“She is not at your rooms, is she?” the woman asked struck by my embarrassment. Her suspicion revealed to me what passionate affection she bore the little one, as she called Camille. The mother’s despair and the servant’s distraction completed the breaking of my heart. Once more I realized in what an atmosphere of naïve and simple tenderness the poor Blue Duchess had grown up. She had been one of those little girls whose coming into the world is treated as a festival, and the steps towards their womanhood are festivals too: baptism, birthdays, her first sacrament, and her first long dress—and all that for the object of so much moving solicitude to end in the defilement of gallantry! The faithful servant continued like a naïve echo of my own bitter thoughts: “No, she cannot be with you or M. Molan, nor with M. Fomberteau; you are all of you too good fellows to turn a girl like her into a kept woman. She will be that now, Camille, Camille, Camille!”
Forgetting her own precautions to prevent the gossip of the porter, the good woman began to sob. I calmed her to the best of my ability by swearing to her that I would make every effort to see Camille during the day and to tell her the state into which her mother had been thrown by her departure.
“Make her come back!” was the only answer I obtained through her tears coupled with this sublime expression of shameless devotion: “If she wants to have adventures I will help her as much as she likes. Tell her so, only let her remain and live with us!”
The struggle then was over. The drama of passion and perfidy at which I had assisted for the last few weeks had reached its logical conclusion. My dream had lied to me. It was too late to prevent that adorable child, born with the most rare and delicate romance in her heart and head, becoming nothing more than a courtesan. Her pride itself, that pretty, vibrating pride for which I had loved her so, would hate her degradation. When she emerged from the furious crisis which had sent her to the bed of a man like Tournade, the contempt she would feel for herself would vilify her so in her own eyes and her inner nausea would have two results equally frightful to imagine: either she would not bear her life a day longer and kill herself, or else she would take a sorrowing pride in incarnating in herself that outrageous type of luxury and triumphant shamelessness which become a great actress who is also a great courtesan. Which of these two solutions should a man prefer who loved her as I did, first of all with a somewhat obscure sentiment, but now with one which was very full of misery and suffering? Both perspectives seemed so horrible to me that in spite of the promise I had given the old servant I made a fixed resolution never to see the unhappy child again, and a wiser one still of putting into execution a plan I had long pondered over, ever since, in fact, I had begun to understand my poor heart: to go away, and return either to Spain or Italy, to one of those sunny lands where a soul wounded to death can at least wrap up its wound in solitude, light and beauty.
I ordered my astonished servant to pack up at once for a long absence, and I set to work to classify studies and then run through guide books, compelling myself to become absorbed in the hustle of this unexpected departure. This new and monstrous fact, the fall of Camille into Tournade’s arms, had suspended every other thought in my mind. I had forgotten Madam de Bonnivet, the scene of the previous evening, and Molan himself. It was therefore like a sudden displacement of the atmosphere, a recall to an abolished reality, when I saw the latter about half-past two enter the studio. It was Molan, however, who was the cause of the moral shipwreck from which I was suffering. He was the man I ought to curse and hate. I perceived him, simply recognizing his face, hearing his voice and touching his hand. He wore his evil expression, that of his periods of ferocious hardness, and his supreme excitement was betrayed at least to any one of experience like myself, by a way he had of biting his lower lip with his teeth, thus imperceptibly lengthening his already somewhat lengthy profile, and the animal hidden in every one of us—which in his case was the fox—was so cruelly in evidence that even the friend most hypnotized by affection could see at those times his real character. For my own part I experienced, on discovering in his face the traces of his real nature, a start of antipathy which inundated me with rancour. All my sufferings of the last few hours exploded and I received him with a torrent of abuse.
“You have come to tell me, have you not, you who have behaved so badly, that poor Camille is utterly lost now? I went to her house this morning, and I learned that she had spent the night from home. We know where. That is the work of your egoism. But there will be a reckoning with you for this infamy; there is justice somewhere. It is a crime, do you hear, a crime to play with a sincere heart and to behave as you have done.”
“Let me alone,” he quickly interrupted with a shrug of the shoulders. “When a young girl takes a lover, she will take two, three, four, and the rest. If Camille had been an honourable creature she would have said to me when I courted her: 'Will you marry me? No? Then good-bye.’ She did not say so. So much the worse for her! Besides, if I did her a wrong, it seems to me that now we are quits, mean trick for mean trick, her scene of last evening was equal to all my infamy!”
“Ah! the scene from Adrienne!” I cried. “Are you thinking of that to try and quiet your remorse instead of shedding every tear in your body over the moral assassination you have committed. Let us talk of that evening! What painful consequences can it have which you can put in the scale to counterbalance a ruined future and a poor soul defiled forever? Has Bonnivet turned his wife out? Has he sent his seconds to you? No, I answer myself, and I will save you the trouble of comparing the bad five minutes you passed and deserved with the vertigo which has just seized and destroyed this poor girl for the whole of her life; I repeat, and you shall hear, for the whole of her life.”
“What heat!” he replied with an ironical smile. “What eloquence! We are engaged in telling the beautiful truth. Come, you are angry with yourself for not having the courage to put yourself forward in Tournade’s place. That is the truth, no denials, please. I know the cause of it, poor La Croix. Hard words are useless between us, you know that, so let us change our subject of conversation, shall we?” Then after a short silence he continued: “I am not annoyed with you, and I am going to prove it by asking you to do me a service. Guess whence I have just come?”
“From the house of that hussy, Madam de Bonnivet, naturally,” I replied. I was quite determined to end the interview with a quarrel, and I had used the phrase which I thought most likely to bring that about quickly. My anger changed into stupor at hearing him reply to me with a chuckle—