face,--the friend and pupil of Madame de Grantmesnil, the
associate of Gustave Rameau, the rival of Julie Caumartin, the aspirant
to that pure atmosphere of art in which there are no vulgar connubial
prejudices! Could I--whether I be rich or poor--see in her the ideal of
an English wife? As it is--as it is--with this mystery which oppresses
me, which, till solved, leaves my own career insoluble,--as it is, how
fortunate that I did not find her alone; did not utter the words that
would fain have leaped from my heart; did not say, 'I may not be the
rich man I seem, but in that case I shall be yet more ambitious, because
struggle and labour are the sinews of ambition! Should I be rich, will
you adorn my station? Should I be poor, will you enrich poverty with
your smile? And can you, in either case, forego--really, painlessly
forego, as you led me to hope--the pride in your own art?' My ambition
were killed did I marry an actress, a singer. Better that than the
hungerer after excitements which are never allayed, the struggler in a
career which admits of no retirement,--the woman to whom marriage is no
goal, who remains to the last the property of the public, and glories
to dwell in a house of glass into which every bystander has a right to
peer. Is this the ideal of an Englishman's wife and home? No, no!--woe
is me, no!"

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

A few weeks after the date of the preceding chapter, a gay party of
men were assembled at supper in one of the private salons of the Maison
Doree. The supper was given by Frederic Lemercier, and the guests were,
though in various ways, more or less distinguished. Rank and fashion
were not unworthily represented by Alain de Rochebriant and Enguerrand
de Vandemar, by whose supremacy as "lion" Frederic still felt rather
humbled, though Alain had contrived to bring them familiarly together.
Art, Literature, and the Bourse had also their representatives in Henri
Bernard, a rising young portrait-painter, whom the Emperor honoured with
his patronage, the Vicomte de Braze, and M. Savarin. Science was not
altogether forgotten, but contributed its agreeable delegate in
the person of the eminent physician to whom we have been before
introduced,--Dr. Bacourt. Doctors in Paris are not so serious as they
mostly are in London; and Bacourt, a pleasant philosopher of the school
of Aristippus, was no unfrequent nor ungenial guest at any banquet in
which the Graces relaxed their zones.