But then another child was coming, and this year was a terrible trial.  In spite of the precautions of the two women, Etienne contracted debts; he worked himself to death to pay them off while Dinah was laid up; and, knowing him as she did, she thought him heroic.  But after this effort, appalled at having two women, two children, and two maids on his hands, he was incapable of the struggle to maintain a family by his pen when he had failed to maintain even himself.  So he let things take their chance.  Then the ruthless speculator exaggerated the farce of love-making at home to secure greater liberty abroad.

Dinah proudly endured the burden of life without support.  The one idea, “He loves me!” gave her superhuman strength.  She worked as hard as the most energetic spirits of our time.  At the risk of her beauty and health, Didine was to Lousteau what Mademoiselle Delachaux was to Gardane in Diderot’s noble and true tale.  But while sacrificing herself, she committed the magnanimous blunder of sacrificing dress.  She had her gowns dyed, and wore nothing but black.  She stank of black, as Malaga said, making fun mercilessly of Lousteau.

By the end of 1839, Etienne, following the example of Louis XV., had, by dint of gradual capitulations of conscience, come to the point of establishing a distinction between his own money and the housekeeping money, just as Louis XV. drew the line between his privy purse and the public moneys.  He deceived Dinah as to his earnings.  On discovering this baseness, Madame de la Baudraye went through fearful tortures of jealousy.  She wanted to live two lives—­the life of the world and the life of a literary woman; she accompanied Lousteau to every first-night performance, and could detect in him many impulses of wounded vanity, for her black attire rubbed off, as it were, on him, clouding his brow, and sometimes leading him to be quite brutal.  He was really the woman of the two; and he had all a woman’s exacting perversity; he would reproach Dinah for the dowdiness of her appearance, even while benefiting by the sacrifice, which to a mistress is so cruel—­exactly like a woman who, after sending a man through a gutter to save her honor, tells him she “cannot bear dirt!” when he comes out.

Dinah then found herself obliged to gather up the rather loose reins of power by which a clever woman drives a man devoid of will.  But in so doing she could not fail to lose much of her moral lustre.  Such suspicions as she betrayed drag a woman into quarrels which lead to disrespect, because she herself comes down from the high level on which she had at first placed herself.  Next she made some concession; Lousteau was allowed to entertain several of his friends—­Nathan, Bixiou, Blondet, Finot, whose manners, language, and intercourse were depraving.  They tried to convince Madame de la Baudraye that her principles and aversions were a survival of provincial prudishness; and they preached the creed of woman’s superiority.