example
presented to a healthier mind would not have been much more salutary, for
we must tell those who, like M. de Camors, trample under foot all
principles of right, and nevertheless imagine that their secretaries,
their servants, their wives and their children, may remain virtuous--we
must tell these that while they wrong others they deceive themselves! And
this was the case with Hippolyte Vautrot.

He was about forty years of age--a period of life when men often become
very vicious, even when they have been passably virtuous up to that time.
He affected an austere and puritanical air; was the great man of the cafe
he frequented; and there passed judgment on his contemporaries and
pronounced them all inferior. He was difficult to please--in point of
virtue demanding heroism; in talent, genius; in art, perfection.

His political opinions were those of Erostratus, with this
difference--always in favor of the ancient--that Vautrot, after setting
fire to the temple, would have robbed it also. In short, he was a fool,
but a vicious fool as well.

If M. de Camors, at the moment of leaving his luxurious study that
evening, had had the bad taste to turn and apply his eye to the keyhole,
he would have seen something greatly to astonish even him.

He would have seen this "honorable man" approach a beautiful Italian
cabinet inlaid with ivory, turn over the papers in the drawers, and
finally open in the most natural manner a very complicated lock, the key
of which the Count at that moment had in his pocket.

It was after this search that M. Vautrot repaired with his volume of
Faust to the boudoir of the young Countess, at whose feet we have already
left him too long.

CHAPTER XVII

LIGHTNING FROM A CLEAR SKY

Madame de Camors had closed her eyes to conceal her tears. She opened
them at the instant Vautrot seized her hand and called her "Poor angel!"

Seeing the man on his knees, she could not comprehend it, and only
exclaimed, simply:

"Are you mad, Vautrot?"

"Yes, I am mad!" Vautrot threw his hair back with a romantic gesture
common to him, and, as he believed, to the poets-"Yes, I am mad with love
and with pity, for I see your sufferings, pure and noble victim!"

The Countess only stared in blank astonishment.

"Repose yourself with confidence," he continued, "on a heart that will be
devoted to you until death--a heart into which your tears now penetrate
to its most sacred depths!"

The Countess did n