“He took them unconcernedly and brought her a receipt the same evening bearing his uncle’s signature.  Three months after she was pocketing a very handsome income.  The sixth month Adolphe disappeared.  The old girl goes straight to the uncle with her screed of paper.  ‘I never signed that,’ says the stockbroker, ’and my nephew never deposited any securities with me.’  She flies like a mad-woman to the Commissary of Police, to learn that Adolphe, hammered at the Bourse, is off to Belgium, carrying with him a hundred and twenty thousand francs he had done another old woman out of.  She never got over the blow; but we must say this of her, she brought up her daughter mighty strictly, and showed herself a very dragon of virtue.  Poor Gabrielle must feel her cheeks burn to this day only to think of her years at the Conservatoire; for in those days her mother used to smack them soundly for her, morning and evening.  Gabrielle, why I can see her now, in her sky-blue frock, running to lessons nibbling coffee-berries between her teeth.  She was a good girl, that.”

“You knew her!” cried Jean, for whom these confidences formed the most exciting love adventure he had ever known.

The old man assured him: 

“We used to have fine rides with her and a lot of artists in old days on horseback and donkey-back in the woods of Ville d’Avray; she used to dress as a man, and I remember one day...”  He finished his story in a whisper,—­it was just as well.  He went on to say he hardly ever saw her now that she was with Monsieur Didier, of the Credit Bourguignon.  The financier had sent the artists to the right-about; he was a conceited, narrow-minded fellow, a dull, tiresome prig.

Jean was neither surprised nor excessively shocked to hear that she had a lover, because having studied the ways of the ladies of the theatre in the proverbs in verse of Alfred de Musset, he pictured the life of Parisian actresses without exception as one continual feast of wit and gallantry.  He loved her; with or without Didier, he loved her.  She might have had three hundred lovers, like Lesbia,—­he would have loved her just as much.  Is it not always so with men’s passions?  They are in love because they are in love, and in spite of everything.

As for feeling jealousy of Monsieur Didier, he never so much as thought of it.  The infatuation of the lad!  He was jealous of the men and women who saw her pass to and fro in the street, of the scene-shifters and workmen whom the business of the stage brought into contact with her.  For the present these were his only rivals.  For the rest, he trusted to the future, the ineffable future big whether with bliss or torment.  Indeed, the literature of romance had inspired him with no small esteem of courtesans, if only their attitude was as it should be—­leaning pensively on the balcony-rail of their marble palace.

What did shock him in the rapscallion architect’s stories, what wounded his love without weakening it, was all the rather squalid elements these narratives implied in the actress’s young days.  Of all things in the world he thought anything sordid the most repugnant.