whereas the Duchess would ruin you. She is too expensive."

Rastignac allowed de Marsay to go without asking further questions. He
knew Paris. He knew that the most refined and noble and disinterested
of women--a woman who cannot be induced to accept anything but a
bouquet--can be as dangerous an acquaintance for a young man as any
opera girl of former days. As a matter of fact, the opera girl is an
almost mythical being. As things are now at the theatres, dancers and
actresses are about as amusing as a declaration of the rights of woman,
they are puppets that go abroad in the morning in the character of
respected and respectable mothers of families, and act men's parts in
tight-fitting garments at night.

Worthy M. Chesnel, in his country notary's office, was right; he had
foreseen one of the reefs on which the Count might shipwreck. Victurnien
was dazzled by the poetic aureole which Mme. de Maufrigneuse chose to
assume; he was chained and padlocked from the first hour in her company,
bound captive by that girlish sash, and caught by the curls twined round
fairy fingers. Far corrupted the boy was already, but he really believed
in that farrago of maidenliness and muslin, in sweet looks as much
studied as an Act of Parliament. And if the one man, who is in duty
bound to believe in feminine fibs, is deceived by them, is not that
enough?

For a pair of lovers, the rest of their species are about as much alive
as figures on the tapestry. The Duchess, flattery apart, was avowedly
and admittedly one of the ten handsomest women in society. "The
loveliest woman in Paris" is, as you know, as often met with in the
world of love-making as "the finest book that has appeared in this
generation," in the world of letters.

The converse which Victurnien held with the Duchess can be kept up at
his age without too great a strain. He was young enough and ignorant
enough of life in Paris to feel no necessity to be upon his guard, no
need to keep a watch over his lightest words and glances. The religious
sentimentalism, which finds a broadly humorous commentary in the
after-thoughts of either speaker, puts the old-world French chat of men
and women, with its pleasant familiarity, its lively ease, quite out of
the question; they make love in a mist nowadays.

Victurnien was just sufficient of an unsophisticated provincial to
remain suspended in a highly appropriate and unfeigned rapture which
pleased the Duchess; for women are no more