‘Ventre St. Bleu, my friend! we are fated to odd rencontres,’ cried Brinvilliers. ‘You have begun the night by protecting my wife; you finish it by robbing me of a mistress.’
‘No, no!’ cried the girl, an actress at the theatre in the Rue du Temple. ‘I am no mistress of his: it is against my will that I am here: he carried me off from my mother’s. Save me, Monsieur de Sainte-Croix!’
‘Pardon, mademoiselle,’ returned Gaudin, sheathing his sword. ‘I cannot interfere in an affair of gallantry. Au revoir, Marquis, and success attend your wooing.’
So saying he resigned the poor girl, who continued to shriek and implore his aid in heart-rending entreaties, to the Marquis. Kissing his hand, he remounted the fiacre, which was by this time disengaged. And each proceeded on his way; the husband to his amour, the gallant to his wife!
The Hôtel d’Aubray, in which the Marchioness of Brinvilliers resided with her father, Monsieur Dreux d’Aubray, Lieutenant-civil of the city of Paris, was a massive building, as we have stated, in the Rue Neuve St. Paul, lately erected by Lemercier. The fiacre rolled under its arched gateway, encrusted with the cupids and wreaths which characterised the ornamental architecture of the period, and stopped in the court-yard. Except on the entresol, where a light shone from the window of the Marchioness’s boudoir, the heavy square was dark and silent. Françoise was on the watch, and admitting Sainte-Croix by an escalier dérobé led him, with a light step, to a door concealed by tapestry, where, knocking with three low raps, she left him. The door opened, and Sainte-Croix, for the second time that night, stood face to face with the Marchioness of Brinvilliers.
It was a low but spacious room. Heavy curtains of rich, dark damask almost hid the two windows. The floor was covered with a soft Persian carpet—a luxury then unusual in Paris—and the air was heavy with the perfume that wreathed in thin, blue smoke from a silver cassolette on the carved marble mantelshelf, over which hung a full-length portrait of the Marchioness, painted with all the elaborate finish of Mignard’s pencil, but scarcely so lovely as the original, on whom Sainte-Croix was gazing with a passion quite unaffected by the contempt he felt for her. On a table near the fire were piled rare fruits, and the reflection of the ruddy flame leapt and sparkled in the silver wine-flagons and tall-stemmed Venetian glasses.
On a settee beside the table sat Marie, in studied disarray. She might have been made up after one of Guido’s Magdalens, so beautiful were her rounded shoulders—so dishevelled her light hair—so little of real grief in her swimming eye, and so much of voluptuous abandonment in the attitude of resignation she wore when Sainte-Croix entered the room.
He comprehended all the artifice in a moment; but there are states of feeling in which trickery, so far from inspiring disgust, is most acceptable. All truth and sincerity was at an end between them; and the only tie that yet held them together—that of passion—has a craving for such dexterity as the Marchioness had exhibited in the mise en scène of herself and her boudoir. Without an effort to resist its influence, and with a voluntary yielding up, for the moment, of his scorn and bitterness, Sainte-Croix passed on to the couch, and sinking at his mistress’s feet, felt her hands entwine his neck, and her long hair mingling with his own, as her rosy mouth, pressed to his forehead, half-sighed, half-whispered, ‘Forgive!’
Not a word was spoken. A more perfect adept in all the arts of gallantry than Sainte-Croix never encountered a more passionate and more calculating woman than Marie de Brinvilliers.
‘Gaudin!’ said the Marchioness, in a low, sweet voice, ‘you love me—still?’