judged correctly of certain events on which her circle of friends
dared not express an opinion. The principal persons about the Court
came in the evening to play whist in her rooms.

Then she also had the qualities of her defects; she was thought to be
--and she was--indiscreet. Her friendship seemed to be staunch; she
worked for her proteges with a persistency which showed that she cared
less for patronage than for increased influence. This conduct was
based on her dominant passion, Vanity. Conquests and pleasure, which
so many women love, to her seemed only means to an end; she aimed at
living on every point of the largest circle that life can describe.

Among the men still young, and to whom the future belonged, who
crowded her drawing-room on great occasions, were to be seen MM. de
Marsay and de Ronquerolles, de Montriveau, de la Roche-Hugon, de
Serizy, Ferraud, Maxime de Trailles, de Listomere, the two
Vandenesses, du Chatelet, and others. She would frequently receive a
man whose wife she would not admit, and her power was great enough to
induce certain ambitious men to submit to these hard conditions, such
as two famous royalist bankers, M. de Nucingen and Ferdinand du
Tillet. She had so thoroughly studied the strength and the weakness of
Paris life, that her conduct had never given any man the smallest
advantage over her. An enormous price might have been set on a note or
letter by which she might have compromised herself, without one being
produced.

If an arid soul enabled her to play her part to the life, her person
was no less available for it. She had a youthful figure. Her voice
was, at will, soft and fresh, or clear and hard. She possessed in the
highest degree the secret of that aristocratic pose by which a woman