V
Since the moment when it had entered her mind that she might find something more than a lover in Monsieur de Rosas, Marianne had been sorely puzzled. She was playing a strong hand. Between the minister and the duke she must make a choice.
She did not care seriously for Vaudrey. In fact she found that he was ridiculously unreserved. "He is a simple fellow!" she said to Claire Dujarrier. But she had sufficient amour-propre to retain him, and she felt assured that Sulpice was weak enough to obey her in everything: such an individual was not to be disdained. As to Rosas, she felt a sentiment which certainly was not love, but rather a feeling of astonishment, a peculiar affection. Rosas held her in respect, and she was flattered by his timid bearing, as he had in his veins the blood of heroes. He spoke almost entirely of his love, which, however, he never proposed to her to test, and this platonic course, which in Vaudrey's case she would have considered simple, appeared to her to be "good form" in the great nobleman's case. The duke raised her in her own eyes.
He had never repeated that word, doubtless spoken by him at random: marriage, and Marianne was too discreet and shrewd to appear to have specially noticed it. She did not even allude to it. She waited patiently. With the lapse of time, she thought, Rosas would be the more surely in her grasp. Meantime it was necessary to live and as she was bent on maintaining her household, she kept Vaudrey, whom she might need at any moment.
Her part was to carry on these two intrigues simultaneously, leading Rosas to believe that the minister was her friend only, nothing more, the patron of Uncle Kayser, and making Vaudrey think that since she had dismissed the duke he had become resigned and would "suppress his sighs." She could have sworn, in all sincerity, that José was not her lover.
To mislead Vaudrey was not a very difficult task. Sulpice was literally blinded by this love.—For a moment, he had been aroused by Jouvenet's intimation that his secret was known to others. For a while he seemed to have kept himself away from Marianne; but after taking new precautions, he returned trembling with ardent passion to Mademoiselle Vanda's hôtel, where his mistress's kiss, a little languid, awaited him.
Months passed thus, the entire summer, the vacation of the Chamber, the dull season in Paris. Adrienne set out for Dauphiny, where Vaudrey was to preside over the Conseil-Général, and she felt a childish delight on finding herself once more in the old house at Grenoble, where she had formerly been so happy! Yet even beneath this roof, within these walls, the mute witnesses of his virtuous love, especially when alone, Vaudrey thought of Marianne, he had but one idea, that of seeing her again, of clasping her in his arms, and he wrote her passionate letters each day, which she hardly glanced over and with a shrug of her shoulders burned as of no importance.
In the depths of his province he grew weary of the continual bustle of fêtes, receptions held in his honor, addresses delivered by him, ceremonies over which he had to preside, deputations received, statues inaugurated. Statues! always statues! In the lesser towns, at Allevard or Marestel, he was dragged from the mairie to the Grande Place, between rows of firemen, in noisy processions, whose accompanying brass instruments split his ears, under pink-striped tents, draped with tricolor flags, before interminable files of gymnastic societies, glee clubs, corporate bodies, associations, Friends of Peace, or Friends of War societies! Then wandering harangues; commonplace remarks, spun out; addresses, sprinkled with Latin by professors of rhetoric; declarations of political faith by eloquent municipal councillors, all delighted to grab at a minister when the opportunity offered. How many such harangues Vaudrey heard! More than in the Chamber. More thickly they came, more compressed, more severe than in the Chamber. What advice, political considerations and remonstrances winding up with demands for offices! What cantatas that begged for subsidies! Everywhere demands: demands for subsidies, demands for grants, demands for help, demands for decorations! Nothing but harass, enervation, lassitude, deafening clamor. They wished to kill him with their shouts: Vive Vaudrey!
The Prefect and the Commandant General of the division were constantly on guard about Vaudrey, who was dragged about in torture between these two coat-embroidered officers. From the lips of the prefect, Vaudrey heard the same commonplace utterances: progress, the future, the fusion of parties and interests, the greatness of the department, the cotton trade and the tanneries, the glory of the minister who—of the minister whom—of the glorious child of the country—of the eagle of Dauphiny. Vive Vaudrey! Vive Vaudrey! The general, at least, varied his effects. He grumbled and wrung his hands, and on the day of the inauguration of the statue of a certain Monsieur Valbonnans, a former deputy and celebrated glove manufacturer,—also the glory of the country,—Vaudrey heard the soldier murmur from morning till night, with a movement of his jaw that made his imperial jerk: "I love bronze! I love bronze!" with a persistency that stupefied the minister.
This was, perhaps, the only recollection of a cheerful nature that Vaudrey retained of his trips in Isère. This eternal murmuring of the general: I love bronze! I love bronze! had awakened him, and he gayly asked himself what devilish sort of appetite that soldier had who continually repeated his phrase in a ravenous tone. Seated beside him on the platform, while the glee-club sung an elegy in honor of the late Monsieur Valbonnans, which was composed for the occasion by an amateur of the town:
Monsieur Valbonnans' praise let's chant, yes, chant!
His gloves the best, as all must grant,
The best extant!
while the flourish of trumpets took up the refrain and the firemen unveiled, amid loud acclamations, the statue of Monsieur Valbonnans, which bore these words on the pedestal: To the Inventor, the Patriot, the Merchant; while, too, the prefect still poured in Vaudrey's left ear his inexhaustible observations: the glove trade, the glory of Isère; the progress, the interest, the greatness of the department, the minister who—the minister whom—(Vive Vaudrey!) Sulpice still heard, even amid the acclamations, the mechanical rumbling of the general's voice, repeating, reasserting, rehearsing: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"
On the evening of the banquet, the minister at length obtained an explanation of this extraordinary affection. The general rose, grasping his glass as if he would shiver it, and while the parfait overflowed on to the plates, he cried in a hoarse voice, as if he were at the head of his division:
"I love bronze—I love bronze—because it serves for the erection of statues and the casting of cannon. I love bronze because its voice wins battles, the artillery being to-day the superior branch, although the cavalry is the most chivalrous! I love bronze because it is the image of the heart of the soldier, and I should like to see in our country an army of men of bronze who—whom—"
He became confused and muddled, and rolled his white eyes about in his purpled face and to close his observations brandished his glass as if it had been his sword, and amid a frenzy of applause from the guests, he valiantly howled: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"
Vaudrey could scarcely prevent himself from laughing hysterically, in spite of his ministerial dignity, and when he returned to Grenoble, his carriage full of the flowers that they had showered on him, he could only answer to Adrienne, who asked him if he had spoken well, if it had been a fine affair, by throwing his bouquets on the floor and saying:
"I have laughed heartily, but I am crushed, stupefied! What a headache!"
And Sulpice wrote all that to Marianne, and innocent that he was, told her: "Ah! all those applauding voices are not worth a single word from you! When shall I see you, Marianne, dear heart?"
