Besides her predilection for the nobility, Mademoiselle Cormon had another and very excusable mania:  that of being loved for herself.  You could hardly believe the lengths to which this desire led her.  She employed her mind on setting traps for her possible lovers, in order to test their real sentiments.  Her nets were so well laid that the luckless suitors were all caught, and succumbed to the test she applied to them without their knowledge.  Mademoiselle Cormon did not study them; she watched them.  A single word said heedlessly, a joke (that she often was unable to understand), sufficed to make her reject an aspirant as unworthy:  this one had neither heart nor delicacy; that one told lies, and was not religious; a third only wanted to coin money under the cloak of marriage; another was not of a nature to make a woman happy; here she suspected hereditary gout; there certain immoral antecedents alarmed her.  Like the Church, she required a noble priest at her altar; she even wanted to be married for imaginary ugliness and pretended defects, just as other women wish to be loved for the good qualities they have not, and for imaginary beauties.  Mademoiselle Cormon’s ambition took its rise in the most delicate and sensitive feminine feeling; she longed to reward a lover by revealing to him a thousand virtues after marriage, as other women then betray the imperfections they have hitherto concealed.  But she was ill understood.  The noble woman met with none but common souls in whom the reckoning of actual interests was paramount, and who knew nothing of the nobler calculations of sentiment.

The farther she advanced towards that fatal epoch so adroitly called the “second youth,” the more her distrust increased.  She affected to present herself in the most unfavorable light, and played her part so well that the last wooers hesitated to link their fate to that of a person whose virtuous blind-man’s-buff required an amount of penetration that men who want the virtuous ready-made would not bestow upon it.  The constant fear of being married for her money rendered her suspicious and uneasy beyond all reason.  She turned to the rich men; but the rich are in search of great marriages; she feared the poor men, in whom she denied the disinterestedness she sought so eagerly.  After each disappointment in marriage, the poor lady, led to despise mankind, began to see them all in a false light.  Her character acquired, necessarily, a secret misanthropy, which threw a tinge of bitterness into her conversation, and some severity into her eyes.  Celibacy gave to her manners and habits a certain increasing rigidity; for she endeavored to sanctify herself in despair of fate.  Noble vengeance! she was cutting for God the rough diamond rejected by man.  Before long public opinion was against her; for society accepts the verdict an independent woman renders on herself by not marrying, either through losing suitors or rejecting them.  Everybody supposed that these rejections were founded on secret reasons, always ill interpreted.  One said she was deformed; another suggested some hidden fault; but the poor girl was really as pure as a saint, as healthy as an infant, and full of loving kindness; Nature had intended her for all the pleasures, all the joys, and all the fatigues of motherhood.