them
the resources of a brilliant mind, invincible force of character, a rare
alliance of cleverness and honesty, and treated with the Government as if
he were a foreign power. She had grown up in the historical castle of
Joinville, bought, restored, and magnificently furnished by her father.
Montessuy made life give all it could yield. An instinctive and powerful
atheist, he wanted all the goods of this world and all the desirable
things that earth produces. He accumulated pictures by old masters, and
precious sculptures. At fifty he had known all the most beautiful women
of the stage, and many in society. He enjoyed everything worldly with the
brutality of his temperament and the shrewdness of his mind.

Poor Madame Montessuy, economical and careful, languished at Joinville,
delicate and poor, under the frowns of twelve gigantic caryatides which
held a ceiling on which Lebrun had painted the Titans struck by Jupiter.
There, in the iron cot, placed at the foot of the large bed, she died one
night of sadness and exhaustion, never having loved anything on earth
except her husband and her little drawing-room in the Rue Maubeuge.

She never had had any intimacy with her daughter, whom she felt
instinctively too different from herself, too free, too bold at heart;
and she divined in Therese, although she was sweet and good, the strong
Montessuy blood, the ardor which had made her suffer so much, and which
she forgave in her husband, but not in her daughter.

But Montessuy recognized his daughter and loved her. Like most hearty,
full-blooded men, he had hours of charming gayety. Although he lived out
of his house a great deal, he breakfasted with her almost every day, and
sometimes took her out walking. He understood gowns and furbelows. He
instructed and formed Therese. He amused her. Near her, his instinct for
conquest inspired him still. He desired to win always, and he won his
daughter. He separated her from her mother. Therese admired him, she
adored him.

In her dream she saw him as the unique joy of her childhood. She was
persuaded that no man in the world was as amiable as her father.

At her entrance in life, she despaired at once of finding elsewhere so
rich a nature, such a plenitude of active and thinking forces. This
discouragement had followed her in the choice of a husband, and perhaps
later in a secret and freer choice.

She had not really selected her husband. She did not know: she had
permitted herse