“Yesterday’s discovery has, all the same, not destroyed Bonnivet’s jealousy, I repeat, since he returned home during my visit, and if Camille does not keep her promise his suspicion may be aroused again.”
“But with this distrust and the knowledge he possesses of your rooms,” I said, “your appointments will not be very easy to make.”
“It is for that reason that Madam de Bonnivet will not fail to keep one now. She is a curious and bored woman, and her commonplace adventure with me has at last given her the tremor,” he added smilingly. “Ah, ah, she is of the same nature as the divine marquis to some extent. But you don’t understand these things at all, my dear boy. As for the address of the rooms, the fact that Bonnivet knows it will make no difference. Having seen me leave there with Camille, he will never believe me capable of taking the other one to the Rue Nouvelle.”
“You will go on then without any fear?”
“Yes. I was frightened yesterday when I heard the ringing and knocking at the door, and I repeat that I am sometimes afraid of my luck. It is as stupid as believing in the evil eye, but the feeling, is stronger than I am.”
“There is no doubt that in Camille,” I replied, “you have met the only woman in Paris capable of such an action. If you had even a little bit of heart, you would spend your life in making her pardon your infamy.”
“My dear boy,” he interrupted, “then you will never understand that she only loves me like that because she understands that I do not love her. Then,” he added, shrugging his shoulders, “without doubt it is a question of personality, I desire the other one and I do not desire Camille. This explanation of love is not brilliant, and if the abstractors of quintessence who subtilize upon the sentiment, like your friend Dorsenne, gave it in one of their books, they would lose their feminine clientele, their twenty-five thousand skirts I call it. I myself am neither an analyst nor a psychologist, and I maintain that this explanation is the true one.”
“So he told you everything!” Camille said ironically when I saw her the day after this conversation. I had written to her, to be sure and not miss her. I found her pale with eyes burning from insomnia. She was in the little drawing-room in the Rue de la Barouillére, which always looked so commonplace, poor and grey, while its canvas-covered furniture gave it the appearance of a room prepared for moving. “Did he boast also of the delicacy with which his wretch of a mistress thanked me? Here,” and she handed me a leather case with her monogram upon it, C.F., which I had noticed her fingering nervously for five minutes. I opened the case, which contained, glistening upon black velvet, a massive gold bracelet incrested with diamonds. It was one of those jewels in which the work of the goldsmith is reduced to a minimum, and of which the brutal richness makes the present an equivalent of a cheque or a roll of sovereigns. I looked at the bracelet, then I looked at Camille with a look in which she could read my surprise at the method employed by Madam de Bonnivet to pay her for her devotion.
“Yes,” the actress went on, and, in a tone of disgust which made me ill, she repeated: “Yes, that is the object which came this very evening with my coat. It is my medal for bravery,” she sneered. “My first object as soon as I go out will be to give the wretch a lesson in delicacy!”
“Be content with returning the jewel through Jacques to her,” I suggested. “A scene would be too unworthy of you. When a person has the whip hand, which you most certainly have, it is wise to keep it to the end.”