Her panting mouth was open,
and her nostrils were not sufficient for her breath. There are certain
animals who fall upon their enemy in their rage, do it to death, and
seem in the tranquillity of victory to have forgotten it. There are
others who prowl around their victim, who guard it in fear lest it
should be taken away from them, and who, like the Achilles of Homer,
drag their enemy by the feet nine times round the walls of Troy. The
Marquise was like that. She did not see Henri. In the first place, she
was too secure of her solitude to be afraid of witnesses; and,
secondly, she was too intoxicated with warm blood, too excited with
the fray, too exalted, to take notice of the whole of Paris, if Paris
had formed a circle round her. A thunderbolt would not have disturbed
her. She had not even heard Paquita's last sigh, and believed that the
dead girl could still hear her.
"Die without confessing!" she said. "Go down to hell, monster of
ingratitude; belong to no one but the fiend. For the blood you gave
him you owe me all your own! Die, die, suffer a thousand deaths! I
have been too kind--I was only a moment killing you. I should have
made you experience all the tortures that you have bequeathed to me. I
--I shall live! I shall live in misery. I have no one left to love but
God!"
She gazed at her.
"She is dead!" she said to herself, after a pause, in a violent
reaction. "Dead! Oh, I shall die of grief!"
The Marquise was throwing herself upon the divan, stricken with a
despair which deprived her of speech, when this movement brought her
in view of Henri de Marsay.
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