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 always the same, surrounded by bright colors and punctuated by dark voids in the fantastic chaos of a thousand dancing flames pouring from the shops, coloring the storefronts and kiosks, painting the façades with fiery ribbons, letters, and designs, studding the shadows with stars, and washing constantly over the roadway. The noise was deafening, a howl, a monotonous, steady hum that rose from the streets like the whine of an organ accompanying an endless procession of little mechanical dolls. At one point Renée thought there had been an accident. The crowd surged to the left just beyond the Passage de l’Opéra. When she took up her spectacles, however, she recognized the omnibus office. The crowd waiting on the sidewalk pressed forward whenever a bus arrived. She heard the gruff voice of the conductor calling out numbers, and then the crystalline tinkle of the bell. Her eyes lingered over the posters plastered to one of the kiosks, as gaudily colored as an Epinal print.² One green-and-yellow frame featured a poster under glass depicting a grinning devil’s head with bristling hair, an ad for a hat-maker, which she failed to comprehend. Every five minutes the Batignolles omnibus passed with its red lights and yellow sides, turning the corner from the rue le Peletier and shaking the building with its rumble, and she saw the men on the upper deck look up with their tired faces, staring at her and Maxime with the curious gaze of famished men peering through a keyhole.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “At this hour, the Parc Monceau is fast asleep.”

That was the only remark she made. They stood there in silence for close to twenty minutes, surrendering to the intoxication of the noise and light. When the table was finally set, they went and sat down, and since Renée seemed embarrassed by the presence of the waiter, Maxime sent him away.

“Leave us. I’ll ring for dessert.”

Her cheeks were slightly flushed, and her eyes sparkled. She looked as though she had just been running. Some of the din and bustle of the boulevard came away from the window with her, and she refused to allow her companion to pull the casement shut.

When he complained about the noise, she said, “Of course! It’s the orchestra! Don’t you find the music odd? It will go very nicely with our oysters and partridge.”

The escapade made her look younger than her thirty years. Her movements were quick, she felt a touch of fever, and this tête-à-tête with a young man in a private room filled with sounds of the street spurred her on and coarsened her appearance. She went at the oysters with gusto. Maxime, who wasn’t hungry, smiled as he watched her devour them.

“Damn!” he muttered. “You’d have made a fine companion for suppers like this.”

She stopped, annoyed with herself for eating so fast.

“Do I seem hungry? What do you expect? It’s the hour we spent at that idiotic ball that left me feeling empty. . . . I feel sorry for you, my dear friend, to live in such society as that!”

“You know perfectly well,” he replied, “that I’ve promised to drop Sylvia and Laure d’Aurigny the day your friends are willing to join me for supper.”

She reacted with a gesture of disdain.

“Well, I should think so! We’re far more amusing than ladies of that sort: admit it! . . . If one of us were to bore her lover the way your Sylvia and your Laure d’Aurigny must bore you—why the poor little woman wouldn’t keep her lover for a week! . . . But you never listen to me. Try it for yourself one of these days.”

Maxime, to avoid calling the waiter, got up, removed the oyster shells, and served the partridge that had been on the serving table. The table had the luxurious look of a first-class restaurant. A delightful breath of lasciviousnesss swept the damask tablecloth, and Renée felt little shivers of contentment as she slid her slender hands from her fork to her knife and from her plate to her glass. She drank white wine without water—she who ordinarily drank water barely tinged with red. Maxime, standing with his napkin over his arm, served her with comical solicitude, resuming the conversation as he did so.

“What could M. de Saffré possibly have said to you to make you so angry? Did he find you ugly?”

“Oh, him!” she replied. “He’s a vile man. I never would have believed that a gentleman who is so distinguished and polite in my home could say such things. But I forgive him. It was the women who irritated me. They looked like the women you see selling apples. There was one who complained of a boil on her hip, and I think it wouldn’t have taken much for her to lift up her skirts and show us all her sore.”

Maxime burst out laughing.

“No, really,” she continued, warming to her task, “I don’t understand you. They’re filthy and stupid. . . . And to think that whenever I saw you going off to be with your Sylvia, I imagined wondrous things, ancient revels of the sort you see in paintings with creatures wearing crowns of roses and golden goblets and the most extraordinary voluptuousness. . . . Yes, indeed. But what you showed me was a filthy dressing room and women who swore like sailors. Sin like that isn’t worth the bother.”