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He consulted his watch. "Half-past eight. I mustn't expect her for nearly an hour, because, like all women, she will come late. What kind of an excuse will she make to Chantelouve, to get away tonight? Well, that is none of my business. Hmmm. This water heater beside the fire looks like the invitation to the toilet, but no, the tea things handy banish any gross idea."
"Well, just now everybody in the world is ill and I am racing around all the time. By the way, I've been attending Chantelouve, who has a pretty serious attack of gout. He complains of your absence, and his wife, whom I should not have taken for an admirer of your books, of your last novel especially, speaks to me unceasingly of them and you.
If you wish ampler information about him," said Gévingey, addressing Des Hermies, "question your friend Chantelouve." "Chantelouve!" cried Durtal. "Yes, he and his wife used to be quite intimate with Canon Docre, but I hope for their sakes that they have long since ceased to have dealings with the monster." Durtal listened no more. Mme. Chantelouve knew Canon Docre! Ah, was she Satanic, too?
Chantelouve entered, the lines of her figure advantageously displayed by a wrapper of white swanskin, which gave off a fragrance of frangipane. She pressed Durtal's hand and sat down facing him, and he perceived under the wrap her indigo silk stockings in little patent leather bootines with straps across the insteps. They talked about the weather.
He paid, and without waiting for his change, he fled. They reached the rue de Vaugirard and he hailed a cab. As they were whirled along they sat lost in their thoughts, not looking at each other. "Soon?" asked Mme. Chantelouve, in an almost timid tone when he left her at her door. "No," he answered. "We have nothing in common. You wish everything and I wish nothing. Better break.
They had met in the strangest of homes, that of Chantelouve, the Catholic historian, who boasted of receiving all classes of people. And every week in the social season that drawing-room in the rue de Bagneux was the scene of a heterogeneous gathering of under sacristans, café poets, journalists, actresses, partisans of the cause of Naundorff, and dabblers in equivocal sciences.
"Supposing he is home this evening and he probably isn't, because surely Hyacinthe will have seen to that I can tell him that I have learned of his illness through Des Hermies and that I have come to see how he is getting along." He paused on the stoop of the building in which Chantelouve lived.
After a thoughtful silence he concluded, "I must be young indeed to have lost my head the way I did." As if echoing his thought, Mme. Chantelouve, coming out through the portière, laughed nervously and said, "A woman of my age doing a mad thing like that!" She looked at him, and though he forced a smile she understood.
Durtal had even noticed that at each of the dinners given by Chantelouve a well-dressed stranger was present, and the rumour went about that this guest was a wealthy provincial to whom men of letters were exhibited like a wax-work collection, and from whom, before or afterward, important sums were borrowed. "It is undeniable that the Chantelouves have no income and that they live in style.
This being was felt near him so distinctly, that the sheet, disarranged by the wind of the flight, was still in motion, and he looked at the empty place in terror. "Ah," thought Durtal, when he had lighted his candle, "this carries me back to the time when I used to visit Madame Chantelouve, and reminds me of the stories of the Succubus."
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