“Do you wish me to tell you?  It seems to me that you are walking to the mayor’s office on eggs!”

“Be easy,” Marianne replied, laughing heartily, “there will be none broken.”

The marriage was celebrated.  At last! as Kayser said.  It was a formality rather than a ceremony.  Marianne, ravishingly beautiful, was exultant at realizing her dream.  Her pale complexion took on tints of the bloom of the azalea pierced by the rays of the sun.  Never had Rosas seen her so lovely.  How stupidly he had acted formerly in yielding to appearances and flying from her, instead of telling her that he loved her.  He had lost whole years of love that he would never recover, even in the blissful fever of this union.  Those joys, formerly disdained, were, alas! never to be restored.

Ah! how he would love her now, adore her and keep her with him as his living delight!  They would travel; in three days they would set out for Italy.  The baggage already filled the house in the Avenue Montaigne, their nuptial mansion.  Marianne would take away all the souvenirs that she had preserved in the grisette’s little room at Rue Cuvier, where Rosas had so often seen her and where he had said to her:  “I love you!”

“People took their penates,” she said, “but I take my fetishes!”

Rosas was wild with joy.  The possession of this woman, sought after as mistress, but more intensely ardent than a mistress, with her outbursts of tears and kisses, threw him into ecstasies and possessed him with distracting joy.  Something within him whispered, as in the days of early manhood, at the ecstatic hour of sunrise.  Already he wished to be on the way to Italy with Marianne, far from the mire and mists of Paris.

“These rain-soaked sidewalks on which the gaslight is reflected seem gloomy to me,” he said.  “Let us seek the blue skies, Marianne, the orange groves of Nice, the stars of Naples.”

She smiled.

“The blue again!” she thought.  “They all desire it, then?”

She desired to remain a few days longer in Paris, delighted to proclaim her new name in its streets, its Bois and its theatres, where she had been known in her sadness, displaying her desperate melancholy.  It seemed to her that, in her present triumph, she crushed both men and things.  What was Naples to her?  She had not miserably dragged her disillusions and her angers along the Chiaja.  Florence might take her for a duchess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame for her follies, her hopes, her failures, her heartbreaks, her deceptions, all her sorrows of an ambitious woman, which had made her the daring woman that she was,—­those boulevards, those paths about the Lake, those proscenium boxes at the theatre, she would see them in her triumph, as she had seen them in her untrammelled follies or in the moments of her ruin and abandonment.