e
herself out with chronic admiration, and wasted her strength on curious
dislikes. Her mind ran on the Pasha of Janina; she would have liked
to try conclusions with him in his seraglio, and had a great notion
of being sewn in a sack and thrown into the water. She envied that
blue-stocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she longed to be a
sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of yellow fever in
a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas a high, a noble destiny! In short, she
thirsted for any draught but the clear spring water of her own life,
flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored Byron and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or dramatic career. Her
tears were ready to flow for every misfortune; she sang paeans for every
victory. She sympathized with the fallen Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali,
massacring the foreign usurpers of Egypt. In short, any kind of genius
was accommodated with an aureole, and she was fully persuaded that
gifted immortals lived on incense and light.

A good many people looked upon her as a harmless lunatic, but in these
extravagances of hers a keener observer surely would have seen the
broken fragments of a magnificent edifice that had crumbled into ruin
before it was completed, the stones of a heavenly Jerusalem--love, in
short, without a lover. And this was indeed the fact.

The story of the first eighteen years of Mme. de Bargeton's married life
can be summed up in a few words. For a long while she lived upon herself
and distant hopes. Then, when she began to see that their narrow income
put the longed-for life in Paris quite out of the question, she looked
about her at the people with whom her life must be spent, and shuddered
at her loneliness. There was not a single man who could inspire the
madness to which women are prone when they despair of a life become
stale and unprofitable in the present, and with no outlook for the
future. She had nothing to look for, nothing to expect from chance, for
there are lives in which chance plays no part. But when the Empire was
in the full noonday of glory, and Napoleon was sending the flower of
his troops to the Peninsula, her disappointed hopes revived. Natural
curiosity prompted her to make an effort to see the heroes who were
conquering Europe in obedience to a word from the Emperor in the order
of the day; the heroes of a modern time who outdid the mythical feats of
paladins of old. The cities of France, however