The preceding lines are the exact story of an event which was the topic of the day; for after a month or two poor Wilhelmina was unfortunate enough for people to take notice of her feelings. Such was the origin of that long series of troubles by which she perished so young and so tragically--poisoned by herself or her lover. All that we could see in this young Captain was that he was an excellent dancer; he had plenty of gaiety and still more assurance, a general air of good nature and spent his time with prostitutes; for the rest, scarcely a nobleman, quite poor and not seen at Court. [Pg 69] In these cases it is not enough to have no misgivings--one must be sick of misgivings--have, so to speak, the impatience of courage to face life's chances. The soul of a woman, grown tired, without noticing it, of living without loving, convinced in spite of herself by the example of other women--all the fears of life surmounted and the sorry happiness of pride found wanting--ends in creating unconsciously a model, an ideal. One day she meets this model: crystallisation recognises its object by the commotion it inspires and consecrates for ever to the master of its fortunes the fruit of all its previous dreams.[2] Women, whose hearts are open to this misfortune, have too much grandeur of soul to love otherwise than with passion. They would be saved if they could stoop to gallantry. As "thunderbolts" come from a secret lassitude in what the catechism calls Virtue, and from boredom brought on by the uniformity of perfection, I should be inclined to think that it would generally be the privilege of what is known in the world as "a bad lot" to bring them down. I doubt very much whether rigidity _à la_ Cato has ever been the occasion of a "thunderbolt." What makes them so rare is that if the heart, thus disposed to love beforehand, has the slightest inkling of its situation, there is no thunderbolt. The soul of a woman, whom troubles have made mistrustful, is not susceptible of this revolution. Nothing facilitates "a thunderbolt" like praise, given in advance and by women, to the person who is to occasion it. False "thunderbolts" form one of the most comic sources of love stories. A weary woman, but one without much feeling, thinks for a whole evening that she is in love for life. She is proud of having found at last one of those great commotions of the soul, which used to [Pg 70] allure her imagination. The next day she no longer knows where to hide her face and, still more, how to avoid the wretched object she was adoring the night before. Clever people know how to spot, that is to say, make capital out of these "thunderbolts."