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Updated: June 21, 2025
Suddenly, further away, a ray of light shot out of a show window, and, doubtless attracted by the sound of the cab wheels, a man wearing the black apron of a wineshop keeper lounged through the shop door and spat on the threshold. "This is the place," said Mme. Chantelouve. She rang. The grating opened. She raised her veil.
"But then there is that damned question of the skirts! I admire the novelists who can get a virgin unharnessed from her corsets and deflowered in the winking of an eye as if it were possible! How annoying to have to fight one's way through all those starched entanglements! I do hope Mme. Chantelouve will be considerate and avoid those ridiculous difficulties as much as possible for her own sake."
For a person customarily so reserved, she seems to me to have become quite enthusiastic about you, does Mme. Chantelouve. Why, what's the matter?" he exclaimed, seeing how red Durtal had become. "Oh, nothing, but I've got to be going. Good night." "Why, aren't you feeling well?" "Oh, it's nothing, I assure you."
"There are worse than those," said Durtal. "Read the life of Marie Alacoque. You will see that she, to mortify herself, licked up with her tongue the dejections of one sick person and sucked an abscess from the toe of another." "I know, but I must admit that I am less touched than revolted by these tales." "I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve.
Chantelouve, and if the latter had profited, the former, on the contrary, lost by the confusion which Durtal had established. In one as in the other case, whether she were Mme. Chantelouve or not, he felt appeased, calmed.
One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn. "He must be aching to throw me into the street," said Durtal to himself, "because he certainly knows all about his wife's goings-on." But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it.
Suppose that an artist depicts a saint and becomes enamoured of her. Thus we have complications of crime against nature and of sacrilege. An enormity!" "Which, perhaps, is exquisite!" He was taken aback by the word she had used. She rose, opened the door, and called her husband. "Dear," she said, "Durtal has discovered a new sin!" "Surely not," said Chantelouve, his figure framed in the doorway.
"I must go about it prudently that night," he concluded, addressing his cat, which, never having seen a woman before, had fled at the arrival of Mme. Chantelouve and taken refuge under the bed, but had now advanced almost grovelling, to sniff the chair where she had sat. "Come to think of it, she is an old hand, Mme. Hyacinthe! She would not have a meeting in a café nor in the street.
It's merely by chance that Mme. Chantelouve spoke of my books to Des Hermies, and I mustn't jump to the conclusion that she is smitten with me and that she has been writing me these hot letters. It isn't she, but who on earth is it?" He continued to revolve the question, without coming any nearer a solution.
"When I was young and ardent the women laughed at me. Now that I am old and stale I laugh at them. That's more in my character, old fellow," he said to the cat, which, with ears pricked up, was listening to the soliloquy. "Truly, Gilles de Rais is a great deal more interesting than Mme. Chantelouve. Unfortunately, my relations with him are also drawing to a close.
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