No one deceives them, for
they delude themselves no longer; but their resignation, their
disillusionment is always graceful; they expect what comes, and
therefor they suffer less. Felix might still rank among the handsomest
and most agreeable men in Paris. He was originally commended to many
women by one of the noblest creatures of our epoch, Madame de
Mortsauf, who had died, it was said, out of love and grief for him;
but he was specially trained for social life by the handsome and
well-known Lady Dudley.
In the eyes of many Parisian women, Felix, a sort of hero of romance,
owed much of his success to the evil that was said of him. Madame de
Manerville had closed the list of his amorous adventures; and perhaps
her dismissal had something to do with his frame of mind. At any rate,
without being in any way a Don Juan, he had gathered in the world of
love as many disenchantments as he had met with in the world of
politics. That ideal of womanhood and of passion, the type of which
--perhaps to his sorrow--had lighted and governed his dawn of life, he
despaired of ever finding again.
At thirty years of age, Comte Felix determined to put an end to the
burden of his various felicities by marriage. On that point his ideas
were extremely fixed; he wanted a young girl brought up in the
strictest tenets of Catholicism. It was enough for him to know how the
Comtesse de Granville had trained her daughters to make him, after he
had once resolved on marriage, request the hand of the eldest.
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