What followed that fatal night you know as well as I; but what you can
not know, what you can not suspect, is what I have suffered since our
separation.
I heard that your father had taken you away with him, but I felt sure
that you could not live away from me for long, and when I met you in the
Champs-Elysees, I was a little upset, but by no means surprised.
Then began that series of days; each of them brought me a fresh insult
from you. I received them all with a kind of joy, for, besides proving
to me that you still loved me, it seemed to me as if the more you
persecuted me the more I should be raised in your eyes when you came to
know the truth.
Do not wonder at my joy in martyrdom, Armand; your love for me had
opened my heart to noble enthusiasm.
Still, I was not so strong as that quite at once.
Between the time of the sacrifice made for you and the time of your
return a long while elapsed, during which I was obliged to have recourse
to physical means in order not to go mad, and in order to be blinded and
deafened in the whirl of life into which I flung myself. Prudence
has told you (has she not?) how I went to all the fetes and balls and
orgies. I had a sort of hope that I should kill myself by all these
excesses, and I think it will not be long before this hope is realized.
My health naturally got worse and worse, and when I sent Mme. Duvernoy
to ask you for pity I was utterly worn out, body and soul.
I will not remind you, Armand, of the return you made for the last proof
of love that I gave you, and of the outrage by which you drove away a
dying woman, who could not resist your voice when you asked her for a
night of love, and who, like a fool, thought for one instant that she
might again unite the past with the present. You had the right to do
what you did, Armand; people have not always put so high a price on a
night of mine!
I left everything after that. Olympe has taken my place with the Comte
de N., and has told him, I hear, the reasons for my leaving him. The
Comte de G. was at London. He is one of those men who give just enough
importance to making love to women like me for it to be an agreeable
pastime, and who are thus able to remain friends with women, not hating
them because they have never been jealous of them, and he is, too, one
of those grand seigneurs who open only a part of their hearts to us, but
the whole of their purses. It was of him that I immediately thought. I
joined him in London. He received me as kindly as possible, but he
was the lover there of a woman in society, and he feared to compromise
himself if he were seen with me. He introduced me to his friends, who
gave a supper in my honour, after which one of them took me home with
him.