Madeleine had really gone away, although it was her first intention to wait for the prince after the conclusion of his interview with M. Pascal. This is why the marquise did not keep her first resolution. She reëntered the parlour, after having treated M. Pascal as he well deserved, when, looking into the garden by chance, she saw Frantz, who had asked the favour of a turn in the park, accompanied by Major Butler. At the sight of Frantz, Madeleine stood petrified with astonishment. She recognised her blond archangel, the object of that ideal and only passion which she had confessed to Sophie Dutertre. CHAPTER XIX. Madeleine did not doubt that the hero of the duel of which she had been an invisible witness, her blond archangel, and the ideal of her passion, Frantz, and the lover of Antonine, were one and the same person. At this sudden discovery the marquise felt a profound agitation. Until then, this love, surrounded with the mystery of the unknown, this vague and charming love which seemed like the memory of a sweet dream, had sufficed to fill her heart in the midst of the perturbations of her life, rendered so fantastic by the calm of her own indifference and the foolish transport that she involuntarily inspired in others. It had never occurred to Madeleine that her ideal could be in love with another woman, or, rather, her thought had never rested on this doubt; for her, this radiant archangel was provided with beautiful wings, which might carry him away before all eyes into the infinite plains of ether. Incessantly besieged by lovers, by no means platonic, she experienced a joy, an ineffable moral repose, in lifting herself into immaterial regions, where her charmed and dazzled eyes saw her ideal hovering. But suddenly reality cut the wings of the archangel, and, fallen from his celestial sphere, he was no more than a handsome young man, in love with a pretty girl of fifteen, who adored him. At this discovery, Madeleine could not repress a sort of sadness, or, rather, of sweet melancholy like that which follows the awakening from an enchanted dream, for to experience the tortures of jealousy, would be to love carnally. In short, if Frantz had almost always occupied the thought of Madeleine, he had never had part in her life; it only concerned her, then, to break the thousand ties that habit, sympathy, and confidence had rendered so dear. Nevertheless, she felt herself a prey to a growing disquietude, to painful presentiments which she could not explain to herself. Suddenly she started, and said: "If fate should order that this strange charm that I exercise on almost all who approach me should also act upon Frantz, if I, too, should share his feeling on seeing the only man who has ever occupied my heart and my thought!" Then, trying to reassure herself by an appeal to her humility, Madeleine said: