tend the sick and die of
yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas a high, a noble
destiny! In short, she thirsted for any draught but the clear spring
water of her own life, flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored
Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or
dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for every misfortune;
she sang paeans for every victory. She sympathized with the fallen
Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali, massacring the foreign usurpers of
Egypt. In short, any kind of genius was accommodated with an aureole,
and she was fully persuaded that gifted immortals lived on incense and
light.

A good many people looked upon her as a harmless lunatic, but in these
extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the
broken fragments of a magnificent edifice that had crumbled into ruin
before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in
short, without a lover. And this was indeed the fact.

The story of the first eighteen years of Mme. de Bargeton's married
life can be summed up in a few words. For a long while she lived upon
herself and distant hopes. Then, when she began to see that their
narrow income put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the
question, she looked about her at the people with whom her life must
be spent, and shuddered at her loneliness. There was not a single man
who could inspire the madness to which women are prone when they
despair of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present, and
with no outlook for the future. She had nothing to look for, nothing
to expect from chance, for there are lives in which chance plays no
part. But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and
Napoleon was sending the flower of his troops to the Peninsula, her
disappointed hopes revived. Natural curiosity prompted her to make an
effort to see the heroes who were conquering Europe in obedience to a
word from the Emperor in the order of the day; the heroes of a modern
time who outdid the mythical feats of paladins of old. The cities of
France, however avaricious or refractory, must perforce do honor to
the Imperial Guard, and mayors and prefects went out to meet them with
set speeches as if the conquerors had been crowned kings. Mme. de
Bargeton went to a _ridotto_ given to the town by a regiment, and fell
in love with an officer of a good family, a sub-lieutenant, to whom
the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of th