The duke seemed to take pleasure in dwelling on these poetic quotations rather than on the reminiscences of his travels.  His individuality, his own impressions vanished before this passionate legacy bequeathed by one human race to another.  Marianne trembled, believing that she could see even in Rosas’s thoughts a desire to speak especially for her and to her.  Was it not thus that he spoke in his own house in the presence of Lissac, squatting on his divan like an Arab story-teller?

She felt her youth renewed by the memory of all those past years.  She thought herself back once more in the studio on Rue de Laval.  Sabine Marsy’s salon disappeared, Rosas was whispering in her ear, looking at her, and allowing the love that he felt to be perceived, in spite of Guy.

Guy! who was Guy?  Marianne troubled herself about no one but De Rosas.  Only the duke existed now.  Had Guy been blended with her life but for a single moment?  She embraced Rosas with her burning glance.

She no longer saw Sulpice, but he never looked away from Mademoiselle Kayser.  He thought her a most charming woman.  A magnetic fluid, as it were, flowed from her to this man, and he, with wandering mind, did not hear one word of Monsieur de Rosas’s narrative, but concentrated his thoughts upon that pretty, enticing woman, whom he could not refrain from comparing with his wife, sitting so near her at this moment.

Adrienne was very pretty, her beauty was more regular than the other’s.  Her smooth, blond hair was in contrast with the tumbled, auburn locks of Marianne, and yet, extraordinary as it was—­Adrienne had never seemed to be so cold as on that evening, as she sat there motionless, watching, while a timid habitual smile played over her lips.

Sulpice suffered somewhat in consequence of this awkwardness on Adrienne’s part, contrasted as it was with the clever freedom of manner, graceful attitude, and flowing outlines of that disturbing neighbor, with her dull white countenance, half-closed mouth, strange curl of her lips, which seemed turned up as if in challenge.  She was decidedly a Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls.  Some words spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey’s ears—­a description of the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians, explained by the duke by way of parenthesis—­suggested to Sulpice that the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was, after all, the filtering of a woman’s glance through the very flesh of a man, and he thirsted for that longed-for poison, intoxicating and delicious—­

He was anxious for the duke to finish his remarks.  What interest had he in all those travels, those Arabic translations, that Oriental poetry, or that poison from America?  He was seized with the desire to know what such a charming creature as Marianne thought.  Ah! what a pretty girl!  He had already inquired her name; he happened to know Uncle Kayser; the painter had formerly sent him a printed memoir On the Method of Moralizing Art through the Mind.