hat she can wish;
she will succeed; she will be wealthy. She is a selfish little jade, and
a woman who is selfish can get anything she likes. But for people with
hearts there's nothing left but to hang a stone round one's neck and
throw oneself into the river. But, I too, I shall go far. I, too, shall
climb high. I, too, will be a selfish hound."

He got up and went out without waiting for the end of the play. He did
not return to Felicie's dressing-room for fear of meeting Ligny there,
the sight of whom was insupportable, and because by avoiding it he could
pretend to himself that Ligny had not returned thither.

Conscious of physical distress on going away from her, he took five or
six turns under the dark, deserted arcades of the Odeon, went down the
steps into the night, and turned up the Rue de Medicis. Coachmen were
dozing on their boxes, while waiting for the end of the performance, and
high over the tops of the plane-trees the moon was racing through the
clouds. Treasuring in his heart an absurd yet soothing remnant of hope,
he went, this night, as on other nights, to wait for Felicie at her
mother's flat.

CHAPTER III

Madame Nanteuil lived with her daughter in a little flat on the fifth
story of a house in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, whose windows opened
upon the garden of the Luxembourg. She gave Chevalier a friendly
welcome, for she thought kindly of him because he loved Felicie, and
because the latter did not love him in return, and ignored on principle
the fact that he had been her daughter's lover.

She made him sit beside her in the dining-room, where a coke fire was
burning in the stove. In the lamplight army revolvers and sabres with
golden tassels on the sword-knots gleamed upon the wall. They were hung
about a woman's cuirass, which was provided with round breast-shields of
tin-plate; a piece of armour which Felicie had worn last winter, while
still a pupil at the Conservatoire, when taking the part of Joan of Arc
at the house of a spiritualistic duchess. An officer's widow and the
mother of an actress, Madame Nanteuil, whose real name was Nantean,
treasured these trophies.

"Felicie is not back yet, Monsieur Chevalier. I don't expect her before
midnight. She is on the stage till the end of the play."

"I know; I was in the first piece. I left the theatre after the first
act of _La Mere confidente_.

"Oh, Monsieur Chevalier, why didn't you stay till the end? My daughter
would have b