This ample person offered to a young man full of ardent desires like Athanase an attraction to which he had succumbed.  Young imaginations, essentially eager and courageous, like to rove upon these fine living sheets of flesh.  Rose was like a plump partridge attracting the knife of a gourmet.  Many an elegant deep in debt would very willingly have resigned himself to make the happiness of Mademoiselle Cormon.  But, alas! the poor girl was now forty years old.  At this period, after vainly seeking to put into her life those interests which make the Woman, and finding herself forced to be still unmarried, she fortified her virtue by stern religious practices.  She had recourse to religion, the great consoler of oppressed virginity.  A confessor had, for the last three years, directed Mademoiselle Cormon rather stupidly in the path of maceration; he advised the use of scourging, which, if modern medical science is to be believed, produces an effect quite the contrary to that expected by the worthy priest, whose hygienic knowledge was not extensive.

These absurd practices were beginning to shed a monastic tint over the face of Rose Cormon, who now saw with something like despair her white skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity.  A slight down on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken like a trail of smoke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning!  It was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush of blood to the head.  She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois, enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting him as to refrigerants.  On such occasions the shrewd old gentleman would pull out his snuff-box, gaze at the Princess Goritza, and say, by way of conclusion:—­

“The right composing draught, my dear lady, is a good and kind husband.”

“But whom can one trust?” she replied.

The chevalier would then brush away the snuff which had settled in the folds of his waistcoat or his paduasoy breeches.  To the world at large this gesture would have seemed very natural; but it always gave extreme uneasiness to the poor woman.

The violence of this hope without an object was so great that Rose was afraid to look a man in the face lest he should perceive in her eyes the feelings that filled her soul.  By a wilfulness, which was perhaps only the continuation of her earlier methods, though she felt herself attracted toward the men who might still suit her, she was so afraid of being accused of folly that she treated them ungraciously.  Most persons in her society, being incapable of appreciating her motives, which were always noble, explained her manner towards her co-celibates as the revenge of a refusal received or expected.  When the year 1815 began, Rose had reached that fatal age which she dared not avow.  She was forty-two years old.  Her desire for marriage then acquired an intensity which bordered on monomania, for she saw plainly that