and these letters he must tear up immediately; for though I am a very
Figaro in contrivances, I have never yet seen a trace of one. Alas! my
sweet, despite the fine promises and vows by which I bound myself after
the scene of the whip, an impulse, which I can only call madness, drove
me to follow him in one of his rapid rides to the post-office. Gaston
was appalled to be thus discovered on horseback, paying the postage of a
letter which he held in his hand. He looked fixedly at me, and then put
spurs to Fedelta. The pace was so hard that I felt shaken to bits when I
reached the lodge gate, though my mental agony was such at the time that
it might well have dulled all consciousness of bodily pain. Arrived at
the gate, Gaston said nothing; he rang the bell and waited without a
word. I was more dead than alive. I might be mistaken or I might not,
but in neither case was it fitting for Armande-Louise-Marie de Chaulieu
to play the spy. I had sunk to the level of the gutter, by the side of
courtesans, opera-dancers, mere creatures of instinct; even the vulgar
shop-girl or humble seamstress might look down on me.

What a moment! At last the door opened; he handed his horse to the
groom, and I also dismounted, but into his arms, which were stretched
out to receive me. I threw my skirt over my left arm, gave him my right,
and we walked on--still in silence. The few steps we thus took might
be reckoned to me for a hundred years of purgatory. A swarm of thoughts
beset me as I walked, now seeming to take visible form in tongues of
fire before my eyes, now assailing my mind, each with its own poisoned
dart. When the groom and the horses were far away, I stopped Gaston,
and, looking him in the face, said, as I pointed, with a gesture that
you should have seen, to the fatal letter still in his right hand:

"May I read it?"

He gave it to me. I opened it and found a letter from Nathan, the
dramatic author, informing Gaston that a play of his had been accepted,
learned, rehearsed, and would be produced the following Saturday. He
also enclosed a box ticket.

Though for me this was the opening of heaven's gates to the martyr, yet
the fiend would not leave me in peace, but kept crying, "Where are the
thirty thousand francs?" It was a question which self-respect, dignity,
all my old self in fact, prevented me from uttering. If my thought
became speech, I might as well throw myself into the lake at once, and
yet I could hardly keep the