"At the latest possible date!" the dear heart said.
She regarded the close of summer and the beginning of autumn with extreme vexation, for it would bring with it the parliamentary session and Vaudrey, and inflict on her the presence of her lover.
Sulpice provided her liberally with all that her luxurious appetites demanded, and it was for good reasons that she decided not to break with him, although for a long time she had sacrificed this man in her inclinations. "Ah! when I shall be able to bounce him!" she said, expressing herself like a courtesan. She could not, she would not accept anything from Rosas. On that side, the game was too fine to be compromised. She could with impunity accept the position of mistress of Vaudrey, but with José she must appear to preserve, as it were, an aureole of modesty, of virginal charms, that she did not possess.
In fact, the Spaniard's mind became singularly crystallized, and she turned this result to good account: in proportion as he associated himself with the real Marianne, he created a fictitious Marianne, ideal, kind, spirituelle, perhaps ignorant, but subtile and corrupted in mind, who amused and disconcerted him at one and the same time. He had left the Continental Hotel, and rented a house on Avenue Montaigne, Champs-Élysées, where he sometimes entertained Marianne as he might have done a princess. At such times she gossiped while smoking Turkish tobacco. Her Parisian grace, her champagne-like effervescent manner, seduced and charmed this serious, pale traveller, whose very smile was tinged with melancholy.
He completely adored this woman and no longer made an effort to resist. He entirely forgot that it was through Guy that he had known her. It seemed to him that he had himself discovered her, and besides, she had never loved Guy. No, certainly not. She was frank enough to acknowledge everything. Then she denied that Lissac ever—Then what! If it should be true? But no! no! Marianne denied it. He blindly believed in Marianne.
All the conflicting, frantic arguments that men make when they are about to commit some foolish action were at war in José's brain. The more so as he did not attempt to analyze his feelings. He passed, near this pretty woman whose finger-tips he hardly dared kiss, the most delicious summer of his life. Once, however, on going out with Marianne in the Champs-Élysées, he had met the old Dujarrier with the swollen eyelids and the yellow hair that he had known formerly. One of his friends, the Marquis Vergano, had committed suicide at twenty for this woman who was old enough to be his mother. The Dujarrier had stopped and greeted Marianne, but as she remarked herself, a thousand bows and scrapes were thrown away, for Rosas had hardly noticed her with a glacial look.
"Why do you return that woman's salutation?" he at once asked Marianne.
"I need her. She has done me services."
"That is surprising! I thought her incapable of doing anything but harm."
He did not dream of Mademoiselle Kayser's coming in contact with courtesans. In the tiny, virtuous room in Rue Cuvier, Rosas thought that Marianne was in her true surroundings. She would frequently sit at the piano—one of the few pieces of furniture contained in this apartment,—and play for Rosas Oriental melodies that would transport him far away in thought, to the open desert, by the slow lulling of David's Caravane, then abruptly change to that familiar air, that rondeau of the Variétés that he hummed yonder, on his dunghill, forsaken—
"Voyez-vous, là-bas,
Cette maison blanche—"
"I love that music-hall air!" she said.
He now no longer meditated resuming travel, or quitting Paris. Mademoiselle Kayser's hold on him grew more certain every day. The suspicion of odd mystery that enveloped this girl intensified his passion.
He sometimes asked her what her uncle was doing.
"He? Why, he has obtained, thanks to Monsieur Vaudrey, the decoration of a hydropathic establishment, Les Thermes des Batignolles. He has commenced the cartoon for a fresco: Massage Moralizing the People. We shall see that in his studio."
"Do you know," Marianne continued, "what I would like to see?"
"What, then?"
"Spain, your own country. Where were you born, Rosas?"
"At Toledo. I own the family château there."
"With portraits and armor?"
"Yes, with portraits and armor."
"Well, I would like to go to Toledo, to see that château. It must be magnificent."
"It is gloomy, simply gloomy. A fortress on a rock. Gray stone, a red rock, scorched by the sun. Huge halls half Moorish in style. Walls as thick as those of a prison. Steel knights, standing with lance in hand as in Eviradnus! Old portraits of stern ancestors cramped in their doublets, or Duchesses de Rosas, with pale faces, sad countenances, buried in their collars whose guipures have been limned by Velasquez or Claude Coëllo. Immense cold rooms where the visitors' footfalls echo as over empty tombs. A splendor that savors of the vault. You would die of ennui at the end of two hours and of cold at the end of eight days."
"Die of cold in Spain?"
"There is a cold of the soul," the duke replied with a significant smile. "That I have travelled so much, is probably due to my desire to escape from that place! But you at Toledo, at Fuentecarral,—that is the name of my castle,—a Parisian like you! It would be cruel. As well shut up a humming-bird in a bear-pit. No! thank God, I have other nooks in Spain that will shelter us, my dear sparrow of the boulevards! Under the Andalusian jasmines, beneath the oleanders of Cordova or Seville, under the fountains whose basins are decorated with azulejos, and in which sultanas bathe, my jasmins could never sufficiently exhale their perfume, my fountains could never murmur harmoniously enough to furnish you a joyous welcome—when you go—if you go—But Toledo! My terrible castle Fuentecarral! It is in vain that I am impenitently romantic, I would not take you there for anything in the world. It would be as if ice fell on your shoulders. Fuentecarral? Ugh!—that smacks of death."
While he spoke, Marianne looked at him with kindling eyes and in thought roamed through those sweet-scented gardens, and she craved to see herself in that tomblike fortress Fuentecarral, passing in front of the pale female ancestors of Rosas, aghast at the froufrou of the Parisian woman.
José thought Marianne's burning glance was an expression of her love. Ah! how completely the last six months in Paris had riveted him to this woman, who was the mistress of another! One day,—Vaudrey had just left Marianne at the rond-point of the Champs-Élysées,—the duke seeing her enter his house, said abruptly to her:
"I was about to write you, Marianne."
"Why, my dear duke?"
"To ask an appointment."
"You are always welcome, my friend, at our little retreat."
He made her sit down, seized both her hands, and looked at her earnestly as he said:
"Swear to me that you have never been Lissac's mistress!"
She did not even quiver, but was as calm as if she had long awaited this question.
She boldly met José's glance and said:
"Does one ask such a question of the woman one loves?"
"Suppose that I ask this question of the Duchesse de Rosas!" said the Spaniard, with quivering lip.
She became as pale as he.
"I do not understand—" she said.
The duke remained silent for a moment; then his entire soul passed into his voice:
"I have no family, Marianne. I am entirely my own master, and I love you. If you swear to me that you have not been Guy's mistress—"
"Nobody has the right to say that he has even touched my lips," replied Marianne firmly. "Only one man, he who took me, an innocent girl, and left me heart-broken, disgusted, believing I should never again love, before I met you. He is dead."
