Normandy, after a notoriety which women for the most part envy and
condemn, especially when youth and beauty in some sort excuse the
transgression. Any sort of celebrity bestows an inconceivable
prestige. Apparently for women, as for families, the glory of the
crime effaces the stain; and if such and such a noble house is proud
of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and
pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a
happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be
pitied, the more she excites our sympathies. We are only pitiless to
the commonplace. If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all
intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we
raise ourselves above other people's heads? The common herd of
humanity feels an involuntary respect for any person who can rise
above it, and is not over-particular as to the means by which they
rise.

It may have been that some such motives influenced Gaston de Nueil at
unawares, or perhaps it was curiosity, or a craving for some interest
in his life, or, in a word, that crowd of inexplicable impulses which,
for want of a better name, we are wont to call "fatality," that drew
him to Mme. de Beauseant.

The figure of the Vicomtesse de Beauseant rose up suddenly before him
with gracious thronging associations. She was a new world for him, a
world of fears and hopes, a world to fight for and to conquer.
Inevitably he felt the contrast between this vision and the human
beings in the shabby room; and then, in truth, she was a woman; what
woman had he seen so far in this dull, little world, where calculation
replaced thought and feeling, where courtesy was a cut-and-dried
formality, and ideas of the very simplest were too alarming to be