“When you cease to love me, kill me.—­If you should cease to love me, I believe I could kill you first and myself after.”

To this sweet exaggeration, Lousteau would reply: 

“All I ask of God is to see you as constant as I shall be.  It is you who will desert me!”

“My love is supreme.”

“Supreme,” echoed Lousteau.  “Come, now?  Suppose I am dragged away to a bachelor party, and find there one of my former mistresses, and she makes fun of me; I, out of vanity, behave as if I were free, and do not come in here till next morning—­would you still love me?”

“A woman is only sure of being loved when she is preferred; and if you came back to me, if—­Oh! you make me understand what the happiness would be of forgiving the man I adore.”

“Well, then, I am truly loved for the first time in my life!” cried Lousteau.

“At last you understand that!” said she.

Lousteau proposed that they should each write a letter setting forth the reasons which would compel them to end by suicide.  Once in possession of such a document, each might kill the other without danger in case of infidelity.  But in spite of mutual promises, neither wrote the letter.

The journalist, happy for the moment, promised himself that he would deceive Dinah when he should be tired of her, and would sacrifice everything to the requirements of that deception.  To him Madame de la Baudraye was a fortune in herself.  At the same time, he felt the yoke.

Dinah, by consenting to this union, showed a generous mind and the power derived from self-respect.  In this absolute intimacy, in which both lovers put off their masks, the young woman never abdicated her modesty, her masculine rectitude, and the strength peculiar to ambitious souls, which formed the basis of her character.  Lousteau involuntarily held her in high esteem.  As a Parisian, Dinah was superior to the most fascinating courtesan; she could be as amusing and as witty as Malaga; but her extensive information, her habits of mind, her vast reading enabled her to generalize her wit, while the Florines and the Schontzes exerted theirs over a very narrow circle.

“There is in Dinah,” said Etienne to Bixiou, “the stuff to make both a Ninon and a De Stael.”

“A woman who combines an encyclopaedia and a seraglio is very dangerous,” replied the mocking spirit.

When the expected infant became a visible fact, Madame de la Baudraye would be seen no more; but before shutting herself up, never to go out unless into the country, she was bent on being present at the first performance of a play by Nathan.  This literary solemnity occupied the minds of the two thousand persons who regard themselves as constituting “all Paris.”  Dinah, who had never been at a first night’s performance, was very full of natural curiosity.  She had by this time arrived at such a pitch of affection for Lousteau that she gloried in her misconduct; she exerted a sort of savage strength to defy the world; she was determined to look it in the face without turning her head aside.