He gave all the silver he had on him to the turnkey, begging him to
forward this letter to its destination, asked for a bottle of wine,
which he drank in little sips while waiting for the cart....
After supper Gamelin ran to the _Amour Peintre_ and burst into the blue
chamber where every night Élodie was waiting for him.
"You are avenged," he told her. "Jacques Maubel is no more. The cart
that took him to his death has just passed beneath your window, escorted
by torch-bearers."
She understood:
"Wretch! it is you have killed him, and he was not my lover. I did not
know him.... I have never seen him.... What was this man? He was young,
amiable ... innocent. And you have killed him, wretch! wretch!"
She fell in a faint. But, amid the shadows of this momentary death, she
felt herself overborne by a flood at once of horror and voluptuous
ecstasy. She half revived; her heavy lids lifted to show the whites of
the eyes, her bosom swelled, her hands beat the air, seeking for her
lover. She pressed him to her in a strangling embrace, drove her nails
into the flesh, and gave him with her bleeding lips, without a word,
without a sound, the longest, the most agonized, the most delicious of
kisses.
She loved him with all her flesh, and the more terrible, cruel,
atrocious she thought him, the more she saw him reeking with the blood
of his victims, the more consuming was her hunger and thirst for him.