Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/321

Rh defensive, leaves nothing to chance; this undefinable nonchalance which makes the Creole woman the essence of womanhood; this sensuality which, like a light perfume, floats around these languid attitudes of the supple and easy limbs, was it not enough to turn the brain of everybody, and most of all of him who was newer and less experienced than any other? The woman seduces him from the first moment, while at the same time the lady dazzles him by, as he says himself, 'that calm and noble dignity of the old French society.

" feels that he is ensnared, that he belongs to her, and when he comes back on the next day, the day after, and then every day, when he sees about Madame de Beauharnais men who belonged to the ancient Court, who are great lords in comparison with him, 'petit noble' (the word is his own), a Ségur, a Montesquieu, a Caulaincourt, who treat her as a friend, an equal, somewhat as a comrade, he does not notice the dark side; he does not realise that these men, who will always have for him a certain prestige, come there as bachelors, and do not bring their wives. After the Jacobin surroundings in which he lived, and which in Vaucluse, Toulon, Nice, and Pa s had been an advantage to him, he experienced an infinite satis-