“He is one of Plutarch’s men,” Victurnien said to himself, as he tossed the letter on the table.  He felt chagrined; such magnanimity made him feel very small.

“There! one must reform,” he thought; and instead of going to a restaurant and spending fifty or sixty francs over his dinner, he retrenched by dining with the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and told her about the letter.

“I should like to see that man,” she said, letting her eyes shine like two fixed stars.

“What would you do?”

“Why, he should manage my affairs for me.”

Diane de Maufrigneuse was divinely dressed; she meant her toilet to do honor to Victurnien.  The levity with which she treated his affairs or, more properly speaking, his debts fascinated him.

The charming pair went to the Italiens.  Never had that beautiful and enchanting woman looked more seraphic, more ethereal.  Nobody in the house could have believed that she had debts which reached the sum total mentioned by de Marsay that very morning.  No single one of the cares of earth had touched that sublime forehead of hers, full of woman’s pride of the highest kind.  In her, a pensive air seemed to be some gleam of an earthly love, nobly extinguished.  The men for the most part were wagering that Victurnien, with his handsome figure, laid her under contribution; while the women, sure of their rival’s subterfuge, admired her as Michael Angelo admired Raphael, in petto.  Victurnien loved Diane, according to one of these ladies, for the sake of her hair—­she had the most beautiful fair hair in France; another maintained that Diane’s pallor was her principal merit, for she was not really well shaped, her dress made the most of her figure; yet others thought that Victurnien loved her for her foot, her one good point, for she had a flat figure.  But (and this brings the present-day manner of Paris before you in an astonishing manner) whereas all the men said that the Duchess was subsidizing Victurnien’s splendor, the women, on the other hand, gave people to understand that it was Victurnien who paid for the angel’s wings, as Rastignac said.

As they drove back again, Victurnien had it on the tip of his tongue a score of times to open this chapter, for the Duchess’ debts weighed more heavily upon his mind than his own; and a score of times his purpose died away before the attitude of the divine creature beside him.  He could see her by the light of the carriage lamps; she was bewitching in the love-languor which always seemed to be extorted by the violence of passion from her madonna’s purity.  The Duchess did not fall into the mistake of talking of her virtue, of her angel’s estate, as provincial women, her imitators, do.  She was far too clever.  She made him, for whom she made such great sacrifices, think these things for himself.  At the end of six months she could make him feel that a harmless kiss on her hand was a deadly sin; she contrived that every grace should be extorted from her, and this with such consummate art, that it was impossible not to feel that she was more an angel than ever when she yielded.