m beyond measure, but she represented him to himself as a child
without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she treated him like a
child, to keep him near her; she made him her reader, her secretary,
and cared more for him than she would have thought possible after the
dreadful calamity that had befallen her.

She was very cruel to herself in those days, telling herself that it
would be folly to love a young man of twenty, so far apart from her
socially in the first place; and her behavior to him was a bewildering
mixture of familiarity and capricious fits of pride arising from her
fears and scruples. She was sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she
was tender and flattered him. At first, while he was overawed by her
rank, Lucien experienced the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the
torture of a first love, that is beaten deep into the heart with the
hammer strokes of alternate bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de
Bargeton was for him a benefactress who would take a mother's interest
in him; but confidences came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address her
poet as "dear Lucien," and then as "dear," without more ado. The poet
grew bolder, and addressed the great lady as Nais, and there followed a
flash of anger that captivates a boy; she reproached him for calling her
by a name in everybody's mouth. The haughty and high-born Negrepelisse
offered the fair angel youth that one of her appellations which was
unsoiled by use; for him she would be "Louise." Lucien was in the third
heaven.

One evening when Lucien came in, he found Mme. de Bargeton looking at a
portrait, which she promptly put away. He wished to see it, and to quiet
the despair of a first fit of jealousy Louise showed him Cante-Croix's
picture, and told with tears the piteous story of a love so stainless,
so cruelly cut short. Was she experimenting with herself? Was she trying
a first unfaithfulness to the memory of the dead? Or had she taken it
into her head to raise up a rival to Lucien in the portrait? Lucien was
too much of a boy to analyze his lady-love; he gave way to unfeigned
despair when she opened the campaign by entrenching herself behind the
more or less skilfully devised scruples which women raise to have them
battered down. When a woman begins to talk about her duty, regard for
appearances or religion, the objections she raises are so many redoubts
which she loves to have carried by storm. But on the guileless Lucien
these coquetri