in a single room, drawn in pastel and mounted under glass. And sometimes to a sky and sea uniformly grey a touch of pink would be added with an exquisite delicacy, while a little butterfly that had gone to sleep at the foot of the window seemed to be appending with its wings at the corner of this “Harmony in Grey and Pink” in the Whistler manner the favourite signature of the Chelsea master. Then even the pink would vanish; there was nothing now left to look at. I would get to my feet and, before lying down again, close the inner curtains. Above them I could see from my bed the ray of light that still remained, growing steadily fainter and thinner, but it was without any feeling of sadness, without any regret for its passing, that I thus allowed the hour at which as a rule I was seated at table to die above the curtains, for I knew that this day was of another kind from ordinary days, longer, like those arctic days which night interrupts for a few minutes only; I knew that from the chrysalis of this twilight, by a radiant metamorphosis, the dazzling light of the Rivebelle restaurant was preparing to emerge. I said to myself: “It’s time”; I stretched myself on the bed, and rose, and finished dressing; and I found a charm in these idle moments, relieved of every material burden, in which, while the others were dining down below, I was employing the forces accumulated during the inactivity of this late evening hour only in drying my washed body, in putting on a dinner-jacket, in tying my tie, in making all those gestures which were already dictated by the anticipated pleasure of seeing again some woman whom I had noticed at Rivebelle last time, who had seemed to be watching me, had perhaps left the table for a moment only in the hope that I would follow her; it was with joy that I embellished myself with all these allurements so as to give myself, fresh, alert and whole-hearted, a new life, free, without cares, in which I would lean my hesitations upon the calm strength of Saint-Loup and would choose, from among the different species of animated nature and the produce of every land, those which, composing the unfamiliar dishes that my companion would at once order, might have tempted my appetite or my imagination.
And then at the end of the season came the days when I could no longer go straight in from the front through the dining-room; its windows stood open no more, for it was night now outside and the swarm of poor folk and curious idlers, attracted by the blaze of light which was beyond their reach, hung in black clusters, chilled by the north wind, on the luminous sliding walls of that buzzing hive of glass.
There was a knock at my door; it was Aimé who had come upstairs in person with the latest list of visitors.
Aimé could not go away without telling me that Dreyfus was guilty a thousand times over. “It will all come out,” he assured me, “not this year, but next. It was a gentleman who’s very thick with the General Staff who told me. I asked him if they wouldn’t decide to bring it all to light at once, before the year is out. He laid down his cigarette,” Aimé went on, acting the scene for my benefit, and shaking his head and his forefinger as his informant had done, as much as to say: “We mustn’t be too impatient.”—“ ‘Not this year, Aimé,’ he said to me, putting his hand on my shoulder, ‘It isn’t possible. But next Easter, yes!’ ” And Aimé tapped me gently on the shoulder, saying, “You see, I’m showing you exactly what he did,” whether because he was flattered at this act of familiarity by a distinguished person or so that I might better appreciate, with a full knowledge of the facts, the weight of the argument and our grounds for hope.
It was not without a slight pang that on the first page of the list I caught sight of the words “Simonet and family.” I had in me a store of old dream-memories dating from my childhood, in which all the tenderness that existed in my heart but, being felt by my heart, was not distinguishable from it, was brought to me by a being as different as possible from myself. Once again I fashioned