"If you want to know how your husband employs his time, all you have to do is to make inquiries at 37 Boulevard Clichy, his new studio, where the handsome Sarah Lamber, your former rival, passes all her time."
At reading these terrible lines, Mme. Meyrin turned deathly pale. She uttered no cry and shed no tear, but, quickly regaining her self-command she, with strange energy, put on her bonnet, slipped over her dressing-gown a furred mantle, went into the studio and took a revolver which she knew was loaded, and calling the first cab she saw on leaving the house, she told the driver to take her to the address she had just received.
In her trembling hands, which she had not taken the time to glove, she crumpled the accursed letter, read and reread it; she went over it letter by letter, as if to gather the more anger and indignation from it.
If Prince Olsdorf had seen the infamous letter he would have recognized the vulgar scrawl of the handwriting. It was plainly from the hand that, three years before, had addressed to him at St. Petersburg a letter forwarding clippings from some newspapers to tell him of his dishonor.
CHAPTER IV.
SARAH'S REVENGE.
In view of the customary indiscretion of the world into which Paul had made his re-entry some months before, under conditions that would have been so hard to explain, the wonder was that his wife had not been told of his conduct sooner. In fact, among the brother artists whom Lise's husband met every day, were several of the visitors to the Rue d'Assas. All had kept silence—some out of indulgence for escapades such as they had often been guilty of themselves, and others out of respect for the wife deceived in so cowardly a manner.
Had it been otherwise, Mme. Meyrin, on the alert from the first, would doubtless have revolted, and would not, by yielding point after point, have encouraged her husband in, as it were, a disposition which some day would make him look upon unfaithfulness as his right.
In that case perhaps she would easily have regained possession of the fugitive, who had only the courage of the weak; that kind of energy in evil-doing which consists in not daring to acknowledge a fault, through cowardice, and in fear of deserved reproaches, or through vanity, from fear of being humbled: just as if, between two lovers, the guilty one did not rise the higher for imploring pardon.
Lise would have pardoned, for if at the time when Paul began to forget his duty the news of his inconstancy had surprised her in her easy security and full happiness, so, too, it would have done in the full tide of love; and her heart would have pleaded the cause of the unfaithful one. The wound might have been the more painful, but the loving woman would have been nerved by the shock to struggle and win back her rights.
Now it was not so. The neglected wife suffered as much in her pride as her love. To see the calmness she was able to command after a single moment of despair, it seemed that she was thinking more of avenging the outrage than of bewailing the betrayal.