Libertines offer to vulgar women an attraction which surprises, but which springs from a reprehensible curiosity.  To a woman of society they offer another, more noble yet not less dangerous—­the attraction of reforming them.  It is rare that virtuous women do not fall into the error of believing that it is for virtue’s sake alone such men love them.  These, in brief, were the secret sympathies whose slight tendrils intertwined, blossomed, and flowered little by little in this soul, as tender as it was pure.

M. de Camors had vaguely foreseen all this:  that which he had not foreseen was that he himself would be caught in his own snare, and would be sincere in the role which he had so judiciously adopted.  From the first, Madame de Tecle had captivated him.  Her very puritanism, united with her native grace and worldly elegance, composed a kind of daily charm which piqued the imagination of the cold young man.  If it was a powerful temptation for the angels to save the tempted, the tempted could not harbor with more delight the thought of destroying the angels.  They dream, like the reckless Epicureans of the Bible, of mingling, in a new intoxication, the earth with heaven.  To these sombre instincts of depravity were soon united in the feelings of Camors a sentiment more worthy of her.  Seeing her every day with that childlike intimacy which the country encourages—­enhancing the graceful movements of this accomplished person, ever self-possessed and equally prepared for duty or for pleasure—­as animated as passion, yet as severe as virtue—­he conceived for her a genuine worship.  It was not respect, for that requires the effort of believing in such merits, and he did not wish to believe.  He thought Madame de Tecle was born so.  He admired her as he would admire a rare plant, a beautiful object, an exquisite work, in which nature had combined physical and moral grace with perfect proportion and harmony.  His deportment as her slave when near her was not long a mere bit of acting.  Our fair readers have doubtless remarked an odd fact:  that where a reciprocal sentiment of two feeble human beings has reached a certain point of maturity, chance never fails to furnish a fatal occasion which betrays the secret of the two hearts, and suddenly launches the thunderbolt which has been gradually gathering in the clouds.  This is the crisis of all love.  This occasion presented itself to Madame de Tecle and M. de Camors in the form of an unpoetic incident.

It occurred at the end of October.  Camors had gone out after dinner to take a ride in the neighborhood.  Night had already fallen, clear and cold; but as the Count could not see Madame de Tecle that evening, he began only to think of being near her, and felt that unwillingness to work common to lovers—­striving, if possible, to kill time, which hung heavy on his hands.

He hoped also that violent exercise might calm his spirit, which never had been more profoundly agitated.  Still young and unpractised in his pitiless system, he was troubled at the thought of a victim so pure as Madame de Tecle.  To trample on the life, the repose, and the heart of such a woman, as the horse tramples on the grass of the road, with as little care or pity, was hard for a novice.