“He wants money!”

A voice within whispered the thought.  But why?  He spends next to nothing; we have absolutely no secrets from each other; there is not a corner of his study which my eyes and my fingers may not explore.  His yearly expenditure does not amount to two thousand francs, and I know that he has thirty thousand, I can hardly say laid by, but scattered loose in a drawer.  You can guess what is coming.  At midnight, while he was sleeping, I went to see if the money was still there.  An icy shiver ran through me.  The drawer was empty.

That same week I discovered that he went to Sevres to fetch his letters, and these letters he must tear up immediately; for though I am a very Figaro in contrivances, I have never yet seen a trace of one.  Alas! my sweet, despite the fine promises and vows by which I bound myself after the scene of the whip, an impulse, which I can only call madness, drove me to follow him in one of his rapid rides to the post-office.  Gaston was appalled to be thus discovered on horseback, paying the postage of a letter which he held in his hand.  He looked fixedly at me, and then put spurs to Fedelta.  The pace was so hard that I felt shaken to bits when I reached the lodge gate, though my mental agony was such at the time that it might well have dulled all consciousness of bodily pain.  Arrived at the gate, Gaston said nothing; he rang the bell and waited without a word.  I was more dead than alive.  I might be mistaken or I might not, but in neither case was it fitting for Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu to play the spy.  I had sunk to the level of the gutter, by the side of courtesans, opera-dancers, mere creatures of instinct; even the vulgar shop-girl or humble seamstress might look down on me.

What a moment!  At last the door opened; he handed his horse to the groom, and I also dismounted, but into his arms, which were stretched out to receive me.  I threw my skirt over my left arm, gave him my right, and we walked on—­still in silence.  The few steps we thus took might be reckoned to me for a hundred years of purgatory.  A swarm of thoughts beset me as I walked, now seeming to take visible form in tongues of fire before my eyes, now assailing my mind, each with its own poisoned dart.  When the groom and the horses were far away, I stopped Gaston, and, looking him in the face, said, as I pointed, with a gesture that you should have seen, to the fatal letter still in his right hand: 

“May I read it?”

He gave it to me.  I opened it and found a letter from Nathan, the dramatic author, informing Gaston that a play of his had been accepted, learned, rehearsed, and would be produced the following Saturday.  He also enclosed a box ticket.

Though for me this was the opening of heaven’s gates to the martyr, yet the fiend would not leave me in peace, but kept crying, “Where are the thirty thousand francs?” It was a question which self-respect, dignity, all my old self in fact, prevented me from uttering.  If my thought became speech, I might as well throw myself into the lake at once, and yet I could hardly keep the words down.  Dear friend, was not this a trial passing the strength of woman?