"Of my studio," replied Paul, laughing. "That would be pretty difficult. You know it is one of my suite of rooms."
As he was less easy in this discussion than he wished to seem, the painter adroitly turned the conversation, and they began talking of other things.
In the evening Paul returned home, his mind, or rather his senses, full of the thought of Sarah. Three months afterward, events proved that Robert Aubrey had not been mistaken. After several stormy, angry, or ironical meetings, after a thousand sharp things had been said on either side, Paul and Sarah had opened their arms to each other, and their passion had riveted them together anew.
In enjoying again with his former mistress the voluptuous intoxications that had been lacking so long, the artist had also taken again to the freedom of bearing, the vulgar ease of manner, the gross flashes which, native to him, were things unknown in the Rue d'Assas. He found the change charming, new, and exciting. His old tastes had returned to him. He was tired of the elegance, the distinction, and the intellectual qualities of his wife. It was the old, old story of satiation with good things.
Paul Meyrin's renewed relations with Sarah were restricted for a time to meetings at his friends' houses and appointments at her place; but soon she begged the painter to take a studio in addition to and apart from his home. He yielded to her wish, delighted at being able to live again, though it were but intermittently, the life of the past.
He became the tenant of a studio on the Boulevard Clichy, which he furnished very elegantly, thanks to the good taste he had learned from Lise, and by dismantling somewhat his rooms in the Rue d'Assas, under pretense of offering a picture or a work of art to a charity sale, or a handsome weapon to some comrade. Then he invented the story of the work on a panorama, as suggested by his mistress, so that he might not have the trouble of imagining a new lie every day to account for his absence.
Matters being thus arranged, Paul Meyrin, who could not pass all his afternoons in the arms or at the knees of Sarah, began work on a picture the subject of which was Cleopatra awaiting Marc Antony.
At the end of two months, in spite of the interruptions that the model was the cause of the painter making, the picture was well advanced and promised to be one of the best by a man whose brush his passions plainly often guided. His love for Sarah did not hinder him from sometimes returning to his wife, by way of contrast. The wretched man, lost to all moral reserve, liked to think at such moments that he was a successful lover.
But Sarah, jealous and envious too, before long suspected these legitimate infidelities. Her hate of Mme. Meyrin grew, and, caring only to work mischief between man and wife, one morning she sent to the Rue d'Assas the unsigned letter which was certain to effect her purpose.
After this infamous and cowardly action she went gayly to the studio where, like the female Machiavelli she was, she seemed tenderer than ever. She desired that that night, when his wife would denounce his infidelity, Paul should be still under the charm of her, his mistress's ardent caresses.