He had told her: "And I took you for a little bit of china!" For three whole months he had tasted joys acute as pain.

Then Felicie had grown elusive, remote, and estranged.
She loved him no longer.

He sought the reason, but could not discover it.

It tortured him to know that he was no longer loved; jealousy tortured him still more.

It was true that in the first beautiful hours of his love he had known that Felicie had a lover, one Girmandel, a court bailiff, who lived in the Rue de Provence, and he had felt it deeply.