He took a seat and lifted in the air a Socratic finger: 

“Are you speaking, Mademoiselle, of the solemn union between man and woman?  In this sense, marriage is a sacrament.  But sometimes, alas! it is almost a sacrilege.  As for civil marriage, it is a formality.  The importance given to it in our society is an idiotic thing which would have made the women of other times laugh.  We owe this prejudice, like many others, to the bourgeois, to the mad performances of a lot of financiers which have been called the Revolution, and which seem admirable to those that have profited by it.  Civil marriage is, in reality, only registry, like many others which the State exacts in order to be sure of the condition of persons:  in every well organized state everybody must be indexed.  Morally, this registry in a big ledger has not even the virtue of inducing a wife to take a lover.  Who ever thinks of betraying an oath taken before a mayor?  In order to find joy in adultery, one must be pious.”

“But, Monsieur,” said Therese, “we were married at the church.”

Then, with an accent of sincerity: 

“I can not understand how a man ever makes up his mind to marry; nor how a woman, after she has reached an age when she knows what she is doing, can commit that folly.”

The Prince looked at her with distrust.  He was clever, but he was incapable of conceiving that one might talk without an object, disinterestedly, and to express general ideas.  He imagined that Countess Martin-Belleme was suggesting to him projects that she wished him to consider.  And as he was thinking of defending himself and also avenging himself, he made velvet eyes at her and talked with tender gallantry: 

“You display, Madame, the pride of the beautiful and intelligent French women whom subjection irritates.  French women love liberty, and none of them is as worthy of liberty as you.  I have lived in France a little.  I have known and admired the elegant society of Paris, the salons, the festivals, the conversations, the plays.  But in our mountains, under our olive-trees, we become rustic again.  We assume golden-age manners, and marriage is for us an idyl full of freshness.”

Vivian Bell examined the statuette which Dechartre had left on the table.

“Oh! it was thus that Beatrice looked, I am sure.  And do you know, Monsieur Dechartre, there are wicked men who say that Beatrice never existed?”

Choulette declared he wished to be counted among those wicked men.  He did not believe that Beatrice had any more reality than other ladies through whom ancient poets who sang of love represented some scholastic idea, ridiculously subtle.

Impatient at praise which was not destined for himself, jealous of Dante as of the universe, a refined man of letters, Choulette continued: 

“I suspect that the little sister of the angels never lived, except in the imagination of the poet.  It seems a pure allegory, or, rather, an exercise in arithmetic or a theme of astrology.  Dante, who was a good doctor of Bologna and had many moons in his head, under his pointed cap—­Dante believed in the virtue of numbers.  That inflamed mathematician dreamed of figures, and his Beatrice is the flower of arithmetic, that is all.”