“See how she has prepared herself,” Rastignac said, turning to de Marsay.  “What a virginal toilette; what swan’s grace in that snow-white throat of hers!  How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash like a little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate.  Who would think that you had passed that way?”

“The very reason why she looks as she does,” returned de Marsay, with a triumphant air.

The two young men exchanged a smile.  Mme. de Maufrigneuse saw the smile and guessed at their conversation, and gave the pair a broadside of her eyes, an art acquired by Frenchwomen since the Peace, when Englishwomen imported it into this country, together with the shape of their silver plate, their horses and harness, and the piles of insular ice which impart a refreshing coolness to the atmosphere of any room in which a certain number of British females are gathered together.  The young men grew serious as a couple of clerks at the end of a homily from headquarters before the receipt of an expected bonus.

The Duchess when she lost her heart to Victurnien had made up her mind to play the part of romantic Innocence, a role much understudied subsequently by other women, for the misfortune of modern youth.  Her Grace of Maufrigneuse had just come out as an angel at a moment’s notice, precisely as she meant to turn to literature and science somewhere about her fortieth year instead of taking to devotion.  She made a point of being like nobody else.  Her parts, her dresses, her caps, opinions, toilettes, and manner of acting were all entirely new and original.  Soon after her marriage, when she was scarcely more than a girl, she had played the part of a knowing and almost depraved woman; she ventured on risky repartees with shallow people, and betrayed her ignorance to those who knew better.  As the date of that marriage made it impossible to abstract one little year from her age without the knowledge of Time, she had taken it into her head to be immaculate.  She scarcely seemed to belong to earth; she shook out her wide sleeves as if they had been wings.  Her eyes fled to heaven at too warm a glance, or word, or thought.

There is a madonna painted by Piola, the great Genoese painter, who bade fair to bring out a second edition of Raphael till his career was cut short by jealousy and murder; his madonna, however, you may dimly discern through a pane of glass in a little street in Genoa.

A more chaste-eyed madonna than Piola’s does not exist but compared with Mme. de Maufrigneuse, that heavenly creature was a Messalina.  Women wondered among themselves how such a giddy young thing had been transformed by a change of dress into the fair veiled seraph who seemed (to use an expression now in vogue) to have a soul as white as new fallen snow on the highest Alpine crests.  How had she solved in such short space the Jesuitical problem how to display a bosom whiter than her soul by hiding