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30

CARNATION AND UNDERGROUND TUNNEL

The first blow had been terrible, and Maurice had needed all the self-control he could muster to hide from Lorin the shock that had shaken his whole body. But once he was in the garden, once he was alone, once he was in the silence of the night, his mind became calmer and his thoughts stopped roiling haphazardly in his brain, instead presenting themselves logically so his reason could analyze and comment on them.

He could not believe it. This house that Maurice had so often visited out of the sheerest pleasure, this house that had been for him paradise on Earth, was just a den of murderous intriguers! All the warm welcomes he had been given, all the protests of undying friendship—all that was nothing but hypocrisy; all Geneviève’s love was nothing but fear!

We already know the layout of the garden, where our readers have followed our young protagonists more than once. Maurice darted from one dark mass to the next until he was sheltered from the moon’s rays by the shadow of the hothouse in which he’d been locked up that first day.

The hothouse was opposite the pavilion where Geneviève lived. But this night, instead of there being a single light burning steadily in the young woman’s bedroom alone, there were lights all over the house, moving from one window to the next. Maurice spotted Geneviève through a curtain that lifted accidentally; she was shoving things frantically into a portmanteau, and he saw with astonishment that a weapon gleamed in her hands.

He hoisted himself up on a ledge to get a better view. A great fire caught his eye, burning away in the fireplace. Geneviève was burning papers!

At that moment a door opened and a young man walked into Geneviève’s room. Maurice’s first idea was that this was Dixmer. The young woman ran to him and seized his hands and they stood looking at each other for a moment, seemingly in the grip of some intense emotion. What was this emotion? Maurice couldn’t guess; their words did not reach him. But Maurice quickly sized the man up.

“That’s not Dixmer,” he muttered. Indeed, the man who had just walked in was thin and short; Dixmer was tall and stocky.

Jealousy is a powerful stimulant. In one second flat Maurice had estimated the height of the stranger to within a quarter of an inch and compared this with the husband’s silhouette.

“That’s not Dixmer,” he muttered again, as though he had to repeat it to himself to be convinced of Genevieve’s perfidy.

He drew closer to the window, but the closer he got the less he could see. His forehead was on fire, and he stumbled and knocked a ladder with his foot. The window was about seven or eight feet from the ground. He leaned the ladder against the wall, climbed up, and glued his eyes to the gap in the curtain.

The stranger in Geneviève’s bedroom was a young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with blue eyes and an elegant demeanor; he was holding the young woman’s hands, talking to her and wiping the tears that veiled her beautiful eyes.

A slight noise that Maurice made caused the young man to wheel around to the window. Maurice bit off a cry of surprise: he recognized his savior from the place du Châtelet.

At that moment, Geneviève withdrew her hands from the stranger’s and went to the fireplace to assure herself the papers had been consumed.

Maurice couldn’t contain himself any longer. All the terrible passions that can torture a man—love, lust for vengeance, jealousy—tore at his heart with their teeth of fire. He seized his chance, violently pushed open the loose casement window, and sprang into the room.

At the same moment two pistols were aimed at at his chest. Geneviève had turned around at the noise and was absolutely dumbfounded at seeing Maurice.

“Monsieur,” said the young republican coldly to the man who held his life twice over at the end of two barrels, “monsieur, so you are the Knight of Maison-Rouge?”

“And what if I were? “replied the Knight.

“Oh! If you were, you are a brave man and so a reasonable man,