"It is grand to lose oneself utterly!" cried the Duchess with pride. "It
is the luxury of the soul."

"Beautiful women are excusable," said Madame Camusot modestly. "They
have more opportunities of falling than we have."

The Duchess smiled.

"We are always too generous," said Diane de Maufrigneuse. "I shall do
just like that odious Madame d'Espard."

"And what does she do?" asked the judge's wife, very curious.

"She has written a thousand love-notes----"

"So many!" exclaimed Amelie, interrupting the Duchess.

"Well, my dear, and not a word that could compromise her is to be found
in any one of them."

"You would be incapable of maintaining such coldness, such caution,"
said Madame Camusot. "You are a woman; you are one of those angels who
cannot stand out against the devil----"

"I have made a vow to write no more letters. I never in my life wrote
to anybody but that unhappy Lucien.--I will keep his letters to my dying
day! My dear child, they are fire, and sometimes we want----"

"But if they were found!" said Amelie, with a little shocked expression.

"Oh! I should say they were part of a romance I was writing; for I have
copied them all, my dear, and burned the originals."

"Oh, madame, as a reward allow me to read them."

"Perhaps, child," said the Duchess. "And then you will see that he did
not write such letters as those to Leontine."

This speech was woman all the world over, of every age and every land.

Madame Camusot, like the frog in la Fontaine's fable, was ready to burst
her skin with the joy of going to the Grandlieus' in the society of the
beautiful Diane de Maufrigneuse. This morning she would forge one of the
links that are so needful to ambition. She could already hear herself
addressed as Madame la Presidente. She felt the ineffable gladness of
triumphing over stupendous obstacles, of which the greatest was her
husband's ineptitude, as yet unrevealed, but to her well known. To win
success for a second-rate man! that is to a woman--as to a king--the
delight which tempts great actors when they act a bad play a hundred
times over. It is the very drunkenness of egoism. It is in a way the
Saturnalia of power.

Power can prove itself to itself only by the strange misapplication
which leads it to crown some absurd person with the laurels of success
while insulting genius--the only strong-hold which power cannot touch.
The knighting of Caligula's horse, an imperial farce, has been,