With this allusion to the play so enthusiastically mentioned by Claude in his letter, she pushed René out of her room, and as she closed the door broke out once more into silvery but cruel, mocking laughter--laughter that was a strange mixture of affectation and hatred, of a courtesan's nonchalance and the vengeance of a slighted mistress.
'What a wicked woman! What a wicked woman!' muttered René as he went down the staircase, now re-echoing with the shouts of the call-boy. He trembled with agitation and asked himself, 'What harm have I ever done her?' forgetting that for a quarter of an hour he had represented Claude in Colette's eyes. Perhaps the joy felt by the actress in wounding him to the quick might have had its rise in the malice often occasioned by a man's unwillingness to pay his friend's mistress attentions. The loyalty of one man to another ranks amongst the sentiments most odious to women.
'What have I done to her?' repeated the poet, unable to find an answer to his question, unable even to collect his thoughts. There are phrases which, flung at us unexpectedly, will stun us as surely as any blow physically dealt. They bring about a sudden cessation of all consciousness--a cessation even of pain. René was not quite himself again until he stood in the Place du Palais Royal amid its throng of traffic. The first feeling that animated him was a fit of furious rage against Claude. 'The perfidious wretch!' he cried; 'how could he trust my secret to a creature like that? And such a secret, too! What did he know about it?' A slight blush and a moment's hesitation in uttering her name. 'He thinks that is sufficient evidence upon which to slander a woman he hardly knows, and in the ears, too, of a hussy whose infamy he proclaims from the housetops!'
He recalled to mind every detail of the only conversation in which Larcher might have discovered his nascent feelings for Suzanne. He saw himself once more in Claude's rooms in the Rue de Varenne, with the manuscripts and proofs strewn about, and the writer's face looking livid in the greenish light of the stained-glass windows. He saw the sceptical smile flit across that face whilst the sarcastic lips uttered the words: 'So you are not in love with her!' Borne on the same wave of memory came other visions connected with the last. He heard Suzanne's voice saying on the occasion of his third visit: 'Your friend M. Larcher--I am sure he doesn't like me.' Had she not expressed her distrust of him only that morning? Her suspicions had, indeed, been only too well justified. And then if he had only contented himself with coupling her name with his, René's. But he had even dared to make this other vile accusation--that she was kept by Desforges! Not that René harboured the least shadow of a suspicion against his divine mistress--it was not that which maddened him--but the knowledge that Colette had not lied in claiming to have heard this infamous thing from Larcher. If Larcher repeated it, he must have got it from some one else. And if Suzanne had insisted, as she had twice done, upon being told how Claude spoke of her, it was because she knew she was exposed to the insult of this abominable calumny.