young couple without a single cloud to dim the blue sky under which
they lived. Life did not hang heavy on the lovers' hands. Theodore
lavished on every day inexhaustible _fioriture_ of enjoyment, and he
delighted to vary the transports of passion by the soft languor of
those hours of repose when souls soar so high that they seem to have
forgotten all bodily union. Augustine was too happy for reflection;
she floated on an undulating tide of rapture; she thought she could
not do enough by abandoning herself to sanctioned and sacred married
love; simple and artless, she had no coquetry, no reserves, none of
the dominion which a worldly-minded girl acquires over her husband by
ingenious caprice; she loved too well to calculate for the future, and
never imagined that so exquisite a life could come to an end. Happy in
being her husband's sole delight, she believed that her
inextinguishable love would always be her greatest grace in his eyes,
as her devotion and obedience would be a perennial charm. And, indeed,
the ecstasy of love had made her so brilliantly lovely that her beauty
filled her with pride, and gave her confidence that she could always
reign over a man so easy to kindle as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus
her position as a wife brought her no knowledge but the lessons of
love.

In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of
acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had
to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them,
no doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of
speech; but she used the language common to all women when they find
themselves plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When,
by chance, Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with
Theodore's, the young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first