"I know," said Rosas, "you confided that to me formerly.—A widow save in name, I offer you, yes, I! my name, my love, my whole life—will you take them?"
"Eh! you know perfectly well that I love you!" she exclaimed, as she frantically gave him the burning and penetrating kiss that had never left his lips since the soirée at Sabine's.
"Then, no one—no one?" José repeated.
"No one!"
"On honor?"
"On honor!"
"Oh! how I love you!" he said, distractedly, all his passion shattering his coldness of manner, as the sun melts the snow. "If you but knew how jealous and crazed I am about you!—I desire you, I adore you, and I condemn myself to remain glacial before you, beneath your glance that fires my blood—I love you, and the recollection of Guy hindered me from telling you that all that is mine belongs to you—I am a ferocious creature, you know, capable of mad outbursts, senseless anger, and unreasoning flight—Yes, I have wished to escape from you again. Well! no, I remain with you; I love you, I love you!—You shall be my wife, do you hear? My wife!—Ah! what a moment of bliss! I have loved you for years! Have you not seen it, Marianne?"
"I have seen it and I loved you! I also have kept silence! I saw plainly that you believed that I had given myself to another—No, no, I am yours, nothing but yours! All my love, all myself, take it; I have kept it for you; for I hate the past, more than that, I do not know that it exists—It is despised, obliterated, it is nothing! But you, ah! you, you are my life!"
She left José's, her youth renewed, haughty, intoxicated with delight. She walked along alone, in the paths of the Champs-Élysées, the rusty leaves falling in showers at the breath of the already cold wind, her heels ringing on the damp asphalt. She marched straight ahead, her thoughts afire from her intoxicating emotions. It seemed that Paris belonged to her.
That evening, she was to go to the theatre. It was arranged that Vaudrey should wait for her at the entrance with a hired carriage and take her to Rue Prony. She wrote to him that she could not leave the house. A slight headache. Uncle Kayser undertook to have the letter taken by a commissionaire.
"Unless you would rather have me go to the ministry!"
"Are you mad?" Marianne said.
"That is true, it would be immoral."
She wished to have the evening to herself, quite alone, so that she could let her dreams take flight.
Dreams? Nonsense! On the contrary, it was a dazzling reality: a fortune, a title, a positive escape from want and the mire. What a revenge!
"It is enough to drive one mad!"
Sudden fears seized her; the terror of the too successful gambler. What if everything crumbled like a house of cards! She wished that she were several weeks older.
"Time passes so quickly, and yet one has a desire to spur it on."
Now in the solitude of her house she felt weary. She could neither read nor think, and became feverish. She regretted that she had written to Vaudrey. She wished to go to the theatre. A new operetta would be a diversion, and why should she not go? She had the ticket for her box. She could at once inform Vaudrey that her headache had vanished.
"And then he bores me!—Especially now."
Matters, however, must not be abruptly changed. Suppose Rosas should take a sudden fancy to fly off again! Besides, she had mutual interests with the minister, there was an account to be settled.
"The Gochard paper?—Bah! he will pay it. More-ever, I am not involved in that."
Suddenly she thought that she would act foolishly if she did not go where she pleased. Sulpice might think what he pleased. She got her maid to dress her hair.
"Madame is going to the theatre?"
"Yes, Justine. To the Renaissance!"
She was greatly amused at the theatre, and was radiant with pleasure. She was the object of many glances, and felt delighted at being alone. One of the characters in the operetta was a duchess whose adventures afforded the audience much diversion. She abandoned herself to her dreams, her thoughts wandering far from the theatre, the footlights and the actors, to the distant orange groves yonder.
During an entr'acte some one knocked at the door of her box. She turned around in surprise. It was Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, who came to greet her in a very gallant fashion. The prefect—he had gained at the palais in former days, the title of L'Avocat Pathelin,—with insinuating and wheedling manners, hastened to pay his meed of respect to Marianne when he met her. There was no necessity to stand on ceremony with him. He knew all her secrets. Such a man, more-ever, must be treated prudently, as he can make himself useful. Never had Jouvenet spoken to her of Vaudrey, he was too politic in matters of state. But as a man who knows that everything in this world is transient, he skilfully maintained his place in the ranks, considering that a Prefect of Police might not be at all unlikely to succeed a President of the Council.
Marianne permitted him to talk, accepted all his gallantries as she might have done bonbons, and with a woman's wit kept him at a distance without wounding his vanity.
Jouvenet with the simple purpose of showing her that he was well-informed, asked her, stroking his whiskers as he did so, if she often saw the Duc de Rosas. What a charming man the duke was! And while the young woman watched him as if to guess his thoughts, he smiled at her.
The prefect, not wishing to appear too persistent, changed the conversation with the remark:
"Ah! there is one of our old friends ogling you!"
"An old friend?"
It was in fact Guy de Lissac who was standing at the balcony training his glass upon the box.
Marianne had only very occasionally met Lissac, but for some time she had suspected him of being secretly hostile to her. Guy bore her a grudge for having taken Sulpice away from Adrienne. He pitied Madame Vaudrey and perhaps his deep compassion was blended with another sentiment in which tenderness had taken the place of a more modified interest. He was irritated against the blind husband because he could not see the perfect charms of that delicate soul, so timid and at the same time so devoted. Although he had not felt justified in showing his annoyance to Vaudrey, he had manifested his dislike to Marianne under cover of his jesting manner, and she had been exceedingly piqued thereby. Wherefore did this man who could not understand her, interfere, and why did he add to the injuries of old the mockery of to-day?
"After all, perhaps it is through jealousy," she thought. "The dolt!"
Guy did not cease to look at her through his glass.
"Does that displease you?" Jouvenet asked.
"Not at all. What is that to me?"
"This Lissac was much in love with you!"
"Ah! Monsieur le Préfet!" Marianne observed sharply. "I know that your office inclines you to be somewhat inquisitive, but it would be polite of you to allow my past to sleep in your dockets. They are famous shrouds!"
Jouvenet bit his lips and in turn brought his glass to bear on Lissac.
"See," he said, "he makes a great deal of the cross of the Christ of Portugal! It is in very bad taste! I thought he was a shrewder man!"
"The order of Christ is then in bad odor?"
"On the contrary; but as it is like the Legion of Honor in color, he is prohibited from wearing it in his buttonhole without displaying the small gold cross—And I see only the red there—"
"I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Préfet, there is one."
"Oh! my glass is a wretched one!—But even so, I do not believe Monsieur de Lissac is authorized by the Grand Chancellor to wear his decoration. That is easily ascertained!—I will nevertheless not fail to insert in the Officiel to-morrow a note relative to the illegality of wearing certain foreign decorations—"
"Is this note directed against Lissac?"
