Her tortured soul cast herself utterly on that of her lover.  She turned her swimming eyes on him and said: 

“How you must despise me!”

Camors, half kneeling on the carpet near her, kissed her hand indifferently and half raised his shoulders in sign of denial.  “Is it not so?” she repeated.  “Answer me, Louis.”

His face wore a strange, cruel smile—­“Do not insist on an answer, I pray you,” he said.

“Then I am right?  You do despise me?”

Camors turned himself abruptly full toward her, looked straight in her face, and said, in a cold, hard voice, “I do!”

To this cruel speech the poor child replied by a wild cry that seemed to rend her, while her eyes dilated as if under the influence of strong poison.  Camors strode across the room, then returned and stood by her as he said, in a quick, violent tone: 

“You think I am brutal?  Perhaps I am, but that can matter little now.  After the irreparable wrong I have done you, there is one service—­and only one which I can now render you.  I do it now, and tell you the truth.  Understand me clearly; women who fall do not judge themselves more harshly than their accomplices judge them.  For myself, what would you have me think of you?

“To his misfortune and my shame, I have known your husband since his boyhood.  There is not a drop of blood in his veins that does not throb for you; there is not a thought of his day nor a dream of his night that is not yours; your every comfort comes from his sacrifices—­your every joy from his exertion!  See what he is to you!

“You have only seen my name in the journals; you have seen me ride by your window; I have talked a few times with you, and you yield to me in one moment the whole of his life with your own—­the whole of his happiness with your own.

“I tell you, woman, every man like me, who abuses your vanity and your weakness and afterward tells you he esteems you—­lies!  And if after all you still believe he loves you, you do yourself fresh injury.  No:  we soon learn to hate those irksome ties that become duties where we only sought pleasures; and the first effort after they are formed is to shatter them.

“As for the rest:  women like you are not made for unholy love like ours.  Their charm is their purity, and losing that, they lose everything.  But it is a blessing to them to encounter one wretch, like myself, who cares to say—­Forget me, forever!  Farewell!”

He left her, passed from the room with rapid strides, and, slamming the door behind him, disappeared.  Madame Lescande, who had listened, motionless, and pale as marble, remained in the same lifeless attitude, her eyes fixed, her hands clenched—­yearning from the depths of her heart that death would summon her.  Suddenly a singular noise, seeming to come from the next room, struck her ear.  It was only a convulsive sob, or violent and smothered laughter.  The wildest and most terrible ideas crowded to the mind of the unhappy woman; the foremost of them, that her husband had secretly returned, that he knew all—­that his brain had given way, and that the laughter was the gibbering of his madness.