He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.

There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic, gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored and the sight of whom still tore his heart.  Pale and dressed in a white gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable attitude, with her fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders—­those shoulders that he still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.

That livid beauty, strangely adorable, with her hair and ears dazzling with jewels, stood clearly out against the background of the box in which, like an enormous Cyclopean eye, appeared the round, ground glass let into the door, forming a nimbus of light around Marianne’s brow.  Paler than her, with a sickly but smiling countenance, Rosas showed his bloodless, pale, Spanish face beside that of Marianne, as tragic looking as a portrait by Coello.  His tired-looking, pensive, thin face was resting on his hand, which through the opera-glass looked a transparent hand of wax, on which an enormous emerald ring flashed under the gaslight.  Monsieur de Rosas did not move.

She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth close to the Castilian’s ear, standing out against his reddish beard as if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up Jose’s sad eyes.  As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red line of the velvet border.  And with his greedy glance he continued to trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed, all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.

This was the vanishing of his last dream!  This love gone, this deception driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted, and branded with its true name, folly, he felt as if a yawning chasm had been opened in him.  Life was over!  He was old now and he had wasted, yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth.  He had believed himself loved!  Loved!  Imbecile that he was!

He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that woman: 

“You do not know her!  She is debauchery and falsehood itself!”

It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne:  the haughty face of Uncle Simon.

While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that attracted him.  He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and voluntarily wounded his own heart.