“But does Mademoiselle Colleville really suit me?” resumed la Peyrade; “that is the very point on which you have lately raised my doubts.  Do you not think there is something cruel in casting me first in one direction and then in the other without affording me any ground to go upon?”

“Ah!” said the countess, in a tone of impatience, “you want my opinion on the premises!  Well, monsieur, there is one very conclusive fact to which I can bring proof:  Celeste does not love you.”

“So I have thought,” said la Peyrade, humbly.  “I felt that I was making a marriage of mere convenience.”

“And she cannot love you, because,” continued Madame de Godollo, with animation, “she cannot comprehend you.  Her proper husband is that blond little man, insipid as herself; from the union of those two natures without life or heat will result in that lukewarm existence which, in the opinion of the world where she was born and where she has lived, is the ne plus ultra of conjugal felicity.  Try to make that little simpleton understand that when she had a chance to unite herself with true talent she ought to have felt highly honored!  But, above all, try to make her miserable, odious family and surroundings understand it!  Enriched bourgeois, parvenus! there’s the roof beneath which you think to rest from your cruel labor and your many trials!  And do you believe that you will not be made to feel, twenty times a day, that your share in the partnership is distressingly light in the scale against their money?  On one side, the Iliad, the Cid, Der Freyschutz, and the frescos of the Vatican; on the other, three hundred thousand francs in good, ringing coin!  Tell me which side they will trust and admire!  The artist, the man of imagination who falls into the bourgeois atmosphere—­shall I tell you to what I compare him?  To Daniel cast into the lion’s den, less the miracle of Holy Writ.”

This invective against the bourgeoisie was uttered in a tone of heated conviction which could scarcely fail to be communicated.

“Ah! madame,” cried la Peyrade, “how eloquently you say things which again and again have entered my troubled and anxious mind!  But I have felt myself lashed to that most cruel fate, the necessity of gaining a position—­”

“Necessity! position!” interrupted the countess, again raising the temperature of her speech,—­“words void of meaning! which have not even sound to able men, though they drive back fools as though they were formidable barriers.  Necessity! does that exist for noble natures, for those who know how to will?  A Gascon minister uttered a saying which ought to be engraved on the doors of all careers:  ’All things come to him who knows how to wait.’  Are you ignorant that marriage, to men of a high stamp, is either a chain which binds them to the lowest vulgarities of existence, or a wing on which to rise to the highest summits of the social world?  The wife you need, monsieur, —­and she would not be long wanting