“Thirty thousand francs!” cried Ursula, in a silly tone.

“Yes, I know it,” replied Dommanget.  “They told me this morning at the house of the young Duchesse Berthe de Maufrigneuse that it was Monsieur de Trailles who won that money from you,” he added, turning to Calyste.  “Why do you play with such men?  Frankly, monsieur le baron, I can well believe you are ashamed of it.”

Seeing his mother-in-law, a pious duchess, the young viscountess, a happy woman, and the old accoucheur, a confirmed egotist, all three lying like a dealer in bric-a-brac, the kind and feeling Calyste understood the greatness of the danger, and two heavy tears rolled from his eyes and completely deceived Sabine.

“Monsieur,” she said, sitting up in bed and looking angrily at Dommanget, “Monsieur du Guenic can lose thirty, fifty, a hundred thousand francs if it pleases him, without any one having a right to think it wrong or read him a lesson.  It is far better that Monsieur de Trailles should win his money than that we should win Monsieur de Trailles’.”

Calyste rose, took his wife round the neck, kissed her on both cheeks and whispered:—­

“Sabine, you are an angel!”

Two days later the young wife was thought to be out of danger, and the next day Calyste was at Madame de Rochefide’s making a merit of his infamy.

“Beatrix,” he said, “you owe me happiness.  I have sacrificed my poor little wife to you; she has discovered all.  That fatal paper on which you made me write, bore your name and your coronet, which I never noticed—­I saw but you!  Fortunately the ‘B’ was by chance effaced.  But the perfume you left upon me and the lies in which I involved myself like a fool have betrayed my happiness.  Sabine nearly died of it; her milk went to the head; erysipelas set in, and possibly she may bear the marks for the rest of her days.”

As Beatrix listened to this tirade her face was due North, icy enough to freeze the Seine had she looked at it.

“So much the better,” she said; “perhaps it will whiten her for you.”

And Beatrix, now become as hard as her bones, sharp as her voice, harsh as her complexion, continued a series of atrocious sarcasms in the same tone.  There is no greater blunder than for a man to talk of his wife, if she is virtuous, to his mistress, unless it be to talk of his mistress, if she is beautiful, to his wife.  But Calyste had not received that species of Parisian education which we must call the politeness of the passions.  He knew neither how to lie to his wife, nor how to tell his mistress the truth,—­two apprenticeships a man in his position must make in order to manage women.  He was therefore compelled to employ all the power of passion to obtain from Beatrix a pardon which she forced him to solicit for two hours; a pardon refused by an injured angel who raised her eyes to the ceiling that she might not see the guilty man, and who put forth reasons sacred to marquises in a voice quivering with tears which were furtively wiped with the lace of her handkerchief.