“Oh! enough!” cried he. “No more copy! Your dissertation is unnecessary, since you can justify yourself by merely saying--‘I have ceased to love!’” “What!” she exclaimed in bewilderment. “Is it I who have ceased to love?” “Certainly. You have calculated that I gave you more trouble, more vexation than pleasure, and you desert your partner--” “I desert!----” cried she, clasping her hands. “Have not you yourself just said ‘Never’?” “Well, then, yes! _Never_,” she repeated vehemently. This final _Never_, spoken in the fear of falling once more under Lousteau’s influence, was interpreted by him as the death-warrant of his power, since Dinah remained insensible to his sarcastic scorn. The journalist could not suppress a tear. He was losing a sincere and unbounded affection. He had found in Dinah the gentlest La Valliere, the most delightful Pompadour that any egoist short of a king could hope for; and, like a boy who has discovered that by dint of tormenting a cockchafer he has killed it, Lousteau shed a tear. Madame de la Baudraye rushed out of the private room where they had been dining, paid the bill, and fled home to the Rue de l’Arcade, scolding herself and thinking herself a brute. Dinah, who had made her house a model of comfort, now metamorphosed herself. This double metamorphosis cost thirty thousand francs more than her husband had anticipated. The fatal accident which in 1842 deprived the House of Orleans of the heir-presumptive having necessitated a meeting of the Chambers in August of that year, little La Baudraye came to present his titles to the Upper House sooner than he had expected, and then saw what his wife had done. He was so much delighted, that he paid the thirty thousand francs without a word, just as he had formerly paid eight thousand for decorating La Baudraye. On his return from the Luxembourg, where he had been presented according to custom by two of his peers--the Baron de Nucingen and the Marquis de Montriveau--the new Count met the old Duc de Chaulieu, a former creditor, walking along, umbrella in hand, while he himself sat perched in a low chaise on which his coat-of-arms was resplendent, with the motto, _Deo sic patet fides et hominibus_. This contrast filled his heart with a large draught of the balm on which the middle class has been getting drunk ever since 1840. Madame de la Baudraye was shocked to see her husband improved and looking better than on the day of his marriage. The little dwarf, full of rapturous delight, at sixty-four triumphed in the life which had so long been denied him; in the family, which his handsome cousin Milaud of Nevers had declared he would never have; and in his wife--who had asked Monsieur and Madame de Clagny to dinner to meet the cure of the parish and his two sponsors to the Chamber of Peers. He petted the children with fatuous delight. The handsome display on the table met with his approval.