A mistress! what mistress? Marianne Kayser! Oh, that woman of whom Sulpice had so often spoken in an indifferent manner, that pretty creature, so often seen, seductive, wonderfully beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, it was she! Your mistress! Sulpice had a mistress! He lied, he deceived. He? She was betrayed! Was it possible? If it were possible? But it was true! Eh! parbleu, yes, it was true—And this, then, was why they had sent her this horrible article! She knew now.
She had been tempted to enter the room suddenly, to throw herself between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling her!—Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.
At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense of outraged modesty.
Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses, clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases—caprices, nothing serious, whim, madness—so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.
"Will you never forgive me?" he asked at last, not knowing too well what he said.
"Never!" she said coldly.
She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had felt of weakness, she crossed the room.
"Are you going away?" stammered Sulpice.
"Yes, I must be alone—Ah! quite alone," she said, with a sort of gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.
He stopped and said, as if by chance: