“Does this Mme. de Beauseant happen to be the lady whose adventure with M. d’Ajuda-Pinto made so much noise?” asked Gaston of his neighbor.

“The very same,” he was told.  “She came to Courcelles after the marriage of the Marquis d’Ajuda; nobody visits her.  She has, besides, too much sense not to see that she is in a false position, so she has made no attempt to see any one.  M. de Champignelles and a few gentlemen went to call upon her, but she would see no one but M. de Champignelles, perhaps because he is a connection of the family.  They are related through the Beauseants; the father of the present Vicomte married a Mlle. de Champignelles of the older branch.  But though the Vicomtesse de Beauseant is supposed to be a descendant of the House of Burgundy, you can understand that we could not admit a wife separated from her husband into our society here.  We are foolish enough still to cling to these old-fashioned ideas.  There was the less excuse for the Vicomtesse, because M. de Beauseant is a well-bred man of the world, who would have been quite ready to listen to reason.  But his wife is quite mad——­” and so forth and so forth.

M. de Nueil, still listening to the speaker’s voice, gathered nothing of the sense of the words; his brain was too full of thick-coming fancies.  Fancies?  What other name can you give to the alluring charms of an adventure that tempts the imagination and sets vague hopes springing up in the soul; to the sense of coming events and mysterious felicity and fear at hand, while as yet there is no substance of fact on which these phantoms of caprice can fix and feed?  Over these fancies thought hovers, conceiving impossible projects, giving in the germ all the joys of love.  Perhaps, indeed, all passion is contained in that thought-germ, as the beauty, and fragrance, and rich color of the flower is all packed in the seed.

M. de Nueil did not know that Mme. de Beauseant had taken refuge in Normandy, after a notoriety which women for the most part envy and condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some sort excuse the transgression.  Any sort of celebrity bestows an inconceivable prestige.  Apparently for women, as for families, the glory of the crime effaces the stain; and if such and such a noble house is proud of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be pitied, the more she excites our sympathies.  We are only pitiless to the commonplace.  If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other people’s heads?  The common herd of humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by which they rise.

It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston de Nueil at unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some interest in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses which, for want of a better name, we are wont to call “fatality,” that drew him to Mme. de Beauseant.