I passed the morning in considering my latest plan.  A certain shyness made it very painful to me.  But it might at the same time conciliate my delicate scruples, my “amour-propre” as an ambitious chronicler, and the interests of my pocket-book.  I knew that Pascal had the name of being very generous with an interview article if it pleased him.  And besides, had he not promised me a reward if I succeeded with Fauchery?  In short, I had decided to try my experiment, when, after a hasty breakfast, I saw, on stepping into the carriage I had had the night before, a victoria with coat-of-arms drive rapidly past and was stunned at recognizing Fauchery himself, apparently lost in a gloomy revery that was in singular contrast to his high spirits of the night before.  A small trunk on the coachman’s seat was a sufficient indication that he was going to the station.  The train for Paris left in twelve minutes, time enough for me to pack my things pell-mell into my valise and hurriedly to pay my bill.  The same carriage which was to have taken me to the Chateau de Proby carried me to the station at full speed, and when the train left I was seated in an empty compartment opposite the famous writer, who was saying to me, “You, too, deserting Nemours?  Like me, you work best in Paris.”

The conversation begun in this way, might easily have led to the confession I had resolved to make.  But in the presence of my unexpected companion I was seized with an unconquerable shyness, moreover he inspired me with a curiosity which was quite equal to my shyness.  Any number of circumstances, from a telegram from a sick relative to the most commonplace matter of business, might have explained his sudden departure from the chateau where I had left him so comfortably installed the night before.  But that the expression of his face should have changed as it had, that in eighteen hours he should have become the careworn, discouraged being he now seemed, when I had left him so pleased with life, so happy, so assiduous in his attentions to that pretty girl.  Mademoiselle de Russaie, who loved him and whom he seemed to love, was a mystery which took complete possession of me, this time without any underlying professional motive.  He was to give me the key before we reached Paris.  At any rate I shall always believe that part of his conversation was in an indirect way a confidence.  He was still unstrung by the unexpected incident which had caused both his hasty departure and the sudden metamorphosis in what he himself, if he had been writing, would have called his “intimate heaven.”  The story he told me was “per sfogarsi,” as Bayle loved to say; his idea was that I would not discover the real hero.  I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things.  It was apropos of the supposed subject of my novel—­oh, irony!—­apropos of the real subject of my interview that he began.