"Not at all. But he reminds me of a step that I have wished to take for a long time: the enforcement of the law."
The entr'acte was over. Jouvenet withdrew, repeating all kinds of remarks with double meanings that veiled declarations of love; that if the occasion arose, he would place himself entirely at her service, and that some day she might be very glad to meet him—
"I thank you, Monsieur le Préfet, and I will avail myself of your kindness," replied Marianne, out of courtesy.
Something suggested to her that Guy would pay his respects to her during the next entr'acte, were it only to jest about Jouvenet's visit, seeing that he was regarded as a compromising acquaintance, and she was not wrong.
Behind his monocle, his keen, mocking glance seemed like a taunting smile.
"Well," he said, in a somewhat abrupt tone, as he sat near Marianne, "I congratulate you, my dear friend."
"Why?" she answered with surprise.
"On the great news, parbleu! Your marriage."
She turned slightly pale.
"How do you know?—"
"I have seen the duke. He called on me."
"On you? What for?"
"Can't you make a little guess—a very little guess—"
"To ask you if I had been your mistress? Lissac, you are very silly."
"Yes, my dear Marianne, prepare yourself somewhat for the position of a duchess. A gentleman, to whom you have sworn that I have never been your lover, could not doubt your word!—José asked me nothing. He simply stated his determination to see what I would say, or gather from my looks what I thought of it."
"And you said?"
"What I had to say to him: I congratulated him!"
Marianne raised her gray eyes to Lissac's face.
"Congratulate?" she said slowly.
"The woman he marries is pretty enough, I think?"
"Ah! my dear, a truce to insolent trifles!—what is it that has possessed you for some time past?"
"Nothing, but something has possessed you—or some one."
"Rosas?"
"No, Vaudrey!"
"I will restore him to you. Oh! oh! you are surprisingly interested in Vaudrey. Vaudrey or his wife?" she remarked.
She smiled with her wicked expression.
"Duchess," said Lissac, "accustom yourself to respect virtuous women!"
"Is it to talk of such pleasant trifles that you have gained access to my box?"
"No, it is to ask you for some special information."
"What?"
"Is it true, is it really true that you are about to wed Rosas?" he asked in an almost cordial tone.
"Why not?" she replied, as she raised her head.
"Because—I am going to be frank—I have always regarded you as an absolutely straightforward woman, a woman of honor—You once claimed so to be. Mad, fantastic, you often are; charming, always; but dishonest, never. To take Rosas's love, even his fortune, would be natural enough, but to take his name would be a very questionable act and a skilful one, but lacking in frankness."
"That is to say that I may devour him like a courtesan, but not marry him as a—"
"As a young girl, no, you cannot do that. And you put me—I am bound to tell you so and I take advantage of the intermission to do so—in a delicate position. If I declared the truth to Rosas, I act toward you as a rascal. If I keep silent to my friend, my true friend, I act almost like a knave."
"Did Rosas ask you to speak to me?"
"No, but there is a voice within me that pricks me to speech and tells me that if I allow you to marry the duke, I am committing myself to a questionable affair—Do you know what he asked me?—To be his witness."
If Marianne had been in a laughing mood, she would have laughed heartily.
"It is absurd," she said. "You did not consent?"
"Yes, indeed, I have consented. Because I really hoped that you would relieve me from such an undesirable duty, a little too questionable."
"You would like?—What would you like?"
"I wish—no, I would have you not marry Monsieur de Rosas."
Marianne shrugged her shoulders.
She clearly felt the threat conveyed in Lissac's words, but she desired to show from the first that she disdained them. What right, after all, had this casual acquaintance to mix himself up in her life affairs? Because, one day, she had been charitable enough to give him her youth and her body! The duty of friendship! The rights of friendship! To protect Vaudrey! To defend Rosas! Words, tiresome words!
"And what if I wish to marry him, myself?—Would you prevent it?"
"Yes, if I could!" he said firmly. "It is time that to the freemasonry of women we should oppose the freemasonry of men."
"You are cruelly cowardly enough when you are alone, what would you be then when you are together?" said Marianne, with a malignant expression. "In fact," said she, after a moment's pause, "what would you have? What? Decide!—Will you send my letters to the duke?"
"That is one way," said Lissac, calmly. "It is a woman's way, that!"
"You have my letters still?"
"Preciously preserved."
He had not contemplated such a threat, but she quickly scented a danger therein.
"Suppose I should ask the return of those letters, perhaps you would restore them to me?"
"Probably," he said.
"Suppose I asked you to bring them to me, you know, in that little out of the way room of which I spoke to you one day?"
She had leaned gently toward Lissac and her elbows grazed the knees of her former lover.
"I would wear, that day, one of those otter-trimmed toques that you have not forgotten."
She saw that he trembled, as if he were moved by some unsatisfied desire for her. She felt reassured.
"Nonsense!" she said with a smiling face. "You are not so bad as you pretend to be."
The manager tapped the customary three blows behind the curtain, and the orchestra began the prelude to the third act.
"Adieu for a brief period, my enemy!" said Marianne, extending her hand.
He hesitated to take that hand. At length, taking it in his own, he said:
"Leave me Rosas!"
"Fie! jealous one! Don't I leave Vaudrey to you?"
She laughed, while Lissac went away dissatisfied.
"I will have my letters, at all risks," thought Marianne when he had disappeared. "It is more prudent."
That night she slept badly, and the following morning rose in a very ill-humor. Her face expressed fatigue, her eyes were encircled with dark rings and burned feverishly, but withal, her beauty was heightened. All the morning she debated as to the course she should take, and finally decided to write to Guy, when Sulpice Vaudrey arrived, and beaming with delight, informed Marianne that he had the entire day to spend with her.
"I learned through Jouvenet this morning that you were able to go to the theatre. Naughty one, to steal an evening from me. But I have all to-day, at least."
And he sat down in the salon like a man spreading himself out in his own house. Marianne was meditating some scheme to get rid of him when the chamber-maid entered, presenting a note on a tray.
"What is that?"
"A messenger, madame, has brought this letter."
Marianne read the paper hurriedly.
Vaudrey observed that she blushed slightly.
"Is the messenger still there, Justine?"
"No, madame, he is gone. He said that there was no reply."
Marianne quickly tore in small pieces the note she had just read.
"Some annoyance?" asked Vaudrey.
"Yes, exactly."
"May I know?"
"No, it does not interest you. A family affair."
"Ah! your uncle?" asked Vaudrey, smiling.
"My uncle, yes!"
"He has asked that he be permitted to exhibit at the Trocadero the cartoons that he has finished: The Artist's Mission, Hydropathy the Civilizer, I don't know what in fact, a series of symbolical compositions—"
"With the mirliton device underneath?—Yes, I know," said Marianne.
