“He did not see her the day before yesterday,” said Alba, “nor the expression upon her face when she recited the Credo.  I do not believe in mysticism, you know, and I have moments of doubt.  There are times when I can no longer believe in anything, life seems to me so wretched and sad....  But I shall never forget that expression.  She saw God!....  Several women were present with very touching faces, and there were many devotees....  The Cardinal is very venerable....  All were by Fanny’s side, like saints around the Madonna in the early paintings which you have taught me to like, and when the baptism had been gone through, guess what she said to me:  ’Come, let us pray for my dear father, and for his conversion.’  Is not such blindness melancholy.”

“The fact is,” said Dorsenne again, jocosely, “that in the father’s dictionary the word has another meaning:  Conversion, feminine substantive, means to him income....  But let us reason a little, Countess.  Why do you think it sad that the daughter should see her father’s character in her own light?....  You should, on the contrary, rejoice at it....  And why do you find it melancholy that this adorable saint should be the daughter of a thief?....  How I wish that you were really my pupil, and that it would not be too absurd to give you here, in this corner of the hall, a lesson in intellectuality!....  I would say to you, when you see one of those anomalies which renders you indignant, think of the causes.  It is so easy.  Although Protestant, Fanny is of Jewish origin—­that is to say, the descendant of a persecuted race—­which in consequence has developed by the side of the inherent defects of a proscribed people the corresponding virtues, the devotion, the abnegation of the woman who feels that she is the grace of a threatened hearth, the sweet flower which perfumes the sombre prison.”

“It is all beautiful and true,” replied Alba, very seriously.  She had hung upon Dorsenne’s lips while he spoke, with the instinctive taste for ideas of that order which proved her veritable origin.  “But you do not mention the sorrow.  This is what one can not do—­look upon as a tapestry, as a picture, as an object; the creature who has not asked to live and who suffers.  You, who have feeling, what is your theory when you weep?”

“I can very clearly foresee the day on which Fanny will feel her misfortune,” continued the young girl.  “I do not know when she will begin to judge her father, but that she already begins to judge Ardea, alas, I am only too sure....  Watch her at this moment, I pray you.”

Dorsenne indeed looked at the couple.  Fanny was listening to the Prince, but with a trace of suffering upon her beautiful face, so pure in outline that the nobleness in it was ideal.

He was laughing at some anecdote which he thought excellent, and which clashed with the sense of delicacy of the person to whom he was addressing himself.  They were no longer the couple who, in the early days of their betrothal, had given to Julien the sentiment of a complete illusion on the part of the young girl for her future husband.