ing he might commit some great folly, and feeling
that wild ideas were getting the better of him. He went to walk in the
open air, lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but without being able
to cool the fire in his cheeks or on his brow.

"I thought you had a noble soul,"--the words still rang in his ears.

"A year ago," he said to himself, "she thought me a hero who could fight
the Russians single-handed!"

He thought of leaving the hotel Laginski, and taking service with the
spahis and getting killed in Africa, but the same great fear checked
him. "Without me," he thought, "what would become of them? they would
soon be ruined. Poor countess! what a horrible life it would be for her
if she were reduced to even thirty thousand francs a year. No, since all
is lost for me in this world,--courage! I will keep on as I am."

Every one knows that since 1830 the carnival in Paris has undergone a
transformation which has made it European, and far more burlesque
and otherwise lively than the late Carnival of Venice. Is it that the
diminishing fortunes of the present time have led Parisians to invent a
way of amusing themselves collectively, as for instance at their clubs,
where they hold salons without hostesses and without manners, but very
cheaply? However this may be, the month of March was prodigal of balls,
at which dancing, joking, coarse fun, excitement, grotesque figures, and
the sharp satire of Parisian wit, produced extravagant effects. These
carnival follies had their special Pandemonium in the rue Saint-Honore
and their Napoleon in Musard, a small man born expressly to lead an
orchestra as noisy as the disorderly audience, and to set the time for
the galop, that witches' dance, which was one of Auber's triumphs, for
it did not really take form or poesy till the grand galop in "Gustave"
was given to the world. That tremendous finale might serve as the symbol
of an epoch in which for the last fifty years all things have hurried by
with the rapidity of a dream.

Now, it happened that the grave Thaddeus, with one divine and immaculate
image in his heart, proposed to Malaga, the queen of the carnival
dances, to spend an evening at the Musard ball; because he knew the
countess, disguised to the teeth, intended to come there with two
friends, all three accompanied by their husbands, and look on at the
curious spectacle of one of these crowded balls.

On Shrove Tuesday, of the year 1838, at four o'clock in the morning,