without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world of
love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of
politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of which
--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life, he
despaired of ever finding again.

At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas
were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the
strictest tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the
Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he
had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest. He
himself had suffered under the despotism of a mother; he still
remembered his unhappy childhood too well not to recognize, beneath
the reserves of feminine shyness, the state to which such a yoke must
have brought the heart of a young girl, whether that heart was soured,
embittered, or rebellious, or whether it was still peaceful, lovable,
and ready to unclose to noble sentiments. Tyranny produces two
opposite effects, the symbols of which exist in two grand figures of
ancient slavery, Epictetus and Spartacus,--hatred and evil feelings on
the one hand, resignation and tenderness, on the other.

The Comte de Vandenesse recognized himself in Marie-Angelique de
Granville. In choosing for his wife an artless, innocent, and pure
young girl, this young old man determined to mingle a paternal feeling
with the conjugal feeling. He knew his own heart was withered by the
world and by politics, and he felt that he was giving in exchange for
a dawning life the remains of a worn-out existence. Beside those
springtide flowers he was putting the ice of winter; hoary experience
with young and innocent ignorance. After soberly judging the position,