und out
that she had sacrificed her happiness, like a millionaire who has gone
mad and has cast his banknotes and shares into the river, and that she
was nothing more than a disabled waif and stray. Consequently, she now
married again, as the solitude of her home made her morose from morning
till night; and then, besides, she found a woman requires a mansion
when she goes into society, to race meetings, or to the theater.

And so, while she became a marchioness, and pronounced her second
"Yes," before a very few friends, at the office of the mayor of the
English urban district, malicious people in the Faubourg were making
fun of the whole affair, and affirming this and that, whether rightly
or wrongly, and comparing the present husband to the former one, even
declaring that he had partially been the cause of the former divorce.
Meanwhile Monsieur de Baudemont was wandering over the four quarters of
the globe trying to overcome his homesickness, and to deaden his
longing for love, which had taken possession of his heart and of his
body, like a slow poison.

He traveled through the most out-of-the-way places, and the most lovely
countries, and spent months and months at sea, and plunged into every
kind of dissipation and debauchery. But neither the supple forms nor
the luxurious gestures of the bayaderes, nor the large passive eyes of
the Creoles, nor flirtations with English girls with hair the color of
new cider, nor nights of waking dreams, when he saw new constellations
in the sky, nor dangers during which a man thinks it is all over with
him, and mutters a few words of prayer in spite of himself, when the
waves are high, and the sky black, nothing was able to make him forget
that little Parisian woman who smelled so sweet that she might have
been taken for a bouquet of rare flowers; who was so coaxing, so
curious, so funny; who never had the same caprice, the same smile, or
the same look twice, and who, at bottom, was worth more than many
others, either saints or sinners.

He thought of her constantly, during long hours of sleeplessness. He
carried her portrait about with him in the breast pocket of his
pea-jacket--a charming portrait in which she was smiling, and showing
her white teeth between her half-open lips. Her gentle eyes with their
magnetic look had a happy, frank expression, and from the mere
arrangement of her hair, one could see that she was fair among the fair.

He used to kiss that portrait of the