Paz (La Fausse Maitresse)

“You are positively intoxicated with Malaga.”

“Oh, she is called Malaga only on the posters,” said Paz, with a piqued air. “She lives in the rue Saint-Lazare, in a pretty apartment on the third story, all velvet and silk, like a princess. She has two lives, her circus life and the life of a pretty woman.”

“Does she love you?”

“She loves me—now you will laugh—solely because I’m a Pole. She saw an engraving of Poles rushing with Poniatowski into the Elster,—for all France persists in thinking that the Elster, where it is impossible to get drowned, is an impetuous flood, in which Poniatowski and his followers were engulfed. But in the midst of all this I am very unhappy, madame.”

A tear of rage fell from his eyes and affected the countess.

“You men have such a passion for singularity.”

“And you?” said Thaddeus.

“I know Adam so well that I am certain he could forget me for some mountebank like your Malaga. Where did you first see her?”

“At Saint-Cloud, last September, on the fete-day. She was at a corner of a booth covered with flags, where the shows are given. Her comrades, all in Polish costumes, were making a horrible racket. I watched her standing there, silent and dumb, and I thought I saw a melancholy expression in her face; in truth there was enough about her to sadden a girl of twenty. That touched me.”

The countess was sitting in a delicious attitude, pensive and rather melancholy.

“Poor, poor Thaddeus!” she exclaimed. Then, with the kindliness of a true great lady she added, not without a malicious smile, “Well go, go to your Circus.”

Thaddeus took her hand, kissed it, leaving a hot tear upon it, and went out.

Having invented this passion for a circus-rider, he bethought him that he must give it some reality. The only truth in his tale was the momentary attention he had given to Malaga at Saint-Cloud; and he had since seen her name on the posters of the Circus, where the clown, for a tip of five francs, had told him that the girl was a foundling, stolen perhaps. Thaddeus now went to the Circus and saw her again. For ten francs one of the grooms (who take the place in circuses of the dressers at a theatre) informed him that Malaga was named Marguerite Turquet, and lived on the fifth story of a house in the rue des Fosses-du-Temple.

The following day Paz went to the faubourg du Temple, found the house, and asked to see Mademoiselle Turquet, who during the summer was substituting for the leading horsewoman at the Cirque-Olympique, and a supernumerary at a boulevard theatre in winter.

“Malaga!” cried the portress, rushing into the attic, “there’s a fine gentleman wanting you. He is getting information from Chapuzot, who is playing him off to give me time to tell you.”

“Thank you, M’ame Chapuzot; but what will he think of me if he finds me ironing my gown?”

“Pooh! when a man’s in love he loves everything about us.”

“Is he an Englishman? they are fond of horses.”

“No, he looks to me Spanish.”

“That’s a pity; they say Spaniards are always poor. Stay here with me, M’ame Chapuzot; I don’t want him to think I’m deserted.”

“Who is it you are looking for, monsieur?” asked Madame Chapuzot, opening the door for Thaddeus, who had now come upstairs.

“Mademoiselle Turquet.”

“My dear,” said the portress, with an air of importance, “here is some one to see you.”

A line on which the clothes were drying caught the captain’s hat and knocked it off.

“What is it you wish, monsieur?” said Malaga, picking up the hat and giving it to him.

“I saw you at the Circus,” said Thaddeus, “and you reminded me of a daughter whom I have lost, mademoiselle; and out of affection for my Heloise, whom you resemble in a most striking manner, I should like to be of some service to you, if you will permit me.”

“Why, certainly; pray sit down, general,” said Madame Chapuzot; “nothing could be more straightforward, more gallant.”

“But I am not gallant, my good lady,” exclaimed Paz. “I am an unfortunate father who tries to deceive himself by a resemblance.”

“Then am I to pass for your daughter?” said Malaga, slyly, and not in the least suspecting the perfect sincerity of his proposal.

“Yes,” said Paz, “and I’ll come and see you sometimes. But you shall be lodged in better rooms, comfortably furnished.”

“I shall have furniture!” cried Malaga, looking at Madame Chapuzot.

“And servants,” said Paz, “and all you want.”

Malaga looked at the stranger suspiciously.

“What countryman is monsieur?”

