“Madame,” said the prince of Bohemia, coldly, “if you wish me for your friend, I consent; but on one condition only.”
“Condition!” she exclaimed.
“Yes; the following condition. You must be reconciled to Monsieur de Rochefide; you must recover the honor of your position; you must return to your handsome house in the due d’Anjou and be once more one of the queens of Paris. You can do this by making Rochefide play a part in politics, and putting into your own conduct the persistency which Madame d’Espard has displayed. That is the situation necessary for the woman to whom I do the honor to give myself.”
“But you forget that Monsieur de Rochefide’s consent is necessary.”
“Oh, my dear child,” said La Palferine, “we have arranged all that; I have given my word of honor as a gentleman that you are worth all the Schontzes of the quartier Saint-Georges, and you must fulfil my pledge.”
For the next week Calyste went every day to Madame de Rochefide’s door, only to be refused by Antoine, who said with a studied face, “Madame is ill.”
From there Calyste hurried to La Palferine’s lodging, where the valet answered, “Monsieur le comte is away, hunting.” Each time this happened the Breton baron left a letter for La Palferine.
On the ninth day Calyste received a line from La Palferine, making an appointment to receive him. He hurried to his lodgings and found the count, but in company with Maxime de Trailles, to whom the young roue no doubt wished to give proof of his savoir-faire by making him a witness of this scene.
“Monsieur le baron,” began Charles-Edouard, tranquilly, “here are the six letters you have done me the honor to write to me. They are, as you see, safe and sound; they have not been unsealed. I knew in advance what they were likely to contain, having learned that you have been seeking me since the day when I looked at you from the window of a house from which you had looked at me on the previous day. I thought I had better ignore all mistaken provocations. Between ourselves, I am sure you have too much good taste to be angry with a woman for no longer loving you. It is always a bad means of recovering her to seek a quarrel with the one preferred. But, in the present case, your letters have a radical fault, a nullity, as the lawyers say. You have too much good sense, I am sure, to complain of a husband who takes back his wife. Monsieur de Rochefide has felt that the position of the marquise was undignified. You will, therefore, no longer find Madame de Rochefide in the rue de Chartres, but—six months hence, next winter—in the hotel de Rochefide. You flung yourself rather heedlessly into the midst of a reconciliation between husband and wife,—which you provoked yourself by not saving Madame de Rochefide from the humiliation to which she was subjected at the Opera. On coming away, the marquise, to whom I had already carried certain amicable proposals from her husband, took me up in her carriage, and her first words were, ‘Bring Arthur back to me!’”
“Ah! yes,” cried Calyste, “she was right; I was wanting in true devotion.”