re was at
first a great outcry amongst Rodolphe's friends when they learned of
this union, but as Mademoiselle Mimi was very taking, not at all
prudish, and could stand tobacco smoke and literary conversations
without a headache, they became accustomed to her and treated her as a
comrade. Mimi was a charming girl, and especially adapted for both the
plastic and poetical sympathies of Rodolphe. She was twenty two years of
age, small, delicate, and arch. Her face seemed the first sketch of an
aristocratic countenance, but her features, extremely fine in outline,
and as it were, softly lit up by the light of her clear blue eyes, wore,
at certain moments of weariness or ill-humor, an expression of almost
savage brutality, in which a physiologist would perhaps have recognized
the indication of profound egotism or great insensibility. But hers was
usually a charming head, with a fresh and youthful smile and glances
either tender or full of imperious coquetry. The blood of youth flowed
warm and rapid in her veins, and imparted rosy tints to her transparent
skin of camellia-like whiteness. This unhealthy beauty captivated
Rodolphe, and he often during the night spent hours in covering with
kisses the pale forehead of his slumbering mistress, whose humid and
weary eyes shone half-closed beneath the curtain of her magnificent
brown hair. But what contributed above all to make Rodolphe madly in
love with Mademoiselle Mimi were her hands, which in spite of household
cares, she managed to keep as white as those of the Goddess of Idleness.
However, these hands so frail, so tiny, so soft to the lips; these
child-like hands in which Rodolphe had placed his once more awakened
heart; these white hands of Mademoiselle Mimi were soon to rend that
heart with their rosy nails.

At the end of a month Rodolphe began to perceive that he was wedded to
a thunderstorm, and that his mistress had one great fault. She was a
"gadabout," as they say, and spent a great part of her time amongst the
kept women of the neighborhood, whose acquaintance she had made. The
result that Rodolphe had feared, when he perceived the relations
contracted by his mistress, soon took place. The variable opulence of
some of her new friends caused a forest of ambitious ideas to spring up
in the mind of Mademoiselle Mimi, who up until then had only had modest
tastes, and was content with the necessaries of life that Rodolphe did
his best to procure for her. Mimi began to dr