self ingloriously,
and the great consolation of gratified vanity is wanting in his misery.

This little sermon will go like a javelin to the heart of many a home.
Madame Marneffes are to be seen in every sphere of social life, even at
Court; for Valerie is a melancholy fact, modeled from the life in the
smallest details. And, alas! the portrait will not cure any man of the
folly of loving these sweetly-smiling angels, with pensive looks and
candid faces, whose heart is a cash-box.

About three years after Hortense's marriage, in 1841, Baron Hulot d'Ervy
was supposed to have sown his wild oats, to have "put up his horses,"
to quote the expression used by Louis XV.'s head surgeon, and yet Madame
Marneffe was costing him twice as much as Josepha had ever cost him.
Still, Valerie, though always nicely dressed, affected the simplicity
of a subordinate official's wife; she kept her luxury for her
dressing-gowns, her home wear. She thus sacrificed her Parisian vanity
to her dear Hector. At the theatre, however, she always appeared in a
pretty bonnet and a dress of extreme elegance; and the Baron took her in
a carriage to a private box.

Her rooms, the whole of the second floor of a modern house in the
Rue Vanneau, between a fore-court and a garden, was redolent of
respectability. All its luxury was in good chintz hangings and handsome
convenient furniture.

Her bedroom, indeed, was the exception, and rich with such profusion
as Jenny Cadine or Madame Schontz might have displayed. There were
lace curtains, cashmere hangings, brocade portieres, a set of chimney
ornaments modeled by Stidmann, a glass cabinet filled with dainty
nicknacks. Hulot could not bear to see his Valerie in a bower of
inferior magnificence to the dunghill of gold and pearls owned by
a Josepha. The drawing-room was furnished with red damask, and the
dining-room had carved oak panels. But the Baron, carried away by his
wish to have everything in keeping, had at the end of six months,
added solid luxury to mere fashion, and had given her handsome portable
property, as, for instance, a service of plate that was to cost more
than twenty-four thousand francs.

Madame Marneffe's house had in a couple of years achieved a reputation
for being a very pleasant one. Gambling went on there. Valerie herself
was soon spoken of as an agreeable and witty woman. To account for her
change of style, a rumor was set going of an immense legacy bequeathed
to her by her