“Well, both,” assented Colleville; “waist slender, heart solid—­”

“No, you old stupid, deep.”

“What is good about you is that you have kept your fairness without growing fat.  But the fact is, you have such tiny bones.  Flavie, it is a fact that if I had life to live over again I shouldn’t wish for any other wife than you.”

“You know very well I have always preferred you to others.  How unlucky that monseigneur is dead!  Do you know what I covet for you?”

“No; what?”

“Some office at the Hotel de Ville,—­an office worth twelve thousand francs a year; cashier, or something of that kind; either there, or at Poissy, in the municipal department; or else as manufacturer of musical instruments—­”

“Any one of them would suit me.”

“Well, then! if that queer barrister has power, and he certainly has plenty of intrigue, let us manage him.  I’ll sound him; leave me to do the thing—­and, above all, don’t thwart his game at the Thuilliers’.”

Theodose had laid a finger on a sore sport in Flavie Colleville’s heart; and this requires an explanation, which may, perhaps, have the value of a synthetic glance at women’s life.

At forty years of age a woman, above all, if she has tasted the poisoned apple of passion, undergoes a solemn shock; she sees two deaths before her:  that of the body and that of the heart.  Dividing women into two great categories which respond to the common ideas, and calling them either virtuous or guilty, it is allowable to say that after that fatal period they both suffer pangs of terrible intensity.  If virtuous, and disappointed in the deepest hopes of their nature —­whether they have had the courage to submit, whether they have buried their revolt in their hearts or at the foot of the altar—­they never admit to themselves that all is over for them without horror.  That thought has such strange and diabolical depths that in it lies the reason of some of those apostasies which have, at times, amazed the world and horrified it.  If guilty, women of that age fall into one of several delirious conditions which often turn, alas! to madness, or end in suicide, or terminate in some with passion greater than the situation itself.

The following is the “dilemmatic” meaning of this crisis.  Either they have known happiness, known it in a virtuous life, and are unable to breathe in any air but that surcharged with incense, or act in any but a balmy atmosphere of flattery and worship,—­if so, how is it possible to renounce it?—­or, by a phenomenon less rare than singular, they have found only wearying pleasures while seeking for the happiness that escaped them—­sustained in that eager chase by the irritating satisfactions of vanity, clinging to the game like a gambler to his double or quits; for to them these last days of beauty are their last stake against despair.

“You have been loved, but never adored.”