She heard the famous words of Monsieur Laine:  ‘Kings are departing!’ This conviction, I believe was not without its influence on her conduct.  She took an intellectual part in the new doctrines, which swarmed, during the three years succeeding July, 1830, like gnats in the sunshine, and turned some female heads.  But, like all nobles, Beatrix, while thinking these novel ideals superb, wanted always to protect the nobility.  Finding before long that there was no place in this new regime for individual superiority, seeing that the higher nobility were beginning once more the mute opposition it had formerly made to Napoleon,—­which was, in truth, its wisest course under an empire of deeds and facts, but which in an epoch of moral causes was equivalent to abdication,—­she chose personal happiness rather than such eclipse.  About the time we were all beginning to breathe again, Beatrix met at my house a man with whom I had expected to end my days, —­Gennaro Conti, the great composer, a man of Neapolitan origin, though born in Marseilles.  Conti has a brilliant mind; as a composer he has talent, though he will never attain to the first rank.  Without Rossini, without Meyerbeer, he might perhaps have been taken for a man of genius.  He has one advantage over those men,—­he is in vocal music what Paganini is on the violin, Liszt on the piano, Taglioni in the ballet, and what the famous Garat was; at any rate he recalls that great singer to those who knew him.  His is not a voice, my friend, it is a soul.  When its song replies to certain ideas, certain states of feeling difficult to describe in which a woman sometimes finds herself, that woman is lost.  The marquise conceived the maddest passion for him, and took him from me.  The act was provincial, I allow, but it was all fair play.  She won my esteem and friendship by the way she behaved to me.  She thought me a woman who was likely to defend her own; she did not know that to me the most ridiculous thing in the world is such a struggle.  She came to see me.  That woman, proud as she is, was so in love that she told me her secret and made me the arbiter of her destiny.  She was really adorable, and she kept her place as woman and as marquise in my eyes.  I must tell you, dear friend, that while women are sometimes bad, they have hidden grandeurs in their souls that men can never appreciate.  Well, as I seem to be making my last will and testament like a woman on the verge of old age, I shall tell you that I was ever faithful to Conti, and should have been till death, and yet I know him.  His nature is charming, apparently, and detestable beneath its surface.  He is a charlatan in matters of the heart.  There are some men, like Nathan, of whom I have already spoken to you, who are charlatans externally, and yet honest.  Such men lie to themselves.  Mounted on their stilts, they think they are on their feet, and perform their jugglery with a sort of innocence; their humbuggery is in their blood; they are born comedians, braggarts;