“No, no!” she said, almost with affright; “we should be too unhappy. I can do no more to make you happy, but while there is a breath of life in me, I will be the slave of your fancies. At whatever hour of the day or night you will, come, and I will be yours; but do not link your future any more with mine, you would be too unhappy and you would make me too unhappy. I shall still be pretty for a while; make the most of it, but ask nothing more.”
When she had gone, I was frightened at the solitude in which she left me. Two hours afterward I was still sitting on the side of the bed, looking at the pillow which kept the imprint of her form, and asking myself what was to become of me, between my love and my jealousy.
At five o’clock, without knowing what I was going to do, I went to the Rue d’Antin.
Nanine opened to me.
“Madame can not receive you,” she said in an embarrassed way.
“Why?”
“Because M. le Comte de N. is there, and he has given orders to let no one in.”
“Quite so,” I stammered; “I forgot.”
I went home like a drunken man, and do you know what I did during the moment of jealous delirium which was long enough for the shameful thing I was going to do? I said to myself that the woman was laughing at me; I saw her alone with the count, saying over to him the same words that she had said to me in the night, and taking a five-hundred-franc note I sent it to her with these words:
“You went away so suddenly that I forgot to pay you. Here is the price of your night.”