“Why, it is M. de Bonnivet!”
“Good gracious, mademoiselle,” Queen Anne’s husband stammered after a moment’s dead silence, “I must have seemed very strange to you just now, but I thought I recognized some one else.” In his hesitation a sudden, immense and unhoped-for joy quivered. The jealous husband had a proof that his suspicions were false. “I thought I recognized the friend of a friend of mine, and in Molan the friend himself. You will excuse me, will you not? What would have been a joke to her becomes to a person like yourself, whom I admire so much, and with whom I am so little acquainted, an unpardonable familiarity.”
“You are quite forgiven,” said Camille with a laugh, adding with as much presence of mind as if she had pronounced the phrase on the Vaudeville stage in the course of an imaginary crisis, instead of finding herself face to face with a real danger: “I live quite close here. I asked the famous author to see me home after rehearsal, and I had scruples about letting him return alone and on foot to civilization. I am going to get into my cab and leave you my cavalier to accompany you, M. de Bonnivet. Molan will explain to you that a woman can be an actress and a simple ordinary woman as well, very simple and very ordinary. Good-bye, Molan; good-bye, sir.”
She bowed her pretty head coquettishly, enveloping the two men in her lovely smile, and made towards the left side of the church where the sacristy was, while Jacques said to Bonnivet putting his finger to his lips—
“Because of her mother, you know.”
“I understand, you bad boy,” the other man replied with a hearty laugh. He continued to feel that gaiety of deliverance, so sweet as to be almost intoxicating, on emerging from a torturing crisis like the one he had just been through. He could have kissed where he stood the lover of his wife, whom he had all day been planning to kill, and he pushed him into his carriage, which was splashed with mud right up to the box through this fierce pursuit across Paris, saying as he did so: “Where shall I drop you? You know your Mademoiselle Favier is quite charming, with such distinction of manner too! She had such a way, too, of justifying her drive with you! Mind, I am asking no questions. I will apologize again to her when she is acting at my house. You might do so, too, for me, if you don’t mind! A likeness, you know, and at that hour a mistake is so easily made.”
CHAPTER IX
The emotion experienced by Camille during this dramatic adventure, suddenly determined upon, thanks to her presence of mind, in a theatrical catastrophe, had been so strong that directly she was out of sight of the two men she felt like fainting. All she could do was to get into a cab and drive to the Rue de la Barouillére. There a real attack of nervous fever prostrated her and made her go to bed. So it was not from her that I learned this episode in which she played a part so naturally, spontaneously, magnanimously, and generously. It was a noble part which suited the noble heart revealed by her beautiful blue eyes, by her proud mouth, and by her well bred and charming personality! Otherwise, had she been well enough to get out, on the day following this dreadful day she would have hastened to me to complete her sorrowful confidence of her first surprise by her second confidence of her heroic sacrifice for her most unworthy lover. But persons capable of acting as she had acted do not boast.
It was Molan himself who first told me the details of these almost incredible scenes—at least those he knew, Camille herself having since completed them. The subtle feline person had two reasons for making me acquainted with this adventure, in which he still played a flattering part—current morality being taken for granted—of a man loved to distraction by one of the most elegant and courted women in Paris, and to martyrdom by one of the prettiest actresses not only in Paris but in Europe. The first of these two reasons was his natural fatuity, and the second his interest. He was afraid that after such an experience the devotion of the Blue Duchess would shrink from another ordeal, that of acting a comedy at the house of the rival she had saved. Now he considered, not without good reason, that Camille’s presence at Madam de Bonnivet’s party was the indispensable conclusion of the scene in the Place Saint François Xavier. The husband’s suspicions must have been strongly aroused to have gone to the extremity of espionage, and there was no answer to this phrase with which Molan completed his disclosure.