I ordered my astonished servant to pack up at once for a long absence, and I set to work to classify studies and then run through guide books, compelling myself to become absorbed in the hustle of this unexpected departure. This new and monstrous fact, the fall of Camille into Tournade’s arms, had suspended every other thought in my mind. I had forgotten Madam de Bonnivet, the scene of the previous evening, and Molan himself. It was therefore like a sudden displacement of the atmosphere, a recall to an abolished reality, when I saw the latter about half-past two enter the studio. It was Molan, however, who was the cause of the moral shipwreck from which I was suffering. He was the man I ought to curse and hate. I perceived him, simply recognizing his face, hearing his voice and touching his hand. He wore his evil expression, that of his periods of ferocious hardness, and his supreme excitement was betrayed at least to any one of experience like myself, by a way he had of biting his lower lip with his teeth, thus imperceptibly lengthening his already somewhat lengthy profile, and the animal hidden in every one of us—which in his case was the fox—was so cruelly in evidence that even the friend most hypnotized by affection could see at those times his real character. For my own part I experienced, on discovering in his face the traces of his real nature, a start of antipathy which inundated me with rancour. All my sufferings of the last few hours exploded and I received him with a torrent of abuse. “You have come to tell me, have you not, you who have behaved so badly, that poor Camille is utterly lost now? I went to her house this morning, and I learned that she had spent the night from home. We know where. That is the work of your egoism. But there will be a reckoning with you for this infamy; there is justice somewhere. It is a crime, do you hear, a crime to play with a sincere heart and to behave as you have done.” “Let me alone,” he quickly interrupted with a shrug of the shoulders. “When a young girl takes a lover, she will take two, three, four, and the rest. If Camille had been an honourable creature she would have said to me when I courted her: 'Will you marry me? No? Then good-bye.’ She did not say so. So much the worse for her! Besides, if I did her a wrong, it seems to me that now we are quits, mean trick for mean trick, her scene of last evening was equal to all my infamy!”