Slightly built and with thin arms and legs, the wide
clothes hung on him, and he was a comical sight with
the embroidered skirt of his coat sweeping the carpet,
and his sword knocking against his heels. The
elbows and the collar were shiny and greasy from wear,
for the Master had worn it until it was threadbare,
to avoid having to buy another, and had never thought
of replacing it.
He made a tremendous hit, and fair Liline Ablette
laughed so at his grimaces and his disguise, that
that night she threw over Prince Noureddin for him,
although he had paid for her house, her horses and
everything else, and allowed her six thousand francs
a month—L240—for extras and
pocket money.
“Certainly,” Dr. Sorbier exclaimed, who,
while appearing to be thinking of something else,
had been listening quietly to those surprising accounts
of burglaries and of daring acts which might have been
borrowed from the trial of Cartouche; “certainly,
I do not know any viler fault, nor any meaner action
than to attack a girl’s innocence, to corrupt
her, to profit by a moment of unconscious weakness
and of madness, when her heart is beating like that
of a frightened fawn, when her body, which has been
unpolluted up till then, is palpitating with mad desire
and her pure lips seek those of her seducer; when
her whole being is feverish and vanquished, and she
abandons herself without thinking of the irremediable
stain, nor of her fall nor of the painful awakening
on the morrow.
“The man who has brought this about slowly,
viciously, and who can tell with what science of evil,
and who, in such a case, has not steadiness and self-restraint
enough to quench that flame by some icy words, who
has not sense enough for two, who cannot recover his
self-possession and master the runaway brute within
him, and who loses his head on the edge of the precipice
over which she is going to fall, is as contemptible
as any man who breaks open a lock, or as any rascal
on the look-out for a house left defenseless and without
protection, or for some easy and profitable stroke
of business, or as that thief whose various exploits
you have just related to us.
“I, for my part, utterly, refuse to absolve
him even when extenuating circumstances plead in his
favor, even when he is carrying on a dangerous flirtation,
in which a man tries in vain to keep his balance,
not to exceed the limits of the game, any more than
at lawn tennis; even when the parts are inverted and
a man’s adversary is some precocious, curious,
seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she
has nothing to learn and nothing to experience, except
the last chapter of love, one of those girls from
whom may fate always preserve our sons, and whom a
psychological novel writer has christened The Semi-Virgins.
