She desired to remain a few days longer in Paris, delighted to proclaim her new name in its streets, its Bois and its theatres, where she had been known in her sadness, displaying her desperate melancholy. It seemed to her that, in her present triumph, she crushed both men and things. What was Naples to her? She had not miserably dragged her disillusions and her angers along the Chiaja. Florence might take her for a duchess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame for her follies, her hopes, her failures, her heartbreaks, her deceptions, all her sorrows of an ambitious woman, which had made her the daring woman that she was,—those boulevards, those paths about the Lake, those proscenium boxes at the theatre, she would see them in her triumph, as she had seen them in her untrammelled follies or in the moments of her ruin and abandonment.
"Two days more! One day more," she said. "After the first representation at the Variétés, we will leave, are you willing?"
"Ah! you Parisienne! Hungry Parisienne!" José replied.
She looked at him with her gray eyes sparkling, and smiling.
"The Variétés?—Don't you know the old rondel?—The one you hummed when you were sick, you know?—It seems to me that I can hear it yet:
Do you see yonder
That white house,
Where every Sunday
Under the sweet lilacs—"
Uncle Kayser, ever prudent, advised a speedy departure. He feared he scarcely knew what. He feared everything, "like Abner, and feared only that." Every morning he dreaded seeing some indiscreet articles in the papers respecting the Duke and the Duchesse de Rosas.
"These journalists disregard, without scruple, the wall of private life! It is a moral wall, however!"
At last, they would leave in two days, so it was determined. Rosas had wished to see Guy again for the last time. At Rue d'Aumale they informed him that Monsieur de Lissac was travelling. The shutters of the apartment were not, however, closed. The duke had for a moment been tempted to insist on entering; then he withdrew and returned home without analyzing too closely the feeling of annoyance that came over him. The weather was splendid and dry. He returned on foot to Avenue Montaigne, where he expected to find Marianne superintending her trunks.
On entering the house, the doors of which were open, as at the hour of packing and removing, giving the whole house the appearance of neglect and flight, he was astonished to hear a man's voice, which was neither that of Simon Kayser nor that of the valet, and evidently answering in a violent tone the equally evident angry voice of Marianne.