She remained motionless, pale and as if frozen.

“Then you have kept?—­” she said.

“A postscriptum, if you like, yes.”

“Are you lying now, or did you lie in giving me the packet that has been burned?”

“I did not tell you that the packet was complete, and what I now tell you is the simple truth!  I regret it, but you have compelled me to keep my batteries, in too quickly unmasking your own.”

Marianne pulled off her gloves in anger.

“If you do not give me everything here that belongs to me, you are a coward; you hear, a coward, Monsieur de Lissac!”

“Oh! your insults are of as little importance as your kisses! but they are less agreeable!”

She clearly saw that she had thrown off the mask too soon, and that Lissac would not now allow himself to be snared by her caresses or disarmed by her threats.  The game was lost.

Lost, or merely compromised?

She looked about her with an expression of powerless rage, like a very graceful wild beast enclosed in a cage.  Her letters, her last letters must be here, in one of those pieces of furniture whose drawers she might open with her nails.  She threw her gloves on the floor and mechanically tore into shreds—­as she always did when in a rage—­between her nervous fingers, her fine cambric handkerchief reduced to rags.

“Be very careful what you are doing, Guy,” she said at last, casting a malicious look at him, “I have purchased these letters from you, for I hate you, I repeat it, and these letters you owe to me as you would owe money promised to a wench.  If you do not give them to me, I will have them, notwithstanding.”

“Really?”

“I promise you I will.”

“And suppose I have burned them?”

“You lie, you have them here, you have kept them.  You have behaved toward me like a thief.”

“Nonsense, Marianne,” said Lissac coldly, “on my faith, I see I have done well to preserve some weapon against you.  You are certainly very dangerous!”

“More than you imagine,” she replied.

He moved slightly backward, seeing that she wished to pass him to reach the door.

“You will not give me back my letters?” she asked in a harsh and menacing tone as she stood on the threshold of the room.

Guy stooped without heeding her and picked up the gloves that were lying on the carpet and handed them to the young woman: 

“This is your property, I think?”

This was said with insolently refined politeness.

Marianne took the gloves, and as a last insult, like a blow on the cheek, she threw them at Guy’s face, who turned aside and the gloves fell on the bed where just before these two hatreds had come together in kisses of passion.

“Miserable coward!” said Marianne, surveying Lissac from head to foot with an expression of scorn, while he stood still, his monocle dangling at the end of a fine cord on his breast, near the buttonhole of his jacket that bore the red rosette; his face was pale but wore a sly expression.