I left her, as usual, towards two or three in the morning. As usual, also, I returned by the park, and reached home by a roundabout way. I have explained the way I took, and how I had to leap a wide ditch so as to reach the park from the open country. In order to avoid making the same jump three or four times a week, which was a very perilous feat on dark nights, I made a very big heap of stones in one corner of the ditch, so that I had only to make for this particular corner and then make my jump in two leaps.
On this particular night, as I leapt into the ditch, I noticed a shadow four paces off me, that looked slightly less caressing than that which had awaited me in the garden, and drawn me inside the summer-house. This shadow held an actual, stout stick—not the shade of one—in all its knotty reality. Directly I attained to manhood's estate, and whenever danger faced me, whether by night or by day, I may proudly record that I always marched straight on towards that danger. I walked right up to the man with the stick. The stick rose, and I clutched it in my hand. Then followed, in that dark ditch, one of the severest tussles I have ever had in my life. I was indeed the person he was lying in wait for, the person he wished to meet. The man who was waiting for me had blackened his face; consequently I could not recognise him; but without recognising him I guessed who he was. He was a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five; I was scarcely eighteen, but I was well broken in to all physical exercises, especially to wrestling. I succeeded in taking hold of him round the body and twisting him under me. His head struck on a stone with a heavy sound. No word passed on either side; but he must have been hurt. I felt him fumbling in his pocket, and I knew he was hunting for his knife. I seized his hand above the wrist, and managed to twist him so that his fingers opened, and the knife dropped. Then, by a quick move, I got hold of the knife. For one second a terrible temptation assailed me, to do what was indeed my right, namely, to open the knife and to plunge it into my antagonist's breast. That moment a man's life hung by a thread: had my anger broken that thread, the man would have been killed! I had sufficient control over myself to get up. I still held the knife in one hand, I took the stick by the other, and, fortified by these two weapons, I allowed my adversary to rise too. He took a step backwards, and stooped to pick up the stone against which he had hurt his head; but just as he was lifting himself up, I hit him with the end of the stick on the chest and he fell back ten paces. This time he seemed to lose consciousness completely, for he did not get up again. I climbed the embankment from the ditch and got away from the place as fast as I could: this unexpected attack had revealed such a spirit of hatred that I feared treachery might follow. No one else put in an appearance, and I reached home very much upset, I must confess, by this incident. I had certainly escaped from one of the most serious dangers I had ever incurred in my life.
This event brought very serious consequences to a person who had had nothing to do with the affair, and led me to commit the only evil action I have to reproach myself with during the course of my life. The blame attaching to this evil deed is all the greater as it was committed against a woman. I can only say that it was committed without any premeditation. I reached home, as I have said, very glad to have escaped with nothing worse than a few bruises, and very proud at the end of the fray to have overthrown my enemy.
Next morning I went to de la Ponce. As such an attack might be renewed under more disadvantageous circumstances than those from which I had just escaped, I wanted to borrow from him the pocket-pistols I had seen in his rooms. It was difficult to borrow them from him without telling him why I wanted them. I told him. But as it would have revealed, or almost revealed, the house I came away from, if I had told him the true locality of the struggle, I indicated another place altogether. I selected, hap-hazard, a spot near the manège, in a little narrow street, where three houses had their entrances. The first of these three houses was inhabited by Hippolyte Leroy, the ex-body-guardsman of whom I have already spoken in connection with our misadventures at M. Collard's, and who was soon to become my cousin by marrying Augustine; the second by the de Leuven family; and the third by the lawyer to whom Maître Mennesson had related the misadventures of my early love-making and who, as I have already mentioned, had married Éléonore, the second daughter of M. Deviolaine by his first marriage. I have related also, when speaking of M. Lebègue, how the charming nature and sociable spirit of his wife had roused suspicion and dislike in a little town, where superiority of any kind is a reason for jealousy. Now I had told others besides de la Ponce of the nocturnal attack of which I had very nearly been a victim; and to others also, as well as to de la Ponce, in order to divert suspicions, I had mentioned the same locality by the manège of which I have just spoken. Where could I have been coming from, at two in the morning, when I was attacked near the manage! It could not have been from Hippolyte Leroy's; it could not have been from Adolphe de Leuven's. It must then have been from M. Lebègue's—or rather, from Madame Lebègue's. This wicked suggestion, entirely incorrect as it was, could only be supported by some semblance of a foundation.
I was a very easy prey to being teased, perhaps because I laid myself open to it by my defenceless condition, and neither Madame Lebègue nor her sisters spared me. Madame Lebègue was pretty, witty and a flirt: she waved the most charming and gracious gestures imaginable to her friends at a distance; whilst at closer quarters she allowed them to look at, admire and even kiss her hand, with that aristocratic indifference assumed by women who are the possessors of pretty hands. It was her only sin, poor woman. The crime was great, but the hand was pretty. I was exceedingly fond of Madame Lebègue; I liked her, I can confess to-day, with a feeling that might even have got beyond the bounds of friendly affection, if she had consented to more; but she had never given me the least encouragement, and whenever I was near her, her superior wit, her woman-of-the-world manners, her fine-lady airs, would send me into the deepest depths of that shyness of which I had given such glaring proofs during my earliest love-makings.
One day, without knowing whence this rumour had sprung, without suspecting the cause that had given rise to it, I heard it whispered that I was Madame Lebègue's lover. I ought at once to have quenched this rumour with indignant denials; I ought to have treated the calumny with the justice it deserved. I was wicked enough to refute it half-heartedly, and in such a fashion that my vain denial bore every appearance of a confession. And of course the ill-natured rumour served my own purposes to perfection. Poor silly fool that I was! I had a momentary delight, an hour's pride, in this rumour, which ought to have made me blush with shame, for I had allowed an untrue statement to be believed. I soon suffered for my mean action. First of all, the rumour set me at variance with the person herself whom it concerned: Madame Lebègue thought me more guilty than I was; she accused me of having started the scandal. She was mistaken there: I had allowed it to live, allowed it to grow, that was all. True, that was bad enough. She forbade me her house, the house my mother and I both loved, and it became hostile to us both ever after. Madame Lebègue never forgave me. On two or three occasions during my life I have felt the prick of the needle of the vengeance she vowed against me. I never attempted to return the injuries received; I felt, in my heart of hearts, I had deserved them. Whenever since I have met Madame Lebègue, I have turned away my head and lowered my eyes before her glance. The guilty one tacitly confessed his crime. To-day he openly avows it. But now the confession has been made, I can boldly face the rest of the world of men or women and say, "You may look me in the face and try to make me blush, if you can!"
The day after my struggle I had the curiosity to visit the scene of battle. I had not been mistaken: the stone on which my enemy's head had crashed was stained with blood at its sharpest end, and the colour of a few hairs, stuck to the bloody stone, confirmed my suspicions—which now became a definite certainty when furnished with this last proof. That night I saw Adèle: she was still ignorant of what had happened to me. I told her everything; I told her whom I suspected: she refused to believe it.
Just at that moment, a surgeon, named Raynal, went past; I had seen him that morning come from the direction which led to the house of my wounded enemy. I went up to him.
"What is the matter?" I asked him. "Why have you been sent for this morning?"
"What is the matter, boy?" he replied in his Provençal accent.