endure no more. He made some pretext for withdrawing and
went away, promising that he would see them again soon.

"I shall not go there very often!" he said to himself, as he descended
the steps, furious with himself that he was obliged to hold back a sob.

He went there, however, and always suffered from it. He was the one who
had made this marriage; he ought to rejoice that Maurice, softened by
conjugal life and paternity, did not return to his recklessness of former
days; but, on the contrary, the sight of this household, Maria's happy
looks, the allusions that she sometimes made of gratitude to Amedee;
above all Maurice's domineering way in his home, his way of speaking to
his wife like an indulgent master to a slave delighted to obey, all
displeased and unmanned him. He always left Maurice's displeased with
himself, and irritated with the bad sentiments that he had in his heart;
ashamed of loving another's wife, the wife of his old comrade; and
keeping up all the same his friendship for Maurice, whom he was never
able to see without a feeling of envy and secret bitterness.

He managed to lengthen the distance between his visits to the young pair,
and to put another interest into his life. He was now a man of leisure,
and his fortune allowed him to work when he liked and felt inspired. He
returned to society and traversed the midst of miscellaneous parlors,
greenrooms, and Bohemian society. He loitered about these places a great
deal and lost his time, was interested by all the women, duped by his
tender imagination; always expending too much sensibility in his fancies;
taking his desires for love, and devoting himself to women.

The first of his loves was a beautiful Madame, whom he met in the
Countess Fontaine's parlors. She was provided with a very old husband
belonging to the political and financial world; a servant of several
regimes, who having on many occasions feathered his own nest, made false
statements of accounts, and betrayed his vows, his name could not be
spoken in public assemblies without being preceded by the epithet of
honorable. A man so seriously occupied in saving the Capitol, that is to
say, in courageously sustaining the stronger, approving the majorities in
all of their mean actions and thus increasing his own ground, sinecures,
tips, stocks, and various other advantages, necessarily neglected his
charming wife, and took very little notice of the ridicule that she
inflicted upon him often,