Her coquetries became the more persistent because she felt within
herself a certain weakness. She played the invalid for a whole week
with charming hypocrisy. Again and again she walked about the velvet
turf which lay between the house and garden leaning on Calyste's arm
in languid dependence.

"Ah! my dear, you are taking him a long journey in a small space,"
said Mademoiselle des Touches one day.

Before the excursion to Croisic, the two women were discoursing one
evening about love, and laughing at the different ways that men
adopted to declare it; admitting to themselves that the cleverest men,
and naturally the least loving, did not like to wander in the
labyrinths of sentimentality and went straight to the point,--in which
perhaps they were right; for the result was that those who loved most
deeply and reservedly were, for a time at least, ill-treated.

"They go to work like La Fontaine, when he wanted to enter the
Academy," said Camille.

Madame de Rochefide had unbounded power to restrain Calyste within the
limits where she meant to keep him; it sufficed her to remind him by a
look or gesture of his horrible violence on the rocks. The eyes of her
poor victim would fill with tears, he was silent, swallowing down his
prayers, his arguments, his sufferings with a heroism that would
certainly have touched any other woman. She finally brought him by her
infernal coquetry to such a pass that he went one day to Camille
imploring her advice.