As he spoke, the Cupid suddenly threw up his leg, expecting to kick Freluchon in the face. But he, by a gesture as quick as thought, seized the leg in its passage, and grasping the ankle in his right hand, squeezed it so hard that the Cupid made a horrible grimace and cried:
"Ten thousand million milliards! Let me go, you hurt me, you squeeze too hard! Let me go, I say!"
"If you had struck my face with your foot, wouldn't you have hurt me, you second-hand Cupid?"
"Look here! just let him go this minute, will you!" observed the gentleman dressed as a Roman, approaching Freluchon with uplifted arm, while the latter still held the Cupid by the leg.
But the little fellow, with his left hand, struck his new adversary a blow that sent him reeling backward; there the Roman fell in with Edmond, who gave him an additional push, while Freluchon suddenly released the Cupid's leg with a violent jerk, so that he fell on his back among the dancers.
Thereupon there was a great outcry on all sides, and, as usually happens, the police appeared on the scene and ordered the combatants to leave the ball-room with them, to explain their conduct elsewhere.
Mesdemoiselles Henriette and Amélia took advantage of the moment when the young men were surrounded to glide among the dancers and disappear.
This scene had taken place almost in front of the box in which the pearl-gray domino and her friend Mademoiselle Héloïse were seated.
A few moments earlier, a little blue domino, the same who had questioned and mystified Edmond, had come to report to the fair Thélénie the result of her conversation with the young man. But when she saw the man she was looking for talking with the little débardeur, and observed the quarrel that followed their conversation, Thélénie at once divined that the woman disguised as a débardeur was the woman for whose sake the man she loved had come to the ball.
Having watched with some anxiety the brief scrimmage which took place during the quadrille, she rose hurriedly and left the box, muttering: