“May it lead to many better! Au revoir! I trust you will win your match at tennis.”
“Would you care to lay anything on Marcilly?” asked de Bresy, with a gambler’s eagerness for a wager, and I humored him.
“Another ten to the Prince’s, if you like,” and I steadied my fretting nag.
“Done with you!” he replied, and so wishing him the day once more, and taking one of the Swiss with me, I trotted off, outwardly calm, but inwardly a prey to a hundred conflicting emotions.
I had just left two men, one of whom had done a generous thing, while the other had performed a great and noble action. In realizing that in this they had gone far beyond me, so strangely was I constituted that I felt a jealous anger at the thought of their nobleness. In soul I had already sunk so low, that I began to hate anything that was good, or rather to think that I hated it, and this, in effect, is the same thing. Yet, with all this, I saw my own fault. I felt that I was wrong, and almost despised myself. Even then I had a chance—up to the last moment I might have saved myself, but for that mad longing for revenge on the woman whom I accused in my heart of having brought me to this level. There are those who will say I was beside myself; that no one, short of an idiot and a fool, could have jumped to the conclusions I had done; that the thing was, and is, impossible. My answer is, that it was just because I was beside myself, it was just because I was blind and frenzied with my own passions, that I did what I did, and I may add that, in my opinion, all such crimes as mine are due to the same cause, to the temporary mental paralysis that makes one unable to follow the right path. It is only necessary to look around, and a hundred such instances may be seen—none, perhaps, so black and damning as mine.
With these conflicting emotions in my mind, I was going across the square of Ste. Croix, when I once again met Achon and his suite. They were evidently returning from the palace, when we crossed each other, coming almost face to face, and this time Achon greeted me, saying as he did so:
“Monsieur! A word with you, with your permission.”
“It cannot, I imagine, be to seek alms for the poor,” I answered with a sneer—I wished the man to know that I was aware of the part he had played in Rue des Lavandières. But his face remained immovable, as he looked at me coldly, saying:
“It was not only to seek alms that I was in the Rue des Lavandières—there were other things I wanted—some I got——”
“Stole, rather! That list of names! Those——”