private and secret details
respecting the departed, which his wife, ill at ease, refused to tell
him. But he obstinately persisted, saying, "Come, now, tell me all about
it. He must have been very comical at such a time?"

She murmured, "Oh! do leave him alone."

But he went on, "No, but tell me now, he must have been a duffer to
sleep with?" And he always wound up with, "What a donkey he was."

One evening, towards the end of June, as he was smoking a cigarette at
the window, the fineness of the evening inspired him with a wish for a
drive, and he said, "Made, shall we go as far as the Bois de Boulogne?"

"Certainly."

They took an open carriage and drove up the Champs Elysees, and then
along the main avenue of the Bois de Boulogne. It was a breezeless
night, one of those stifling nights when the overheated air of Paris
fills the chest like the breath of a furnace. A host of carriages bore
along beneath the trees a whole population of lovers. They came one
behind the other in an unbroken line. George and Madeleine amused
themselves with watching all these couples, the woman in summer toilet
and the man darkly outlined beside her. It was a huge flood of lovers
towards the Bois, beneath the starry and heated sky. No sound was heard

save the dull rumble of wheels. They kept passing by, two by two in each
vehicle, leaning back on the seat, silent, clasped one against the
other, lost in dreams of desire, quivering with the anticipation of
coming caresses. The warm shadow seemed full of kisses. A sense of
spreading lust rendered the air heavier and more suffocating. All the
couples, intoxicated with the same idea, the same ardor, shed a fever
about them.

George and Madeleine felt the contagion. They clasped hands without a
word, oppressed by the heaviness of the atmosphere and the emotion that
assailed them. As they reached the turning which follows the line of the
fortification, they kissed one another, and she stammered somewhat
confusedly, "We are as great babies as on the way to Rouen."

The great flood of vehicles divided at the entrance of the wood. On the
road to the lake, which the young couple were following, they were now
thinner, but the dark shadow of the trees, the air freshened by the
leaves and by the dampness arising from the streamlets that could be
heard flowing beneath them, and the coolness of the vast nocturnal vault
bedecked with stars, gave to the kisses of the perambulating pairs a
more pe