A previous acquaintance with Clemenceau?  It was a ray of light, but still Cesarine, who did not cease to stare at him, failed to identify him with a figure in her past.  Was this only a new phase of a Proteus?

“Clemenceau is no longer the frank and enthusiastic student but a man of talent and feeling who has found his true course.  In what concerns the revelation he has had from science, he is reserved and circumspect.  Happily, man that is borne of woman, however great, if a simpleton and an idealist, almost always is the prey of the sex in one form or another.  When they escape feminine influence, they are impregnable, and strong measures must be employed.”

“Strong measures,” repeated Cesarine, shuddering at the icy, passionless tone like a lecturer’s.

“They must be blotted off the book of life—­and it is always painful to have to proceed to such extremities.  It is frequent, very—­and ninety-nine times in the hundred, we run up against the woman for whom a great magistrate advised the search whenever a crime is perpetrated.”

“It would appear that you expect to induce me to commit that crime!” sneered the woman, pale but rebellious.

“We have no need to induce you, dear madame, for we can constrain you.”

“Constrain me!” repeated the woman savagely and tossing her head with pride.  “If you really knew my nature, you would not say that.  You might tell me how?”

“Really know you? you shall judge for yourself.  In your marriage certificate, you are described as of the Vieradlers, but your eagle is not the German one—­it is the Polish.  The women of your race are distinguished for beauty, when young, and freedom in love at all times.  Your grandma has a volumnious chronicle of scandal all to herself, but her glory is thrown into the shade by the peculiar celebrity enjoyed rather briefly by her favorite daughter, La Belle Iza, that one of the Sirens of Paris who has, under the present Empire, lured the most men to wreck.  This was your aunt.  Her sister, your mother, quite as beautiful, was rescued at an early hour from her mother’s manoevres to ‘place’ her, as she called it, and for this loss, the indignant old lady vowed a kind of unnatural vengeance, to be visited on the child of her who had offended her by remaining in the path of virtue.  This child is the woman before me.  Oh, it is useless to look at me like that!” he grimly said, with the perplexed air of a man with no ear for music who listens to a music-box delighting others.  “Pure wasted labor!  The old lady, who had fallen from her high estate where Iza had lifted her, and was ordered out of the capital for extorting hush-money upon her daughter’s stock of love-letters, the old lady became a queen—­a queen of the disreputable classes.  In Munich, sleepy old town where superstitions linger and the women are as besotted with ignorance as the men with beer, she ruled the beggars and vagabonds.  It was there that fate led you and you fell under