red.

"Calyste remains to you," said Beatrix, looking into Camille's eyes;
"but I am fixed in his heart, and no woman can ever drive me out of it."

Camille replied, with an inimitable tone of irony that struck the
marquise to the heart, in the famous words of Mazarin's niece to Louis
XIV.,--

"You reign, you love, and you depart!"

Neither Camille nor Beatrix was conscious during this sharp and bitter
scene of the absence of Conti and Calyste. The composer had remained
at table with his rival, begging him to keep him company in finishing a
bottle of champagne.

"We have something to say to each other," added Conti, to prevent all
refusal on the part of Calyste.

Placed as they both were, it was impossible for the young Breton to
refuse this challenge.

"My dear friend," said the composer, in his most caressing voice, as
soon as the poor lad had drunk a couple of glasses of champagne, "we are
both good fellows, and we can speak to each other frankly. I have not
come here suspiciously. Beatrix loves me,"--this with a gesture of the
utmost self-conceit--"but the truth is, I have ceased to love her. I am
not here to carry her away with me, but to break off our relations, and
to leave her the honors of the rupture. You are young; you don't yet
know how useful it is to appear to be the victim when you are really
the executioner. Young men spit fire and flame; they leave a woman with
noise and fury; they often despise her, and they make her hate them.
But wise men do as I am doing; they get themselves dismissed, assuming a
mortified air, which leaves regret in the woman's heart and also a sense
of her superiority. You don't yet know, luckily for you, how hampered
men often are in their careers by the rash promises which women are
silly enough to accept when gallantry obliges us to make nooses to catch
our happiness. We swear eternal faithfulness, and declare that we
desire to pass our lives with them, and seem to await a husband's death
impatiently. Let him die, and there are some provincial women obtuse or
silly or malicious enough to say: 'Here am I, free at last.' The spent
ball suddenly comes to life again, and falls plumb in the midst of our
finest triumphs or our most carefully planned happiness. I have seen
that you love Beatrix. I leave her therefore in a position where she
loses nothing of her precious majesty; she will certainly coquet with
you, if only to tease and annoy that angel of a Camille Maupin. Well