“Madame Marneffe!  Now I understand!” she exclaimed, seeing it all.  “But Josepha?”

“Alas, Cousin, Josepha is no more.  I was turned out of doors like a discarded footman.”

“And you would like . . .?” said Lisbeth, looking at the Baron with the dignity of a prude on her guard a quarter of an hour too soon.

“As Madame Marneffe is very much the lady, and the wife of an employe, you can meet her without compromising yourself,” the Baron went on, “and I should like to see you neighborly.  Oh! you need not be alarmed; she will have the greatest consideration for the cousin of her husband’s chief.”

At this moment the rustle of a gown was heard on the stairs and the footstep of a woman wearing the thinnest boots.  The sound ceased on the landing.  There was a tap at the door, and Madame Marneffe came in.

“Pray excuse me, mademoiselle, for thus intruding upon you, but I failed to find you yesterday when I came to call; we are near neighbors; and if I had known that you were related to Monsieur le Baron, I should long since have craved your kind interest with him.  I saw him come in, so I took the liberty of coming across; for my husband, Monsieur le Baron, spoke to me of a report on the office clerks which is to be laid before the minister to-morrow.”

She seemed quite agitated and nervous—­but she had only run upstairs.

“You have no need to play the petitioner, fair lady,” replied the Baron.  “It is I who should ask the favor of seeing you.”

“Very well, if mademoiselle allows it, pray come!” said Madame Marneffe.

“Yes—­go, Cousin, I will join you,” said Lisbeth judiciously.

The Parisienne had so confidently counted on the chief’s visit and intelligence, that not only had she dressed herself for so important an interview—­she had dressed her room.  Early in the day it had been furnished with flowers purchased on credit.  Marneffe had helped his wife to polish the furniture, down to the smallest objects, washing, brushing, and dusting everything.  Valerie wished to be found in an atmosphere of sweetness, to attract the chief and to please him enough to have a right to be cruel; to tantalize him as a child would, with all the tricks of fashionable tactics.  She had gauged Hulot.  Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.

The man of the Empire, accustomed to the ways to the Empire, was no doubt quite ignorant of the ways of modern love-making, of the scruples in vogue and the various styles of conversation invented since 1830, which led to the poor weak woman being regarded as the victim of her lover’s desires—­a Sister of Charity salving a wound, an angel sacrificing herself.

This modern art of love uses a vast amount of evangelical phrases in the service of the Devil.  Passion is martyrdom.  Both parties aspire to the Ideal, to the Infinite; love is to make them so much better.  All these fine words are but a pretext for putting increased ardor into the practical side of it, more frenzy into a fall than of old.  This hypocrisy, a characteristic of the times, is a gangrene in gallantry.  The lovers are both angels, and they behave, if they can, like two devils.