Page:Marquis de Sade - Adelaide of Brunswick.djvu/163

 all over Germany to become in turn the mistress of a margrave, a bandit and of a conspirator? Can she justify this multitude of wrongs? When I question her why does she answer only by a guilty embarrassment? No, my friend, you can never clear her name."

"Your honor," said Thuringia, "is as dear to me as my own. I have thought it my duty to get some more information about what concerns Adelaide during her travels and Bathilda has given them to me. She is a young woman incapable of trickery or deceit, and she has assured me that there was nothing reprehensible in the conduct of your wife. During the course of absence and up to the present time there is nothing to reproach her for. As for the embarrassment which your questions cause her, I assure you, my prince, that it comes only from modesty. Don't let your imagination make life miserable for you and for the best of women."

This explanation might have calmed Frederick if Mersburg, who knew how the prince could be influenced, had not come to stimulate in his heart the serpents of jealousy.

When Frederick told the count of the conversation he had just had with his cousin and of the calm which had resulted from it, the count answered:

"Certainly, I am not astonished at what you tell me, and the one who makes your wife guilty should have the greatest interest in making her seem innocent to you."

"What!? Thuringia the lover of my wife? Impossible!"

"My prince, I have discovered all. The one who brought you the daughter of the Duke of Brunswick would have liked to take her for his own wife. Both of them had the same feelings, and everything which has happened has been the result of this guilty love. The rendezvous at the bird house near which Kaunitz was placed to put you in error, the burning of Torgau and the escape which followed, the trip which he had your wife take in order to get her out of your hands, that Bathilda which he placed in her service while she was traveling; all was the result of the guilty love of your cousin and the perfidy of your wife."

"Sir," said Frederick boiling with anger, "your life is at stake if all this is not true. Furnish me with the proofs of