The wealth of the Evangelistas, proverbial in Bordeaux, had remained in Paul’s mind as a memory of his childhood.  Thus the pecuniary conditions were known to him from the start, without necessitating those discussions and inquiries which are as repugnant to a timid mind as to a proud one.  When some persons attempting to say to Paul a few flattering phrases as to Natalie’s manner, language, and beauty, ending by remarks, cruelly calculated to deter him, on the lavish extravagance of the Evangelistas, the Pink of Fashion replied with a disdain that was well-deserved by such provincial pettiness.  This method of receiving such speeches soon silenced them; for he now set the tone to the ideas and language as well as to the manners of those about him.  He had imported from his travels a certain development of the Britannic personality with its icy barriers, also a tone of Byronic pessimism as to life, together with English plate, boot-polish, ponies, yellow gloves, cigars, and the habit of galloping.

It thus happened that Paul escaped the discouragements hitherto presented to marriageable men by dowagers and young girls.  Madame Evangelista began by asking him to formal dinners on various occasions.  The Pink of Fashion would not, of course, miss festivities to which none but the most distinguished young men of the town were bidden.  In spite of the coldness that Paul assumed, which deceived neither mother nor daughter, he was drawn, step by step, into the path of marriage.  Sometimes as he passed in his tilbury, or rode by on his fine English horse, he heard the young men of his acquaintance say to one another:—­

“There’s a lucky man.  He is rich and handsome, and is to marry, so they say, Mademoiselle Evangelista.  There are some men for whom the world seems made.”

When he met the Evangelistas he felt proud of the particular distinction which mother and daughter imparted to their bows.  If Paul had not secretly, within his heart, fallen in love with Mademoiselle Natalie, society would certainly have married him to her in spite of himself.  Society, which never causes good, is the accomplice of much evil; then when it beholds the evil it has hatched maternally, it rejects and revenges it.  Society in Bordeaux, attributing a “dot” of a million to Mademoiselle Evangelista, bestowed it upon Paul without awaiting the consent of either party.  Their fortunes, so it was said, agreed as well as their persons.  Paul had the same habits of luxury and elegance in the midst of which Natalie had been brought up.  He had just arranged for himself a house such as no other man in Bordeaux could have offered her.  Accustomed to Parisian expenses and the caprices of Parisian women, he alone was fitted to meet the pecuniary difficulties which were likely to follow this marriage with a girl who was as much of a Creole and a great lady as her mother.  Where they themselves, remarked the marriageable men, would have been ruined, the Comte de Manerville, rich as he was, could evade disaster.  In short, the marriage was made.  Persons in the highest royalist circles said a few engaging words to Paul which flattered his vanity:—­