Diard was therefore debarred from succeeding in society.  Henceforth his wife alone had the power to make anything of him.  Miracle of our strange civilization!  In Paris, if a man is incapable of being anything himself, his wife, when she is young and clever, may give him other chances for elevation.  We sometimes meet with invalid women, feeble beings apparently, who, without rising from sofas or leaving their chambers, have ruled society, moved a thousand springs, and placed their husbands where their ambition or their vanity prompted.  But Juana, whose childhood was passed in her retreat in Tarragona, knew nothing of the vices, the meannesses, or the resources of Parisian society; she looked at that society with the curiosity of a girl, but she learned from it only that which her sorrow and her wounded pride revealed to her.

Juana had the tact of a virgin heart which receives impressions in advance of the event, after the manner of what are called “sensitives.”  The solitary young girl, so suddenly become a woman and a wife, saw plainly that were she to attempt to compel society to respect her husband, it must be after the manner of Spanish beggars, carbine in hand.  Besides, the multiplicity of the precautions she would have to take, would they meet the necessity?  Suddenly she divined society as, once before, she had divined life, and she saw nothing around her but the immense extent of an irreparable disaster.  She had, moreover, the additional grief of tardily recognizing her husband’s peculiar form of incapacity; he was a man unfitted for any purpose that required continuity of ideas.  He could not understand a consistent part, such as he ought to play in the world; he perceived it neither as a whole nor in its gradations, and its gradations were everything.  He was in one of those positions where shrewdness and tact might have taken the place of strength; when shrewdness and tact succeed, they are, perhaps, the highest form of strength.

Now Diard, far from arresting the spot of oil on his garments left by his antecedents, did his best to spread it.  Incapable of studying the phase of the empire in the midst of which he came to live in Paris, he wanted to be made prefect.  At that time every one believed in the genius of Napoleon; his favor enhanced the value of all offices.  Prefectures, those miniature empires, could only be filled by men of great names, or chamberlains of H.M. the emperor and king.  Already the prefects were a species of vizier.  The myrmidons of the great man scoffed at Diard’s pretensions to a prefecture, whereupon he lowered his demand to a sub-prefecture.  There was, of course, a ridiculous discrepancy between this latter demand and the magnitude of his fortune.  To frequent the imperial salons and live with insolent luxury, and then to abandon that millionaire life and bury himself as sub-prefect at Issoudun or Savenay was certainly holding himself below his position.  Juana, too late aware of our laws and habits and administrative