She spoke to me and laughed!  Ah, she was happy, Sir!  Happy in that she had completely and irrevocably tricked me!  That traitor Fernand Rochez was up to the neck in the plot which had saddled me for ever with an ugly, elderly wife of dour mien and no fortune, while he and the lovely Leah were spinning the threads of perfect love at the other end of Paris and laughing their fill at my discomfiture.  Think, Sir, what I suffered during those few brief minutes while the coach lurched through the narrow streets of Suresnes, and I had perforce to listen to the protestations of undying love from this unprepossessing female!

That love, she vowed, was her excuse, and everything, she asserted, was fair in love and war.  She knew that after Rochez had attained his heart’s desire and carried off the lady of his choice—­which he had successfully done half an hour before I myself made my way up the Passage Corneille—­I would pass out of her life for ever.  This she could not endure.  Life at once would become intolerable.  And, aided and abetted by Rochez and Leah, she had planned and contrived my mystification and won me by foul means, since she could not do so by fair; and it seemed as if her volubility then was the forecast of what my life with her would be in the future.  Talk!  Talk!  Talk!  She never ceased!

She told me the whole story of the abominable conspiracy against my liberty.  Her brother, M. Goldberg, she explained, had determined upon remarriage.  She, Sarah, felt that henceforth she would be in the way of everybody; she would have no home.  Leah married to Rochez; a new and young Mme. Goldberg ruling in the old house of the Rue des Medecins!  Ah, it was unthinkable!

And I, Sir—­I, Hector Ratichon—­had, it appears, by my polite manners and prepossessing ways, induced this dour old maid to believe that she was not altogether indifferent to me.  Ah, how I cursed my own charms, when I realised whither they had led me!  It seems that it was that fickle jade Leah who first imagined the whole execrable plot.  Rochez was to entrust me with the task of carrying off his beloved, and thus I would be tricked in the darkness into abducting Mlle. Goldberg senior from her home.  Then some friends of Rochez arranged to play the comedy of false gendarmes, and again I was tricked into acknowledging Sarah as my affianced wife before independent witnesses.  After that I could no longer repudiate mine honourable intentions, for if I did, then I should be arraigned before the law on a criminal charge of abduction.  In this comedy of false gendarmes Rochez himself and the heartless Leah had joined with zest and laughed over my discomfiture, whilst the friends who played their roles to such perfection had a paltry hundred francs each as the price of this infamous trick.  Now my doom was sealed, and all that was left for me to do was to think disconsolately over my future.