“Ah! did he work the infallible pistol trick on you?” Jacques said with a burst of his loudest laughter when we met the following day. “That is very good. He looked you in the face to make you understand that if you court Madam de Bonnivet, you run the risk of getting in your head one of the bullets with which the husband every day salutes the sheet-iron man at the range. He did better with me. He took me to see the targets.” This conversation took place at the breakfast-table, for Jacques had called on the following morning as soon as his four pages were finished to ask for the classic egg and cutlet, a thing he had never done before. This curious haste proved to me how interested he was in the success of his manœuvre in diplomatic gallantry. I had not received him very cordially. “Tricks like that are not very attractive,” I said to him; “you force me to accept an invitation to dinner which is odious to me, on purpose to meet you there, and then you do not turn up.” “But you must admit that it was very jolly!” he replied in such a gay tone that I had not the heart to be angry any more. After he had very minutely questioned me as to the diverse attitudes of different persons, concluding with the ridiculous warning of Senneterre the Jealous, he said seriously— “You noticed nothing in particular then, even you who know how to see? Yes, you painters do not understand, but you know how to see. Nothing in the intercourse of Machault and Queen Anne, for instance?” “Stop,” I replied; “certainly when he warned me that Senneterre had met you, Machault gave me a singular look. Why do you ask me that? Is he paying court to her too?” “I think, if she has already risked a false step, it is with Machault.” “With Machault?” I cried. “With Machault, the drunken colossus, the gladiator in black, the fencing machine, while she herself is such a fine woman, though a little too angular for my taste, and so aristocratic? It is not possible. The other day, too, you told me that you thought she was true to her husband.” “Ah, my dear fellow!” he said with a nod, “you do not know that when one wishes to find out of whom an ideal woman, a siren, a madonna, an angel, is the mistress, one must first think of the most vulgar person of her own circle. There has been a good deal of gossip about her, I know, and she knows that I know. I have not concealed the fact from her. Consequently, the presence of Machault last evening was designed to produce upon me exactly the same effect which I produced upon her by my absence. I took the initiative, and I was right. Besides,” he added with almost hateful acrimony in his voice, “one of two things, either she has already had lovers and she is a jade. In that case I should be the greatest of fools if I did not have her in my turn. Or else she has not had lovers and is a coquette who will not make me go the same way as the others.”