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The sun was high and hot in the rue de la Monnaie and the gossips were all gabbling away at their doorsteps, as gaily as if a cloud of blood had not settled over the city for the past ten months, as Maurice came home in the cabriolet he’d promised to bring back.

He left his horse’s reins in the hands of a scrubber in front of the church of Saint-Eustache and ran upstairs to his place, his heart filled with joy.

Love is an invigorating feeling: it can revive hearts dead to sensation; it peoples deserts; it causes the phantom of the beloved to rise before your very eyes; it causes the voice singing in the lover’s soul to reveal all of Creation illuminated by hope and happiness; and since, while being an expansive feeling, it’s still a self-centered one, it blinds the one who loves to everything that is not the beloved.

Maurice did not see those other women; Maurice did not hear their comments; he saw only Geneviève preparing a departure that would bring them lasting happiness; he heard only Geneviève distractedly humming her favorite song, and that song was buzzing so deliciously in his ears he would have sworn he heard the different modulations of her voice mingled with the sound of a lock clicking shut.

Outside the door, Maurice paused. The door was half open. Normally it was always shut, so this circumstance surprised Maurice. He looked around to see if he could see Geneviève in the hall; Geneviève was not in the hall. He went inside, crossed the anteroom, the kitchen, the salon; he visited the bedroom. Anteroom, kitchen, salon, bedroom were unoccupied. He called. No one answered.

The officieux had gone out, as we know. Maurice imagined that in his absence Geneviève had needed some rope, say, to tie up the chests, or some provisions for the coach trip, that she had gone down to buy these things. Such a course seemed absolutely reckless to him, but although anxiety was beginning to get the upper hand, he still did not suspect anything.

And so he waited, pacing from one end of the room to the other, leaning out of the window from time to time to be hit in the face by gusts of air whooshing in at him, laden with rain.

Maurice eventually thought he could hear footsteps on the stairs; he listened; it wasn’t Geneviève’s tread, but that didn’t stop him from rushing to the landing and leaning over the balustrade, where he recognized the officieux coming up the stairs with the typical insouciance of servants.

“Agesilaus!” he cried. The officieux looked up.

“Ah! It’s you, citizen!”

“Yes, it’s me; but where is the citizeness?”

“The citizeness?” Agesilaus asked in bewilderment as he continued to climb.

“Who else! Did you see her downstairs?”

“No.”

“Then go down again. Ask the concierge and speak to the neighbors.”

“Right away.”

Agesilaus went back down the stairs.

“Run! Faster!” cried Maurice. “Can’t you see I’m on tenterhooks?”

Maurice waited for five or six minutes at the top of the stairs, then, when Agesilaus did not return, he went back into the apartment to hang out the window again. He spotted Agesilaus going in and out of two or three shops, apparently without result.

He shouted to him in his frustration. Agesilaus looked up and saw his master leaning impatiently out of the window. Maurice made a sign for him to come back up.

“She can’t have gone out, it’s not possible!” Maurice said to himself. And he called out again: “Geneviève! Geneviève!” Everything was dead quiet. The lonely room even seemed to have lost its echo. Agesilaus reappeared.

“Well, the concierge is the only one who’s seen her.”

“The concierge saw her?”

“Yes; the neighbors know nothing about her.”

“The concierge saw her, you say? How come?”

“He saw her go out.”

“So she went out?”

“It looks like it.”

“Alone? I don’t believe Geneviève went out alone.”

“She wasn’t alone, citizen; she was with a man.”

“What! With a man?”

“That’s what the citizen concierge reckons.”

“Go and get him. I must know who this man is.