"It is Julien's sparrow and I love it," replied Julie. "Here, do you want to kill it? Here it is!"
Her manner of speaking, her livid pallor, and the savagely indifferent air with which she offered him the poor little bird, all warm with her kisses, made a profound impression on Monsieur Antoine. He looked at Marcel as if to say: "Is she mad, I wonder?" and instead of twisting the sparrow's neck as he would have done three months earlier, he pushed it away, saying stupidly:
"Psha! psha! keep the thing! There's no great harm in it!"
"You are so kind!" rejoined Julie, with the same feverish bitterness. "You have come to receive my thanks, haven't you? You know that I accept everything, that I am happy now, that I no longer love anything or anybody, that you have done me the very greatest service, and that you can say to God every night: 'I have been good and great like unto Thee!'"
Monsieur Antoine stood with his mouth open, uncertain whether Madame d'Estrelle said these things to make sport of him or to thank him; too cunning to trust, too dull to understand.
"She is going to fly in my face," he whispered to Marcel. "You deceived me, you rascal!"
"No, uncle," Marcel replied aloud. "Madame la comtesse is thanking you. She is very ill, as you see; do not ask her to make long speeches."
Marcel had relied on the impression that the alteration in Julie's features would probably produce on Monsieur Antoine. That impression was in truth profound. He stared at her with a dazed, cruel, yet terrified expression, and said to himself with a joy not unmingled with terror: "That is my work!"
"Madame," he said, after a moment's hesitation, "I said that I would be revenged on you, that I would force you to ask my pardon for your insults. Do you want to get through with it and admit that you were in the wrong? I ask nothing but that."
"What is my offence?" said Julie. "Explain it so that I may know what it is."