But Noel heard not, and seemed hardly in a state to hear.  The young man, usually so cold, so self-contained, could no longer control his anger.  At the sound of his own voice, he became more and more animated, as a good horse might at the jingling of his harness.

“Was ever man,” continued he, “more cruelly deceived, more miserably duped, than I have been!  I, who loved this woman, who knew not how to show my affection for her, who, for her sake, sacrificed my youth!  How she must have laughed at me!  Her infamy dates from the moment when for the first time she took me on her knees; and, until these few days past, she has sustained without faltering her execrable role.  Her love for me was nothing but hypocrisy! her devotion, falsehood! her caresses, lies!  And I adored her!  Ah! why can I not take back all the embraces I bestowed on her in exchange for her Judas kisses?  And for what was all this heroism of deception, this caution, this duplicity?  To betray me more securely, to despoil me, to rob me, to give to her bastard all that lawfully appertained to me; my name, a noble name, my fortune, a princely inheritance!”

“We are getting near it!” thought old Tabaret, who was fast relapsing into the colleague of M. Gevrol; then aloud he said, “This is very serious, all that you have been saying, my dear Noel, terribly serious.  We must believe Madame Gerdy possessed of an amount of audacity and ability rarely to be met with in a woman.  She must have been assisted, advised, compelled perhaps.  Who have been her accomplices?  She could never have managed this unaided; perhaps her husband himself.”

“Her husband!” interrupted the advocate, with a laugh.  “Ah! you too have believed her a widow.  Pshaw!  She never had a husband, the defunct Gerdy never existed.  I was a bastard, dear M. Tabaret, very much a bastard; Noel, son of the girl Gerdy and an unknown father!”

“Ah!” cried the old fellow; “that then was the reason why your marriage with Mademoiselle Levernois was broken off four years ago?”

“Yes, my friend, that was the reason.  And what misfortunes might have been averted by this marriage with a young girl whom I loved!  However I did not complain to her whom I then called my mother.  She wept, she accused herself, she seemed ready to die of grief:  and I, poor fool!  I consoled her as best I could, I dried her tears, and excused her in her own eyes.  No, there was no husband.  Do such women as she have husbands?  She was my father’s mistress; and, on the day when he had had enough of her, he took up his hat and threw her three hundred thousand francs, the price of the pleasures she had given him.”

Noel would probably have continued much longer to pour forth his furious denunciations; but M. Tabaret stopped him.  The old fellow felt he was on the point of learning a history in every way similar to that which he had imagined; and his impatience to know whether he had guessed aright, almost caused him to forget to express any sympathy for his friend’s misfortunes.