cannot better describe my relations with Olivier than by comparing them to a duel between a rider and his horse, when each tries to get the better of the other. I repeat it, I am sure I did not love him. I am not certain that I did not hate him." She spoke with a dryness that showed how deeply these memories were implanted. She paused a moment, and, plucking a rose from a bush near her, she began to bite the petals nervously, while Madame Brion sighed:-- "Need I pity you for that also,--for having sought happiness out of marriage, and for having met this man, this hard and capricious monster of egoism?" "I do not judge of him," Madame de Carlsberg answered. "If I had been different myself, I should doubtless have changed him. But he had touched me in an irritable spot; I wished to control him, to master him, and I used a terrible weapon. I made him jealous. All that is a bitter story, and I spare you the details. It would be painful to recall it, and it does not matter. You will know enough when I say that after a day of intimacy, when he had been more tender than ever before, Olivier left Rome suddenly, without an explanation, without a word of adieu, without even writing a letter. I have never seen him again. I have never heard of him, except in a chance conversation this winter, when I learned that he was married. Now you will understand the strange emotions I felt when two months ago Chésy asked permission to present a son of a friend of his mother, who had come to Cannes to recover from a bad cold, a young man, rather solitary and very charming; his name was Pierre Hautefeuille. In the countless conversations that Olivier and I had together in the intervals of our quarrelling, this name had often been spoken. Here again I must explain to you a very peculiar thing,--the nature of this man's conversation and the extraordinary attraction it had for me. This self-absorbed and enigmatic being had sudden hours of absolute expansion which I have seen in no one else. It was as though he relived his life aloud for me, and I listened with an unparalleled curiosity. He used at these times a kind of implacable lucidity which almost made you cry out, like a surgical operation, and which at the same time hypnotized you with a potent fascination. It was a brutal yet delicate disrobing of his childhood and his youth, with characterizations of such vividness that certain individuals were presented to me as distinctly as though I had really met them. And he himself? Ah, what a strange soul, incomplete and yet superior, so noble and so degraded, so sensitive and so arid, in whom there seemed to be nothing but lassitude, failure, stain, and disillusionment--excepting one sentiment. This man who despised his family, who never spoke of his country without bitterness, who attributed the worst motive to every action, even his own, who denied the existence of God, of virtue, of love, this moral nihilist, in short, in so many ways like the Archduke,