and duty, I asked God, my conscience, and my mirror, if I was as beautiful as that wretched Fanfarlo. My mirror and my conscience replied “Yes”. God forbade me to be proud of it, but did not forbid me to derive a legitimate victory from the fact. Why, then, between two equal beauties, do men often prefer the flower whose perfume every one has inhaled to that which had always kept aloof from passers-by in the darkest walks of the conjugal garden? Why is it, then, that women who are prodigal with their bodies, a treasure of which only one sultan should have the key, possess more adorers than we others, unfortunate martyrs of a solitary love? What is the magic charm which vice sets like a halo on the brow of certain creatures? What awkward and repulsive aspect does virtue lend to certain others? Tell me, you who from your profession must know all the sentiments of life and their various reasons.’

Samuel had no time to reply, for she continued ardently:

‘M. de Cosmelly has very grave things on his conscience if the loss of a young and virginal soul interests the God who created it for the happiness of another. If M. de Cosmelly were to die this very evening he would have a great many pardons to implore; for, by his fault, he has taught his wife dreadful sentiments, suspicion of a loved one, and the thirst for revenge. Ah, monsieur, I spend nights of great sorrow and sleepless anxiety: I pray, I curse, I blaspheme. The priest tells me I must bear my cross with resignation, but you cannot teach resignation to insane love and shattered faith. My confessor is not a woman, and I love my husband; I love him with all the passion and all the grief of a mistress beaten and trodden under foot. There is nothing I have not tried. Instead of the dark and simple dresses that formerly pleased his eye, I have worn dresses as crazy and sumptuous as those of actresses. I, the chaste wife whom he had discovered hidden in an old château, I paraded before him dressed like a courtesan. I made myself witty and gay when death was in my heart. I spangled my despair with glittering smiles. I put on rouge, sir, I put on rouge! You see it is a banal story, the story of all unhappy women, a provincial novel!’

Whilst she was sobbing, Samuel looked like Tartuffe in the grasp of Orgon, the unexpected husband who springs from his hiding place, as the virtuous sobs of the lady sprang from her heart, seizing our poet’s tottering hypocrisy by the scruff of the neck.

Madame de Cosmelly’s extreme self-abandonment, her freedom and confidence had prodigiously emboldened, without astonishing him. Samuel Cramer, who has often astonished the world, scarcely ever was astonished. In his life he seemed to try to practise and demonstrate the truth of that thought of Diderot’s: ‘Incredulity is sometimes the vice of a fool, and credulity the defect of a man of wit. The man of wit sees far into the immensity of the possible. The fool scarcely ever conceives as possible anything save what actually is. It is that perhaps which makes the one timid and the other bold’. This is the reply to everything. No doubt some scrupulous readers, who love probable truth, will find many objections to this story, in which, however, all I have had to do was to change the names and accentuate certain details; how is it, they will say, that Samuel Cramer, a poet of doubtful tone and morals, can so quickly approach a woman like Madame de Cosmelly? And how can he, apropos of a Scott novel, flood her with a torrent of romantic and banal poetry? How can Madame de Cosmelly, the discreet and virtuous spouse, pour out to him, without shame or mistrust, the secret of her sorrows? To which I reply that Madame de Cosmelly was a simple, beautiful soul, and that Samuel was bold like all butterflies, cockchafers and poets: he threw himself into all sorts of flames and entered all sorts of windows. Diderot’s thought explains why one was so abandoned, and the other so brusque and so shameless. It explains, too, all the blunders Samuel committed in his life, blunders which a fool would not have committed. That portion of the public which is essentially pusillanimous will hardly understand the character of Samuel, who was essentially credulous and imaginative, to the point of believing—as a poet, in his public—as a man, in his own passions.

Now he perceived that this woman was stronger, more precipitous than she seemed, and that he must not dash, bull-headed, at this candid piety. Once more he served up his romantic jargon. Ashamed at having been stupid, he tried to be a roué; for a time he still spoke to her in a jesuitical strain of wounds to be closed or cauterized by opening fresh wounds which would bleed freely and painlessly. Anybody who, without possessing the absolutory power of Valmont or Lovelace, has desired to possess a decent woman who was not very interested, knows with what ridiculous and emphatic awkwardness every one