The truth was that she suffered cruelly. She would now have preferred to deceive Maxime with Monsieur de Saffré. She had revolted at Madame Sidonie's, she had given way to instinctive pride, to disgust for such a low bargain. But on the following days, when she endured the anguish of adultery, everything in her foundered; and she felt herself so despicable that she would have surrendered herself to the first man who pushed open the door of the room containing the pianos. The thought of her husband had, at times, formerly passed before her, amid her incest, like a touch of voluptuous horror; but henceforth the husband, the man himself, entered into it with a brutality that transformed her most delicate sensations into intolerable sufferings. She, who had enjoyed the refinement of her sin, and had willingly dreamt of a corner of a superhuman paradise where the gods partook of their amours together, was now descending to vulgar debauchery, to being shared by two men. In vain did she try to derive enjoyment from her infamy. Her lips were still warm with Saccard's kisses when she offered them to Maxime's. Her inquisitiveness descended to the depths of these accursed pleasures. She went as far as to mingle the two affections, and to seek for the son amid the father's hugs. And she emerged yet more alarmed and more bruised from this journey into unknown evil, from this ardent darkness in which she confounded the person of her double lover, with a terror which was like the death-rattle of her enjoyment. She kept this drama to herself alone, and increased the suffering it occasioned by the feverishness of her imagination. She would have preferred to die rather than own the truth to Maxime. She had an inward fear that the young man might revolt and leave her; she had such an absolute belief in the monstrosity of her sin and in eternal damnation, that she would have more willingly crossed the Parc Monceaux naked than have confessed her shame aloud. On the other hand, she still remained the madcap who astonished Paris by her extravagant conduct. Nervous gaiety seized hold of her, prodigious caprices which the newspapers talked about, designating her by her initials. It was at this period that she seriously wished to fight a duel with pistols with the Duchess de Sternich who had, intentionally, so she said, upset a glass of punch over her dress. To calm her, it was necessary for her brother-in-law, the minister, to get angry. On another occasion she bet with Madame de Lauwerens that she would make the round of the Longchamps racecourse in less than ten minutes, and it was only a question of costume that deterred her from doing so. Maxime himself began to feel afraid of this head, in which madness lurked; and on the pillow at night-time he thought he could hear all the hubbub of a city bent on enjoying itself.