Dear Monsieur,—­I disappear forever, because my play is played out.  I thank you for having made it both attractive and easy.  By setting against you the Thuilliers and Collevilles (who are fully informed of your sentiments towards them), and by relating in a manner most mortifying to their bourgeois self-love the true reason of your sudden and pitiless rupture with them, I am proud and happy to believe that I have done you a signal service.  The girl does not love you, and you love nothing but the eyes of her “dot”; I have therefore saved you both from a species of hell.  But, in exchange for the bride you have so curtly rejected, another charming girl is proposed to you; she is richer and more beautiful than Mademoiselle Colleville, and—­to speak of myself —­more at liberty than

Your unworthy servant,
Torna “Comtesse de Godollo.”

P.S.  For further information apply, without delay, to Monsieur du
Portail, householder, rue Honore-Chevalier, near the rue de la
Cassette, quartier Saint-Sulpice, by whom you are expected.

When he had read this letter the advocate of the poor took his head in his hands; he saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing; he was annihilated.

Several days were necessary to la Peyrade before he could even begin to recover from the crushing blow which had struck him down.  The shock was terrible.  Coming out of that golden dream which had shown him a perspective of the future in so smiling an aspect, he found himself fooled under conditions most cruel to his self-love, and to his pretensions to depth and cleverness; irrevocably parted from the Thuilliers; saddled with a hopeless debt of twenty-five thousand francs to Madame Lambert, together with another of ten thousand to Brigitte, which his dignity required him to pay with the least delay possible; and, worst of all,—­to complete his humiliation and his sense of failure,—­he felt that he was not cured of the passionate emotion he had felt for this woman, the author of his great disaster, and the instrument of his ruin.

Either this Delilah was a very great lady, sufficiently high in station to allow herself such compromising caprices,—­but even so, she would scarcely have cared to play the role of a coquette in a vaudeville where he himself played the part of ninny,—­or she was some noted adventuress who was in the pay of this du Portail and the agent of his singular matrimonial designs.  Evil life or evil heart, these were the only two verdicts to be pronounced on this dangerous siren, and in either case, it would seem, she was not very deserving of the regrets of her victim; nevertheless, he was conscious of feeling them.  We must put ourselves in the place of this son of Provence, this region of hot blood and ardent heads, who, for the first time in his life finding himself face to face with jewelled love in laces, believed he was to drink that passion from a wrought-gold cup.  Just as