She snapped her fingers in her impatience.
The letter that she had torn up had been written by Rosas, and received by Uncle Kayser at his studio, whence he had forwarded it to his niece. The duke informed Marianne that he would wait for her at five o'clock at Avenue Montaigne. He had something to say to her. He had passed the entire night reflecting and dreaming. She remembered her own wild dreams. Had Rosas then caught her thought floating like an atom on the night wind?
At five o'clock! She would be punctual. But how escape Vaudrey? She could not now feign sickness since she had received him! Moreover, he would instal himself near her and bombard her with his attentions. Was there any possible pretext, any way of getting out now? Her lover had the devoted, radiant look of a loved man who relied on enjoying a long interview with his mistress. He looked at her with a tender glance.
"The fool—The sticker!" thought Marianne. "He will not leave!"
The best course was to go out. She would lose him on the way.
"What time have you, my dear minister?"
"One o'clock!"
"Then I have time!" she said.
Vaudrey seemed surprised. Marianne unceremoniously informed him, in fact, that she had some calls to make, to secure some purchases.
"How disagreeable!"
"Yes, for me!"
"I beg your pardon," said Sulpice, correcting himself.
She sent for a coupé and damp and keen as the weather was, she substituted for the glorious day of snug, intimate joy that Vaudrey had promised himself, a succession of weary hours passed in the draught caused by badly-fitting windows, while making a series of trips hither and thither, Marianne meantime cudgelling her brains to find a way to leave her lover on the way, or at least to notify Rosas.
But above all to notify Lissac! It was Lissac whom she was determined to see. Yes, absolutely, and at once. The more she considered the matter, the more dangerous it appeared to her.
Sulpice had not given her a moment of freedom at her house, in which to write a few lines. He might have questioned her and that would be imprudent.
"I wish, however, to tell Guy to expect me!—Where? Rue Cuvier? He would not go there!—No, at his house!"
On the way she found the means.
Vaudrey evidently was at liberty for the day and, master of his time, he would not leave her. This he repeated at every turn of the wheel. She ordered the driver to take her to The Louvre.
"I have purchases to make!"
Sulpice could not accompany her, so he waited for her at the entrance on Place du Palais-Royal, nestled in a corner of the carriage, the blinds of which were lowered in order that he might not be seen. He felt very cold.
Marianne slowly crossed between the stalls on the ground floor, hardly looking at the counters bearing the Japanese goods, the gloves and the artificial flowers. She ascended a winding iron stairway draped with tapestries, her tiny feet sinking into the moquette that covered the steps, and entered a noiseless salon where men and women were silently sitting before three tables, writing or reading, just as in the drawing-room of a hotel. At a large round table, old ladies and young girls sat looking at the pictures in Illustration, the caricatures in the Journal Amusant, and the sketches in La Vie Parisienne. Others, at the second table, were reading the daily papers, some of which were rolled about their holders like a flag around its staff, or the Revue des Deux Mondes. Further on, at a red-covered table furnished with leather-bound blotters and round, glass inkstands in which the ink danced with a purple reflection, people were writing, seated on chairs covered in worn, garnet-colored velvet, with mahogany frames. This gloomy apartment was brightened by broad-leaved green plants, and was lighted from the roof by means of a flat skylight.
Marianne walked direct to the table on which the paper was symmetrically arranged in a stationery rack, and quickly seating herself, she laid her muff down, half-raised her little veil, and beat a tattoo with her tiny hand on the little black leather blotter before her, then taking off her gloves, she took at random some sheets of paper and some envelopes bearing the address of the establishment on the corners. As she looked around for a pen, Marianne could not refrain from smiling, she thought of that poor Sulpice down there, waiting in the carriage and probably shivering in the draughts issuing from the disjointed doors. And he a minister!
"Such is adultery in Paris!" she said to herself, happy to make him suffer.
She did not hurry. She was amused by her surroundings. A uniformed man promenaded the salon, watching the stationery in the cases and replacing it as it was used. If required, he sold stamps to any one present. A letter-box was attached near the tall chimney, bearing the hours of collection.
Beside Marianne, elbow to elbow, and before her, were principally women, some writing with feverish haste, others hesitatingly, and amongst them were two girls opposite her, who as they finished their letters chuckled in a low tone and passed them one to the other, say-to each other, as they chewed their plaid penholders:
"It is somewhat cold, eh! He will say: Eh, well, it is true then!"
The two pretty, cheerful girls before her were doubtless breaking in this way some liaison, amusing themselves by sending an unexpected blow to some poor fellow, and enjoying themselves by spoiling paper; the one writing, the other reading over her companion's shoulder and giving vent to merry laughter under her Hungarian toque, a huge Quaker-collar almost covering her shoulders and her little jacket with its large steel buttons.
This feminine head-gear made Marianne think of Guy. Her eyes, catlike in expression, gleamed maliciously.
She took some paper and essayed to frame some tempting, tender phrases, something nebulous and exciting, but she could not.
"What I would like to write him is that he is a wretch and that I hate him!" she thought.
Then she stopped and looked about her, altogether forgetting Vaudrey.
The contrast between that silent reading-room and the many-colored crowd in that Oriental bazaar, whose murmurs reached her ears like the roaring of a distant sea, and of which she could see only the corner clearly defined by the framework of the doors, amused Marianne, who with a smile on her lips, enjoyed the mischievous delight of fooling a President of the Council.
"At least that avenges me for the cowardice that the other forced me to commit!"
Then mechanically regarding the crowd that flowed through these docks, that contained everything that could please or disgust a whole world at once, the crowd, the clerks, the carpets, the linen, the crowding, the heaping,—all seemed strange and comic to her, novel and not Parisian, but American and up-to-date.
"Oh! decidedly up-to-date!—And so convenient!" she said, as she heard the young girls laugh when they finished their love-letters.
Then she began to write, having surely found the expressions she sought. She sent Rosas a letter of apology: she would be at his house to-morrow at the same hour. To-day, her uncle took up her day, compelling her to go to see his paintings, to visit the Louvre, to buy draperies for an Oriental scene that he intended to paint. If Rosas did not receive the letter in time, it mattered little! To Lissac,—and this was the main consideration,—she intimated that she would call on him the next morning at ten o'clock.
"Rendezvous box!" she said, as she slipped her two letters into the letter-box. "This extreme comfort is very ironical."
She smiled as she thought how long it would take to count the number of the little hands, some trembling, some bold, that had slipped into the rectilinear mouth of the letter-box some little missive that was either the foretaste or the postscript of adultery.
Then she went downstairs and rejoined Vaudrey, who was impatiently tapping the floor of the carriage with his foot.
