Our tribunals
and society are much more cruel."
"In what?" asked Lousteau.
"In letting the woman live with a slender allowance. Every one turns
away from her. She has neither dress nor consideration, two things
which are everything to a woman."
"But she has happiness," replied Madame de la Baudraye grandly.
"No!" replied the husband, lighting his candle to go to bed; "for she
has a lover."
Dinah's punishment is of this kind. Persuaded at length to go back to
the house of her husband, who had been made a peer of France and
accepts Lousteau's children with her, she lives to see her former
lover and father of her children sink so low that she must despise
him, while still occasionally tempted to yield to his caresses.
When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French
Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, asserted
that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others,
had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count
was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed
outside only because he could not get in. Between 1839 and 1849, he
made several attempts to secure the promise of a number of votes
sufficient to elect him.
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