This event brought very serious consequences to a person who had had nothing to do with the affair, and led me to commit the only evil action I have to reproach myself with during the course of my life. The blame attaching to this evil deed is all the greater as it was committed against a woman. I can only say that it was committed without any premeditation. I reached home, as I have said, very glad to have escaped with nothing worse than a few bruises, and very proud at the end of the fray to have overthrown my enemy. Next morning I went to de la Ponce. As such an attack might be renewed under more disadvantageous circumstances than those from which I had just escaped, I wanted to borrow from him the pocket-pistols I had seen in his rooms. It was difficult to borrow them from him without telling him why I wanted them. I told him. But as it would have revealed, or almost revealed, the house I came away from, if I had told him the true locality of the struggle, I indicated another place altogether. I selected, hap-hazard, a spot near the _manège_, in a little narrow street, where three houses had their entrances. The first of these three houses was inhabited by Hippolyte Leroy, the ex-body-guardsman of whom I have already spoken in connection with our misadventures at M. Collard's, and who was soon to become my cousin by marrying Augustine; the second by the de Leuven family; and the third by the lawyer to whom Maître Mennesson had related the misadventures of my early love-making and who, as I have already mentioned, had married Éléonore, the second daughter of M. Deviolaine by his first marriage. I have related also, when speaking of M. Lebègue, how the charming nature and sociable spirit of his wife had roused suspicion and dislike in a little town, where superiority of any kind is a reason for jealousy. Now I had told others besides de la Ponce of the nocturnal attack of which I had very nearly been a victim; and to others also, as well as to de la Ponce, in order to divert suspicions, I had mentioned the same locality by the _manège_ of which I have just spoken. Where could I have been coming from, at two in the morning, when I was attacked near the _manage!_ It could not have been from Hippolyte Leroy's; it could not have been from Adolphe de Leuven's. It must then have been from M. Lebègue's--or rather, from Madame Lebègue's. This wicked suggestion, entirely incorrect as it was, could only be supported by some semblance of a foundation.