red, without skipping a word, all the accounts of
first nights, races, and soirees, took interest in the debut of a
singer, in the opening of a new shop. She knew the latest fashions, the
addresses of the best tailors, the days of the Bois and the Opera. In
Eugene Sue she studied descriptions of furniture; she read Balzac and
George Sand, seeking in them imaginary satisfaction for her own desires.
Even at table she had her book by her, and turned over the pages
while Charles ate and talked to her. The memory of the Viscount always
returned as she read. Between him and the imaginary personages she made
comparisons. But the circle of which he was the centre gradually widened
round him, and the aureole that he bore, fading from his form, broadened
out beyond, lighting up her other dreams.

Paris, more vague than the ocean, glimmered before Emma's eyes in an
atmosphere of vermilion. The many lives that stirred amid this tumult
were, however, divided into parts, classed as distinct pictures. Emma
perceived only two or three that hid from her all the rest, and in
themselves represented all humanity. The world of ambassadors moved over
polished floors in drawing rooms lined with mirrors, round oval tables
covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There were dresses with
trains, deep mysteries, anguish hidden beneath smiles. Then came the
society of the duchesses; all were pale; all got up at four o'clock; the
women, poor angels, wore English point on their petticoats; and the men,
unappreciated geniuses under a frivolous outward seeming, rode horses to
death at pleasure parties, spent the summer season at Baden, and towards
the forties married heiresses. In the private rooms of restaurants,
where one sups after midnight by the light of wax candles, laughed the
motley crowd of men of letters and actresses. They were prodigal as
kings, full of ideal, ambitious, fantastic frenzy. This was an existence
outside that of all others, between heaven and earth, in the midst of
storms, having something of the sublime. For the rest of the world it
was lost, with no particular place and as if non-existent. The nearer
things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them.
All her immediate surroundings, the wearisome country, the middle-class
imbeciles, the mediocrity of existence, seemed to her exceptional, a
peculiar chance that had caught hold of her, while beyond stretched, as
far as eye could see, an immense land of joys