“I may have told you that I would write to Conti, but to do it was another matter,” cried Camille.  “I am incapable of such baseness.  But you are unhappy, and I will forgive the suspicion.”

“What will become of Calyste?” said the marquise, with naive self-conceit.

“Then Conti carries you off, does he?” asked Camille.

“Ah! you think you triumph!” cried Beatrix.

Anger distorted her handsome face as she said those bitter words to Camille, who was trying to hide her satisfaction under a false expression of sympathy.  Unfortunately, the sparkle in her eyes belied the sadness of her face, and Beatrix was learned in such deceptions.  When, a few moments later, the two women were seated under a strong light on that divan where the first three weeks so many comedies had been played, and where the secret tragedy of many thwarted passions had begun, they examined each other for the last time, and felt they were forever parted by an undying hatred.

“Calyste remains to you,” said Beatrix, looking into Camille’s eyes; “but I am fixed in his heart, and no woman can ever drive me out of it.”

Camille replied, with an inimitable tone of irony that struck the marquise to the heart, in the famous words of Mazarin’s niece to Louis XIV.,—­

“You reign, you love, and you depart!”

Neither Camille nor Beatrix was conscious during this sharp and bitter scene of the absence of Conti and Calyste.  The composer had remained at table with his rival, begging him to keep him company in finishing a bottle of champagne.

“We have something to say to each other,” added Conti, to prevent all refusal on the part of Calyste.

Placed as they both were, it was impossible for the young Breton to refuse this challenge.

“My dear friend,” said the composer, in his most caressing voice, as soon as the poor lad had drunk a couple of glasses of champagne, “we are both good fellows, and we can speak to each other frankly.  I have not come here suspiciously.  Beatrix loves me,”—­this with a gesture of the utmost self-conceit—­“but the truth is, I have ceased to love her.  I am not here to carry her away with me, but to break off our relations, and to leave her the honors of the rupture.  You are young; you don’t yet know how useful it is to appear to be the victim when you are really the executioner.  Young men spit fire and flame; they leave a woman with noise and fury; they often despise her, and they make her hate them.  But wise men do as I am doing; they get themselves dismissed, assuming a mortified air, which leaves regret in the woman’s heart and also a sense of her superiority.  You don’t yet know, luckily for you, how hampered men often are in their careers by the rash promises which women are silly enough to accept when gallantry obliges us to make nooses to catch our happiness.  We swear eternal faithfulness, and declare that we desire to pass our lives with them, and seem to await