best for us both.”  So she thinks for me!  She not only decides, she thinks; she is the active principle; ’tis mine to submit.—­A certain presumption was in that girl always.  Ha! do you hear me?  Her letter may sting, it shall not dupe.  Strangers?  Poor fool!  You see plainly she was nailed down to write the thing.  This letter is a flat lie.  She can lie—­Oh! born to the art! born to it!—­lies like a Saint tricking Satan!  But she says she has left the city.  Now to find her!’

He began marching about the room with great strides.  ’I ’ll have the whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I ’ll have them by the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force.  I have sworn it.  I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it’s war.  I declare war on them.  They will have it!  I mean to take that girl from them—­ snatch or catch!  The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against my having my own, to powder with the laws!  Well, and do you suppose me likely to be beaten?  Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people’s legend.  Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have power over the blood and souls of men.  First, I write to her!’

His friend suggested that he knew not where she was.  But already the pen was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.

Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of his fever.  As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more fiercely desired.  The concentration of his active mind directed his whole being on the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human.  That last day when he had seen her appeared to him as the day of days.  That day was Clotilde herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman, and saw himself translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all was dark, as in front.  That one day was the sun of his life.  It had been a day of rain, and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with the dark threaded air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all daily radiance.  His letter was a burning hymn to the day.  His moral grandeur on the day made him live as part of the splendour.  Was it possible for the woman who had seen him then to be faithless to him?  The swift deduction from his own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion to the contrary, and he became lighthearted.  He hummed an air when he had finished his letter to her.

Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde.  His gold rained into their hands with the directions.