"Ah, my sweet friend, I feel so much the younger for your letter!
I shall begin life again and make a fortune, you will see, for our
dear little one. As I read your letter, a thousand times more
ardent than those of the _Nouvelle Heloise_, it worked a miracle!
I had not believed it possible that I could love you more. This
evening, at Lisbeth's you will see
"YOUR HECTOR, FOR LIFE."
Reine carried off this reply, the first letter the Baron had written
to his "sweet friend." Such emotions to some extent counterbalanced
the disasters growling in the distance; but the Baron, at this moment
believing he could certainly avert the blows aimed at his uncle,
Johann Fischer, thought only of the deficit.
One of the characteristics of the Bonapartist temperament is a firm
belief in the power of the sword, and confidence in the superiority of
the military over civilians. Hulot laughed to scorn the Public
Prosecutor in Algiers, where the War Office is supreme. Man is always
what he has once been. How can the officers of the Imperial Guard
forget that time was when the mayors of the largest towns in the
Empire and the Emperor's prefects, Emperors themselves on a minute
scale, would come out to meet the Imperial Guard, to pay their
respects on the borders of the Departments through which it passed,
and to do it, in short, the homage due to sovereigns?
At half-past four the baron went straight to Madame Marneffe's; his
heart beat as high as a young man's as he went upstairs, for he was
asking himself this question, "Shall I see her? or shall I not?"
How was he now to remember the scene of the morning when his weeping
children had knelt at his feet? Valerie's note, enshrined for ever in
a thin pocket-book over his heart, proved to him that she loved him
more than the most charming of young men.
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