“Ah! There’s your name, Maxime!” Renée exclaimed. “Listen. . . . I love—”

But he had sat down at the corner of the divan, practically at the young woman’s feet. With a quick movement he managed to grasp her hands. He turned her away from the mirror and in a strange voice said, “Please don’t read that.”

With a nervous laugh she struggled to free herself.

“Why not? Am I not your confidante?”

But he insisted and with a choking voice said, “No, no, not tonight.”

He was still holding on to her, and she tried to free herself by jerking her wrists. They looked at each other with eyes that neither had ever seen before, with a touch of shame in their fixed, forced smiles. She fell to her knees at the end of the divan. They continued to struggle, but she had ceased to pull away toward the mirror and was already surrendering herself. When the young man seized her around the waist, her embarrassed laughter died in her mouth as she said, “Let me go . . . you’re hurting me.”

Not a whisper more escaped her lips. In the deep silence of that room, in which the gaslight seemed to flare up, she felt the earth tremble and heard the clatter of a Batignolles omnibus that must just then have been turning the corner of the boulevard. And then it was over. When they were once again seated side by side on the divan, he punctured their mutual embarrassment by stammering, “Bah! It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

She said nothing. Looking stunned, she stared at the roses in the carpet.

“Had you ever thought about it?” Maxime went on stammering. “I never did, not once. . . . I should have been careful about the private room.”

Yet she had turned sober, as if all the bourgeois rectitude of the Béraud Du Châtels had been aroused by this supreme sin, and with a face looking suddenly old and very grave murmured in a deep voice, “What we’ve just done is vile.”

Gasping for air, she went over to the window, drew the curtains, and leaned out. The orchestra was now a memory. The sin had been committed amid the last quiver of the basses and the distant wail of violins, the muffled sounds of a boulevard now asleep and dreaming of love. The pavement and sidewalks below stretched off into the distance and merged with the gray solitude. All the rumbling carriage wheels seemed to have gone, carrying the light and the crowd off with them. Beneath the window the Café Riche was closed, and not a sliver of light slipped through the shutters. On the other side of the avenue, a shimmering glow was all that still emanated from the façade of the Café Anglais, and in particular from one half-open window through which faint laughter could be heard. And all along this ribbon of darkness, from the bend in the rue Drouot to the other extremity, as far as her eye could see, she perceived only the symmetrical patches where kiosks stained the night red or green without illuminating it, like regularly spaced nightlights in some gigantic dormitory. She raised her head. The upper branches of the trees stood out against a clear sky, while the irregular line of the houses blurred to the point where it resembled masses of rock jutting up along the shore of a bluish sea. But this strip of sky made her sadder still, and it was in the darkness of the boulevard that she found a certain consolation. What remained clinging to the deserted avenue of the evening’s noise and vice was her excuse. She could almost feel the heat of all the footsteps of all those men and women rising from the cooling sidewalk. The shame that had loitered there—the momentary lusts, the whispered offers, the one-night nuptials paid for in advance—evaporated, hovering in the air like a heavy mist roiled by the morning breezes. Leaning out over the darkness, she breathed in this shivering silence, this bedroom scent, as an encouragement that came to her from below, an assurance that her shame was shared and accepted by a complicit city. And when her eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, she caught sight of the woman in the lacy blue dress, alone in the gray solitude, standing in the same place, still waiting, still offering herself to the empty night.

On turning away from the window, Renée saw Charles snooping around and sniffing the air. He soon noticed the young woman’s blue ribbon, lying crumpled and forgotten on a corner of the divan. Affecting politeness, he hastened to hand it to her. His gesture brought home to her a full awareness of her shame. Standing in front of the mirror, she attempted to retie the ribbon, but her hands were clumsy. Her chignon had fallen, her little curls all lay flattened against her temples, and she could not manage to tie a bow. Charles came to her assistance, and sounding as though he were offering her some everyday item such as a finger bowl or toothpick, he asked, “Would madame like the comb?”

“No, don’t bother with that,” Maxime interrupted, fixing the waiter with an impatient stare. “Go fetch us a cab.”

Renée decided just to pull up the hood of her domino. As she was about to walk away from the mirror, she raised herself up slightly to look for the words that Maxime’s embrace had prevented her from reading. Slanting upward toward the ceiling and written in a large, abominable hand was this declaration, signed “Sylvia”: “I love Maxime.” She pressed her lips together and pulled her hood up a little bit more.

In the carriage they felt horribly awkward. As on the trip down from the Parc Monceau, they sat facing each other, but neither could think of anything to say. The darkness in the cab was opaque, and now there was not even a red dot of light from Maxime’s cigar, a glowing orange ember. The young man, once again “up to his eyes” in skirts, suffered from this darkness, this silence, and this mute young woman, whose presence he felt near him and whose eyes he imagined wide open to the night. So as to seem less stupid, he finally sought her hand, and when he held it in his own he felt relieved and found the situation tolerable. That hand surrendered itself to him, soft and as if in a dream.

The cab crossed the place Madeleine. Renée was thinking that she had done nothing wrong. She hadn’t wanted the incest. The more deeply she examined herself, the more innocent she found herself to be—during the first hours of her escapade, in her furtive exit through the Parc Monceau, at Blanche Muller’s, on the boulevard, and even in the restaurant’s private room. Why, then, had she fallen to her knees next to the divan? She was no longer sure. She certainly had not given a second’s thought to that. She would have angrily refused. It had all been for laughs, for fun, nothing more. As the cab drove on, she thought back on that deafening boulevard orchestra and the steady stream of men and women who came and went while tongues of fire burned her weary eyes.

Maxime, in his corner, was also dreaming, not without a certain irritation. The adventure had made him angry. He blamed the black satin domino. Had anyone ever seen a woman done up like that before? You couldn’t even see her neck. He had mistaken her for a boy, he’d been playing with her, and it wasn’t his fault if things had taken a serious turn. He certainly wouldn’t have touched her with his fingertips if she’d shown even a bit of shoulder. He would have remembered that she was his father’s wife. And then, because he disliked unpleasant thoughts, he forgave himself. What did it matter in the end? He’d try not to do it again. It was just foolishness.

The cab stopped, and Maxime got out first to help Renée down. But he did not dare kiss her there at the side gate of the park. They touched hands as usual. She was already past the fence when, feeling a need to say something, she revealed a worry that had been vaguely on her mind since leaving the restaurant: “By the way, what was that comb the waiter mentioned?”

“Comb?” the embarrassed Maxime repeated. “Why, I have no idea.”