Then Tom Sheffield and the others all joined in.

They had never seen anything like it, they declared; it was most exciting, and made one shiver unpleasantly, like when the espada comes to close quarters with the infuriated brute at a bull fight.

Countess Regina listened in silence, and nibbled the petals of a tea rose.

“How I should like to see them!” giddy Madame de Rhouel exclaimed.

“Unfortunately, cousin,” the Countess said, in the solemn tones of a preacher, “a respectable woman dare not let herself be seen in improper places.”

They all agreeing with her, nevertheless, Madame de Villegby was present at the Montefiores’ performance two days later, dressed all in black, and wearing a thick veil, at the back of a stage box.

And that woman was as cold as a steel buckler, and had married as soon as she left the convent in which she had been to school, without any affection or even liking for her husband, whom the most skeptical respected as a saint, and who had a look of virgin purity on her calm face as she went down the steps of the Madeleine on Sundays, after high mass.

Countess Regina stretched herself nervously, grew pale, and trembled like the strings of a violin, on which an artist had been playing some wild symphony, and inhaled the nasty smell of the sawdust, as if it had been the perfume of a bouquet of unknown flowers, and clenched her hands, and gazed eagerly at the two mountebanks, whom the public applauded rapturously at every feat.  And contemptuously and haughtily she compared those two men, who were as vigorous as wild animals that have grown up in the open air, with the rickety limbs, which look so awkward in the dress of an English groom, that had tried to inflame her heart.

* * * * *

Count de Villegby had gone back to the country, to prepare for his election as Councilor-General, and the very evening that he started, Regina again took the stage box at the Eden Reunis.  Consumed by sensual ardor as if by some love philter, she scribbled a few words on a piece of paper—­the eternal formula that women write on such occasions: 

“A carriage will be waiting for you at the stage door after the performance—­An unknown woman who adores you.”

And then she gave it to a box opener, who handed it to the Montefiore who was the champion pistol shot.

Oh! that interminable waiting in a malodorous cab, the overwhelming emotion, and the nausea of disgust, the fear, the desire of waking the coachman who was nodding on the box, of giving him her address, and telling him to drive her home.  But she remained with her face against the window, mechanically looking at the dark passage, that was illuminated by a gas lamp, at the “actors’ entrance,” through which men were continually hurrying, who talked in a loud voice, and chewed the end of a cigar which had gone out.  She remained as if she were glued to the cushions, and tapped impatiently on the bottom of the cab with her heels.