“I am a Pole.”

“Oh! then I accept,” she said.

Paz departed, promising to return.

“Well, that’s a stiff one!” said Marguerite Turquet, looking at Madame Chapuzot; “I’m half afraid he is wheedling me, to carry out some fancy of his own—Pooh! I’ll risk it.”

A month after this eccentric interview the circus-rider was living in a comfortable apartment furnished by Comte Adam’s own upholsterer, Paz having judged it desirable to have his folly talked about at the hotel Laginski. Malaga, to whom this adventure was like a leaf out of the Arabian Nights, was served by Monsieur and Madame Chapuzot in the double capacity of friends and servants. The Chapuzots and Marguerite were constantly expecting some result of all this; but at the end of three months none of them were able to make out the meaning of the Polish count’s caprice. Paz arrived duly and passed about an hour there once a week, during which time he sat in the salon, and never went into Malaga’s boudoir nor into her bedroom, in spite of the clever manoeuvring of the Chapuzots and Malaga to get him there. The count would ask questions as to the small events of Marguerite’s life, and each time that he came he left two gold pieces of forty francs each on the mantel-piece.

“He looks as if he didn’t care to be here,” said Madame Chapuzot.

“Yes,” said Malaga, “the man’s as cold as an icicle.”

“But he’s a good fellow all the same,” cried Chapuzot, who was happy in a new suit of clothes made of blue cloth, in which he looked like the servant of some minister.

The sum which Paz deposited weekly on the mantel-piece, joined to Malaga’s meagre salary, gave her the means of sumptuous living compared with her former poverty. Wonderful stories went the rounds of the Circus about Malaga’s good-luck. Her vanity increased the six thousand francs which Paz had spent on her furniture to sixty thousand. According to the clowns and the supers, Malaga was squandering money; and she now appeared at the Circus wearing burnous and shawls and elegant scarfs. The Pole, it was agreed on all sides, was the best sort of man a circus-rider had ever encountered, not fault-finding nor jealous, and willing to let Malaga do just what she liked.

“Some women have the luck of it,” said Malaga’s rival, “and I’m not one of them,—though I do draw a third of the receipts.”

Malaga wore pretty things, and occasionally “showed her head” (a term in the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher’s stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a curiosity that was greater than Psyche’s. She reported them in tears to Paz.

“When I want to injure a woman,” she said in conclusion, “I don’t calumniate her; I don’t declare that some one magnetizes her to get stones out of her, but I say plainly that she is humpbacked, and I prove it. Why do you compromise me in this way?”

Paz maintained a cruel silence. Madame Chapuzot was not long in discovering the name and title of Comte Paz; then she heard certain positive facts at the hotel Laginski: for instance, that Paz was a bachelor, and had never been known to have a daughter, alive or dead, in Poland or in France. After that Malaga could not control a feeling of terror.

“My dear child,” Madame Chapuzot would say, “that monster—” (a man who contented himself with only looking, in a sly way,—not daring to come out and say things,—and such a beautiful creature too, as Malaga,—of course such a man was a monster, according to Madame Chapuzot’s ideas) “—that monster is trying to get a hold upon you, and make you do something illegal and criminal. Holy Father, if you should get into the police-courts! it makes me tremble from head to foot; suppose they should put you in the newspapers! I’ll tell you what I should do in your place; I’d warn the police.”

One particular day, after many foolish notions had fermented for some time in Malaga’s mind, Paz having laid his money as usual on the mantel-piece, she seized the bits of gold and flung them in his face, crying out, “I don’t want stolen money!”

The captain gave the gold to Chapuzot, went away without a word, and did not return.

Clementine was at this time at her uncle’s place in Burgundy.

When the Circus troop discovered that Malaga had lost her Polish count, much excitement was produced among them. Malaga’s display of honor was considered folly by some, and shrewdness by others. The conduct of the Pole, however, even when discussed by the cleverest of women, seemed inexplicable. Thaddeus received in the course of the next week thirty-seven letters from women of their kind. Happily for him, his astonishing reserve did not excite the curiosity of the fashionable world, and was only discussed in the demi-mondaine regions.

