The art critic took the little yellow paper, a delicate etching, and pronounced:
"Good, very good, a little dark, too deeply bitten. From afar," and he stretched out his hand, "from afar it turns to aquatint."
"By whom is it? There is an S and an M interlaced at the left-hand corner."
"S M, S M," repeated Van Baël. "I cannot guess. It is a portrait. I see more letters after the monogram. Strange, strange ... It reads: S. M. to S. M. A laconic dedication of the author to himself, or else a strange coincidence of initials."
Nobody, not even Entragues who studied it intently, could find the key to the monogram.
Hubert and Calixte were old friends who owed each other valuable services. Calixte observed Hubert's insistance: a fatidical attraction, rather than curiosity, fascinated his eyes, keeping them glued to the engraving.
"You can have it if you wish, my dear Entragues."
"I accept it," Entragues replied, "but with the permission of being able to return it to you or else to throw it into the fire."
"Chino la fronte e con lo sguardo a terra L'amoroso Pensier rode se stesso." Cav. Marino, _l'Adone_, VIII, 12.
More than two weeks had passed since the feverish and mysterious evening which Sixtine granted to Entragues. Three times he had tried to see her, three times he had failed: irritated, exasperated, cast down, such were his three successive states of mind.
After the door had closed on him, by the gleam of an instantaneous if tardy clairvoyance, he had seen and deciphered Sixtine's final irony: "You do not take me? Yet I am at your mercy. I have the air of thinking, of listening, of speaking, but I do not think, I do not listen, I do not speak--I merely pretend to do all these things and I await. Yet another half-hour, another ten minutes, five, one, the last one, nothing! Go! you make me lose my patience!"
"Now," Entragues told himself, "it is quite well reorganized, I must not lose it." And going by the longest route to his home, meditatively he recomposed the scene, wrote it in his mind. How Would it go at the theater? He planned the play. While the man in love explains the tenderness of his sentiments, the woman disrobes. He shrugged his shoulders: this would not be understood, he would be charged with coarseness. And yet the comic Plato had already done it, then Andronicus, then several Destouches, several Picards and several Augiers.