"I went away completely enraptured with this woman, dazzled by the
luxury around her, gratified in every faculty of my soul--noble and
base, good and evil. When I felt myself so excited, eager, and elated,
I thought I understood the attraction that drew thither those artists,
diplomatists, men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple
brass. They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious
emotion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing through
my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, fretting even the
tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to none, so as to keep them
all. A woman is a coquette so long as she knows not love.
"'Well,' I said to Rastignac, 'they married her, or sold her perhaps,
to some old man, and recollections of her first marriage have caused
her aversion for love.'
"I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honore, where Foedora lived.
Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between her mansion and the Rue
des Cordiers, but the distance seemed short, in spite of the cold. And
I was to lay siege to Foedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter,
with only thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that
lay between us! Only a poor man knows what such a passion costs in
cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like.
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