“Why? She pleased you. You pleased her. She has had lover after lover since Tournade—Philippe de Vardes, Machault, Roland de Bréves—every one, in fact, ending by the little Duke of Lautrec, who spends 200,000 francs a year on her, and yet you did not return! It is said,” he continued with more malice still in his eyes, “that you will never see her again except under my chaperonage! Do you recall our last conversation, how I asked you to act as my ambassador to her and you refused? Ah, well, I want you to undertake another mission to her. Are you going to refuse again?” “That depends upon the mission,” I replied in the same jesting tone. “Alas! it is quite a literary one,” he went on gaily. “It is not that I fear my wife’s jealousy. We are not lovers, she and I. We are associates for life, and she is intelligent enough to understand that the infidelities of a man like myself are of no consequence. But I have in all things a horror of going back, and particularly in love! Briefly this is what it is. You remember Madam de Bonnivet and her jealousy of Camille?” “Queen Anne!” I interrupted; “do you want to send me to her too? That would crown everything.” “No!” he said, “that is all over, and a very good thing, too. Do you know that she has been left a widow. There is a report that she is going to get married again. But the whole story, Camille’s jealousy, the scene at my rooms, and the scene in the drawing-room, were all so well suited to a play that I have written one. It is a kind of _Adrienne Lecouvreur_, but modern. I have read it to a few friends and they are all of the same opinion, that it is the best thing I have done. We shall see whether his accession of wealth has spoiled Jacques Molan. It is a fact that I swore to write no more, and this is the only exception I shall make to that rule. After the age of forty, however great a genius a man may be, he repeats himself, then he has outlived his day. When a man cannot surpass himself it is better for him to be silent. I dream of an end like Shakespeare and Rossini, the end of a very little Rossini and an even smaller Shakespeare. But I have done what I can and I wish to let my twenty volumes rest. But this opportunity was too strong for me. The subject took possession of me, and the play is written. I repeat it is the last!” “You have written a play upon that story?” I interrupted. “What will Madam de Bonnivet say?” “That I am not clever,” he said. “With women of the world it is very simple. You figure in their drawing-rooms and you are a great man. You no longer appear there and your plays are not worth seeing. My wife has already recognized three of our friends as the principal character in the play. Besides people like the Bonnivets are very common now and they will not be recognized in it.” “But Camille, whose romance, a sad and true romance, this adventure was, have you not thought of what you were doing to her by transporting her adventure warm with life to the stage?”