because she knows that he will learn the truth at Richeport, and because she hopes that the gayeties around him will more quickly make him forget this love that so interfered with her ambitious projects.  So Edgar was in Paris the day of my wedding ... and perhaps ... but no, who could have told him anything?  I lived three miles from the parish where I was married....  It could not have been he ... and yet I fear that man....  I remember with what bitterness and spite he spoke to me of Raymond, in a letter, filled with unjust reproaches, that he wrote me three days after my departure from Richeport.  In this letter, which I immediately burned, he told me that M. de Villiers was engaged to be married to his cousin.  O how wretched this information made me!  It had been broken off years ago, but M. de Villiers thought the engagement still existed; he spoke of it as a tie that would prevent his friend from indulging in any pretensions to my favor; and yet what malevolence there was in his praise of him, what jealous fear in his insolent security!  How ingenuously he said:  “Since I have no cause to fear him, why do I hate him?” I now remember this hatred, and it frightens me.  Aided by Roger he will soon know all; he will discover that Irene de Chateaudun and Louise Guerin are the same person, and then two furious men will demand an explanation of my trifling with their feelings and reproach me with the duplicity of my conduct....  Valentine, do you think they could possibly act thus?  Valentine! do you think these two men, who have so shamefully insulted my memory, so grossly betrayed me and proved themselves disgracefully faithless, would dare lay any claims to my love?  Alas! in spite of the absurdity of such a supposition, Heaven knows they are fully capable of acting thus; men in love have such relaxed morality, such elastic consciences!

Under pretext of imaginary ungovernable passions, they indulge, without compunction, in falsehood, duplicity and the desecration of every virtue!... and yet think a pure love can condone and survive such unpardonable wrongs.  They lightly weigh the tribute due to the refinement of a woman’s heart.  Their devotion is characterized by a singular variety.  The loyal love of noble women is sacrificed to please the whims of those unblushing creatures who pursue such men with indelicate attentions and enslave them by flattering their inordinate vanity, and they, to preserve their self-love unhurt, pierce and mortally wound the generous hearts that live upon their affection and revere their very names—­these they strike without pity and without remorse.  And then when the tender love falls from these broken hearts, like water from a shattered vase, never to be recovered, they are astonished, uneasy, ... they have broken the heart filled with love, and now, with stupid surprise and pretended innocence, they ask what has become of the love!... they cowardly murdered it, and are indignant that it dared to die beneath their cruel