Receiving no replies now from the husband of her poor friend, Marthe told her that Paul had left Rome and was traveling East, where his letters had doubtless not reached him; but the deserted wife did not believe this pious fib; she knew then how unworthy had become the man she had loved so well; and she begged Mme. Daubrel not only to address not another line to him, in any circumstances, but not even to utter his name before her.
It was from this time forth that Sarah had ventured on hiding away all letters from France. The miserable creature began to hate the woman she had inflicted such torments on. To excuse herself to herself she said that Mme. Meyrin's sickness was a farce, got up by her friends with the idea alone of bringing back Paul to his wife.
Being thus without news, the painter soon came to think it was so himself. Then he fell under the absolute sway of this girl who flattered his vanity and satisfied his senses.
The husband of poor Lise Barineff had rented on the Via Venti Settembri, a couple of hundred yards from the Pia Gate, a small villa, one of the rooms of which he had made into a studio. There he was living with Sarah, not knowing what was really going on in Paris in the Rue d'Assas, when he received the visit he so little looked for from Prince Olsdorf's seconds, and replied to the challenge as has been written above.
A man of stronger fiber than Paul would have been careful to say nothing to his mistress, from self-respect and even from affection. The painter, on the contrary, hurried to tell her all, and then there was a torrent of abuse poured out by the model on the Russian nobleman and the woman who had borne his name.
Sarah loved Paul as a master loves a slave, as a female a male. Even so, but, after all, she loved him with her violent and passionate nature; besides, she was jealous of the past, and as her ignorance in matters of honor did not allow her to suppose that Pierre Olsdorf was desirous of avenging the outrage done to him four years ago, she interpreted the challenge in quite another sense. Either the prince again in love with the wife, wanted to kill her husband to regain her, or his duel with M. Meyrin was nothing but a means of intimidation to force him to return to Lise.
"You see," she exclaimed, when her lover had told her everything, "all these people are against you. After making you marry his wife that he might be rid of her, here is the prince come now to call you to account. And what for? Does he suppose he has the right to govern your present conduct? Are not you free to live as you please? Do your household affairs concern him? It would be too absurd. A divorced woman sending for her first husband to help her! If it is not so, he wants to fight you because you—betrayed him in the olden time. That would be a still more absurd idea. He has taken time for reflection, and you may be sure that he has not come without some urging on. Well, if I were you I should send this Cossack off about his business. It is simply his former wife who has plotted all this. If you fight you are a fool."
"I can not do otherwise," said Paul, when Sarah let him get in a word, "Prince Olsdorf would say everywhere that I was frightened of him."
"And if he did?"
"If he did? You don't consider that if I refuse to fight, my friends, to begin with, would call me a coward, and I should be the scoff of every studio in Paris; besides, my foreign patrons, who are mostly Russians, would desert me. Moreover, I have a grudge to pay off. I should not have gone to look for him, but since he challenges me— Well, we shall see. It is time that there was an end put to people saying I married his wife by order. I am not quite so unskilled as I was four years ago. If he thinks I am he makes a mistake, as I will prove to him."