"I was a long time there, I ask your pardon," said Marianne.
"At any rate, I hope you have bought something that suited you?" asked Vaudrey, who seemed to have caught a cold.
"Nothing at all. There is nothing in that store!"
Vaudrey was alarmed. Were they to visit one after the other all the fancy goods stores?
Marianne took pity on him.
"Let us return, shall we?" she asked.
She called to the coachman: "Rue Prony!" while Sulpice, whom she unwillingly took with her, though he wearily yawned, seized her hand and said as he sneezed:
"Ah! how kind you are!"
The next day, Marianne rang the bell of Lissac's house in Rue d'Aumale, a little before the appointed hour.
"Punctual as a creditor!" she thought.
She reached Guy's, ready for anything. She was very pale and charming in her light costume, and she entered as one would go into a fray with head high. She would not leave the place until she had recovered her letters.
It was only for those scraps of paper that she again, as it were, bound and tied herself to her past; she wished to cut herself away from it and to tear them to pieces with her teeth. But what if Guy should refuse to give them up to her? That could not be possible, although he was sincerely attached to Rosas. Still, between gratitude to a woman and duty to a friend, a man might hesitate, when he is a corrupted Parisian like Lissac.
"His affection for José will not carry him to the length of forgetting all that I have given him of myself!" Marianne thought.
Then shrugging her shoulders:
"After all, these men have such a freemasonry between them, as he said!—And they speak of our fraternity, we women!—It is nothing compared with theirs!"
Guy did not show any displeasure on hearing Mademoiselle Kayser announced. He was waiting for her. As Marianne could not feel free so long as he held the proof of her imprudence, some day or other she must inevitably seek him to supplicate or threaten him. The letter received overnight had apprised him that that moment had arrived.
He had just finished dressing when she entered. His suède gloves were laid out flat on a little table beside his hat, his stick and a small antique cloisonné vase into which were thrown the many-colored rosettes of his foreign decorations, some of them red, amid which a little gold cross glistened like some brilliant beetle settled on a deep-hued rose.
"I wager that you are going out!" Marianne remarked abruptly. "Clearly, you did not expect me!—Haven't you received my letter?"
"My dear Marianne," he replied, as he slowly finished adjusting the knot of his cravat, "that is the very remark you made when you condescended to reappear at my house after a lapse of some years. You have too modest a way of announcing yourself; I assure you that, for my part, I always expect you—and that with impatience. But to-day, more than on any other occasion, because of your charming note."
She knew Guy well enough to perceive that his exquisite politeness only concealed a warlike irony. She did not reply, but stood smiling in front of the fireplace and warmed her toes at the light flames that leapt about the logs.
"You are exceedingly polite," she said at last. "On honor, I like you very much—you laugh? I say very much—Yes, in spite—In no case, have you had aught to complain of me."
She half turned, resting her left hand on the edge of the velvet-covered mantel, and cast a furtive, gentle glance at Lissac that recalled a multitude of happy incidents.
"I have never complained," said the young man, "and I have frequently expressed my thanks!"
Marianne laughed at the discreet manner so ceremoniously adopted by Lissac.
"You are silly, come!—We have a great liking for each other, and it is in the name of that affection that I come to ask a service."
"You have only to speak, my dear Marianne," Lissac answered, as if he had not noticed the intimacy her words expressed.
He affected a cold politeness; Marianne replied to him with apparent renewed tenderness. She looked at him for some time as if she hesitated and feared, her glance penetrating Lissac's, and begging with a tearful petition that wished to kindle a flame in his eyes.
"What I have to say to you will take some time. I am afraid—"
"Of what?" he asked.
"I don't know. You are in a hurry? I interfere with you, perhaps!"
"Not the least in the world. I breakfast at the Club, take a turn in the Bois, and drop in at the Mirlitons to see the opening. You see that I should be entitled to very little merit in sacrificing to you a perfectly wasted day."
"Is the present Exposition of the Mirlitons well spoken of?" asked Marianne, indifferently.
"Very. It is a collection of things that are to be sold for the benefit of a deceased artist. Would you like to go there at four o'clock?"
"No, thanks!—And I repeat, my dear Guy, that I will not hinder you, you know, if I have been indiscreet in giving you an appointment!—"
She seemed to be mechanically toying with the silk rosettes in the little vase; she picked them up and let them drop from her fingers like grains.
"These are yours?" she asked.—"Come near that I may put them on!"
She went to Guy, smilingly, and resting her body against his for its entire length, she paused for a moment while she held the lapel of his jacket, and from head to foot she gazed at him with a look that seemed to impregnate him with odor and turned him pale.
"What an idea, Marianne! I do not wear these ribbons now."
"A childish one. I remember that I was the first to place in this buttonhole some foreign decoration that Monsieur de Rosas brought you—"
She pronounced this name boldly, as if she would bring on the battle.
"That suits you well," she continued. "Orders on your coat are like diamonds in our ears—they are of no use, but they are pretty."
She had passed a red rosette through the buttonhole, and lowering his head, Guy saw her fair brow, her blond locks within reach of his lips. They exhaled a perfume—the odor of hay, that he liked so well—and those woman's fingers on his breast, the fingers of the woman whom he had mocked the previous night at the theatre, caused him a disturbing sensation. He gently disengaged himself, while Marianne repeated: "That suits you well—" Then her hand fell on his and she pressed his fingers in her burning and soft palm and said, as she half lowered her head toward him:
"Do you know why I have come? You know that I am silly. Well, naughty one, the other evening in that box when you punished me with your irony, all my love for you returned!—Ah! how foolish we are, we women! Tell me, Guy, do you recall the glorious days we have spent? Those recollections retain their place in the heart! Has the idea of living again as in the past never occurred to you? It was so sweet!"
Lissac laughed a little nervously and trembled slightly, trying to joke but feeling himself suddenly weakening in the presence of this woman whose wrath or contemptuous smile he preferred.
He recognized all the vanished perfumes. The sensation of trembling delight that years had borne away now returned to him. The silent pressure of the hands recalled nights of distraction. He half shut his eyes, a sudden madness overcame him, although he was sufficiently calm to say to himself that she had an end in view, this woman's coming to him, loveless, to speak of love to him, herself unmoved by the senses, to awaken vanished feelings, to offer herself with the irresistible skill of desire: a dead passion born of caprice.
"Nevertheless, it is you who left me, satiated after taking from me all that you were capable of loving," she said. "Do you know one thing, however, Guy? There is more than one woman in a woman. There are as many as she possesses of passions or joys, and the Marianne of to-day is so different from the one who was your mistress formerly!—You would never leave me, if you were my lover now!"
