en she would say, "Let us go," and they would leave. She would pass
rapidly, with bent head and the short steps of an actress leaving the
stage, among the drinkers, who, with their elbows on the tables, watched
her go by with suspicious and dissatisfied glances; and when she had
crossed the threshold would give a deep sigh, as if she had just escaped
some terrible danger.

Sometimes she asked Duroy, with a shudder: "If I were insulted in these
places, what would you do?"

He would answer, with a swaggering air: "Take your part, by Jove!"

And she would clasp his arm with happiness, with, perhaps, a vague wish
to be insulted and defended, to see men fight on her account, even such
men as those, with her lover.

But these excursions taking place two or three times a week began to
weary Duroy, who had great difficulty, besides, for some time past, in
procuring the ten francs necessary for the cake and the drinks. He now
lived very hardly and with more difficulty than when he was a clerk in
the Northern Railway; for having spent lavishly during his first month
of journalism, in the constant hope of gaining large sums of money in a
day or two, he had exhausted all his resources and all means of
procuring money. A very simple method, that of borrowing from the
cashier, was very soon exhausted; and he already owed the paper four
months' salary, besides six hundred francs advanced on his lineage
account. He owed, besides, a hundred francs to Forestier, three hundred
to Jacques Rival, who was free-handed with his money; and he was also
eaten up by a number of small debts of from five francs to twenty.
Saint-Potin, consulted as to the means of raising another hundred
francs, had discovered no expedient, although a man of inventive mind,
and Duroy was exasperated at this poverty, of which he was more sensible
now than formerly, since he had more wants. A sullen rage against
everyone smouldered within him, with an ever-increasing irritation,

which manifested itself at every moment on the most futile pretexts. He
sometimes asked himself how he could have spent an average of a thousand
francs a month, without any excess and the gratification of any
extravagant fancy, and he found that, by adding a lunch at eight
francs to a dinner at twelve, partaken of in some large cafe on the
boulevards, he at once came to a louis, which, added to ten francs
pocket-money--that pocket-money that melts away, one does not know
how--makes a tota