ysician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is
willing to acknowledge.

"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.

"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is
still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like
thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its
liquid mud, that--ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it
rains, it rains with terrible constancy."

As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement
that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull
dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.

"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual
round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you
understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is
mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I
abandon to others--whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated
at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my
own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but
one desire, hear--"

"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and
suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his
feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.

"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little
room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the
Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage
saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not
what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name,
whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves,
everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch
myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,--as
happens sometimes--an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what,
should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am,
nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the
grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little
otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah!
those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my
good moments. Judge of the others, then."

Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him:
that