Alas! when such a project, with all its supreme magnanimity, occurred to him, he felt strongly that Pierre would reply, No! and that he himself was not sincere. He understood it with a mingling of terror and shame. In spite of all it was a joy for him--a savage, hideous joy, but still a joy--to think that if Ely was no longer his mistress she would nevermore be the mistress of his friend. They were cruel moments. The time was not less miserable for Pierre. He also, the moment he was alone, tried not to think of Ely. And in trying he felt that he was yielding. In order to drive her image away he would call up in his mind the image of his friend, and this formed the very nature of his suffering. He would tell himself that Olivier had been this woman's lover, and this fact, which he knew to be the truth, which he knew to be of the most complete, the most, indisputable verity, took possession of his brain. He felt as though a hand had taken him by the head, a hand that would never let him go again. While Olivier was thinking about his mistress in Rome, a softened, ennobled mistress, transformed by the love that Pierre inspired in her, Pierre perceived, beyond the sweet and gentle Ely of the past winter, the woman whom Olivier had described to him without naming her. He saw her again, coquettish and perverse, with the same beautiful face in which he had believed so sincerely. He told himself that she had had two other lovers, one when she was Olivier's mistress and one before then. Olivier, Pierre, and those two men made four, and probably there were others of whom he did not know. The idea that this woman, whom he had believed he possessed in all the purity of her soul, had simply passed from one adultery to another, the idea that she had come to him sullied by so many intrigues, maddened him with pain. All the episodes of his delightful romance, of his fresh and lovely idyl, faded away and became vile in his eyes. He saw nothing in it now save the lustful desire of a woman, wounded in her pride, who had attracted him by one artful plan after another. Then he would open the drawer in which he preserved the relics of what had been his happiness. He would take out the cigarette case he had bought at Monte Carlo with such happiness. The sight of this foreign trinket wounded his soul, for it brought back to him the words uttered by his friend in the woods of Vallauris, "She had lovers before me; at any rate she had one, a Russian, who was killed at Plevna." It was probably this lover who had given Ely the object around which he, Pierre, had woven so many cherished ideas, which he had worshipped almost with a scrupulous piety. This ironical contrast was so humiliating that the young man quivered with indignation.