“Wretch!” cried Jacques.

She looked at him with a mocking air, and her eyes beamed with infernal audacity.

“You do not know me yet,” she cried.  “Go, speak, denounce me!  M. Folgat no doubt has told you how I can deny and defend myself.”

Maddened by indignation, and excited to a point where reason loses its power over us, Jacques de Boiscoran moved with uplifted hand towards the countess, when suddenly a voice said,—­

“Do not strike that woman!”

Jacques and the countess turned round, and uttered, both at the same instant, the same kind of sharp, terrible cry, which must have been heard a great distance.

In the frame of the door stood Count Claudieuse, a revolver in his hand, and ready to fire.

He looked as pale as a ghost; and the white flannel dressing-gown which he had hastily thrown around him hung like a pall around his lean limbs.  The first cry uttered by the countess had been heard by him on the bed on which he lay apparently dying.  A terrible presentiment had seized him.  He had risen from his bed, and, dragging himself slowly along, holding painfully to the balusters, he had come down.

“I have heard all,” he said, casting crushing looks at both the guilty ones.

The countess uttered a deep, hoarse sigh, and sank into a chair.  But Jacques drew himself up, and said,—­

“I have insulted you terribly, sir.  Avenge yourself.”

The count shrugged his shoulders.

“Great God!  You would allow me to be condemned for a crime which I have not committed.  Ah, that would be the meanest cowardice.”

The count was so feeble that he had to lean against the door-post.

“Would it be cowardly?” he asked.  “Then, what do you call the act of that miserable man who meanly, disgracefully robs another man of his wife, and palms off his own children upon him?  It is true you are neither an incendiary nor an assassin.  But what is fire in my house in comparison with the ruin of all my faith?  What are the wounds in my body in comparison with that wound in my heart, which never can heal?  I leave you to the court, sir.”

Jacques was terrified; he saw the abyss opening before him that was to swallow him up.

“Rather death,” he cried,—­“death.”

And, baring his breast, he said,—­

“But why do you not fire, sir?  Why do you not fire?  Are you afraid of blood?  Shoot!  I have been the lover of your wife:  your youngest daughter is my child.”

The count lowered his weapon.

“The courts of justice are more certain,” he said.  “You have robbed me of my honor:  now I want yours.  And, if you cannot be condemned without it, I shall say, I shall swear, that I recognized you.  You shall go to the galleys, M. de Boiscoran.”

He was on the point of coming forward; but his strength was exhausted, and he fell forward, face downward, and arms outstretched.