I made Lecuyer talk.  I disentangled from his lies, his language, and his reticence, the threads I lacked to bring to light the whole plot of the domestic conspiracy hatched against you.  This evening, at the Spanish embassy, I shall offer my admiring compliments to your mother-in-law and your wife.  I shall pay court to Madame Evangelista; I intend to desert you basely, and say sly things to your discredit,—­nothing openly, or that Mascarille in petticoats would detect my purpose.  How did you make her such an enemy?  That is what I want to know.  If you had had the wit to be in love with that woman before you married her daughter, you would to-day be peer of France, Duc de Manerville, and, possibly, ambassador to Madrid.

If you had come to me at the time of your marriage, I would have helped you to analyze and know the women to whom you were binding yourself; out of our mutual observations safety might have been yours.  But, instead of that, these women judged me, became afraid of me, and separated us.  If you had not stupidly given in to them and turned me the cold shoulder, they would never have been able to ruin you.  Your wife brought on the coldness between us, instigated by her mother, to whom she wrote two letters a week,—­a fact to which you paid no attention.  I recognized my Paul when I heard that detail.

Within a month I shall be so intimate with your mother-in-law that I shall hear from her the reasons of the hispano-italiano hatred which she feels for you,—­for you, one of the best and kindest men on earth!  Did she hate you before her daughter fell in love with Felix de Vandenesse; that’s a question in my mind.  If I had not taken a fancy to go to the East with Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and a few other good fellows of your acquaintance, I should have been in a position to tell you something about that affair, which was beginning just as I left Paris.  I saw the first gleams even then of your misfortune.  But what gentleman is base enough to open such a subject unless appealed to?  Who shall dare to injure a woman, or break that illusive mirror in which his friend delights in gazing at the fairy scenes of a happy marriage?  Illusions are the riches of the heart.

Your wife, dear friend, is, I believe I may say, in the fullest application of the word, a fashionable woman.  She thinks of nothing but her social success, her dress, her pleasures; she goes to opera and theatre and balls; she rises late and drives to the Bois, dines out, or gives a dinner-party.  Such a life seems to me for women very much what war is for men; the public sees only the victors; it forgets the dead.  Many delicate women perish in this conflict; those who come out of it have iron constitutions, consequently no heart, but good stomachs.  There lies the reason of the cold insensibility of social life.  Fine souls keep themselves reserved, weak and tender natures succumb;