e found him not a little
ridiculous, and requested him to remove himself, his grievances, and
his _bel tete de Jesu_ elsewhere. M. Destournelle took refuge in
nerves, threats of morphia, and his bedchamber,--in the chaste
seclusion of which apartment Helen left him, unvisited and unconsoled,
while, attended by her servants, she gaily resumed her journey.

An adorable sense of independence possessed her, of the charm of her
own society, of the absence of all external compelling or directing of
her movements--no circumscription of her liberty possible--the world
before her where to choose! Not only were privations, dismal hauntings
of siege and slaughter, left behind, and M. Destournelle, just now most
wearisome of lovers, left behind also, but de Vallorbes himself had,
for the time being, become a permissibly negligible quantity. The news
of more fighting, more bloodshed, had just reached her, though the
German armies were marching back to the now wholly German Rhine. For
upon unhappy Paris had come an hour of deeper humiliation than any
which could be procured by the action of foreign foes. She was a
kingdom divided against herself, a mother scandalously torn by her own
children. News had reached Helen too, news special and highly
commendatory of her husband, Angelo Luigi Francesco. Early in that
eventful struggle he had enlisted in the Garde Mobile, all the manhood
and honest sentiment resident in him stirred into fruitful activity by
the shame and peril of his adopted country. Now Helen learned he had
distinguished himself in the holding of Chatillon against the
insurgents, had been complimented by MacMahon upon his endurance and
resource, had been offered, and had accepted, a commission in the
regular army. Promotion was rapid during the later months of the war,
and probability pointed to the young man having started on a serious
military career.

"Well, let him both start and continue," Helen commented. "I am the
last person to be otherwise than delighted thereat. Just in proportion
as he is occupied he ceases to be inconvenient. If he succeeds--good.
If he is shot--good likewise. For him laurels and a hero's tomb. For me
crape and permanent emancipation. An agreeably romantic conclusion to a
profoundly unromantic marriage--fresh proof, were such needed, of the
truth of the immortal Dr. Pangloss' saying, that 'all is for the best
in this best of all possible worlds!'"

In such happy frame of mind did Madame de Va