Two weeks later the handsome circus-rider, crippled by debt, wrote the following letter to Comte Paz, which, having fallen into the hands of Comte Adam, was read by several of the dandies of the day, who pronounced it a masterpiece:—

“Marguerite Turquet.”

“That letter,” thought Thaddeus, shouting with laughter, “is worth the ten thousand francs I have spent upon her.”

III

Clementine came home the next day, and the day after that Paz beheld her again, more beautiful and graceful than ever. After dinner, during which the countess treated Paz with an air of perfect indifference, a little scene took place in the salon between the count and his wife when Thaddeus had left them. On pretence of asking Adam’s advice, Thaddeus had left Malaga’s letter with him, as if by mistake.

“Poor Thaddeus!” said Adam, as Paz disappeared, “what a misfortune for a man of his distinction to be the plaything of the lowest kind of circus-rider. He will lose everything, and get lower and lower, and won’t be recognizable before long. Here, read that,” added the count, giving Malaga’s letter to his wife.

Clementine read the letter, which smelt of tobacco, and threw it from her with a look of disgust.

“Thick as the bandage is over his eyes,” continued Adam, “he must have found out something; Malaga tricked him, no doubt.”

“But he goes back to her,” said Clementine, “and he will forgive her! It is for such horrible women as that that you men have indulgence.”

“Well, they need it,” said Adam.

“Thaddeus used to show some decency—in living apart from us,” she remarked. “He had better go altogether.”

“Oh, my dear angel, that’s going too far,” said the count, who did not want the death of the sinner.

Paz, who knew Adam thoroughly, had enjoined him to secrecy, pretending to excuse his dissipations, and had asked his friend to lend him a few thousand francs for Malaga.

“He is a very firm fellow,” said Adam.

“How so?” asked Clementine.

“Why, for having spent no more than ten thousand francs on her, and letting her send him that letter before he would ask me for enough to pay her debts. For a Pole, I call that firm.”

“He will ruin you,” said Clementine, in the sharp tone of a Parisian woman, when she shows her feline distrusts.

“Oh, I know him,” said Adam; “he will sacrifice Malaga, if I ask him.”

“We shall see,” remarked the countess.

“If it is best for his own happiness, I sha’n’t hesitate to ask him to leave her. Constantin says that since Paz has been with her he, sober as he is, has sometimes come home quite excited. If he takes to intoxication I shall be just as grieved as if he were my own son.”

“Don’t tell me anything more about it,” cried the countess, with a gesture of disgust.

Two days later the captain perceived in the manner, the tones of voice, but, above all, in the eyes of the countess, the terrible results of Adam’s confidences. Contempt had opened a gulf between the beloved woman and himself. He was suddenly plunged into the deepest distress of mind, for the thought gnawed him, “I have myself made her despise me!” His own folly stared him in the face. Life then became a burden to him, the very sun turned gray. And yet, amid all these bitter thoughts, he found again some moments of pure joy. There were times when he could give himself up wholly to his admiration for his mistress, who paid not the slightest attention to him. Hanging about in corners at her parties and receptions, silent, all heart and eyes, he never lost one of her attitudes, nor a tone of her voice when she sang. He lived in her life; he groomed the horse which she rode, he studied the ways and means of that splendid establishment, to the interests of which he was now more devoted than ever. These silent pleasures were buried in his heart like those of a mother, whose heart a child never knows; for is it knowing anything unless we know it all? His love was more perfect than the love of Petrarch for Laura, which found its ultimate reward in the treasures of fame, the triumph of the poem which she had inspired. Surely the emotion that the Chevalier d’Assas felt in dying must have been to him a lifetime of joy. Such emotions as these Paz enjoyed daily,—without dying, but also without the guerdon of immortality.

But what is Love, that, in spite of all these ineffable delights, Paz should still have been unhappy? The Catholic religion has so magnified Love that she has wedded it indissolubly to respect and nobility of spirit. Love is therefore attended by those sentiments and qualities of which mankind is proud; it is rare to find true Love existing where contempt is felt. Thaddeus was suffering from the wounds his own hand had given him. The trial of his former life, when he lived beside his mistress, unknown, unappreciated, but generously working for her, was better than this. Yes, he wanted the reward of his virtue, her respect, and he had lost it. He grew thin and yellow, and so ill with constant low fever that during the month of January he was obliged to keep his bed, though he refused to see a doctor. Comte Adam became very uneasy about him; but the countess had the cruelty to remark: “Let him alone; don’t you see it is only some Olympian trouble?” This remark, being repeated to Thaddeus, gave him the courage of despair; he left his bed, went out, tried a few amusements, and recovered his health.

