daughter's lover.

3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE FRIENDS.

Louise de L-----, daughter of an officer killed at Wagram, had been
the object of Napoleon's special protection. She left Ecouen to marry a
commissary general, the Baron de V-----, who is very rich.

Louise was eighteen and the baron forty. She was ordinary in face and
her complexion could not be called white, but she had a charming
figure, good eyes, a small foot, a pretty hand, good taste and abundant
intelligence. The baron, worn out by the fatigues of war and still more
by the excesses of a stormy youth, had one of those faces upon which the
Republic, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire seemed to have set
their impress.

He became so deeply in love with his wife, that he asked and obtained
from the Emperor a post at Paris, in order that he might be enabled to
watch over his treasure. He was as jealous as Count Almaviva, still more
from vanity than from love. The young orphan had married her husband
from necessity, and, flattered by the ascendancy she wielded over a man
much older than herself, waited upon his wishes and his needs; but
her delicacy was offended from the first days of their marriage by the
habits and ideas of a man whose manners were tinged with republican
license. He was a predestined.

I do not know exactly how long the baron made his honeymoon last, nor
when war was declared in his household; but I believe it happened in
1816, at a very brilliant ball given by Monsieur D-----, a commissariat
officer, that the commissary general, who had been promoted head of the
department, admired the beautiful Madame B-----, the wife of a banker,
and looked at her much more amorously than a married man should have
allowed himself to do.

At two o'clock in the morning it happened that the banker, tired of
waiting any longer, went home leaving his wife at the ball.

"We are going to take you home to your house," said the baroness to
Madame B-----. "Monsieur de V-----, offer your arm to Emilie!"

And now the baron is seated in his carriage next to a woman who,
during the whole evening, had been offered and had refused a thousand
attentions, and from whom he had hoped in vain to win a single look.
There she was, in all the lustre of her youth and beauty, displaying
the whitest shoulders and the most ravishing lines of beauty. Her face,
which still reflected the pleasures of the evening, seemed to vie with
the brilliancy of