Her
desire to know how great was my friendship for La Tournoire? This arose
perhaps from a thought that I might be won over to her purpose, perhaps
from a fear that I might some day avenge his betrayal. The barrier that,
she said, lay between us? A pretext to get rid of me as soon as I might
be, not only useless to her, but also in the way of her designs against
La Tournoire. Her strange agitation? A mask to cover the real excitement
that one in her position must have felt. Her aspect of horror at the
disclosure that I was La Tournoire? This may have been real, coming from
a fear that she might have betrayed herself by the curiosity she had
shown about me, that the eyes of La Tournoire must be keener than those
of the light-hearted man she had taken me to be, that I had dissembled to
her as well as to De Berquin, that I had been playing with her from the
first. After she knew me to be La Tournoire, and was assured that I did
not suspect her, she no more spoke of my going from her. What was her
weakness of body at Maury but a pretext for delay, that the governor
might have time to come to Clochonne and the project of the ambush be
carried out? She had forged chains of love to hold me where she was. Her
coyness but kept those chains the stronger, her postponement of the
surrender made it the more impossible for me to leave her side. Who can
go from the woman he loves while his fate is uncertain? If she had made
no show of love, I could have left her.
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