night lamp. With his eyes still uplifted
he began forming a plan; he would ring the bell, go upstairs despite the
porter's remonstrances, break the doors in with a push of his shoulder
and fall upon them in the very bed without giving them time to unlace
their arms. For one moment the thought that he had no weapon upon him
gave him pause, but directly afterward he decided to throttle them. He
returned to the consideration of his project, and he perfected it while
waiting for some sign, some indication, which should bring certainty
with it.

Had a woman's shadow only shown itself at that moment he would have
rung. But the thought that perhaps he was deceiving himself froze him.
How could he be certain? Doubts began to return. His wife could not be
with that man. It was monstrous and impossible. Nevertheless, he stayed
where he was and was gradually overcome by a species of torpor which
merged into sheer feebleness while he waited long, and the fixity of his
gaze induced hallucinations.

A shower was falling. Two policemen were approaching, and he was forced
to leave the doorway where he had taken shelter. When these were lost to
view in the Rue de Provence he returned to his post, wet and shivering.
The luminous streak still traversed the window, and this time he was
going away for good when a shadow crossed it. It moved so quickly that
he thought he had deceived himself. But first one and then another black
thing followed quickly after it, and there was a regular commotion in
the room. Riveted anew to the pavement, he experienced an intolerable
burning sensation in his inside as he waited to find out the meaning
of it all. Outlines of arms and legs flitted after one another, and
an enormous hand traveled about with the silhouette of a water jug. He
distinguished nothing clearly, but he thought he recognized a woman's
headdress. And he disputed the point with himself; it might well have
been Sabine's hair, only the neck did not seem sufficiently slim. At
that hour of the night he had lost the power of recognition and of
action. In this terrible agony of uncertainty his inside caused him
such acute suffering that he pressed against the door in order to calm
himself, shivering like a man in rags, as he did so. Then seeing that
despite everything he could not turn his eyes away from the window, his
anger changed into a fit of moralizing. He fancied himself a deputy; he
was haranguing an assembly, loudly denouncing debauche