useful and appropriate in a sovereign or an ambassadress, were of little service to a household compelled to jog in the common round.  Those who have the gift of speaking well desire an audience; they like to talk, even if they sometimes weary others.  To satisfy the requirements of her mind Madame Rabourdin took a weekly reception-day and went a great deal into society to obtain the consideration her self-love was accustomed to enjoy.  Those who know Parisian life will readily understand how a woman of her temperament suffered, and was martyrized at heart by the scantiness of her pecuniary means.  No matter what foolish declarations people make about money, they one and all, if they live in Paris, must grovel before accounts, do homage to figures, and kiss the forked hoof of the golden calf.  What a problem was hers! twelve thousand francs a year to defray the costs of a household consisting of father, mother, two children, a chambermaid and cook, living on the second floor of a house in the rue Duphot, in an apartment costing two thousand francs a year.  Deduct the dress and the carriage of Madame before you estimate the gross expenses of the family, for dress precedes everything; then see what remains for the education of the children (a girl of eight and a boy of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least two thousand francs besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin could barely afford to give her husband thirty francs a month.  That is the position of half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being thought monsters.

Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book.  Already, terrible sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not long after the death of her father.  Most women grow weary of this daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine’s ambition, far from lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside.  To her mind this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut.  Far from accepting the pettiness of middle-class existence, she was angry at the delay which kept the great things of life from her grasp,—­blaming fate as deceptive.  Celestine sincerely believed herself a superior woman.  Perhaps she was right; perhaps she would have been great under great circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place.  Let us remember there are as many varieties of woman as there are of man, all of which society fashions to meet its needs.  Now in the social order, as in Nature’s order, there are more young shoots than there are trees, more spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities (Athanase Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of moisture, like seeds on stony ground.