ised themselves on tiptoe in order the better to see him. He
remained dumbfounded under this downpour of filthy abuse. It appeared to
him that these words, which came from that mouth and fell upon him,
defiled him like dirt, and, in presence of the row which was beginning,
he fell back, retraced his steps, and rested his elbows on the railing
towards the river, turning his back upon the three victorious women.

There he stayed watching the water, and sometimes with rapid gesture as
though he plucked it out, he removed with his sinewy fingers the tear
which had formed in his eye.

The fact was that he was hopelessly in love, without knowing why,
notwithstanding his refined instincts, in spite of his reason, in spite,
indeed, of his will. He had fallen into this love as one falls into a
sloughy hole. Of a tender and delicate disposition, he had dreamed of
liaisons, exquisite, ideal and impassioned, and there that little bit of
a woman, stupid like all girls, with an exasperating stupidity, not even
pretty, thin and a spitfire, had taken him prisoner, possessing him from
head to foot, body and soul. He underwent this feminine bewitchery,
mysterious and all powerful, this unknown power, this prodigious
domination, arising no one knows whence, from the demon of the flesh,
which casts the most sensible man at the feet of some girl or other
without there being anything in her to explain her fatal and sovereign
power.

And there at his back he felt that some infamous thing was brewing.
Shouts of laughter cut him to the heart. What should he do? He knew well,
but he could not do it.

He steadily watched an angler upon the bank opposite him, and his
motionless line.

Suddenly, the worthy man jerked a little silver fish, which wriggled at
the end of his line, out of the river. Then he endeavored to extract his
hook, hoisted and turned it, but in vain. At last, losing patience, he
commenced to pull it out, and all the bleeding gullet of the beast, with
a portion of its intestines, came out. Paul shuddered, rent himself to
his heart-strings. It seemed to him that the hook was his love and that
if he should pluck it out, all that he had in his breast would come
out in the same way at the end of a curved iron fixed in the depths of
his being, of which Madeleine held the line.

A hand was placed upon his shoulder; he started and turned; his mistress
was at his side. They did not speak to each other; and she rested, like
him, wit