She tempted this man whose curiosity was aroused, accustomed as he was to casual and easy love adventures. He foresaw danger, but there within reach of his lips were experienced kisses, an ardent supplicant, a proffered delight, full of burning promise. In a sort of anger, he seized the woman who recalled all the past joys, uttered the well-known cries, and who suddenly, as in a nervous attack, deliriously plucked the covering from her bosom, and bared with the boldness of beauty that knows itself to be irresistible, her white arms, her brilliant, untrammeled breasts, the sparkling splendor of her flesh, with her golden hair unfastened, as she used to appear lying on a pillow of fair silk, almost faint and between her kisses, that were as fierce as bites, uttering: "I love you—you—I adore you—" And the lovely, imperious girl again became, almost without a word having been exchanged, the submissive woman carried away by lascivious ardor; and Guy, confused and speechless, no longer reasoning, was unable to say whether Marianne belonged to him, or he to the mistress of former days, become the mistress of to-day.
He held her clasped to him, his hand raising her pale, languishing face about which her fair hair fell loosely; to him she looked like one asleep, her pink nostrils still dilating with a spasmodic movement, and it seemed to him that he had just suffered from the perturbing contact of a courtesan in the depths of some luxurious den.
It was an immediate reawakening, enervating but furious. She had given herself impulsively. He recovered himself similarly. The sudden contact of two bodies resulted in the immediate recoil of two beings.
With more bitter shame, he had had similar morose awakenings after a dissipated night, his heart, his brave heart thumping against the passionate form, often lean and sallow, of some satiated girl, fearfully weary.
What cowardice! Was it Vaudrey's mistress or the future wife of Rosas who had clung to his lips?
He felt disgusted at heart.
Yet she was adorable, this still young and lovely Marianne.
With cruel perspicacity, he already foresaw that he would be guilty of cowardly conduct in yielding to this sudden weakness, and ashamed of himself he disengaged himself from her hysterical embrace, while Marianne squatted on his bed, throwing back her hair from her face, still smiling as she looked at him and asked:
"Well—what? What is the matter with you, then?"
She rose slowly, slipping upon the carpet while he went to the window to look mechanically into the yard. Between these two creatures but a moment before clasped together, a sudden icy coldness sprung up as if each had divined that the hour was about to sound, terrible as a knell, when their affairs must be settled. The kisses of love are to be paid for.
Standing before the mirror, half undressed, Marianne was arranging her hair. Her white shoulders, her still heaving and oppressed bosom were still exposed within the border of her fine chemisette. She felt her wrists, instinctively examining her bracelets, and looked toward the bed in an absent sort of way as if to see if some charm had not slipped from them.
"Guy," she said abruptly, but in a tone which she tried to make endearing, "promise me that you will not refuse what I am about to ask you."
"I promise."
They now quite naturally substituted for the "thou" of affectionate address, the more formal "you," secretly realizing that after the intertwining of their bodies, their real individualities independent of all surprises or sensual appetite, would find themselves face to face.
"I could wish that our affection—and it is profound, is it not, Guy?—dated only from the moment that we have just passed."
"I do not regret the past," he said.
"Nor I! Yet I would like to efface it—yes, by a single stroke!"
She held between her white fingers some rebellious little locks of hair that had come out, which she had rolled and twisted, and casting them into the clear flame, she said:
"See! to burn it like that!—Pft!—"
"Burn it?" Lissac repeated.
He had left the window, returned to Marianne and smiling in his turn, he said:
"Why burn it?—Because it is tiresome or because it is dangerous?"
"Both!" she replied.
She paused for a moment before continuing, drew up over her arms the lace of her chemisette, then half bending her head, and looking at Guy like a creditor of love she said:
"You still have my letters, my dear?"
"Your letters?"
"Those of the old days?"
"That is so," he said. "The past."
He understood everything now.
"You came to ask me to return them?"
"I have been, you must admit, very considerate, not to have claimed them—before!"
"You have been—generous!" answered Lissac, with a gracious smile.
He opened his secrétaire, one of the drawers of which contained little packages folded and tied with bands of silk ribbon, that slept the sleep of forgotten things.
"There are your letters, my dear Marianne! But you have nothing to fear; they have never left this spot."
The eyes of the young woman sparkled with a joyous light. Slowly as if afraid that Guy would not give them to her, she extended her bare arm toward the packet of letters and snatched it suddenly.
"My letters!"
"It is an entire romance," said Lissac.
"Less the epilogue!" she said, still enveloping him with her intense look.
She placed the packet on the velvet-covered mantelpiece and hastily finished dressing. Then taking between her fingers those little letters in their old-fashioned envelopes bearing her monogram, and that still bore traces of a woman's perfume, she looked at them for a moment and said to Lissac:
"You have read them occasionally?"
"I know them by heart!"
"My poor letters!—I was quite sincere, you know, when I wrote you them!—They must be very artless! Yours, that I have burned, were too clever. I remember that one day you wrote me from Holland: 'I pass my life among chefs-d'oeuvre, but my mind is far away from them. I have Rembrandt and Ruysdaël; but the smallest millet seed would be more to my liking: millet is fair!' Well, that was very pretty, but much too refined. True love has no wit.—All this is to convey to you that literature will not lose much by the disappearance of my disconnected scrawls."
She suddenly threw the packet into the fire and watched the letters as they lightly curled, at first spotted with fair patches, and enveloped in light smoke, then bursting into flame that cast its rosy reflection on Marianne's face. Little by little all disappeared save a patch of black powder on the logs, that danced like a mourning veil fluttering in the wind and immediately disappeared up the chimney:—the dust of dead love, the ashes of oaths, all black like mourning crêpe.
Marianne watched the burning of the letters, bending her forehead, while a strange smile played on her lips, and an expression as of triumphant joy gleamed in her eyes.
When the work was done, she raised her head and turned toward Guy and in a quivering voice, she said proudly and insolently:
"Requiescat! See how everything ends! It is a long time since lovers who have ceased to love invented cremation! Nothing is new under the sun!"
She was no longer the same woman. A moment before she manifested a sort of endearing humility, but now she was ironically boastful, looking at Lissac with the air of one triumphing over a dupe. He bit his lips slightly, rubbing his hands together, while examining her sidelong, without affectation. Marianne's ironical smile told him all that she now had to say.
It was not the first time that he had been a witness to such a transformation of the feminine countenance before and after the return of letters. Guy for some time had ceased to be astonished at anything in connection with women.
"Now, my dear," said Marianne, "I hope that you will do me the kindness of allowing me to go on in my own way in life, and that I shall not have the annoyance of finding you again in the way of my purpose."
"I confess," Lissac replied, "that I should be the worst of ingrates if I did not forget many things in consideration of what I owe you, both in the present and in the past. Your burned letters still shed their fragrance!"
