“Like you,” resumed the princess, “I have received more love than most women; but through all my many adventures, I have never found happiness. I committed great follies, but they had an object, and that object retreated as fast as I approached it. I feel to-day in my heart, old as it is, an innocence which has never been touched. Yes, under all my experience, lies a first love intact,--just as I myself, in spite of all my losses and fatigues, feel young and beautiful. We may love and not be happy; we may be happy and never love; but to love and be happy, to unite those two immense human experiences, is a miracle. That miracle has not taken place for me.” “Nor for me,” said Madame d’Espard. “I own I am pursued in this retreat by dreadful regret: I have amused myself all through life, but I have never loved.” “What an incredible secret!” cried the marquise. “Ah! my dear,” replied the princess, “such secrets we can tell to ourselves, you and I, but nobody in Paris would believe us.” “And,” said the marquise, “if we were not both over thirty-six years of age, perhaps we would not tell them to each other.” “Yes; when women are young they have so many stupid conceits,” replied the princess. “We are like those poor young men who play with a toothpick to pretend they have dined.” “Well, at any rate, here we are!” said Madame d’Espard, with coquettish grace, and a charming gesture of well-informed innocence; “and, it seems to me, sufficiently alive to think of taking our revenge.” “When you told me, the other day, that Beatrix had gone off with Conti, I thought of it all night long,” said the princess, after a pause. “I suppose there was happiness in sacrificing her position, her future, and renouncing society forever.” “She was a little fool,” said Madame d’Espard, gravely. “Mademoiselle des Touches was delighted to get rid of Conti. Beatrix never perceived how that surrender, made by a superior woman who never for a moment defended her claims, proved Conti’s nothingness.” “Then you think she will be unhappy?” “She is so now,” replied Madame d’Espard. “Why did she leave her husband? What an acknowledgment of weakness!” “Then you think that Madame de Rochefide was not influenced by the desire to enjoy a true love in peace?” asked the princess. “No; she was simply imitating Madame de Beausant and Madame de Langeais, who, be it said, between you and me, would have been, in a less vulgar period than ours, the La Villiere, the Diane de Poitiers, the Gabrielle d’Estrees of history.” “Less the king, my dear. Ah! I wish I could evoke the shades of those women, and ask them--”