“In good faith, my poor child,” she said, “you have not had, up too this time, your just share of happiness in this world.  I would not speak ill of your husband, since he is dead; but, entre nous, he was a horrid brute.  Mon Dieu! charming at times, I grant you,—­since I have been caught myself—­like all worthless scamps! but in fact, beastly, beastly!  Well, certainly, I shall not undertake to say that marriage is ever a state of perfect bliss; nevertheless it is the best thing that has been imagined up to this time, to enjoy life decently among respectable people.  You are in the flower of your age—­you are quite good-looking, quite—­and, by the way, it will do you no harm to wear your skirts a little higher up behind, with a proper sort of bustle; for you don’t even know what they wear now, my poor pet.  Here, look!  It’s horrible, I know; but what can we do? we must not attract attention.  In short, what I meant to tell you is that you still have all that is necessary, and even more than is necessary, to fix a husband—­if indeed there are any that can be fixed, which I hope is the case—­otherwise, we should have to despair wholly of Providence, if it did not have some compensation in store for us after all our trials.  It is already a manifest sign of its kindness that you should have recovered your embonpoint, my darling!  Kiss your mother.  Come, now, when is our pretty little woman going to be married?”

There was no maternal exaggeration whatever in the compliments which the baroness was addressing to Clotilde.  All Paris looked upon her with the same eyes as her mother.  She had never been so attractive as now, and she had always been infinitely so.  Her person, reposed in the peace of her mourning, had then the bright lustre of a fine fruit, ripe and fresh.  Her black eyes full of timid tenderness, her pure brow crowned with splendid and life-like braids, her shoulders of rosy marble, her particular grace of a young matron, at once handsome, loving, and chaste—­all that, joined to a spotless reputation and to sixty thousand francs a year, could not fail to bring forward more than one pretender.  And indeed they sprang up in legions.  Reason, and public opinion itself, which had done full justice to her husband and to herself, were both urging her to a second wedding.  Her own private feelings, whatever might be their natural delicacy, did not seem likely to prove an obstacle, for there was nothing in her heart that was not true.  She had been faithful to her husband, she had shed sincere and bitter tears over that wretched companion of her youth; but he had exhausted and worn out her affection, and without ever joining her mother in her posthumous recriminations against Monsieur de Trecoeur, she felt that she had no further duty to fulfill toward him but that of prayer.

She had, however, been for many months a widow, and she still continued to oppose to the solicitations of the baroness, a resistance of which the latter sought in vain to ascertain the mysterious cause.  One day she fancied she had discovered it.