Page:The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant.djvu/191

Rh string breaks when a woman leaves you, and you think that you must start all over again, and take another chance in that forbidden sport in which one risks so much, the sport that one has been through a hundred times before, and which leaves you nothing to show in the end.

"Nothing is more unpleasant than to lend your apartments to a friend, to realize that some one is going to disturb the mysterious intimacy which really exists between the actual owner and his fortune, and violate the soul of those past kisses which float in the air; that the room whose tints you connect with some recollection, some dream, some sweet vision, and whose colors you have tried to make harmonize with certain fair-haired, pink-skinned girls, is going to become a commonplace lodging, like the rooms in an ordinary lodging house, fit only for hidden crime and for evanescent love affairs.

"However, poor Stanis had begged me so urgently to do him that service; he was so very much in love with Madame de Fréjus. Among the characters in this comedy there was a brute of a husband who was terribly jealous and suspicious; one of those Othellos who have always a flea in their ear, and come back unexpectedly from shooting or the club, who pick up pieces of torn paper, listen at doors, smell out meetings with the nose of a detective, and seem to have been sent into the world only to be cuckolds, but who know better than most how to lay a snare, and to play a nasty trick. So when I went to Venice, I consented to let him have my rooms.

"I will leave you to guess whether they made up for lost time, although, after all, it is no business of yours. My journey, however, which was only to have lasted a few weeks,—just long enough for me to benefit by the change of air, to rid my brain of the image of my last mistress, and perhaps to find another, among that strange mixture of society which one meets there, a medley of American, Slav, Viennese, and Italian women, who instill a little artificial life into that old city, asleep amid the melancholy silence of the lagoons,—was prolonged, and Stanis was as much at home in my rooms as he was in his own.

"Madame Piquignolles, the retired canteen-keeper, took great interest in this adventure, watched over their little love affair, and, as she used to say, was on guard as soon as they arrived one after the other, the marchioness covered with a thick veil, and slipping in as quickly as possible, always uneasy, and afraid that Monsieur de Fréjus might be following her, and Stanis with the assured and satisfied look of an amorous husband, who is going to meet his little wife after having been away from home for a few days.

"Well, one day during one of those delicious moments when his beloved one, fresh from her bath, and invigorated by the coolness of the water, was pressing close to her lover, reclining in his arms, and smiling at him with half-closed eyes, during one of those moments when people do not speak, but continue their dream, the sentinel, without even asking leave, suddenly burst into the room, for worthy Madame Piquignolles was in a terrible fight.

"A few minutes before, a well-dressed gentleman, followed by two others of