The Princess rallied the Deputy.

“Then you do not know, Monsieur Garain, that one does the same things for very different reasons?”

Montessuy said she was right.

“It is very true, as you say, Madame, that actions prove nothing.  This thought is striking in an episode in the life of Don Juan, which was known neither to Moliere nor to Mozart, but which is revealed in an English legend, a knowledge of which I owe to my friend James Russell Lowell of London.  One learns from it that the great seducer lost his time with three women.  One was a bourgeoise:  she was in love with her husband; the other was a nun:  she would not consent to violate her vows; the third, who had for a long time led a life of debauchery, had become ugly, and was a servant in a den.  After what she had done, after what she had seen, love signified nothing to her.  These three women behaved alike for very different reasons.  An action proves nothing.  It is the mass of actions, their weight, their sum total, which makes the value of the human being.”

“Some of our actions,” said Madame Martin, “have our look, our face:  they are our daughters.  Others do not resemble us at all.”

She rose and took the General’s arm.

On the way to the drawing-room the Princess said: 

“Therese is right.  Some actions do not express our real selves at all.  They are like the things we do in nightmares.”

The nymphs of the tapestries smiled vainly in their faded beauty at the guests, who did not see them.

Madame Martin served the coffee with her young cousin, Madame Belleme de Saint-Nom.  She complimented Paul Vence on what he had said at the table.

“You talked of Napoleon with a freedom of mind that is rare in the conversations I hear.  I have noticed that children, when they are handsome, look, when they pout, like Napoleon at Waterloo.  You have made me feel the profound reasons for this similarity.”

Then, turning toward Dechartre: 

“Do you like Napoleon?”

“Madame, I do not like the Revolution.  And Napoleon is the Revolution in boots.”

“Monsieur Dechartre, why did you not say this at dinner?  But I see you prefer to be witty only in tete-a-tetes.”

Count Martin-Belleme escorted the men to the smoking-room.  Paul Vence alone remained with the women.  Princess Seniavine asked him if he had finished his novel, and what was the subject of it.  It was a study in which he tried to reach the truth through a series of plausible conditions.

“Thus,” he said, “the novel acquires a moral force which history, in its heavy frivolity, never had.”

She inquired whether the book was written for women.  He said it was not.

“You are wrong, Monsieur Vence, not to write for women.  A superior man can do nothing else for them.”

He wished to know what gave her that idea.

“Because I see that all the intelligent women love fools.”