She was now more preoccupied than ever about the relations which she suspected to exist between M. de Camors and Madame de Campvallon.  These relations could not but prove fatal to the hopes she had so long founded on the widowhood of the Marquise and the heritage of the General.  The marriage of M. de Camors had for the moment deceived her, but she was one of those pious persons who always think evil, and whose suspicions are soon reawakened.  She tried to obtain from Vautrot, who had so long been intimate with her nephew, some explanation of the mystery; but as Vautrot was too prudent to enlighten her, she turned him out of doors.

After his encounter with M. de Camors, he immediately turned his steps toward the Rue St. Dominique, and an hour later Madame de la Roche-Jugan had the pleasure of knowing all that he knew of the liaison between the Count and the Marquise.  But we remember that he knew everything.  These revelations, though not unexpected, terrified Madame de la Roche-Jugan, who saw her maternal projects destroyed forever.  To her bitter feeling at this deception was immediately joined, in this base soul, a sudden thirst for revenge.  It was true she had been badly recompensed for her anonymous letter, by which she had previously attempted to open the eyes of the unfortunate General; for from that moment the General, the Marquise, and M. de Camors himself, without an open rupture, let her feel their marks of contempt, which embittered her heart.  She never would again expose herself to a similar slight of this kind; but she must assuredly, in the cause of good morals, at once confront the blind with the culpable, and this time with such proofs as would make the blow irresistible.  By the mere thought, Madame de la Roche-Jugan had persuaded herself that the new turn events were taking might become favorable to the expectations which had become the fixed idea of her life.

Madame de Campvallon destroyed, M. de Camors set aside, the General would be alone in the world; and it was natural to suppose he would turn to his young relative Sigismund, if only to recognize the far-sighted affection and wounded heart of Madame de la Roche-Jugan.

The General, in fact, had by his marriage contract settled all his property on his wife; but Madame de la Roche-Jugan, who had consulted a lawyer on this question, knew that he had the power of alienating his fortune during life, and of stripping his unworthy wife and transferring it to Sigismund.

Madame de la Roche-Jugan did not shrink from the probability—­which was most likely—­of an encounter between the General and Camors.  Every one knows the disdainful intrepidity of women in the matter of duels.  She had no scruple, therefore, in engaging Vautrot in the meritorious work she meditated.  She secured him by some immediate advantages and by promises; she made him believe the General would recompense him largely.  Vautrot, smarting still from the cut of Camors’s whip on his shoulder, and ready to kill him with his own hand had he dared, hardly required the additional stimulus of gain to aid his protectress in her vengeance by acting as her instrument.