Derville to himself, on emerging from his long reverie, as his cab
stopped at the door of the Hotel Ferraud in the Rue de Varennes. "How
is it that he, so rich as he is, and such a favorite with the King, is
not yet a peer of France? It may, to be sure, be true that the King,
as Mme. de Grandlieu was telling me, desires to keep up the value of
the /pairie/ by not bestowing it right and left. And, after all, the
son of a Councillor of the /Parlement/ is not a Crillon nor a Rohan. A
Comte Ferraud can only get into the Upper Chamber surreptitiously. But
if his marriage were annulled, could he not get the dignity of some
old peer who has only daughters transferred to himself, to the King's
great satisfaction? At any rate this will be a good bogey to put
forward and frighten the Countess," thought he as he went up the
steps.

Derville had without knowing it laid his finger on the hidden wound,
put his hand on the canker that consumed Madame Ferraud.

She received him in a pretty winter dining-room, where she was at
breakfast, while playing with a monkey tethered by a chain to a little
pole with climbing bars of iron. The Countess was in an elegant
wrapper; the curls of her hair, carelessly pinned up, escaped from a
cap, giving her an arch look. She was fresh and smiling. Silver,
gilding, and mother-of-pearl shone on the table, and all about the
room were rare plants growing in magnificent china jars. As he saw
Colonel Chabert's wife, rich with his spoil, in the lap of luxury and
the height of fashion, while he, poor wretch, was living with a poor
dairyman among the beasts, the lawyer said to himself:

"The moral of all this is that a pretty woman will never acknowledge
as her husband, nor even as a lover, a man in an old box-coat, a tow