Auguste then gave himself up wholly to the delights of the deepest and most moving of passions, to a love that was purely adoring.  Innumerable repressed desires there were, shadows of passion so vague yet so profound, so fugitive and yet so actual, that one scarcely knows to what we may compare them.  They are like perfumes, or clouds, or rays of the sun, or shadows, or whatever there is in nature that shines for a moment and disappears, that springs to life and dies, leaving in the heart long echoes of emotion.  When the soul is young enough to nurture melancholy and far-off hope, to find in woman more than a woman, is it not the greatest happiness that can befall a man when he loves enough to feel more joy in touching a gloved hand, or a lock of hair, in listening to a word, in casting a single look, than in all the ardor of possession given by happy love?  Thus it is that rejected persons, those rebuffed by fate, the ugly and unfortunate, lovers unrevealed, women and timid men, alone know the treasures contained in the voice of the beloved.  Taking their source and their element from the soul itself, the vibrations of the air, charged with passion, put our hearts so powerfully into communion, carrying thought between them so lucidly, and being, above all, so incapable of falsehood, that a single inflection of a voice is often a revelation.  What enchantments the intonations of a tender voice can bestow upon the heart of a poet!  What ideas they awaken!  What freshness they shed there!  Love is in the voice before the glance avows it.  Auguste, poet after the manner of lovers (there are poets who feel, and poets who express; the first are the happiest), Auguste had tasted all these early joys, so vast, so fecund.  SHE possessed the most winning organ that the most artful woman of the world could have desired in order to deceive at her ease; she had that silvery voice which is soft to the ear, and ringing only for the heart which it stirs and troubles, caresses and subjugates.

And this woman went by night to the rue Soly through the rue Pagevin! and her furtive apparition in an infamous house had just destroyed the grandest of passions!  The vidame’s logic triumphed.

“If she is betraying her husband we will avenge ourselves,” said Auguste.

There was still faith in that “if.”  The philosophic doubt of Descartes is a politeness with which we should always honor virtue.  Ten o’clock sounded.  The Baron de Maulincour remembered that this woman was going to a ball that evening at a house to which he had access.  He dressed, went there, and searched for her through all the salons.  The mistress of the house, Madame de Nucingen, seeing him thus occupied, said:—­

“You are looking for Madame Jules; but she has not yet come.”

“Good evening, dear,” said a voice.

Auguste and Madame de Nucingen turned round.  Madame Jules had arrived, dressed in white, looking simple and noble, wearing in her hair the marabouts the young baron had seen her choose in the flower-shop.  That voice of love now pierced his heart.  Had he won the slightest right to be jealous of her he would have petrified her then and there by saying the words, “Rue Soly!” But if he, an alien to her life, had said those words in her ear a thousand times, Madame Jules would have asked him in astonishment what he meant.  He looked at her stupidly.