He cast discretion to the winds; reason went out of him, and only blind anger remained to drive him into immediate action.

And as suddenly as that flood of rage had leaped, as suddenly did it ebb now that he found himself face to face with the outraged Condillac and began to understand the magnitude of the folly he had committed.
Everything was lost now, utterly and irretrievably--lost as a dozen other fine emprises had been by his sudden and ungoverned frenzy.

God! What a fool he was! What a cursed, drivelling fool! What, after all, was a kiss or two, compared with all the evil that might now result from his interference?
Haply Marius would have taken them and departed, and at midnight they would have been free to go from Condillac.
The future would not have been lacking in opportunities to seek out and kill Marius for that insult.
Why could he not have left the matter to the future?
But now, with Florimond to be murdered on the morrow at La Rochette, himself likely to be murdered within the hour at Condillac, Valerie was at their mercy utterly.
Wildly and vainly did he strive even then to cover up the foolish thing that he had done.

He bowed apologetically to Marius; he waved his hands and filled the air with Italian phrases, frenziedly uttered, as if by the very vigour of them he sought to drive explanation into his master's brain.

Marius watched and listened, but his rage nowise abated; it grew, instead, as if that farrago of a language he did not understand were but an added insult.