The words fell like an avalanche of snow on a burning crater. Lisbeth sat down. She gazed with despondent eyes on the youth before her, on his aristocratic beauty—the artist’s brow, the splendid hair, everything that appealed to her suppressed feminine instincts, and tiny tears moistened her eyes for an instant and immediately dried up. She looked like one of those meagre statues which the sculptors of the Middle Ages carved on monuments.
“I cannot curse you,” said she, suddenly rising. “You—you are but a boy. God preserve you!”
She went downstairs and shut herself into her own room.
“She is in love with me, poor creature!” said Wenceslas to himself. “And how fervently eloquent! She is crazy.”
This last effort on the part of an arid and narrow nature to keep hold on an embodiment of beauty and poetry was, in truth, so violent that it can only be compared to the frenzied vehemence of a shipwrecked creature making the last struggle to reach shore.
On the next day but one, at half-past four in the morning, when Count Steinbock was sunk in the deepest sleep, he heard a knock at the door of his attic; he rose to open it, and saw two men in shabby clothing, and a third, whose dress proclaimed him a bailiff down on his luck.
“You are Monsieur Wenceslas, Count Steinbock?” said this man.
“Yes, monsieur.”
“My name is Grasset, sir, successor to Louchard, sheriff’s officer——”
“What then?”