Marianne touched the half-consumed logs with the tip of her foot and the débris of the paper fluttered around her shoe like little black butterflies.
"I wish I could have destroyed the past as I have made those letters flame! It weighs on me, it chokes me! You do not imagine, perhaps," she said, "that I have forgiven you for your flight and all that followed it?—If, for a moment, I almost stumbled in the mire, the fault was yours, for I loved you and you abandoned me, as a man forsakes a strumpet.—So, you see, my dear, a woman never forgets it, and I would have cried out long before, if I had felt myself free, free as I am now that those letters are burned, the poor letters of a stupid mistress, confiding in her lover who is overcome with weariness, and who is only thinking of deserting her, while she is still intoxicated in yielding to him—and because I adored you—yes, truly—because I was your mistress, do you arrogate to yourself the right of preventing me from marrying as I wish, and of drawing myself out of the bog into which, perhaps, by your selfishness, I have fallen? Ah, my dear fellow, really I am somewhat surprised at you, I swear!—I said nothing because of those scraps of paper, that you would have been cowardly enough, I assert, to show Rosas and every line of which told how foolish I had been to love you."
"Monsieur de Rosas would never have seen them!" said Lissac severely.
She did not seem to hear him.
"But now, what? Thank God," she continued, "there is nothing, and you have delivered those letters to me that you ought never to have returned. And I have paid you for them, paid for them with new caresses and a last prostitution! Well! that ends it, doesn't it? There is nothing more between us, nothing, nothing, nothing!—And these two beings, who exchanged here their loveless kisses, the kisses of a debauchee and a courtesan, will never recognize each other again, I hope—you hear, never recognize each other again—when they meet in life. Moreover, I will take care to avoid meetings!"
Guy said nothing.
He twirled his moustache slightly and continued to look at Marianne sideways without replying.
This indifference, though doubtless assumed, nevertheless annoyed the young woman.
"Go, find Monsieur de Rosas now!" she said. "Tell him that you have been my lover, he will not believe you."
"I am satisfied of that," Lissac replied very calmly.
She realized a threat in his very calmness. But what had she to fear now?
She fastened her ironical glance on Lissac, the better to defy him, and to enjoy his defeat.
With extended hands, he noiselessly tapped his fingers together, the gesture of a person who waits, sure of himself and displaying a mocking silence.
"Then adieu!" she said abruptly. "I hope that we shall never see each other again!"
"How can you help it?" said Lissac, smiling. "In Paris!"
He sat down on a chair, while Marianne stood, putting on her gloves.
"On my word, my dear Marianne, for a clever woman you are outrageously sanguine."
"I?"
"And credulous! You credit me with the simplicity of the Age of Gold, then?—Is it possible?—Do you think a corrupted Parisian like myself would allow himself to be trifled with like a schoolboy by a woman as extremely seductive as I confess you are? But, my dear friend, the first rule in such matters is only to completely disarm one's self when it is duly proved that peace has been definitely signed and that a return to offensive tactics is not to be feared. You have shown your little pink claws too nimbly, Marianne. Too quickly and too soon. In one of those drawers, there are still one or two letters left, I was about to say, that belong to the series of letters that are slumbering: exquisite, perfumed, eloquent, written in that pretty, fine and firm writing that you have just thrown into the fire, and those letters I would only have given you on your continuing to act fairly. They were my reserve. It is an elementary rule never to use all one's powder at a single shot, and one never burns en bloc such delicate autographs. They are too valuable! Tell me, will you disdain to recognize me when you meet me, Miss Marianne?"
She remained motionless, pale and as if frozen.
"Then you have kept?—" she said.
"A postscriptum, if you like, yes."
"Are you lying now, or did you lie in giving me the packet that has been burned?"
"I did not tell you that the packet was complete, and what I now tell you is the simple truth! I regret it, but you have compelled me to keep my batteries, in too quickly unmasking your own."
Marianne pulled off her gloves in anger.
"If you do not give me everything here that belongs to me, you are a coward; you hear, a coward, Monsieur de Lissac!"
"Oh! your insults are of as little importance as your kisses! but they are less agreeable!"
She clearly saw that she had thrown off the mask too soon, and that Lissac would not now allow himself to be snared by her caresses or disarmed by her threats. The game was lost.
Lost, or merely compromised?
She looked about her with an expression of powerless rage, like a very graceful wild beast enclosed in a cage. Her letters, her last letters must be here, in one of those pieces of furniture whose drawers she might open with her nails. She threw her gloves on the floor and mechanically tore into shreds—as she always did when in a rage—between her nervous fingers, her fine cambric handkerchief reduced to rags.
"Be very careful what you are doing, Guy," she said at last, casting a malicious look at him, "I have purchased these letters from you, for I hate you, I repeat it, and these letters you owe to me as you would owe money promised to a wench. If you do not give them to me, I will have them, notwithstanding."
"Really?"
"I promise you I will."
"And suppose I have burned them?"
"You lie, you have them here, you have kept them. You have behaved toward me like a thief."
"Nonsense, Marianne," said Lissac coldly, "on my faith, I see I have done well to preserve some weapon against you. You are certainly very dangerous!"
"More than you imagine," she replied.
He moved slightly backward, seeing that she wished to pass him to reach the door.
"You will not give me back my letters?" she asked in a harsh and menacing tone as she stood on the threshold of the room.
Guy stooped without heeding her and picked up the gloves that were lying on the carpet and handed them to the young woman:
"This is your property, I think?"
This was said with insolently refined politeness.
Marianne took the gloves, and as a last insult, like a blow on the cheek, she threw them at Guy's face, who turned aside and the gloves fell on the bed where just before these two hatreds had come together in kisses of passion.
"Miserable coward!" said Marianne, surveying Lissac from head to foot with an expression of scorn, while he stood still, his monocle dangling at the end of a fine cord on his breast, near the buttonhole of his jacket that bore the red rosette; his face was pale but wore a sly expression.
That silk rosette looked there like a vermilion note stamped on a dark ground, and it seemed to pierce like a luminous drill into Marianne's eyes; and with her head erect, pallid face and trembling lip she passed before the domestic who hastened to open the door and went downstairs, repeating to herself with all the distracted fury of a fixed idea:
"To be avenged! To be avenged! Oh! to be avenged!"
She jumped into a cab.
"Well?"—said the coachman, looking with blinking eyes at this pale-faced, distraught-looking woman.
She remained there as if seeking an idea, a purpose.
"Where shall we go?" repeated the driver.
Suddenly Marianne's face trembled with a joyous expression and she abruptly said:
"To the Prefecture of Police!"
The general rose, grasping his glass as if he would shiver it, and while the parfait overflowed on to the plates, he cried in a hoarse voice, as if he were at the head of his division:
"I love bronze—I love bronze—...."
