“But, my dear Flavie, half the absurdities of life are the result of such conspiracies; and men are not alone in these deceptions.  In how many families one sees the husband, children, and friends persuading a silly mother that she is a woman of sense, or an old woman of fifty that she is young and beautiful.  Hence, inconceivable contrarieties for those who go about the world with their eyes shut.  One man owes his ill-savored conceit to the flattery of a mistress; another owes his versifying vanity to those who are paid to call him a great poet.  Every family has its great man; and the result is, as we see it in the Chamber, general obscurity of the lights of France.  Well, men of real mind are laughing to themselves about it, that’s all.  You are the mind and the beauty of this little circle of the petty bourgeoisie; it is this superiority which led me in the first instance to worship you.  I have since longed to drag you out of it; for I love you sincerely —­more in friendship than in love; though a great deal of love is gliding into it,” he added, pressing her to his heart under cover of the recess of a window to which he had taken her.

“Madame Phellion will play the piano,” cried Colleville.  “We must all dance to-night—­bottles and Brigitte’s francs and all the little girls!  I’ll go and fetch my clarionet.”

He gave his empty coffee-cup to his wife, smiling to see her so friendly with la Peyrade.

“What have you said and done to my husband?” asked Flavie, when Colleville had left them.

“Must I tell you all our secrets?”

“Ah! you don’t love me,” she replied, looking at him with the coquettish slyness of a woman who is not quite decided in her mind.

“Well, since you tell me yours,” he said, letting himself go to the lively impulse of Provencal gaiety, always so charming and apparently so natural, “I will not conceal from you an anxiety in my heart.”

He took her back to the same window and said, smiling:—­

“Colleville, poor man, has seen in me the artist repressed by all these bourgeois; silent before them because I feel misjudged, misunderstood, and repelled by them.  He has felt the heat of the sacred fire that consumes me.  Yes I am,” he continued, in a tone of conviction, “an artist in words after the manner of Berryer; I could make juries weep, by weeping myself, for I’m as nervous as a woman.  Your husband, who detests the bourgeoisie, began to tease me about them.  At first we laughed; then, in becoming serious, he found out that I was as strong as he.  I told him of the plan concocted to make something of Thuillier, and I showed him all the good he could get himself out of a political puppet.  ‘If it were only,’ I said to him, ’to make yourself Monsieur de Colleville, and to put your charming wife where I should like to see her, as the wife of a receiver-general, or deputy.  To make yourself all that you and she ought to be,