"And she would die rather than soil that name. This Jacquemin has found this pearl of great price, and hid it away under the gutters of Paris! And I--I have encountered--what? A miserable woman who betrayed me! Ah! men and women are decidedly the victims of chance; puppets destined to bruise one another!" On entering his hotel, he found Yanski Varhely there, with an anxious look upon his rugged old face. "Well?" "Well-nothing!" And Zilah told his friend what he had seen. "A droll city, this Paris!" he said, in conclusion. "I see that it is necessary to go up into the garrets to know it well." He took a sheet of paper, sat down, and wrote as follows: MONSIEUR:--You have published an article in regard to Prince Andras Zilah, which is an outrage. A devoted friend of the Prince had resolved to make you pay dearly for it; but there is some one who has disarmed him. That some one is the admirable woman who bears so honorably the name which you have given her, and lives so bravely the life you have doomed her to. Madame Jacquemin has redeemed the infamy of Monsieur Puck. But when, in the future, you have to speak of the misfortunes of others, think a little of your own existence, and profit by the moral lesson given you by--AN UNKNOWN. "Now," said Zilah, "be so kind, my dear Varhely, as to have this note sent to Monsieur Puck, at the office of 'L'Actualite' and ask your domestic to purchase some toys, whatever he likes--here is the money-- and take them to Madame Jacquemin, No. 25 Rue Rochechouart. Three toys, because there are three children. The poor little things will have gained so much, at all events, from this occurrence." CHAPTER XXVI "AM I AVENGED?" After this episode, the Prince lived a more solitary existence than before, and troubled himself no further about the outside world. Why should he care, that some penny-aliner had slipped those odious lines into a newspaper? His sorrow was not the publishing of the treachery, it was the treachery itself; and his hourly suffering caused him to long for death to end his torture. "And yet I must live," he thought, "if to exist with a dagger through one's heart is to live." Then, to escape from the present, he plunged into the memories of the war, as into a bath of oblivion, a strange oblivion, where he found all his patriotic regrets of other days. He read, with spasmodic eagerness, the books in which Georgei and Klapka, the actors of the drama, presented their excuses, or poured forth their complaints; and it seemed to him that his country would make him forget his love.