lf to be married by her father, who, then a widower,
embarrassed by the care of a girl, had wished to do things quickly and
well. He considered the exterior advantages, estimated the eighty years
of imperial nobility which Count Martin brought. The idea never came to
him that she might wish to find love in marriage.

He flattered himself that she would find in it the satisfaction of the
luxurious desires which he attributed to her, the joy of making a display
of grandeur, the vulgar pride, the material domination, which were for
him all the value of life, as he had no ideas on the subject of the
happiness of a true woman, although he was sure that his daughter would
remain virtuous.

While thinking of his absurd yet natural faith in her, which accorded so
badly with his own experiences and ideas regarding women, she smiled with
melancholy irony. And she admired her father the more.

After all, she was not so badly married. Her husband was as good as any
other man. He had become quite bearable. Of all that she read in the
ashes, in the veiled softness of the lamps, of all her reminiscences,
that of their married life was the most vague. She found a few isolated
traits of it, some absurd images, a fleeting and fastidious impression.
The time had not seemed long and had left nothing behind. Six years had
passed, and she did not even remember how she had regained her liberty,
so prompt and easy had been her conquest of that husband, cold, sickly,
selfish, and polite; of that man dried up and yellowed by business and
politics, laborious, ambitious, and commonplace. He liked women only
through vanity, and he never had loved his wife. The separation had been
frank and complete. And since then, strangers to each other, they felt a
tacit, mutual gratitude for their freedom. She would have had some
affection for him if she had not found him hypocritical and too subtle in
the art of obtaining her signature when he needed money for enterprises
that were more for ostentation than real benefit. The man with whom she
dined and talked every day had no significance for her.

With her cheek in her hand, before the grate, as if she questioned a
sibyl, she saw again the face of the Marquis de Re. She saw it so
precisely that it surprised her. The Marquis de Re had been presented to
her by her father, who admired him, and he appeared to her grand and
dazzling for his thirty years of intimate triumphs and mundane glories.
His adventures f