Rosas was wild with joy. The possession of this woman, sought after as mistress, but more intensely ardent than a mistress, with her outbursts of tears and kisses, threw him into ecstasies and possessed him with distracting joy. Something within him whispered, as in the days of early manhood, at the ecstatic hour of sunrise. Already he wished to be on the way to Italy with Marianne, far from the mire and mists of Paris. "These rain-soaked sidewalks on which the gaslight is reflected seem gloomy to me," he said. "Let us seek the blue skies, Marianne, the orange groves of Nice, the stars of Naples." She smiled. "The _blue_ again!" she thought. "They all desire it, then?" She desired to remain a few days longer in Paris, delighted to proclaim her new name in its streets, its Bois and its theatres, where she had been known in her sadness, displaying her desperate melancholy. It seemed to her that, in her present triumph, she crushed both men and things. What was Naples to her? She had not miserably dragged her disillusions and her angers along the Chiaja. Florence might take her for a duchess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame for her follies, her hopes, her failures, her heartbreaks, her deceptions, all her sorrows of an ambitious woman, which had made her the daring woman that she was,--those boulevards, those paths about the Lake, those proscenium boxes at the theatre, she would see them in her triumph, as she had seen them in her untrammelled follies or in the moments of her ruin and abandonment. "Two days more! One day more," she said. "After the first representation at the Varietes, we will leave, are you willing?" "Ah! you Parisienne! Hungry Parisienne!" Jose replied. She looked at him with her gray eyes sparkling, and smiling. "The Varietes?--Don't you know the old rondel?--The one you hummed when you were sick, you know?--It seems to me that I can hear it yet: Do you see yonder That white house, Where every Sunday Under the sweet lilacs--" Uncle Kayser, ever prudent, advised a speedy departure. He feared he scarcely knew what. He feared everything, "like Abner, and feared only that." Every morning he dreaded seeing some indiscreet articles in the papers respecting the Duke and the Duchesse de Rosas. "These journalists disregard, without scruple, the wall of private life! It is a moral wall, however!"