The Slav's especial characteristic is a prodigious, instantaneous nervousness.

It seems that those beings with the uncertain hearts have a faculty of amplifying in themselves, to the point of absorbing the heart altogether, states of partial, passing, and yet sincere emotion.

The intensity of their momentary excitement thus makes of them sincere comedians, who speak to you as if they felt certain sentiments of an exclusive order, to feel contradictory ones the day after, with the same ardor, with the same untruthfulness, unjustly say the victims of those natures, so much the more deceitful as they are more vibrating.
He suffered, indeed, on discovering that Maud had been initiated into his criminal intrigue, but he suffered more for her than for himself.

It was sufficient for that suffering to occupy a few moments, a few hours.
It reinvested the personality of the impassioned and weak husband who loved his wife while betraying her.

There was, indeed, a shade of it in his adventure, but a very slight shade.