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Updated: May 25, 2025
As she lay in bed she awaited accustomed sounds which should have connoted Chirac's definite retirement for the night. Her ear, however, caught no sound whatever from his room. Then she imagined that there was a smell of burning in the flat. She sat up, and sniffed anxiously, of a sudden wideawake and apprehensive. And then she was sure that the smell of burning was not in her imagination.
He noiselessly approached the bed he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand. It was Chirac's card. "Monsieur asked for monsieur," said the waiter. "And then, as monsieur had gone away he demanded to see madame. He says it is very important."
Flag after flag waved out from neighbouring roofs in the breeze that tempered the August sun. Then hats began to go up, and cheers rolled across the square like echoes of firing in an enclosed valley. Chirac's driver jumped madly on to his seat, and cracked his whip. "Vive la France!" he bawled with all the force of his lungs. A thousand throats answered him. Then there was a stir behind them.
He had decided to join forces with a widowed sister, who was accustomed to parsimony as parsimony is understood in France, and who was living on hoarded potatoes and wine. "There!" said Sophia, "you have lost me a tenant!" And she insisted, half jocularly and half seriously, that Carlier was leaving because he could not stand Chirac's infantile conceit. The flat was full of acrimonious words.
The charwoman brought her coffee, and Chirac's newspaper; from which she learnt that the news of the victory which had sent the city mad on the previous day was utterly false. Tears came into her eyes as she gazed absently at all the curtained windows of the courtyard.
"I don't know." murmured Madame Foucault. "Eight weeks or is it nine?" "Suppose we say nine," said Sophia. "Very well," agreed Madame Foucault, apparently reluctant. "Now, how much must I pay you per week?" "I don't want anything I don't want anything! You are a friend of Chirac's. You " "Not at all!" Sophia interrupted, tapping her foot and biting her lip. "Naturally I must pay."
At dawn her eyes were inflamed with weeping. She was back in the kitchen then. Chirac's door was wide open. He had left the flat. On the slate was written, "I shall not take meals to-day." Their relations were permanently changed.
Chirac's inability to draw from his own pride strength to sustain himself against the blow of her refusal gradually killed in her the sexual desire which he had aroused, and which during a few days flickered up under the stimulus of fancy and of regret. Sophia saw with increasing clearness that her unreasoning instinct had been right in saying him nay.
In the passage she could discern nothing at first, and then she made out a thin line of light, which indicated the bottom of Chirac's door. The smell of burning was strong and unmistakable. She went towards the faint light, fumbled for the door-handle with her palm, and opened. It did not occur to her to call out and ask what was the matter. The house was not on fire; but it might have been.
Now, in swift collapse, he was as flaccid as a sick hound and as disgusting as an aged drunkard. "He is some little souffrant," said Chirac, weakly. Sophia perceived in Chirac's tone the assumption that of course her present duty was to devote herself to the task of restoring her shamed husband to his manly pride. "And what about me?" she thought bitterly.
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