“I have laughed heartily, but I am crushed, stupefied!  What a headache!”

And Sulpice wrote all that to Marianne, and innocent that he was, told her:  “Ah! all those applauding voices are not worth a single word from you!  When shall I see you, Marianne, dear heart?”

“At the latest possible date!” the dear heart said.

She regarded the close of summer and the beginning of autumn with extreme vexation, for it would bring with it the parliamentary session and Vaudrey, and inflict on her the presence of her lover.

Sulpice provided her liberally with all that her luxurious appetites demanded, and it was for good reasons that she decided not to break with him, although for a long time she had sacrificed this man in her inclinations.  “Ah! when I shall be able to bounce him!” she said, expressing herself like a courtesan.  She could not, she would not accept anything from Rosas.  On that side, the game was too fine to be compromised.  She could with impunity accept the position of mistress of Vaudrey, but with Jose she must appear to preserve, as it were, an aureole of modesty, of virginal charms, that she did not possess.

In fact, the Spaniard’s mind became singularly crystallized, and she turned this result to good account:  in proportion as he associated himself with the real Marianne, he created a fictitious Marianne, ideal, kind, spirituelle, perhaps ignorant, but subtile and corrupted in mind, who amused and disconcerted him at one and the same time.  He had left the Continental Hotel, and rented a house on Avenue Montaigne, Champs-Elysees, where he sometimes entertained Marianne as he might have done a princess.  At such times she gossiped while smoking Turkish tobacco.  Her Parisian grace, her champagne-like effervescent manner, seduced and charmed this serious, pale traveller, whose very smile was tinged with melancholy.

He completely adored this woman and no longer made an effort to resist.  He entirely forgot that it was through Guy that he had known her.  It seemed to him that he had himself discovered her, and besides, she had never loved Guy.  No, certainly not.  She was frank enough to acknowledge everything.  Then she denied that Lissac ever—­Then what!  If it should be true?  But no! no!  Marianne denied it.  He blindly believed in Marianne.

All the conflicting, frantic arguments that men make when they are about to commit some foolish action were at war in Jose’s brain.  The more so as he did not attempt to analyze his feelings.  He passed, near this pretty woman whose finger-tips he hardly dared kiss, the most delicious summer of his life.  Once, however, on going out with Marianne in the Champs-Elysees, he had met the old Dujarrier with the swollen eyelids and the yellow hair that he had known formerly.  One of his friends, the Marquis Vergano, had committed suicide at twenty for this woman who was old enough to be his mother.  The Dujarrier had stopped and greeted Marianne, but as she remarked herself, a thousand bows and scrapes were thrown away, for Rosas had hardly noticed her with a glacial look.