Although the childish and unjust hatred of the jealous—­the hatred which degrades us in lowering the one we love-had poisoned his discourse with its bitterness, he did not cease watching Dorsenne.  He partly raised himself on the couch and thrust his head forward as he uttered the name of his rival, glancing keenly at the novelist meanwhile.  The latter fortunately had been rendered indignant at the news of the anonymous letter, and he repeated, with an astonishment which in no way aided his interlocutor: 

“Wait,” resumed Boleslas; “that was merely a beginning.  The next day I received another letter, written and sent under the same conditions; the day after, a third.  I have twelve of them—­do you hear? twelve—­in my portfolio, and all composed with the same atrocious knowledge of the circle in which we move, as was the first.  At the same time I was receiving letters from my poor wife, and all coincided, in the terrible series, in a frightful concordance.  The anonymous letter told me:  ’To-day they were together two hours and a quarter,’ while Maud wrote:  ’I could not go out to-day, as agreed upon, with Madame Steno, for she had a headache.’  Then the portrait of Alba, of which they told me incidentally.  The anonymous letters detailed to me the events, the prolongation of sitting, while my wife wrote:  ’We again went to see Alba’s portrait yesterday.  The painter erased what he had done.’  Finally it became impossible for me to endure it.  With their abominable minuteness of detail, the anonymous letters gave me even the address of their rendezvous!  I set out.  I said to myself, ’If I announce my arrival to my wife they will find it out, they will escape me.’  I intended to surprise them.  I wanted—­Do I know what I wanted?  I wanted to suffer no longer the agony of uncertainty.  I took the train.  I stopped neither day nor night.  I left my valet yesterday in Florence, and this morning I was in Rome.

“My plan was made on the way.  I would hire apartments near theirs, in the same street, perhaps in the same house.  I would watch them, one, two days, a week.  And then—­would you believe it?  It was in the cab which was bearing me directly toward that street that I saw suddenly, clearly within me, and that I was startled.  I had my hand upon this revolver.”  He drew the weapon from his pocket and laid it upon the divan, as if he wished to repulse any new temptation.  “I saw myself as plainly as I see you, killing those two beings like two animals, should I surprise them.  At the same time I saw my son and my wife.  Between murder and me there was, perhaps, just the distance which separated me from the street, and I felt that it was necessary to fly at once—­to fly that street, to fly from the guilty ones, if they were really guilty; to fly from myself!  I thought of you, and I have come to say to you, ’My friend, this is how things are; I am drowning, I am lost; save me.’”