The sincere affection which the young professor testified for Felicie,
whom he treated as a sister, excited Pierquin's spirit of emulation.
He tried to eclipse Emmanuel by mingling a fashionable jargon and
sundry expressions of superficial gallantry with anxious elegies and
business airs which sat more naturally on his countenance. When he
declared himself disenchanted with the world he looked at Felicie, as
if to let her know that she alone could reconcile him with life.
Felicie, who received for the first time in her life the compliments
of a man, listened to this language, always sweet however deceptive;
she took emptiness for depth, and needing an object on which to fix
the vague emotions of her heart, she allowed the lawyer to occupy her
mind. Envious perhaps, though quite unconsciously, of the loving
attentions with which Emmanuel surrounded her sister, she doubtless
wished to be, like Marguerite, the object of the thoughts and cares of
a man.
Pierquin readily perceived the preference which Felicie accorded him
over Emmanuel, and to him it was a reason why he should persist in his
attentions; so that in the end he went further than he at first
intended. Emmanuel watched the beginning of this passion, false
perhaps in the lawyer, artless in Felicie, whose future was at stake.
Soon, little colloquies followed, a few words said in a low voice
behind Emmanuel's back, trifling deceptions which give to a look or a
word a meaning whose insidious sweetness may be the cause of innocent
mistakes.
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