nted her story out of sheer stupidity and cruelty. He
ought to have crushed her head when he had it under his heel. After all
was said and done, the business was too shameful. Never would he see
her; never would he touch her again, or if he did he would be miserably
weak. And with that he breathed hard, as though he were free once
more. Oh, that naked, cruel monster, roasting away like any goose and
slavering over everything that he had respected for forty years back.
The moon had come out, and the empty street was bathed in white light.
He felt afraid, and he burst into a great fit of sobbing, for he had
grown suddenly hopeless and maddened as though he had sunk into a
fathomless void.

"My God!" he stuttered out. "It's finished! There's nothing left now!"

Along the boulevards belated people were hurrying. He tried hard to be
calm, and as the story told him by that courtesan kept recurring to his
burning consciousness, he wanted to reason the matter out. The countess
was coming up from Mme de Chezelles's country house tomorrow morning.
Yet nothing, in fact, could have prevented her from returning to Paris
the night before and passing it with that man. He now began recalling
to mind certain details of their stay at Les Fondettes. One evening, for
instance, he had surprised Sabine in the shade of some trees, when she
was so much agitated as to be unable to answer his questions. The
man had been present; why should she not be with him now? The more he
thought about it the more possible the whole story became, and he ended
by thinking it natural and even inevitable. While he was in his shirt
sleeves in the house of a harlot his wife was undressing in her lover's
room. Nothing could be simpler or more logical! Reasoning in this
way, he forced himself to keep cool. He felt as if there were a great
downward movement in the direction of fleshly madness, a movement which,
as it grew, was overcoming the whole world round about him. Warm images
pursued him in imagination. A naked Nana suddenly evoked a naked
Sabine. At this vision, which seemed to bring them together in shameless
relationship and under the influence of the same lusts, he literally
stumbled, and in the road a cab nearly ran over him. Some women who had
come out of a cafe jostled him amid loud laughter. Then a fit of weeping
once more overcame him, despite all his efforts to the contrary, and,
not wishing to shed tears in the presence of others, he plunged into
a