old life came back across her head and heart.

We must add that Marguerite had returned more beautiful than she had
ever been; she was but twenty, and her malady, sleeping but not subdued,
continued to give her those feverish desires which are almost always the
result of diseases of the chest.

It was a great grief to the duke when his friends, always on the lookout
for some scandal on the part of the woman with whom, it seemed to them,
he was compromising himself, came to tell him, indeed to prove to him,
that at times when she was sure of not seeing him she received other
visits, and that these visits were often prolonged till the following
day. On being questioned, Marguerite admitted everything to the duke,
and advised him, without arriere-pensee, to concern himself with her no
longer, for she felt incapable of carrying out what she had undertaken,
and she did not wish to go on accepting benefits from a man whom she was
deceiving. The duke did not return for a week; it was all he could do,
and on the eighth day he came to beg Marguerite to let him still visit
her, promising that he would take her as she was, so long as he might
see her, and swearing that he would never utter a reproach against her,
not though he were to die of it.

This, then, was the state of things three months after Marguerite's
return; that is to say, in November or December, 1842.

Chapter 3

At one o'clock on the 16th I went to the Rue d'Antin. The voice of the
auctioneer could be heard from the outer door. The rooms were crowded
with people. There were all the celebrities of the most elegant
impropriety, furtively examined by certain great ladies who had again
seized the opportunity of the sale in order to be able to see, close at
hand, women whom they might never have another occasion of meeting, and
whom they envied perhaps in secret for their easy pleasures. The Duchess
of F. elbowed Mlle. A., one of the most melancholy examples of our
modern courtesan; the Marquis de T. hesitated over a piece of furniture
the price of which was being run high by Mme. D., the most elegant and
famous adulteress of our time; the Duke of Y., who in Madrid is supposed
to be ruining himself in Paris, and in Paris to be ruining himself in
Madrid, and who, as a matter of fact, never even reaches the limit of
his income, talked with Mme. M., one of our wittiest story-tellers, who
from time to time writes what she says and signs what she writes, while
at