The fourth meeting between this couple had been agreed upon at the end of the third, exactly as formerly in Italian theatres the play was announced for the next night.  The hour fixed was nine in the morning.  On the next day when the happiness was due for which the amorous old man had resigned himself to domestic rules, at about eight in the morning, Reine came and asked to see the Baron.  Hulot, fearing some catastrophe, went out to speak with Reine, who would not come into the anteroom.  The faithful waiting-maid gave him the following note:—­

“DEAR OLD MAN,—­Do not go to the Rue du Dauphin.  Our incubus is ill, and I must nurse him; but be there this evening at nine.  Crevel is at Corbeil with Monsieur Lebas; so I am sure he will bring no princess to his little palace.  I have made arrangements here to be free for the night and get back before Marneffe is awake.  Answer me as to all this, for perhaps your long elegy of a wife no longer allows you your liberty as she did.  I am told she is still so handsome that you might play me false, you are such a gay dog!  Burn this note; I am suspicious of every one.”

Hulot wrote this scrap in reply: 

“MY LOVE,—­As I have told you, my wife has not for five-and-twenty years interfered with my pleasures.  For you I would give up a hundred Adelines.—­I will be in the Crevel sanctum at nine this evening awaiting my divinity.  Oh that your clerk might soon die!  We should part no more.  And this is the dearest wish of

“YOUR HECTOR.”

That evening the Baron told his wife that he had business with the Minister at Saint-Cloud, that he would come home at about four or five in the morning; and he went to the Rue du Dauphin.  It was towards the end of the month of June.

Few men have in the course of their life known really the dreadful sensation of going to their death; those who have returned from the foot of the scaffold may be easily counted.  But some have had a vivid experience of it in dreams; they have gone through it all, to the sensation of the knife at their throat, at the moment when waking and daylight come to release them.—­Well, the sensation to which the Councillor of State was a victim at five in the morning in Crevel’s handsome and elegant bed, was immeasurably worse than that of feeling himself bound to the fatal block in the presence of ten thousand spectators looking at you with twenty thousand sparks of fire.

Valerie was asleep in a graceful attitude.  She was lovely, as a woman is who is lovely enough to look so even in sleep.  It is art invading nature; in short, a living picture.

In his horizontal position the Baron’s eyes were but three feet above the floor.  His gaze, wandering idly, as that of a man who is just awake and collecting his ideas, fell on a door painted with flowers by Jan, an artist disdainful of fame.  The Baron did not indeed see twenty thousand flaming eyes, like the man condemned to death; he saw but one, of which the shaft was really more piercing than the thousands on the Public Square.