“Good God, what a mess!  And to think that the nineteenth century takes on airs and adulates itself.  There is one word in the mouths of all.  Progress.  Progress of whom?  Progress of what?  For this miserable century hasn’t invented anything great.

“It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything.  At the present hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it discovered.  But electricity was known and used in remotest antiquity, and if the ancients could not explain its nature nor even its essence, the moderns are just as incapable of identifying that force which conveys the spark and carries the voice—­acutely nasalized—­along the wire.  This century thinks it discovered the terrible science of hypnotism, which the priests and Brahmins in Egypt and India knew and practised to the utmost.  No, the only thing this century has invented is the sophistication of products.  Therein it is passed master.  It has even gone so far as to adulterate excrement.  Yes, in 1888 the two houses of parliament had to pass a law destined to suppress the falsification of fertilizer.  Now that’s the limit.”

The doorbell rang.  He opened the door and nearly fell over backward.

Mme. Chantelouve was before him.

Stupefied, he bowed, while Mme. Chantelouve, without a word, went straight into the study.  There she turned around, and Durtal, who had followed, found himself face to face with her.

“Won’t you please sit down?” He advanced an armchair and hastened to push back, with his foot, the edge of the carpet turned up by the cat.  He asked her to excuse the disorder.  She made a vague gesture and remained standing.

In a calm but very low voice she said, “It is I who wrote you those mad letters.  I have come to drive away this bad fever and get it over with in a quite frank way.  As you yourself wrote, no liaison between us is possible.  Let us forget what has happened.  And before I go, tell me that you bear me no grudge.”

He cried out at this.  He would not have it so.  He had not been beside himself when he wrote her those ardent pages, he was in perfectly good faith, he loved her—­

“You love me!  Why, you didn’t even know that those letters were from me.  You loved an unknown, a chimera.  Well, admitting that you are telling the truth, the chimera does not exist now, for here I am.”

“You are mistaken.  I knew perfectly that it was Mme. Chantelouve hiding behind the pseudonym of Mme. Maubel.”  And he half-explained to her, without, of course, letting her know of his doubts, how he had lifted her mask.

“Ah!” She reflected, blinking her troubled eyes.  “At any rate,” she said, again facing him squarely, “you could not have recognized me in the first letters, to which you responded with cries of passion.  Those cries were not addressed to me.”

He contested this observation, and became entangled in the dates and happenings and in the sequence of the notes.  She at length lost the thread of his remarks.  The situation was so ridiculous that both were silent.  Then she sat down and burst out laughing.