Ely had been angered by his departure. She had felt the same resentment with him that he had felt with her. Chance had brought her face to face with his dearest friend, with Pierre Hautefeuille, of whom he had so often spoken in exalted terms. She must have decided upon revenge, upon a vengeance that resembled her--criminal, refined, and so profoundly, so cruelly, intelligent!--In this way Du Prat reasoned. And, although his reasoning was only hypothetical, he felt, as he fed his mind with such thoughts, a suffering mingled with a sort of unhealthy and irresistible satisfaction that would have terrified him had he considered it calmly. To suppose that Madame de Carlsberg had avenged herself upon him with such calculation was to suppose that she had not forgotten him. The windings in the human heart are so strange! In spite of the fact that he had insulted his former mistress all the time they had been together, that he had left her first, without a farewell, that he had married after due reflection, and had resolved to keep his vows honorably--in spite of all this, the idea that she still remembered him secretly stirred him strangely. It must be remembered that he was just passing through one of the most dangerous moments of conjugal existence. Every moral crisis is complicated with a multitude of contradictory elements in souls such as his,--souls without fixed principles, that are turned aside at every moment by the influence of their faintest impression. Marriages contracted through sheer lassitude, such as the one he admitted having contracted, bring down their own punishment upon the abominable egoism that prompts them. They have to pay a penalty worse than the most redoubtable catastrophe. They are followed immediately by profound, incurable weariness. The man, thirty years of age, who, thinking he is disgusted forever with sensual passions, and who, mistaking this disgust for wisdom, settles down, as the saying is, quickly finds that those very passions that sickened him are as necessary to him as morphine is to the morphine maniac who has been deprived of his Pravaz syringe, as necessary as alcohol is to the inebriate put upon a _régime_ of pure water. He suffers from a species of nostalgia, of longing for those unhealthy emotions whose fruitlessness he has himself recognized and condemned. If a brutal but very exact comparison can be borrowed from modern pathology, he becomes a favorable medium for the cultivation of all the morbid germs floating in his atmosphere. And at the very moment when everything seems to point to the pacific arrangement of their destiny, some revolution takes place, as it was doing in Olivier,--a revolution so rapid, so terrible, that the witness and victims of these sudden wild outbursts are left almost more disconcerted than despairing.