About the end of February Adam lost a large sum of money at the Jockey-Club, and as he was afraid of his wife, he begged Thaddeus to let the sum appear in the accounts as if he had spent it on Malaga.

“There’s nothing surprising in your spending that sum on the girl; but if the countess finds out that I have lost it at cards I shall be lowered in her opinion, and she will always be suspicious in future.”

“Ha! this, too!” exclaimed Thaddeus, with a sigh.

“Now, Thaddeus, if you will do me this service we shall be forever quits,—though, indeed, I am your debtor now.”

“Adam, you will have children; don’t gamble any more,” said Paz.

“So Malaga has cost us another twenty thousand francs,” cried the countess, some time later, when she discovered this new generosity to Paz. “First, ten thousand, now twenty more,—thirty thousand! the income of which is fifteen hundred! the cost of my box at the Opera, and the whole fortune of many a bourgeois. Oh, you Poles!” she said, gathering some flowers in her greenhouse; “you are really incomprehensible. Why are you not furious with him?”

“Poor Paz is—”

“Poor Paz, poor Paz, indeed!” she cried, interrupting him, “what good does he do us? I shall take the management of the household myself. You can give him the allowance he refused, and let him settle it as he likes with his Circus.”

“He is very useful to us, Clementine. He has certainly saved over forty thousand francs this last year. And besides, my dear angel, he has managed to put a hundred thousand with Nucingen, which a steward would have pocketed.”

Clementine softened down; but she was none the less hard in her feelings to Thaddeus. A few days later, she requested him to come to that boudoir where, one year earlier, she had been surprised into comparing him with her husband. This time she received him alone, without perceiving the slightest danger in so doing.

“My dear Paz,” she said, with the condescending familiarity of the great to their inferiors, “if you love Adam as you say you do, you will do a thing which he will not ask of you, but which I, his wife, do not hesitate to exact.”

“About Malaga?” said Thaddeus, with bitterness in his heart.

“Well, yes,” she said; “if you wish to end your days in this house and continue good friends with us, you must give her up. How an old soldier—”

“I am only thirty-five, and haven’t a white hair.”

“You look old,” she said, “and that’s the same thing. How so careful a manager, so distinguished a—”

The horrible part of all this was her evident intention to rouse a sense of honor in his soul which she thought extinct.

“—so distinguished a man as you are, Thaddeus,” she resumed after a momentary pause which a gesture of his hand had led her to make, “can allow yourself to be caught like a boy! Your proceedings have made that woman celebrated. My uncle wanted to see her, and he did see her. My uncle is not the only one; Malaga receives a great many gentlemen. I did think you such a noble soul. For shame! Will she be such a loss that you can’t replace her?”

“Madame, if I knew any sacrifice I could make to recover your esteem I would make it; but to give up Malaga is not one—”

“In your position, that is what I should say myself, if I were a man,” replied Clementine. “Well, if I accept it as a great sacrifice there can be no ill-will between us.”

Paz left the room, fearing he might commit some great folly, and feeling that wild ideas were getting the better of him. He went to walk in the open air, lightly dressed in spite of the cold, but without being able to cool the fire in his cheeks or on his brow.

“I thought you had a noble soul,”—the words still rang in his ears.

“A year ago,” he said to himself, “she thought me a hero who could fight the Russians single-handed!”

He thought of leaving the hotel Laginski, and taking service with the spahis and getting killed in Africa, but the same great fear checked him. “Without me,” he thought, “what would become of them? they would soon be ruined. Poor countess! what a horrible life it would be for her if she were reduced to even thirty thousand francs a year. No, since all is lost for me in this world,—courage! I will keep on as I am.”

