licity, that jovial lusty spirit celebrated by the old masters.

Certainly, Haarlem and Amsterdam had enraptured him. The unwashed
people, seen in their country farms, really resembled those types
painted by Van Ostade, with their uncouth children and their old fat
women, embossed with huge breasts and enormous bellies. But of the
unrestrained joys, the drunken family carousals, not a whit. He had to
admit that the Dutch paintings at the Louvre had misled him. They had
simply served as a springing board for his dreams. He had rushed
forward on a false track and had wandered into capricious visions,
unable to discover in the land itself, anything of that real and
magical country which he had hoped to behold, seeing nothing at all,
on the plots of ground strewn with barrels, of the dances of
petticoated and stockinged peasants crying for very joy, stamping
their feet out of sheer happiness and laughing loudly.

Decidedly nothing of all this was visible. Holland was a country just
like any other country, and what was more, a country in no wise
primitive, not at all simple, for the Protestant religion with its
formal hypocricies and solemn rigidness held sway here.

The memory of that disenchantment returned to him. Once more he
glanced at his watch: ten minutes still separated him from the train's
departure. "It is about time to ask for the bill and leave," he told
himself.

He felt an extreme heaviness in his stomach and through his body.
"Come!" he addressed himself, "let us drink and screw up our courage."
He filled a glass of brandy, while asking for the reckoning. An
individual in black suit and with a napkin under one arm, a sort of
majordomo with a bald and sharp head, a greying beard without
moustaches, came forward. A pencil rested behind his ear and he
assumed an attitude like a singer, one foot in front of the other; he
drew a note book from his pocket, and without glancing at his paper,
his eyes fixed on the ceiling, near a chandelier, wrote while
counting. "There you are!" he said, tearing the sheet from his note
book and giving it to Des Esseintes who looked at him with curiosity,
as though he were a rare animal. What a surprising John Bull, he
thought, contemplating this phlegmatic person who had, because of his
shaved mouth, the appearance of a wheelsman of an American ship.

At this moment, the tavern door opened. Several persons entered
bringing with them an odor of wet dog to which was blent the sme