"it is impossible, you will not leave!"

"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your
entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave
Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from
falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over
my body!--I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"

"Well, let it be so!" exclaimed Vaudrey. "Go! But if it is a stranger
who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her. Here is the authority.
Will you take it back?"

"I? No, I will not take it back! If you desire me to be worthy of the
name that you have given me, keep it honored, at least, in the sight of
the world, since to betray a woman, to mock and insult her, is not
dishonoring. I alone have the right to save you from shame. Do not deny
me the privilege that I claim. I do not desire that the man who has been
my husband should descend to the questionable intrigues of a Molina.
You have outraged me enough, do not impose this last insult on me!"

"For the last time, adieu!"

She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this
living mourning of a faith. She fled and he allowed her to descend the
stairway, followed by her femme de chambre. She entered the carriage
that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussee-d'Antin, but he had not
the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling
he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly
and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels
had crushed his bosom.

"Ah! what a wretch I have been!" he said as he struck his knee with his
closed fist. "How unhappy I am! Adrienne!"

He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window
which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November
evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled
through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps shining like so many
eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne
away. He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading
its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.

He leaned upon the window-sill, and like a shipwrecked sailor who sees a
receding ship, he called out, with a loud cry lost in the tempest of
that bustling and busy street:

"Adrienne! Adrienne!"

No reply! The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.

For a moment, Sulp