Monsieur Tudesco, feeling sure his brandy-cherries would be paid for, did not trouble himself to talk, and the conversation was languishing when the architect remarked casually: 

“By-the-by!  As I was going to Bellevue yesterday on business of my own, I came upon that actress of yours, young man, at her gate... oh! a rubbishy little villa, run up to last through a love affair, standing in six square yards of garden, meant to give a stock-broker some sort of notion what the country’s like.  She invited me in—­but what was the use?"...

She was at Bellevue!  Jean forgot all the humiliating details the old man had told him, retaining the one fact only, that she was at Bellevue and it was possible to see her there in the sweet intimacy of the country.

He got up to go.  Monsieur Tudesco caught him by the skirt of his jacket to detain him: 

“My young friend, you have my admiration; for I see you rise on daring pinions above the hindrances of a lowly station to the realms of beauty, fame and wealth.  You will yet cull the splendid blossom that fascinates you, at least I hope so.  But how much better had you loved a simple work-girl, whose affections you could have beguiled by offering her a penn’orth of fried potatoes and a seat among the gods to see a melodrama.  I fear you are a dupe of men’s opinion, for one woman is not very different from another, and it is opinion, that mistress of the world, and nothing else, which sets a high price on some and a low one on others.  Do you profit, my young and very dear friend, by the experience afforded me by the vicissitudes of fortune, which are such that I am obliged at this present moment to borrow of you the modest sum of two and a half francs.”

So spake the Marquis Tudesco.

XIV

Jean had trudged afoot up the hill of Bellevue.  Evening was falling.  The village street ran upwards between low walls, brambles and thistles lining the roadway on either side.  In front the woods melted into a far-off blue haze; below him stretched the city, with its river, its roofs, its towers and domes, the vast, smoky town which had kindled Servien’s aspirations at the flaring lights of its theatres and nurtured his feverish longings in the dust of its streets.  In the west a broad streak of purple lay between heaven and earth.  A sweet sense of peace descended on the landscape as the first stars twinkled faintly in the sky.  But it was not peace Jean Servien had come to find.

A few more paces on the stony high road and there stood the gate festooned with the tendrils of a wild vine, just as it had been described to him.

He gazed long, in a trance of adoration.  Peering through the bars, between the sombre boughs of a Judas tree, he saw a pretty little white house with a flight of stone steps before the front door, flanked by two blue vases.  Everything was still, nobody at the windows, nobody stirring on the gravel of the drive; not a voice, not a whisper, not a footfall.  And yet, after a long, long look, he turned away almost happy, his heart filled with satisfaction.