, and maul her.
She is pregnant, and it takes the turn of murderous ideas; she has
actually and openly bought pistols."

"Tell the duchess that Madame de Rochefide will not leave Paris, but
within a fortnight she will have left Calyste. Now, d'Ajuda, shake
hands. Neither you nor I have ever said, or known, or done anything
about this; we admire the chances of life, that's all."

"The duchess has already made me swear on the holy Gospels to hold my
tongue."

"Will you receive my wife a month hence?"

"With pleasure."

"Then every one, all round, will be satisfied," said Maxime. "Only
remind the duchess that she must make that journey to Italy with the du
Guenics, and the sooner the better."

For ten days Calyste was made to bear the weight of an anger all the
more invincible because it was in part the effect of a real passion.
Beatrix now experienced the love so brutally but faithfully described
to the Duchesse de Grandlieu by Maxime de Trailles. Perhaps no
well-organized beings exist who do not experience that terrible passion
once in the course of their lives. The marquise felt herself mastered by
a superior force,--by a young man on whom her rank and quality did not
impose, who, as noble as herself, regarded her with an eye both powerful
and calm, and from whom her greatest feminine arts and efforts could
with difficulty obtain even a smile of approval. In short, she was
oppressed by a tyrant who never left her that she did not fall
to weeping, bruised and wounded, yet believing herself to blame.
Charles-Edouard played upon Madame de Rochefide the same comedy Madame
de Rochefide had played on Calyste for the last six months.

Since her public humiliation at the Opera, Beatrix had never ceased to
treat Monsieur du Guenic on the basis of the following proposition:--

"You have preferred your wife and the opinion of the world to me. If you
wish to prove that you love me, sacrifice your wife and the world to me.
Abandon Sabine, and let us live in Switzerland, Italy, or Germany."

Entrenched in that hard _ultimatum_, she established the blockade which
women declare by frigid glances, disdainful gestures, and a certain
fortress-like demeanor, if we may so call it. She thought herself
delivered from Calyste, supposing that he would never dare to break
openly with the Grandlieus. To desert Sabine, to whom Mademoiselle des
Touches had left her fortune, would doom him to penury.

But Calyste, half-mad with despair,