struck fire
like flints. The marquise lowered her eyes.

"After man, there is nought but God," said the celebrated woman. "God
is the Unknown. I shall fling myself into that as into some vast abyss.
Calyste has sworn to me that he admires you only as he would a picture;
but alas! you are but twenty-eight, in the full magnificence of your
beauty. The struggle thus begins between him and me by falsehood. But I
have one support; happily I know a means to keep him true to me, and I
shall triumph."

"What means?"

"That is my secret, dear. Let me have the benefits of my age. If Claude
Vignon, as Conti has doubtless told you, flings me back into the gulf,
I, who had climbed to a rock which I thought inaccessible,--I will at
least gather the pale and fragile, but delightful flowers that grow in
its depths."

Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax in those able hands. Camille
felt an almost savage pleasure in thus entrapping her rival in her
toils. She sent her to bed that night piqued by curiosity, floating
between jealousy and generosity, but most assuredly with her mind full
of the beautiful Calyste.

"She will be enchanted to deceive me," thought Camille, as she kissed
her good-night.

Then, when she was alone, the author, the constructor of dramas, gave
place to the woman, and she burst into tears. Filling her hookah with
tobacco soaked in opium, she spent the greater part of the night in
smoking, dulling thus the sufferings of her soul, and seeing through the
clouds about her the beautiful young head of her late lover.

"What a glorious book to write, if I were only to express my pain!" she
said to herself. "But it is written already; Sappho lived before me. And
Sappho was young. A fine and touching heroine truly, a woman of forty!
Ah! my poor Camille, smoke your hookah; you haven't even the resource
of making a poem of your misery--that's the last drop of anguish in your
cup!"

The next morning Calyste came before mid-day and slipped upstairs, as
he was told, into Camille's own room, where he found the books. Felicite
sat before the window, smoking, contemplating in turn the marshes,
the sea, and Calyste, to whom she now and then said a few words about
Beatrix. At one time, seeing the marquise strolling about the garden,
she raised a curtain in a way to attract her attention, and also to
throw a band of light across Calyste's book.

"To-day, my child, I shall ask you to stay to dinner; but you must
refuse