Felicite, during her present stay, was not alone in Les Touches. She
had a guest. That guest was Claude Vignon, a scornful and powerful
writer who, though doing criticism only, has found means to give the
public and literature the impression of a certain superiority.
Mademoiselle des Touches had received this writer for the last seven
years, as she had so many other authors, journalists, artists, and men
of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter
penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the
way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him.
She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various
ways,--by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she
wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune
would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance in the
literary world.
With these apparent intentions she had brought Claude Vignon from
Paris to Les Touches, as an eagle bears away a kid in its talons,--to
study him, and decide upon some positive course.
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