“Yes, happy indeed!” replied Felicite, with savage bitterness.

The two women dropped upon a bench from a sense of exhaustion.  No creature of her sex was ever played upon like an instrument with more Machiavellian penetration than the marquise throughout this week.

“Yes, you are happy, but I!” she said,—­“to know of Conti’s infidelities, and have to bear them!”

“Why not leave him?” said Camille, seeing the hour had come to strike a decisive blow.

“Can I?”

“Oh! poor boy!”

Both were gazing into a clump of trees with a stupefied air.

Camille rose.

“I will go and hasten breakfast; my walk has given me an appetite,” she said.

“Our conversation has taken away mine,” remarked Beatrix.

The marquise in her morning dress was outlined in white against the dark greens of the foliage.  Calyste, who had slipped through the salon into the garden, took a path, along which he sauntered as though he were meeting her by accident.  Beatrix could not restrain a quiver as he approached her.

“Madame, in what way did I displease you yesterday?” he said, after the first commonplace sentences had been exchanged.

“But you have neither pleased me nor displeased me,” she said, in a gentle voice.

The tone, air, and manner in which the marquise said these words encouraged Calyste.

“Am I so indifferent to you?” he said in a troubled voice, as the tears came into his eyes.

“Ought we not to be indifferent to each other?” replied the marquise.  “Have we not, each of us, another, and a binding attachment?”

“Oh!” cried Calyste, “if you mean Camille, I did love her, but I love her no longer.”

“Then why are you shut up together every morning?” she said, with a treacherous smile.  “I don’t suppose that Camille, in spite of her passion for tobacco, prefers her cigar to you, or that you, in your admiration for female authors, spend four hours a day in reading their romances.”

“So then you know—­” began the guileless young Breton, his face glowing with the happiness of being face to face with his idol.

“Calyste!” cried Camille, angrily, suddenly appearing and interrupting him.  She took his arm and drew him away to some distance.  “Calyste, is this what you promised me?”

Beatrix heard these words of reproach as Mademoiselle des Touches disappeared toward the house, taking Calyste with her.  She was stupefied by the young man’s assertion, and could not comprehend it; she was not as strong as Claude Vignon.  In truth, the part being played by Camille Maupin, as shocking as it was grand, is one of those wicked grandeurs which women only practise when driven to extremity.  By it their hearts are broken; in it the feelings of their sex are lost to them; it begins an abnegation which ends by either plunging them to hell, or lifting them to heaven.