“I never thought of that,” said Lousteau simply; and he added to himself, “Time enough to part when little La Baudraye is safe back again.”

From that day forth Etienne lived in luxury; and Dinah, on first nights, could hold her own with the best dressed women in Paris.  Lousteau was so fatuous as to affect, among his friends, the attitude of a man overborne, bored to extinction, ruined by Madame de la Baudraye.

“Oh, what would I not give to the friend who would deliver me from Dinah!  But no one ever can!” said he.  “She loves me enough to throw herself out of the window if I told her.”

The journalist was duly pitied; he would take precautions against Dinah’s jealousy when he accepted an invitation.  And then he was shamelessly unfaithful.  Monsieur de Clagny, really in despair at seeing Dinah in such disgraceful circumstances when she might have been so rich, and in so wretched a position at the time when her original ambitions would have been fulfilled, came to warn her, to tell her—­“You are betrayed,” and she only replied, “I know it.”

The lawyer was silenced; still he found his tongue to say one thing.

Madame de la Baudraye interrupted him when he had scarcely spoken a word.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“I would lose my soul for you!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet.

The hapless man’s eyes flashed like torches, he trembled like a leaf, his throat was rigid, his hair thrilled to the roots; he believed he was so blessed as to be accepted as his idol’s avenger, and this poor joy filled him with rapture.

“Why are you so startled?” said she, making him sit down again.  “That is how I love him.”

The lawyer understood this argument ad hominem.  And there were tears in the eyes of the Judge, who had just condemned a man to death!

Lousteau’s satiety, that odious conclusion of such illicit relations, had betrayed itself in a thousand little things, which are like grains of sand thrown against the panes of the little magical hut where those who love dwell and dream.  These grains of sand, which grow to be pebbles, had never been discerned by Dinah till they were as big as rocks.  Madame de la Baudraye had at last thoroughly understood Lousteau’s character.

“He is,” she said to her mother, “a poet, defenceless against disaster, mean out of laziness, not for want of heart, and rather too prone to pleasure; in short, a great cat, whom it is impossible to hate.  What would become of him without me?  I hindered his marriage; he has no prospects.  His talent would perish in privations.”

“Oh, my Dinah!” Madame Piedefer had exclaimed, “what a hell you live in!  What is the feeling that gives you strength enough to persist?”

“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.

There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor.  We accept compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play prosecutor.  Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been torturing Dinah.