Every one knows that since 1830 the carnival in Paris has undergone a transformation which has made it European, and far more burlesque and otherwise lively than the late Carnival of Venice. Is it that the diminishing fortunes of the present time have led Parisians to invent a way of amusing themselves collectively, as for instance at their clubs, where they hold salons without hostesses and without manners, but very cheaply? However this may be, the month of March was prodigal of balls, at which dancing, joking, coarse fun, excitement, grotesque figures, and the sharp satire of Parisian wit, produced extravagant effects. These carnival follies had their special Pandemonium in the rue Saint-Honore and their Napoleon in Musard, a small man born expressly to lead an orchestra as noisy as the disorderly audience, and to set the time for the galop, that witches’ dance, which was one of Auber’s triumphs, for it did not really take form or poesy till the grand galop in “Gustave” was given to the world. That tremendous finale might serve as the symbol of an epoch in which for the last fifty years all things have hurried by with the rapidity of a dream.

Now, it happened that the grave Thaddeus, with one divine and immaculate image in his heart, proposed to Malaga, the queen of the carnival dances, to spend an evening at the Musard ball; because he knew the countess, disguised to the teeth, intended to come there with two friends, all three accompanied by their husbands, and look on at the curious spectacle of one of these crowded balls.

On Shrove Tuesday, of the year 1838, at four o’clock in the morning, the countess, wrapped in a black domino and sitting on the lower step of the platform in the Babylonian hall, where Valentino has since then given his concerts, beheld Thaddeus, as Robert Macaire, threading the galop with Malaga in the dress of a savage, her head garnished with plumes like the horse of a hearse, and bounding through the crowd like a will-o-the-wisp.

“Ah!” said Clementine to her husband, “you Poles have no honor at all! I did believe in Thaddeus. He gave me his word that he would leave that woman; he did not know that I should be here, seeing all unseen.”

A few days later she requested Paz to dine with them. After dinner Adam left them alone together, and Clementine reproved Paz and let him know very plainly that she did not wish him to live in her house any longer.

“Yes, madame,” said Paz, humbly, “you are right; I am a wretch; I did give you my word. But you see how it is; I put off leaving Malaga till after the carnival. Besides, that woman exerts an influence over me which—”

“An influence!—a woman who ought to be turned out of Musard’s by the police for such dancing!”

“I agree to all that; I accept the condemnation and I’ll leave your house. But you know Adam. If I give up the management of your property you must show energy yourself. I may have been to blame about Malaga, but I have taken the whole charge of your affairs, managed your servants, and looked after the very least details. I cannot leave you until I see you prepared to continue my management. You have now been married three years, and you are safe from the temptations to extravagance which come with the honeymoon. I see that Parisian women, and even titled ones, do manage both their fortunes and their households. Well, as soon as I am certain not so much of your capacity as of your perseverance I shall leave Paris.”

“It is Thaddeus of Warsaw, and not that Circus Thaddeus who speaks now,” said Clementine. “Go, and come back cured.”

“Cured! never,” said Paz, his eyes lowered and fixed on Clementine’s pretty feet. “You do not know, countess, what charm, what unexpected piquancy of mind she has.” Then, feeling his courage fail him, he added hastily, “There is not a woman in society, with her mincing airs, that is worth the honest nature of that young animal.”

“At any rate, I wish nothing of the animal about me,” said the countess, with a glance like that of an angry viper.

After that evening Comte Paz showed Clementine the exact state of her affairs; he made himself her tutor, taught her the methods and difficulties of the management of property, the proper prices to pay for things, and how to avoid being cheated by her servants. He told her she could rely on Constantin and make him her major-domo. Thaddeus had trained the man thoroughly. By the end of May he thought the countess fully competent to carry on her affairs alone; for Clementine was one of those far-sighted women, full of instinct, who have an innate genius as mistress of a household.

This position of affairs, which Thaddeus had led up to naturally, did not end without further cruel trials; his sufferings were fated not to be as sweet and tender as he was trying to make them. The poor lover forgot to reckon on the hazard of events. Adam fell seriously ill, and Thaddeus, instead of leaving the house, stayed to nurse his friend. His devotion was unwearied. A woman who had any interest in employing her perspicacity might have seen in this devotion a sort of punishment imposed by a noble soul to repress an involuntary evil thought; but women see all, or see nothing, according to the condition of their souls—love is their sole illuminator.

