"I could well refuse any satisfaction to the prince," he said, "but I won't have it that he shall be able to say a Roumanian was afraid of a Russian. So settle this affair as you please with his seconds; sword or pistol, whichever he likes."
Paul Meyrin did not add, though he understood, that what the prince wished to avenge was not the past but the present. And it was precisely the present that the painter hoped to free himself from in accepting the proposed duel. It seemed to him that in challenging him Pierre Olsdorf furnished him with a weapon against his wife whom he would then have the right to abandon altogether.
The wretched man had not heard anything of her for two months. His brother had indeed written to him that she was ill; but he did not know her condition was desperate. Like all men without energy, not daring to face the tears and the reproaches of the woman he had basely deserted, he shrunk from learning anything about her, in fear of being forced to return to the Rue d'Assas, if it were but out of common humanity and to avoid making himself a scoundrel in the eyes of even the most indulgent.
It is probable, however, that had he known the true situation of his wife, Paul would have left Rome; but at the time we have reached, Sarah, with whom he lived wholly, was intercepting all the letters from Paris, which she did not even read, out of womanly cunning, that she might have an excuse in reserve for the future. She simply put them on one side.
The painter was also urged on by another reason to finish with Pierre Olsdorf, of whom he could not be jealous, for he knew through Mme. Daubrel that Lise had not met him at Pampeln when she went thither to nurse her son.
In the early days of his marriage with the ex-Princess Olsdorf he had been applauded and envied. Flattered that one of them had carried off the wife of a great Russian lord, Paul's brother artists congratulated him; for several months he was quite a romantic hero, but when they saw him so soon wreck his home, when they knew he had taken up again with Sarah Lamber, there was surprise that this love which had made so much noise had passed so quickly. Inquiries were made, and in a short time there came whispers from St. Petersburg which gave a handle to the jealous and the envious.
It was told that it was Prince Olsdorf himself who had made the princess sue for a divorce and forced Paul to marry her. He was thrown down from the pedestal he had been planted on; there was much laughter at the quite novel revenge of the outraged husband; Paul was nicknamed "the husband by order," and, being questioned by his mistress, he lied so poorly that she, in the midst of a quarrel about his household in Paris, retorted upon him, not knowing she had hit the mark so exactly:
"Ah, don't bother me. You won't dare to be away from Paris a couple of days. Your wife's former husband would look you up and lead you back by the ear to your lawful home."
It was after this that Paul Meyrin, to prove he was free and his own master, had left Paris with Sarah and established himself in Rome, where his feebleness, his cowardice, and also his passion for the model, soon made so complete a slave of him that he gave up all idea of going back to Lise, and scarcely thought of his child.
During the first month of his absence he wrote to Mme. Meyrin once or twice to tell her that important commissions were detaining him in Italy; then, when he did not know how to explain his prolonged absence, he rarely answered the letters Mme. Daubrel wrote to him unknown to Lise, for she, too proud to complain, wrapped up in her maternal love, and not desiring to furnish her husband with new occasions for lying, had given up writing to him.