The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a live coal.  A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and possess.  All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.

Jose felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him, and that he was giving his life to that woman.  But he returned.  His fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne’s whereabouts.  He went to her as he might walk to a gulf.  Under his cold demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely passionate and would neither reflect nor resist.  He had experienced that delightful sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat.  He would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a fashionable little mansion.  She promised herself to explain that to him when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had taken up her abode there.  A mere whim:  Mademoiselle Vanda having gone away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan’s curtains.  “I will tell him that this transient luxury recalls my former follies when I made him believe that I was spending an inheritance from my grandmother.”

She had, indeed, already lied to him, for the money she had formerly squandered had been provided by De Lissac, but even then it was necessary—­for the duke was in expectancy—­to conceal its source from Rosas, hence the story of the inheritance that never existed.  But she at once thoroughly realized that the surroundings which were favorable to the progress of the duke’s love were not the bedroom and the dressing-room of Mademoiselle Vanda.  What difference would Rosas have found between her and the fashionable courtesans whom he had loved, or rather, enriched, in passing?  He would not believe this new lie this time.

All that luxury might seduce Sulpice Vaudrey; it would have disgusted Jose.  What satisfied the appetite of the little, successful bourgeois would nauseate the gentleman.

As soon as Rosas returned to her, happy and stupefied at the same time, extravagantly happy in his joy, her plan of campaign was at once arranged.  She did not wish to receive him in the vulgar hotel, where the clubmen had wiped their feet upon the carpets.  She entreated him, since he wished to see her again, to see her at her “own house,” yes, really, at her own house, in that little, unknown room, in Rue Cuvier, far from the noise of Paris and near the Botanical Garden, a kind of hidden cell into which no one entered.

“No one but me,” she said.

The order had been given to Uncle Kayser in advance:  in case Rosas should reappear, Simon was to at once inform his niece and prevent the duke from discovering Marianne’s new address.  And this had been done.