He had promised to make a songstress of the one, to send her to Paris; had roused in her wild, ambitious hopes of fame and fortune--dreams that, in any case, could be little like the real thing: fanciful visions of conquest and golden living, where never the breath of her hawthorn and wild violets entered; only sickly perfumes, as from an odalisque's fan, amid the enervating splendour of voluptuous boudoirs--for she had read of these things.
Valmond had, in a vague, graceless sort of way, worked upon the quick emotions of Elise.

Every little touch of courtesy had been returned to him in half-shy, half-ardent glances; in flushes, which the kiss he had given her the first day of their meeting had made the signs of an intermittent fever; in modest yet alluring waylayings; in restless nights, in half-tuneful, half-silent days; in a sweet sort of petulance.
She had kept in mind everything he had said to her; the playfully emotional pressure of her hand, his eloquent talks with her uncle, the old sergeant's rhapsodies on his greatness; and there was no place in the room where he had sat or stood, which she had not made sacred--she, the mad cap, who had lovers by the dozen.

Importuned by the Cure and her mother to marry, she had threatened, if they worried her further, to wed fat Duclosse, the mealman, who had courted her in a ponderous way for at least three years.

The fire that corrodes, when it does not make glorious without and within, was in her veins, and when Valmond should call she was ready to come.

She could not, at first, see that if he were, in truth, a Napoleon, she was not for him.