But at last, after some months during which her sister Clotilde and her mother had caressed and petted her, she acknowledged her grief, confided her sorrows, cursed life, and declared that she saw death coming with delirious joy.  She begged Clotilde, who was resolved to remain unmarried, to be a mother to her little Calyste, the finest child that any royal race could desire for heir presumptive.

One evening, as she sat with her young sister Athenais (whose marriage to the Vicomte de Grandlieu was to take place at the end of Lent), and with Clotilde and the duchess, Sabine gave utterance to the supreme cries of her heart’s anguish, excited by the pangs of a last humiliation.

“Athenais,” she said, when the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu departed at eleven o’clock, “you are going to marry; let my example be a warning to you.  Consider it a crime to display your best qualities; resist the pleasure of adorning yourself to please Juste.  Be calm, dignified, cold; measure the happiness you give by that which you receive.  This is shameful, but it is necessary.  Look at me.  I perish through my best qualities.  All that I know was fine and sacred and grand within me, all my virtues, were rocks on which my happiness is wrecked.  I have ceased to please because I am not thirty-six years old.  In the eyes of some men youth is thought an inferiority.  There is nothing to imagine on an innocent face.  I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who wants to hide her yellowing teeth.  A fresh complexion is monotonous; some men prefer their doll’s wax made of rouge and spermaceti and cold cream.  I am straightforward; but duplicity is more pleasing.  I am loyally passionate, as an honest woman may be, but I ought to be manoeuvring, tricky, hypocritical, and simulate a coldness I have not, —­like any provincial actress.  I am intoxicated with the happiness of having married one of the most charming men in France; I tell him, naively, how distinguished he is, how graceful his movements are, how handsome I think him; but to please him I ought to turn away my head with pretended horror, to love nothing with real love, and tell him his distinction is mere sickliness.  I have the misfortune to admire all beautiful things without setting myself up for a wit by caustic and envious criticism of whatever shines from poesy and beauty.  I don’t seek to make Canalis and Nathan say of me in verse and prose that my intellect is superior.  I’m only a poor little artless child; I care only for Calyste.  Ah! if I had scoured the world like her, if I had said as she has said, ‘I love,’ in every language of Europe, I should be consoled, I should be pitied, I should be adored for serving the regal Macedonian with cosmopolitan love!  We are thanked for our tenderness if we set it in relief against our vice.  And I, a noble woman, must teach myself impurity and all the tricks of prostitutes!  And Calyste is the dupe of such grimaces!  Oh, mother! oh, my dear Clotilde!  I feel that I have got my death-blow.  My pride is only a sham buckler; I am without defence against my misery; I love my husband madly, and yet to bring him back to me I must borrow the wisdom of indifference.”