"Married----" "Married as much as one can be, before the mayor and the priest." "What nonsense! she would bear her husband's name and title." "Ah! there you are! There's a mystery about her. When I have time, I propose to investigate it, and I will tell you what I learn. They say that she has no known lover, although she leads a very independent life. But of course you know how that is, don't you?" "I don't know the first thing about it. Come, come! do you suppose I pass my life watching and questioning women? I am not an idler like you. I find life hardly long enough to live and work." "As to living, I don't say that you are not right. You seem to live hard enough, my boy. But as to working,--they say that you don't work enough. Let us see, what have you there? Let me look!" "No, it's nothing; I have nothing started here." "Yes, you have: that head--that is very fine, deuce take me! Let me look, I say, or I'll give you the devil in my next _salon_." "You are quite capable of it." "Yes, when you deserve it; but as to that head, it is superb, and one cannot help admiring it. What is it to be?" "Do you suppose I know?" "Do you want me to tell you?" "You will confer a favor on me." "Make a sibyl of it. Then you can arrange the hair as you please, it doesn't make any difference." "Stay! that's an idea." "And then you don't compromise the person it resembles." "Does it resemble any one?" "_Parbleu_! wretched joker, do you think that I don't recognize it? Come, come, my dear fellow, you must have meant to laugh at me, since you deny everything, even the simplest things. You are the lover of that face!" "And to prove it, I am going to Montmorency!" said Laurent, coldly, taking his hat. "That doesn't prove anything!" replied Mercourt. They went out together, and Mercourt saw Laurent enter a cab; but Laurent went no farther than the Bois de Boulogne, where he dined all alone at a small café, and returned at night-fall, on foot and lost in his thoughts. The Bois de Boulogne of that time was not what it is to-day. It was smaller, more neglected, poorer, more mysterious, and more like the country; one could reflect there. On the Champs-Elysées, less splendid and less thickly settled than to-day, were tracts of land newly thrown open to building, where one could hire at a reasonable price small houses with gardens, where perfect privacy was attainable. One could live quietly there and work. It was in one of those neat white cottages, amid flowering lilacs, and behind a tall hedge of hawthorn with a green gate, that Thérèse lived. It was May. The weather was magnificent. How Laurent found himself, at nine o'clock, behind that hedge, in the lonely, unfinished street where no lanterns had as yet been placed, and where nettles and weeds still flourished along the sides, he himself would have been embarrassed to explain.