobleness is not surprised or moved by nobleness in others; whom grandeur and delicacy consonant with their own does not affect; but who seek from inferior or fallen natures the seal of their own superiority—­if indeed they do not openly beg for praise.  Calyste found nothing to protect in Sabine, she was irreproachable; the powers thus stagnant in his heart were now to vibrate for Beatrix.  If great men have played before our eyes the Saviour’s part toward the woman taken in adultery, why should ordinary men be wiser in their generation than they?

Calyste reached the hour of two o’clock living on one sentence only, “I shall see her again!”—­a poem which has often paid the costs of a journey of two thousand miles.  He now went with a light step to the rue de Chartres, and recognized the house at once although he had never before seen it.  Once there, he stood—­he, the son-in-law of the Duc de Grandlieu, he, rich, noble as the Bourbons—­at the foot of the staircase, stopped short by the interrogation of the old footman:  “Monsieur’s name?” Calyste felt that he ought to leave to Beatrix her freedom of action in receiving or not receiving him; and he waited, looking into the garden, with its walls furrowed by those black and yellow lines produced by rain upon the stucco of Paris.

Madame de Rochefide, like nearly all great ladies who break their chain, had left her fortune to her husband when she fled from him; she could not beg from her tyrant.  Conti and Mademoiselle des Touches had spared Beatrix all the petty worries of material life, and her mother had frequently send her considerable sums of money.  Finding herself now on her own resources, she was forced to an economy that was rather severe for a woman accustomed to every luxury.  She had therefore gone to the summit of the hill on which lies the Parc de Monceaux, and there she had taken refuge in a “little house” formerly belonging to a great seigneur, standing on the street, but possessed of a charming garden, the rent of which did not exceed eighteen hundred francs.  Still served by an old footman, a maid, and a cook from Alencon, who were faithful to her throughout her vicissitudes, her penury, as she thought it, would have been opulence to many an ambitious bourgeoise.