The marquise could not avoid dropping Calyste’s arm and taking that of Conti.  This ignoble transit, imperiously demanded, so dishonoring to the new love, overwhelmed Calyste who threw himself on the bench beside Camille, after exchanging the coldest of salutations with his rival.  He was torn by conflicting emotions.  Strong in the thought that Beatrix loved him, he wanted at first to fling himself upon Conti and tell him that Beatrix was his; but the violent trembling of the woman betraying how she suffered—­for she had really paid the penalty of her faults in that one moment—­affected him so deeply that he was dumb, struck like her with a sense of some implacable necessity.

Madame de Rochefide and Conti passed in front of the seat where Calyste had dropped beside Camille, and as she passed, the marquise looked at Camille, giving her one of those terrible glances in which women have the art of saying all things.  She avoided the eyes of Calyste and turned her attention to Conti, who appeared to be jesting with her.

“What will they say to each other?” Calyste asked of Camille.

“Dear child, you don’t know as yet the terrible rights which an extinguished love still gives to a man over a woman.  Beatrix could not refuse to take his arm.  He is, no doubt, joking her about her new love; he must have guessed it from your attitudes and the manner in which you approached us.”

“Joking her!” cried the impetuous youth, starting up.

“Be calm,” said Camille, “or you will lose the last chances that remain to you.  If he wounds her self-love, she will crush him like a worm under her foot.  But he is too astute for that; he will manage her with greater cleverness.  He will seem not even to suppose that the proud Madame de Rochefide could betray him; she could never be guilty of such depravity as loving a man for the sake of his beauty.  He will represent you to her as a child ambitious to have a marquise in love with him, and to make himself the arbiter of the fate of two women.  In short, he will fire a broadside of malicious insinuations.  Beatrix will then be forced to parry with false assertions and denials, which he will simply make use of to become once more her master.”

“Ah!” cried Calyste, “he does not love her.  I would leave her free.  True love means a choice made anew at every moment, confirmed from day to day.  The morrow justifies the past, and swells the treasury of our pleasures.  Ah! why did he not stay away a little longer?  A few days more and he would not have found her.  What brought him back?”

“The jest of a journalist,” replied Camille.  “His opera, on the success of which he counted, has fallen flat.  Some journalist, probably Claude Vignon, remarked in the foyer:  ’It is hard to lose fame and mistress at the same moment,’ and the speech cut him in all his vanities.  Love based on petty sentiments is always pitiless.  I have questioned him; but who can fathom a nature