“What idea, General?”

“Well, there are here this evening a number of charming young girls.  This set me to thinking of you, and I even said to my wife that we must marry you to one of these young women!”

“Oh, General!”

“Well, why not?”

“That is a very serious thing—­if one makes a mistake in his choice—­that is everything.”

“Bah! it is not so difficult a thing.  Take a wife like mine, who has a great deal of religion, not much imagination, and no fancies.  That is the whole secret.  I tell you this in confidence, my dear fellow!”

“Well, General, I will think of it.”

“Do think of it,” said the General, in a serious tone; and went to join his young wife, whom he understood so well.

As to her, she thoroughly understood herself, and analyzed her own character with surprising truth.

Madame de Campvallon was just as little what her manner indicated as was M. de Camors on his side.  Both were altogether exceptional in French society.  Equally endowed by nature with energetic souls and enlightened minds, both carried innate depravity to a high degree.  The artificial atmosphere of high Parisian civilization destroys in women the sentiment and the taste for duty, and leaves them, nothing but the sentiment and the taste for pleasure.  They lose in the midst of this enchanted and false life, like theatrical fairyland, the true idea of life in general, and Christian life in particular.  And we can confidently affirm that all those who do not make for themselves, apart from the crowd, a kind of Thebaid—­and there are such—­are pagans.  They are pagans, because the pleasures of the senses and of the mind alone interest them, and they have not once, during the year, an impression of the moral law, unless the sentiment, which some of them detest, recalls it to them.  They are pagans, like the beautiful, worldly Catholics of the fifteenth century—­loving luxury, rich stuffs, precious furniture, literature, art, themselves, and love.  They were charming pagans, like Marie Stuart, and capable, like her, of remaining true Catholics even under the axe.

We are speaking, let it be understood, of the best of the elite—­of those that read, and of those that dream.  As to the rest, those who participate in the Parisian life on its lighter side, in its childish whirl, and the trifling follies it entails, who make rendezvous, waste their time, who dress and are busy day and night doing nothing, who dance frantically in the rays of the Parisian sun, without thought, without passion, without virtue, and even without vice—­we must own it is impossible to imagine anything more contemptible.

The Marquise de Campvallon was then—­as she truly said to the man she resembled—­a great pagan; and, as she also said to herself in one of her serious moments when a woman’s destiny is decided by the influence of those they love, Camors had sown in her heart a seed which had marvellously fructified.