"There's a lucky man. He is rich and handsome, and is to marry, so
they say, Mademoiselle Evangelista. There are some men for whom the
world seems made."

When he met the Evangelistas he felt proud of the particular
distinction which mother and daughter imparted to their bows. If Paul
had not secretly, within his heart, fallen in love with Mademoiselle
Natalie, society would certainly have married him to her in spite of
himself. Society, which never causes good, is the accomplice of much
evil; then when it beholds the evil it has hatched maternally, it
rejects and revenges it. Society in Bordeaux, attributing a "dot" of a
million to Mademoiselle Evangelista, bestowed it upon Paul without
awaiting the consent of either party. Their fortunes, so it was said,
agreed as well as their persons. Paul had the same habits of luxury
and elegance in the midst of which Natalie had been brought up. He had
just arranged for himself a house such as no other man in Bordeaux
could have offered her. Accustomed to Parisian expenses and the
caprices of Parisian women, he alone was fitted to meet the pecuniary
difficulties which were likely to follow this marriage with a girl who
was as much of a Creole and a great lady as her mother. Where they
themselves, remarked the marriageable men, would have been ruined, the
Comte de Manerville, rich as he was, could evade disaster. In short,
the marriage was made. Persons in the highest royalist circles said a
few engaging words to Paul which flattered his vanity:--

"Every one gives you Mademoiselle Evangelista. If you marry her you
will do well. You could not find, even in Paris, a more delightful
girl. She is beautiful, graceful, elegant, and takes after the
Casa-Reales through her mother. You will make a charming couple; you
have the same tastes, the same desires in life, and you will certainly