"Ah! Madame de Mortsauf is dead; your poor brother has, no doubt, gone to Clochegourde."
"Are you aware, monsieur," resumed the marquise, turning to Eugene, "that what you have just said is a great impertinence?"
"If I did not know the strictness of your principles," he answered, naively, "I should think that you wished either to give me ideas which I deny myself, or else to tear a secret from me. But perhaps you are only amusing yourself with me."
The marquise smiled. That smile annoyed Eugene.
"Madame," he said, "can you still believe in an offence I have not committed? I earnestly hope that chance may not enable you to discover the name of the person who ought to have read that letter."
"What! can it be still Madame de Nucingen?" cried Madame de Listomere, more eager to penetrate that secret than to revenge herself for the impertinence of the young man's speeches.
Eugene colored. A man must be more than twenty-five years of age not to blush at being taxed with a fidelity that women laugh at—in order, perhaps, not to show that they envy it. However, he replied with tolerable self-possession:—
"Why not, madame?"
Such are the blunders we all make at twenty-five.
This speech caused a violent commotion in Madame de Listomere's bosom; but Rastignac did not yet know how to analyze a woman's face by a rapid or sidelong glance. The lips of the marquise paled, but that was all. She rang the bell for wood, and so constrained Rastignac to rise and take his leave.