During forty-five days Paz watched and tended Adam without appearing to think of Malaga, for the very good reason that he never did think of her. Clementine, feeling that Adam was at the point of death though he did not die, sent for all the leading doctors of Paris in consultation.

“If he comes safely out of this,” said the most distinguished of them all, “it will only be by an effort of nature. It is for those who nurse him to watch for the moment when they must second nature. The count’s life is in the hands of his nurses.”

Thaddeus went to find Clementine and tell her this result of the consultation. He found her sitting in the Chinese pavilion, as much for a little rest as to leave the field to the doctors and not embarrass them. As he walked along the winding gravelled path which led to the pavilion, Thaddeus seemed to himself in the depths of an abyss described by Dante. The unfortunate man had never dreamed that the possibility might arise of becoming Clementine’s husband, and now he had drowned himself in a ditch of mud. His face was convulsed, when he reached the kiosk, with an agony of grief; his head, like Medusa’s, conveyed despair.

“Is he dead?” said Clementine.

“They have given him up; that is, they leave him to nature. Do not go in; they are still there, and Bianchon is changing the dressings.”

“Poor Adam! I ask myself if I have not sometimes pained him,” she said.

“You have made him very happy,” said Thaddeus; “you ought to be easy on that score, for you have shown every indulgence for him.”

“My loss would be irreparable.”

“But, dear, you judged him justly.”

“I was never blind to his faults,” she said, “but I loved him as a wife should love her husband.”

“Then you ought, in case you lose him,” said Thaddeus, in a voice which Clementine had never heard him use, “to grieve for him less than if you lost a man who was your pride, your love, and all your life,—as some men are to you women. Surely you can be frank at this moment with a friend like me. I shall grieve, too; long before your marriage I had made him my child, I had sacrificed my life to him. If he dies I shall be without an interest on earth; but life is still beautiful to a widow of twenty-four.”

“Ah! but you know that I love no one,” she said, with the impatience of grief.

“You don’t yet know what it is to love,” said Thaddeus.

“Oh, as husbands are, I have sense enough to prefer a child like my poor Adam to a superior man. It is now over a month that we have been saying to each other, ‘Will he live?’ and these alternations have prepared me, as they have you, for this loss. I can be frank with you. Well, I would give my life to save Adam. What is a woman’s independence in Paris? the freedom to let herself be taken in by ruined or dissipated men who pretend to love her. I pray to God to leave me this husband who is so kind, so obliging, so little fault-finding, and who is beginning to stand in awe of me.”

“You are honest, and I love you the better for it,” said Thaddeus, taking her hand which she yielded to him, and kissing it. “In solemn moments like these there is unspeakable satisfaction in finding a woman without hypocrisy. It is possible to converse with you. Let us look to the future. Suppose that God does not grant your prayer,—and no one cries to him more than I do, ‘Leave me my friend!’ Yes, these fifty nights have not weakened me; if thirty more days and nights are needed I can give them while you sleep,—yes, I will tear him from death if, as the doctors say, nursing can save him. But suppose that in spite of you and me, the count dies,—well, then, if you were loved, oh, adored, by a man of a heart and soul that are worthy of you—”

“I may have wished for such love, foolishly, but I have never met with it.”

“Perhaps you are mistaken—”

Clementine looked fixedly at Thaddeus, imagining that there was less of love than of cupidity in his thoughts; her eyes measured him from head to foot and poured contempt upon him; then she crushed him with the words, “Poor Malaga!” uttered in tones which a great lady alone can find to give expression to her disdain. She rose, leaving Thaddeus half unconscious behind her, slowly re-entered her boudoir, and went back to Adam’s chamber.

An hour later Paz returned to the sick-room, and began anew, with death in his heart, his care of the count. From that moment he said nothing. He was forced to struggle with the patient, whom he managed in a way that excited the admiration of the doctors. At all hours his watchful eyes were like lamps always lighted. He showed no resentment to Clementine, and listened to her thanks without accepting them; he seemed both dumb and deaf. To himself he was saying, “She shall owe his life to me,” and he wrote the thought as it were in letters of fire on the walls of Adam’s room. On the fifteenth day Clementine was forced to give up the nursing, lest she should utterly break down. Paz was unwearied. At last, towards the end of August, Bianchon, the family physician, told Clementine that Adam was out of danger.

