he was by a phenomenon in which was revealed to the full the singular complexity of his nature.  The Slav’s especial characteristic is a prodigious, instantaneous nervousness.  It seems that those beings with the uncertain hearts have a faculty of amplifying in themselves, to the point of absorbing the heart altogether, states of partial, passing, and yet sincere emotion.  The intensity of their momentary excitement thus makes of them sincere comedians, who speak to you as if they felt certain sentiments of an exclusive order, to feel contradictory ones the day after, with the same ardor, with the same untruthfulness, unjustly say the victims of those natures, so much the more deceitful as they are more vibrating.

He suffered, indeed, on discovering that Maud had been initiated into his criminal intrigue, but he suffered more for her than for himself.  It was sufficient for that suffering to occupy a few moments, a few hours.  It reinvested the personality of the impassioned and weak husband who loved his wife while betraying her.  There was, indeed, a shade of it in his adventure, but a very slight shade.  And yet, he did not think he was telling an untruth, when he finally broke the silence to say to her whom he had so long deceived: 

“You have avenged yourself with much severity, Maud, but you had the right....  I do not know who has informed you of an error which was very culpable, very wrong, very unfortunate, too....  I know that I have in Rome enemies bent upon my ruin, and I am sure they have left me no means of defending myself.  I have deceived you, and I have suffered.”

He paused after those words, uttered with a tremor of conviction which was not assumed.  He had forgotten that ten minutes before he had entered the room with the firm determination to hide his duel and its cause from the woman for whose pardon he would at that moment have sacrificed his life without hesitation.  He continued, in a voice softened by affection:  “Whatever they have told you, whatever you have read, I swear to you, you do not know all.”

“I know enough,” interrupted Maud, “since I know that you have been the lover of that woman, of the mother of my intimate friend, at my side, under my very eyes....  If you had suffered by that deception, as you say, you would not have waited to avow all to me until I held in my hands the undeniable proof of your infamy....  You have cast aside the mask, or, rather, I have wrested it from you....  I desire no more....  As for the details of the shameful story, spare me them.  It was not to hear them that I reentered a house every corner of which reminds me that I believed in you implicitly, and that you have betrayed me, not one day, but every day; that you betrayed me the day before yesterday, yesterday, this morning, an hour ago....  I repeat, that is sufficient.”