'A pleasure, madame,' the lancer responded gaily, raising a gloved hand to his hat. A moment later, the same hand was applied to the Russian officer's cheek.
'That looks like the beginnings of a nice little duel.' Gracchus observed. Well, a sword thrust is a lot to pay for one smile.'
'Suppose you mind your own business,' Marianne snapped back. 'Take me home quickly and then come back and find out what has happened. Try and discover who both these gentlemen are. I will do what I can to prevent the duel.'
In a very few moments, she was standing in the forecourt of her own house, having despatched Gracchus to the scene of the quarrel. But when he returned not many minutes later, her young coachman could tell her nothing more. The two parties to the quarrel had already disappeared and the small crowd attracted by their altercation had melted away. Fearing the incident would attract a good deal more notoriety than it deserved and might even reach the Emperor's ears, Marianne did what she had always done in such a case and waited for Arcadius to come home to confide her troubles to him.
When he returned, Arcadius found himself entrusted with a confidential mission to prevent an absurd duel between a Russian and a Polish officer. This mission he accepted with his twinkling smile, merely asking Marianne which of the two adversaries she preferred.
'How can you ask!' she exclaimed. The Pole, of course! Didn't he rescue me from a man who was molesting me, at the risk of his life?'
'My experience of woman, my dear,' Arcadius retorted calmly, 'has not shown me that rescuers inevitably receive the gratitude they deserve. It all depends on who has done the rescuing. Take your friend Fortunée Hamelin. Well, I would stake my right arm that not only would she have felt not the faintest desire to be rescued from your pursuer, but she would actually have regarded any man who was fool enough to try it as a deadly enemy.'
Marianne shrugged.
'Oh, I know. Fortunée adores all men in general and anyone in uniform in particular. She would think a Russian a great prize.'
'Not all Russians perhaps, but this one, most certainly.'
'Anyone would think you knew him,' Marianne said, staring. 'Yet you did not see him, you were not there.'
'No,' Jolival agreed pleasantly, 'but if your description is correct, I know who he is. Particularly as Russians who wear the Legion d'Honneur are not exactly two a penny.'
Then who —?'
'Count Alexander Ivanovitch Chernychev, Colonel of Cossacks of the Russian Imperial Guard, aide-de-camp to his majesty Tzar Alexander I and his customary emissary to France. He is one of the finest horsemen in the world and one of the most inveterate womanizers of two hemispheres. Women adore him.'
'Do they? Well, not this one!' Marianne cried, reacting with fury to Jolival's complacent introduction of the insolent rider of Longchamp. 'If this duel does take place, I hope very much that the Pole will skewer your Cossack as neatly as a tailor sewing thread. Attractive or no, his manners are atrocious.'
'That is what pretty women generally say of him the first time. It is odd, though, how often they tend to change their minds later on. Come now, don't be cross,' he added, seeing her green eyes grow stormy. 'I will go and see whether I am able to prevent a massacre, although I doubt it.'
'Why?'
'Because a Russian and a Pole have never yet been known to renounce such a splendid opportunity for killing one another.'
In the event, ten o'clock was striking the next morning as Arcadius, who had gone out well before daylight, returned to inform Marianne that the duel had taken place that very morning at the Pré Catelan. The two parties had fought with swords and had returned unreconciled, one, Chernychev, with a thrust through his arm, the other, Baron Kozietulski, with a wound in the shoulder.
'You need not pity him too much,' Jolival added, seeing Marianne's distressed face. The wound is not severe and it will have the advantage of saving him from a tour of duty in Spain, where the Emperor would most certainly have sent him. And don't worry, I will send to inquire how he does. As for the other…'
'The other does not interest me,' Marianne interrupted curtly.
The faintly sardonic smile which was Jolival's answer to this so offended Marianne that she turned her back on him without a word and went out into the garden. Why, she wondered, had her old friend smiled like that? What was he thinking? Did he imagine that she did not mean what she said when she declared that the Russian did not interest her? Did he think she was like all those other women who had fallen such easy victims to the handsome Cossack?
She strolled a little way along the sanded paths, all leading to the little pool with its murmuring fountain. It was a small garden, made up of no more than a few lime trees and masses of roses basking in the summer sun. The fountain was also small, in the form of a bronze dolphin clasped in the arms of an enigmatically smiling cupid. It was certainly nothing to compare with the marvels of the Villa dei Cavalli. Here, no proud stallion made the ground echo at night to the thunder of his furious galloping hooves, no phantom rider streaked through the shadows on his lonely way, carrying with him to the end of the night some terrible secret, some awful despair. Here, all was peace and cheerfulness, ordered, companionable, as a small Parisian garden should be.
The cupid on the dolphin smiled through the shower of falling crystal drops and it seemed to Marianne that she read a kind of irony in his smile. 'You are mocking me,' she thought. 'But why? What have I done to you? I believed in you and you betrayed me cruelly. You have never smiled at me except to take away what you have given. I entered into marriage as other women enter religion, yet you made marriage nothing but a mockery to me. And yet, here I am, married for the second time, and still as lonely. The first was a villain, the second is no more than a shadow – while the man I love is merely another woman's husband. Will you never have mercy on me?'
But no, the cupid remained silent and his smile did not change. With a sigh Marianne turned her back and went to sit down on a bench of mossy stone where a climbing rose dropped its crimson petals. Her heart felt empty, like one of those deserts created in a night by a hurricane gust of wind, carrying everything away with it, obliterating even the memory of what was there before. And when she tried to revive the fire that was slowly going out within her by remembering the madness of her love, the delirium of joy, the blind despair which the very name, the very picture of her lover had once had power to evoke. Marianne found to her distress that not even the echo of her cries remained. It was as if – yes, it was as if it were a story she had heard, but a story of which someone else was the heroine.
From a great distance, as though at the end of a long series of vast, empty rooms, she seemed to hear Talleyrand's persuasive voice saying: 'This was never made to last…' Could he have been right, after all? Was he proved right already? Could it be that her great love for Napoleon was dying, leaving behind it only the small change of tenderness and admiration that remains after the burning, golden flood of passion has withdrawn?. The present day Place de l'Italie.