possibly understand
him, and in the only world in which he could live; his petty bourgeois,
sensual inexperience flourished in the little hotel of the courtesan.

He had doubtless loved; often enough he had thought himself once more in
love; the poor grisettes, to whom he had written in verse, as he might
have sung songs to them, were gone from his thoughts, though they had
occupied his heart for a short time. He had profoundly loved her who
bore his name, perhaps he loved her still as warmly, as sincerely--the
unfortunate man!--as of old. He sometimes recalled with tearful eye, how
his whole frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl
who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity,
in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But
Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and
appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite
luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her
attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared
everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some
drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and
mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.

When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and
indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and
that his marrow had been touched. This man of forty felt all the
enthusiasm and distraction of a youth. It seemed to him that this was
the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the
only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of
self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for
which he would have braved and risked everything.

When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a
questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the
woman's self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a
questioning _yes_:

"Yes?"

Simply that.

And in this _yes_, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and
burning promises for Sulpice.

Then he drew her to him:

"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his
head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise,
and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.

Yes! And he would have uttered this _yes_ before every one like a
brava