For about three weeks, however, at the time we are speaking of, the duke had neither crossed her threshold nor written.  He had told her he was going for a few days to Normandy, where he had large estates, but had remained absent so long after the date he had fixed for his return that she began to feel uneasy.  What could be keeping him?  Some new flame, perhaps.  The anxiety of the lady was all the more keen, that until now nothing had passed between them but looks of languor and words of love.  The duke had laid himself and all he possessed at the feet of Angelique, and Angelique had refused his offer.  A too prompt surrender would have justified the reports so wickedly spread against her; and, made wise by experience, she was resolved not to compromise her future as she had compromised her past.  But while playing at virtue she had also to play at disinterestedness, and her pecuniary resources were consequently almost exhausted.  She had proportioned the length of her resistance to the length of her purse, and now the prolonged absence of her lover threatened to disturb the equilibrium which she had established between her virtue and her money.  So it happened that the cause of the lovelorn Duc de Vitry was in great peril just at the moment when de Jars and Jeannin resolved to approach the fair one anew.  She was sitting lost in thought, pondering in all good faith on the small profit it was to a woman to be virtuous, when she heard voices in the antechamber.  Then her door opened, and the king’s treasurer walked in.

As this interview and those which follow took place in the presence of witnesses, we are obliged to ask the reader to accompany us for a time to another part of the same house.

We have said there were several tenants:  now the person who occupied the rooms next to those in which Mademoiselle de Guerchi lived was a shopkeeper’s widow called Rapally, who was owner of one of the thirty-two houses which then occupied the bridge Saint-Michel.  They had all been constructed at the owner’s cost, in return for a lease for ever.  The widow Rapally’s avowed age was forty, but those who knew her longest added another ten years to that:  so, to avoid error, let us say she was forty-five.  She was a solid little body, rather stouter than was necessary for beauty; her hair was black, her complexion brown, her eyes prominent and always moving; lively, active, and if one once yielded to her whims, exacting beyond measure; but until then buxom and soft, and inclined to pet and spoil whoever, for the moment, had arrested her volatile fancy.  Just as we make her acquaintance this happy individual was a certain Maitre Quennebert, a notary of Saint Denis, and the comedy played between him and the widow was an exact counterpart of the one going on in the rooms of Mademoiselle de Guerchi, except that the roles were inverted; for while the lady was as much in love as the Duc de Vitry, the answering devotion professed by the notary was as insincere as the disinterested attachment to her lover displayed by the whilom maid of honour.