butter and florid cheeks like a monk’s jowl seemed scarcely big enough to contain his exuberant jubilation.  Camusot had left his wife at home, and they were applauding Coralie to the skies.  All the rich man’s citizen vanity was summed up and gratified in Coralie; in Coralie’s lodging he gave himself the airs of a great lord of a bygone day; now, at this moment, he felt that half of her success was his; the knowledge that he had paid for it confirmed him in this idea.  Camusot’s conduct was sanctioned by the presence of his father-in-law, a little old fogy with powdered hair and leering eyes, highly respected nevertheless.

Again Lucien felt disgust rising within him.  He thought of the year when he loved Mme. de Bargeton with an exalted and disinterested love; and at that thought love, as a poet understands it, spread its white wings about him; countless memories drew a circle of distant blue horizon about the great man of Angouleme, and again he fell to dreaming.

Up went the curtain, and there stood Coralie and Florine upon the stage.

“He is thinking about as much of you as of the Grand Turk, my dear girl,” Florine said in an aside while Coralie was finishing her speech.

Lucien could not help laughing.  He looked at Coralie.  She was one of the most charming and captivating actresses in Paris, rivaling Mme. Perrin and Mlle. Fleuriet, and destined likewise to share their fate.  Coralie was a woman of a type that exerts at will a power of fascination over men.  With an oval face of deep ivory tint, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and a chin subtly delicate in its contour as the edge of a porcelain cup, Coralie was a Jewess of the sublime type.  The jet black eyes behind their curving lashes seemed to scorch her eyelids; you could guess how soft they might grow, or how sparks of the heat of the desert might flash from them in response to a summons from within.  The circles of olive shadow about them were bounded by thick arching lines of eyebrow.  Magnificent mental power, well-nigh amounting to genius, seemed to dwell in the swarthy forehead beneath the double curve of ebony hair that lay upon it like a crown, and gleamed in the light like a varnished surface; but like many another actress, Coralie had little wit in spite of her aptness at greenroom repartee, and scarcely any education in spite of her boudoir experience.  Her brain was prompted by her senses, her kindness was the impulsive warm-heartedness of girls of her class.  But who could trouble over Coralie’s psychology when his eyes were dazzled by those smooth, round arms of hers, the spindle-shaped fingers, the fair white shoulders, and breast celebrated in the Song of Songs, the flexible curving lines of throat, the graciously moulded outlines beneath the scarlet silk stockings?  And this beauty, worthy of an Eastern poet, was brought into relief by the conventional Spanish costume of the stage.  Coralie was the delight of the pit; all eyes dwelt on the