sank into a bewildered stupor, darkness settled down over his brain.  Visions of past rapture flitted across the misty gloom like the figures that Raphael painted against a black background; to these he must bid farewell.  Inexorable and disdainful, the Duchess played with the tip of her scarf.  She looked in irritation at Victurnien from time to time; she coquetted with memories, she spoke to her lover of his rivals as if anger had finally decided her to prefer one of them to a man who could so change in one moment after twenty-eight months of love.

“Ah! that charming young Felix de Vandenesse, so faithful as he was to Mme. de Mortsauf, would never have permitted himself such a scene!  He can love, can de Vandenesse!  De Marsay, that terrible de Marsay, such a tiger as everyone thought him, was rough with other men; but like all strong men, he kept his gentleness for women.  Montriveau trampled the Duchesse de Langeais under foot, as Othello killed Desdemona, in a burst of fury which at any rate proved the extravagance of his love.  It was not like a paltry squabble.  There was rapture in being so crushed.  Little, fair-haired, slim, and slender men loved to torment women; they could only reign over poor, weak creatures; it pleased them to have some ground for believing that they were men.  The tyranny of love was their one chance of asserting their power.  She did not know why she had put herself at the mercy of fair hair.  Such men as de Marsay, Montriveau, and Vandenesse, dark-haired and well grown, had a ray of sunlight in their eyes.”

It was a storm of epigrams.  Her speeches, like bullets, came hissing past his ears.  Every word that Diane hurled at him was triple-barbed; she humiliated, stung, and wounded him with an art that was all her own, as half a score of savages can torture an enemy bound to a stake.

“You are mad!” he cried at last, at the end of his patience, and out he went in God knows what mood.  He drove as if he had never handled the reins before, locked his wheels in the wheels of other vehicles, collided with the curbstone in the Place Louis-Quinze, went he knew not whither.  The horse, left to its own devices, made a bolt for the stable along the Quai d’Orsay; but as he turned into the Rue de l’Universite, Josephin appeared to stop the runaway.

“You cannot go home, sir,” the old man said, with a scared face; “they have come with a warrant to arrest you.”

Victurnien thought that he had been arrested on the criminal charge, albeit there had not been time for the public prosecutor to receive his instructions.  He had forgotten the matter of the bills of exchange, which had been stirred up again for some days past in the form of orders to pay, brought by the officers of the court with accompaniments in the shape of bailiffs, men in possession, magistrates, commissaries, policemen, and other representatives of social order.  Like most guilty creatures, Victurnien had forgotten everything but his crime.