Louise, knowing the necessity of this union, had accepted it, and had been horribly unhappy. It was the same year that Ely de Sallach, constrained by her father, married the Archduke Henry Francis, who had fallen in love with her at Carlsbad, with one of those furious passions that may overtake a _blasé_ prince of forty-five, for whom the experience of feeling is so violent and unexpected that he clings to it with all the fever of youth momentarily recaptured. The Emperor, though very hostile on principle to morganatic marriages, had consented to this one in the hope that the most revolutionary and disquieting of his cousins would quiet down and begin a new life. General Sallach had looked to the elevation of his daughter for a field-marshalship. He and his wife had so persuaded the girl, that she, tempted herself by a vanity too natural at her age, had yielded. Twelve years had passed since then, and the two old friends of Sacré-Cœur were still just as orphaned and as solitary and unhappy, one in the glittering rôle of a demi-princess, the other, queen of the great bank, as on the day when they first met under the trees of the garden by the Boulevard des Invalides. They had never ceased to write to each other; and each having seen the image of her own sorrow in the destiny of the other, their affection had been deepened by their mutual misery, by all their confidences, and by their silence, too. The hardness of the financier, his ferocious egoism, disguised beneath the studied manners of a sham man of the world, his brutal sensuality, had made it possible for Louise to understand the miseries of poor Ely, abandoned to the jealous despotism of a cruel and capricious master, in whom the intellectual nihilism of an anarchist was associated with the imperious pride of a tyrant; while the Baroness was able to sympathize, through the depth of her own misery, with the wounds that bled in the tender heart of her friend. But she, daughter of a soldier, the descendant of those heroes of Tchernagora, who had never surrendered, was not submissive, like the heiress of the good Rodier and Vimal families. She had immediately opposed her own pride and will to those of her husband. The atrocious scenes she had passed through without quailing would have ended in open rupture if the young woman had not thought of appealing to a very high authority. A sovereign influence commanded a compromise, thanks to which the Baroness recovered her independence without divorce or legal separation, with what rage on the part of her husband may be imagined. In fact, in four years this was the first winter she had spent with the Archduke, who, being ill, had retired to his villa at Cannes--a strange place, truly, made in the image of its strange master; half of the house was a palace, and half a laboratory.