ffice on eggs!"

"Be easy," Marianne replied, laughing heartily, "there will be none
broken."

The marriage was celebrated. At last! as Kayser said. It was a formality
rather than a ceremony. Marianne, ravishingly beautiful, was exultant at
realizing her dream. Her pale complexion took on tints of the bloom of
the azalea pierced by the rays of the sun. Never had Rosas seen her so
lovely. How stupidly he had acted formerly in yielding to appearances
and flying from her, instead of telling her that he loved her. He had
lost whole years of love that he would never recover, even in the
blissful fever of this union. Those joys, formerly disdained, were,
alas! never to be restored.

Ah! how he would love her now, adore her and keep her with him as his
living delight! They would travel; in three days they would set out for
Italy. The baggage already filled the house in the Avenue Montaigne,
their nuptial mansion. Marianne would take away all the souvenirs that
she had preserved in the grisette's little room at Rue Cuvier, where
Rosas had so often seen her and where he had said to her: "I love you!"

"People took their penates," she said, "but I take my fetishes!"

Rosas was wild with joy. The possession of this woman, sought after as
mistress, but more intensely ardent than a mistress, with her outbursts
of tears and kisses, threw him into ecstasies and possessed him with
distracting joy. Something within him whispered, as in the days of early
manhood, at the ecstatic hour of sunrise. Already he wished to be on
the way to Italy with Marianne, far from the mire and mists of Paris.

"These rain-soaked sidewalks on which the gaslight is reflected seem
gloomy to me," he said. "Let us seek the blue skies, Marianne, the
orange groves of Nice, the stars of Naples."

She smiled.

"The _blue_ again!" she thought. "They all desire it, then?"

She desired to remain a few days longer in Paris, delighted to proclaim
her new name in its streets, its Bois and its theatres, where she had
been known in her sadness, displaying her desperate melancholy. It
seemed to her that, in her present triumph, she crushed both men and
things. What was Naples to her? She had not miserably dragged her
disillusions and her angers along the Chiaja. Florence might take her
for a duchess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which
was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame
for her follies, her hopes, her failur