“It is too soon to sing victory, madame,” said Maxime.  “I foresee enormous difficulties; though I shall no doubt vanquish them.  Your esteem and your protection are rewards which would make me commit the vilest actions, but these will be—­”

“The vilest actions!” cried the duchess, interrupting this modern condottiere, and showing on her countenance as much disgust as amazement.

“And you would share them, madame, inasmuch as I am only your agent.  But are you ignorant of the degree of blindness to which Madame de Rochefide has brought your son-in-law?  I know it from Canalis and Nathan, between whom she was hesitating when Calyste threw himself into the lioness’s jaws.  Beatrix has contrived to persuade that serious Breton that she has never loved any one but him; that she is virtuous; that Conti was merely a sentimental head-love in which neither the heart nor the rest of it had any part,—­a musical love, in short!  As for Rochefide, that was duty.  So, you understand, she is virgin!—­a fact she proves by forgetting her son, whom for more than a year she has not made the slightest attempt to see.  The truth is, the little count will soon be twelve years old, and he finds in Madame Schontz a mother who is all the more a mother because maternity is, as you know, a passion with women of that sort.  Du Guenic would let himself be cut in pieces, and would chop up his wife for Beatrix; and you think it is an easy matter to drag a man from the depths of such credulity!  Ah! madame, Shakespeare’s Iago would lose all his handkerchiefs.  People think that Othello, or his younger brother, Orosmanes, or Saint-Preux, Rene, Werther, and other lovers now in possession of fame, represented love!  Never did their frosty-hearted fathers know what absolute love is; Moliere alone conceived it.  Love, Madame la duchesse, is not loving a noble woman, a Clarissa—­a great effort, faith!  Love is to say to one’s self:  ’She whom I love is infamous; she deceives me, she will deceive me; she is an abandoned creature, she smells of the frying of hell-fire;’ but we rush to her, we find there the blue of heaven, the flowers of Paradise.  That is how Moliere loved, and how we, scamps that we are! how we love.  As for me, I weep at the great scene of Arnolphe.  Now, that is how your son-in-law loves Beatrix.  I shall have trouble separating Rochefide from Madame Schontz; but Madame Schontz will no doubt lend herself to the plot; I shall study her interior.  But as for Calyste and Beatrix, they will need the blows of an axe, far deeper treachery, and so base an infamy that your virtuous imagination could never descend to it —­unless indeed your director gave you a hand.  You have asked the impossible, you shall be obeyed.  But in spite of my settled intention to war with fire and sword, I cannot absolutely promise you success.  I have known lovers who did not recoil before the most awful disillusions.  You are too virtuous to know the full power of women who are not virtuous.”