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“You, disgraced?”

“Yes, I, Comte Paz; I am madly in love with a girl who travels all over France with the Bouthor family,–people who have the rival circus to Franconi; but they play only at fairs. I have made the director at the Cirque-Olympique engage her.”

“Is she handsome?”

“To my thinking,” said Paz, in a melancholy tone. “Malaga (that’s her stage name) is strong, active, and supple. Why do I prefer her to all other women in the world?–well, I can’t tell you. When I look at her, with her black hair tied with a blue satin ribbon, floating on her bare and olive-colored shoulders, and when she is dressed in a white tunic with a gold edge, and a knitted silk bodice that makes her look like a living Greek statue, and when I see her carrying those flags in her hand to the sound of martial music, and jumping through the paper hoops which tear as she goes through, and lighting so gracefully on the galloping horse to such applause,–no hired clapping,–well, all that moves me.”

“More than a handsome woman in a ballroom?” asked Clementine, with amazement and curiosity.

“Yes,” answered Paz, in a choking voice. “Such agility, such grace under constant danger seems to me the height of triumph for a woman. Yes, madame, Cinti and Malibran, Grisi and Taglioni, Pasta and Ellsler, all who reign or have reigned on the stage, can’t be compared, to my mind, with Malaga, who can jump on or off a horse at full gallop, or stand on the point of one foot and fall easily into the saddle, and knit stockings, break eggs, and make an omelette with the horse at full speed, to the admiration of the people,–the real people, peasants and soldiers. Malaga, madame, is dexterity personified; her little wrist or her little foot can rid her of three or four men. She is the goddess of gymnastics.”

“She must be stupid–“

“Oh, no,” said Paz, “I find her as amusing as the heroine of ‘Peveril of the Peak.’ Thoughtless as a Bohemian, she says everything that comes into her head; she thinks no more about the future than you do of the sous you fling to the poor. She says grand things sometimes. You couldn’t make her believe that an old diplomatist was a handsome young man, not if you offered her a million of francs. Such love as hers is perpetual flattery to a man. Her health is positively insolent, and she has thirty-two oriental pearls in lips of coral. Her muzzle–that’s what she calls the lower part of her face–has, as Shakespeare expresses it, the savor of a heifer’s nose. She can make a man unhappy. She likes handsome men, strong men, Alexanders, gymnasts, clowns. Her trainer, a horrible brute, used to beat her to make her supple, and graceful, and intrepid–“

“You are positively intoxicated with Malaga.”

“Oh, she is called Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with a piqued air. “She lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, in a pretty apartment on the third story, all velvet and silk, like a princess. She has two lives, her circus life and the life of a pretty woman.”

“Does she love you?”

“She loves me–now you will laugh–solely because I’m a Pole. She saw an engraving of Poles rushing with Poniatowski into the Elster,–for all France persists in thinking that the Elster, where it is impossible to get drowned, is an impetuous flood, in which Poniatowski and his followers were engulfed. But in the midst of all this I am very unhappy, madame.”

A tear of rage fell from his eyes and affected the countess.

“You men have such a passion for singularity.”

“And you?” said Thaddeus.

“I know Adam so well that I am certain he could forget me for some mountebank like your Malaga. Where did you first see her?”

“At Saint-Cloud, last September, on the fete-day. She was at a corner of a booth covered with flags, where the shows are given. Her comrades, all in Polish costumes, were making a horrible racket. I watched her standing there, silent and dumb, and I thought I saw a melancholy expression in her face; in truth there was enough about her to sadden a girl of twenty. That touched me.”