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“Monsieur, I’ve already begged you to be quiet, in the name of our friendship, monsieur, I beg you once more, for my sake if not for yours—not another word, for heaven’s sake, not another word!”

“Our friendship! Friendship! Ha! If this is the kind of friendship you feel for Monsieur Morand, I don’t want any more of your friendship, Geneviève. I need more than what you give to other people.”

“That’s enough,” said Madame Dixmer with a queenly flap of the hand. “Enough, Monsieur Lindey. Here is our carriage, please take me home to my husband.”

Maurice was quivering with chills and fever. When Geneviève placed her hand on his arm again to hoist herself up into the carriage, which was indeed waiting only a few feet away, it seemed to the young man that her hand was on fire. They both climbed up into the carriage, Geneviève sitting at the back, Maurice at the front, and crossed the whole of Paris without either one saying a word. Yet Geneviève held her handkerchief to her eyes the entire trip.

When they reached the factory, Dixmer was busy in his office and Morand had returned from Rambouillet and was changing his clothes. Geneviève gave Maurice her hand as she moved off toward her room:

“Adieu, Maurice, farewell, since that is what you want.”

Maurice did not reply. He went straight to the mantelpiece, where a miniature of Geneviève hung. He kissed it ardently, pressed it to his heart, put it back in its place, and left.

Maurice had no idea how he got home. He traversed Paris without seeing or hearing a thing. All he saw was a replay in his head of what had just happened, as in a dream, without being able to fathom his actions or his words or the feelings that inspired them. There are moments when the most serene, the most self-controlled person lets himself go with a violence demanded by the underhanded powers of the imagination that were previously subdued.

Maurice, as we have said, raced home rather than walked. He got undressed without the help of his manservant, did not answer his cook when she showed him supper was all ready; then he took the day’s letters from his table and read them all, one after the other, without understanding a single word. The fog of jealousy, sending reason reeling, had not yet lifted.

At ten o’clock, Maurice got into bed as mechanically as he had done everything else since leaving Geneviève. If you’d told Maurice when he was cool and collected that someone else had behaved the way he had, he would have been baffled, would have regarded as a madman any man who indulged in such desperate action, not justified either by any great reserve or any great abandon on Geneviève’s part. All that he registered was a terrible blow to hopes he hadn’t been aware till then that he entertained and upon which, vague as they were, rested all his dreams of happiness, floating amorphous, like barely discernible wisps of smoke, toward the horizon.

What then happened to Maurice was what almost always happens in such cases: stunned by the blow received, he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. Or, rather, he lay there senseless until the next day. A noise awoke him, however, the noise his officieux made whenever he opened the door. He was coming, as was his wont, to open Maurice’s bedroom windows, which looked over a great big garden, and to bring flowers.

They grew a lot of flowers in ’93 and Maurice loved them, but he didn’t even glance at this lot, half sitting up as he was, with his heavy head propped on his hand, trying for the life of him to remember what had happened the day before.

Maurice wondered why he felt so glum, but he couldn’t quite hit on it. The sole thing he could come up with was his jealousy of Morand. But it was hardly the moment to play at being jealous of a man when that man was out of the way in Rambouillet and when he himself was alone with the woman he loved, enjoying such splendid isolation with all the sweetness laid out for them by nature, awakening