. "These scenes shatter me. I am in a daze.
I must have a glass of water."

And she went up the street, leaning on him, straight to the wine shop,
which was open. It was an ignoble lair, a little room with tables and
wooden benches, a zinc counter, cheap bar fixtures, and blue-stained
wooden pitchers; in the ceiling a U-shaped gas bracket. Two
pick-and-shovel labourers were playing cards. They turned around and
laughed. The proprietor took the excessively short-stemmed pipe from his
mouth and spat into the sawdust. He seemed not at all surprised to see
this fashionably gowned woman in his dive. Durtal, who was watching him,
thought he surprised an understanding look exchanged by the proprietor
and the woman.

The proprietor lighted a candle and mumbled into Durtal's ear,
"Monsieur, you can't drink here with these people watching. I'll take
you to a room where you can be alone."

"Hmmm," said Durtal to Hyacinthe, who was penetrating the mysteries of a
spiral staircase, "A lot of fuss for a glass of water!"

But she had already entered a musty room. The paper was peeling from the
walls, which were nearly covered with pictures torn out of illustrated
weeklies and tacked up with hairpins. The floor was all in pieces. There
were a wooden bed without any curtains, a chamber pot with a piece
broken out of the side, a wash bowl and two chairs.

The man brought a decanter of gin, a large one of water, some sugar, and
glasses, then went downstairs.

Her eyes were sombre, mad. She enlaced Durtal.

"No!" he shouted, furious at having fallen into this trap. "I've had
enough of that. It's late. Your husband is waiting for you. It's time
for you to go back to him--"

She did not even hear him.

"I want you," she said, and she took him treacherously and obliged him
to desire her. She disrobed, threw her skirts on the floor, opened wide
the abominable couch, and raising her chemise in the back she rubbed
her spine up and down over the coarse grain of the sheets. A look of
swooning ecstasy was in her eyes and a smile of joy on her lips.

She seized him, and, with ghoulish fury, dragged him into obscenities of
whose existence he had never dreamed. Suddenly, when he was able to
escape, he shuddered, for he perceived that the bed was strewn with
fragments of hosts.

"Oh, you fill me with horror! Dress, and let's get out of here."

While, with a faraway look in her eyes, she was silently putting on
her clothes, he sat down on