Denoisel would then disappear from Paris for a time. He would ruralize at some little country inn, near a river, on half-a-crown a day, and he would spend no other money than what was necessary for tobacco. Two or three winters, finding himself quite out of funds, he had emigrated, and, on discovering a city like Florence, where happiness costs nothing and where the living is almost as inexpensive as that happiness, he had stayed there six months, lodging in a room with a cupola, dining _a la trattoria_ on truffles with Parmesan cheese, passing his evenings in the boxes of society people, going to the Grand Duke's balls, feted, invited everywhere, with white camellias in his buttonhole--economizing in the happiest way in the world. Denoisel spent no more for his love-affairs than for other things. It was no longer a question of self-respect with him, so that he only paid what he thought them worth. And yet such things had been his one allurement as a young man. He had, however, always been cool and methodical, even in his love-affairs. He had wanted, in a lordly way, to test for himself what the love of the woman who was the most in vogue in Paris was like. He allowed himself for this experiment about two thousand pounds of the seven thousand he then possessed, and, during the six months that he was the accepted lover of the celebrated Genicot, a woman who would give a five-pound note as a tip to her postillion on returning from the Marche, he lived in the same style as a man with five thousand a year. When the six months were over he left her, and she, for the first time in her life, was in love with a man who had paid for that love.