“Your letter told me all,” replied Camille; “happiness ignores everything but itself.  You boasted too much of yours to be really happy.  Truth is deaf, dumb, and blind where love really is.  Consequently, seeing very plainly that you have your reasons for abandoning Conti, I have feared to have you here.  My dear, Calyste is an angel; he is as good as he is beautiful; his innocent heart will not resist your eyes; already he admires you too much not to love you at the first encouragement; your coldness can alone preserve him to me.  I confess to you, with the cowardice of true passion, that if he were taken from me I should die.  That dreadful book of Benjamin Constant, ‘Adolphe,’ tells us only of Adolphe’s sorrows; but what about those of the woman, hey?  The man did not observe them enough to describe them; and what woman would have dared to reveal them?  They would dishonor her sex, humiliate its virtues, and pass into vice.  Ah!  I measure the abyss before me by my fears, by these sufferings that are those of hell.  But, Beatrix, I will tell you this:  in case I am abandoned, my choice is made.”

“What is it?” cried Beatrix, with an eagerness that made Camille shudder.

The two friends looked at each other with the keen attention of Venetian inquisitors; their souls clashed in that rapid glance, and struck fire like flints.  The marquise lowered her eyes.

“After man, there is nought but God,” said the celebrated woman.  “God is the Unknown.  I shall fling myself into that as into some vast abyss.  Calyste has sworn to me that he admires you only as he would a picture; but alas! you are but twenty-eight, in the full magnificence of your beauty.  The struggle thus begins between him and me by falsehood.  But I have one support; happily I know a means to keep him true to me, and I shall triumph.”

“What means?”

“That is my secret, dear.  Let me have the benefits of my age.  If Claude Vignon, as Conti has doubtless told you, flings me back into the gulf, I, who had climbed to a rock which I thought inaccessible, —­I will at least gather the pale and fragile, but delightful flowers that grow in its depths.”

Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax in those able hands.  Camille felt an almost savage pleasure in thus entrapping her rival in her toils.  She sent her to bed that night piqued by curiosity, floating between jealousy and generosity, but most assuredly with her mind full of the beautiful Calyste.

“She will be enchanted to deceive me,” thought Camille, as she kissed her good-night.

Then, when she was alone, the author, the constructor of dramas, gave place to the woman, and she burst into tears.  Filling her hookah with tobacco soaked in opium, she spent the greater part of the night in smoking, dulling thus the sufferings of her soul, and seeing through the clouds about her the beautiful young head of her late lover.

“What a glorious book to write, if I were only to express my pain!” she said to herself.  “But it is written already; Sappho lived before me.  And Sappho was young.  A fine and touching heroine truly, a woman of forty!  Ah! my poor Camille, smoke your hookah; you haven’t even the resource of making a poem of your misery—­that’s the last drop of anguish in your cup!”