“Ah, madame, you are under no obligation to me,” he said; “without his friend, Comte Paz, we could not have saved him.”

The day after the meeting of Paz and Clementine in the kiosk, the Marquis de Ronquerolles came to see his nephew. He was on the eve of starting for Russia on a secret diplomatic mission. Paz took occasion to say a few words to him. The first day that Adam was able to drive out with his wife and Thaddeus, a gentleman entered the courtyard as the carriage was about to leave it, and asked for Comte Paz. Thaddeus, who was sitting on the front seat of the caleche, turned to take a letter which bore the stamp of the ministry of Foreign affairs. Having read it, he put it into his pocket in a manner which prevented Clementine or Adam from speaking of it. Nevertheless, by the time they reached the porte Maillot, Adam, full of curiosity, used the privilege of a sick man whose caprices are to be gratified, and said to Thaddeus: “There’s no indiscretion between brothers who love each other,—tell me what there is in that despatch; I’m in a fever of curiosity.”

Clementine glanced at Thaddeus with a vexed air, and remarked to her husband: “He has been so sulky with me for the last two months that I shall never ask him anything again.”

“Oh, as for that,” replied Paz, “I can’t keep it out of the newspapers, so I may as well tell you at once. The Emperor Nicholas has had the grace to appoint me captain in a regiment which is to take part in the expedition to Khiva.”

“You are not going?” cried Adam.

“Yes, I shall go, my dear fellow. Captain I came, and captain I return. We shall dine together to-morrow for the last time. If I don’t start at once for St. Petersburg I shall have to make the journey by land, and I am not rich, and I must leave Malaga a little independence. I ought to think of the only woman who has been able to understand me; she thinks me grand, superior. I dare say she is faithless, but she would jump—”

“Through the hoop, for your sake and come down safely on the back of her horse,” said Clementine sharply.

“Oh, you don’t know Malaga,” said the captain, bitterly, with a sarcastic look in his eyes which made Clementine thoughtful and uneasy.

“Good-by to the young trees of this beautiful Bois, which you Parisians love, and the exiles who find a home here love too,” he said, presently. “My eyes will never again see the evergreens of the avenue de Mademoiselle, nor the acacias nor the cedars of the rond-points. On the borders of Asia, fighting for the Emperor, promoted to the command, perhaps, by force of courage and by risking my life, it may happen that I shall regret these Champs-Elysees where I have driven beside you, and where you pass. Yes, I shall grieve for Malaga’s hardness—the Malaga of whom I am now speaking.”

This was said in a manner that made Clementine tremble.

“Then you do love Malaga very much?” she asked.

“I have sacrificed for her the honor that no man should ever sacrifice.”

“What honor?”

“That which we desire to keep at any cost in the eyes of our idol.”

After that reply Thaddeus said no more; he was silent until, as they passed a wooden building on the Champs Elysees, he said, pointing to it, “That is the Circus.”

He went to the Russian Embassy before dinner, and thence to the Foreign office, and the next morning he had started for Havre before the count and countess were up.

“I have lost a friend,” said Adam, with tears in his eyes, when he heard that Paz had gone,—“a friend in the true meaning of the word. I don’t know what has made him abandon me as if a pestilence were in my house. We are not friends to quarrel about a woman,” he said, looking intently at Clementine. “You heard what he said yesterday about Malaga. Well, he has never so much as touched the little finger of that girl.”

“How do you know that?” said Clementine.

“I had the natural curiosity to go and see Mademoiselle Turquet, and the poor girl can’t explain even to herself the absolute reserve which Thad—”

“Enough!” said the countess, retreating into her bedroom. “Can it be that I am the victim of some noble mystification?” she asked herself. The thought had hardly crossed her mind when Constantin brought her the following letter written by Thaddeus during the night:—

“If my poor Adam says he has lost a friend, what have I lost?” thought Clementine, sinking into a chair with her eyes fixed on the carpet.

The following letter Constantin had orders to give privately to the count:—