“That is precisely it,” he replied nodding his head; “it is her life and her personality. She is the only one who can play the part, and I do not know how to negotiate with her. She is a strange creature. She never forgets. Would you believe that three weeks ago she spoke bitterly of me to one of our mutual friends! If I write to her she is quite capable of leaving my letter unopened. Some one must go and suggest the part to her, some one before whom she has no self-conceit. I thought of Fomberteau. But we have not been very friendly since my marriage. He reproached me with selling myself. What foolishness! Camille and he have quarrelled, too, over some article. Oh, she has become a great actress now. That is the reason I have come to you to ask for your assistance.” “Me!” I cried. “You want me to go with your manuscript and beg that poor girl not only to forgive you for writing the play, but also on your behalf to take the part herself! Come, let me look you straight in the face! But you are not a fool. You are a man like another. Yet you do not realize what a monstrous thing you are proposing to me!” “Ah, well!” he replied with his usual smile, which he had already employed to laugh at my _naïveté_, “will you undertake simply to convey our conversation to her as far as your indignant exit just now? I authorize you to do so. That does not make you into the accomplice of any infamy. You are going to see an old friend you have somewhat neglected. Nothing can be more natural, can it? You talk of the rain and the fine weather. My name is mentioned and you repeat our conversation exactly, beginning like this: What do you think Jacques dared to ask me? You will then see what answer she will give.” Was it the continuation of the habitual empire his vitality had exercised from our college days over my doubts? Was there concealed within me a secret desire to see Camille again, a curiosity to know what the Blue Duchess of two years ago had become? Did I also feel curious to know her reply to Jacques’ outrageous proposal? But whatever the reason, I accepted this mission which I considered and still consider monstrous. I called upon Camille, everybody’s Camille, to take her the horrible words of her old lover. I saw once more the face I loved so well, but now it was framed in ignoble luxury which contrasted so cruelly to my mind with the proud and humble simplicity of the Rue de la Barouillére! Not one of those pieces of furniture in those former apartments in that old street but told of a noble act of her who did not wish to sell her beauty, or of her mother who had saved the honour of their name by the heroic sacrifice of her fortune. There was not a room in the sumptuous house, that home of infamy where she lived now in the Avenue de Villiers, like my fashionable colleagues, which did not tell of one of her prostitutions.