“How do you know that?” asked the attache. “Thank God, though I pour out a flood of words, I have already acquired the art of not telling more than I intend, like all the other diplomatic apprentices I know.”
“You told me, I assure you.”
Monsieur de Longueville looked at Mademoiselle de Fontaine with a surprise that was full of perspicacity. A suspicion flashed upon him. He glanced inquiringly from his brother to his partner, guessed everything, clasped his hands, fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and began to laugh, saying, “I am an idiot! You are the handsomest person here; my brother keeps stealing glances at you; he is dancing in spite of his illness, and you pretend not to see him. Make him happy,” he added, as he led her back to her old uncle. “I shall not be jealous, but I shall always shiver a little at calling you my sister——”
The lovers, however, were to prove as inexorable to each other as they were to themselves. At about two in the morning, refreshments were served in an immense corridor, where, to leave persons of the same coterie free to meet each other, the tables were arranged as in a restaurant. By one of those accidents which always happen to lovers, Mademoiselle de Fontaine found herself at a table next to that at which the more important guests were seated. Maximilien was of the group. Emilie, who lent an attentive ear to her neighbors’ conversation, overheard one of those dialogues into which a young woman so easily falls with a young man who has the grace and style of Maximilien Longueville. The lady talking to the young banker was a Neapolitan duchess, whose eyes shot lightning flashes, and whose skin had the sheen of satin. The intimate terms on which Longueville affected to be with her stung Mademoiselle de Fontaine all the more because she had just given her lover back twenty times as much tenderness as she had ever felt for him before.
“Yes, monsieur, in my country true love can make every kind of sacrifice,” the Duchess was saying, in a simper.
“You have more passion than Frenchwomen,” said Maximilien, whose burning gaze fell on Emilie. “They are all vanity.”
“Monsieur,” Emilie eagerly interposed, “is it not very wrong to calumniate your own country? Devotion is to be found in every nation.”
“Do you imagine, mademoiselle,” retorted the Italian, with a sardonic smile, “that a Parisian would be capable of following her lover all over the world?”
“Oh, madame, let us understand each other. She would follow him to a desert and live in a tent but not to sit in a shop.”
A disdainful gesture completed her meaning. Thus, under the influence of her disastrous education, Emile for the second time killed her budding happiness, and destroyed its prospects of life. Maximilien’s apparent indifference, and a woman’s smile, had wrung from her one of those sarcasms whose treacherous zest always let her astray.