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I have had the epilogue printed in italics to suggest that the action has now moved completely on to the stage of the inner world. In the outer world Madeleine might with time have jettisoned the perilous stuff of youth and have sailed serenely the rough, fresh sea of facts. In the inner world, there was one thing and one thing only that could happen to her: life is the province of free-will, art the province of fate.

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‘En effet, si on laisse aller le Christianisme sans l’approfondir et le régénérer de temps en temps, il s’y fait comme une infiltration croissants de bon sens humain, de tolérance philosophique, de semi-Pélagianisme à quelque degré que ce soit: la “folie de la Croix” s’atténue.’

Sainte-Beuve.

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In the middle of the seventeenth century a family called Troqueville came from Lyons to settle in Paris. Many years before, Monsieur Troqueville had been one of the four hundred procureurs of the Palais de Justice. There were malicious rumours of disgraceful and Bacchic scenes in Court which had led to his ejection from that respectable body. Whether the rumours were true or not, Monsieur Troqueville had long ceased to be a Paris procureur, and after having wandered about from town to town, he had at last settled in Lyons, where by ‘devilling’ for a lawyer, writing bombastic love-letters for shop apprentices, and playing Lasquinet with country bumpkins, he managed to earn a precarious livelihood. When, a few months before the opening of this story, he had been suddenly seized with a feverish craving to return to Paris ‘and once more wear the glove of my lady Jurisprudence in the tournay of the law-courts,’ as he put it, his wife had regarded him with a frigid and sceptical surprise, as she had long since given up trying to kindle in him one spark of ambition. However, Madeleine, their only child, a girl of seventeen, expressed such violent despair and disappointment when Madame Troqueville pronounced her husband’s scheme to be vain and impracticable, that finally to Paris they came—for to her mother, Madeleine’s happiness was the only thing of any moment.