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By Root 1393 0

lines of doggerel, prodigious thoughts, and astounding confessions. Renée fancied she saw something obscene but lacked the courage to satisfy her curiosity. She looked at the divan, felt embarrassed again, and, working hard to maintain her composure, looked up at the ceiling and the gilded brass chandelier with its five gaslights. There was something very pleasurable about her discomfort, however. While tilting her head upward as if to study the cornice, looking grave and holding her spectacles in her hand, she took deep pleasure in the equivocal furniture she sensed around her: the clear, cynical mirror, whose purity, barely touched by all that obscene fly-spotting, had facilitated the adjustment of so many false chignons; the divan, whose width shocked her; the table and even the carpet, which gave off the same smell she had detected on the stairs, a vague, penetrating, and somehow religious smell of dust.

When at last she was forced to lower her eyes, she asked, “What is this Wednesday supper anyway?”

“Nothing,” he answered, “a bet that one of my friends lost.”

In any other place, he would have told her straightaway that he had had supper that Wednesday night with a lady he’d met on the boulevard, but since entering the private room with her, he had instinctively begun to treat her as a woman he was obliged to please and whose jealousy must not be aroused. In any case she did not insist. She went and leaned on the window railing, where he joined her. Behind them Charles bustled in and out of the room with a clatter of dishes and silver.

It was not yet midnight. Down below, on the boulevard, Paris went rumbling on, prolonging the blaze of daylight before making up its mind to turn in for the night. Wavering lines of trees separated the whiteness of the sidewalks from the murky blackness of the roadway with its thunder of speeding carriages and flash of headlights. At intervals on either side of this dark strip newsdealers’ kiosks blazed forth like huge Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely gaudy, as if they had been set down in these precise places for some colossal illumination. At this time of night, however, their muffled glow was lost in the glare of nearby storefronts. Not a single shutter was down, and the sidewalks ran on without a patch of shadow, under a shower of light that sprinkled them with golden dust, as warm and bright as the midday sun. Maxime pointed out to Renée the bright windows of the Café Anglais opposite them. The high branches of the trees interfered somewhat with their view of the buildings and sidewalk across the way. They leaned out to get a better view of what lay below. A steady stream of traffic flowed past. Groups of people walked by; prostitutes, strolling in pairs, dragged their skirts along the sidewalk, lifting them from time to time in a languid motion while casting weary, smiling glances from side to side. Directly below the window, the tables of the Café Riche basked in the glare of its lamps, whose light reached to the middle of the roadway. It was in the center of the restaurant’s glow that they could best see the pale faces and hear the wan laughter of the passersby. Around the small round tables, women mingled with the men and drank. They wore revealing dresses, and their hair cascaded down upon their necks. They shimmied in their chairs and spoke in loud voices that Renée could not make out above the noise. She took particular notice of one, sitting alone at a table in a loud blue outfit trimmed with white lace. With little sips this woman finished off a glass of beer, then leaned back a bit and placed her hands over her belly with an air of gloomy resignation. The streetwalkers slowly vanished into the crowd, and Renée, who found them fascinating, followed them with her eyes, scanning from one end of the boulevard to the other all the way to the tumultuous bustle of the avenue, filled with people strolling in darkness occasionally relieved by flashes of light. The parade was endless, moreover, renewing itself with tiresome regularity; it was a strangely mixed crowd, yet