Under these circumstances, if Hautefeuille had been wise, he would have gone away alone. This he did not do. It was impossible for him to leave Du Prat alone in Cannes. He said to himself that it was because he could not leave his friend at such a moment. If he had gone down to the bottom of his heart, if he had probed the place where we dissemble thoughts of which we are ashamed, where lie hidden plans and secret egoism, he would have discovered that there were other motives that kept him there, motives that were much more degrading. Although he had the most complete confidence in Olivier's word, he trembled at the idea of his remaining alone in the same town as Ely de Carlsberg. In spite of the heroic effort to preserve a friendship that was so dear to them both, notwithstanding the esteem, the tenderness and pity they felt for each other, in spite of so many sacred recollections, in spite of honor, a woman stood between them. And that woman had introduced with her all the fatal influence that so quickly creeps into friendly relations, all the instinctive jealousy, the quivering susceptibility and uneasy taciturnity that destroys all. They were not long in feeling this. Each understood how deeply the fatal poison had eaten into their souls. And soon they understood a thing that is both strange and monstrous in appearance, and yet is really so natural--they realized that the love whose death they had vowed in the name of their friendship was now bound up in that friendship by the closest ties! Neither one nor the other could think of his friend, could look at him, or hear him, without immediately seeing Ely's image, without immediately thinking of the mistress who had belonged to them both. They were in the grasp of an idea that turned the few following days of intimacy into a veritable crisis of madness, a madness that was all the more torturing because they both avoided the name of the woman out of fidelity to their promise. But was it necessary for them to speak of her, seeing that each knew the other was thinking of her? How painful these few days were! Although they were not many, they seemed interminable!