Then one fine morning amid his grand success,
when Bordenave, who was mad after advertisement, kept firing the
Parisian imagination with colossal posters, it became known that she
must have started for Cairo the previous day. She had simply had a few
words with her manager. Something had been said which did not please
her; the whole thing was the caprice of a woman who is too rich to let
herself be annoyed. Besides, she had indulged an old infatuation, for
she had long meditated visiting the Turks.
Months passed--she began to be forgotten. When her name was mentioned
among the ladies and gentlemen, the strangest stories were told, and
everybody gave the most contradictory and at the same time prodigious
information. She had made a conquest of the viceroy; she was reigning,
in the recesses of a palace, over two hundred slaves whose heads she now
and then cut off for the sake of a little amusement. No, not at all! She
had ruined herself with a great big nigger! A filthy passion this, which
had left her wallowing without a chemise to her back in the crapulous
debauchery of Cairo. A fortnight later much astonishment was produced
when someone swore to having met her in Russia. A legend began to
be formed: she was the mistress of a prince, and her diamonds were
mentioned.
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