und one; but on analysing it
he perceived that it explained nothing; that he loved the girl not
because she was exceedingly pretty, but because she was pretty in a
certain uncommon fashion of her own; that he loved her for that which
was incomparable and rare in her; because, in a word, she was a
wonderful thing of art and voluptuousness, a living gem of priceless
value. Thereupon, realizing how weak he was, he wept, mourning over his
lost freedom, his captive mind, his disordered soul, the devotion of his
very flesh and blood to a weak, perfidious little creature.

He had scorched his eyes by gazing at the coke fire behind the bars of
the grate. He closed them in pain and, under his closed eyes, he saw
negroes leaping before him in an obscene and bloody riot. While he
sought to remember from what book of travel, read in boyhood, these
blacks emerged, he saw them diminish, resolve themselves into
imperceptible specks, and disappear into a red Africa, which little by
little came to represent the wound seen by the light of a match on the
night of the suicide. He reflected.

"That fool of a Chevalier! Why, I was scarcely thinking of the fellow!"

Suddenly, against this background of blood and flame; appeared the
slender form of Felicie, and he felt lurking within him a hot, cruel
desire.

CHAPTER XIV

He went to see her the following day, in the little flat in the
Boulevard Saint-Michel. He was not in the habit of going thither. He did
not particularly care to meet Madame Nanteuil; she bored him and
embarrassed him, although she was extremely polite to him, even to
obsequiousness.

It was she who received him in the little drawing-room. She thanked him
for his interest in Felicie's health, and informed him that she had been
restless and unwell the night before, but was now feeling better.

"She is in her bedroom, working at her part. I will tell her that you
are here. She will be very glad to see you, Monsieur de Ligny. She knows
that you are very fond of her. And true friends are rare, especially in
the theatrical world."

Robert observed Madame Nanteuil with an attention which he had not
hitherto bestowed upon her. He was trying to see in her face the face
that would be her daughter's in years to come. When walking in the
street he was fond of reading, in the faces of the mothers, the
love-affairs of the daughters. And on this occasion he assiduously
deciphered the features and the figure of this woman