Was he going to leave without her, going away with the certainty of never seeing her again? What! he would fly, pursued by all the police of the civilized world, tracked like a wild beast, and she would remain peaceably in Paris? Was it possible? For whom then had he committed this crime? For her. Who would have reaped the benefits of it? She. Was it not just, then, that she should bear her share of the punishment?
“She does not love me,” thought the advocate bitterly, “she never loved me. She would be delighted to be forever free of me. She will not regret me, for I am no longer necessary to her. An empty coffer is a useless piece of furniture. Juliette is prudent; she has managed to save a nice little fortune. Grown rich at my expense, she will take some other lover. She will forget me, she will live happily, while I—And I was about to go away without her!”
The voice of prudence cried out to him: “Unhappy man! to drag a woman along with you, and a pretty woman too, is but to stupidly attract attention upon you, to render flight impossible, to give yourself up like a fool.”
“What of that?” replied passion. “We will be saved or we will perish together. If she does not love me, I love her; I must have her! She will come, otherwise—”
But how to see Juliette, to speak with her, to persuade her. To go to her house, was a great risk for him to run. The police were perhaps there already.
“No,” thought Noel; “no one knows that she is my mistress. It will not be found out for two or three days and, besides, it would be more dangerous still to write.”
He took a cab not far from the Carrefour de l’Observatoire, and in a low tone told the driver the number of the house in the Rue de Provence, which had proved so fatal to him. Stretched on the cushions of the cab, lulled by its monotonous jolts, Noel gave no thought to the future, he did not even think over what he should say to Juliette. No. He passed involuntarily in review the events which had brought on and hastened the catastrophe, like a man on the point of death, reviews the tragedy or the comedy of his life.
Just one month before, ruined, at the end of his expedients and absolutely without resources, he had determined, cost what it might, to procure money, so as to be able to continue to keep Madame Juliette, when chance placed in his hands Count de Commarin’s correspondence. Not only the letters read to old Tabaret, and shown to Albert, but also those, which, written by the count when he believed the substitution an accomplished fact, plainly established it.
The reading of these gave him an hour of mad delight.
He believed himself the legitimate son; but his mother soon undeceived him, told him the truth, proved to him by several letters she had received from Widow Lerouge, called on Claudine to bear witness to it, and demonstrated it to him by the scar he bore.