sing through a dining room in which it was very
evident that no one ever ate, I entered a typical room of all these
women, a furnished room with red curtains and a soiled eiderdown bed
covering.

"Make yourself at home, 'mon chat'," she said.

I gave a suspicious glance at the room, but there seemed no reason for
uneasiness.

As she took off her wraps she began to laugh.

"Well, what ails you? Are you changed into a pillar of salt? Come, hurry
up."

I did as she suggested.

Five minutes later I longed to put on my things and get away. But this
terrible languor that had overcome me at home took possession of me
again, and deprived me of energy enough to move and I stayed in spite of
the disgust that I felt for this association. The unusual attractiveness
that I supposed I had discovered in this creature over there under the
chandeliers of the theater had altogether vanished on closer
acquaintance, and she was nothing more to me now than a common woman,
like all the others, whose indifferent and complaisant kiss smacked of
garlic.

I thought I would say something.

"Have you lived here long?" I asked.

"Over six months on the fifteenth of January."

"Where were you before that?"

"In the Rue Clauzel. But the janitor made me very uncomfortable and I
left."

And she began to tell me an interminable story of a janitor who had
talked scandal about her.

But, suddenly, I heard something moving quite close to us. First there
was a sigh, then a slight, but distinct, sound as if some one had turned
round on a chair.

I sat up abruptly and asked.

"What was that noise?"

She answered quietly and confidently:

"Do not be uneasy, my dear boy, it is my neighbor. The partition is so
thin that one can hear everything as if it were in the room. These are
wretched rooms, just like pasteboard."

I felt so lazy that I paid no further attention to it. We resumed our
conversation. Driven by the stupid curiosity that prompts all men to
question these creatures about their first experiences, to attempt to
lift the veil of their first folly, as though to find in them a trace of
pristine innocence, to love them, possibly, in a fleeting memory of their
candor and modesty of former days, evoked by a word, I insistently asked
her about her earlier lovers.

I knew she was telling me lies. What did it matter? Among all these lies
I might, perhaps, discover something sincere and pathetic.

"Come," said I, "tell me who he w