I will only say, Come, if you ever loved, even for a day, the woman who has never told you and never will tell you aught but the truth. I swear it, my only love.' When Suzanne had finished her letter she read it over. A lingering instinct of prudence made her hesitate before signing it, but the sincerity of her passion caused her to blush for her momentary weakness, and, taking up her pen, she wrote her name at the bottom of this faithful description of the strange moral condition into which she had drifted. She lied once more in swearing that she spoke the truth, and yet nothing was truer, more spontaneous, and less artificial than the feelings which dictated the supreme deception that capped all the rest. She summoned her footman, and, again scorning all ideas of prudence, told him to give the letter--any single sentence in which would have ruined her--to a commissionaire for immediate delivery. During the thirty-six hours that separated her from the rendez-vous she had fixed she lived in a state of nervous excitement of which she would never have deemed herself capable. This woman, who had such perfect control over herself, and who had entered upon this adventure with the same Machiavelian _sangfroid_ she had maintained in all her Society relations for years, now felt powerless to follow, or even to form, any kind of plan respecting the attitude to be assumed towards her lover. She was to dine out that night, but she went through the process of dressing in an absolutely listless way--an unusual thing for her--and without even looking in the glass. During the whole of the dinner she found not a word to say to her neighbour, the ubiquitous Crucé, and her brougham had been ordered for ten o'clock on the plea that she was still suffering from her indisposition of the preceding evening. On her way home she paid not the slightest attention to her husband's words; his very presence was intolerable to her, for it was on his account, remaining at home as he did on Sundays, that she had been obliged to put off her meeting with René until Monday. Would the poet consent to come? How anxiously, as the servant helped her off with her cloak, did she scan the tray on which were placed the letters that had come by the evening post! The poet's writing was not to be seen on any envelope. She spent the whole of Sunday in bed, under pretext of a bad headache, but in reality trying to think out some plan in case René refused to believe her story of a sick friend as an explanation of her visit to the Rue du Mont-Thabor.