--necessary perhaps--which literature imparts by depicting the
passions; she knew nothing of the world, and was ignorant of all the
dangers of society. The dear child had suffered so little that she had
not even developed her courage. In short, her guilelessness would have
led her to walk fearless among serpents, like the ideal figure of
Innocence a painter once created. We lived together like two brothers.

"'At the end of a year I said to her one day, in the garden of this
house, by the basin, as we stood throwing crumbs to the fish:

"'"Would you like that we should be married? With me you could do
whatever you please, while another man would make you unhappy."

"'"Mamma," said she to my mother, who came out to join us, "Octave
and I have agreed to be married----"

"'"What! at seventeen?" said my mother. "No, you must wait eighteen
months; and if eighteen months hence you like each other, well, your
birth and fortunes are equal, you can make a marriage which is
suitable, as well as being a love match."

"'When I was six-and-twenty, and Honorine nineteen, we were married.
Our respect for my father and mother, old folks of the Bourbon Court,
hindered us from making this house fashionable, or renewing the
furniture; we lived on, as we had done in the past, as children.
However, I went into society; I initiated my wife into the world of
fashion; and I regarded it as one of my duties to instruct her.

"'I recognized afterwards that marriages contracted under such
circumstances as ours bear in themselves a rock against which many