ngs to protect this woman, inwardly
so strong, and that sentiment of secret protection counts for much in
the wondrous charm of her friendship. Her life, so painful during her
youth, is beautiful and serene towards evening. Her sufferings are
known, and no one asks who was the original of that portrait by Lefebvre
which is the chief and sacred ornament of her salon. Her face has the
maturity of fruits that have ripened slowly; a hallowed pride dignifies
that long-tried brow.

At the period when the marquise came to Paris to open the new house, her
fortune, increased by the law of indemnities, gave her some two hundred
thousand francs a year, not counting her husband's salary; besides this,
Laurence had inherited the money guarded by Michu for his young masters.
From that time forth she made a practice of spending half her income and
of laying by the rest for her daughter Berthe.

Berthe is the living image of her mother, but without her warrior nerve;
she is her mother in delicacy, in intellect,--"more a woman," Laurence
says, sadly. The marquise was not willing to marry her daughter until
she was twenty years of age. Her savings, judiciously invested in the
Funds by old Monsieur d'Hauteserre at the moment when consols fell in
1830, gave Berthe a dowry of eighty thousand francs a year in 1833, when
she was twenty.

About that time the Princesse de Cadignan, who was seeking to marry her
son, the Duc de Maufrigneuse, brought him into intimate relations with
Madame de Cinq-Cygne. Georges de Maufrigneuse dined with the marquise
three times a week, accompanied the mother and daughter to the Opera,
and curvetted in the Bois around their carriage when they drove out. It
was evident to all the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain that Georges
loved Berthe. But no one could discover to a certainty whether Madame
de Cinq-Cygne was desirous of making her daughter a duchess, to become a
princess later, or whether it was only the princess who coveted for
her son the splendid dowry. Did the celebrated Diane court the noble
provincial house? and was the daughter of the Cinq-Cygnes frightened
by the celebrity of Madame de Cadignan, her tastes and her ruinous
extravagance? In her strong desire not to injure her son's prospects the
princess grew devout, shut the door on her former life, and spent the
summer season at Geneva in a villa on the lake.

One evening there were present in the salon of the Princesse de
Cadignan, the Marquise