or curtains, he had often seen women who walked about like
geese; others, on benches, rested their elbows on the marble tables,
humming, their temples resting between their hands; still others
strutted and posed in front of mirrors, playing with their false hair
pomaded by hair-dressers; others, again, took money from their purses
and methodically sorted the different denominations in little heaps.

Most of them had heavy features, hoarse voices, flabby necks and
painted eyes; and all of them, like automatons, moved simultaneously
upon the same impulse, flung the same enticements with the same tone
and uttered the identical queer words, the same odd inflections and
the same smile.

Certain ideas associated themselves in the mind of Des Esseintes,
whose reveries came to an end, now that he recalled this collection of
coffee-houses and streets.

He understood the significance of those cafes which reflected the
state of soul of an entire generation, and from it he discovered the
synthesis of the period.

And, in fact, the symptoms were certain and obvious. The houses of
prostitution disappeared, and as soon as one of them closed, a cafe
began to operate.

This restriction of prostitution which proved profitable to
clandestine loves, evidently arose from the incomprehensible illusions
of men in the matter of carnal life.

Monstrous as it may appear, these haunts satisfied an ideal.

Although the utilitarian tendencies transmitted by heredity and
developed by the precocious rudeness and constant brutalities of the
colleges had made the youth of the day strangely crude and as
strangely positive and cold, it had none the less preserved, in the
back of their heads, an old blue flower, an old ideal of a vague, sour
affection.

Today, when the blood clamored, youths could not bring themselves to
go through the formality of entering, ending, paying and leaving; in
their eyes, this was bestiality, the action of a dog attacking a bitch
without much ado. Then, too, vanity fled unsatisfied from these houses
where there was no semblance of resistance; there was no victory, no
hoped for preference, nor even largess obtained from the tradeswoman
who measured her caresses according to the price. On the contrary, the
courting of a girl of the cafes stimulated all the susceptibilities of
love, all the refinements of sentiment. One disputed with the others
for such a girl, and those to whom she granted a rendezvous, in
considerati