on airs and adulates itself. There is one word in the mouths of all.
Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century
hasn't invented anything great.

"It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything. At the present
hour it glorifies itself in this electricity which it thinks it
discovered. But electricity was known and used in remotest antiquity,
and if the ancients could not explain its nature nor even its essence,
the moderns are just as incapable of identifying that force which
conveys the spark and carries the voice--acutely nasalized--along the
wire. This century thinks it discovered the terrible science of
hypnotism, which the priests and Brahmins in Egypt and India knew and
practised to the utmost. No, the only thing this century has invented
is the sophistication of products. Therein it is passed master. It has
even gone so far as to adulterate excrement. Yes, in 1888 the two houses
of parliament had to pass a law destined to suppress the falsification
of fertilizer. Now that's the limit."

The doorbell rang. He opened the door and nearly fell over backward.

Mme. Chantelouve was before him.

Stupefied, he bowed, while Mme. Chantelouve, without a word, went
straight into the study. There she turned around, and Durtal, who had
followed, found himself face to face with her.

"Won't you please sit down?" He advanced an armchair and hastened to
push back, with his foot, the edge of the carpet turned up by the cat.
He asked her to excuse the disorder. She made a vague gesture and
remained standing.

In a calm but very low voice she said, "It is I who wrote you those mad
letters. I have come to drive away this bad fever and get it over with
in a quite frank way. As you yourself wrote, no liaison between us is
possible. Let us forget what has happened. And before I go, tell me that
you bear me no grudge."

He cried out at this. He would not have it so. He had not been beside
himself when he wrote her those ardent pages, he was in perfectly good
faith, he loved her--

"You love me! Why, you didn't even know that those letters were from me.
You loved an unknown, a chimera. Well, admitting that you are telling
the truth, the chimera does not exist now, for here I am."

"You are mistaken. I knew perfectly that it was Mme. Chantelouve hiding
behind the pseudonym of Mme. Maubel." And he half-explained to her,
without, of course, letting her know of his doubts, how he had lifted
her mas