“But I! I would have given you everything. I would have sold all, worked for you with my hands, I would have begged on the high roads for a smile, for a look, to hear you say ‘Thanks!’ And you sit there quietly in your armchair, as if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you, and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made you do it? Was it a bet? Yet you loved me⁠—you said so. And but a moment since⁠—Ah! it would have been better to have driven me away. My hands are hot with your kisses, and there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you swore an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years you held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream! Eh! Our plans for the journey, do you remember? Oh, your letter! your letter! it tore my heart! And then when I come back to him⁠—to him, rich, happy, free⁠—to implore the help the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and bringing back to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would cost him three thousand francs!”

“I haven’t got them,” replied Rodolphe, with that perfect calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.