n honorable strife and
sufficient resistances--and then she had consented, and with what
emotion, what nervousness, what terrible, delightful fear, and that
first meeting in his small, ground-floor bachelor rooms, in the Rue de
Miromesnil. Her heart? What did her little heart of a woman who had been
seduced, vanquished, conquered, feel when she for the first time entered
the door of that house which was her nightmare? She really did not know!
She had quite forgotten. One remembers a fact, a date, a thing, but one
hardly remembers, after the lapse of two years, what an emotion, which
soon vanished, because it was very slight, was like. But, oh! she had
certainly not forgotten the others, that rosary of meetings, that road
to the cross of love, and those stations, which were so monotonous, so
fatiguing, so similar to each other, that she felt a nauseating taste in
her mouth at what was going to happen so soon.

And the very cabs were not like the other cabs which one makes use of
for ordinary purposes! Certainly, the cabmen guessed. She felt sure of
it, by the very way they looked at her, and the eyes of these Paris
cabmen are terrible! When one remembers they are constantly remembering,
in the Courts of Justices, after a lapse of several years, faces of
criminals whom they have only driven once, in the middle of the night,
from some street or other to a railway station, and that they have to do
with almost as many passengers as there are hours in the day, and that
their memory is good enough for them to declare: "That is the man whom I
took up in the Rues des Martyrs, and put down at the Lyons Railway
Station, at 12 o'clock at night, on July 10, last year!" Is it not
terrible when one risks what a young woman risks when she is going to
meet her lover, and has to trust her reputation to the first cabman she
meets? In two years she had employed at least a hundred to a hundred and
twenty in that drive to the Rue Miromesnil, reckoning only one a week,
and they were so many witnesses, who might appear against her at a
critical moment.

As soon as she was in the cab, she took another veil, which was as thick
and dark as a domino mask, out of her pocket, and put it on. That hid
her face, but what about the rest, her dress, her bonnet, and her
parasol? They might be remarked; they might, in fact, have been seen
already. Oh! I What misery she endured in this Rue de Miromesnil! She
thought that she recognized all the foot-passeng