“But listen,” he went on more violently than ever, “you will chaff me presently, and you will be right. I thought I had touched this icy soul in a spot with some feeling in it. I was taken in, that is all. You cannot imagine what hard, cruel things she said to me in that quarter of an hour; and though I very well knew to what risk I was exposing myself by allowing Camille to act there, yet I had naturally felt flattered at having my two mistresses face to face, and at being received there myself as a man of the world and Camille as a lady; and though I had conducted myself as a man of letters while she behaved like a common actress, yet she dared to make use of words which indicated that it was a scheme devised between us to satisfy my vanity and to revenge the insolence she had suffered, that it was the last time her door would be opened to me, and that she had spoken to her husband—she dared to tell me that—yes, that she had spoken to him and explained to him this girl’s ignoble conduct by a boast on my part! But if you had heard her tone of voice when she insisted: 'My first vengeance shall be, since it appears she loves you, to send you back to her, and she shall see you unhappy, and unhappy through me; for you shall be, you shall be!’ She laughed her bitter laugh, which you know, and I, the Jacques Molan you know, listened, so terrified at the baseness of soul which these phrases proved, that I did not stop her. I might say if I posed to you that I amused myself by studying it. Alas, no! at that moment I was paralysed, I do not really understand by what. But I was. Can you imagine Pierre de Bonnivet entering in the midst of this scene, and the silence which fell upon the three of us in that little drawing-room? I swear to you I thought of crying out to that fool of a husband then: 'You know I have been your wife’s lover.’ I believe that would have soothed me! What would have followed? A duel. I should have survived it, and I should have been revenged through this woman’s dishonour. But the prejudice which requires a man to bear everything rather than to betray a woman who has given herself to him, even when she deserves it, stopped me. And so, here I am.” “But what motive has she obeyed?” I cried, so astounded by the story that it did not occur to me to laugh at the contrast between Jacques’ triumphant attitude of the previous evening and the piteous confession he had just made in a hesitating though furious way, being so overwhelmed that he had told me everything haphazard, this time without calculation and without posing. It was the shriek of the wounded animal. “Yes,” I repeated, “what is her motive? She has been your mistress. Consequently she must have thought something of you!”