“Yes, with that hussy, Madam de Bonnivet. You hate her very much, do you not? You think I am very infamous to sacrifice Camille for her, don’t you? Ah, well!” he went on in a singularly bitter tone which made me realize that something very new and unexpected had taken place in that quarter, “I have come to ask you to aid me in my revenge. That surprises you, does it not?”
“Confess that there is a reason,” I answered him. “I left you at eleven o’clock last evening, only thinking of her and indignant with Camille on her account. Then you treated as a dirty trick the foolish prank of that poor child because she——”
“I repeat the expression,” he very quickly interrupted me. Another period of silence followed. I could see that a combat between most contradictory sentiments was taking place in him. What he had to tell me wounded his vanity sorely. On the other hand the same vanity desired to wreak upon Madam de Bonnivet the immediate vengeance of which he had spoken, and I alone was able to help him effectively. But this man, who was usually master of himself, had just been so completely overwhelmed by an affront, which was all the harder for him to bear as he was unprepared for it. His anger was very great, and he went on in a hissing voice which vibrated with absolute sincerity: “Yes, a dirty trick. I stand by the expression, and I am almost happy to have to do so, for it constitutes a hold over her. Listen,” he went on, putting his hand on my arm, and pressing it as he spoke. “I called upon Madam de Bonnivet directly after lunch to-day. I was uneasy. It is in vain that we know that women are like cats, and always fall on their feet, keeping something in their disposition with which to twist a husband who loves them round their fingers when and as often as they please—do you understand me?—we have to be so very careful! I was afraid that Bonnivet had made a scene with his wife after Camille’s escapade last evening. Now you will admire my foolishness and cease to reproach me with heartlessness. For once I obeyed my poor heart and it was a success! So I called upon her and was received in the small drawing-room, which you know, by the woman, reclining in a long chair, clad in a thin dressing-gown. You can imagine that clad in lace, with just enough light to give her a shadowy charm like a phantom, she looked like a picture of the ideal capable of bewitching a lover who is about to be dismissed. Listen: 'Have you a headache?’ I asked her. 'I ought to have one at least,’ she replied, looking at me with eyes I cannot describe—eyes in which there was hatred and fury; but at the same time they were cold and venomous eyes. 'You have the audacity,’ she continued, 'to return here after what took place yesterday.’ I was so dumbfounded by this reception that I had no answer ready. She was making me responsible for the insult Camille had levelled at her!”
“It is a little severe,” I said, laughing in spite of myself at this prodigious change of front, and the sheepish look of the pseudo Don Juan before this surprising display of feminine malice. “Between ourselves you well earned it.”
“But listen,” he went on more violently than ever, “you will chaff me presently, and you will be right. I thought I had touched this icy soul in a spot with some feeling in it. I was taken in, that is all. You cannot imagine what hard, cruel things she said to me in that quarter of an hour; and though I very well knew to what risk I was exposing myself by allowing Camille to act there, yet I had naturally felt flattered at having my two mistresses face to face, and at being received there myself as a man of the world and Camille as a lady; and though I had conducted myself as a man of letters while she behaved like a common actress, yet she dared to make use of words which indicated that it was a scheme devised between us to satisfy my vanity and to revenge the insolence she had suffered, that it was the last time her door would be opened to me, and that she had spoken to her husband—she dared to tell me that—yes, that she had spoken to him and explained to him this girl’s ignoble conduct by a boast on my part! But if you had heard her tone of voice when she insisted: 'My first vengeance shall be, since it appears she loves you, to send you back to her, and she shall see you unhappy, and unhappy through me; for you shall be, you shall be!’ She laughed her bitter laugh, which you know, and I, the Jacques Molan you know, listened, so terrified at the baseness of soul which these phrases proved, that I did not stop her. I might say if I posed to you that I amused myself by studying it. Alas, no! at that moment I was paralysed, I do not really understand by what. But I was. Can you imagine Pierre de Bonnivet entering in the midst of this scene, and the silence which fell upon the three of us in that little drawing-room? I swear to you I thought of crying out to that fool of a husband then: 'You know I have been your wife’s lover.’ I believe that would have soothed me! What would have followed? A duel. I should have survived it, and I should have been revenged through this woman’s dishonour. But the prejudice which requires a man to bear everything rather than to betray a woman who has given herself to him, even when she deserves it, stopped me. And so, here I am.”
“But what motive has she obeyed?” I cried, so astounded by the story that it did not occur to me to laugh at the contrast between Jacques’ triumphant attitude of the previous evening and the piteous confession he had just made in a hesitating though furious way, being so overwhelmed that he had told me everything haphazard, this time without calculation and without posing. It was the shriek of the wounded animal. “Yes,” I repeated, “what is her motive? She has been your mistress. Consequently she must have thought something of you!”
“Her object was to take me from Camille,” he interrupted. “That I have always known. Now that she has succeeded I no longer interest her, which is quite natural. The spite of outraged self-conceit has done the rest. For a few minutes I represented Camille to her and she detested me with the hatred she bears her. That is also very natural. She has found a means of satisfying everything at once: her caution concerning her husband’s suspicions, which were now very much aroused; her ferocious hate, and without doubt her natural fund of brutality by that unlikely rupture. But I am not turned out just like that. I have a revenge to take, and I will take it. You will aid me, and at once.”
“I?” I replied; “how?”
“By going at once to Camille,” he told me, and as I made a gesture he insisted: “Yes, to Camille. There is a first night at the Théâtre Français for which I have a box. I wish to attend the performance with her tête-à-tête, do you understand? Madam de Bonnivet will be there. I want the wretch to see me with little Favier, and I want her to realize that we are reconciled and happy, for that will wound her self-conceit. It is the only place where I can attack her. Ah! she is convinced that I left her house in tears with my heart torn, and that I am miserable! She will have before her fine guinea fowl eyes the proof that she will no longer be of any more account in our lives, Camille’s and mine, than that,” and he threw down a match with which he had just lit his cigarette; “and she will have to say to herself: 'All the same, this man has had me.’ For I have had her; she cannot alter the fact that she has been my mistress. What a revenge it is even to think that a woman can never efface that!”
This horrible explosion of evil sentiments had made the face of Jacques, who not without reason passed as a handsome man, and who could make himself so feline, so gentle, and so caressing, quite sinister. He was hideous at this moment when he was justifying in a striking way the theories of poor Claude upon the savage hatred which is at the root of sexual intercourse. This so-called love, which has cruelty for its root, has always been so repulsive to me that it was impossible for me to pity Jacques, although I felt that he was as unhappy as it was possible for him to be. Besides, I could clearly see the absolute uselessness of the mission which the discarded lover wished me to undertake. Madam de Bonnivet’s character became quite clear to me. I realized that even with his subtle pretensions to trickery my companion had been in the hands of this woman what the most corrupt of writers would always be in the hands of a really wicked creature who did not dally with depravity. A child, a poor, little swaggering imp of vice immediately unmasked and bound.