“Your husband, madame, did what he always does—made a little calculation.”
The lawyer left the box when the journalist returned, bowing with dignity.
“You are a greater hit than the piece,” said Etienne to Dinah.
This brief triumph brought greater happiness to the poor woman than she had ever known in the whole of her provincial existence; still, as they left the theatre she was very grave.
“What ails you, my Didine?” asked Lousteau.
“I am wondering how a woman succeeds in conquering the world?”
“There are two ways. One is by being Madame de Stael, the other is by having two hundred thousand francs a year.”
“Society,” said she, “asserts its hold on us by appealing to our vanity, our love of appearances.—Pooh! We will be philosophers!”
That evening was the last gleam of the delusive well-being in which Madame de la Baudraye had lived since coming to Paris. Three days later she observed a cloud on Lousteau’s brow as he walked round the little garden-plot smoking a cigar. This woman, who had acquired from her husband the habit and the pleasure of never owing anybody a sou, was informed that the household was penniless, with two quarters’ rent owing, and on the eve, in fact, of an execution.
This reality of Paris life pierced Dinah’s heart like a thorn; she repented of having tempted Etienne into the extravagances of love. It is so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has wrecked more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets. Dinah, happy in seeing Etienne taking his ease, smoking a cigar after breakfast, his face beaming as he basked like a lizard in the sunshine, could not summon up courage enough to make herself the bum-bailiff of a magazine.