One of Napoloen’s marshals had a son--himself a prince and a soldier--unhappily married to a lady of unattractive virtue. A nervous, artistic, irascible man, he went about still seeking his ideal, _circuit rudens, quærens quem devoret_. He found it, unfortunately for her, in the maiden daughter of one of his old friends. Often have I heard of a certain dinner-party given by the girl’s father--an old general--in honour of the prince, and how the guests waited in the stiff yellow Empire _salon_, where the clock on the chimney-piece struck, first the half-hour, then the hour; and yet the prince never appeared; and still the young hostess lingered in her pressing-room. At last the dreadful truth burst upon the hungry and anxious company--they had eloped together! Save for this one great slip in conduct, the lady was a saint--a mute inglorious George Eliot. She reclaimed her lover, whose courses up to that time had been of the most devious, and showed him the sweetness of a calm, domestic life. She even reconciled him with his virtuous spouse, and if, as I fear, she broke her father’s heart, she lived to be blessed by the family she had outraged. Society in France still bore traces of the recent upheaval of the Revolution; the rule of morals was relaxed, and passion was held a great excuse. The lady’s character and her lover’s rank and fidelity combined to attenuate their fault: people ended by thinking of her as a sort of morganatic wife. She would say sometimes to her partner in shame: “My dear, you must not neglect the good princess. Remember she has always the first claim on your attention.” If, thus despatched to his duties, he stayed too long at home, the prince’s lawful helpmeet would remark one day: “_Mon ami_, it is a long time since you looked after your plantations at the Commanderie.” There is a beautiful old romance by Marie de France called _Eliduc, or, The Man with Two Wives_. With no less gracious a courtesy, no less delicate a sense of a rival’s due and a lover’s duty, did these two nineteenth-century ladies grace a difficult, an impossible, position.