“That’s a foolish life, my Calyste,” said Sabine.  “Young noblemen in these days ought to busy themselves about recovering in the eyes of the country the ground lost by their fathers.  It isn’t by smoking cigars, playing whist, idling away their leisure, and saying insolent things of parvenus who have driven them from their positions, not yet by separating themselves from the masses whose soul and intellect and providence they ought to be, that the nobility will exist.  Instead of being a party, you will soon be a mere opinion, as de Marsay said.  Ah! if you only knew how my ideas on this subject have enlarged since I have nursed and cradled your child!  I’d like to see that grand old name of Guenic become once more historical!” Then suddenly plunging her eyes into those of Calyste, who was listening to her with a pensive air, she added:  “Admit that the first note you ever wrote me was rather stiff.”

“I did not think of sending you word till I got to the club.”

“But you wrote on a woman’s note-paper; it had a perfume of feminine elegance.”

“Those club directors are such dandies!”

The Vicomte de Portenduere and his wife, formerly Mademoiselle Mirouet, had become of late very intimate with the du Guenics, so intimate that they shared their box at the Opera by equal payments.  The two young women, Ursula and Sabine, had been won to this friendship by the delightful interchange of counsels, cares, and confidences apropos of their first infants.

While Calyste, a novice in falsehood, was saying to himself, “I must warn Savinien,” Sabine was thinking, “I am sure that paper bore a coronet.”  This reflection passed through her mind like a flash, and Sabine scolded herself for having made it.  Nevertheless, she resolved to find the paper, which in the midst of her terrors of the night before she had flung into her letter-box.

After breakfast Calyste went out, saying to his wife that he should soon return.  Then he jumped into one of those little low carriages with one horse which were just beginning to supersede the inconvenient cabriolet of our ancestors.  He drove in a few minutes to the vicomte’s house and begged him to do him the service, with rights of return, of fibbing in case Sabine should question the vicomtesse.  Thence Calyste, urging his coachman to speed, rushed to the rue de Chartres in order to know how Beatrix had passed the rest of the night.  He found that unfortunate just from her bath, fresh, embellished, and breakfasting with a very good appetite.  He admired the grace with which his angel ate her boiled eggs, and he marvelled at the beauty of the gold service, a present from a monomaniac lord, for whom Conti had composed a few ballads on ideas of the lord, who afterwards published them as his own!