he hoped that she would content herself as his helpmate and the genius
of the hearth when a mother.

But maternity had nothing but thorns for her. She chafed under the
burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he
had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined
sufficiently with flowers to gratify or at least pacify her.

But Césarine was, like her aunt, a born dissolvent of society's vital
elements. Ruled by a strong hand, and removed from the pernicious
influence of the vicious countess, her mother had never inculcated evil
to her child; on the contrary, impressed by the lesson of Iza's career,
she had perhaps been too Puritanic with Césarine, whose flight from home
at an early age, was like the spring of a deer through a gap in a fence.
Césarine, wherever placed, sapped morality, faith, labor and the family
ties.

In the new country she feared at first that she had but exchanged
parental despotism for marital tyranny. But soon she perceived that
nothing was changed that would affect her. On the contrary, France, in
the last decade of the Empire, was more corrupt than Russia's chief
towns and the dissoluteness, though not as coarse as at Munich, was more
diffused. Here she was assured that she could gratify her insatiable
appetite at any moment. She saw that the manners excused her; the laws
guaranteed the unfaithful wife, and religion screened her; that the
social atmosphere, despite slander and gossip, enveloped and preserved
her; in short, it was clear that to a creature in whom wickedness
developed like a plant in a hot-house, the freedom society accorded her
was as delicious as that given by her husband in his trust and his
devotion to art.