it in gauze?  How could she look so ethereal while her eyes drooped so murderously?  Those almost wanton glances seemed to give promise of untold languorous delight, while by an ascetic’s sigh of aspiration after a better life the mouth appeared to add that none of those promises would be fulfilled.  Ingenuous youths (for there were a few to be found in the Guards of that day) privately wondered whether, in the most intimate moments, it were possible to speak familiarly to this White Lady, this starry vapor slidden down from the Milky Way.  This system, which answered completely for some years at a stretch, was turned to good account by women of fashion, whose breasts were lined with a stout philosophy, for they could cloak no inconsiderable exactions with these little airs from the sacristy.  Not one of the celestial creatures but was quite well aware of the possibilities of less ethereal love which lay in the longing of every well-conditioned male to recall such beings to earth.  It was a fashion which permitted them to abide in a semi-religious, semi-Ossianic empyrean; they could, and did, ignore all the practical details of daily life, a short and easy method of disposing of many questions.  De Marsay, foreseeing the future developments of the system, added a last word, for he saw that Rastignac was jealous of Victurnien.

“My boy,” said he, “stay as you are.  Our Nucingen will make your fortune, whereas the Duchess would ruin you.  She is too expensive.”

Rastignac allowed de Marsay to go without asking further questions.  He knew Paris.  He knew that the most refined and noble and disinterested of women—­a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a bouquet—­can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any opera girl of former days.  As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an almost mythical being.  As things are now at the theatres, dancers and actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman, they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of respected and respectable mothers of families, and act men’s parts in tight-fitting garments at night.

Worthy M. Chesnel, in his country notary’s office, was right; he had foreseen one of the reefs on which the Count might shipwreck.  Victurnien was dazzled by the poetic aureole which Mme. de Maufrigneuse chose to assume; he was chained and padlocked from the first hour in her company, bound captive by that girlish sash, and caught by the curls twined round fairy fingers.  Far corrupted the boy was already, but he really believed in that farrago of maidenliness and muslin, in sweet looks as much studied as an Act of Parliament.  And if the one man, who is in duty bound to believe in feminine fibs, is deceived by them, is not that enough?

For a pair of lovers, the rest of their species are about as much alive as figures on the tapestry.  The Duchess, flattery apart, was avowedly and admittedly one of the ten handsomest women in society.  “The loveliest woman in Paris” is, as you know, as often met with in the world of love-making as “the finest book that has appeared in this generation,” in the world of letters.