Thereupon, his eyes had wandered in the direction of the ladies; he could see only the backs of those who occupied the front rows of seats, and Madame de Grangeville was one of them; so that he was looking, without paying any particular attention to them, at the ladies of the company, who, however, were very handsomely dressed, when one of them, Madame de Grangeville, turned her head and looked in his direction. Monsieur Malberg was struck by that glance; a thousand memories awoke in his mind; but the lady turned her head away almost immediately, and he could not see her features. Impelled by curiosity, however, to know that person, a single glance from whom had so disturbed him, he had quietly left his place and had drawn nearer to the stage, without, however, mingling with the audience, until he was so placed that, without being seen, he could at his leisure examine the lady who was seated beside Madame Glumeau. On scrutinizing the baroness closely, Monsieur Malberg had thought at first that he had made a mistake; nineteen years had caused so many changes! And all of us have a singular habit: if we are many years without seeing a woman, when we think of that woman, we always imagine her as she was when we saw her last. Instead of saying to ourselves: “Time must have marched with her; her beauty and charm and freshness must have undergone deplorable changes;” we always imagine that she is as we left her, because her image, her figure, her bearing charmed us so, and because the heart and the memory shrink from attributing age to the objects whose souvenir they cherish. And so, while gazing attentively at Madame de Grangeville, Monsieur Malberg said to himself: “No, I am mistaken, it isn’t she, it cannot be the woman whose grace, whose fresh complexion and slender figure and light step everyone admired; and yet, those are her features; despite the deep wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, that is the lower part of her face; her eyes are black-ringed and swollen, but the expression is still the same, and it is that expression which has awakened all my memories. Her face is thinner, her hair has changed its color; there are wrinkles on her brow; and yet I cannot doubt it; it is she! yes, surely she! And, in truth, over nineteen years have passed since I saw her; but I had not thought that she could grow old!” Monsieur Malberg could not remove his eyes from the baroness after that; he abandoned himself the more freely to that mute contemplation, because no one could observe it.