"
Madame de Rochefide was moulded like wax in those able hands. Camille
felt an almost savage pleasure in thus entrapping her rival in her
toils. She sent her to bed that night piqued by curiosity, floating
between jealousy and generosity, but most assuredly with her mind full
of the beautiful Calyste.
"She will be enchanted to deceive me," thought Camille, as she kissed
her good-night.
Then, when she was alone, the author, the constructor of dramas, gave
place to the woman, and she burst into tears. Filling her hookah with
tobacco soaked in opium, she spent the greater part of the night in
smoking, dulling thus the sufferings of her soul, and seeing through
the clouds about her the beautiful young head of her late lover.
"What a glorious book to write, if I were only to express my pain!"
she said to herself. "But it is written already; Sappho lived before
me. And Sappho was young. A fine and touching heroine truly, a woman
of forty! Ah! my poor Camille, smoke your hookah; you haven't even the
resource of making a poem of your misery--that's the last drop of
anguish in your cup!"
The next morning Calyste came before mid-day and slipped upstairs, as
he was told, into Camille's own room, where he found the books.
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