Now Ralph understood better the drama which was unfolding before him; and the characters who were playing their parts in it assumed their right proportion. Country squires, rustics, bumpkins? Yes--without a doubt. But Beaumagnan was there--Beaumagnan who inspired them with his own spirit and filled them with his exaltation. In the middle of these vulgar lives and these absurd figures he stood forth the prophet and the seer. He had forced on them as a duty some conspirator’s task to which he had devoted himself body and soul, as in the old days one devoted oneself to God, and left one’s castle to go on a crusade. Mystic passions of this kind transform those in whom they burn into heroes or executioners. In Beaumagnan there was a veritable inquisitor. In the fifteenth century he would have persecuted and mangled to tear from the impious the confession of faith. He had the instinct of domination and the bearing of a man for whom no obstacle exists. Did a woman rise between him and his end? Let her die. If he loved this woman, a public confession absolved him. And those who listened to him succumbed to the ascendancy of this hard master all the more easily because his hardness appeared to be directed quite as much against himself. Humiliated by the confession of his fall, he was no longer angry; and he continued in a dull voice: “Why did I fail? I do not know. A man like me ought not to fail. I have not even the excuse of being able to say that she questioned me. She did not. She often talked about the four enigmas mentioned by Cagliostro; and one day almost without knowing what I was doing, I spoke the irreparable words ... like a wretched weakling ... just to make myself agreeable ... just to seem important to her eyes ... that her smile might grow more tender. I said to myself: ‘She shall be our ally.... She shall help us with her counsel, with her clearsightedness, refined and heightened by years of practice of divination.’ I was mad. The intoxication of sin had set my reason tottering. “The awakening was terrible. About three weeks ago I had to go to Spain on a mission. I said good-by to her in the morning. In the afternoon, towards three o’clock, having an appointment in the center of Paris I left the set of rooms in which I was living in the Luxembourg. Then it chanced that, having forgotten to give some orders to my man, I returned to my rooms through the court-yard and up the servants’ staircase. My man had gone out and left the kitchen door open. As I came through it, I heard a noise. I went forward quietly. There was someone in my bedroom. It was this woman. I had a good view of her in the looking-glass. What was she doing, bending over my trunk? I watched. She opened a small cardboard box which contained the cachets which I take when I’m traveling, to cure my insomnia. She took out one of these cachets and in its place she put another, a cachet which she took from her purse.