Finally, at half past three, the carriage set off, affording me an opportunity to study my rival’s expression: He was somber, not a trace of a smile on his face; but he was in love, and no doubt it was some private concern that was troubling him. I went to our meeting place, and the queen of my heart comes as well, and I find her calm, pure, serene. Here I must confess that I’ve always thought Othello not only a fool but also a man without taste. Only a half Negro could do such a thing. Indeed, Shakespeare sensed this quite clearly, since he titled his play The Moor of Venice. The sight of a woman we adore comes as such a balm for the heart that it can only dispel all our sorrow, our doubts, and our grievances. My anger subsided, my smile returned. At my present age, such a demeanor would be a vile dissimulation, but at that time, it simply reflected my youth and my love. All jealousy stilled, I found the strength to observe her. My ill health was plain to see, and the dreadful doubts tormenting me had aggravated it still further. At last I found an opportune moment to slip in these words: ‘So you had no callers this morning?’—justifying the question by my fear that she might have made other plans for her day on reading my first note.

“‘Ah!’ she said, ‘only a man could have such ideas! Do you really believe I could think of anything but your misery? Until that second word came, I did nothing but try to find some way of coming to see you.’

“‘And you were alone?’

“‘Alone,’ she said, looking at me with an air of the most perfect innocence. It must have been just such a look that drove the Moor to do in Desdemona. As she was the sole resident of her hôtel particulier, that word was clearly an ignoble lie. One single falsehood shatters the perfect confidence that is, for some at least, the very foundation of love. In order to grasp what was taking place within me at that moment, let us imagine that we each have an inner self of which the visible us is the sheath, and that this self, brilliant as light, is also as delicate as a shadow . . . well, that fine me was then garbed in crepe for all eternity. Yes, I felt a cold, fleshless hand drape the shroud of experience over me, sentence me to the eternal mourning that a first betrayal injects into our soul. Lowering my eyes lest she note my distress, I steadied myself with this prideful thought: ‘If she is untrue to you, she is unworthy of you!’ I blamed the sudden redness of my face and the tears in my eyes on an abrupt aggravation of my symptoms, and that sweet creature insisted on accompanying me home, with the coach shades carefully drawn. On the way, her tenderness and solicitude would have deceived that same Moor of Venice I’ve been using as a point of comparison. Indeed, as any intelligent spectator can see, if that overgrown child hesitates two seconds longer, he will be begging Desdemona’s forgiveness. From which we may conclude that killing a woman is truly the act of a child! She wept as we parted, distraught that she couldn’t minister to me herself. She wished she were my valet, whose happiness was for her a subject of undying jealousy—and all this said with such turns of phrase, oh! precisely like what a happy Clarissa would have written. Even in the prettiest and most angelic of women, there is always an ape!”

Here the women lowered their eyes, as if wounded by that cruel truth, so cruelly put.

“I will say nothing to you of the night that ensued, nor the week,” de Marsay resumed. “It was then that I realized I was a politician.”

This quip was so neatly said that a gesture of admiration escaped us all.

“Reviewing, in a diabolical mood, all the cruel vengeances one can exact on a woman,” de Marsay continued, “and, since we were in love, some of them were terrible indeed, and irreparable, I felt only contempt for myself, I felt vulgar, little by little I was drawing up a horrible code, the code of indulgence. When we seek vengeance for the sake of a woman, are we not acknowledging that there is only one woman for us, that we cannot do without her? And in that case, is vengeance the way to win her back? If one does not think her indispensable, if there are others, then why not allow her the same right to change that we claim for ourselves? This, let me be clear, applies only to extramarital passion; otherwise it would do harm to society, and nothing better proves the necessity of an unbreakable marriage bond than the instability of passion. The two sexes must be chained, like the fierce beasts they are, by unyielding laws, deaf and mute. Take away vengeance, and betrayal is of no import in love. Those who believe there is only one woman in all the world for them must choose vengeance, and in that case there is only one, Othello’s.