e Maufrigneuse.

"Whom should I bring with me but a woman who is devoted to Lucien and
willing to help us?"

Asie had hit the truth. Madame de Serizy, who was regarded as one of the
most fickle of fashionable women, had had an attachment of ten years'
standing for the Marquis d'Aiglemont. Since the Marquis' departure for
the colonies, she had gone wild about Lucien, and had won him from
the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, knowing nothing--like the Paris world
generally--of Lucien's passion for Esther. In the world of fashion a
recognized attachment does more to ruin a woman's reputation than ten
unconfessed liaisons; how much more then two such attachments? However,
as no one thought of Madame de Serizy as a responsible person,
the historian cannot undertake to speak for her virtue thus doubly
dog's-eared.

She was fair, of medium height, and well preserved, as a fair woman can
be who is well preserved at all; that is to say, she did not look more
than thirty, being slender, but not lean, with a white skin and flaxen
hair; she had hands, feet, and a shape of aristocratic elegance, and
was as witty as all the Ronquerolles, spiteful, therefore, to women, and
good-natured to men. Her large fortune, her husband's fine position, and
that of her brother, the Marquis de Ronquerolles, had protected her
from the mortifications with which any other woman would have been
overwhelmed. She had this great merit--that she was honest in her
depravity, and confessed her worship of the manners and customs of the
Regency.

Now, at forty-two this woman--who had hitherto regarded men as no more
than pleasing playthings, to whom, indeed, she had, strange to say,
granted much, regarding love as merely a matter of sacrifice to gain the
upper hand,--this woman, on first seeing Lucien, had been seized with
such a passion as the Baron de Nucingen's for Esther. She had loved, as
Asie had just told her, for the first time in her life.

This postponement of youth is more common with Parisian women than might
be supposed, and causes the ruin of some virtuous souls just as they are
reaching the haven of forty. The Duchesse de Maufrigneuse was the only
person in the secret of the vehement and absorbing passion, of which
the joys, from the girlish suspicion of first love to the preposterous
follies of fulfilment, had made Leontine half crazy and insatiable.

True love, as we know, is merciless. The discovery of Esther's existence
had been followed by o