"I confess," Lissac replied, "that I should be the worst of ingrates if I did not forget many things in consideration of what I owe you, both in the present and in the past. Your burned letters still shed their fragrance!"
Marianne touched the half-consumed logs with the tip of her foot and the débris of the paper fluttered around her shoe like little black butterflies.
"I wish I could have destroyed the past as I have made those letters flame! It weighs on me, it chokes me! You do not imagine, perhaps," she said, "that I have forgiven you for your flight and all that followed it?—If, for a moment, I almost stumbled in the mire, the fault was yours, for I loved you and you abandoned me, as a man forsakes a strumpet.—So, you see, my dear, a woman never forgets it, and I would have cried out long before, if I had felt myself free, free as I am now that those letters are burned, the poor letters of a stupid mistress, confiding in her lover who is overcome with weariness, and who is only thinking of deserting her, while she is still intoxicated in yielding to him—and because I adored you—yes, truly—because I was your mistress, do you arrogate to yourself the right of preventing me from marrying as I wish, and of drawing myself out of the bog into which, perhaps, by your selfishness, I have fallen? Ah, my dear fellow, really I am somewhat surprised at you, I swear!—I said nothing because of those scraps of paper, that you would have been cowardly enough, I assert, to show Rosas and every line of which told how foolish I had been to love you."
"Monsieur de Rosas would never have seen them!" said Lissac severely.
She did not seem to hear him.
"But now, what? Thank God," she continued, "there is nothing, and you have delivered those letters to me that you ought never to have returned. And I have paid you for them, paid for them with new caresses and a last prostitution! Well! that ends it, doesn't it? There is nothing more between us, nothing, nothing, nothing!—And these two beings, who exchanged here their loveless kisses, the kisses of a debauchee and a courtesan, will never recognize each other again, I hope—you hear, never recognize each other again—when they meet in life. Moreover, I will take care to avoid meetings!"
Guy said nothing.
He twirled his moustache slightly and continued to look at Marianne sideways without replying.
This indifference, though doubtless assumed, nevertheless annoyed the young woman.
"Go, find Monsieur de Rosas now!" she said. "Tell him that you have been my lover, he will not believe you."