These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies.  From these frightful tempests which ravage a woman’s heart springs an ignoble, unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the shopkeeper’s wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker’s lady, the angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate, at once puts into execution.  They imitate the government, every one of them; they resort to espionage.  What the State has invented in the public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in the interest of their love.  This fatal woman’s curiosity reduces them to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in this situation, has not lost her self-respect,—­a situation in which her jealousy will not permit her to respect anything:  neither your little boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of your desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with private compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your india-rubber girdles—­her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.

In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman makes no calculations, takes no observations.  She simply wishes to know the whole truth.

And Justine is delighted:  she sees her mistress compromising herself with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her suspicions, with terrible friendship.  Justine and Caroline hold councils and have secret interviews.  All espionage involves such relationships.  In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate of the married couple.  Example:  Lord Byron.

“Madame,” Justine one day observes, “monsieur really does go out to see a woman.”

Caroline turns pale.

“But don’t be alarmed, madame, it’s an old woman.”

“Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old:  men are inexplicable.”

“But, madame, it isn’t a lady, it’s a woman, quite a common woman.”

“Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de Fischtaminel told me so.”

And Caroline bursts into tears.

“I’ve been pumping Benoit.”

“What is Benoit’s opinion?”

“Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his secret from everybody, even from Benoit.”

For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go to pay spies and to purchase reports.

Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet; she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very much like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand mother who has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly school-bills, and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two thousand francs which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.