For ten days Calyste was made to bear the weight of an anger all the more invincible because it was in part the effect of a real passion.  Beatrix now experienced the love so brutally but faithfully described to the Duchesse de Grandlieu by Maxime de Trailles.  Perhaps no well-organized beings exist who do not experience that terrible passion once in the course of their lives.  The marquise felt herself mastered by a superior force,—­by a young man on whom her rank and quality did not impose, who, as noble as herself, regarded her with an eye both powerful and calm, and from whom her greatest feminine arts and efforts could with difficulty obtain even a smile of approval.  In short, she was oppressed by a tyrant who never left her that she did not fall to weeping, bruised and wounded, yet believing herself to blame.  Charles-Edouard played upon Madame de Rochefide the same comedy Madame de Rochefide had played on Calyste for the last six months.

Since her public humiliation at the Opera, Beatrix had never ceased to treat Monsieur du Guenic on the basis of the following proposition:—­

“You have preferred your wife and the opinion of the world to me.  If you wish to prove that you love me, sacrifice your wife and the world to me.  Abandon Sabine, and let us live in Switzerland, Italy, or Germany.”

Entrenched in that hard ultimatum, she established the blockade which women declare by frigid glances, disdainful gestures, and a certain fortress-like demeanor, if we may so call it.  She thought herself delivered from Calyste, supposing that he would never dare to break openly with the Grandlieus.  To desert Sabine, to whom Mademoiselle des Touches had left her fortune, would doom him to penury.

But Calyste, half-mad with despair, had secretly obtained a passport, and had written to his mother begging her to send him at once a considerable sum of money.  While awaiting the arrival of these funds he set himself to watch Beatrix, consumed by the fury of Breton jealousy.  At last, nine days after the communication made by La Palferine to Maxime at the club, Calyste, to whom his mother had forwarded thirty thousand francs, went to Madame de Rochefide’s house with the firm intention of forcing the blockade, driving away La Palferine, and leaving Paris with his pacified angel.  It was one of those horrible alternatives in which women who have hitherto retained some little respect for themselves plunge at once and forever into the degradations of vice,—­though it is possible to return thence to virtue.  Until this moment Madame de Rochefide had regarded herself as a virtuous woman in heart, upon whom two passions had fallen; but to adore Charles-Edouard and still let Calyste adore her, would be to lose her self-esteem,—­for where deception begins, infamy begins.  She had given rights to Calyste, and no human power could prevent the Breton from falling at her feet and watering them with the tears of an absolute repentance.  Many