from college to live in this old house. Honorine, who
had been brought up by my mother, was just awakening to life. Full of
grace and of childish ways, she dreamed of happiness as she would have
dreamed of jewels; perhaps happiness seemed to her the jewel of the
soul. Her piety was not free from puerile pleasures; for everything,
even religion, was poetry to her ingenuous heart. She looked to the
future as a perpetual fete. Innocent and pure, no delirium had disturbed
her dream. Shame and grief had never tinged her cheek nor moistened
her eye. She did not even inquire into the secret of her involuntary
emotions on a fine spring day. And then, she felt that she was weak and
destined to obedience, and she awaited marriage without wishing for
it. Her smiling imagination knew nothing of the corruption--necessary
perhaps--which literature imparts by depicting the passions; she knew
nothing of the world, and was ignorant of all the dangers of society.
The dear child had suffered so little that she had not even developed
her courage. In short, her guilelessness would have led her to walk
fearless among serpents, like the ideal figure of Innocence a painter
once created. We lived together like two brothers.

"'At the end of a year I said to her one day, in the garden of this
house, by the basin, as we stood throwing crumbs to the fish:

"'"Would you like that we should be married? With me you could do
whatever you please, while another man would make you unhappy."

"'"Mamma," said she to my mother, who came out to join us, "Octave and I
have agreed to be married----"

"'"What! at seventeen?" said my mother. "No, you must wait eighteen
months; and if eighteen months hence you like each other, well, your
birth and fortunes are equal, you can make a marriage which is suitable,
as well as being a love match."

"'When I was six-and-twenty, and Honorine nineteen, we were married.
Our respect for my father and mother, old folks of the Bourbon Court,
hindered us from making this house fashionable, or renewing the
furniture; we lived on, as we had done in the past, as children.
However, I went into society; I initiated my wife into the world of
fashion; and I regarded it as one of my duties to instruct her.

"'I recognized afterwards that marriages contracted under such
circumstances as ours bear in themselves a rock against which many
affections are wrecked, many prudent calculations, many lives. The
husband becomes a pedagogue,