We shall see presently how far they succeeded in that pious object, for the sake of which they first entered on concealments.  But first a word is due about one of the victims of their amiable, self-sacrificing lubricity.  Edouard Riviere fell in one night, from happiness and confidence, such as till that night he had never enjoyed, to deep and hopeless misery.

He lost that which, to every heart capable of really loving, is the greatest earthly blessing, the woman he adored.  But worse than that, he lost those prime treasures of the masculine soul, belief in human goodness, and in female purity.  To him no more could there be in nature a candid eye, a virtuous ready-mantling cheek:  for frailty and treachery had put on these signs of virtue and nobility.  Henceforth, let him live a hundred years, whom could he trust or believe in?

Here was a creature whose virtues seemed to make frailty impossible:  treachery, doubly impossible:  a creature whose very faults—­for faults she had—­had seemed as opposite to treachery as her very virtues were.  Yet she was all frailty and falsehood.

He passed in that one night of anguish from youth to age.  He went about his business like a leaden thing.  His food turned tasteless.  His life seemed ended.  Nothing appeared what it had been.  The very landscape seemed cut in stone, and he a stone in the middle of it, and his heart a stone in him.  At times, across that heavy heart came gushes of furious rage and bitter mortification; his heart was broken, and his faith was gone, for his vanity had been stabbed as fiercely as his love.  “Georges Dandin!” he would cry, “curse her! curse her!” But love and misery overpowered these heats, and froze him to stone again.

The poor boy pined and pined.  His clothes hung loose about him; his face was so drawn with suffering, you would not have known him.  He hated company.  The things he was expected to talk about!—­he with his crushed heart.  He could not.  He would not.  He shunned all the world; he went alone like a wounded deer.  The good doctor, on his return from Paris, called on him to see if he was ill:  since he had not come for days to the chateau.  He saw the doctor coming and bade the servant say he was not in the village.

He drew down the blind, that he might never see the chateau again.  He drew it up again:  he could not exist without seeing it.  “She will be miserable, too,” he cried, gnashing his teeth.  “She will see whether she has chosen well.”  At other times, all his courage, and his hatred, and his wounded vanity, were drowned in his love and its despair, and then he bowed his head, and sobbed and cried as if his heart would burst.  One morning he was so sobbing with his head on the table, when his landlady tapped at his door.  He started up and turned his head away from the door.

“A young woman from Beaurepaire, monsieur.”

“From Beaurepaire?” his heart gave a furious leap.  “Show her in.”